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Ep 502: Digital Talent One Year On

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Digital Talent, the second book co-authored by Mervyn Dinnen and myself, came out a year ago this month. We’ve been blown away by the response to the book and want to thank everyone who has bought, read and shared it.

Twelve months is a long time in our industry at the moment, so I sat down with Mervyn to discuss the book’s key themes and how things have developed over the last year. We recorded the conversation in a proper studio, so there is also a video version of this podcast, which is worth watching just to take in the full glory of Mervyn’s shirt. Enjoy the conversation

In our conversation, we discuss:

• The acceleration of Digital Transformation

• The ongoing disruption of Talent Acquisition

• Redefining talent

• Results versus noise in DE&I

• Taking a more strategic approach to hiring

• Talent Experience

• Talent Mobility

• Skills

• AI & Personalization

• The new future of work

• Another book?

The video version of our conversation

Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript:

SHL (0s):
Support for this podcast is provided by SHL. From talent acquisition through to talent management, SHL Solutions provide your organization with the power and scale to build your business with the skilled, motivated, and energized workforce you need. SHL takes the guesswork out of growing a talented team by helping you match the right people to the right moments with simplicity and speed. They equip recruiters and leaders with people insights at an organization, team, and individual level, accelerating growth, decision making, talent mobility, and inspiring an inclusive culture.

SHL (42s):
To build a future where businesses thrive because their people thrive, visit shl.com to learn more.

Matt Alder (1m 5s):
Hi there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 502 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. Digital Talent is the second book that I’ve co-authored with Mervin Denin, and it came out a year ago this month. We’ve been blown away by the response to the book and want to thank everyone who’s bought, read, and shared it. Twelve months is a long time in our industry at the moment, so I sat down with Mervin to discuss the book’s key themes and how they’ve developed over the last year. We recorded the conversation in a proper studio so there’s also a video version of this podcast.

Matt Alder (1m 49s):
Link in the show notes, which is worth watching, just to take in the full glory of Mervin’s shirt. Enjoy the conversation. Hi, and welcome to a very special edition of the podcast. Normally, I’m sitting in my office in Scotland talking to people down the line, but today, we’re in a studio. We’re in London, and I’m talking to my very good friend and very good friend of the show, Mervin Denin. Mervin, would you like to introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?

Mervin Denin (2m 19s):
Thank you, Matt. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. My name is Mervin Denin. I am a co-author with Matt of two books. We also co-author reports. By day, I’m a writer, analyst around HR talent and work tech trends. I also have a nascent podcast called HR Means Business on the HR Happy Hour Network, in which I talk to HR professionals about how their role is changing. It’s a pleasure to be talking to you, Matt.

Matt Alder (2m 48s):
I don’t even know if I know what nascent means.

Mervin Denin (2m 50s):
It sounded good.

Matt Alder (2m 52s):
It’s a new podcast, isn’t it?

Mervin Denin (2m 55s):
Yes. Yeah, yes.

Matt Alder (2m 56s):
Working through the first few episodes?

Mervin Denin (2m 57s):
I am, indeed. Yes.

Matt Alder (2m 57s):
Now, the reason that we’ve gone to such a special effort to hire studio complete with cameras, we may or may not publish the video of this depending on whether how well Mervin’s shirt shows up on camera. The reason we’re doing this is it is a year since we published our second book, Digital Talent, and we wanted to do a special episode of the podcast talking about the book, looking at some of the themes that we discussed in the book, and really seeing how they’ve developed since we wrote the book. Now, the book’s a year old, but actually some of the things that we were writing for the book we were actually writing two years ago, so lots of things have happened since then. We also wanted to think about how those trends might pan out in the future.

Matt Alder (3m 41s):
To start off with, I think we wanna say a big thank you to everyone who bought the book, everyone who shared the book, everyone who’s talked about the book. It’s been more successful than we could have imagined or certainly could have hoped for. It’s been translated into Turkish. It’s a textbook on a university called HR Course in America. Lots and lots of things, all in a year. Best place to start. Mervin, do you remember why we wrote the book in the first place?

Mervin Denin (4m 10s):
I do, I do. Our first book was called Exceptional Talent, and we wrote that about 2016, 2017. That was looking at, I suppose, introducing the concept of the talent journey, how the, I suppose, process of attracting, hiring, developing, onboarding, retaining people. It was now underpinned by tech, and so this rather than separate stages was just one seamless journey. That’s what the candidate or employee experienced. What we then began to notice was there was a huge acceleration in digital transformation, and one of the biggest problems that the clients and the companies we spoke to were finding was that they couldn’t really acquire digital talent.

