Episode 140: Navigating the Talent Marketplace of the Future (Interview with Jeff Schwartz & Jeroen Wels)
In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders, David will take a journey into the past, present and future of the talent marketplaces.
Joining him is Jeff Schwartz, VP of Insights and Impact at Gloat and Senior Advisor of Future of Work at Deloittes, and Jeroen Wels, Founder of The People@Work Innovation Collective.
With their combined experience and insights, this conversation will highlight thought-provoking advice on how organisations can start thinking and actioning for the future of their businesses.
Expect to learn more about:
How the talent marketplace supported Unilever and other businesses during the pandemic,
The role of the talent marketplace during economic headwinds,
The possibilities that can arise from skills-based organisations,
Why 2023 is a critical time to be thinking about 2030,
What HR professionals need to start doing today to prepare for the future of their business, and much more.
Enjoy!
Support from this podcast comes from Gloat. You can learn more by visiting: gloat.com
David Green: When we reflect on recent years, we can see that there have been seismic shifts in the way that organisations approach their people strategies. Advances in technology, talent shortages and changing employee expectations have all left organisations asking a fundamental question, "How do we plan for the future?"
So today, I'm delighted to be joined by Jeff Schwartz and Jeroen Wels, two leading visionaries in the future of work. With their combined experience, broad thinking perspectives and astute analyses, they are here to provide some thought-provoking advice on how organisations can start developing their people strategies for the future world of work. We'll be discussing the past, present and future of the talent marketplace, its place in the new workforce ecosystem that is evolving, and the opportunities presented by the shift towards skills-based organisations.
So, without further ado, let's jump right in and start the discussion with Jeff and Jeroen.
Jeroen, Jeff, it's wonderful to welcome you both to the show, Jeroen for the second time, Jeff for the first time. Today's episode is as you both have a really deep understanding of the talent marketplace. But before we get started, could you tell listeners a little bit about yourselves; Jeroen, I'll come to you first?
Jeroen Wels: Okay. Hi, David. Hi, Jeff. Nice to meet both of you again actually. I'll keep it very short. I was 20 years in Unilever as the EVP HR for Beauty and Personal Care, as well as the Chief Talent Officer, and I recently started, like you nicely said, People@Work Innovation Collective to accelerate innovation in HR, particularly humanising technology, and I'm excited to be here today.
David Green: Well, it's great to have you back on the show, Jeroen. And, Jeff?
Jeff Schwartz: Great, David and Jeroen, thank you very much. So, as you said, I'm the Vice President of Insights and Impact at Gloat. I joined Gloat after 20 years as a Senior Partner in Human Capital at Deloitte. In addition to all this great work I do at Gloat, I've also written a couple of books. I wrote a book called Work Disrupted that came out in 2021, very well timed in retrospect; and I have a book coming out with colleagues at MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, on workforce ecosystems, coming out in April.
I also teach both MBA students and executive ed on Future of Work at Columbia Business School. So, very busy and really looking forward to today's discussion.
David Green: So, Jeff, staying with you, as you mentioned when we spoke last week, to fully understand what the future of the talent marketplace is, we need to rewind, press play before we fast forward. So, if we go back to 2015 when Gloat, or shall we say Workey, as it was known at the time, was first founded, what have you learnt as an organisation over the years about building talent marketplaces?
Jeff Schwartz: I love this question, and my first degree actually is in history, and then I went on and got an MBA and a master's in economics. So, I think going back to the history is extremely valuable. In 2015, 2016 when Workey was started by our founders, they were looking at another very common problem, which is, in the case of Workey, the former name of Gloat, how could they help engineers and technical works in Israel find jobs with global tech companies. They set up an algorithm and a set of websites that helped people do that. Think of it as a dating site for helping engineers find jobs; others were doing that as well.
A couple of years into it, through a number of conversations, and Jeroen I think will talk about the experience that he had with a team at Unilever, we came upon this very interesting idea, and it's a radical idea, but it's a real shift, which is, can we take the dynamics of a marketplace, which is what a dating site or a job board was in a sense, and can we bring that inside the organisation? This was a very big shift because historically, and actually for most companies today, HR and talent processes are administrative processes, they are run by HR managers and executives. There's relatively little agency choice that employees have other than joining the company; and once they join, they get on, I'd almost call it an escalator or a ladder-type career.
So, it was in 2017, 2018 that Gloat began to co-design with Unilever, Schneider Electric and some other companies, what we call the talent marketplace. In 2019, when we started a series of research at MIT and Deloitte on the future of the workforce, we were looking at really new issues and new trends that were coming up. And probably the biggest one that we found was the whole idea of a talent marketplace; we also called it an opportunity marketplace.
But I think one of the reasons it's become so popular and in demand, is it actually allows us to take a different approach to building and using both the skills and the interest of the workforce. It's a very different model. I'd summarise it by saying, think of a marketplace model versus an administrative model, and hopefully we don't have to argue for a long time as to why markets, or even managed markets, are better than administrative strategies in organisations; I think that's where we are today and I'll kick it back to you and Jeroen.
