We are currently living through a period of time where assessment that’s based on skills and potential has never been more critical. As the economic crisis plays out, employers need to understand the skills base within their workforces to drive mobility and enable redeployment. At the same time, correctly understanding the transferable skills of available talent will help companies make some fantastic hires.
Unfortunately, though recruiting is still dominated by a reliance on resumes and other outdated practices. So how might this be changed and how can technology help to drive our industry forward.
My guest this week is Todd Raphael from Eightfold. Todd has been studying and writing about the talent acquisition for over 20 years and has some great insights to share about skills-based recruiting.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The most significant developments in talent acquisition in the last ten years
• Outdated recruiting methods
• The benefits of skilled, focused hiring
• Transferable skills in an economic crisis
• Redeployment to prevent layoffs
• The role of AI
• Innovating to improve internal mobility
• Mitigating bias
• The future potential of intelligent automation
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Eightfold. Eightfold delivers the talent intelligence platform, the most effective way for companies to identify promising candidates, reach diversity hiring goals, retain top performers and engage talent. Eightfold’s patented artificial intelligence based platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into competitive advantage. To find out more, go to www.infold.AI. that’s www.infold.AI.
Matt Alder [00:00:49]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 281 of the Recruiting Future podcast. We’re currently living through a period of time where assessment that’s based on skills and potential has never been more critical. As the economic crisis plays out, employers need to understand the skills base within their workforces in order to drive mobility and enable redeployment. At the same time, correctly understanding the transferable skills of available talent will help companies make some fantastic hires. Unfortunately though, recruiting is still dominated by a reliance on resumes and other outdated practices. So how might this be changed? And how can technology help drive our industry forward? My guest this week is Todd Raphael from Eightfold. Todd has been studying and writing about talent acquisition for over 20 years and has some great insights to share about skills based recruiting. Hi Todd and welcome to the podcast.
Todd Raphael [00:02:03]:
Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:04]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Todd Raphael [00:02:10]:
Sure. My name is Todd Rapahel and I work for a company called Eightfold which is an artificial talent intelligence platform or artificial intelligence based platform for the whole life cycle of employee and I’m out in near Los Angeles, California.
Matt Alder [00:02:25]:
Fantastic stuff. Now you’ve been in this industry for a really long time and you’ve, you’re kind of in a position where you can kind of really observe what’s going on. So just, just give us a little bit on your backstory about how you got to where you are now. But also I’m really interested, interested to know what do you think the most significant changes that have sort of taken place in in TA in the last few years? You know what have they been?
Todd Raphael [00:02:48]:
Sure, yeah, I spe or eight years at a generalist human resources media company called Workforce Workforce Management, which put on events and print and online publications all about human resources of all kinds. Generalists, not recruiting centrics necessarily. And then about, I think 14 years at another B2B media organization called eRE, which was more talent acquisition centric where we put on events and Publications for recruiters, recruiting leaders. So I’ve kept track of all of the trends in this field for a good couple decades. I think there’s been tremendous. Not just talk about some action in recent years about the experience. So sometimes people call it the talent experience, but candidate experience for people who are job applicants or job seekers trying to treat people more like customers, trying to consider how people are treated if they don’t get the job, or how people in the process of applying for a job are treated. So I think there’s been a lot of attention in a positive way paid toward employees, applicants, job seekers in a way that there hadn’t really been prior, other than a smaller number of companies.
Matt Alder [00:04:12]:
What about the way that talent’s assessed? Because to me, despite all the technology that’s come into the industry and the new thinking around things like experience and other aspects in recruitment, marketing, for example, other aspects of the industry, people seem to still value resumes and make assessment decisions on who to hire in very.
Todd Raphael [00:04:36]:
Traditional ways, which is really frustrating. I mean, for one thing, a lot of people just looking at LinkedIn, if you kind of see that as a substitute for a resume, which it kind of is, for a lot of people just looking at LinkedIn, pretty clear that many great employees don’t really keep up with their LinkedIn profiles. Many, not as great employees do keep up with their LinkedIn profiles. Even those people who do keep up with their profiles, those profiles don’t really tell you a whole lot about a person. Often people leave out a lot of things they’ve done because they wouldn’t have thought of them or maybe not even aware of them. Things we do sometimes are like, commonplace. And then of course, the whole assessment, as you mentioned, I mean, if you think about this, has been talked about for years, but job interviews, I don’t know that they’ve changed a ton. They’re still not so much based on who has certain skills, but more based on who can communicate well, present themselves well, who can be coached well to get through the interview, who likes who, who knows who. Unfortunately, I know some companies have done a lot of work on behavioral interviews and other kinds of interviews like that, but ultimately it essentially comes down to the interview and not what the person can do. There’s not a ton of companies who are really focused on skills to the point where the interview becomes largely irrelevant.
Matt Alder [00:06:05]:
What are organizations missing out on? What do you think the advantages would be for focusing on skills, particularly in the COVID world that we’re currently living through?