Mervin Denin (4m 57s):
They didn’t really know what digital talent was, how to acquire it, and how to develop. We started writing the book, but of course, something happened when we started. There was a pandemic.

Matt Alder (5m 10s):
Absolutely.

Mervin Denin (5m 10s):
Suddenly, things began to change, but what we noticed during the pandemic was that there was a huge acceleration in digital transformation. The original purpose for writing the book came even more pressing.

Matt Alder (5m 22s):
Yeah, absolutely. The pandemic was obviously a very unexpected event and a massive shock for everyone. I think it was particularly difficult in the process of writing this book because lots of the things that we were writing about that might happen in the future, for example, we were writing about hybrid working, accelerated digital transformation, they all happened during the pandemic, and we hadn’t finished the book. We had to go back and rewrite it because we didn’t feel we could really publish it saying, “These are all the things that are gonna happen,” because it’d already happened. It made it perhaps a much longer process than we envisaged, but really interesting to pick up straight off the pandemic and look at some of the big changes that were happening and indeed continue to happen.

Matt Alder (6m 10s):
Just gonna pull out three or four topics from the book to really get your thoughts moment on what’s happening now, and also, give my own thoughts in terms of what we’re seeing, and also what a lot of the guests that I’ve had on the podcast have spoken about. The first one, which is really a core theme of the book is. It won’t surprise anyone that it’s talent acquisition. Obviously, when we wrote the book, we thought it was a very disruptive time for talent acquisition. It’s even more disruptive at the moment. Very, very complex market. I think I described it on the podcast a few weeks ago. It’s something that’s just impossible to generalize.

Matt Alder (6m 49s):
On the one hand, particularly in the tech sector, you’ve got mass layoffs, including layoffs of talent acquisition, employer branding, and recruiting people. On the other hand, we were planning this podcast in a pub around the corner, and they didn’t have enough staff, basically. Hospitality sector, lots of other sectors, still massive shortages of talent, still huge talent shortages in areas of the tech sector, and particularly when it comes to lots of specific skills. Really, really complicated market that’s got even more complicated. There’s two things that I wanted to pull out that we spoke about in the book in terms of how they develop now.

Matt Alder (7m 32s):
The first one was, we talked a lot, if you remember, about redefining the definition of talent. Looking at the fact that companies couldn’t find the skills that they need, the skills of the future hadn’t been invented yet. There weren’t people with those skills. They’d need to think differently and look much broader at an open, new markets of talent. We talked about various different ways of doing that. Skills based hiring, also a big, big focus on DE&I as a way of not just doing the right thing for society, but also extending talent pools and bringing new talents into business. Where we’ve got with that, I think what sums it up best for me was, I did an interview a few weeks ago with a guy who works for Microsoft called Bruce Jackson, who’s got a really interesting book about his journey from living in a housing project in Manhattan, all the way to becoming a general attorney at Microsoft.

Matt Alder (8m 28s):
One of the phrases that he used when we were talking about the approach to diversity, equity, inclusion that employers are taking is that he wanted to see results, not hear noise. I think we’ve seen lots of noise in this area, but at the moment, we are not seeing the results that we need. It’s still a very big focus area. One of the interesting things though, when it comes to social mobility is I’ve spoken to a number of employers who are really rethinking the way that they look at talent. People like Body Shop, for example, in the US, who have this open hiring initiative where they don’t do background checks.

Matt Alder (9m 13s):
They literally take anyone who applies, who can work the shifts. In the UK you’ve got companies like Timson and Green King recruiting people straight out of prisoners. They’re leaving prison. Really thinking differently about talent, really a win-win for society, a win-win for the employer, and it’s been really encouraging to see that. The other thing that we talked about in the talent acquisition part of the book was the fact that really the strategic case for talent acquisition, mature approach to hiring needed to be understood throughout the organization, particularly at that C-suite level. Now, while there has been some fantastic work in some organizations in terms of really understanding the role that talent acquisition plays in corporate strategy, I think unfortunately, what we are seeing right now with TA teams being the first to be laid off as companies make cuts, that case still hasn’t been made.

Matt Alder (10m 16s):
That’s not yet understood. We haven’t made our case to be properly understood at that top level about the strategic case for talent. That’s me been talking. I’ve been talking a lot there. Mervin, your views on that.

Mervin Denin (10m 33s):
I think that it’s an interesting point you make there, because I suppose, for me, one of the most important areas across the whole employee cycle is experience. We’ve written a lot about it. I’ve been involved in quite a bit of research around candidate experience, employee experience, learning experience, all of this area. One of the phrases that I often use is that we’ve never invested so much money in workplace tech. We’ve got technology companies becoming unicorns, millionaires, billionaires, and yet candidate experience and employee experience by just about every measure is at rock bottom still.

