The Rise of Skills-Based Hiring: How AI and Data are Shaping the Future of Work

[00:00:00] What's going on everybody? Ryan Leary from WRKdefined. Before we kick off today's episode, I want to let you know about one of our newest partners, DEAL.

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[00:01:10] So we have Bruce Morton on today and we're going to be talking about AI and skills-based hiring.

[00:01:15] We've got a bunch of fun takes so I can't wait to get into Bruce's mind and kind of explore a little bit. Bruce, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself?

[00:01:25] Absolutely and firstly thanks for having me on, great to be here.

[00:01:28] So Bruce Morton originally from Birmingham in the UK for those folks that spot the accident.

[00:01:34] Now living in town right there.

[00:01:36] The Pinky Blinders fans of the world?

[00:01:37] Yeah, that's right. Subtitles.

[00:01:42] So I tripped into the industry 45 years ago and loved every minute ever since.

[00:01:48] So I'm in my 45th year in the industry.

[00:01:50] Moved to the US via Asia 14 years ago.

[00:01:55] And my job at Allegious as Global Head of Strategy is to try and see around the corner, predict the future

[00:02:02] and then build the services to deliver on promises to our clients.

[00:02:06] Where in Asia were you?

[00:02:09] I spent time in Hong Kong and then I was in Australia for a few years.

[00:02:13] Oh nice, okay.

[00:02:14] Wonderful.

[00:02:15] Very nice.

[00:02:17] Bruce, I kick off with a quick question here. What happens if you're wrong?

[00:02:23] Predicting the future.

[00:02:25] We mean what if?

[00:02:26] Is this like the Hall of Fame? Like you go one for ten, you're in the Hall of Fame or what's to deal with this?

[00:02:31] I think it's about having enough irons in the fire that some of them are right.

[00:02:36] 100%. It's no stardom is one-on-one.

[00:02:38] Having a two-way strategy, like the door opens on both ways.

[00:02:43] Right.

[00:02:43] So you get in, you can get out.

[00:02:45] That's legit.

[00:02:46] And learning from the failures fail fast and all those.

[00:02:50] Which is William. He ended up at Wikihwachi to find the mermaid.

[00:02:56] Oh, there's a story there. We won't explore it during the show but there's definitely a story there.

[00:03:02] What's your take? Because you've been doing this for a while.

[00:03:07] What's your take on hearing skills-based?

[00:03:09] Basically everything because it goes all the way through HR but skills-based hiring.

[00:03:14] Like when that first started kicking off year and a half, two years ago, what did you think?

[00:03:18] Yeah, I think it was a reaction from organizations post-COVID to literally the smarter organizations taking the learnings from the biggest social experiment the world has ever seen called COVID.

[00:03:35] Of how we were able to work differently in some cases more efficiently, more effectively.

[00:03:40] Wrote down some of those myths of what working at home meant.

[00:03:43] No, it doesn't mean you're playing golf on a Friday necessarily.

[00:03:46] We can actually work in different places and then it's got companies to think, well, actually who'd have thought that we could have in our instance at Leegus,

[00:03:55] we had 15,000 employees online within three days working them out.

[00:04:00] We'd never been able to do that unless we had to.

[00:04:02] Right.

[00:04:04] Isn't that interesting?

[00:04:06] It's fascinating.

[00:04:07] Fascinating.

[00:04:07] But that led to organizations saying, okay now we're coming back in this post-COVID world.

[00:04:13] What we don't want to do is do what we did last time there was a bit of a spike, throw bodies at things and just hire more and more people because we're getting cash through the door.

[00:04:22] And then the next cycle comes and here we go again.

[00:04:25] We've got to lay people off which is very painful.

[00:04:27] So it got companies truly thinking perhaps there's a better way.

[00:04:31] How do we think differently about getting work done?

[00:04:34] And there's a direct correlation then to that.

[00:04:37] Start joining the dots of, well, what talent do we have within?

[00:04:42] If I'm going to start thinking differently, if I'm going to start sort of perhaps having stretch assignments for my people and really embracing internal mobility,

[00:04:50] I'd better be better than just going out to LinkedIn to see who works for us.

[00:04:53] What skills do we actually have inside?

[00:04:55] That led itself to oops, we better get a catalog on a way of understanding what talent skills we have.