Todd Raphael [00:06:15]:
Well, a few things. One is Companies should have a sense of what a person can do just based on their potential, not just what they’ve done. So companies should be thinking, obviously it’s been talked about many times, but business is changing rapidly and a hire will be doing tomorrow, next year will not be what they’re doing today. And so I think companies need to focus on people’s potential and have a way to look at people’s skills that they’ve done and accomplished in the past and say, well, what does that set them up for in the future? What skills lead to another skill? You mentioned the current environment. Do you have a lot of people, for example, at restaurants who are laid off and furloughed? And if you talk to some of them, as we all have, they’ll say things like, I’ve always loved restaurants and food and it’s kind of like all I know. I mean, I’ve been doing it forever and that’s kind of what I know. I’m kind of so deep in that. I just don’t know much else. But if you really get a handle on their skills, you start to learn that what someone from a restaurant knows is actually more than food. It can be hiring, motivating people, morale, inventory, budgeting, payroll, managing time, all kinds of things, depending on, of course, their job in a restaurant. So if companies and society can get a handle on people’s skills, they can take a look at what those skills are and how they can be transferred to another industry and what potential people have based on those skills. Maybe some of those laid off or furloughed restaurant employees would make great employees in other fields and they would. Where those skills are in demand.
Matt Alder [00:08:06]:
Absolutely. And I think, I think we’ve seen some interesting examples in the, in the last few months. So certainly in the UK there’s been a situation where some airline cabin crew have been redeployed to their healthcare sector because of their customer care and hospitality skills. So I think it’s an area that’s really kind of being uncovered for a lot of people kind of right now. What other advantages do you see of focusing more on skills than some of the other things that currently come to the fore in talent acquisition?
Todd Raphael [00:08:35]:
Well, just on hiring, a lot of companies have a certain idea in their head about what makes a good employee. Like we have, we have a customer who’s a financial services company and they had been hiring people, assessing people for certain skills for a long time, and then they used AI to take a deeper look into what skills are actually making a great employee. And they Learned that they were assessing for the wrong thing, and they started finding out that some of their best, speaking of restaurants, but some of their best bank teller employees, frontline bank employees, were actually ex bartenders because those bartenders had the right employees to engage with people, communicate with people, chat with people, things that the banks do now as opposed to before, when they just handed you your money, you withdrew it from the bank. I think just to get to your question, taking a really deep look, using technology to kind of break down what it is that makes a great employee or successful employee and then hiring for those skills. But there are other things you can do, I think when you get a handle on skills. This is a little off from talent acquisition, but we’ve all seen companies that are laying people off and we’ve all thought to ourselves, wait a second, I’ve looked at their career site and they’re hiring people at the same time. Could any of those people have done a job at another part of the company? In defense of some of these companies that lay off several thousand people, they don’t often know what skills people have all over the world in their own workforce, far flung departments, locations, so they don’t really know. And so they get laid off. And they don’t really realize that this person who is a user experience person, could have been in the accounts payable department or vice versa. So if you can get a handle, I think, on skills better, you may be able to reduce layoffs. We had a customer who did do that. They were laying off a group of people and they were able to save, I think it was around 40% of the jobs by redeploying people once they got a handle on what skills those people had, that they were laying off contingent work too, I think, is another area. If you can get a handle. A lot of companies, you say you have 10,000 employees, even 50,000, 100,000. You don’t know what everyone can do who knows, who knows PowerPoint, who knows Spanish and who knows some computer language or who’s a good writer or good at making a video or podcast. So you don’t really know all over the world. But if you can kind of get a grip on that, you can. Instead of going out for a temp agency or outside agency for a contingent employee for upwork or Fiverr or Toptown, one of those, you could go to some of your own employees and they’ll be able to use some of their own skills internally. And that can really reduce layoffs, make people more valuable, help your own employees gain new Skills at the same time.
Matt Alder [00:11:30]:
That all makes perfect sense. And I guess one of the problems has been, as we’ve said, the tools that people are using to do recruiting or to manage their sort of internal mobility. So resumes, LinkedIn profiles, information in the ATS, information in HR systems that’s kind of incomplete are. Remember in the last recession working for a company that was laying off people and there was the opportunity to apply for internal jobs, but you had to submit your cv, which didn’t reflect what you’d done in the, in the time you’d been in the, in the business. So you’ve sort of mentioned technology a few times in the conversation. How exactly can technology solve this and give people access to different ways of working?
