Get my free whitepaper “10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition” – Download Now
Trend Spotting – Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization – Click Here
The shortening shelf life of skills, shifting business priorities, and the surge in AI-driven job applications are compelling many employers to rethink their candidate assessment and selection processes. This shift towards skills-based thinking is fostering greater integration between talent acquisition and talent management. By combining data on soft skills, hard skills, and career aspirations, employers can leverage a unified dataset to gain a comprehensive view throughout the entire employee lifecycle.
So how can this be done and what advantages can it bring?
My guest this week is Jason Putnam, the CRO at Plum. Jason has been driving the charge around the scientific assessment of soft skills for a while and has recently incorporated data on hard skills into their methodology. Jason has some important insights to share on the future of assessment and the implementation of skills-based hiring.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How the market is evolving
• The changing balance between talent acquisition and talent management
• TA’s responsibility for retention
• Combining hard skills and soft skills
• Pace paradox versus business latency
• Focusing on the skills you need rather than the skills you have
• The evolution of the recruiting process
• Building alignment between talent acquisition, talent management, and hiring managers
• The importance of one universal dataset
• The role of AI
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Matt: Support for this podcast comes from Plum. Plum is a revolutionary workforce solutions provider that knows when people flourish, business thrives. With their powerful new platform, PlumThrive, you can unlock science-based data to help you measure and match human potential to job needs. PlumThrive provides personalized career insights, improves quality of hire and creates high-performing teams from a single, simple to use platform. Want to learn more? Visit www.plum.io, and discover all the ways that Plum can help you thrive.
[Recruiting Future theme]
Matt: Hi there. Welcome to Episode 620 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. The shortening shelf life of skills, shifting business priorities and the surge in AI-driven job applications are compelling many employers to rethink their candidate assessment and selection processes. The shift towards skills-based thinking is also fostering greater integration between talent acquisition and talent management. By combining data on soft skills, hard skills and career aspirations, employers can leverage a unified dataset to gain a comprehensive view throughout the entire employee lifecycle. So how can this be done and what advantages can it bring?
My guest this week is Jason Putnam, CRO at Plum. Plum has been driving the charge around the scientific assessment of soft skills for a while now and has recently incorporated data on hard skills into their methodology. Jason has some important insights to share, both on the future of assessment and on the implementation of skills-based thinking.
Hi Jason, and welcome back to the podcast.
Jason: Hey Matt, how are you? Thanks for having me back.
Matt: I’m very good, thank you very much and it is a pleasure to have you back on the show. For people who may not have heard your sort of previous appearances, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Jason: Yeah. My name is Jason Putnam, I live in Austin, Texas. I am the Chief Revenue Officer. So, all the go to market stuff at Plum, been in the industry in that role for longer than I care to admit but, yeah.
Matt: Fantastic. And tell us a little bit more about Plum for people who may not be familiar with what you do.
Jason: Yeah. And the answer may change from the last time I was on. Historically, for the last 12 years we have been an assessment company that is more than an assessment company. We’ve really solved the soft skill side of the equation and we started with really looking at as a scientific-based company, we wanted to ensure that we could put the human first, but also get to those psychometric soft skills in a way that other people weren’t doing it. So, our philosophy has always been, let’s take something that’s incredibly scientific and incredibly well thought through and incredibly predictive. And let’s do it in a way that’s better, faster, cheaper than what’s historically been done in the market, which a lot of times it involved consultants in the past.
So, for the first eight years of the company, that’s what we did on the talent acquisition side. So, if you think kind of pre-hire side, and then we rolled that same data set into talent management. So, our clients historically have used that same data set on every applicant and every employee on the talent management side so all things like leadership potential and succession planning. And then recently we’ve made some changes to that using the same philosophy. Let’s take something that’s incredibly predictive, make it still scientific, and do it in a way that’s different, but as predictive, better, faster, cheaper. So last week on the 21st, we rolled out really the first platform that is combining the legacy of what we’ve had, the things we’ve won all the awards for and had all the customer’s psychometric side, but we’re the first platform to now roll in hard skills and culture into that data.
Matt: Fantastic stuff. And going to talk about that a little bit more in a minute, particularly in this sort of the context of everything that’s going on in talent acquisition and talent management. But perhaps that’s a good place to start, actually, because the last time we spoke, I sort of asked you about what you were seeing in the market and what was kind of changing. And I’ll just ask you the same question, “What are you seeing in the market at the moment? How has it evolved since the last time we spoke?”
