My guest on this week's episode of the podcast is Ruslan Tovbulatov, who first saw how HR and people analytics could be a strategic enabler of innovation, during his time at Google. This inspired Ruslan to pivot towards the HR tech field, first by joining Arianna Huffington at Thrive Global, where he worked in senior product and marketing roles for four years before moving on to his current role as VP of Global Marketing at Gloat. The company that first coined the phrase “talent marketplace”.

When I talk to Senior HR Leaders in large companies, talent marketplace is invariably one of the first topics that gets raised. If you think about it for a moment, this isn't surprising when one considers that a thriving talent marketplace promotes agility, innovation and efficiency for businesses, enables managers to quickly assemble teams to complete projects and helps employees develop their careers, learning and skills.

As you will hear from Ruslan in our conversation, one particularly powerful example of the possibilities afforded by talent marketplace saw a manager in Turkey quickly assemble a global team from India, Europe and Latin America. Together, this team created a new brand of ice cream for the Turkish market and because the team was global in its nature, they were able to introduce a flavour of ice cream that hitherto didn't exist in Turkey.

You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.

In our conversation Ruslan and I discuss:

• The burgeoning HR technology market, the factors driving its growth, why the market is fragmented and what lies ahead

• The challenges involved with running a company in a new category of HR technology

• Powerful examples of the business benefits of a talent marketplace at companies such as Unilever, Schneider Electric, Nestle, Standard Chartered Bank and Walmart

• The benefits talent marketplace provides to employees, managers and businesses as well as the future developments in this field

• Whether the talent marketplace will mean that jobs won't exist anymore

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in HR transformation, internal mobility, workforce planning, people analytics and HR technology. So that is Business Leaders. Chief HR Officers and anyone in a people analytics, learning or HR business partner role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by gloat. To learn more, visit https://www.gloat.com/.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today I am delighted to welcome Ruslan Tovbulatov, VP of Global Marketing at Gloat to The Digital HR Leaders podcast. Welcome to the podcast, it is great to have you on. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and your background, your role at Gloat and also a bit about Gloat as well?

Ruslan Tovbulatov: Yeah, absolutely. Great to be here, David, always a pleasure talking to you. So I will give you a quick background of my journey to the conversation today. So I started my career, actually you will appreciate this, running large-scale consumer research and data at a company called Kantar Retail.

The reason I mention that is it was largely running consumer research for the largest retailers and manufacturers in the world, but what that allowed me to do is it really gave me an insight into how to run an insights team, how to run a data analytics team, which I ended up doing later in my career. Then as I got into the HR tech space, imagine analysing employee engagement surveys and the yearly surveys that were coming into us and then layering on research, on top of that, running focus groups, doing qualitative and quantitative insights, very powerful for us to actually leverage insights in the work we were doing in the HR space.

Then I moved on to Google and YouTube. A large part of my career was spent in the Google and YouTube ecosystem doing a number of different roles, but what was really powerful in that stint in my career, was just seeing the power of HR in an organisation like that. You had Laszlo's team, really being a strategic member of almost the innovation that was happening in the company. During that time we were doing project Aristotle, that came during that time, Radical Candor was really influencing a lot of the work we were doing during that time. So you really saw how HR could power the strategic arm of a business and even the innovation agenda, but I also saw some of the downsides of a large company. There was a saying when I was at Google “If you want to get promoted, leave and come back” I mention that because it was very much at the heart of why I actually joined the Gloat team, which we will get into in a second, because you saw these incredible talent in an organisation like that that was in a way trapped. You had to have re-orgs all the time and you would be uncertain what is there for me next and then you also have these incredibly talented people that are just focused on one problem set. How do you actually allow them to do more? That was kinda my first insight into wow, the power of HR but there is also an opportunity to innovate in this space. So when I got the opportunity to join a smaller company where I felt like I could make even greater impact and really unlock my skills, if you will. I did that about, almost five years ago now, a company called Thrive Global. So I went into the health and wellbeing space as one of the early employees, with Arianna Huffington launching the Thrive Global company and behaviour change platform. Really focused on mental health, mental resilience, health and wellbeing and did a number of different roles there. So product, partnerships, overseeing strategic partnerships with SAP, Qualtrics, Accenture and a few others. Then eventually I ended up running the Marketing Team and really had a front row seat to this HR tech space.

Seeing the power of the innovation happening in the space and how it can transform businesses, working with CHROs at some of these largest companies. That journey was amazing, kind of made me fall in love with everything happening in the HR and the people operations space. And when Gloat came along, I just knew I actually had to take this opportunity.

So Gloat, known for the talent marketplace, really the way we talk about the company is we are really helping democratise careers and career opportunities. We are unlocking skills within organisations and we are future-proofing workforces. We do that by connecting individuals and their skill sets and capacity, to the right opportunities within an organisation. When I heard the CEO Ben, talk about his vision for Gloat and I went back to what I had experienced as a Googler. The reason I left, it was such a no-brainer to me, the opportunity that existed in this space to really re-envision how we think about talent within organisations and then you combine that with the amazing customer stories we were hearing. So it was a great idea. When I saw the impact that they were already having at Unilever and Schneider Electric and Standard Chartered Bank and, you know, dozens of other companies, I knew they were something special.

