The past nine months have thrown up multiple challenges for talent acquisition leaders. While technology isn’t ever the whole answer, it has been interesting to see how employers have been using emerging recruiting technologies to help address the unique problems 2020 has created.
My guest this week is Michael Watson, Senior Director of Talent Transformation Advisory at Eightfold.ai. Michael has previously been a TA Leader and some great insights to share in terms of driving practical value from AI technology.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ The current challenges for talent acquisition
▪ Using technology to separate the signal from the noise
▪ What value does AI bring to talent acquisition?
▪ Using technology to reduce bias
▪ Enhancing human interaction by automating repeatable tasks
▪ Mobility and retention
▪ Building meaningful engagement
▪ What’s next for recruiting technology
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Eightfold AI. Eightfold AI delivers the talent Intelligence platform, the most effective way for companies to retain top performers, upskill and reskill the workforce, recruit top talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Eightfold AI’s deep learning artificial intelligence platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into into a competitive advantage.
Matt Alder [00:00:47]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 323 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The past nine months has thrown up multiple challenges for talent acquisition leaders. While technology isn’t ever the whole answer, it has been interesting to see how employers have been using emerging recruiting technologies to help address the unique problems 2020 has created. My guest this week is Michael Watson, Senior Director of Talent Transformation Advisory at Eightfold AI. Michael has previously been a TA leader and has some great insights to share in terms of driving practical value from AI technology. Hi, Michael, and welcome to the podcast.
Michael Watson [00:01:36]:
Matt, how are you? I’m excited to be here.
Matt Alder [00:01:38]:
I’m very well, thank you. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Michael Watson [00:01:44]:
Yeah. So my name is Michael Richard Watson and I work for a company called a Eightfold and we are in the talent intelligence space and I help lead their talent transformation teams. And what that is really is I’m a former customer. So prior to joining the artificial intelligence and the HR tech world, I was a practitioner. I was running corporate TA organizations for the last 20 some years. I started in the contingent staffing world out of college and really for the last 12, 13 years, been focused on running global TA teams for various high tech companies out here in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Matt Alder [00:02:27]:
2020 has been a year like no other. What are you seeing happening in the talent acquisition marketplace at the moment? What’s going on out there with employers? What kind of challenges are they facing?
Michael Watson [00:02:39]:
Yeah, so it’s a weird dynamic. We went from near record unemployment to record unemployment overnight. We went from sub 3% to over 30, 40% in some parts of the world. And even more, thanks to the pandemic. The shift has gone from really having to tap in. This is on the talent acquisition side, really having to tap into your talent network, fostering and engaging those folks and convincing them to come work for your organization. To now you’re being inundated with thousands and thousands of really great people. And how do you separate the signal from the noise? So we’re seeing that A lot. We’re also seeing a lot of traction or a lot of chros discussing talent management and what that’s doing and what the pandemic is doing to the speed of change around digital transformation. Diversity and inclusion is a hot topic now that’s touching on both sides. Not just the recruiting them into the organization, but then how do you keep them? So there’s a lot of discussion right now around talent, whether it’s bringing it in the door or making sure you keep your best talent in the doors during these difficult times.
Matt Alder [00:04:04]:
Obviously, I kind of really want to ask you about technology, and I think you’re in a really interesting position because you’re working for a technology company, but you have all of that context of being a talent acquisition leader and really seeing where technology fits in in terms of solving these challenges. So just to sort of go through them one by one in terms of the signal noise ratio that’s out there at the moment. So companies being inundated by some fantastic candidates, although not necessarily the candidates that map to the sort of vacanc and skills that they’re looking for. How can technology help solve that problem or address that challenge in some way?