David Green: Well, I don't think you're going to get any dissention there that markets are better than administrative processes! And before I come to you, Jeroen, I guess what it did, Jeff, is it kind of transformed the whole way that we thought about internal mobility. So, internal mobility before was, you're working in a job effectively, you either get the tap on the shoulder or you apply for a job internally, and you move to another job with a different manager. Whereas, the talent marketplace is building much more flexibility around that, allowing people to take on additional work, additional projects that support their interests as you said, Jeff, but also relate to the skills that they've got, which they either are already using in their current role, but maybe not using as well. So, it kind of makes it a bit more fluid.
Jeff Schwartz: I think that's right and let me add one comment here. It is a shift, it's not just an acceleration. We talk a lot about acceleration in shifts. The talent marketplace is a shift, it is a different mindset, it is a different way of operating talent and skills and projects and jobs and careers in an organisation. And because it is a shift, because it is a mindset shift, one of my favourite quotes and, David, you probably know I love quotes, is a quote from Albert Einstein who said, "You can't use an old map to explore a new world".
I don't think you can expect our legacy HR systems to provide the maps for the shift to talent marketplaces, and it is a different way of thinking, it is a different way of operating, it is new technology, it is new processes, and of course none of us would be surprised that in order to make that kind of shift, there's a lot of transformation and change management involved, because we're not used to operating in a marketplace way of working; we're used to HR and careers being administratively managed and administratively driven. So, that combination of tech and process and change is absolutely essential to what we've seen over the last couple of years as well.
David Green: And, Jeroen, I'm going to turn to you a bit for the practitioner perspective, if you put your former hat on; during your time at Unilever, as Jeff has already said, you were one of the early adopters of the talent marketplace with Gloat, and actually helped them shape the direction of the product as well, particularly in the early days. How did the talent marketplace support the business and people strategy at Unilever prior to 2020 -- we'll talk about the pandemic in a minute -- and actually, then during the most intense phases of the pandemic?
Jeroen Wels: Thanks. Yeah, actually when I met Workey for the first time, around the same time as Jeff met them, they pitched to us and say, "Hey, we've got here new technology and we're helping external recruiting to become a little bit smarter", and I started to ask myself the question, "But what problem are you actually solving for? You are taking out a middleman, which is helpful; you bring costs down, very helpful; but the big problem is actually that you need to develop people and why don't you bring therefore your technology inside the company because then you really solve for a big problem which is, how can we faster up and reskill people; how can we give them more new experiences?"
We got to the understanding ourselves that we need to democratise the opportunities that we were giving to people, and that was something very different than taking out a middleman. In a way, you took out a middleman called HR, and a middleman called the line manager, but you want to create visibility so that people could follow their dreams, and not only follow their dreams but also building the skills that they require to stay relevant for the company. And then this idea of a talent marketplace was born, and we started to develop that from MVP, helped to scale it up in Unilever in several stages, and then the pandemic went.
In the pandemic, we realised as Unilever that we really needed to step up agility, because part of the business did not have a business at all, think about the part of the business that serves the restaurants, they were really closing down. And other parts of the business, think about hand hygiene, they couldn't keep up with the demand, and the demand was actually lifesaving. So, then we raised a campaign to support this agility to shift resources in the company, and the campaign was called Raise a Hand, when you need it, and Lend a Hand, when you have availability, when you're temporarily without work that you find meaningful whilst we are trying to whether the storm of this pandemic.
So, all of a sudden we saw the potential, the real potential of the talent marketplace, which was an enabler for agility, an enabler to shift resources and keep people relevant much faster than you could otherwise do, and at the same time you could develop people. So, it was a beautiful marriage of business and people that could both benefit from a talent marketplace. And I think those are the dynamics that Jeff was talking about, in a much more sophisticated way than I could do it. But we helped Unilever to make a big step into becoming more agility without adopting fully new ways of working, but just creating the mindset that should go where the biggest value of the company is.
David Green: And before we move to where talent marketplace is today and moving into the future as well, again a question for both of you and maybe, Jeroen, I'll come to you first again, there's a bit of a misconception that talent marketplace is just about technology. From what you've both said so far, that's clearly not the case. What are some of the ingredients that you need within an organisation to actually make this new approach work? I know last time, Jeroen, when we spoke, you mentioned a lot about this isn't about technology, this is about culture.
Jeroen Wels: I would actually like to answer this question, David, maybe in a way that you might not expect, but a real answer to the question is just start; you don't need anything, as long as you start small in a certain group to learn. But of course when you work with a talent marketplace, when line managers have more of a visibility to what kind of skills and resources you have in the company, and you do the same for people, you will have to adjust your policies to that, you will have to create mindset in pockets where that is not normal, or where people have to think about flexibility and agility in a different way. In other parts of your organisation, it will go much faster.