So I actually joined at the tail end of December 2020, to lead up the Marketing Function here. But given my background, I have my finger on the pulse of a lot of things at the company and am very excited to see where we take this thing.

David Green: Right and what a great background as well. You started looking at that consumer research and running, effectively, a data analytics team and then going through Google. It is funny what you say, I won't mention the company I worked at, but I felt that I would have had to do something similar, leave and then re-apply because there was talent hoarding going on in this particular organisation. If you wanted to go to another opportunity in the company, you had to wait three months. Whereas if I had resigned and applied as an external hire, I would have been done to start within four weeks. Just crazy. So, I think it is great what Gloat is doing and we will talk about some of that talent marketplace stuff as we go through the conversation.

You mentioned the HR tech landscape, it is definitely fast growing, it is dynamic. We see what people like, Josh Bersin and what Red Thread Research, what they talk about is this really thriving marketplace. We have seen some recent acquisition and investment by other companies in this space as well.

What is it like to be part of such a fast growing, dynamic, HR tech landscape? What are some of the challenges involved with running a company in this space?

Ruslan Tovbulatov: You are absolutely right, it is unbelievably exciting what is happening in the space and I am so glad my career has allowed me to actually enter it and really be in the mix on a lot of these conversations. And as you said, acquisitions, even IPO's, so much excitement happening in the space.

There are a couple of trends that I think are contributing to that. One is one that we talked about and you wrote an amazing piece about this, of just the fact that the HR function has completely transformed in the role it plays in an organisation and you said it yourself and in other episodes you have talked about this, it was almost akin to what the CFO experienced during the financial crisis. So you have HR’s elevated role, more than ever in an organisation, which is contributing to a lot of eyes on the function, which is amazing. Also combined with the fact as you wrote, if you look at the value of a company today, 84% of it is intangible assets, the majority of which is people. So the reality is in companies, the people are its most valuable assets.

Then you have this function becoming more data-driven. So there is a lot of insights and analytics really powering the function, which is very powerful.

And then finally, you have employee experience changing. This idea that there are already changing expectations of what employees expected out of their careers and mobility and all that. But now you have, because of the pandemic, you have companies like Spotify and Salesforce saying the nine to five is dead. We are going remote forever.

It's all those pieces that contribute to this incredible influx of attention into the HR function and the space and so you have these VC’s, they are investing a lot of money. I saw some report recently that said, there is basically in the past half year, there has been more investment in the space than there were in the first 10 years of investment in work tech. And it is not surprising to me at all, because all these pieces are coming together to allow for it. It is very exciting because the work is also meaningful. Where I started my career, it was exciting. Ad tech was, there was so much innovation happening in marketing tech and all of that. But the work we are fundamentally doing, all these companies, is really helping individuals create more meaningful careers, meaning and purpose in their day to day and then helping organisations really get the best out of their people to create cultures and environments where they can thrive and that is meaningful work.

So the only challenge frankly, in all of that, you can probably tell in my voice, there is so much excitement around being here. Really the only challenge is are we keeping pace and are we keeping up? Meaning there is such an incredible opportunity, I wake up every day thinking, how do we get something like Gloat in the hands of more customers and more partners, because we see the impact we are having.

We are blessed to have on our list, some of the leading companies in each industry. From Unilever, Nestle and PepsiCo in CPG, to Walmart in retail and MasterCard, HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank. But we are just almost scratching the surface of the impact we can have. And that is what I think keeps me up at night, thinking about, are we moving fast enough to bring what we are doing to more people and also just enable the impact that we know we can have before, frankly, it's too late for some of these companies. Because every company needs to adapt very quickly to these changing times and employee expectations have shifted.

So how do we actually partner with organisations like we have with our first set, to really enable organisations to thrive and individuals to have more meaning in their careers, in their lives.

David Green: Yeah, I love that. I was just making some notes so I didn't forget to come back to you on some of those things.

It is almost like, in many respects, that data analytics is transforming HR just as it transformed marketing, 10 to 15 years ago. Obviously you saw that side coming through as well, which kind of makes it all a very exciting time. When you add the pandemic on top of that and the way that has really thrown things up around the ways of working, we still don't know how long the pandemic is going to last. We still don't know what the new normal, if we can call it that, is going to be. I guess thinking about employee experience, we as employees expect similar experiences against consumers. It has got to be personalised, it has got to be easy to use, we have got to get value from it and let’s be honest, traditional HR tech from a few years ago, just doesn't do that as it is that kind of one size fits all. So there is such a mindset change, it is not just the technology, it is a mindset change that has changed management for HR as well. So to adapt to this kind of new way of working for them, I guess is a huge opportunity as well.