Jason: Things change fast, which is really interesting. I’ve been here about two and a half years. So, for the first two years I was here, which it probably isn’t a surprise, talent acquisition was really the top of the need for everyone, and talent management was all things talent management were important, but they were almost like a nice to have. And that really pivoted about six months ago where talent management was in all the aspects of talent management from a culture, succession planning, leadership potential, future proofing the company that really ended up being the main reason people were speaking to Plum. And what we’re seeing now is that’s pivoting a little bit again back towards talent acquisition. But there’s no kind of reduction in the talent management conversation.
So, what we’re seeing is an interesting mix of, I believe about six months ago in a boardroom or in the C level suite, people were kind of worried about macroeconomic conditions, maybe even geopolitical issues. So, they were pulling back as an organization that circled the wagons. Do the best with what we have, do more with less. All the things we’ve talked about this year. But now, as people are looking ahead from, again, a board and a C-suite, we’re starting to see that matriculate down into people saying, “Hey, we’re not as worried as we once were six months ago.” Many are even becoming much more bullish on it. We’re leading into an election in the US, so who knows how all that’s going to go with how people feel? But to me, there’s so much more positivity in the last 90 days than there was six months ago.
Matt: Well, that’s always great to hear. I suppose one question for me is, “Are you noticing a coming together of talent acquisition and talent management in a way that maybe we’ve not seen before?”
Jason: Yeah. It’s a soapbox of mine, because I think of it a lot, like when you look at a– which I run right? When you look at a sales and marketing organization, if they don’t come together, and frankly, a lot of times under united leadership, there’s a lot of finger pointing. Marketing is going to say our leads are great, but you have bad salespeople, and salespeople are going to say marketing is bad and they don’t generate enough leads. I am seeing a lot more of talent acquisition and talent management coming together because it has to start with talent acquisition. To me, talent acquisition should have the exact same amount of responsibility for retention as talent management does. And where I’m seeing it come together is at the CHRO level, where they’re really looking at it as this united group that they have to go out and kind of win this together.
But part of the problem I’m seeing, and continue to see, is the disparate data sets between those two groups. And if you think about this, we may have even talked about this on the last one. Think about times you’ve been promoted, Matt, or you promoted somebody, or I have, the reason once somebody’s in your organization, we look at them as a top performer with a different lens. Oh, Suzie or Johny has a lot of grit, or they’re a great teammate, or they’re very innovative. So, we’re going to promote them. Rarely do we promote somebody because Johny’s a 10 at Excel and Suzie’s a 9 at Excel. But in TA, we only screen them in for the hard skills, not those things that we’re promoting people for. So, we’re now seeing there’s still that gap. But we’re now seeing as long as there’s this united leadership over both groups, we’re starting to see them come together in a way where in a dream world, that data is pulled throughout the entire process. So not just from screening them in, but all the way through retirement.
Matt: So let’s dive deeply into skills around all of this. And I suppose to start with what might sound like a simple question, but I think it’s an important thing for people to be sort of very clear about. What would you class as the difference between hard skills and soft skills?
Jason: So I am not an IO psychologist, although that’s what our company does, and we have people on my team who are. But if you ask me as a practitioner or somebody who’s leading this company, the simplest way to explain it is soft skills are essentially who you are. That’s who you are as a human being and you may get that from a personality perspective, we’ve all taken assessments and once you’re at a certain age, it’s typically about 22 it doesn’t really change all that much. We can build coping mechanisms. For me, I’m very low in teamwork, but as an executive, I have to display teamwork. So, I have to build some coping mechanisms, like I make sure I have a good support team around me, make sure I put things in my calendar to do that. But if you gave me free 30 minutes this afternoon, would I rather go to a happy hour or get my to-do list done? I’m going to prioritize my to-do list, but as an executive, I have to make sure I go to the happy hour and do that.
Hard skills are– none of us were born learning how to tie our shoes or ride a bike. That’s things you learned and you were taught. That’s hard skills. Given a long enough timeline, somebody can become an expert at excel. Given enough timeline, people can learn to code any language. So to me, that’s the biggest difference. There’s really a third aspect. The way I like to explain it to people is very similar to a globe. If you look at kind of the intersection between longitude and latitude, longitude is hard skills. Those things I’ve learned and can learn and can potentially learn in the future. Soft skills are latitude, and there’s a third aspect, which is altitude. So, of those hard skills that you know what’s your proficiency in those hard skills? So that’s really the whole skill set for me when I look at it at a human level.