So, I think that what is really important is that you just start with doing it and playing around with it but then as you learn and you get to that tipping point of 15% to 20% of the organisation using the talent marketplace, then you need to pause and then you really need to think hard about how were we doing talent management; how were we doing learning; how were we doing upskilling and reskilling; and what is it in our policies that's actually going to put constraints in place to let the talent marketplace flourish?
I would be very careful with strategising too much of, "This is what we now need to change", unless you have experienced where the value sits in the talent marketplace for your company, because the value is very different depending on your business situation, whether that is driving retention, whether that is stepping up upskilling and reskilling, whether that is introducing agility. There are now so many use cases of where the talent marketplace creates value, that I would say, "What are your top three value-creating initiatives that a talent marketplace can benefit from?" and then decide what your implementation strategy is going to be. And then you always start with what I started this answer with; just to start.
David Green: Jeff, anything you'd like to add to that base, on obviously your own experience, but also what you've seen across multiple organisations that have adopted talent marketplaces successfully?
Jeff Schwartz: The strategies that we've seen that have worked most effectively have been agile strategies. Now, it's almost funny to say, but there are companies who say, "We're going to put in a programme of workforce agility, and we're going to plan it out as if it's a large, administrative, hierarchical process", which of course doesn't make very much sense at all. But the notion and the ideas that Jeroen just talked about, in the same way that when we built Gloat, we built an MVP and then we co-designed it with customers and then we've built it out over the last five or six years into a very robust platform with a set of change enablement and implementation programmes, I think, and I'm picking up what Jeroen was saying, I think that's where Gloat customers and talent marketplace customers have seen real value, which is they get started, they take an agile approach.
We know that agile means that you get all the different players into that scrum, into that group. You've got obviously the process and programme leaders, the change leaders, the business leaders, and the technology leaders or experts; they're all on the team, they're working together towards very specific objectives for the MVP or the goals within the organisation. That approach has worked extremely well, and then companies have said, "How do we expand that MVP; how do we take this broader?" sort of that pause moment that Jeroen talked about.
What's interesting about this is that companies who have taken the agile approach, and Jeroen, I'm sure, will have things to add, have found that they started with one or two business goals that they were trying to achieve; but relatively quickly said, "Well, wait a minute. In addition to doing project work, we can use this for jobs. In addition to jobs, we can use this for mentors. Well, wait a minute, we've created a marketplace". Marketplaces are the most amazing source of information of any institution that we ever built. So, what we began to see and what our customers saw, was that the marketplace was a skills insight and information engine.
So, by starting with an agile approach, getting these different groups together, building for specific business objectives, and then following that trajectory, and as I talk with Gloat talent marketplace and workforce intelligence companies and clients around the world, the diversity of their journeys is really fascinating. And, Jeroen, I mean you've seen this, and I know we were at Gloat Live together in November, and I think that was one of the themes of what we heard from many of the people who were on these implementation journeys.
David Green: As we hopefully come out on the other side of the pandemic, we're now confronted with the paradoxical combination of economic headwinds and talent scarcity, although the figures that came out about the G7 countries today were a little bit more positive, unless you happened to be in the UK, like me. This means, I suspect, that the three of us may share a similar hypothesis that this makes talent marketplaces even more important. Jeff, what guidance would you offer listeners on the role and relevance that the talent marketplace has, for example, on redeployment and the restructuring of the workforce?
Jeff Schwartz: I have two perspectives on this question, David and Jeroen. One is, and I know we very briefly talked about the power of talent marketplaces in the pandemic. I mentioned earlier in the discussion the research that we did at MIT and Deloitte, we produced this report in April 2020 on Opportunity in Talent Marketplaces. And then in June, we actually wrote an article on how companies were using talent marketplaces, in an agile way, to respond to the imbalances they saw in Covid-19.
Jeroen, you put it extremely well; one of our clients, Jean Peltier at Schneider Electric, has said many times, "When the pandemic hit, half of our employees were overworked and half of them were underworked and we did not have the administrative capability to redeploy in real time. So, we put the foot on the accelerator in the talent marketplace, then we used that to move work and people around in a way that we simply could not do through administrative processes".
I think that what we all experienced during the COVID era, and I'll go back to your question, I think we are transitioning beyond the COVID era in 2023, is that some of what we learned in the early days of COVID and through COVID, which is the importance of adaptability, the role that talent marketplaces play in adaptability; I think also the role that they played in helping us create growth opportunities in companies for employees through what became known as The Great Resignation. One of the CHROs of one of our clients, Patricia Frost at Seagate, said at Gloat Live, which she's also said several times, "At Seagate Technologies, we didn't have the same experience of The Great Resignation, meaning our employees weren't leaving to go to outside opportunities, because we had a platform with Gloat that enabled them to find opportunities inside".