Ruslan Tovbulatov: Absolutely, just adding onto that too. I love that point you said, everything you said is something that we think about all the time too, right? Because it is adapting fast enough, but it is also building solutions that approach this HR tech space in a totally different way. Because what you said, building something that has the end user and end employee in mind is the core to what we are doing. That is really what differentiates Gloat, for example, one of the reasons I was so excited about what they are building is they don't approach this challenge as, how do we optimise for the backend experience, right?

Yes, we use the best AI. Yes, we have used really amazing architecture. Yes, we make it really seamless for the admin and on the backend. But at the end of the day, what matters is, does the end user engage with the technology? Does the end user, to your point, change enablement? Are they motivated, inspired, empowered to use the technology?

And those are all the things that I think excite us about what we are doing with Gloat, it is partly technology and a technology built that is consumer grade. I think that is so important in HR tech today and you see more of that pressure happening in the space right now. Is it mobile friendly? Is it designed well? You are going to see more and more of that pressure, I think. You see that even in investments that are being made, you get asked now as a company, what is your engagement rate? They are almost looking at MAU’s and DAU’s, just like you would at a consumer tech platform.

The beauty of what we are doing is we live and breathe that. We are trying to build technology and we have built technology that is really optimised for consumers and the end user, that is what I mean in the end employee. Because once you get the employee engaging, then it opens up all these opportunities for the HR function and also the business to really optimise that talent once you are actually getting employees sending you signals and engaging.

Then the change enablement piece, we will talk about more. I love that you brought that up as that is such an important component of that because it is not just about technology, it is about how you create an environment for these things to happen.

You even mentioned talent hoarding, I am sure we will get back to that in a minute as well, but I totally agree with you.

David Green: Yeah, we will definitely get on to all of those things, I just want to stay in the HR tech landscape for the time being. Obviously we are speaking in late February and this episode is going to go out in March. We have already seen a lot of activity this year. For you and a company like Gloat, there have been the acquisitions, IPOs, there has been a fragmentation, almost, of the HR tech landscape. How do you see it evolving? What do you think is going to happen? I won’t hold you to it either!

Ruslan Tovbulatov: Let's do another episode and revisit our predictions. The fragmentation conversation is a very interesting one. I often, as you can probably gather, look at my past experience and my experience in consumer tech, as a leading indicator of what happens in enterprise. And we just touched on it, this idea of UX and design and end user experience, that mattered 10/15 years ago. Consumer tech made its way into HR tech. HCMs are now selling, based on the user experience. Same thing with mobile, right? We are only just catching up in the enterprise space, you can't buy a product without having a mobile solution, but you have mobile only products launching now on the consumer side and I think we will see some of that in HR tech and the enterprise tech space.

But the reason I bring that up is because we have been talking about fragmentation and consolidation, that debate, for over a decade in the consumer tech space. Both on the consumer side, but also in the MarTech landscape. What I really gathered over the years, because I didn't know what would happen on the consumer side. Where I think I land on this is that people really do have expectations for purpose-built solutions. And what I mean by that is if you think about some of the technologies and apps you might use whether it is WhatsApp or Signal, very different use case than your Uber or Lyft. Very different use case than Amazon. Very different use case than Google. Very different use case than LinkedIn. Very different use case than Netflix and YouTube. And despite those company's best attempts to consolidate and just create one monolithic experience, at the end of the day users have an expectation to get the best quality experience, for what they are trying to do. So that is why I am not booking travel on Amazon or buying cars on Amazon. That is why I am not necessarily doing networking with colleagues on Google. So that logic has to apply in the enterprise tech space as well, people talk about this all the time, but when I leave me being a consumer and go into work, I am not fundamentally changing my expectations. I am still the same human being and so this idea that you can just replicate something or consolidate and create one platform that does it all. As amazing as that sounds in theory, from an admin perspective of making lives easier for the HR admin administrators or IT. From the end user perspective, if you care about people using, engaging and really making the most of the technology, I think purpose-built solutions are here to stay.

Now, could consolidation happen on the backend? I think, yes and it should in a way. Meaning these systems should talk to one another seamlessly and whether they all belong to one company through acquisition or they are just very smart integrations that are seamless for the admin. That is a totally different experience in that conversation where I absolutely think, and even at Gloat the way we built our technology integrations are at the core of what we do. So Gloat plays incredibly well with an ATS, with the learning system, with a core HCM and a core HRIS system, because the more data talks to one another, the more powerful each of those pieces is going to be and definitely the more powerful Gloat will be. So on the backend, I think there needs to be consolidation and integration if you will, seamlessly, but for the end user experience, I think it is so important for purpose-built solutions for specific use cases to exist. Now, how that happens contractually, financially, there are a lot of different ways that that can play out. But I think that is at the core of our belief, that purpose built is incredibly important, but you need these systems to talk to one another on the backend. 

