Greg Irwin  0:18

This is a one hour conversation probably in one of the more important aspects of HR around talent, sourcing and, and Talent Management. Thrilled to be here today with Andrea Shiah, and Ram Subramanian. Over at TCS and Eightfold.ai. We've been very lucky. My name is Greg Irwin, when I'm one of the partners at BWG. We were on these forums for a living. But I'm very fortunate to have been connected to Ram and Andrea, because they're really in the middle of providing innovative solutions around talent sourcing, and really help companies address their talent, talent issues and programs. So the way this forum works, a little different from your typical webinars is it's an open conversation. And what we're going to do is we're going to go around the group, and talk a little bit about the good ideas that companies have pursued, the things that companies are thinking about doing. And maybe some of the things that didn't work out as well as they might have hoped. And we'll learn a little bit from each other. It's an open dialogue. This is all about networking. And, you know, some of the best ideas for you might not come from BWG, TCS, or Eightfold, they might come from somebody else around the group. So what I'm going to be constantly encouraging here is for people to connect, and and follow up and learn from each other. So that's actually a specific takeaway. Outside of learning and understanding, make a personal goal to connect with one person from across this group. Again, doesn't have to be any of the hosts. But for me, and on behalf of the host, I'd like to introduce them. Let's start with Ram over at TCS, Ram please give a quick intro to to the group and a little bit on your practice at TCS. Thank you,

Ram Subramanian  2:22

Greg, thank you for having me in this forum. Looking forward to this conversation. My name is Ram Subramanian, I'm based out of Chicago, I lead the human capital practice within TCS, a lot of the work that we do is you know, helping organizations to have the right type of talent strategies that that are closely aligned with their business strategies as they grow and transform in the very unpredictable market space that is right there right now. So the we are, you know, we do a lot of the work around advisory consulting, and then work with multiple products to help customers know those vision. And so this tivities has a broad end to and, you know, player in this area, and I'm really looking forward to, you know, to this conversation. Thank you for having me.

Greg Irwin  3:16

And Ram, we're gonna we're gonna get you actively involved today, because want to hear about what some, some of your clients are doing to address the challenges. But first, let's go to Andrea, Andrea, thanks so much for Co-hosting with us today. Please introduce yourself to the group.

Andrea Shiah  3:33

Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I love your idea, Greg, of connecting with at least one other person, such a great outlet, have somebody else to bounce around, you know, the things that you're facing in this environment. So I actually was a former talent acquisition, global talent acquisition leader at American Express. I actually had a career there for 25 years. And the last two or three years I spent transforming talent acquisition there. One of the things I implemented was Eightfold as a platform. And I saw how much it could do, I decided to join Eightfold. So I've been part of it for the past eight, nine months. I'm the head of global talent, strategy and transformation. And I spend my time talking to talent leaders, just talking about AI, how it fits in their strategy, the impact it can make, and also talk about, you know, how you implement AI and what that entails. So I have the best job in the world, just talking to so many interesting people in interesting times. So that's who I am.

Greg Irwin  4:42

Andrea, you know, I don't typically set these up as sales pitches, and I'm not opening it up to you, but I do think that he should give us a little bit of an overview of what Eightfold is. For those who aren't already familiar.

Andrea Shiah  4:56

Yeah, sure. So um, So when you're talking about AI, in the talent space, the data intelligence that Eightfold has, is really about skills. So skills data is really, you know, maybe we can talk a little bit more about this later. But that's the true building blocks to enable so much with regards to talent strategy. And so what Eightfold does is we capture over one half billion data sets. And that's about half the world's workforce worth of skills data. And we capture that data as it relates to skills as it relates to jobs, as it relates to companies, because jobs in different companies have different skills, as it relates to geographies, and we also capture people and their movement in terms of acquiring skills, and all that intelligence brings to life a lot. You know, from even including potential potential to learn new skills. And so we take all that intelligence, we work with our customers, we integrate it into their HR data. So whether it's an ATS platform for talent, acquisition, or hrs platform for employees, and we bring all the data that you have on either candidates or employees to life, with all our intelligence, and all of a sudden, it becomes really powerful for talent leaders in terms of the ability to match and identify candidates, or employees, and they're fit for different roles in the company. So that is my long elevator pitch.