Mervin Denin (11m 18s):
Candidate experience is the most important thing. It’s so personal to the individual and we still can’t seem to get it right. Particularly now as we are looking to hire very digital talent, very switched on talent, maybe slightly younger have come up in different era, they expect to be taken seriously. They expect to have agency in what they’re doing. They don’t just expect to apply into the ether and they may or may not hear back. They want to know where they stand at each stage of the process.

Mervin Denin (11m 58s):
They live their personal lives that way, and organizations still can’t seem to create an experience which allows them that, which gives them actionable information. If there’s interview feedback, it’s actionable. “This is what’s good. This is where we need more.” I think that is a big concern because one of the overall messages in the book that I wrote was that the talent mobility, or as we used to call it internal mobility, moving people around an organization, I maintained would become a talent acquisition issue, not an HR or learning and development issue.

Mervin Denin (12m 40s):
Of course, it is, yeah. Talent mobility is a talent acquisition priority. TA need to have overview of all the skills, all the competencies, capabilities within the business, who’s at what stage of their career, to be able to talk to a hiring manager to be able to say, “Look, this is where we need to move this person. We don’t need to look externally for that. We’ve got somebody here who’s doing these skills. Look at adjacent skills, they’ve got these skills, therefore with some development, we can move them into this area.” I think that’s a very important part for talent acquisition. I think that a lot of organizations are becoming aware of that, but I think the pace of adoption of that could be faster.

Mervin Denin (13m 26s):
We’ve also got, at the moment, the concept of career experience, which I think is a fascinating area where you have people within the organization whose responsibility is to oversee, I suppose, the whole of the journey from somebody coming in to the way their careers developed, to the way they develop, and to what they can achieve with the business. I think those to me are the most important things I’ve seen. I think areas that show the huge need for a good qualified talent acquisition teams who are really on top of everything that’s going on, but as you’ve just said, it’s a concern that maybe in these economic times they’re being cut.

Matt Alder (14m 9s):
I think it’s an interesting point though because what’s been a massive positive for me is I’ve had a number of conversations on the podcast in recent months where TA teams are taking that responsibility for talent mobility, for internal hiring, and really picking up on that skills piece. I think, perhaps the bit where the hype doesn’t quite meet the reality is maybe round this skills piece because I think we were having this conversation right at the start of the pandemic about TA teams were suddenly in charge of internal mobility and organizations really needed to understand the skills that they have in their business. That comes into skills-based hiring and all those kind of things.

Matt Alder (14m 53s):
In fact, I was talking to talking to Sam at SHL the other night about companies understanding skills and actually did an understanding of the skills within the organizations play a part in the strategy for the layoffs that we’re seeing in big tech. We felt the answer was probably no, and that perhaps also illustrates how far we’ve got to go with that sense of understanding skills within business. Now, the technology seems to be there to do it. The willingness seems to be there to do it. Is it something that you are seeing? Do you think organizations are able to map the skills within their organizations?

Mervin Denin (15m 35s):
I think they can. I think it’s an improving area in the whole concept I suppose of talent intelligence across an organization. It’s something that is relatively new. It has been around for a few years, but it is probably something like candidate experience. We could have sat here 15 years ago and talking about that. Whereas think talent intelligence and this understanding of all the available, I suppose, skills, knowledge, capabilities within an organization, I think it is improving. I think it tends to be the much larger organizations are better at this. I think, ultimately, every organization of any size, if it’s going to compete and thrive in the future needs, needs this information, needs access to this data.

Tech Entrepreneur on the Mission (16m 22s):
Imagine how fast we could solve the world’s biggest problems if more SAS startups would gain traction sooner. Welcome to the tech entrepreneur on the Mission podcast. This podcast is dedicated to sharing experiences from B2B SAS CEOs who are going above and beyond to deliver chains that is noticed. You’ll hear their secrets and learn what is required to build a SAS business that the world starts talking about and keeps talking about, and how to overcome the roadblocks to do so.

Matt Alder (16m 56s):
Talking about data, let’s talk about technology. I revisited the book a week or so ago in preparation of this conversation. Obviously, I can remember everything that we wrote to the word, but I thought I’d go through and you know, just pick out some of the things that stood out, looking at it retrospectively. We talk about AI all the way through the book and saying how the increase in sophistication of AI is becoming incredibly important. It’s probably one of the other than layoffs the economy, talent shortages, and the very strange situation we currently find ourselves in.

