Recruiting Future is the podcast that helps Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology.
Skills shortages in emerging technologies have reached critical levels, with companies all fishing in the same tiny talent pool for experienced professionals. But if these technologies are relatively new, why assume only experienced talent can work with them?
In such fast-moving industries, how can companies develop their early career hiring strategies to ensure they get net new talent who can be productive immediately?
My guest this week is Tan Moorthy, CEO of Revature. Revature is helping employers build pipelines of entry-level talent by giving high-potential hires the training and development they need to be effective from their first day. In our conversation, Tan gives us an insight into a structured approach to identifying, developing, and deploying new talent, which is transforming how organizations solve their tech talent shortages.
• In the interview, we discuss:
• Are employers looking at tech skill shortages through the wrong lens?
• The ABCD of in-demand skills (AI, big data, cloud, digital)
• AI Native entry-level talent
• Critical thinking and problem solving
• What employers get wrong about upskilling
• Cohorts, structure, and impact metrics
• Talent as a C-Suite priority
• The process to identify, develop, and deploy net new talent
• The role of technology and data
• Focusing humans on unique human skills
• What does the future look like
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Follow this podcast on Spotify.
00:00
Matt Alder
Do emerging technologies like Gen AI require companies to rethink how they source the technical talent needed to build with them? What if the answer to tech talent scarcity isn’t searching harder for experienced professionals, but thinking differently about early career recruiting and development? Keep listening to find out how leading tech companies are solving these critical talent shortages. Support for this podcast comes from Vonk. Vonk is transforming recruitment advertising with a results driven platform that helps employers attract, vet and shortlist top quality candidates. Efficiently trusted by global leaders like Danone, Bayer, Randstad and PwC. VonK combines AI powered technology, deep ATS integrations and recruitment expertise to streamline hiring workflows, enhance employer branding and deliver measurable outcomes. We with Vonk, you can streamline your recruitment process, improve ROI and build diverse high performing teams. Hire Smarter, faster. Hi there, this is Matt Alder.
01:28
Matt Alder
Welcome to episode 702 of Recruiting Future, the podcast that helps talent acquisition teams drive measurable value by developing strategic capability in foresight influence talent and technology. In this episode we’ll be focusing specifically on talent. Skill shortages in emerging technologies have reached critical levels with companies all fishing in the same tiny talent pool for experienced professionals. But with these technologies being relatively new, why do we assume that only experienced talent can work with them? In such fast moving industries, how can companies develop their early careers hiring strategies to ensure they get net new talent who can be productive immediately? My guest this week is Tan Moorthy, CEO of Revature. Revature is helping employers build pipelines of entry level talent by giving potential hires the training and development they need to be effective.
02:28
Matt Alder
From their first day in our conversation, Tan gives us an insight into a structured approach to identifying, developing and deploying new tech talent which is transforming how organizations solve their tech talent shortages. Hi Tan and welcome to the podcast Mac.
02:46
Tan Moorthy
Pleasure to be here.
02:47
Matt Alder
It’s a pleasure to be talking to you. Please could you introduce yourself and tell.
02:51
Tan Moorthy
Everyone what you do suddenly Tan Moorthy, CEO of Revature with over three decades of experience in the IT world, working on different areas, but most importantly the passionate one is about talent development. So at Revature we are in the business of helping clients build a pipeline of day one productive AI native entry level talent and also helping them with upskilling existing employees, both of which reduce the total cost of human capital and increase retention for our clients. We do this for the Fortune 1000 and the Global Systems Integrators enjoy what I do for avature. And I’m looking forward to our conversation.
03:39
Matt Alder
Absolutely. And it’s a really fascinating topic for me as well. So let’s start with this. I mean, do you think that we have genuine talent shortages or are employers just looking at things through the wrong kind of lens?