Todd Raphael [00:12:13]:
Well, a few things. One, just based on what you were talking about, people who have. If you look at people who maybe are internal, or if you look at past applicants, like a silver medalist, past employees, like boomerangs. If you take all these groups of people, employee referrals, so all these people, current employees, past applicants, ex employees, employee referrals, technology can enrich those people’s profiles. So if you applied, or if you worked for, let’s say, BP two years ago, or you applied to BP two years ago, or you were referred two years ago, but you haven’t really sent in any further CVs, technology can automatically enrich your profile. So it can tell a company what you’ve been doing since just based on public data on all of the AI that can work through the public data system and see through millions of pieces of data what you’ve been up to. It can enrich your profile and make it more complete and see how a past applicant, ex employee referral and so on would make a current good employee good hire. So that’s one another thing which is super interesting, which really wasn’t around in the last recession to any degree that it is now, is how technology can really automatically see what makes one person different than another and then rank them for a recruiter. If they’ve got, say, 150 people applying for a job, well, who’s better, who’s worse for a fit. What technology can do now is it can just automatically know. Let’s say one person worked at Vodafone from 2000 to 2010 as a product manager. Let’s say the other person worked at Exxon from 2000 to 2010 as a product manager, but we don’t really know. They didn’t really spell out exactly what they did in their job as a product manager. Neither of them did. Well, technology can automatically know because it’s seen so many, so many records of people who have come and gone and gone on to new jobs from these product manager roles at both Vodafone and Exxon that it can see. It can know that one person’s role was really pretty different than the others. One of them involved maybe more business, one more involved, maybe more technology, something like that. It just knows that based on so much information that’s digested, that you have these two applicants and you’re really working, you’re really looking in your search for someone who’s, let’s just pretend, more technology minded or something like that, it will bubble them up higher than the other just based on its massive digestion of data.
Matt Alder [00:15:10]:
How does that work internally within an organization for mobility purposes?
Todd Raphael [00:15:15]:
Well, same thing. You have an open job internally and nowadays technology is sophisticated enough, advanced enough, that it can see that one person has more skills based on, again, the massive amount of data that it’s seen. So you have, let’s say you’re a company with hundreds of customer service people. It has a sense of what kind of skills you have in your customer service department or customer service employees. And it can know that you would or would not be perfect for a job internally, which, by the way, is great for succession planning. So succession planning can happen oftentimes. If there’s succession planning in a company, it tends to be focused more on leaders, executives. But really, if you have the right technology, you can do it for pretty much the whole company. You can have every position and know what skills your whole workforce has and how those skills might fit into future roles if they do open up just based on the skills people have.
Matt Alder [00:16:21]:
I suppose one of the biggest conversations that’s kind of going on at the moment round this type of technology. And I’ve kind of seen, I’ve seen people coming from both sides of this is all about bias. Is there a risk that this amplifies bias or does it help negate human unconscious bias that might be there?
Todd Raphael [00:16:38]:
Yeah, I do think there’s some risk. I mean, depending on what we’re talking about, certainly there are technologies that could, could clearly amplify bias depending on what you’re doing. So if, let’s just say you’re trying to put some AI or some technology in and your data pool you’re looking at is, let’s say, people who have applied to jobs at your company. Well, yeah, I mean, it could be that the people who have applied for jobs at your company are mostly men. And then you’ve kind of measured who’s a good employee among those applicants and you’ve tried to then screen future applicants based on that. And you’ve already kind of just baked in bias. Or if you’re looking again at your internal population only, I suppose that could be biased. Again, if you have a very homogeneous workforce and you’re trying to find people who mirror your most successful employees without any anonymization or anything like that for gender or race, I suppose that could magnify bias. So yeah, I wouldn’t say that technology is inherently bias free. Things you can do, you can anonymize so that the top of the funnel, you can make sure that no one is screening people out because of their name or their gender or anything like that. That would be important. You can make sure that the amount of data that you’re using is not from one limited source, but from a very large pool of sources. You really need to use the state of the art and equal opportunity algorithms. Really the best anonymization you can get I think is most necessary. And really anytime you add features, I think to any kind of technology, you need to make sure it’s bias free. So there’s a lot you can do to not be biased and even to use technology to prevent discrimination when you’re using this kind of technology.
Matt Alder [00:18:34]:
Final question. Obviously we’re kind of reaching a new stage when it comes to recruiting technology, adding in this sense of artificial, artificial intelligence and everything that comes that comes with that. And I sense that this is going to develop considerably over the next few years. Where do you think this is all going? What do you think is going to be possible in terms of intelligent automation in a few years from now?
Todd Raphael [00:19:02]:
I like to think as I’m optimistic, I like to think that they’ll just be more hiring based on ability. We always read these blog posts over the years for job seekers saying, make sure you look someone in the eye, make sure you shake their hand firmly. Now you see things like make sure your zoom background is good and your volume is right and the lighting is right and you’re not in the wrong kind of room in your house and stuff like this. And I mean it’s not all, it’s not all terrible advice. But at the same time, like our companies, like really, is this really how companies have been hiring and are hiring? Are they hiring based on your handshake, your eye contact, your zoom background, does that correlate to a good hire? And I like to think that is. Technology shows over the years has been shown more and more that your ability, your skills correlates to a good hire and not these other things that we will continue to discard some of the bad methods of assessing and screening, like stupid interview questions about where you’re going to be in five years and five great things about you and five bad things about you and all that kind of stuff. So I like to think that some of those interview questions and these screening and assessment methods will fall by the wayside over the years in a more skills based, ability based and as we talked about bias less methods will prevail. So we can only hope and I think that that will continue to happen.
Matt Alder [00:20:47]:
Todd, thank you very much for talking to me.
Todd Raphael [00:20:49]:
You too. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:20:50]:
My thanks to Todd Raphael. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Sure. You follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. You can also listen and subscribe to the show on Spotify. You can find and search through all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