Matt Alder (17m 36s):
AI is the number onetopic of conversation at the moment. A lot of that has come from chatGPT and the fact that everyone can now see how this technology works. It’s now got this conversational framework to allow people like you and me access into this science, into this technology. Now, the technology’s been around for quite some time, but I’ve never known it be so front and center in everything that we are talking about. What I think’s interesting is we’ve talked about talent acquisition and has it made that kind of strategic case and all these sort of things. I think what we are seeing is a massive reinvention, evolution, disruption, whatever buzzwords you want to use, but certainly talent acquisition is changing.

Matt Alder (18m 21s):
Things like AI and the the economic circumstances in various countries are really driving that. One of the things that I touched on in the book, but probably didn’t write about as much as I thought I had was personalization. Anyone who listens to this podcast will be very bored of me talking about personalization because it is my favorite topic. Very, very important. I am really, really interested to see how the quantum leaps that we’re seeing in AI are really gonna help us personalize talent acquisition, offer people a uniquely personal experience all the way through the process, but also one that relies on automation.

Matt Alder (19m 5s):
It relies on using humans and human intelligence in the right kind of places. Really interesting conversation recently on the podcast with Karl Lag Gunni. He’s on a really, really interesting report on the uptake of AI within HR, within talent acquisition. Lots of people are saying that they’re gonna spend money on this and getting into their business, but not many people actually have the right strategy in place to make it work. That’s I think where we are with technology. We’ve seen what’s possible. We need to change as an industry and I think the smartest HR and TA leaders will be the ones who can make sense of that, tie it into the strategy of their business, get that senior buy-in and really move the industry forward.

Matt Alder (19m 57s):
What’s your view on that tech piece?

Mervin Denin (20m 2s):
I think I’m gonna go a slight tangent on this because I agree with you. I think AI and certainly the possibilities that conversational AI opens up are huge. That’s one of your top areas at the moment. One of mine is wellbeing and the impact all of this has on the people who work for us. The best organizations are those who are able to somehow support the wellbeing of their employees. I’ve often said that. We are very close to the time now when, on interview, candidates will actually ask the question on interview. “If I’m struggling, how will you help me?

Mervin Denin (20m 44s):
If I need help, how will will you support me?” I think that if we get too far focused, I suppose, on the data and analytics, we missed the human side of business. I had a recent podcast interview with Derek Irvin, who’s the VP at WorkHuman. This was about the role that that thanks and recognition plays in improving wellbeing. It is a huge link and I think that that’s the kind of area and possibly the side that’s maybe missing from the future organization. It’s that how we look out for our people. I often talk about the move away from direction and management to support and enablement.

Mervin Denin (21m 27s):
Rather than than managing people, directing them, we’re supporting them, we’re enabling them. We can use the data. We can certainly, you mentioned chatGPT. People can now use that to ask questions like, “How can I do this? How can I do that? What are the essential skills for doing this?” Yeah, people before interviews will be using that. I’m interviewing for a systems engineer, “What are the five things I need to know?” I think all of this plays into a much, I suppose, to me, this emotional, social, mental wellbeing picture.

Mervin Denin (22m 7s):
I think that that that that’s the future success of an organization will be one that can marry the data, the analytics, and what we can learn through the AI with the actual support for the people.

Matt Alder (22m 21s):
That’s really interesting as well. I think that brings me on to the final topic. It was very much the thing that changed most about the book with the pandemic because we were writing a section on the future of work and we were starting to talk about maybe there’ll be more remote work, maybe there’ll be more hybrid work. Then suddenly, literally one day, there was remote work everywhere. Looking back, what’s disappointing for me is I still don’t feel we’re having a grown up conversation about what work is and where work should take place.

Matt Alder (23m 1s):
The newspapers, the internet is still full of huge amounts of headlines and commentary about productivity. People going back to the office, people being forced to go back to the office, people wanting to go back to the office, people never going back to the office. Iit’s just a disappointing conversation because it’s full of vested interests and there’s not much data in there. It’s full of opinion. There are some significant challenges that employers and employees need to work through with new ways of working, but some significant benefits as well. I just don’t feel that we’re having those conversations because we are almost stuck in this pantomime style thing.

Matt Alder (23m 43s):
“Should we go back to the office?” “Oh yes, we should.” “Oh no, we shouldn’t.” It’s really disappointing and I think that I’m seeing lots of people working really effectively in a hybrid way. I’m seeing lots of people who’ve always been remote, continuing to be remote, and very effective. Likewise, people have a title location and they don’t have that flexibility, but I think if organizations want to be inclusive, they want to offer flexibility, they want to broaden the talent pools that they work in, then hybrid remote work is a key aspect of that, if not the the overall solution.