I think these two challenges, the challenges of constantly changing work, the need for new skills, and the desire of employees to have as many possible opportunities for growth inside their company as outside, is more relevant or as relevant to 2023 as it was in 2020 or 2021 or 2022. So, I think this is a really interesting time, and I'll make one other point on this question. 2023 is probably the first time in three years that business and HR leaders have an opportunity to set a direction that isn't overwhelmingly being driven by responding to the external world.
What I mean is, in the pandemic, we had to respond to the pandemic. Do we have economic headwinds? By the way, we always have economic headwinds and tailwinds, there's no question about that. But in 2023, I think business and HR leaders have a fundamental set of questions around direction. In 2023, are we going to zoom out and think about where we want to be in 2030 and set that course in 2023 so that we are on a really good growth trajectory and path? Are we going to turn around and try to go back to where we were? There are some people who are talking about, "The path forward is the path backward. Or, some people are saying, "Look, it's 2023, Jeff, David, Jeroen, we're just tired. Can we just take a breather in 2023 and can we pick up the future in 2024?"
So, I think this is the year that business and HR leaders really have the opportunity to set that course and pick up many of the lessons we've learned around agility, and I think this is very relevant for the whole restructuring question, because what we do with the current workforce, and this is I think the premise of the skills-based economy question, how we build skills and potential of our current workforce to help us to do the things that we need to do and create meaningful careers is really front and centre, and that's what the talent marketplace discussion and movement I think is fundamentally about in 2023.
Jeroen Wels: I may add to that, David, if you're okay with that, because I like the way that Jeff says it; and if I translate that to how strategic the talent marketplace can be for HR functions to really demonstrate where they can add value over a longer point of time, it is about this, I wouldn't even call it responsible restructuring, but just anticipating for the skills gaps that you have, not only this year, but the year after and the year thereafter, because your strategies are often three years out. So, you should know what the core capabilities are that you are going to build.
We know what the numbers are in terms of the skills shortages that we have. Numerous studies have been already thrown at us, yet we are a little bit slow in responding. Why are we slow in responding? Because, you still see an event that everybody who listens into the podcast today could get those numbers from their own company. If you look over any kind of role in 12, 18 months, the chances are high that you're recruiting as many people into your company as that you've laid off. Maybe there's some differences here and there during certain periods, but that's a little bit crazy, isn't it? So, the amount of money that is spent in recruiting and every person that you recruit in is going to cost you at least six months of salary.
Imagine that you allow much more flexibility for people to find new jobs and you support them with small budgets to upskill them, to train them up to perform in those jobs, let them have a lead time of three or six months to perform, what kind of huge problem of upskilling and reskilling and preparing yourself as a company for your future capabilities do you have? It doesn't have to be at a large multinational skill globally; pick out the pockets where the transformation is going to hit you the hardest, but anticipate and have a strategic view. There's so much budget of money available to enable that, and that links in to what Jeff was saying. Think forwards and then think backwards what you can do with a talent marketplace to achieve your midterm strategic goals.
David Green: What are some of the other innovations that you are seeing, or that you would expect to see in our space relating to that shift towards skills and the possibilities that are afforded through the talent marketplace?
Jeroen Wels: Hopefully this leads to an invitation for another podcast, David, because I'm really excited about what I see, working with various multinationals on what I call a digital HR safari, exploring what start-ups are building and propositions. So, I'm trying to redo what we did with Gloat five or six years ago. So, we're looking at start-ups and scaleups that bring new technology, or better yet, apply technology that exists to accelerate value. And a lot of it is about actually value creation rather than efficiency building, what I see in those start-ups.
I've looked at more than 75 in the last three or four months, and there are two or three that I would really like to call out, and they're all related to the talent marketplace; because, we've built now an internal talent marketplace and my dream has always been, "What if you could connect external talent marketplaces to the internal talent marketplaces, whether that is through the MSPs and you're tapping into the freelance talent pools that you have, or not?" But I'm very hopeful that that is creating even more opportunity for people, not only within your company, but also outside of your company.
So, imagine that you've got your MS Teams or if you've got your Slack, and you know which work projects you're working on, and you've got with two clicks access to internal and external talent that you dynamically can place on your teams, because you know what kind of skills they have. I think that's hugely beneficial to both the talent as well as the companies. And I think we're very close to realising that. We just need to have a couple of the Microsofts and the Slacks that pick up this innovative idea, and start engineering for the solution.
If you then think forwards, if that is going to happen, and I think it is going to happen, imagine that we could use the blockchain to create digital skill and experiences credential wallets, that is basically a wallet that you own as a candidate, as a talent, as a human being, you own what you want to disclose to companies, or to your own company where you're going to apply to your jobs, and it's all verified on the blockchain. So, it becomes a transportable, digital wallet.
I looked into a company called Velocity that have made fantastic strides towards realising this future, and they have got a couple of experiments with banks in the Netherlands and in other areas, where they really try to break down those barriers so that talent can flow. Can you imagine in the banking sector how many credential checks need to take place before people can shift from one bank to the other, or actually can take on a job, giving all the heavy governance that is taking place? So, I think that's a big future.
