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[00:00:00] Everyone, this is Dylan Taggart here with another episode of the HRTechChat podcast. From here today with James Griffin, James is baiting the UK, he's principal consultant at Skills Elective.
[00:00:13] James focuses on Skills Enterprise, that found out transformation consulting and really focusing on the customer of James Thanks for joining me.
[00:00:23] Great to be here, Dylan. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:27] My pleasure.
[00:00:28] You might tell people a little bit about yourself before we dive into the Southern XXX3.
[00:00:33] Yeah, sure. I think you did a pretty good job there to kind of explain what I'm all about.
[00:00:40] Yeah, let's say, based in the UK, starting with kind of non-wet stuff, I'm a married guy, got a couple of kids.
[00:00:47] I live on the outskirts of London, a place called Twickenham, which is the headquarters of the English National Rugby team.
[00:00:56] We got a 90,000 C to stadium just over the way there.
[00:01:01] So sort of wants to know, well, quite frequently we get descended upon by a lot of beer drinking men and women who are going off to enjoy the rugby, which is fun in some ways.
[00:01:12] I like the outdoors, like paddle boarding, like getting on my bike and going for walks with the kids and stuff like that.
[00:01:20] So yeah, nothing out of the extraordinary there. Guess I like to barbecue meat and drink beer so again pretty typical.
[00:01:27] But on the professional side, yeah, enterprise, enterprise SaaS with a strong dollar per skills, I guess is how you might put it.
[00:01:35] I studied my career as a recruiter and working supply side into the city of London into a lot of financial services organizations.
[00:01:44] And I switched to work for my first technology company in, for I forget now, to run about 2010.
[00:01:52] And yeah, we're sort of you know a bootstraps startup so I was doing a sort of little bit of everything. It was a disruptive technology in the in the talent acquisition space.
[00:02:01] And since there I forged a career predominantly on that on that customer side within SaaS technology businesses. So eventually kind of building and managing customer success teams.
[00:02:12] All the while within those tech companies that I worked for this skills thing was coming along and you know it's it's become quite a hot topic.
[00:02:21] It's a pretty established concept now for organizations to try and understand the skills they have in their business and, you know, really how they put them to work.
[00:02:28] But when we were building you know machine learning and AI technology in the in the 2010s, what skills wasn't really in established concepts it was something that was still pretty innovative.
[00:02:42] So you know I guess I'm doing skills for you know longer than it's been cool.
[00:02:46] And yeah my passion around working in enterprise SaaS is really around the problem that the customer wants to solve.
[00:02:52] So how do you solve customer problems, you know, first of all you need to identify what it is and then you configure a solution to do that.
[00:03:00] And you have a measurable outcome and I think this is something that's always missing within a lot of a lot of narratives that I hear here and a lot of maybe HR functions that I've worked with is that they don't they don't they don't align that well to the business strategy.
[00:03:16] They don't align that well to a measurable outcome and I think it's really worth taking the time and investment to do that it's hard it's not trivial.
[00:03:25] But if you're going to actually be able to talk about whatever you've done within your role, whether that's procuring tech or optimizing it or whatever.
[00:03:34] Having a measurable outcome is going to be better than not so I do think it's worth the investment.
[00:03:37] So my passion is really to deliver value for those customers.
[00:03:41] And as you said now, I can for skill-clays if so I've kind of switched sides. I've moved over into a consultancy business business services business and you know we focus on simplifying skills and skills technology for everybody.
[00:03:54] We think there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace. We feel like buyers are struggling to get started with skills or they have got started and you know maybe they've hit a few pumps in the road.
[00:04:06] You know in this 15 years experience I've got work and the skills in that space. I think really enables me to empathize with that buyer and to enable them to kind of strategize on how to use skills as a force for transformation in their business.
[00:04:21] So that was a long wind wind answer wasn't it.
[00:04:23] I hope that was all right.
[00:04:25] Yeah, so one question I kind of do have is you said it kind of emerged. You're not that long ago this concept of skills. How are people operating before it seems like it's kind of a fundamental part of looking at someone's talent.