Matt Alder (24m 22s):
What do you think?

Mervin Denin (24m 26s):
I have an expression about HR in the time of #outrage. This is this place straight into it. Every day, as you say, the digital narrative that we see, whether it’s through the daily email newsletters, whether it’s going on LinkedIn, whether it’s going on social media, whether it’s our daily update from whoever we subscribe to, be it the Times or whatever it is, all about these arguments about quiet quitting, loud quitting, remote working, and rage applying, and all those things. I think that the reality for me is that something like 60% of the jobs in the UK economy can’t be done remotely.

Mervin Denin (25m 10s):
In one respect, we are talking about a, a minority, but it’s a very significant minority, but most of the people who carry the digital narrative are people who can work remotely and flexibly. I think that’s how it becomes intensified. I do think we need a grownup conversation around it because there are a number of things that we have to take into account. If I had a recent podcast chat with Gemma Dale, who some listeners may know has written a couple of books on this. The thing is that a remote, flexible hybrid, asynchronous working of four different things.

Mervin Denin (25m 50s):
Are we talking about location? Are we talking about time? That’s the first thing we have to decide. I suppose the second thing is understanding our goals and understanding I suppose what the other pressures are on somebody. If you have people who have caring responsibilities, people with childcare responsibilities, people with different kind of family pressures, those can all be woven in. Having some form of flexible hybrid remote working can help those people to actually have a more fulfilling work life and actually probably contribute more to the organization they work with.

Mervin Denin (26m 32s):
I think that some of the nonsense is around if I speak to people I know who maybe aren’t part of this, so people in my personal life who do manual jobs, they say, “Well of course people wanna work from home because they don’t do anything. They spend all day watching TV and drinking coffee.” I think, to get the overall narrative around the world of work away from that kind of thing and onto the kind of how productive people are. What is the end game? I think that it is a huge area and we’ll still be talking about it in a few years time, but I think it’s something that needs to be properly analyzed and organizations have to find a way, going back to what I said about supporting and enabling, to actually what is the work arrangement that works best for the employee, for the organization, for the team that they’re a part of, for the managers in that team.

Mervin Denin (27m 31s):
What is the best arrangement and how can they support everybody to do their best work?

Matt Alder (27m 36s):
I have one more question for you, but before I do, I will ask you that after something else. What’s rage applying? I’ve not heard that one.

Mervin Denin (27m 48s):
No. It had a very short-lived hashtag life, I think. The concept was that you got so angry or fed up with your job, you just, in a rage, applied to lots of other jobs.

Matt Alder (27m 57s):
I think that’s how I got every job I ever had. Is that not how people change jobs? It’s news to me.

Mervin Denin (28m 4s):
I think the concept was that you were applying on master jobs that might not even be right for you, but you were just applying.

Matt Alder (28m 12s):
Well, that still applies I think. A final, proper question, if we were gonna write another book, what would we write out about?

Mervin Denin (28m 19s):
Ten best beers we’ve drank? No. If we are writing another book around this, I think it’s an exciting time to do so, because a lot of has changed, but I’m not one of these that every, every few months the world changes. It’ll never be the same again. I think that there is a lot change. There is a lot of some serious analysis to be done around the whole concept. Our relationship with work and the whole thing about remote, hybrid, flexible, asynchronous. I think, for me, a lot of it is around wellbeing, and I suppose this cycle of, I said, supporting enablement.

Mervin Denin (28m 59s):
It’s to do with engagement. If people are engaged, then they feel supported. If they feel supported, their wellbeing is better, they’re much more productive. If they’re more productive, they are producing better results for the organization. Retention is improved. Obviously, all of those things linking together for the organization means stronger commercial outcomes. I think that there is a lot, particularly with what we’ve been talking about over the last few minutes to do with the growth of AI, the growth of conversational AI.

Mervin Denin (29m 39s):
I think that if we were to write another book, I would be very excited about writing about these topics in the, I suppose, almost like the future of talent or the future world of work.

Matt Alder (29m 53s):
Exactly. I think it’s just such interesting. When we wrote the book after the pandemic, I thought, “Well, this is a really interesting time to write a book,” but fast forward to now, so much is changing and it really feels like the next five years are gonna be very, very different to the last five years. Well, hopefully there won’t be another pandemic. That’s already three years, that’s different. I think it’s a really interesting time to maybe have that conversation about doing it all again. Mervin, thank you very much for joining me.

Mervin Denin (30m 22s):
Matt, thank you very much for inviting me and it’s been a real pleasure to discuss it with you.

Matt Alder (30m 30s):
My thanks to Mervin. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to the mailing list, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.

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