The last one, if I can mention companies here as well by the way, David, I didn't check that with you, but they deserve it. It's another start-up called TestGorilla. What they do is they say, "Forget about a job opening or a job posting that you have on a job board, where you're going to describe anything else than the skills". What they do is they say, "We offer up to select five skills that are critical for a job, that people can on the spot do tests on". Then you get a list of candidates, let's say 500 candidates, and you take the ones that ranked highest on those five skills. You invite them for an interview and then are going to look at their CVs. Now that is going to accelerate the skills-based organisation.
But if you take even one step further, if you do that in an internal talent marketplace as well, so that you strengthen the insights on the skills that you have; but also, if you then democratise it further and allow people to do all kinds of skills tests of 10, 15 minutes, then all of a sudden it doesn't matter any more what kind of job you've done really, because you've proven that you've got the skills, or that you are maybe a little bit more competitive than somebody else on the skill level. That will accelerate the skills-based organisation massively in conjunction with the talent marketplace that helps you to match the right people to the right opportunity at the right time.
So, those are just a couple of innovations that I see and I could actually go on and on because I'm very excited about it, but yeah, maybe you should talk about it another time!
David Green: Well, I'll give Jeff an opportunity to respond to that and maybe add to that as well. Jeff, I'm going to pull up the comment you made when you suggested that 2023 could be the year when talent leaders, business leaders start thinking a bit more forward-thinking about 2030, we've got the opportunity to do that now. It would be interesting, in the context of what Jeroen said, why you believe that to be the case; and what do you think this means for HR leaders listening to this podcast? I think this might give you an opportunity to introduce some of the ideas that are going to be in the workforce ecosystems book as well.
Jeff Schwartz: This is a great discussion, and hopefully our listeners will enjoy it and be engaged in it as well. I'll make one comment and then I'll give five yesses to what I heard Jeroen talking about. One of the expressions that I have been exploring and using in discussions in the last few months is that I've talked about the Einstein quote to, "You can't explore a new world with an old map", but the sort of alternative to that is, "To change the game, you need to make game-changing moves", and I think that in 2023 it is absolutely time to do that.
I think that again we're not pinned down by the pandemic in the way that we were in previous years. We have the opportunity and responsibility as business and HR leaders to chart a course forward in this year. But I think it's imperative, I don't know how else to say it, that to set priorities for 2023, we have the opportunity to really zoom out and think about where we want to be in 2030. We know where we want to be in 2030 is just fundamentally different than we all thought in 2019. So, this is the time to do that, reframing in that calibration.
So, yes to five things that I heard that Jeroen has been talking about, and this is something that Tanuj talked about in her podcast with you, from Standard Chartered, "Every company is looking at moving from sunset jobs to sunrise jobs". That's a way of saying that the nature of work and jobs and skills is changing very, very fast; the half-life of skills has fallen. Talent marketplaces, and Tanuj puts it extremely well in your conversation with her, have been fundamental to the way that they've done the analysis and moved from understanding what the sunset jobs are, what the sunrise jobs are, and how to engage employees in different ways to move in and to do reskilling.
Yes to the idea that the skills-based economy is a major new way of thinking. We weren't talking about this three years ago, four years ago, I don't think I heard it. It was only in the last year or two that the work from Ravin and John Boudreau and Sue Cantrell and Michael Griffiths have really put it centre stage. What they've pointed out to us is that the job is no longer the only unit of analysis for the way we think about talent management. And the job, Sue Cantrell puts it very well, is getting pulled in two directions. It's being fragmented, it's being taskified, so that gives us different ways of organising work; but it's also being broadened and made into projects and projects and team-based works are becoming more important. So, yes to recognising that we need to manage beyond the job.
Yes to recognising that employees fundamentally want growth and opportunity, and then building a skills-based and also an intent-based and aspiration-based system that uses marketplace dynamics, it's just uncovered and unleashed so much in organisations. Fourth, and you've asked me to mention the workforce ecosystem, we are in the midst of moving from looking at market dynamics inside the organisation, that's where talent marketplaces have focused.
Where we're going at Gloat, I think the industry is going as well, is we're going to be applying it not only to current employees, but to future employees, and manage that the people that you're hiring also have visibility into a talent marketplace, and they could see not just the one job that they're applying to, but the multiple jobs and opportunities in your companies. Then of course, how do we extend that to not only your current and your future employees, but all the people that do work as part of your workforce ecosystem. This is the agenda that's playing out there.
Then, fifth, yes to the notion that we will have something like blockchain credentialisation. I think it's going to be blockchain, maybe it will be something else where, as Dror Gurevich, who's the leader of Velocity Network and Velocity Foundation talks about, we will be able to have a visible layer of credentials that is controlled by employees that can be authenticated in some way. I think we talked earlier when we were starting about, "Let's do a rewind, play, fast-forward discussion"; I think we're at the fast-forward discussion.