03:56
Tan Moorthy
You know, it’s a bit of yes and no. And let me explain. Yes, in the sense that the number of people clients are looking for who have the ready skills to work on these new technologies don’t exist. But that doesn’t mean that there are not people who can be trained to do that. And that’s what I mean by the S and no. And part of the problem I think most companies face is continuously looking out for experienced talent while not paying so much attention to the possibility of creating net new talent. After all, the technology that they’re looking to use is relatively new, 1, 2, 3, 4 years. So there are not enough people who have experience in those technologies.
04:48
Tan Moorthy
So the real choice is to upscale existing people and build a net new talent to by looking out beyond the traditional pool of the experienced people. And that’s what I mean by the yes and the no.
05:03
Matt Alder
That just makes perfect sense to me. Based on what you’re seeing at the market at the moment, what are the most in demand skills right now and how are businesses sort of adapting to make sure they have those skills?
05:15
Tan Moorthy
I think the ABCDs of technology, the new technologies continue to be AI business, big data, cloud and digital. And I think those really are the skills that are in high demand from a technology perspective. And equally important, I think there is a need for people who have good critical thinking, have the ability to build solutions using technologies that are out there and also look at ethics professional skills while providing solutions. So I think it’s a combination of both of these that are required and companies are looking at people who have similar experience in other fields and cross skilling them.
06:06
Tan Moorthy
Sometimes people are looking at individuals or employees within their organization that they can upskill and increasingly I’m seeing the trend for clients to look out and say let’s get these digital native talent and train them in these new technologies because they also happen to represent the customers these enterprises serve. So it’s good to have talent that can come in without a baggage and look at things afresh and start using these new technologies without the biases they would have had from having used dual technologies. So companies are using a mixed approach.
06:47
Matt Alder
And I think so many employers are still kind of stuck in this search for the Right talent, exceptional talent that’s up and running on day one, all those kind of things. And as you said at the beginning of the conversation, that kind of talent in these emerging skills doesn’t exist. It certainly doesn’t exist at the scale that’s needed. So how should companies start to rethink that kind of mental process about what’s the right talent? And you know, some of the companies that you are alluding to there who have done that, how do you go about that? What kind of mindset do you need to make this work?
07:24
Tan Moorthy
Mindset is the right thing. Actually that because the lot of reasons why people have not looked at early career talent sometimes is the mindset of having been used to this idea of getting people with experience. But given that technology that they want to build solutions with have not existed for that long, it is very important to look beyond these traditional pools. And therefore the steps to follow in my mind have been first to understand the skills of people that exist in the company through a skills intelligence process. When you could look at the digital footprint of your employees and build a skill taxonomy to understand what skills people have, create a roadmap of the skills that you want your people to have based on say, the technology landscape, the business need and the ecosystem that you want to create in the organization.
08:23
Tan Moorthy
Once you’ve done both of those, understand the current situation, create a roadmap of where you want to go. I think the pathways are twofold and they need to be in parallel. One, to upskill existing employees by looking at the adjacent skills to the skills that you need them to be upskilled in and give them a flexible pathway to do that, not merely by giving them access to content, but by creating a structured cohort based learning program that can help them achieve those goals. And at the same time, look at the entry level talent who may or may not have the degree that you used to be hiring from, but look at skills as a critical determinant of the people that you want to bring. And skills being do these people have the ability to learn and apply the learning to solve new problems.
09:27
Tan Moorthy
And I think critical thinking and problem solving skills are the ones to look out for an entry level talent and then create a custom program to help them get the skills for them to get up and running and productive on day one when they join the organization. So I think it’s a mix of both that is required to get to the destination that clients are looking to have. From a skill perspective.
09:55
Matt Alder
When you describe it like that, it just seems like quite an obvious thing to do, but obviously many employers aren’t doing that. And what do you think the main barriers that are sort of stopping companies investing in reskilling and upskilling? What are they and how can they sort of get over them?