[00:04:42] Well, I think that I think the job if you want to look at it from a sort of data attribute and how we try to identify what somebody does.
[00:04:53] I forget about sort of how they do it that asks that's and that's a whole another kind of dead of data.
[00:05:02] But for years and I can think about to the work I did as a recruiter we're looking for a project manager we're looking for a software engineer.
[00:05:09] The job was the almost like the most finite data attribute that you could use to try and understand exactly what we're going to hire and against that job.
[00:05:21] You would align it with a level in a high rock in an organization that will come with a salary benefits other reward and remuneration elements.
[00:05:35] And it will come with a position in an hierarchy level of authority direct reports all that and it was all this it was all defined at the job.
[00:05:43] So I think what we've had is like legacy job architectures that have struggled to evolve from that to incorporate skills.
[00:05:52] And then we're using the word evolved there because I think you need to chuck out the job architecture.
[00:05:57] I think you need to look at how you break down a job into skills.
[00:06:03] So that's like skill to roll mapping and then you can do stuff with that data so you know you can use that for more targeted sorting within your recruitment practice you can use that within more targeted learning within your talent management practice you can use that data within your.
[00:06:17] The teaching planning function if you have one to say well we should be hiring some for engineers over here or we've probably got too many over there and not enough over here so.
[00:06:28] Gills is the most I think it's that the strongest and most reliable data attribute that you can measure in that way.
[00:06:41] Interesting so what do you think kind of brought that about was it just the before finding they were hiring the wrong people and this was a way to narrow it down to getting more.
[00:06:50] And so we're not a one size fits all type of person and you're getting a bit more of a corner of the people coming into organization.
[00:07:02] It's a great question yeah I mean I think people are still hiring the wrong person you know I think that's not you know we haven't sold those problems yet.
[00:07:11] I think the all questions how did it come about I think if we if we just forget about HR and HR tech for a minute and if we think about what's happened in the world.
[00:07:22] Over the last let's say.
[00:07:25] I don't know let's go back to the dot comp and the late 90s early 2000s.
[00:07:29] The huge point of disruption organizations didn't know which way to turn like questions that CEOs were asking are being asked where.
[00:07:37] Should we put a browser on this terminal on our on our land on our local network.
[00:07:44] For our employees to be able to look in everything was client server there was no such thing as you know a SaaS service through a browser so those with those are the big rocks that people are trying to move then.
[00:07:54] Then we had the onset of what we had you know these things we had you know Steve Jobs came out with the smartphone prior to that we had the iPod you know millions songs in your pocket.
[00:08:08] But the iPhone and the concepts of a marketplace in the app store I think really changed everything that that bought our consumer desires to the four like we can have anything we want.
[00:08:19] Downloaded from an app store any kind of experience and we kind of want that now in the corporate world as well that's kind of bled in from consumerism into corporatism.
[00:08:30] So yeah I think it's I think there's other aspects that have hit the prevalence of cloud services.
[00:08:37] You want to start a business before a technology company you'd have to go and buy a bunch of servers and stick them in a garage and have some cissats like actually look after them was your software engineers are writing the code and then bring those two bits together.
[00:08:51] You'd have to do that you can have a software engineer in Toronto and you can have a server hired through Amazon or somebody else anywhere on the planet.
[00:09:03] And they take care of all of that for you just deploy your code through some very clever technology so all of these things have come together that have really driven a different expectation or us as human beings.
[00:09:18] Now not looking to some kind of ages to anything but I think it's safe to say I've got a few more years.
[00:09:24] The new Dylan so I've been through that experience but some haven't you know some have grown up in the digital world.
[00:09:31] In the middle of the last decade the millennials made up the largest cohort of workers in most corporations.
[00:09:37] So you demand in your expectations around what is the norm of completely changed and the final one here is you know I guess in sort of 2010, 2012 like this whole onset of big data machine learning.
[00:09:52] The ability to take unstructured data normalize it get it into a schema and ask it questions.
[00:10:01] Now okay that did exist before that did exist in there you know even go back to the 60s but not in a way that is available to now like data data as a service machine learning as a service.