David Green: Yeah, because if you are going to link all those things together, you need the data and the data needs to come from all of those systems that you mentioned. I think it is interesting because we went through the “one system to rule the world” kind of conversation in HR tech, a few years ago and I think there is a realisation now that that is just not realistic. You have got to make too much compromise, I am not going to mention any companies by name, but the compromise might be that if you take the whole system that the ATS might not be very good, it won’t necessarily be best in class. And I guess now that you have got this fragmentation and proliferation of all these different tools, it is probably impossible anyway for one organisation, no matter how big or how successful they are, to be the best at everything across the board, it is just unrealistic. So as you said, it is more about how they integrate together, how they share data, how they provide a great user experience which should benefit all of the companies involved in that ecosystem of a company.

So obviously talent marketplace is a relatively new concept. I think actually Gloat might have been the first to use the term.

It is something that has really caught on and certainly whenever I am talking to a Senior HR Leader in a big global company at the moment, it is one of the first few things that gets mentioned. So why do you think that talent marketplace, skills inference solutions, why are they gaining so much traction now?

Ruslan Tovbulatov: So there were a number of trends that were true before the pandemic that I think were just accelerated by it and they created this surge in demand for the talent marketplace. To simplify it I will put it into two macro trends. So the first, there was this realisation that people and specifically the talent, within the organisation, was really the most important asset. Right now this is true in the corporate environment, as we all dispersed and started working remotely, there is this collective realisation that the building doesn't really matter as much as the people that were doing the work. We saw, even though you can debate it, but you saw a lot of productivity maintained and people were working very effectively because it was about the people doing the work. We also saw in partners of ours, like Walmart on the front lines, the people that were actually on the front lines in retail, in manufacturing, they really kept the economy running. So talent became this very clear lifeblood of both business, but also really the global economy during this time. There was a collective realisation of that very real fact that we talked, about of that 84 plus percent being intangibles in a business and not the buildings driving the value. I think the world collectively realised that.

The second trend was that businesses needed to be more agile than ever before. So you have this amazing talent and you need talent in the organisation, but you need to adapt to the changing dynamics of the environment and the market, almost in real time. So when you had the wave of Covid hitting in certain regions but not others, how do you actually staff up in certain places while staffing down in others? When you had retail getting hard hit in a region but then for the customer service reps, the phones were going off the hook, how do you actually redeploy talent from retail to the web and web support?

So as these two  trends came together and companies started to solve them, I think there was a collective realisation that we don't necessarily have the tools in place to do this effectively because the traditional ways of doing it were just not fast or efficient enough. So if you think about external sourcing and hiring, it was just really not the answer during something like the pandemic, because it is not fast enough. You don't have the luxury of time to source onboard talent and actually deploy them effectively and it is also just so wildly inefficient when you know that in a certain region or certain business line, you are actually having to furlough people and are potentially thinking about letting them go but you have this surge somewhere else, like the internet business. How do you actually redeploy talent? So the idea of external hiring solving that, was not really the answer.

There has also been a lot of focus on learning and how do you actually up-skill people? The reality is you can't just take a huge group of people, put them through a course and then redeploy them somewhere. For some people that might work but the reality, this idea of learning and helping people do a certain job in real time, it just wasn't a real solution during this moment.

Then finally, the legacy HRIS systems, the data that we have in place, as much as it has been great to move things to the cloud, make them more efficient, connect data sources and sets, the reality is there is a huge missing gap of data. And so we had countless conversations with CHROs and Executives talking to me about, we had a need in one region and are considering furloughing in another, clearly there is an opportunity to redeploy talent, but we don't have the data. Profiles are incomplete in the HR system, we don't know what skills we have with these individuals and so for us to be able to redeploy talent, we don't really have the visibility we need to do that. And that is really where the talent marketplace came in, because it was truly a purpose-built solution for all these challenges that we just described. How do you connect business needs and opportunities tied to those critical business needs, with the right talent, skills and capacity in the organisation and really at the individual level?

So you had this amazing opportunity to automate this experience, make it wildly efficient because a purpose-built solution like a talent marketplace is designed to solve that and it really helps on both ends. So talent marketplace, because you have both ends of the market and the marketplace, contributing to solving this challenge.

So for individuals, you are empowering them. You are basically saying “Hey, we want to know your skills. We want to know your capabilities and also your aspirations, desires and your capacity” So you are almost from the employee level or the associate level, you are getting visibility into the business. Then Managers in near real time without the HR team or Management having to overthink this and slow it down, Managers in real-time basically saying “Hey, I need support on something happening on my market, we have a digital launch happening or we need support in the hygiene product deployment” Whatever it might be happening in the business, Managers now are empowered to actually raise their hand and say “Hey, we could use support”

The talent marketplace, that is the beauty of technology and AI, it creates a seamless approach. Forget the manual spreadsheets that we heard people were using to redeploy talent. All of this is actually powered in real time, through technology and that is what made it so powerful. You had a deep need in the market for it and you had a purpose-built solution, all of that wasn't just theoretical. Some of our earliest partners like Unilever, have these incredible stories where in the first 60 days of the pandemic, they were able to redeploy a huge number of their talent using the Gloat powered marketplace that they call Flex Experiences. So they were able to staff, I think the numbers were 700 plus business critical projects. They unlocked tens of thousands of hours that would otherwise have been unused. And the amazing thing about it too was they connected the globe almost overnight where 60% of the job assignments and the role assignments were cross country, which just would never have happened without a talent marketplace in action, because you are so focused on your region. So it enabled them to really be so efficient and adapt, in almost real-time, to the changing dynamics.