[00:05:04] That led to skills.

[00:05:06] What do we have already within the organization?

[00:05:10] Building some type of taxonomy to where you're going to be.

[00:05:11] Certainly the driver for it.

[00:05:13] A number of our clients they were saying that they're going to hire in freeze.

[00:05:17] Now that we're coming out of it, actually I want to stay in that home freeze a little bit longer to say before you go out and get a contractor or hire somebody.

[00:05:25] Let's just see if we've got somebody inside.

[00:05:28] The phrase I use is stop giving all the sex you work to the big four.

[00:05:32] Where does AI, because I see that wave, fully you've already articulated it really well.

[00:05:41] But where does AI and Gen AI play a role here?

[00:05:44] Because I also feel like people got blind signs, probably not the right word.

[00:05:50] But paranoid about okay, we don't have the right skills for the future.

[00:05:57] So where in that experiment or after the experiment do you see that coming in?

[00:06:04] There's a couple of spots.

[00:06:05] I think first is organizations that truly understand how they're getting work done.

[00:06:11] It's a lot harder than it sounds.

[00:06:12] That simple phrase, how do you get work done?

[00:06:14] Those organizations that are using deconstruction to break down the work into bite-sized tasks and then taking an automation approach first.

[00:06:23] AI obviously plays a big part in that.

[00:06:25] Stop getting your people to the job of robots.

[00:06:27] So that's at the front end of it in this purest form.

[00:06:31] The other reason why we're seeing great strides now is as a multiplier really, humans can do some of this matching of what skills do we need to be successful in that job.

[00:06:41] Success profiles for those forever.

[00:06:43] But how do you do that at scale?

[00:06:45] How do you take an organization that has 100,000 employees and actually start to understand what skills they have?

[00:06:52] You need technology to do that.

[00:06:54] Purely, nothing smart about it, it's a pure multiplier.

[00:06:58] We think about skills in three different ways.

[00:07:01] One is inferred and that is if you have been doing this job for this many years we can infer that you'll have these skills.

[00:07:09] The next is those validated skills.

[00:07:13] You might be certified to do it, it might be education, it might be a qualification, a training course you've been on and then the third one is self-reported.

[00:07:21] So giving people the opportunity to go in to their profile and say, oh I forgot to tell you I'm fluent in French.

[00:07:29] Take those three and that gives you then that individual skill profile.

[00:07:34] The example we use is if you're hiring a nurse it's okay for them to self-report their good bedside manner.

[00:07:42] If they're a brain surgeon you might want to see a certificate.

[00:07:44] Right, now do either of those get weighted more heavy?

[00:07:48] I know they each have a critical role in putting that big picture together but do you weight any of those over the top?

[00:07:54] That's a great question absolutely and AI can help with that as well.

[00:07:57] By understanding the job profile and the work itself then you can start playing around with which of those three are most important and how much weight you give to those.

[00:08:08] And it's really fascinating once you take the covers off your eyes and start looking through a skills-based lens instead of the old traditional way of you've got a job description and you've got a resume.

[00:08:21] Before we move on I need to let you know about my friend Mark Pfeffer and his show People Tech.

[00:08:28] If you're looking for the latest on product development, marketing, funding, big deals happening in talent acquisition, HR, HCM that's the show you need to listen to.

[00:08:40] Go to the work defined network, search up People Tech, Mark Pfeffer you can find them anywhere.

[00:08:49] Not the best way of matching people to work necessarily.

[00:08:53] In one of our example I'll give you one of our clients, they're in the beauty industry and they wanted to find some marketing people must have beauty industry experience.

[00:09:05] Couldn't fill the job, just couldn't find the people.

[00:09:08] We said well what about if they were just really passionate about beauty and they'd been at some marketing skills.

[00:09:14] They fought like mad, fought like in the end.

[00:09:17] Okay okay we'll do it.

[00:09:19] We put five people in front of them they wanted to hire them all.

[00:09:23] The one they hired was actually a school teacher assistant that had a real passion for beauty products and understood their particular brand as well and was a massive, massive family ambassador.

[00:09:34] Lesson you can teach skills you can't teach passion.

[00:09:38] Yeah that's right.

[00:09:39] You have another great example of a client that they're looking for project managers that are getting more and more scarce now and again open the eyes just think differently.