Greg Irwin  6:29

Not long at all. What What's the net result? In other words, is this providing more more, I mean, it's time to fill a meantime, meantime to sell is is kind of the the measuring stick, at least from from an outsider's view. What's what's, what's the net result,

Andrea Shiah  6:47

it actually impacts everything, right. So if you think about if you have the ability to understand the skills that your candidates are bringing to the table, and how they match to jobs, it impacts everything. So I usually think about results in three buckets. One is quality. So your ability to very quickly find the quality talent that matches with the jobs, to bring the skills that drive the business results to this the quality of talent, it affects experience. So for your candidates, they can find the right jobs very quickly, instead of being confused about what role they should look at which business use they should look at. And it gives them a great experience. And and then to your point, Greg, the efficiencies, right? The speed, your ability to scan 1000s of resumes in minutes, happens very quickly. So the speed to fill roles, but also the resources, right? Even if you talk about recruiters time, they can actually screen 1000s of resumes, I said very quickly and facilitate an automated process for interviews. So there's an efficiency with your resources and even hiring leaders, right? They have more transparency, their time is also more efficient. So it's kind of all of the above.

Greg Irwin  8:00

Excellent. All right, let's go to some stories. I think if you if you've been on one of my forums before, this is about telling some stories and learning from those stories. So I'm going to bring everybody into that fold, I'm going to come back to Ram with our first story and maybe set the, you know, set the stage here, tell us about a company that's addressing the great reshuffling I like that, like the title on our event, and what they experienced, and maybe what they've what they've been doing about it.

Ram Subramanian  8:34

So one of the, you know, group companies that we are working with, they have multiple businesses from retail banking, and, you know, some supply chain related work. And they are also in shipping. It's a very large corporation across the globe, with about 350,000 employees, collectively, and they had attrition of about 18 to 20% in the beginning of last year, and then their fulfillment was taking anywhere between 60 to 90 days, and many other questions and they are more than, you know, every portion in the company is staying back and for a longest period of time. And then one other thing that they never done in the past was like trying to put together the entire, you know, Group company into a proper, you know, skills mapping, and then their aspirations and putting it on one place to see how they're kind of, you know, how they can use some of the, you know, skills they have within their database to kind of create some might have talent mobility across the board, and what happened within that three months of their deployment, their fulfillment, from 60 to 90 days gone to, you know, 15 to 25 days. And then some of them were like, you know, usually, you know, entering for them, because they already know the culture and the environment and all of that, you know, not only that, they were able to fulfill them the productivity also pretty high, you know, in when bringing a new person on board. And then the other thing that we also, you know, found that, you know, organizations are, you know, actively, you know, trying to, you know, go away from a job and potions as a primary thing to try rather skills in the way that how they, you know, see people across, you know, the talent pool, and I think this has, you know, created a lot of, you know, benefits for these organizations, in people to, you know, connect with their, you know, particular aspiration that can be broken down into skills and competencies, and so that you can map all of that as a DNA, or they're like a Rosetta Stone to put all of that thing together. So this is usually improved. This is just one other personal story that, you know, I got involved in, in working with three other groups EHRs, and then bringing it all together into a platform where they could do this together.

Greg Irwin  11:04

Got it. Got it. Now, how we got started, we got so many questions here. How difficult was it for them to put this system in place.

Ram Subramanian  11:16

So I think the most common reason the system is the, you know, is part that they were able to do it pretty quickly. But I think the most of the challenges are being, you know, a, you know, the ability to kind of bring the data forward about about an individual are the jobs, I think this is where we were using artificial intelligence, every job by nature, and a portion that was open. And that was inherently translated bigger than what the cooter has put in place. And that was one big thing they had done. And the second thing about an individual, a lot of times when you ask someone what they have done internal, you know, data with the longer you stay in a company, the older than that knowledge about you is like very poor. Right? When you are new to an organization, there's a lot of knowledge about like, you know, who you are, what you're done, what's your background, what your strengths are, but the longer you are in a place, a lot of that knowledge become very archaic and unusable. So we had to do rely on a lot of the artificial intelligence in the projects that you're taking the groups that you were part of, and associations you had with who you worked for. And then which which teams you are part of, we could take glean lot of that through artificial intelligence and create a skills profile, and map that with artificial intelligence that was extracted from the job profile, there was a huge amount of mapping. And this was the hard work that was done, to actually to validate and test and see how that all fits in because every one of them said, certain flavor of the industry. So there was some cleanup we need to do in the beginning. With that, once we had that all figured out, then artificial engine, pretty much take two core the whole process it made all those matching and collection. You know, pretty seamless,