That was just the beginning of Covid, they had countless stories around this and eventually Alan Jope, the CEO, as Jeroen I think talked about on the previous podcast, talking about how at the investor meeting how critical the talent marketplace and Flex Experiences was for them during the Covid pandemic. To be agile and to redeploy talent in the places where the business needed it at the time, at the time he said it was about 300,000 hours unlocked. Now they are up to half a million hours unlocked and it is almost a snowball effect, it is getting larger and larger.

We continue to hear every week incredible stories from that business of how the talent marketplace is helping, in real time, to match the needs of the business to opportunities, capacity and skills that already exist. But it wasn't just Unilever. Standard Chartered Bank, amazing story from them. We launched with the first group of 12,000 people in the bank and it wasn't just about being more efficient with talent redeployment, that is just the beginning. Now you also have the opportunity to expose people to opportunities, to make them feel like there is an opportunity for growth within the business and that is exactly what we measured and found with Standard Chartered. So those first 12,000 people, not only did we unlock thousands of hours of productivity that were trapped. We also, and we love this stat, we also saw a huge upticks in people feeling like there was an opportunity for career growth. That is really meaningful to us because you are not just unlocking productivity or creating efficiency in the system, all of which are critical and will continue to be critical, but you are also making individuals feel like they have an opportunity for growth and development. We will get into even more examples, probably as the conversation goes on.

But all of those macro trends, the deep need, the lack of a solution in many organisations that is really purpose built for this. Then the talent marketplace and particularly Gloat, we have been doing this for years and being able to apply that in a time of such need and we are just starting to scale this more and more.

Obviously it had an incredible impact with our existing partners and we saw a huge influx of interest in demand because of all the success I just talked about.

David Green: And I suppose if we think about that great example around re-deploying people from other countries to support areas of the business that are really busy, partly because of the pandemic, but that could happen anyway because of the natural ebb and flow of business. If we think to the future, who knows what it is going to be, but I think it is very safe to say there is going to be more hybrid working than there was before. So if you have got a big global organisation, it is almost like we know now that you have to have Zoom or Teams in your business to effectively run remotely. You almost need something like a talent marketplace to run remotely as well, so you can re-deploy people quickly, people can get on projects that are maybe being led in other countries or in other business functions. That also supports the agility of the organisation, to ultimately respond to customers.

So, as you say, it does open some interesting doors for technologies like Gloat.

Ruslan Tovbulatov: Yes, it absolutely does.

David Green: You talked about a couple of them but what are some of the thorny business problems that solutions like Gloat are trying to solve for? You mentioned a couple of examples there, but what are some of the other kind of business problems that Gloat can help solve?

Ruslan Tovbulatov: Well I think you just said it so well just then which is why I almost didn't cut you off because what you were just talking about is at the heart of what Gloat can enable for businesses. You talked about speed and scale being at the heart of what we are doing.

So there are all these fundamental challenges that HR is dealing with. Right now it is, how are we up-skilling the workforce? How are we future-proofing the workforce? Do we have the talent and skills, both from a skill-set perspective, but also from a diversity perspective within our four walls? And how do we do that more efficiently than ever before? Because you have seen this, I think you even talked about this recently, HR despite how important it is, there is also restrictions on headcount and that is happening across the business. People don't want to be too aggressive in hiring right now in certain industries, but in HR it is definitely feeling that. So how do you almost do more, with less with all those strategic goals? At the core of all of that for us is this idea of moving faster and more efficiently with all of these new objectives.

That is really what Gloat enables. We are talking about in larger enterprises, breaking down this understanding of what skills, capabilities and also passions do you have from every individual? What does the business need done? What are the opportunities that need matching so that we can survive and thrive as a business? And how do you connect those two, most efficiently? We talk about this a lot at Gloat, the reason that is not happening today we believe is that we are still using this hundred plus year old system of managing talent. If you look at an org chart from a hundred plus years ago and you look at one today, they are really not that different, sadly. There are literally people in boxes and hierarchies and ladders and as much as we talk from a theoretical standpoint, you hear a lot of analysts and a lot of conversation about moving to super teams or more agile ways of work. But if you really look at an org chart in most organisations, it hasn't fundamentally changed that much.

So that is really what we are trying to do at the core, that is the fundamental challenge we are trying to solve is, how do you un-box talent, if you will because it is not good for the business. You are creating silos and bureaucracy that doesn't need to exist and it is terrible for individuals. I shared my Google story, you shared yours, without naming a name. There are so many people feeling trapped by whatever box they are put in and they know that they actually have so much more capability, so many more passions that they can give to the business. But the way the systems are set up, we are not really allowing people to be their best selves. We are not allowing them to tap into those skills and capabilities and so that is at the core of what we are trying to do. How do we use technology and AI, we built what we really fundamentally believe is the very best AI in this space purpose-built for this, breaking down talent, understanding within an organisation skills, passions, capabilities and capacity. Then matching that to the jobs to be done and the opportunities that need to be done in an organisation most efficiently. If you bring that to life right now, all of a sudden we are believers that the largest organisations can be as nimble and agile as startups.