What's interesting about this last part of the discussion is everything that Jeroen and I are talking about is happening right now somewhere. This is the William Gibson quote, "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed". There is nothing that we're talking about that isn't happening somewhere. The challenge for HR leaders is how do you put it into your vision and your plan in 2023 and going forward.
David Green: To achieve this, you need a combination of tools within your technology ecosystem, so that you can manage cost, but also the growth, the agility, the development that we've talked about, so we can deliver what our employees are increasingly expecting as well. So, Jeff, what does an effective HR technology ecosystem look like as we move towards 2030, which is quite a big question I know; so, I'm definitely interested in hearing your thoughts on this?
Jeff Schwartz: I don't know if people can hear me smiling through an audio podcast, but I am smiling! It's probably a good question for a full podcast discussion at some point, but I'll try to summarise it this way. The HR technology ecosystem in 2030 is going to be different than the HR technology ecosystem is that we brought into the 2020s. I think that many of the HR technology models that we have will be kind of running on fumes.
I remember when I was at business school, this is a while ago, David, one of my professors telling me that you should never ask a system a question to answer that it wasn't designed to answer. So, I don't think we can expect that what we built HCM systems to do, or ATS systems or LMS systems to do are what we're going to do, but I'll summarise it this way.
I think what we call today, HR technology, is going to become four or five interrelated fields. One is, there will be an area called "work tech", and work tech are the tools that we use to actually do our work. I'm not talking about managing the workforce, I'm talking about doing the work. One of the big stories is ChatGPT, the role of AI in work. This is a very good example of work tech. Everybody in the next several years will be working next to and with a smart machine and a robot. How do we design that work? Work tech is central to that. The use to do digital surgery, the tools to do finance, the tools to do any job that we have in retail; this is work tech.
The second of course is "workplace tech", what technology we have to change the workplace dynamic. We're using that now, we're recording on a digital studio, we're all working on Zoom and Teams, and we are looking at different ways of managing place in work, and that's an area that I would call workplace tech.
Then I think the third, probably the most important for HR leaders, is what I would call "workforce tech", not HR tech, but workforce tech, because I think in workforce tech, we're answering several questions. Of course we're going to answer the fundamental HCM, ATS and LMS questions, "Who are our employees? Where are they? How do we pay their taxes? How do we make payroll happen? Are we in compliance with rules and regulations? Can we do fundamental transactions?"
We also have a set of similar programmes that we call "vendor management systems". These are the systems for procurement, the systems for contractors, for gig workers. That's the base layer. On top of that layer in workforce tech, this is where we are at Gloat, we're building an experience and an opportunity and a marketplace and a skills layer, and that's an entirely new layer that is being added, both for our current employees and future employees, but also for the external marketplace that we've talked about earlier.
So, I think we have the opportunity, and this is actually a chapter in the book that we've written on workforce ecosystems, on technology and workforce ecosystems, we talk about work tech, workforce tech, workplace tech; we talk about technology as workers. How do we, in what we used to call HR, and maybe we're not the HR department any more, maybe we're the capability department, how do we manage capabilities, some of which are people, some of which are machines, some of which are people and machines? And then, how do we integrate credentialisation technologies that we've already mentioned?
I think it's going to be a very interesting time for the HR tech ecosystem. I'm not sure that the past is prologue in this case, it may be that there's some reframing and rethinking that will go on, but that's what makes it so exciting; because, as we go through this reframing of workforce tech and work tech and workplace tech and technology as part of the workforce and credentialisation, as HR leaders, as capability leaders, we are reframing the impact that we have, both for our employees and for the organisation.
David Green: Well, Jeroen, I'm going to put it, you've already highlighted a couple of really interesting start-ups and new technologies that probably fit into some of the categories there that Jeff's outlined as well, and I'm very excited about the way that you've outlined that, Jeff. How can HR leaders best evaluate, pilot and implement some of these tools within their companies?
Jeroen Wels: If I would answer the question completely for myself, then I would say you need to understand how it works, you need to understand how it works for you, you need to understand how it creates value for you because you know how it works; and for that, you need simple experimentation, and that's complex enough. Again, it's about starting with something small and then test how it works. That's the only way that in an HR department, a pretty experienced department, or any department, or any team, I should say, is going to improve work in itself. You should be starting to understand, because you're not going to get it from the big vendors, because they create big modules that need to be tested first themselves. They have a little bit of a learning model as well before they launch a module, but that doesn't make you fast enough to keep up with what's available there.
So I would say 2023 is about experimenting, piloting how it works. Start with something and collaborate with other companies, because you don't have to do it yourself. Pick out companies that have more or less the same culture, that have more or less the same business prophecies, more or less the same way of dealing with people, and if each of you just pick out one or two experiments, then together you will learn much faster. And where to then focus on, from my perspective, is particularly how can you access data about people and how they work. I think we're still not good enough, and that's a very fundamental first step to take. It will take years to get it at a high level. We're behind in people-related functions.