Greg Irwin  13:05

is Andrea, you looked at that whole cycle, and you've dealt with a lot of companies around this. How do you get away from just comp? Because that's clearly I think one of the concerns is how much flexibility sure we can just offer more and help help improve our close rate that way? I don't know. Tell us a little bit about how your clients are managing that that issue where they see people asking for $70,000 out of college, and you need parity?

Andrea Shiah  13:35

Yeah, no, I mean, I think so. Look, I think there's a macro event happening, right? That's why this is the common experience across all talent acquisition, right? If you looked at the data, resignation rates right now are 3% a month, right? That's been September, October, November, December, January. And I think most recently, February looks the same. That's equivalent to like, 36% a year, so resignations, and I think the expectations is not going to reverse anytime soon. And then job posting rates are at 7% versus what's typical, somewhere around three or 4%. So you've got this macro environment where you know, you've got lots of roles, not enough people in the workforce, a lot of exited. And I think they have looked at, you know, considering different things, right. It's not just, they're no longer they want more out of their work. I guess that's what kind of came out of a pandemic. So they're looking for, you know, good career, pass some balance in their lives, good location where they want to live, all these different things are coming to play. So I do think there's more than just calm I mean comp is definitely rising because there's so much competition right now. So I do think if you kind of have the full package, I think people are really a lot of companies that we work with are are starting to kind of brand more about themselves as an employer, you know what they stand for? They're investing in our solution to support talent, mobility, career mobility. That's a very, that's one of the top priorities. People want to be able to move to great jobs. And they can't do that internally. And oftentimes, it's easier to do outside of your company. That's what they're doing. And so I think there's, there's a lot of focus on those types of things and creating quality, careers, experiences. And those are things that compete with just comp alone.

Ram Subramanian  15:42

Yeah, guy a few things thing for you to kind of consider, which is worked out some strategies, I think, especially when you talk about the entry level portions that you are having challenges with few things, some of our customers even personally, we have tried within, you know, TCS, we hired about 40,000 People just in the last 14 months within this North America region. And one of the things that we have done in the entry level, which is about 25,000 people that we hired, is basically engaging yearly with Lara Divya data partnership with local colleges, and also the colleges and the region. So for example, somebody in Purdue, we start to engage in their sophomore year itself, and then you know, giving internship and then also create some type of constant follow up and connection. And then we contact people who are interned there, you know, definitely have the sense of connection with the computer that gives a lot of comfort they want usually about 70% always come to us, the people who give internship. And then the other thing that we have done to conduct a lot of these hackathons with these students, like within the sophomore year, junior year and senior year, the whole time, they see us constantly present there. And then they see the sense of connection, and there is a community thing that is created. And that really helped us to meet our growing demand on the entry level, especially. And this is something not only as training, you know, Caterpillar, some of the bigger companies in this region, I know they are trying the same kind of thing. They're usually successful with this.

Greg Irwin  17:19

I love Ram, I love that idea of kind of, it's not your first contact with them is not just to fill for the job. But you're building a whole universe of connection at the internship level or just the awareness level. Great. Let's, Yep,

Andrea Shiah  17:43

sorry, I'd love to go back to what Mary was talking about, if that's okay. Because I think what she described is a common challenge every town acquisition leaders facing which is getting, like the right quality talent, you know, for the roles that are open. And I'm hearing for the first time some talent acquisition leaders are saying they've got zero applicants for roles, which has never happened in the past. And so I think that's a big challenge that boarding any talent acquisition leaders are really facing right now. And I loved her conversation of looking into different types of talent like veterans. I know, Eightfold has just partnered with the Department of Labour, where we're actually connecting, there's 200,000 veterans that roll off every year into the workforce. And so Eightfold’s now a solution that the department labour is leveraging to help connect them with jobs. So that's a powerful, that's a lot of people and very skilled workforce to, you know, workers, sorry, to kind of really connect with, I think another category I've heard of too, is women who've taken a break, and now coming back to the workforce if they stepped away to raise their kids. So I think people are getting really good at identifying these different groups that have really great skills to really try to build on on, you know, the potential talent to really tap into.

