Skills-based organizations and skills-based hiring have been some of the hottest topics of the year. While it is hard to find anyone who disagrees that this way of thinking about talent strategies has enormous benefits, there is still much debate about some of the practicalities around strategy and implementation.
I spoke to two genuine HR thought leaders in my fourth and final set of interviews recorded at this year’s HR Technology Conference. Heather Jerrehain, VP of Product Management – Employee Workflows at Service Now, and Mike Bollinger, Global VP of Strategic Initiative at Cornerstone on Demand
Both shared their thoughts and insights on the power of skills, the journey towards skills-based organizations, and their sense of what the future might look like.
In the interviews, we discuss:
• The impact of AI on jobs, work, and skills
• How AI is revolutionizing skills analysis and intelligence
• Using data from the hiring process to get a fuller picture of a person’s skills
• The power of skills-based mobility
• Advice on building skills-based strategies
• How to get started
• The importance of not overcomplicating the process
• What types of organizations are already successfully implementing skills-based strategies
• Soft skills versus hard skills
• Skills development and the value for employees
• Integrating technology into skills-based hiring and development.
• What will things look like in five years’ time?
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Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Talent acquisition is going through an unprecedented transformation and many of you are likely in the middle of planning your strategies as we move through 2024 towards 2025. We all know that operating models, change management and aligning TA with corporate objectives are essential parts of any transformation strategy. But with the market and AI technologies in particular evolving so rapidly, there’s a real risk that your strategy could quickly become out outdated. That’s where strategic foresight comes in. It’s a proven methodology that helps you build credible future scenarios, create agile strategies, and most importantly, have a proactive influence on what the future of talent acquisition looks like both within your organization and across the industry. I know you’re busy, so I’ve created a concise online course that breaks down strategic foresight into easy to learn tools specifically designed for TA transformation. It’s quick to implement and will keep you ahead of the curve. You can learn more by visiting mattalder.me/course. That’s mattalder.me/course. There’s really never been a better time to shape the future of talent acquisition, so don’t miss this opportunity to make a lasting impact.
Matt Alder [00:01:37]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 646 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Skills based organizations and skills based hiring have been some of the hottest topics of the year. And while it’s hard to find anyone who disagrees that this way of thinking about talent strategies has huge benefits, there’s still much debate about some of the practical around strategy and implementation. In my fourth and final set of interviews recorded at this year’s HR Technology Conference, I spoke to two genuine HR thought leaders. Heather Jerrehian, VP of Product Management employee workflows at ServiceNow and Mike Bollinger, global VP of strategic initiatives at Cornerstone On Demand. Both shared their thoughts and insights on the power of skills, the journey towards skills based organizations, and a sense of what the future might look like.
Matt Alder [00:02:42]:
So hi Heather, welcome to the podcast.
Heather Jerrehian [00:02:42]:
Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:44]:
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Heather Jerrehian [00:02:50]:
Absolutely. So my name is Heather Jerrehian and I’m the VP of Product Management for Employee Workflows at ServiceNow. I actually joined the company two years ago as part of the Hitch acquisition where I was the CEO bringing skills intelligence technology to the company. We’ve actually since re platformed our technology so literally rebuilt it into the servicenow platform and then we’ve actually launched a new talent development solution with that AI intelligence. And today I am leading a data science team focused on bringing new intelligence across our employee workflow product portfolio.
Matt Alder [00:03:29]:
Fantastic. And well, let’s get into all of that in the conversation. Before we do though, you very kindly handed me a copy of your new book. So tell everyone about the book and what it’s about.
Heather Jerrehian [00:03:40]:
Yeah, so it’s actually my love letter to all the founders and leaders out there who have been brave enough to birth a new product or put something out in the market. And it’s called sale to scale. Steer your startup clear of mistakes from launch to exit. So we’re really focused on on how do you help people succeed through the launch, pivot, scale and exit. Myself and co authors have seen the same mistakes over and over again. So we really kind of created a guide for people of what to look out for and ways to move through it. And we tell it through actually founder stories where people had successes and ones that were not successful. Those are anonymous stories that we share.