There is no reason for us to actually slow down the larger we get and so that is at the core of what we believe we do.

When we create this agility within an organisation, speed and scale, it then allows all these other things to happen. So you are building a more networked organisation. You are democratising career opportunity and career development because you are exposing people to opportunities they may never have had visibility into and you are really helping employees find opportunities for growth.

Just a couple of quick examples to bring this to life because a lot of these things are good in theory, but this is what excites me, it is seeing the actual impact of what we are talking about here.

So, amazing story out of Turkey, launch of a new ice cream brand. There is a Brand Manager who says “Hey, it is getting competitive. We want to launch a new ice cream brand.” He doesn't have the head count, so how does he take on this challenge? So he posts the project. Gets, within weeks, a global team of people from India, LatAm and Europe, to support him on this vision to create a new premium ice cream brand. Not only did he all of a sudden unlock capacity that was existing in the organisation, in passionate people that wanted to work in a different region, on a different business line. It also, this is my favourite part, it also enabled innovation that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Because what they did is that they introduced flavours into that ice cream line that the person in Turkey didn't even know existed, because the person from India knew this large enterprise. Many people listening here probably have no idea what the supply chain is like in a different part of the world. You don't know the ingredients you have access to. That is probably my favourite part of that story where it wasn't just about getting the work done, it was about actually getting the work done in a more innovative, creative way.

So they introduced flavours in the ice cream that didn't exist in Turkey before, because it was using the talent from around the globe.

Then one other just quick example, it is moving beyond all of that even, to actual business impact. So there is another story of amazing redeployment of talent when Covid hits.

Basically bringing together within a week, a team of 10 people launching entirely new products, 15 different products that came to market and being attributed to about 280 million euros of revenue in new products. Brought together, literally using a talent marketplace. So those are the types of stories that really excited me.

There is the macro level that is incredible. The democratising talent, creating these opportunities for individuals, unboxing talent. But when you hear those stories of the new ice cream brand launch or several new products leading to actual revenue, now we are really realising this dream of, this isn't just feel good, this isn't just the traditional kind of benefits for HR. This is strategic business imperatives, driving the business forward, type of human resources and these projects are coming from HR. It is so important to hear the CEO talking about this, like with Alan Jope at the investors meeting.

So that is really what I think is the opportunity for talent marketplace and Gloat specifically.

David Green: Amazing stories and also everyone wins. The company wins, that Manager in Turkey for example, won because he got his new ice cream brand, a flavour and innovation he never would have had if he had just done it in country.

And the people that worked on the project got good experience and got to exhibit their skills and got good learning. So you can see the power of it.

Obviously you have created a marketplace, if you pardon the pun, but you created a market for talent marketplace.

What are some of the misconceptions that Gloat faces? Because I imagine there are some.

Ruslan Tovbulatov: Yeah, I am glad you asked that. So, as we are talking about it, this can be seen as a big shift in organisations. One of the things, going back to that point about talent management and thinking about it almost as a hundred year old approach, there are still a lot of misconceptions that exist I think, as you approach a challenge like this. One of the first we hear all the time is just because of the way we have thought about job architectures in the past. So the first reaction is okay, if we are going to do this, we need to just slow down and we need a job architecture, we need a skills taxonomy, we need the skills library. We need to manually map all those skills to the roles and create the perfect hierarchy and then we can launch the marketplace. But that is actually fundamentally the reason why marketplace succeeds so well, why Gloat succeeds so well is because you lean into the technology, into the AI, you put all of that to the side. Not only is it not necessary for Gloat, I actually think it is unnecessary for a lot of organisations in this day and age to go through that exercise. Now, you have talked about it, the diminishing half-life of skills. The sad reality is a lot of these, especially at a large organisation, you go through a skills mapping exercise, you go through a career architecture exercise, by the time you are done with it a full third of the skills you map might be outdated. Even worse by the time you are rolling them out when you apply it, when you decide what skills go with Project Management, are your Managers actually going to apply it that consistently across the organisation? So now you have the definition of Project Management or a Program Manager completely different and so the skills that you mapped out might not even be applied in the right way. So all of that to say that the power of AI and technology is that you don't need any of that. You can actually start and let the technology do the work for you. So that is where, for us, we talk about it as a self evolving skills ontology. Now, the reason that is really powerful is that the system learns from itself. As Managers need new skills and post opportunities they want done, the system is learning in real time from oh, look this is a new skill that Managers are looking for, not because we got in a room and decided it was going to be important, by the time it grows into a system it is outdated. This is in real time. Business needs something, you post a skill, all of a sudden the system sees it. And reverse, when you see individuals say, Hey, here are my aspirations, here are the skills that I want to learn, because you do that all in the talent marketplace.