10:12
Tan Moorthy
Yeah, I don’t think that companies are not doing it, except I think they’re not doing it in a structured way. In my view, for the longest time, upskilling has been looked at as a choice of online content to be provided to employees versus making it a structured program. Also, I don’t think from an organization perspective, upskilling can be an individual sport. It is a team effort that needs to bring in different aspects of HR and the business together to decide these skills that are required. Also, I think the measures for upskilling have largely focused around saying, are people happy with the content that has been provided to them or the course completion rates Versus looking at, has the upskilling yielded the business need, which is about making the right people available at the right place at the right time?
11:21
Tan Moorthy
Which means looking at, do we have enough people that have moved internally to take up a new role? Have we reduced the total cost of human capital by reducing expensive external hires? I think the metrics have not been in place in most organizations to look at the making upskilling effective. So I think it’s a bit of bringing together the organization. And today, with upskilling becoming a board priority and not an HR initiative alone, companies are getting there because the board and the CFO is asking the return on investment and asking the question, why don’t we have the people that we need for the things that we need to do?
12:12
Matt Alder
Let’s talk about net new talent. So talk us through. How do you select people? How do you train people? I mean, how. How is it possible to kind of train and deploy skilled talent at speed to solve these business problems?
12:30
Tan Moorthy
Yeah. So the approach that we have taken is first to identify the people who have the desire and the capability to learn new technologies. And we do that by offering 200 hours of free training on our platform, where we get to observe the people while they are going through the learning process, understanding, are they disciplined enough to learn? Are they doing the assessments that have been given to them? Are they demonstrating their learning? So that becomes the starting point of a talent pool that we dip into when we engage with a client to create this new talent for the client.
13:17
Tan Moorthy
We start by working with the client to understand what is required of them in the first year, create a custom curriculum that is required for these people to Be skilled in, and then go back into this pool of talent that we have assessed, dip into that to assist them further, and then identify from among them the best for the technologies that we are going to do for this specific client. And then start the training process. Once they train on the custom, during the training process, on the custom curriculum is when we get to again assess them continuously to see if they are learning, if they’ve got the concepts, if they’re able to apply the learning before we make them available for an interaction with the client.
14:04
Tan Moorthy
So what this has done from an organization perspective for a client is taken out the guesswork from hiring, taken out the effort required to identify the best talent for them and ultimately pick the people that are best suited for their organization.
14:25
Matt Alder
I mean, you must have a huge amount of data from that in terms of how people learn, spotting potential, all those kind of things. What kind of role does technology and data play in this kind of whole world of upskilling and also kind of longer term workforce planning?
14:42
Tan Moorthy
Yeah. So for us, for an upskilling perspective, a lot of time it is about the adjacent skills. And so kind of looking at what skills and what prerequisites help individuals perform better in a new skill is an important element. At the entry level, it is about observing the ability to solve problems while they are doing this. 200 hours of free training is a key data element comes into play for us to decide who are the right fit for the organizations that we are working with. So you’re right, data is an important element. And data is also an important element for our clients because even when they have a cohort for that they ask us to upskill, we are able to share with them the pace at which different learners are learning, the pace at which the talent is available to them.
15:39
Tan Moorthy
Because we show them dashboards every week about the progress each one of their employees are making against the training. And all of that data plays a role in clients being able to pick and choose the people they want to put on critical engagements.
15:55
Matt Alder
Final question for you, what does the future look like? So we’re seeing kind of increasingly different ways of thinking about talent. We’re seeing AI disrupting everything in the workplace. Where are we heading? What do you think the future looks like in terms of talent?
16:11
Tan Moorthy
I think the future talent is a combination of people and machines and therefore the ability to augment individual capabilities with what AI can provide. It’s also about letting technology do what it can do and therefore ensuring that the upskilling is only for skills that are required for humans to do. Therefore, if you want to take the skill base of an organization, it has to be a combination of both humans and machines. That will be the total skill base of an organization, and I think that’s what the future will be.
16:53
Matt Alder
Tan, thank you very much for talking to me.
16:56
Tan Moorthy
Been a pleasure, Matt. Thank you for having me on the call.
17:00
Matt Alder
My thanks to Tan. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com or on that site. You can also sign up for 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.