Matt: One of the things that I’ve been talking about all year is we’re not just facing skill shortages, we’re also facing shortening skills as skills go out of date much, much quicker. And every single conversation I have about this, I’m just surprised by how even bigger an issue that’s coming in terms of the speed that things are changing. What’s your perspective on how fast things are changing and how quickly skills are kind of going out of date and turning into other skills?
Jason: Yeah. I think if we look at it, let’s use somebody else’s opinion, not mine. There’s a futurist, his name is Ira S. Wolfe, people should read him. He has this concept called The Pace Paradox, and it’s how fast things change. So to put it in perspective, which is going to sound scary, but nevertheless it’s true. If you look at the period of time from 2000 to 2004, so it’s a five-year period of time. There was a pace of change that existed in that five-year period of time. That pace of change has now been truncated to 12 months in 2024. So, the pace of change is five times faster now than it was in 2000. If we look 15 years ahead, that five-year pace of change is going to happen in somewhere between two weeks and a month. So, we can all be really scared about that. But it is the world we are living in, and it’s not going to change.
We’ve had similar kind of paces that sped up and gotten slower when the Internet happened or the telephone came. Like, those are big technological advancements that happen, but it’s not going to slow down. And people are fearful of that for two reasons. And this is my opinion. Number one is they’re afraid to be left behind, which is a legit fear. So, you got to do something about it. And then number two is, what if I don’t have the skills to keep up with the pace? I’m going to be left behind as an organization or in my job, but there’s also the fear of being left behind as a human, and they’re real things, but there’s nothing– we can stick our head in the sand. But if you look at that Pace Paradox, a year ago, we were touting a report that says the half-life of hard skills. So those things that you learn and you know was at an all-time low, it was two and a half years. If we look at this speed of this Pace Paradox, again, my opinion, by the end of this year, the half-life of hard skills may be a year.
All the things that people look at, a hiring manager wants five years’ experience with this particular thing. There’ll be nobody with it. Just because the amount of skills that are being sunsetted and the amount of skills that are coming out new every day, there’s no way to move in a direction where you can categorize all these skills and count every grain of sand on the ocean and put them in this big skills ontology. No one will ever be done. You’ll never be able to check the box being a skills-based org if you’re trying to outpace this pace of change, it’s never going to happen.
Matt: I think that’s interesting because I recently just worked with company called Vector on a piece of research into skills-based thinking in organizations and skills-based hiring in particular. And this was a problem that all of the very large employers we spoke to had, it was the speed of which things went out of date, and they were finding it very difficult to understand the skills they had in their business because they were changing so quickly, understand the skills they needed. And it was really, lots of people were stuck on this and didn’t really have a clear idea about how they were going to move forward with it. What are employers getting wrong when they’re thinking about this kind of their move towards being a more skill-focused organization?
Jason: And I hate to say people are getting it wrong. I just think they’re misinformed. And I also think there historically hasn’t been great solutions out there. So, number one, if you think about this Pace Paradox, the speed of change, and then you think about the speed of business, they’re vastly different. So, I think a lot of things that happened in the last year, there’s a latency of decisions being made at a C-level by the time they get implemented at, let’s say, a director level at an organization. So, CEO is ultimately responsible for the business, says, “Hey, here’s what we want to do as a business that goes down to VPs, and eventually it gets down to directors, managers, and doers. But that latency may be six months, and by the time that ship has sailed and you’ve set it off, maybe two months later, something different is happening in the boardroom at the C-level.
So now that’s going to take another six months to come down. So, it’s just people are looking at it from a traditional go-to market business perspective. What happens inside of our org, and we’ve got to get this approval, we’ve got to talk to this person. That is not how the world is moving. So, people need to think about how your business is constructed and how decisions are made. Because if you’re literally having all these toll gates to get something done and those toll gates are taking 90 days, those 90 days actually are going to feel more like two years if we go back a decade ago. So that’s, number one, they’re getting that wrong. Number two, trying to archive every skill, it’s not going to matter. I can go and archive every piece of car parts that have ever been built in the world, but if those cars haven’t been on the road in 100 years, who cares if they’re there?