[00:10:14] You know Microsoft provide that it's kind of providers out there so come back to your question around you know how that happened and why skills.
[00:10:22] That's why it is because it is the lift to be able to do it now is so much lighter than it was before.
[00:10:29] And the expectations of the individual as a professional person as an employee have completely changed to what they were even go about 15 years.
[00:10:40] So it's quite a false pace of innovation and it's only ever going to have a speed up I think.
[00:10:48] It's very interesting through line height how you put that together and make a lot of sense kind of going from the consumer market to the corporate market in how people demand.
[00:10:59] Things or want to purchase things ever let's say of be a talent or like a phone.
[00:11:04] It's much more I guess you could say on demand but also just focus in a way where you can kind of give whatever you want whenever you want how you want it.
[00:11:14] And but what kind of button against that I find is a little bit is.
[00:11:18] You know because our desire is that I think there's a different person in an organization organization that made up of people.
[00:11:28] What kind of button against that for me a little bit is the AI inclusion of that because AI does run a bit of a homogeneous kind of methodology and find something that works.
[00:11:38] And then I kind of stick to it until you tell the thought there was still a hiring being in peace with kind of artificial intelligence now.
[00:11:48] Are we how do we kind of keep that in checks so you don't avoid just hiring the same person over and over again or the same type of people over again.
[00:11:57] Well, I mean there's there's a few on there's a few truth say there's there's more than one truth.
[00:12:02] The reality for some organizations that they didn't they trained AI let's say a sourcing solution so it can automatically source or shortness people based on the historical data that they had.
[00:12:16] And that data had bias in it so the AI confirmed that bias and it was trained on data that basically just manifested that bias in an in a in a more prevalent way.
[00:12:27] Now there's fair I'm not going to name any names, but there are great examples of this on the internet.
[00:12:32] You know one of them is a very well known global e-commerce platform and they did that exact same thing they hire at scale.
[00:12:40] And they made a mistake and they had to rub out from that and turn it off so how do we prevent that happening.
[00:12:49] So I actually think this is the job of of many people I think it's the job of product owners and visionaries and the innovators in the world you know the mavericks.
[00:13:01] And there are organizations out there who are pursuing an ethical AI approach.
[00:13:08] You know there's a great you know skills management and sort of talent market place software, a Australia that you know they they positioning and the messaging is very strong around ethically.
[00:13:18] And then there are policy makers here you know there is a lot of compliance that is hit particularly in North America.
[00:13:27] New York state has a law that you know around that exact use case of and that it's sourcing.
[00:13:35] So unless you want to get a big fine you better make sure that you're compliant with that regulation.
[00:13:40] I think Colorado has similar one that's more to do with compensation.
[00:13:45] So there are various elements of compliance depending where an organization operates most of the clients we were with a global so they have to take a global compliance viewpoint on what they're going to do with AI.
[00:13:58] So it is.
[00:14:01] It's not known yet there's no one size fits all solution for that but you know be super super diligent.
[00:14:09] Don't take any risk on it and you know think about the value of what your artificial intelligence is supposed to deliver.
[00:14:18] I get I get a bit of a being my bonnet about AI because it seems to have been this year's big label big sticker.
[00:14:26] And you know for the last couple years that big sticker was like skills we do skills you know stuck on the wall we do AI stuck on the wall.
[00:14:34] And it's like so what like what does your AI do what benefit does it have if your technology vendor is enabling your users to be more efficient to save time.
[00:14:45] Which is essentially a question money. Are they going to be able to give the poorest repetitive tasks to the AI and focus on higher value items themselves.
[00:14:57] Which makes them more productive in their work and probably do prefer to do better in their performance reviews and maybe get up for a promotion.
[00:15:06] There's a lot of AI for AI sake like I say this big label of approach.
[00:15:09] So I think before anybody's like we're going to do AI it's like what problem you solving the AI and how is it a value to the user.
[00:15:21] Yeah, I think I completely agree with that something that I do think it needs to have a time value time to in order to be relevant otherwise it's just kind of like you said AI for AI sake.