Invest heavily in work collaboration and then keep on experiencing with that, how does it work; what is the maximum capacity for people to also use those tools? A talent marketplace obviously, internal and external, I would say. Start to redefine how the dynamics work for your company. The fourth one is a bit related to what you said, Jeff, around work tech itself, so how do you bring automation in decision-making tools, etc? Start experimenting with it because you want to make it human. Tech is not going to benefit your company if you don't know how your people are going to work with it, even if it means less people. But actually, I don't believe it means less people, it means more people, because your company becomes more productive, it will have more time to go after value-generating initiatives for your company. So, start with humanising the work tech, I would say.
Last but not least, you didn't mention this one, Jeff, maybe it's a hobbyhorse now for me, but I believe that we in the people-related function have not put enough attention to what neuroscience insights can bring to us. Yes, we finally, for a few years now unfortunately due to the pandemic, that was a difficult word, we focus now on mental wellbeing. But try to create it a little bit more positively, from prevention into something positive. What if we better understand how our brain works? What is Jeff's brain, David's brain, Jeroen's brain; how is it wired? What makes me happy doesn't make Jeff happy, doesn't make you happy, David. Whether that is colours, whether that is situations, whether that is music, whether that is the way you approach your work. So, I think there's a world to be won there.
In hospitals, neuroscientists, they know all of this already to a large extent. How can we learn faster? If you broke a leg, they know how your brain is reacting to helping you to walk again. How can we apply those insights in the workplace to make you happier, more fulfilled and help you to learn faster. So, that's a big plea on the last one, to start experimenting with that, because we need it to really create a more sustainable world of work.
David Green: What do you foresee as the main challenges that could prevent or delay achieving this vision of 2030, if we want to call it that; and actually, what factors could also accelerate?
Jeff Schwartz: I think number one, I think it is an amazing opportunity in 2023 to do this zoom-out exercise, to have a point of view on where your business and people and technology strategies will be in 2030. And I agree with Jeroen that there are two paths forward here: there's an experimentation and innovation path; but there is also a scaling path.
I think what we've seen in talent marketplaces in the last five years, we talked about the evolution of working in Gloat, is that the core elements of a talent marketplace, creating agency and choice for employees to explore jobs and internal projects and mentors and learning and multiple career paths so that they have more opportunity inside their organisation than outside, are areas that companies should be moving beyond experimentation in 2023, and they should be moving into scale, and we talked about the agile approach to actually do that.
I think the related piece here is, there's an interesting dichotomy, if you will, in the skills-based economy discussion right now. Or maybe another way to put it is, we're seeing people argue about which is the path forward; is the path forward skills and data maturity, or is the path forward mobility and marketplace maturity? My view, and again I'm the Vice President of Gloat, is we think that those are the vectors that determine the path forward. Every company is trying to both become more skills and data mature and they're trying to drive maturity. One is going north, the other is going east, if you can think about it that way. You need to move in both directions over the next couple of years and you can't expect that one of those directions is going to happen without the other.
Again, as I mentioned earlier, marketplaces, and we know this as economists and business economists, marketplaces produce information. I think if you ask me what can delay or accelerate it, I think there's some paralysis going on. I think that some of the agility that we all saw and were part of during COVID, because we had to move quickly, we had to put in place collaborative technologies, remote work technologies practically overnight, we did it. I think one of the things that will delay moving forward towards 2030 is a bit of analysis paralysis; I think just a lot of great lessons and experiences on how to get started and actually how to have impact.
What accelerates it is this. Companies that are implementing and have implemented talent marketplaces have seen obviously efficiency improvement. But more importantly, they have moved the needle on employee experience, that's what Patricia Frost told us at Seagate, that's what almost every Gloat and talent marketplace client tells us as well. And, as Tanuj talked about and others have talked about and Jeroen has talked about, they have innovated and created new business value. What accelerates and moves us beyond analysis paralysis is focusing on impact for the business and impact on the employee experience.
David Green: What does it mean for HR professionals in terms of maybe some of the skills and capabilities they need to develop themselves, so that they can actually help enable what we've spoken about in the last 45 minutes or so, within their organisations?
Jeroen Wels: Yeah, for me it is staying on the front foot. So, I think we're living in a time when I would like to add to what Jeff is saying, is that we are paralysed by cost again, rather than growing ourselves out of the problems, because of inflation, because of stagnation or economic recessions that we're all very careful of, and it's all true; it's a reality, I'm not going to ignore that. But then you play defence, so you don't play offence. I'm not an ice hockey player, but it also works in football, it also works in field hockey, and playing offence often is (1) more exciting; (2) often much better, because then you can dominate your game much more than when you're playing defence, and I think that's also the case in 2023.