Greg Irwin  19:14

It makes sense, you have to think a little bit differently, you have to be a little bit creative, and, and really maybe change your perspective of what that ideal candidate might be. As brilliant.

Ram Subramanian  19:27

That's another thing also you want to think about setting so one of the customers we are just talking to, they identified six roles. They have total of I think 46 type of potions in the company, they've picked six, and they are hiring purely to Priam the potential, you know, attrition that area so they're not feeling for pushing that his backhand rather, what might be potentially act and then and even with that all that there are still open question. I think that's something to think about. As well depending on the Now you're doing your currently strategic workforce planning, promotion, management job and all that those are the ones decent really helps you to kind of organize for, you know how you want to do this, this company is very high turnover company, they have identified only six, and they just do volume hiring on that on those areas.

Andrea Shiah  20:21

Yeah, and I was, I was asking about the dynamics of the referral, because I mean, one of the things that we're finding as our customers, I mean, obviously, with the AI, your ATS database becomes a sourcing platform. And what we're finding referrals are so powerful, you know, as quality talent, what we're finding is, our customers are able to kind of find those referrals on an ongoing basis as candidates, along with any other candidates and, or silver or bronze medalist, because those are also strong talent to consider, they're able to kind of rediscover them. And we had a customer, one of our customers just shared with us last year in 2021 41% of their roles were filled using the candidates and their ATS platform. So there's something very powerful in that as a solution. And I think referrals just prompts me on that that thinking

Ram Subramanian  21:20

must find that Tiffany was talking about the talent community is a very, very important one, because I think the alumnae we are actually building so many reporters right now. And while you have imply quarters, that actually engaged with the existing applies, aluminum quarters are so important, because actually the there is a lot of merit, you know, companies are, especially our customers are finding for the whole left, three, four years before when they are actually invested either in themselves in upscaling them, or some other organization invested in, you know, upscaling them where they probably are lot more, you know, suitable to the, you know, the money thing, they're looking forward to that. And, and since they already have a lot of their knowledge about the company, culture and work environment, going after that type of talent is a huge benefit. So alum network is something that talent network that Tiffany is talking about, I think expanding that community into Omni is a very, very important one

Greg Irwin  22:22

Andrea we're talking about really good new ideas. The problem is, districts, as well as all groups are tightly staffed and can't necessarily just jump in and say, Great, we're now going to create a new program, a new referral program, let's just do that. What do you see in terms of the effort and the confidence that these kinds of initiatives? How do you go about launching these initiatives and being able to promote them, and have the confidence that they're going to have an impact? Yeah,

Andrea Shiah  22:57

so with all the things that are going on all the pressure that talent acquisition leaders are facing, it's actually an exciting time, right? Because you're starting to see what's happening is because this is happening at a macro environment. Companies and the most senior leaders are realizing one of the challenges for growth is actually going to be talent, right, and the need to kind of, you know, build the talent in the organization to drive growth. And so I think there's greater awareness now, at the most senior level about these challenges. I don't know if this group is seeing that, you know, the CHRO is the CEOs are realizing this, and realizing that they need to do something differently, because it's not just the function that's facing the challenge. It's happening everywhere, right? There's a macro event that's happening here. And so I think what I'm seeing more and more of as we're having more conversations is that the most senior leaders are realizing we need to do something different. We're under invested, right? A lot of talent acquisition leaders are telling me their organizations are facing burnout. Over the past few years have been so many pivots, and this ramp up of hiring volume is happening like rapidly and continuously. So organizations are facing burnout. And what they're seeing is that is because the talent acquisition process can be very manual. Right? Even we talked about communities, establishing communities, oftentimes, it's a very manual process that's established to do that. And so I think leaders, the most senior leaders are realizing like we're under invested, we need to automate and we need to leverage AI that will help us a lot. And so we're seeing a lot more movement across companies where there's an acknowledgment of that at the most senior level, and the funding is starting to become available because the pain point has gotten so extreme right to the point of potentially putting growth at risk. If you can't fill roles that are supposed to be there to drive growth. There's just growing awareness about this.

Greg Irwin  24:56

Hmm. Thank you and Ram, what about you?