And understanding that whatever I’m thinking about today as a skill that is needed is going to most likely be irrelevant 18 months from now, and I can look at my company and say, “What skills do I have?” And that’s really important. But it’s not as important as determining what skills I’m going to need from a future perspective, that is much more critical to say, “Hey, if I’m a CEO or I’m thinking about kind of workforce planning, what are going to be the most important skills for this company in this industry 18 months from now and build towards that versus worrying about the skills we already have.”
Matt: Last time that we spoke, we were very much talking about the science behind measuring soft skills, which is another thing that a lot of employers were struggling with in terms of how they sort of defined that. From your kind of the science-based approach that you have as a company, what’s the solution to this when it comes to hard skills? How do we kind of understand what people have, where they’re going, and what the organization might need?
Jason: I’m going to give you a very nonscientific answer, because as a science company, as I talked about in the beginning, how we got to where we are with hard skills, I think is important in a non-Plum promotion way. So, two and a half years ago, we said, hey–because we’re very human first. We have the highest completion rate, we have the highest adoption rate among humans. We have 50,000 people a month and growing every month who create their own Plum profile part of it’s the assessment, and we said, “Hey, if we’re trying to do more for the humans, part of what we rolled out was PlumThrive, which is corporations use PlumFlourish, which is what humans use.” And part of what we rolled out on the 21st was giving more value to those humans. So we said, “Hey, having hard skills is important for them so we can help them in their career journey, whether they’re an employee or they’re looking for a job, or they’re those 10,000 organic people who come to us every month to fill out their profile.”
So, two and a half years ago, we said, “Hey, let’s figure out how to put hard skills in here.” And one reason I love Plum is we had no tech debt when I started. We have no tech debt now. We take a very scientific approach to getting things right, no matter how long it takes. So for a year, we used all the underpinning technology that’s out there from the scraping and matching companies. Scrape a resume, scrape this, whether that’s for screening people, for hiring or internal mobility, whatever your case. So for a year, we ran real data, using that data and real circumstances through a scientific lens, and we said, “Huh, it’s nonpredictive at all.” Number one, the matches weren’t predictive and predicting performance weren’t there. So we said, “Well, darn, that’s not going to work, not for us.” So, we then spent the next year saying, “What’s the best way to actually solve hard skills scientifically?” What we found was something actually nonscientific. We asked people, so as the people come through those 50,000, we said, “Hey, we want to know two things about you.” Number one, “What are you?” And then, number two, “What do you want to be?”
And what we found was, during that kind of second year, and this may be very controversial, there wasn’t a job, remember, we work with huge companies that have very, very disparate jobs, janitor to nuclear physicists. And we said, “How many things do we actually need to know about a person on the hard skills side, to say that person is worth interviewing, or that person is worth an internal mobility conversation, or whatever the conversation may be.” And what we found was, for any job, there wasn’t more than five things we needed to know. And ideally, if you can think of a resume, and you had, here’s the five things I know that would make every resume so much better, especially if you had like a LinkedIn profile or whatever. And there was a lot of pushbacks on this. And we said, “Okay, let’s take a job. Let’s take. I need a nuclear physicist in Florida. How many things you need to know to interview that person? Do you live in Florida and are you a nuclear physicist?” That’s it.
So, combining that with the psychometric data meant that that match and that predictive outcome of that person being 300% more productive and staying three years longer is fantastic. Really the more complicated the job, the less things you need to know. So, if you think about like a sales rep at Plum or an enterprise company, it’s like, “Are you a sales rep? What do you sell? Do you sell timeshares? Do you sell software? Where are you in your career? Where do you live? What language do you speak?” some basic things. So we asked people, they told us the second thing we did as part of that process is not just what do you know, but also aspirationally, what do you want? So maybe you’re a BDR today, but you want to be a CRO, maybe you’re a nurse tech today, but you’re going to school and you want to be a doctor. And so now we have the aspect of not just what do they have from the hard skills to screen somebody to interview them or internal mobility, but aspirationally what they want to be. So, and that’s important on the frontend, but it’s also important once they’re an employee.
So, it’s a simplistic yet predictive way to solve the skills problem that we’re having. And because the PlumFlourish side is something that people will use throughout their career, they’re actively coming in and updating those skills because they’re getting benefit from it. So, it’s not like it’s fallow data that they just do it once and it goes away. Because they use Plum as part of their career management platform, they’re coming in and updating skills, they’re getting upskilling. And all that data is captured in the profile, which is beneficial, number one for them, but beneficial for the current employer, potential employer, or whatever thing they’re going to use in the future.