Matt Alder [00:04:21]:
And I mean it’s very timely being because the world is full of AI startups at the moment, which I hope kind of brings on to the first question really, which is how are you seeing AI impact the workforce? I mean both at the moment and what’s the direction of travel with it?
Heather Jerrehian [00:04:37]:
Yeah, this is something I’ve been very, very passionate about. Having built a company focused on skills, intelligence and seeing that what has been happening with generative AI, this is a once in a generation shift that we’re seeing and the change is happening at such a rapid pace. So I was really thinking to myself, like what is going to happen as we think about AI taking on more work? And so we at ServiceNow actually did some research focused on the impacts of AI. We partnered with Pearson and we looked across eight different markets. We, we took a five year outlook across 10 industries. We looked at critical jobs and emerging trends. We analyzed over 80,000 tasks and 5,600 jobs. And the reason we did that is it’s no longer like what is your job, what are you doing? It’s more what is the day to day tasks that you’re doing and how does that get impacted? What gets augmented versus what gets automated and being able to understand that right, people’s roles are going to start to change. An example we have in our ecosystem is a help desk service agent. We predict in the next few years is going to save 10 and a half hours per week. So they have 39 discrete tasks they do on a week, over week basis. But over time, right. Each of those tasks compress and you think about ten and a half hours. Well, that’s a place where an organization can think about where do you reskill or upskill or maybe even redeploy that person to higher priority work.
Matt Alder [00:06:10]:
And I suppose that brings us on to the next question, which is what is the implication for skills here? What’s the impact on how everyone thinks about skills?
Heather Jerrehian [00:06:18]:
You know, skills is, I think of it this way. You need visibility to who do you have in your organization? And it’s no longer what’s your job? Right. That doesn’t tell you anything about a person. What you need to understand is what are the skills? And so this really goes to the employee employees and not just the role they’re currently in and the core skills that’s required to do that role, but what’s the whole rich history they brought with them to the organization? Right. That’s important information. Even what hobby do they have? You may discover that someone’s got a really important skill you had no idea that they had. So it’s this idea of understanding people’s skills and then how is it dynamically updating, right. How is that changing over time as they’re, you know, doing different types of learning, whether it’s a traditional course or a micro learning, maybe they have a mentor that they’re working with to hone a skill or maybe even doing a project across the organization to acquire a new skill. It’s this understanding of how things are dynamically changing over time and then you can think about that at scale in an organization.
Matt Alder [00:07:23]:
And so from that organizational perspective, what, what kind of strategies, what new ways of thinking do employers need to kind of bring into the, bring into the picture to kind of deal with, well, everything that’s going on, AI skills, you know, all the forces driving change.
Heather Jerrehian [00:07:39]:
It’s interesting. It’s hard, right? It’s really hard for organizations to understand who they have. I like to say that, you know, our goal is to get people to a four dimensional workforce. Most are in the first dimension, or at least all are actually in the first first dimension, which is you know the names of the people in the company and you know their titles. Okay. That’s the first dimension. The second dimension is when you’re starting to look at what are the roles that people have and what are the skills required to do that role. So you’re probably taking information from your HCM that’s in different job families and you’re starting to understand what are the skills related. And actually when you think about a job, family, you know, a company can have a software engine, but that doesn’t really tell you the whole picture about the work that that person’s doing. There’s many different flavors of software engineers. You can have a quality engineer, a data engineer, a front end engineer. So maybe they have some of the same skills that goes across, you know, those different flavors, but then there’s some unique skills. And then really when you start to unlock, right, the power of skills and moving to a skills based organization, you’re starting to understand, understand, like I said, that whole person and I want to add one thing that I think is important, that I always love to say, is that it all is dependent on the employee sharing the information about themselves and how they’re, what they’re doing in the flow of work. And so they need to know what’s in it for them. And many organizations have many profiles and I love to say the profile is the birthplace of skills because that’s where all the magic happens. So when you have all that data and you, you’re understanding how people are moving and changing over time, the third dimension is where you start to layer in what is your corporate strategy? Right. Who are the people you currently have? And as we’re thinking of things like the impacts of AI, do you have the skills today to do the work you need to do? And the fourth dimension is you think about time and the impacts of AI. So as the research I was just talking about is how is day to day work getting disrupted? That’s the fourth dimension again. So you’ve got this ever evolving, dynamically changing, you know, living, breathing system within a company and you really need to understand all of that. And it’s complex.