This isn't just a top-down approach, this is empowering individuals to say, what do I want to learn? What do I care about? And so when you can have the technology at the centre of that transaction, talent marketplace, you can actually develop a skills ontology almost in real time. So this idea that you need to slow down and do this big project in order to get started is not only not necessary, I wouldn't really even recommend it. You let the talent marketplace do a lot of the work for you.

David Green: And I guess maybe start with a pilot within an organisation and learn. As you said, work agile, iterate, learn and move on from there. You talked about some of the misconceptions, what is the number one thing holding prospective clients back from moving? Is it that they feel they need to do all this pre-work before they can start? Or is there other things that potentially hold people back?

Ruslan Tovbulatov: I think that one is definitely one of them, there is this feeling that you need to do a bunch of pre-work before this can work. The other one, and this ties on some of the themes we have been hitting on, is this idea of I'm not ready. It is more like change readiness in the organisation, are people ready? The reality is that no one is really ready for a change like this until you just do it. No one was ready for the pandemic and then you saw HR do such amazing things, really meet the moment if you will, on some of the challenges still in their way. So I think, there is this fear that we don't know how to actually roll this out or we don't know how to implement it. That’s where I will say there is a legitimacy to that because there are change management components that need to be considered, but that is where you need a partner that is thinking about this day in and day out and really specialising in this. So the reason we have such success with our partners, is that we have a change enablement team at the ready to compliment the technology. So when you deal with issues like talent hoarding, or you deal with how do we actually inspire change with the organisation? We have a playbook, we have experts. So when we roll this out, we know how to do it right. So that is really important when you are thinking about a talent marketplace, it is not just going to be about the technology. It is certainly not just flicking on a feature of an HCM. Because this needs to be a purpose-built solution that thinks about talent marketplace beyond just full-time jobs, to all the different nuances of it, to projects and gigs, to mentorships and a lot of other things that are on the way with Gloat, because we are really thinking about this day in, day out. How do you create agility within an organisation? How do you even think about learning in different ways? And not just learning as taking a course or taking a class of some sort, really learning through experience. But in order to have success with that you also do need that change enablement piece and that is very important for us because we are a full service shop. We work hand in hand with our partners to create a marketing campaign internally. To actually create change management and permission and role models within an organisation from the top down to say, this is the new way of working.

So when we launched at Nestle, we have their US President talking about how the marketplace is the future of work for us. This is at the core of everything we are doing as an organisation and you see the same thing at Schneider and Seagate, you have leadership coming out and saying this is the future of work.

We work hand in hand with them to create those assets to actually enable that change and then we have a team that really helps tackle some of those challenges, like talent hoarding and other elements.

So when you combine this realisation that, you actually don't have to slow down, you can move quickly because the technology can do a lot of the work, but you also have a change enablement team at your back. And that is an important one, right? I do worry someone going and say, we have a talent marketplace flick a switch, technology is there so we hope people use it.

We don't think that is going to succeed but if you combine the technology and the best technology, that is purpose-built, with the change enablement expertise, we have seen the success. This is the last point I will make. Not in months or years, we are talking like weeks, like within 13 weeks, to your point of maybe might not be overnight the full organisation and every single type of feature within the talent marketplace, but to have impact in your organisation literally within 13 weeks, we can get up and running and making impact on the employees and the business.

David Green: I mean, you can't ask for more than that. In terms of thinking about stakeholders, certainly in the work we do in people analytics, we say that stakeholders actually are sometimes the most important thing. Which are the stakeholders that need the most convincing around talent marketplace? Is it the employee, The Manager, HR or Business Leaders or a bit of all of them?

Ruslan Tovbulatov: I think Managers definitely. You have talked about this, this concept of talent hoarding is very real. We have this obsession almost with “I’m going to fight for my headcount and then I want to keep it. I don't want to lose it.”

And so the talent hoarding piece is a very interesting one which we deal with in every organisation. What is amazing though, is when that moment happens that a Manager realises “wait, I’m not giving up capacity, I am actually increasing the capacity of my team because yes, I might have someone that does a 20% project somewhere or gets an interest in the passion point they pursue outside of their day-to-day job.” But you are getting a person that all of a sudden is very energised and excited by that project.

There is this incredible story from Schneider Electric, where someone was hired in the more engineering and data side and then next thing you know, they were actually posting a story about how there was a need for a photographer in the business.

He had this passion for photography, that was not something any recruiter would have known or anyone within the company, maybe your direct team knows. But they posted this role and he said “Hey, I'd love to actually practice my photography skills.” And the next thing you know, he is writing a blog post about how the talent marketplace enabled him to pursue his photography passion, while also doing his day job.

So as a Manager, when you see that right now you have an engaged employee, who is becoming an advocate for the company and at the same time, you are actually seeing other talent coming into your organisation because you, as a Manager, can post roles and opportunities as well.

So that is a magic moment when we are working with our partners, where you see that switch kind of flip, where this traditional way of working of having this one person in a box that is reporting to me and has these specific objectives, just to me.