So, what are one or two things that you decide you're going to play offence, knowing that you also need to be very cautious about cost; but then select at least one or two big initiatives that help you to also play offence. I think the talent marketplace is one because it is very rich in terms of the value that they can bring, the use cases that it can bring. What I would like to recommend for people who have not started yet, or are in the early stage, seek your buddies in other companies and collaborate to scale; not only collaborate to innovate, but collaborate to scale.
There's so many really useful use cases available that you can learn from that you should actually start thinking about, what kind of community of practices can we set up around use cases on how you can leverage the talent marketplace, as we did when we started to globalise and scale the system of records. What's that for the talent marketplace? How, on the back of that, can we both scale and innovate and therefore play an offense game?
So, I would recommend that particularly for people to not be waiting. In the pandemic, we did it. In the pandemic, you moved forward despite the threat that we had. So, rather than what skills you need to have, what courses you need to go to, I would say collectively work on the mindset, grab this opportunity now, remember what you did, how courageous you were during the pandemic, keep on moving forwards and pick one. And if there is one thing that you would pick, I would say it is the talent marketplace, but maybe I'm biased!
David Green: Well, Jeff, Jeroen, we've got to the final question. I'm going to be playing back this conversation later because there's so much that I'm learning listening to both of you as well. So, this is a question that we're asking everyone on this series, and I'll come to you again, Jeroen, first because you're definitely in flow at the moment. How can a company get started to successfully shift from a focus on jobs to instead a focus on skills, and appreciate that you might be paraphrasing some of the comments that you've already given?
Jeroen Wels: First, start with agility as a mindset in your company. If you don't have that, then you should question if talent marketplace is the right thing to do. Then simply start with a talent marketplace, know which bubble you want to address first, focus on building your core skills taxonomy, don't be too detailed about it, also work it, try to work with inferred data so that you know what your people say, what your tests say, but work with inferred data, let technology work for you. And then the most important one again is, just start. That's what I would recommend, David. And it's a bit of a summary of what I try to consistently convey.
David Green: No, that's absolutely perfect, Jeroen. And, Jeff, anything to add to that?
Jeff Schwartz: I'll double down on a couple of things that I've heard and summarise it this way. I think if you have not already started on a talent marketplace and the associated skills intelligence it creates, you should do that in 2023. I think one of the things that we are a little accustomed to doing in HR, but in other business functions, is putting in our plan for the year that we put something on the roadmap. I don't think 2023 and 2024 are years where we're going to get a lot of points on the board, or score a lot of points in the game, whether it's football or hockey or field hockey, by saying that we're going to do something in 2024 or 2025; the game has already changed. So, we actually need to do something different in 2023.
I think the other is, I was briefly talking about this a moment ago, recognising that moving from jobs as the main unit of analysis and mobility to both skills and interest, I don't think it's only skills by the way; I think potentially there are the skills and developing skills, but also the interests and the needs and aspirations of the business and the workers, this is a journey of both mobility and agency and skills and data maturity.
What's been so exciting in the last couple of years is seeing that in an integrated journey, we can improve mobility and agency, the talent marketplace itself, for projects, gigs, roles, mentors, learning. And, because markets create information, it's very powerful. And of course, we're going to be able to infer information from the activities in the marketplace, we can infer information from third-party data.
But all of these things only happen, as Jeroen said, and I'm going to underscore, if you actually get started, if you put a marketplace in place, if you put it in flow and you take an agile approach and you start moving and you continue to learn.
David Green: Perfect. So, everyone listening to this, get started, if you haven't already. Jeff, Jeroen, thank you so much for being guests on the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Final thing, can you let listeners know how they can find you on social media, find out more about your work, and, Jeff, I'll come to you first; and find out more about your book, Workforce Ecosystems, which is out in a few weeks' time, I guess?
Jeff Schwartz: You can find me via gloat.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, I have a very active LinkedIn channel, where I'm trying to share my perspectives on what's happening, jeff.s@gloat.com. And the book, Workforce Ecosystems, is coming out the first week in April. We're starting very aggressively marketing it. And if you go to MIT Press and look for Workforce Ecosystems, you'll see all the information on the book and it will be out, we're going to be talking about it all over the world in the next couple of months, so we're looking forward to that. It's been a great conversation, David, thank you.
David Green: Thank you, Jeff. And, Jeroen, how can people stay in touch with you?
Jeroen Wels: Before we do so, David, we should ask for a copy of the book from Jeff, now that we are still on here!
David Green: Yes, I think we should, a signed copy of the book.
Jeroen Wels: That's the most important thing!
Jeff Schwartz: On the way, gentlemen.
Jeroen Wels: And for the socials, I tend to keep my Instagram for my friends, so I hope that I can keep it like that, and my daughter is way too active on it anyhow. But I'm soon going to post more insights at the People@Work Innovation Collective LinkedIn page, as well as on my own page, so people can go there. It was great again to talk.
David Green: Last thing for me to say, thank you very much, and look forward to seeing you both again in person hopefully very soon.
Jeroen Wels: Thank you.
Jeff Schwartz: Thank you, David; thank you, Jeroen.