[00:15:31] Kind of leads me to something else I want to get into which is something we talked about in our first conversation which wasn't reported everyone didn't miss something.
[00:15:43] It was kind of the bleeding of soft for categories into one another and how they kind of leads to buyer confusion.
[00:15:52] You might be talking a little bit about that and how do you think that happened and what can we do about it and what's the landscape given that.
[00:16:01] It's an interesting one yeah and.
[00:16:04] You know in the word I do for skill collective we consult on both the enterprise side and we help large enterprises do software skills but we also can sort on the vendor side so you know we work with.
[00:16:18] That's technology vendors.
[00:16:21] And we do a bunch of stuff for them whether that's within they go to market within their customer journey you know whatever it might be.
[00:16:28] So we it's our job to to I kind of understand the market at a pretty good level.
[00:16:34] I just let yourself I guess and and I think the the way to I recently I've done somewhere where I've been trying to visualize the software categories trying to visualize the HR market.
[00:16:46] Pretty it's just getting harder it's just like there's so many different software categories now and there's so much overlap between them like you say the software categories bleed into one.
[00:16:57] Previously you had a ton of acquisition you had the ATS you had possibly a CRM solution.
[00:17:03] But it integrated with to allow your recruiters to get a do stuff with it.
[00:17:07] You have the ATS which enable people to apply for jobs and enable the organization to publish jobs for people to apply to.
[00:17:14] So you know that's still known software categories pretty well established you know some major players doing that space but kind of close behind that you've got the.
[00:17:23] The talent intelligence category and you know they typically are pursuing quite a strong skills strategy or skills kind of management capability that they want within their platform.
[00:17:35] And some of them provide you with the ability to publish jobs and provide the ability for people to apply for jobs.
[00:17:43] They also provide you with the ability to share jobs internally.
[00:17:46] So you know you've probably got an internet and you previously had a career site.
[00:17:51] That's evolved now into what's often called the talent marketplace so you've got this software category that sits in talent intelligence which bleed overlaps.
[00:18:01] The TA ATS software category and also overlaps the talent marketplace category, which was the category that seemed to.
[00:18:08] Again a really strong foot holding the pandemic as organizations were looking to maybe reskill but certainly redeploy large cohorts of workers as maybe their retail operations got closed and they had to move sales to a remote call center type in vorm.
[00:18:26] So there's a couple of examples so you know from you know the talent acquisition to the talent management but now we've got another category just right in the middle that bridges that bridges both.
[00:18:38] So you know you could you could carry on into you know the the rest of the talent management experience learning management systems which are traditionally for compliance based learning.
[00:18:50] And the evolution of the learning experience platform and how that some of those have also provided the opportunity to provide not just learning opportunities but the opportunity to go and practice what you're learning.
[00:19:03] On an opportunity marketplace which looks very similar to a talent marketplace.
[00:19:08] So there's another overlap in that talent management sphere so I think from the buyers that I was hitting event earlier on this this summer.
[00:19:18] And there was a chat there and he had a he had obviously had an ATS he had a talent intelligence solution and he had an LXP.
[00:19:26] So he had those three but he nonetheless we had a very deep conversation about the overlaps between those two so he's.
[00:19:35] The reality for those vendors is confusing messaging in the market as led buyers to procure stuff that they may not have understood.
[00:19:46] So now they're under pressure from their CFO or from their CHRO so rationalized spend let's be fair the macro economic environment is still not wildly positive.
[00:20:00] And spend is being scrutinized in you know still being scrutinized a lot it's been a difficult sort of 12 months and I think that will persist or see what happens in November in North America whether that changes anything but.
[00:20:13] You know CFO's are kind of looking saying well what is this thing what does it do what's the ROI and people can't evidence it they can't say well we've been able to move even an HR metric you know often they can talk about an HR metric maybe they've been able to reduce voluntary attrition in an area where critical roles.
[00:20:35] Exist so you know they haven't had to go buy those skills from the market they saved money.
[00:20:41] But ideally we want to be talking about that in a business metrics so okay what where we what new products were able to launch quicker.
[00:20:48] How did it increase sales how did it make us more compliant and avoid fines.