Matt: And how does this play out? Because the last time we were talking very much about soft skills, and as you mentioned there, if you get selection right in that area, people stay longer, they’re happier, they’re more productive, all those kind of things. And with hard skills, I think you’re making an excellent point that actually very often we overcomplicate this in terms of trying to understand what someone can do and five things sounds perfectly right to me. Both of those things go against the recruiting process as it currently stands. How do you see it evolving over the next few years to sort of take into account the new ways of thinking around all of this?
Jason: It’s a phenomenal question and I think it only goes against the recruiting process because there wasn’t an alternative. And let me explain to you what I mean by that. So, it goes back to, “Why do we promote people?” A lot of times we’re promoting people for performance and their soft skills versus we’re screening them in or out based on their hard skills. But part of that is the lack of alignment that we talked about between TA, TM, and the third aspect, which is the hiring manager. So, recruiters and a lot of HR in general has historically been and really more of an administrative function. They’ve been working in the business, not on the business. So, they were not thought of as a strategic function, which to me, it’s one of the most, if not the most strategic function you can have in a business. So, if you think about the hiring manager, the hiring manager says, because they don’t have any other bar to measure, “I need a person that has this and this and this and this and these 20 things from a hard skill.” And then they push it out to recruiting and recruiting only looks for those things. They serve up candidates. Irrespective of the soft skills, the hiring manager says, “Hey, you check the box. You didn’t check the box.”
But again, administrative, where I see things going, and I’m hopeful of this, is that TA and TM with the hiring manager are using data not from the outside in, but from the inside out to make all talent decisions. So, it’s not just the decision of what skills do I need to bring somebody in, but who’s currently here. So if you think about, how I’ll call talent, but it’s, HR in general is kind of architected. It’s architected to be an outside in process. So, we know we need this. We’re trying to solve this problem so we go by this piece of technology or we go hire this consultant. So if you imagine, like, these concentric circles, you have all this disparate technology on the outside. They all have their own unique data sets. And ideally, at some point, you’re hoping that all those data sets somehow converge in the middle, where you can make decisions as a business, that is something that will never be done, and if it is done, it’s not efficient. The way to do it right is to get all the data in the middle and let the data feed the outside so you can take HR because you have one universal data set. And HR can now become strategic and start making decisions from the inside out versus being reliant and reactive from the outside in.
Matt: As a final question, I’m going to ask you the inevitable question about AI. The reason I’m doing that is I know that as we’ve kind of discussed before, it’s not something that you’re using in any of these processes, but there’s been a lot of thinking that actually maybe AI is going to come in and solve some of the issues we have in terms of mapping hard skills and all those kind of things. What’s your take on that? And how do you think things will evolve over the next 6 to 12 months in terms of that?
Jason: Yeah. And I have an AI background, so I’m not anti-AI. We don’t use AI in the psychometric side because you can’t. It’s not something you can infer you have to assess it from a personality perspective. We are now using AI on the hard skills side and we’re doing it differently than others. What’s interesting with us is we have our own unique data set that others don’t have, and that’s actually a pretty big benefit for us. So, when we continue to apply, our LLM to our data set, it’s going to drive different things. And frankly, I think that data is going to be valuable not just for the human, not just for the company, but for other vendors in the space frankly. AI is a good thing. AI should take the things off our plate, especially in the HR world, so we can go back and be better humans. It shouldn’t replace the human. But if you can start seeing patterns in 50,000 people a month, there’s some commonality in people who have applied to this job, both from a hard skills, soft skills and cultural aspect, versus I’m going to look at my company and say, with this Pace Paradox, “Hey, our culture is great today. But if these five things happen from a change perspective, how do I as a CEO need to change my culture in the future to take advantage of it?”
That’s all things you should use AI for. It’s all things that we use the Internet for. It’s all things that we used the telephone for. It’s all things that people used a telegraph for. It’s just now it’s just doing things better, faster, cheaper, and there’s no downside to that. People are so fearful it’s going to take their job. It’s not, it’s going to make people who embrace AI exponentially better at their job. But that Pace Paradox, if people aren’t willing to embrace it either as a human or as an organization you’re going to be incredibly left behind, and there’s no point in continuing to go on because if everyone else is using it and you’re not, the playing field is only going to get broader and broader and broader for you.
Matt: Jason, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jason: Of course. Always a pleasure. You’re fantastic, Matt.
Matt: My thanks to Jason. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to mattalder.tv. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and 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.