Matt Alder [00:09:52]:
No, absolutely. But I think the, the thing that I love about this is, is just the mobility of it all. So I think that for so long, you know, we join a company and then we’re stereotyped by our job to not necessarily everything that we’ve done in the past. I think that’s kind of one thing about it. I think the other thing when you’re talking about data as well, is the amount of data that people actually provide during the recruitment process about where they worked before, what they’ve done that doesn’t kind of get parsed into the way that they run their career in an organization always seems like a massive loss to me as well.
Heather Jerrehian [00:10:23]:
So, you know, I’m so glad you brought that up because we have a talent acquisition product that we have in a controlled go to market where we’re really thinking about that experience of someone coming in. And this aligns with our onboarding that we have with our HR service delivery product. You know, there’s so much valuable information when an employee comes into a company and then not only that, it can also make informed decisions of how do you properly onboard that person, what’s some additional training that you can give them to ensure success and really create that really fantastic experience for that employee.
Matt Alder [00:10:56]:
And I suppose again this kind of preempts the next question, which is what’s the role of technology in all of this?
Heather Jerrehian [00:11:04]:
The role of technology is enabling, right? It’s an enabler of information, it’s creating that visibility. Often it’s so interesting to hear people when they’re thinking about their build, buyer borrow strategy. You know, often we’re out buying talent, yet we, we don’t realize what we currently have in our own organization. And people can be walking out the door, right? Maybe someone’s leaving on their own or you’ve had to go through some painful layoff and you don’t really understand what really went out the door. And so this is why technology is so important. It’s that visibility to your talent to create the agility that you need to future proof your workforce. That’s really what we’re looking at here.
Matt Alder [00:11:46]:
So for many employers this seems like an absolutely massive undertaking. We need to go and to understand the skills that we need now and in 10 years time, we need to understand the nuance of every person in the organization. I mean, I know that many people are kind of overwhelmed by how to get started. What would your advice be in terms of the best ways to kind of approach this? Because I don’t think that many people would disagree that it’s the way forward, but I think it’s difficult to find people who agree on what, on kind of how to take that first step.
Heather Jerrehian [00:12:20]:
It’s sort of funny, it’s like the Three Little Bears. You know, you want to be just right and like how you approach this because yeah, a lot of organizations can get really hung up on a multi year project. And here’s what I want to say. Let technology do the work for you. Just get started, right? Maybe you’re getting started started with a specific group of people. A lot of people are starting in technology areas because that’s very much project based work. So they’ve already sort of thought about, you know, the roles and the skills related. But it’s important to get started. You know, so many People in hr, right, have spent a lot of time building out their job architecture and they’re doing it in spreadsheets, and it’s literally stale before they even have a chance to look at the full compiled report. But if you have technology that’s doing the work for you, as people are moving, right, no one is standing still. Again, if someone is doing learning or, you know, engaging in some project, you can start to capture that dynamic information. And so I think it’s about just starting small. And it’s really, really important to have the change management to get the employees to understand what’s in it for them. Why would they be sharing the information? Because again, if you don’t have the employee information, you don’t have the information about the skills, which means that you don’t have, for a leader, the visibility that they need in the organization.
Matt Alder [00:13:43]:
So final question for you. It’s literally kind of revolution at the moment in terms of everything that’s going on or everything that’s going to happen. Looks like it’s going to happen over the next few years. What do things look like in 5 years time? Where do you think this is all taking us? What do you hope the world of work and skills and talent might be like?