[00:20:53] Whatever that business outcome is so to come back to your question I think the.
[00:20:57] I think vendors are under the pressure technology vendors are under pressure.
[00:21:03] So try and come up with the next bit of innovation it's the pace of innovation again that I talked about before we've constantly got to be innovating constantly got to be innovating.
[00:21:12] That enables them to differentiate although I don't think many different shape that well but that puts.
[00:21:19] I because the buyer doesn't why you for innovation doesn't buy you from roadmap items it buys here she buys you for what you can do now to solve the problem they procure due to solve.
[00:21:33] If you don't solve that problem and you're constantly focus on the innovation and bleeding out into other software categories you just have unhappy guys are used to manage customer success teams your sees that will go down your MPS will go down.
[00:21:45] Your your turn rate will go up you know you're neb recurring revenue will go up sales that will that will go down you know all those metrics will be impacted and what does that mean that means unhappy investors.
[00:21:58] That means more reductions in force that we've seen over the last couple years so I think it's a it's a complicated question to answer and you know I've said a lot just there.
[00:22:08] But I think that it's it's the it's the reality of the HR tech market it's so confusing that buyers are just a bit like me I don't know I don't know I'm maybe I'll just rationalize and just use my core HR system and all their little module plugins to do everything and I won't have any best to bring point solutions anymore.
[00:22:28] I could just go away work day or say p or something yeah I might sacrifice a bit user experience but at least I know that I'm going to have consistent data and that you know everything will work.
[00:22:38] Whereas I'm trying to build a ecosystem approach and I'm not getting the value out that I thought that's the big problem.
[00:22:47] I think that's a very valid point especially given the kind of the economic slumber and right now I guess or approaching slumber and everyone call it.
[00:22:58] But as that happened before to one of one size itself product more and more most likely just to the fullest pay less people and like you said they're really good to justify every decision they made.
[00:23:10] And like is that one specific tool really worth it if it's like kind of use sometimes or they kind of like but I lose the water too much for user experience.
[00:23:21] Yeah people are going to have a bad sentiment about it and maybe they may not keep it on board just for that reason alone.
[00:23:27] But it comes back to what I said before is is you know when I introduced myself I talked about my passion in in the post sales you know customer journey that that I would you know manage and understand.
[00:23:40] It's all about value it's all about solving a problem.
[00:23:45] It's not about the leading KPIs how long did people spend learning in an LMS you know how many jobs did you publish.
[00:23:52] It's about the outcomes of the people got hired into those jobs you know how quick did they get to productivity again that's an hometric how do you.
[00:24:01] How do you evolve that into a business metric well they became productive also we could launch new products quicker or we could move into an adjacent market quicker.
[00:24:09] Or we could defend ourselves against the competitive threat quicker you know those are the business outcomes that people want to get to but I see that vendors.
[00:24:19] That's not what technology companies are bought for you know though that the specialisms within a post sales customer success team is really around a playbook to get the technology configured deployed adopted and working.
[00:24:33] You know the strategy that they're going to use that technology for I think that's really down to the business and to make their investments internally.
[00:24:42] And maybe too much pressure has been put on vendors so I don't know if that's necessary true maybe vendors have invited that but I think there is this disconnect between what the buyer expects he's going to get what she's going to get they are going to get and the reality of what the vendor is going to provide.
[00:25:01] And that is that's a gap to close during a contract cycle and it really really happens.
[00:25:10] That's a good point.
[00:25:12] So one final question for you before we wrap up I know you look at how in transformation quite a bit.
[00:25:19] So let's say you know you're not you're the CEO or your I'm a CEO of an organization let's say.
[00:25:27] I'm not happy with the people what my workforce has become like who I ended up with hiring me by using my pay iron I have all of so many gems on staff let's say and.
[00:25:38] What is what is day one look like a of like me getting back on track.
[00:25:43] And where do I go from there in terms of talent for transformation if I'm not if I'm like.
[00:25:48] I've been James I got a I got a sort of workforce south the thought I'm not hiring people and want to have been hiring people I want to.
[00:25:56] To hire two year and I want to change that.