Michael Watson [00:04:42]:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And it’s somewhat of the secret sauce to what we do here at Eightfold, right, Is we take publicly available information. And what I mean by that is we’ve ingested over a billion and a half profiles. And what I mean by that is we understand what a software engineer does, we understand what a mechanic does, and we’ve broken that down into skills. So we’ve. We’ve looked at jobs at a massive scale and taken those skills and built those into an ontology, right? And then when we sign up with a customer, which really turns into a partner, we take their information and we couple it with that. So we’re able to look at their internal folks and look at all of the skills they have. That many times the organizations don’t realize that, Matt, you have this skill that you might have picked up at this position that you forgot about and frankly, you don’t even list on your resume anymore. And that’s the true power of AI, right? It’s not just skills matching. It’s not just matching terms or doing a Boolean search or finding this. It’s really tapping into that neural network where we have this huge skills ontology. And we can say, okay, you were a baggage handler for Delta Airlines. You could for sure have a job tomorrow working at CVS in their shipping and receiving organization, right? Those Skills transfer. So that’s how we’re able to do that. Right. We have a huge set of information publicly available and then we couple that with our customers information and that really provides a rich data set that it’s, it’s, it’s very, very powerful.
Matt Alder [00:06:30]:
And I think it’s interesting because there is so much talk around AI and artificial intelligence in talent acquisition at the moment, at the minute. And I think what would be listening interesting for the people listening are how can they use it to solve specific recruiting challenges? What would your advice be in terms of implementation and the, the outputs that they could expect?
Michael Watson [00:06:54]:
Yeah, so I think the first thing I did as a practitioner was I looked for repeatable T that I could use the AI to help me with. Right. So I spent three years at a company and we went from 1500 to 8000 people during those three years and we had to ramp up very, very quickly. And part of that was pairing up a sourcer with a recruiter. Fast forward ahead. When I was my last position before I joined Eightfold, I ran that by my leadership team. They said, no, it’s way too expensive, we can’t do that. I had to look for a solution that was going to help me source, help me make sense of all of this data. I’ve been a believer in this for years. We’ve been collecting all of this data for last 20, 30 years. When I started recruiting, we were still using milk crates and file cabinets. I remember when the job boards came out and we started collecting all this vast amounts of information. But the problem was the systems were siloed, they didn’t talk to each other, the information was stale. So once I found out about this solution and particularly Eightfold, being able to look into my talent network and being able to refresh those folks and then map those to my open positions, I said, okay, right, I gotta make 300 hires and I have 100,000 people in my talent pool. This is a no brainer. Why do I need to go to these external sources? Why do I need to go all these places if it really works the way it’s going to work? And it worked that way for me. So that’s one way it uses it, I think the other way. And if you looked. I made a LinkedIn post a year and a half ago about some of the diversity work we were doing at Gigamon at the time. And we were ready. We moved the ball on female hiring, Black, African American, Latin, Latino and veteran hiring, specifically by having the AI up front because that allowed us to Remove that bias. We could in essence mask a profile so it removes name. It might remove. And you can configure these. You can configure it to remove the school or the tenure they have. Maybe ageism is something you’re trying to weed out of the organization. So you can say, hey, any profile over eight years, just display it to me as eight years plus. Right. So by removing that bias up front. Right. And making it all about the skills, we saw a tremendous increase in all of our diversity. So. Right. It helps with think about this. As recruiters, we’ve all been there. We have 20 RECs on our plate. I have 150 to 200 applicants on each one of my requisitions. I got 15 or 20 employee referrals I need to get to. How do you make sense of it? What the successful organizations are doing now is they’re using AI to sort that to say, okay, let me remove the bias. Let’s look at it from a skills standpoint. Now tell me who, from a skill standpoint I need to talk to first. So out of this list of 200 people on this requisition, I need to start my conversations with these seven now. It doesn’t mean I don’t go. Right. And now it’s like a ranking system. I’m gonna start with these five star people according to skills and then I’m gonna go down to the four and a half and the three and three and a half and right. And I go down looking for that right fit and once. And that helps. That’s what I mean by separating the signal from the noise. Right. Traditional recruiting is we would click on every one of those resumes, look at them 30 seconds a minute into that process. Depending on your systems and how many clicks and how fast it was, it was a long time. Right. And being able to use that now. Right. My recruiters, they’re now able to spend more meaningful time with their hiring managers. Right. They’re able to talk about some of those soft skills that we need to bring into the organization now that we have the hard skills identified. So it really just helped eliminate some of those repeatable tasks. Right. For scheduling, my coordinators, right. It’s never the initial scheduling that’s hard. I’ve filled in for schedulers at times I’ve done it. It’s 10 minutes later when you start getting the rejection, saying, oh, my calendar wasn’t up to date. I didn’t have this marked. I have this, I’m on a plane. And that rescheduling is tough. And that eats up time. We can use AI to do that, right? So I really broke it down by what’s repeatable, where I don’t need a heavy human touch and where can I reallocate my resources? Because hr, they never give you extra. Where can I reallocate my resources to do more human work is what I would call it.