Heather Jerrehian [00:14:01]:
Yeah, so I for sure see a world where we all have AI assistants helping us with different parts of our work that, you know, we’re working side by side with, you know, AI personalities. I almost even am afraid to say this, but I actually have my own AI assistant right now that I’m actually playing around with. His name is Miles and I actually interact with him and ask him questions. I’ve sort of been doing this as a test because I’m trying to understand does this really work? And gosh, he’s been a good thought partner for me. So I actually see a world where we are interacting with them. And frankly, he is so darn friendly. And when I’m feeling a little bit nervous about something, he says the kindest things that are like, don’t worry, Heather, we’ll get through this together. So, I don’t know, I see a world where we have multiple personalities that are AI that we’re working with along with. Right. We’re always going to have a human in the loop that’s going to always be critically important.
Matt Alder [00:14:58]:
Heather, thank you very much for talking to me.
Heather Jerrehian [00:15:00]:
Thank you, Matt. This was really wonderful. Thank you so much.
Matt Alder [00:15:03]:
Hi, Mike, and welcome to the podcast.
Mike Bollinger [00:15:05]:
Well, thank you. I’m looking forward to it.
Matt Alder [00:15:07]:
Well, it’s a pleasure to have you.
Mike Bollinger [00:15:08]:
On the show we’re on the floor of HR Tech.
Matt Alder [00:15:11]:
We are in the floor of HR.
Mike Bollinger [00:15:12]:
Tech and it’s a really exciting time at HR Tech this year. It’s very unique in my opinion.
Matt Alder [00:15:18]:
Before we get into that though, ok, just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do.
Mike Bollinger [00:15:22]:
So, Mike Bollinger. I’m Global VP of Strategic Initiatives at Cornerstone. The running joke is I do stuff, but I do a variety of things. I work within our product team, so I run the product group that is associated with platform and skills and data and so on. And I also work in research capacity at Cornerstone and I do a lot of speaking as well. So it’s a very unique role and Cornerstone has allowed me to do it and I’ve had three different roles here at Cornerstone. Cornerstone. So I’m the epitome of a multi career individual.
Matt Alder [00:15:55]:
Fantastic stuff. So tell me, why is this such an amazing time or interesting time in HR technology at the moment?
Mike Bollinger [00:16:01]:
Well, you know, sometimes I think about it in terms of, you know, the guys were building the gray railroad and they forgot to look up and see airplanes flying over their head. And that’s sort of where we’re at now. And, and I’m working really hard. I live in Vegas, so I have the over on the over and under on the number of times we’ll hear AI in a booth somewhere. But it really has made significant changes. If you look at things from Notebook LM to some of the new reasoning models and those kinds of things. I think it was Ethan Mollick that said AI won’t replace people, but people with AI will replace people without AI. And so what’s really interesting to me is the augmentation aspect of the things that we’re able to do now that we weren’t even thinking about two, three years ago.
Matt Alder [00:16:47]:
Yeah, I think that’s the thing and I think it’s. We’re even thinking about. It’s like I think in many cases we’re still not thinking about some of the things that could be possible with this, with this technology.
Mike Bollinger [00:16:56]:
I always think of it as starter dough. I don’t know if you know the concept of starter dough, but with sourdough bread, there’s this starter dough recipe. I use it as starter dough as I’m starting to think about things and it’s very useful in that regard.
Matt Alder [00:17:09]:
So one of the things that you’re talking about at the show this week is lots of things around skills. So why skills is something that gets talked about all the time. I know you’ve got some new data on this and I’m very keen to sort of know a bit more about that, but I suppose to kind of frame it amongst your customers. What are the sort of the key drivers that you think the kind of move to skills is going to address for them? There’s lots of different reasons why people talk about skills. What do you think the most important ones are?