[00:26:00] So you've just laid this out for me to have a new ticket big skills clock here.
[00:26:06] Well I think well I think so forget about skills let's say let's just.
[00:26:13] As part of skills let's consider skills as a component of the data that your organization should have it its disposal to be able to make decisions.
[00:26:25] Okay, let's look at an example let's look at let's look at digital marketing let's look at the marketing industry.
[00:26:31] So I think probably back in the late 80s 90s maybe mid 90s you know chief marketing officers run a pressure like well what are these guys these guys are spending a ton of money.
[00:26:41] Like what are they doing like what return are we getting from this oh well we put a verse on you know the television and on you know the underground sit network and we sell them stuff.
[00:26:53] And it's like well how do you know that how do you know there's a strong inference there but now look at digital marketing through the use of data and the internet and mobile networks and a ton of other clever technology.
[00:27:08] They know so much about their organization out there potential customers that it's a little bit frightening but they've done that good a job that they can probably predict who is going to buy something and who isn't and when.
[00:27:23] And at what price point whether they'll buy the first version whether they're wait and get it on sale that they they're able to profile people in this way.
[00:27:32] We haven't done that in the corporate world yet we spend more or almost an equal amount of time of our lives using technology.
[00:27:44] In the corporate environment that could enable us to build an incredibly data rich picture.
[00:27:51] Of our employees so that we could make decisions about them and they could make decisions about us the CFO when it comes to you know doing the accounts.
[00:28:02] Very data driven a brilliant data management practice where you know you get that wrong you got a prison so you know that's probably why the investments have been made there.
[00:28:13] But HR has not done this so your question what does the CEO do the CEO needs to actually provide HR with the tools part of that is data literacy and other elements around data management.
[00:28:28] To enable them to deliver on that kind of solution and that's where I'm going to come back to skills that's what skills are all about skills are about understanding people at a more granular level.
[00:28:40] So that we know if they're a good fit for the organization or not or we know if they could move into this adjacent role over here or not or we know if they might be a flight risk or we know if there's some.
[00:28:53] Other issues around them. So it to me, it's about data skills data is a component of that and I think that the marketing story is a great example because most people understand that or they've lived it you know they've seen the change from you know kind of analog desk marketing to digital marketing now and how sophisticated that is the opportunity for the CEO to work with these HR leaders.
[00:29:18] So be able to provide that within their organization and within her organization is genuine the technology is out there to do it.
[00:29:29] But you know I'm pleased that you chose the CEO because it takes that level of advocacy for this stuff to happen and it needs the CEO to say right I am going to align this with our corporate strategy.
[00:29:43] This is something I'm going to report on a great detail to the SEC this is something our investors are going to consume.
[00:29:52] So then you have to budget and you have to go on that strategy according me to provide that data back to the CEO so you can do all of those things.
[00:30:00] So it's it's a journey you can't just flick a switch but day one probably looks at level of commitment that level of understanding that we can do what you know targeted ads company does in the online advertising world and we can do that for our employees we can understand comes back to the consumer and I would you again we can understand our employees like they understand their consumers.
[00:30:31] And that makes a lot of say. Well James thank you so much. It's been a really insane budget before we wrap up.
[00:30:40] Is there any final point you want to go to anything anywhere people can reach you if they want to reach out to you.
[00:30:46] Oh yeah, great. Thank you. Yeah, I mean I mentioned skill collective a couple of times already we're a boutique and something see.
[00:30:51] We got people on the ground here in the UK but also North America so you can catch me at James at skill collective dot code at UK excuse me.
[00:31:01] I'm also on LinkedIn as you'd imagine and my handle if you know after the LinkedIn dot com bit is just James the Griff but you could probably find me by typing in James Griffin and skills and I reckon I've come up.
[00:31:13] You know anybody who's watching listening today any questions or anything that was brought up you know love to chat you know no commitment just let's true the fact get some other opinions on the table.
[00:31:24] You know and see where it goes so yeah it's been a pleasure doing the thank you so much for having me.
[00:31:29] My pleasure thanks so much. Take care everyone.
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