Matt Alder [00:11:59]:
And I think this is such an interesting time because we’re finally getting to the point where technology can help people move away from that kind of very basic keyword matching in word documents. That, that has kind of powered recruiting technology up to this. Up to this point. And I think it’s. It’s really encouraging to see all this work being done with skills and this, this type of intelligent mapping.
Michael Watson [00:12:24]:
And I think the other thing, Matt, real quick is right this, I don’t know where the unruly written rule came in in recruiting that if you interviewed for a place once and you didn’t get it, you were forever banned from ever applying there again or ever working there again. It’s such an archaic way of thinking, right? Organizations need to be embracing people that apply to them, right? They went out of their way to apply to you. They raised their hand to say, hey, I want to learn more. Keep me informed, right? So if a person wasn’t right five years ago because they needed one more year of experience, well, guess what? They got that experience. Now let’s see what they’re matched to. Right? And I think for me, that paradigm shift and really working with my customers to say, hey, unless it was just not the right culture fit, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? Let’s look at these folks and let’s foster those relationships again. So that’s how you get to zero days to hire. One of my mentors, Grant Bassett, told me that we talked about this all the time. Zero days to hire. How do you get to zero days to hire? You do it through interacting with your talent, your talent pool. How do you do that? You do that through engagement, through campaigns. AI enabled helps you do it. You set it and forget it, and it’s off and running. So there’s so many things you can do to help with that on the TA side or the talent management side, keeping your best people from walking out the door.
Matt Alder [00:13:53]:
And that’s the next thing I wanted to ask about. So internal mobility has been such a big topic that people have been talking about this year, and very often people lack the technology to, to really sort of make that happen in an effective in an effective way. Tell us about the technology and how it can help with that.
Michael Watson [00:14:14]:
Think back to how it’s being done in a lot of traditional places. Right. I have a SharePoint intranet that might have a static list of jobs that might be updated or it might not be. And I go in there every once in a while and look at it versus what we’re trying to do is say, okay, let’s give people meaningful engagement. So a, they’re going to come back into the platform time and time again because they’re deriving some value from it. Right? If you’re just asking employees to go in and fill out this form to never be used again, to be shelved away, yeah, they’re never going to come back in there, Right. So we really take a holistic approach to this and say, okay, let’s a build meaningful engagement. So when you come in and you build out your profile, we’re going to use that AI to extrapolate those skills. We’re going to then use it to then start recommending things to you. Hey, Mike, did you know you could be a fit for this? Hey, Matt, you’ve been doing this for a year. Did you know that you got the skills to run podcasts? You’d be like, oh, no, I had no idea. Let’s check it out. Right? And not only that, but you also, right? Because once again, because we have this incredible ontology of external skills and internal skills, you could say, you know what? I want to be a chro someday. I’ve been a TA my whole life. I’ve been the head of ta. You know, my next move is really to be that head of hr. I think I’ve been exposed to enough that I can do it. So let me go in and let me highlight some other VPs in the organization and some of our C level executives and let me see how my skills match up against theirs. So that’s a. Okay, here’s my, what I call areas of opportunity. Now, when you have it integrated with your learning and management system, now we have that dovetail down below, it says, okay, you’re trying to get to this level. These are the skills you need to increase. Here’s some courses you can take. And by taking these courses and completing them, right, we’ll add these skills to your profile. We’re going to recommend more positions for you. You’ll be a better fit for it. Right? So now when you’re applying to these jobs internally, right, there’s no resume, right. You’re just one click apply. We Know your background, we know your profile, we know the extra additional courses you’ve taken. Right. It’s, that’s, that’s what I mean by meaningful engagement. Right? When, when, when customers, and I call them customers, but when your employees come in, they want to know that the company cares about me. Right. The worst thing that can happen to you, and it’s happened to me, is when your best employee comes to you and says, hey, I’m giving my notice, you can try and save them, you can give them another offer, you can give them an increase, you can give them a higher title. All the studies show that within six months they’re likely going to be out the door anyways. At that point, it’s too late. And it really comes back to the question, what were you doing before that to stop that from happening? Well, nothing. We had a static page there with some links. This is a great employee, but they had their head down for three weeks finishing a project when this one internal position was posted for five days and taken down and they had no idea it came and went. That right there is what gets great people to walk out the door.