[00:09:50] What are the skills you need to have to be a good project manager that ended up hiring a wedding planner?

[00:09:55] Good project management skills.

[00:09:57] It just means you have to tweak the job description in that case take out the fact they need this specific technology because they don't you can teach that piece of it.

[00:10:05] You can teach certain things.

[00:10:06] Yeah.

[00:10:08] On the example that you gave on the assistant on the school teacher did they take into or did it work out this way in terms of the generation of the assistant so they were looking for somebody in marketing.

[00:10:23] She was an assistant school teacher.

[00:10:25] I'm not sure she had background in marketing but clearly she had a passion and beauty and I'm assuming understands the landscape of what's happening in the marketplace today in order to reach.

[00:10:36] People of certain demographics in age.

[00:10:39] Yeah yeah so it's a social media skills that is just get very and you know happened to be a younger person didn't need to be but it you know right generally speaking they tend to be on screens more.

[00:10:53] Yeah yeah.

[00:10:54] That's what you I mean again you can teach a marketing.

[00:10:58] You can teach with skills a lot of those types of things you could put them through courses.

[00:11:03] You can't teach passion.

[00:11:05] Right.

[00:11:06] You just can't teach them to be passionate so the passion in that in that instance is more important it's weighted more it's like you want to be really into the fashion industry or the beauty industry.

[00:11:17] Great.

[00:11:18] They're following all the influencers on Instagram they're up to date on Tik Tok like they get it they get what's going on they get some of the trends etc.

[00:11:28] Okay now teach them about marketing.

[00:11:29] Yeah.

[00:11:30] All right.

[00:11:30] The question I had as a guide.

[00:11:33] They tend to be a lower cost and somebody that has the experience.

[00:11:37] Well yeah.

[00:11:40] Because they want to be in their passion.

[00:11:42] Exactly.

[00:11:42] They'll take less.

[00:11:43] It's a different that's all the other different economic deal because the people that have acquired the skills of marketing through the years.

[00:11:52] They get to a certain pay grade and whether or not they have the passion or not.

[00:11:57] They might have the passion for marketing which is totally cool.

[00:12:02] But another way we're using AI is to actually help with the deconstruction so to take the description of work as opposed to the job description that's massively different.

[00:12:15] What is the work we're trying to get done?

[00:12:17] What skills are then required to be successful in that role?

[00:12:20] In the algorithms that we use a job developer there are 14 skills that you need to be to be a good job developer.

[00:12:30] Five of those skills you'll also see in a business analyst.

[00:12:35] So now gets your thinking actually if we took those the tasks that job developers doing that needed those five skills out of that job and gave them to a business analyst.

[00:12:46] I've now got 30 times more people in my talent pool on half the cost.

[00:12:50] So the deconstruction is really, really important when you start thinking about this is you know we ran a good old time and motion study for one of our clients on the West Coast around developers, app developers because they were getting more expensive and more scarce.

[00:13:07] And the average amount of time their employee base that had an app developer role was developing apps with 75%.

[00:13:17] Now, that's sort of okay. That's not bad. We've seen a lot worse in other industries, but that does mean you're paying them for 25% of their time.

[00:13:25] You're overpaying them for what they're doing.

[00:13:28] And if you're hiring a developer guess what you want them doing?

[00:13:30] You want to develop an apps.

[00:13:32] So how do we design the job now and take that away from them?

[00:13:36] So there's a lot of that going on.

[00:13:38] Was that just meetings and other like stuff business?

[00:13:43] Yeah, it was.

[00:13:44] And the best example we have is a very large client that hire thousands of thousands of nurses literally many, many thousands of nurses.

[00:13:55] We all know there's a global shortage of nurses that are struggling to keep hiring and hiring.

[00:14:00] And so we same thing. We did the good old fashioned time motion study.

[00:14:05] Their most common skill set or job was a senior care manager.

[00:14:10] 30% of the time they were nursing.

[00:14:14] 70% of the time they're doing other stuff.

[00:14:17] And which we didn't even look for, but then it hit us in the face.

[00:14:21] The number one reason for attrition was in the 70% not 30%.

[00:14:25] You're kidding.

[00:14:27] In the 70% of the time they were not doing.

[00:14:29] Yeah, in other words, hey, I went to college because I want to go after people.