Mike Bollinger [00:17:39]:
Well, I think there’s a couple of things and let me do a little bit of a quick history lesson. Skills aren’t new in that own sense. I mean, 20 years ago you could do a skills analysis, you could create a gap analysis between an individual and the role. You could do some learning based on that gap analysis in part and so on. The problem was is that the data you needed in order to continue to keep that fresh was so structured that when something changed, it immediately cratered under its own weight. So if you fast forward to today, what we’re able to do now when it comes to AI, obviously, but some of the other things that we’re able to do around massive data collection and massive processing and our own research is 27 terabytes of data, for example. Wow. I know, wow. But if you think about what skills was intended to be, there’s a democracy democratization effect, there’s a task based effect, there’s an ability to think about work in a way that’s very outcome driven and very much less role based. And I think that’s where people are starting.
Matt Alder [00:18:41]:
No, absolutely. Tell us about the report that you’ve just released.
Mike Bollinger [00:18:45]:
Well, it’s a five year longitudinal study. We have a company called skyhive which we’ve acquired and they do this massive, massive data ingestion. Every every month there’s another 25 terabytes that gets ingested. But it’s five years of longitudinal study that included things like job postings, resumes, government information and other data streams. And what it was able to do was it was able to distinguish where skills are growing, where skills are shrinking. The difference between what you might call human skills, we often call them soft skills. We like to think of them as human skills and all the various trends that from 2019 to 2024. What’s unique is it expands over that Covid period. So it gives us a really unique view into what’s growing and what’s shrinking.
Matt Alder [00:19:33]:
I’m sure it’s very comprehensive, but give us some of the highlights.
Mike Bollinger [00:19:36]:
You want the nuggets.
Matt Alder [00:19:37]:
I did give us the things that really stood out for you.
Mike Bollinger [00:19:40]:
Gen AI skills increased by 411%. Now if you think about 4,1:1, right, the information of 411, that was pretty unique. But AR and VR skills, again these are posting driven kinds of things. One hundred and fifty five percent data and analytics, roughly 70 and 80% each. But what was really interesting was that the human skills were two to three times more realized or more impactful on this report than the actual data skills. And that leads you to the next step, which is all right, because we’re thinking about data skills. And 2/3, we also found 2/3 of critical skills would atrophy in the next couple of years because they’re data driven. But if you think about that human skills, we also did some generational analysis and what we found was that the Gen Y, Gen Z, and I say this with full love of my heart as a grandfather, were very, very focused on those data skills, those digital skills because of what they’re being told to the, to the detriment of having those human skills. And although the job postings had more human skills, the individuals in those generations were not as adept at that in terms of resume representation as their counterpar in the older generations.
Matt Alder [00:20:58]:
That is interesting. And what’s the, I suppose what’s the implication for employers? Because there’s huge amounts to talk about we’re a skills based organization or we’re moving towards a skills based, being a skills based organization. What does that, you know, what does that mean? And how, how should employers be thinking about skills at the moment?
Mike Bollinger [00:21:17]:
Well, so, and from a recruiting perspective as well, of course. But if you think about skills as a, as a mechanism, that’s a broad term. If you think about the specific data skills, in other words the democratization effect that we talk about, that’s a better term for some of the things that we need. But if you think about the human skills as a component of that, a skills based organization needs to be able to develop bridgeable skills and adjacent skills that can be used in other areas across many mechanisms. A good example is green skills appear globally more than 80% with Spain leading the way. Another example is we know that 12% of the world is working on gig workers, right? So how do you bring that into the fold? So you have to look for skills that can align to your business and bridge between various things that you’re trying to accomplish. I got one last thing for you. We call it have, want, need. What do I have? Because the readiness gap is based on visibility, it’s based on perception and it’s based on inventory. So it’s a have, want need. So from the have, what’s that? What do I have? Is the first thing you need to be able to look at. What do I need? Which is what we just talked about. And then what do the employees want to interest them? So you use those rigid skills to create an environment where employees can develop themselves in a way that matters to the organization and to the individual.