When you break that free and see the benefits, that is a magic moment, but it does take some work. It is that Management level where we are doing a lot of that change enablement work.

David Green: And then you get advocates like the Manager you mentioned in Turkey, he is going to be saying to his colleagues that actually this is something that is going to actually help you more anything else.

If we can gaze into the crystal ball for a moment, I don't just do that every December. Where do you think talent marketplace is going next? What do you think is the next evolution in this space? What are you working towards at Gloat for example?

Ruslan Tovbulatov: We have a very visionary company. Anyone listening, I don't know if you are aware, but we had Aaron Au Founder of Success Factors, join us as a Chief Strategy Officer. We have Lars from Success Factors, as an Investor and Advisor, we have a very big vision for what we are doing. So I will spare you the hours of visionary work that we have ahead of us when we are thinking about the future of work. But I will give you the quick hits of what is next in our product roadmap for this year/next year.

One of the things we think about a lot is how do we make impact on every single type of work and worker?

So we have already had a lot of success across organisations and globally rolling out, but we are working really to optimise with a few of our early partners, how do we think about the frontline worker experience? How do we optimise the experience for those workers? Just thinking about even contingent labor and moving beyond what you have within your own four walls, you are managing a lot of different resources. How do we think about all of those types of work and worker?

The other one is, we spent a lot of time thinking about this marketplace and marketplaces where we have optimised for the internal experience, but thinking about how do we connect cross-company, is something that comes up quite a bit. You saw Accenture did some great work there and just a vision of what can be done on that.

You also think about just even externally/ internally and connecting those more seamlessly.

Then the thing that excites me most and we are doing a lot of work on, is just more use cases. I talked about how we evolved from, and we already have, full-time roles and gigs and projects and mentorships. But you think about succession planning, dynamic talent relocation and also learning, which I talked about, but also knowledge sharing. How do we actually create? That is the beauty of what we are enabling, is that we are actually creating a map of knowledge in an organisation.

So that is what I get excited about, that we are not a system of record, we are not a system of transaction. This is an engagement system.

We hold ourselves to the metrics of a monthly active user, are people coming back, re-engaging and we are really proud to say that we can go neck to neck with a consumer app on some of these things and that is why we are having that success.

So for us it is how do we create more resources like that, that keep people coming back and knowledge and almost creating an engagement hub at the centre of that?

David Green: Lots to come then, basically. And I guess that thing about potentially connecting companies together, so they can start effectively sharing talent, becoming really flexible and agile, that could be really interesting, I think that could really shake things up a little bit, which leads us on to the question that we are asking everyone on this series.

Will talent marketplace mean jobs don’t exist anymore?

Ruslan Tovbulatov: I love this question, it is near and dear to us because we just hosted an amazing webinar, about a week or two ago, with Dr John Boudreau, of USC and Mercer’s, Ravin Jesuthasan. They wrote this incredible paper and are now releasing the book, Work Without Jobs. We are so aligned in how they see the world actually, we love the conversation we had with them, because the idea is that jobs will still exist but I think the way we look at jobs needs to fundamentally shift and is already shifting. It is not that we need to shift them, it is just naturally happening. And the thing that needs to happen is one, we need to deconstruct jobs on one end. So think about a job isn’t just a job title and this is what you are doing for the next year or five years of your life. This is thinking about deconstructing the job into the tasks to be done and thinking beyond just one individual filling all of those tasks, in that one job.

On the other end, you also need to deconstruct talent. This idea of individuals having skills, passions and aspirations, but also capacity. Like every week you start the week by saying this is how many of my hours are really accounted for. How do you match those two dynamically? Because you have to break down both components and you can get much more nimble and almost swarm as they say, to get work done and then finish the task and then redeploy.

That is a very new way of thinking about work. It is different than OKRs and let's set the strategy for a year. But I actually think what happened with the pandemic just showed us how not only beneficial that can be, but also critical. I don't think that is going away anytime soon.

David Green: And as you said right at the start, you have got the title of VP Global Marketing, but you said you are getting involved in lots of other things as well. So were you just kind of hinting there, practicing what you preach a bit.

Ruslan, it has been absolutely fantastic to have you on the show. I am sure we could talk a lot longer. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and follow you on social media? Also, how they can find out more about Gloat as well?

Ruslan Tovbulatov: Yeah, absolutely. We are very active on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn, probably is the best place to find us. Gloat, look us up on LinkedIn. We would love to engage with you. Then for me personally, same thing, LinkedIn. It is a mouthful, but look up Ruslan T and hopefully I am one of the first that shows up. I am sure if you want to look me up, just look me up on Gloat as well, but I would love to engage with anyone that wants to have a conversation around these topics.

David Green: Well thanks Ruslan, we will put links to your LinkedIn stuff on the publicity that goes out with the show. So it has been fantastic having you on, really amazing stuff I think that you and Gloat are doing and some great examples that you bought throughout our conversation. So thank you.

Ruslan Tovbulatov: Thank you so much for having me.