Ram Subramanian  25:02

I find that I want to add to what Andrea was talking about this, I think this is where the operations used to be pretty cumbersome. And then there was a lot of cost associated to it. Even the Andrea was talking about putting all the data together, just to get the intelligence on to make the right set or right decisions used to always involve some kind of system work, some type of manual, some type of a lot of that effort that is involved, I think, you know, I think with AI in place, right now, a lot of these are more like, you know, Eightfold is a very good example of how the one example that I gave about, you know, candidate data, the employee data, and the Alumini data, and then the data from the group companies, right, there are multiple of them, they're all in many different ways, if we had to really massage it in the one way that a single data format, it probably would have taken months and months or data and then time to actually do it with you know, I, you know, yeah, I put into work and he ate for lighting, that brought together in within like weeks, so that that project could get off the ground very easily. I think this is something that I like, everyone to kind of think about that while we always feel that in, you know, recruiting operation is not an easy thing, it's a lot of very cumbersome effort involved to not just from understanding the needs, and also go out to the user more a candidate profile, getting the right candidate to look at and who were the right potential, if you want to, you know, expand your candidate, you know, population, and all of that now can happen with, you know, help of technology, I think that's, that's a that, you know, there was not a lot of help in the past in this area, why there was like constantly rara frustration around this, and then the investment is always low in HR, right. So now with this, there is a, this is not something that you have to hire, you know, you know, recruiting and HR operation, people put it together to, you know, a lot of these things, rather, you know, you know, you employ the technology to actually get the work done. I think that's one big message I want to get out there. I personally, as seen in this, you know, the times that I was talking about time to fell, and then potions, Waupun ratios against the past and present, and they were all cut down, when they actually put the right use of technology

Greg Irwin  27:23

at all. I mean, let's let's spell it out, maybe a bit more clearly, because this is what you do in terms of going in and helping improve retention, and of course, recruiting. So we've obviously have a number of organizations here, you know, down to small to mid, and some larger organizations. Can you can you help to people on the line here?

Ram Subramanian  27:49

Definitely, I think a lot of these, I think I know, there is a one man show here that we are talking about, like, you know, there's some that that just me you are talking about the entire recruiting and HR is just one person, right? How do you know amplify the monta impact that you can talk to, to have a you know, there are huge candidate poll, they, you, you know, what we do that one person, go through each other profile and see the connection, right, and then call and make the call or may send an email out to actually to let the candidate see that the portion they're looking for, right, the, you know, what they look is actually this portion, right, there is larger the translation that happens and the effort that is put in and in this is where there is a huge amount of effort, you know, then the AI that is put in, that we personally have seen where it cut down the amount of time that is needed to do any of this guy, you know, creative sourcing is what we are calling, so you have a lot of techniques that you had already known. But how do you put that into use? And this is where I think we see that, you know, putting into use and with the little team smaller team size, you can make bigger impacts and in hiring in volumes as well.

Andrea Shiah  29:06

I would just say to this group, like when I talk about it being an exciting time, it's exciting for talent acquisition leader because you can champion right? This and you can actually educate your leaders about you know, I mean, I just share some of the macro environment data, they may be aware of that, but it's quite amazing. And, you know, they're probably not familiarity of how manual processes and just talking about the needs and the investment and improvements and bringing those ideas forward. Because yeah, I just think it's such an important function. It plays such an important role. And right now it's like pushing a you know, giant boulder uphill. But it doesn't need to be that way because there is technology available. Eightfold is an example but there's new technology available. That should be you know, used by such an important function that drives so much scale It comes through the function that oftentimes is very manual. So I think it's exciting for that perspective for talent leaders. Right,

Greg Irwin  30:09

I get automation is probably one of the key word that we've been talking about across so many markets, whether it's sales or marketing or contact center or operations, and the idea that it isn't, but should be applied more rigorously to talent, recruiting and retention, I think is, is a pretty straightforward story, so it resonates 100%. Let's wrap it up here. I want to thank you, Andrea, and thank you Ram and remind people connect across this group if we can help connect you with TCS or Eightfold. They're a great resource. We believe in them. And we'll be we'll be happy to make those connections if it's useful. And we'll continue our series here around HR tech, and I look forward to speaking with all of you on future call. With that. Thank you all and everybody. Have a great day. Bye, everybody.