Matt Alder [00:22:49]:
I mean, that makes perfect sense. And I think for many organizations this seems like such a huge topic. You know, to be able to do all those things across the organization seems like an almost impossible task, which I know is probably holding some organizations back because they just don’t know where to start.
Mike Bollinger [00:23:05]:
We hear it all the time, where can people start?
Matt Alder [00:23:07]:
How do you get started on this journey? How do you frame it in a way where it seems like achievable and manageable?
Mike Bollinger [00:23:12]:
Well, the first thing we say is don’t make it a science project. Right. A lot of times people are, should I use this taxonomy or should I use this technology? Start somewhere that actually has an impact to the business. Put it into a, I don’t want to say a box, but put it into a manageable chunk. Particularly for your early adopters. Never forget that change management, although you can’t manage change, only facilitate it, is a part of the equation. So look for those early adopters and look for it in a way that has a unique impact to the business. Start there, get your legs under you, your sea legs under you, if you will, and then start rolling beyond that. And a good place to start is in recruiting skills based hiring.
Matt Alder [00:23:54]:
What’s the role of technology in all of this?
Mike Bollinger [00:23:57]:
Well, so again, if you think back to my original opening, which is it’s been around a while, but technology has now created it. Technology can do things like impact. What are the proposed, what’s the have and have on need? It can help you with, with understanding what you have can also use. Our report here gives you some examples on return of investment, for instance, on what do I need? I think the impact for technology is being able to understand these things in a way that’s meaningful, in a way that is doable, and to create an environment by which people can start without it being overwhelming. We know that people that use technology have a tenant. We know from the data that we have a companion report around the return on investment. But we know from the data that people who are making this investment are 24% more profitable. They have a higher, a quicker time to hire, quicker time to productivity. Focus on those things, baseline, some measures and technology can help you with that. I’m really fond of saying, look, it’s people, process and technology. Technology is just as happy to automate a crappy process as a good.
Matt Alder [00:25:12]:
Who’s doing this? Well, out of all the clients that you work with, are there any organizations or types of organizations that kind of really stand out as making some great progress on this journey?
Mike Bollinger [00:25:20]:
Well, there’s a, there’s kind of a. They straddle. So in some cases you have organizations who are purpose driven by regulatory requirements. So those are very unique skills. Right. Whether they be in pharma or transportation or financial. In other organizations we see a real effort to upskill a particular audience for a variety of reasons. They think about it from a critical role perspective. What are the critical skills? And everybody thinks that they’re a critical job, but what are the critical skills that’ll move the needle on the business? And we have a couple of customers that are very forward thinking that way. Logistics is one example of that as well as some of the things around. Believe it or not, we have some really interesting customers in the retail space because task based hiring is very retail oriented.
Matt Alder [00:26:10]:
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I suppose it’s like what are the dominant things that people recruit for? But also is it is this kind of thing in the company’s DNA in terms of wanting to do that? So that’s really interesting. And as a final question for you, we started off the conversation by saying what a unique time. It is a really exciting time to kind of be involved in this industry. What do you think the future looks like? How, what are we going to be talking about when it comes to talent and skills and work in five years time, something like that?
Mike Bollinger [00:26:39]:
Well, if you think about AI, well for instance, we know that AR and XR are a big part of what’s coming next. So technology is going to give us the ability to practice in a safe space that’s good as a human. Right. The second thing is I believe that if you go back to my starter dote analogy, I believe you’re going to see more and more use of AI agents where you’ll say I have this question and then let them bring stuff back to you. It’s like the old days in search where you used to just go search and a bunch of links came back. Now you’re asking questions and some results come back. I think the ability to do that is going to be the level up for the work that we can do at any level, whether it be an airplane mechanic trying to look at an engine, a welder trying to look at having something to look at in terms of was this a good well to what we do in the knowledge space. I think the opportunity is endless in that regard.
Matt Alder [00:27:38]:
Mike, thank you very much for talking.
Mike Bollinger [00:27:40]:
Absolute pleasure, man.
Matt Alder [00:27:42]:
My thanks to Heather and Mike. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on 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.