Matt Alder [00:17:38]:
Final question, where’s this technology taking us to? If we were to have this conversation, say in 18 months, two years time, what would we be talking about?
Michael Watson [00:17:49]:
Yeah, I think all of HR will be using this, right? I think this will be used when I envision this at a C level. Chro’s dashboard being able for succession planning, looking at mergers and acquisitions, figuring out who you need to keep, who has the skills. Right. We’ve seen this time again, companies lay off divisions to then later hire back people and have to pay them in maybe a 10% increase in more than what they’re paying them before because they realize, oh, they had the skills that we need for this new project. I just didn’t know before they walked out the door. Right. So I think once again, I think today’s gold rush is data. And we provide the most robust set of data to the executive leaders at the C level suite regarding their talent that they can make meaningful decisions on. Right. Whether that’s diversity information and looking at your pipeline and seeing where things are breaking down, looking at your succession planning, hey, do we need to go to outside sources? Do we have plenty of people internally? What is our plan? There’s just so many things. I think some of the questions that we’re hearing from leaders is how do I empower my employees? You hear more and more about, it’s not about your manager managing your career. You should be managing Your career. So providing the skill sets and the platforms that people can move forward in their careers I think is important. I think all the landscape is changing as far as goals, right? So what we were focused on in January of last year is dramatically different than what we’re going to be focused on. AOP planning this year with everyone, people are going to be looking at real estate. Do we need the real estate that we once had? Do we need the footprint? Do we need this? So I think AI has a huge role in this. Not just from a TA perspective. I think from a TA perspective, you have a tsunami of talent about to hit your organization and you better have some type of platform there that can help absorb that wave and tell you who you need to talk to. From a talent management perspective, it’s going to provide meaningful engagement to your best people, to all your people, right? And really provide them a long career because. Right. I mean, here’s some things we know, right, and we’ll end with just some stats. We know that 83, 85% of the workforce would be interested in changing jobs, but only 53% of those folks want to change companies. So what does that mean, right? They’re, they’re just, they want to do something different. And now you put on top of that a year of being locked in your house doing the same thing. There’s going to be a lot of people that are just looking for something different, right? Because of the certain circumstances, when you look at the younger workforce, you know, they’re 22 times more likely to work for a company that has a purpose. You know, do you have a purpose driven mission? You know, ours is enabling the right career for everyone in the world. And we mean that, right? We mean that for our veterans returning. We mean that for people that don’t have formal four year degrees. You know, we mean that for people that just never had a chance to go to college or went to a two year school or you know, learn through experience. So I, that that’s how it’s changing. I think that’s why everyone’s so passionate about it over here. Matt and Eightfold is because we say it all the time. We’re using AI for good. We’re using AI to remove bias. We’re removing AI to give the people that have been looked over traditionally a chance. We’re using AI to uplift people that have been downtrodden in the past and looked over. We’re saying, hey, let’s not do that. Let’s look at the skills that people have gained and let’s mirror that to what you need done and let’s start the conversations there.
Matt Alder [00:22:02]:
Michael, thank you very much for talking to me.
Michael Watson [00:22:05]:
My pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:22:06]:
My thanks to Michael Watson. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