[00:14:33] And now you got me doing this other BS.

[00:14:36] I got two meetings every day.

[00:14:38] Yes, hedging, meet and greet, customers meet and greet patients.

[00:14:41] You don't need to be a nurse for that taking temperatures or those sorts of things.

[00:14:45] Right.

[00:14:46] Take that away from them.

[00:14:47] Now they won't know what to get to 100%.

[00:14:48] But even if you got it to 60%, now you need half the nurses you thought you needed.

[00:14:54] That's really fascinating.

[00:14:55] And they're doing the things that they want to do.

[00:14:57] So you've been through the whole wave about 20 years ago, 15 years ago of competency models.

[00:15:05] And where companies kind of fell in love with competency, competencies models.

[00:15:10] People didn't really hire to them.

[00:15:12] They didn't really promote to them and they didn't really fire them.

[00:15:15] Some companies, they had them and used them in some ways.

[00:15:19] What's the similarity or difference in what you see now with this kind of skills based kind of revolution?

[00:15:25] Yeah, I mean, Nirvana is you do both.

[00:15:27] It doesn't go place.

[00:15:28] It's an addition to.

[00:15:30] I think there's still a massive value in situational questioning for competencies.

[00:15:35] I wish Morgan Ozeis had used them vigorously.

[00:15:38] It tends to be a trend.

[00:15:40] Some of the HR get excited about it, roll it out.

[00:15:42] And then six months later, the manager is like, yeah, it's okay.

[00:15:47] I've got a good feeling about this person.

[00:15:48] They're going to mind me when I was his age.

[00:15:50] No better way to hire than...

[00:15:52] Yeah, exactly.

[00:15:53] But I do think, and I think there is some evidence out there now that assessments are getting their time back in the sun again.

[00:16:01] Because if you're going to hire not purely on experience, you're going to hire on skills and you need to be able to assess for those skills.

[00:16:09] Right.

[00:16:09] So I know like Savlin holds, for example, Savill is assessment as they're now called.

[00:16:14] They've just launched a project around skills based.

[00:16:16] So I think we'll see companies like that having a bit of a resurgence.

[00:16:20] Well, and with the technology now you're able to act on what the assessment is telling you where before.

[00:16:27] You just kind of looking at a graph.

[00:16:30] Yeah, and you should be able to do the assessments now and penny on the dollar.

[00:16:34] When I first started it was probably 300 pounds or something soon.

[00:16:37] Oh yeah.

[00:16:39] Super expensive.

[00:16:40] Super, super.

[00:16:41] You sit down with a psychologist for two hours, you know, fill a form.

[00:16:44] Yeah.

[00:16:44] I can remember.

[00:16:46] It's funny you say that.

[00:16:47] So way back I worked with Kinects and we did assessments and I remember we brought in, I say we the Kinects brought in, we had about 100 IOC who did the actual interviews with the people.

[00:17:02] Like it was a phone assessment and then they wrote their judgment or whatever they called it their assessment and they then gave that into the portfolio team who in turn went to the client.

[00:17:13] The amount of money that cost was insane but it was actually a novelty because well you're going to have an IOC psychologist do the assessment.

[00:17:24] Like what better way is there to do that?

[00:17:26] Right.

[00:17:27] Obviously there's a much better way now.

[00:17:28] Then for them to use their biases in hiring.

[00:17:31] Yeah, yeah.

[00:17:32] Yeah, yeah, they use their biases in hiring.

[00:17:34] I don't get that type of treatment here.

[00:17:36] Do you see simulations or VR or any of that type of stuff?

[00:17:43] Do you see that working with skills based?

[00:17:46] We haven't yet.

[00:17:47] I think some companies have used it as a bit of an employer branding type gig.

[00:17:53] McDonald's has some cool stuff without a while ago but I don't think it's real yet.

[00:17:58] It's not really yet.

[00:18:00] No.

[00:18:01] No.

[00:18:02] But in other just thinking about assessing there's also the ability now because of the amount of data we have to look at pure metrics to understand success.

[00:18:15] I'll give you an example on and this is, you know, with things like LinkedIn you can track where people have come from to which organizations and where they've gone when they've left.

[00:18:23] And very, very large global software company we're working with and we did study doing some analysis of their sales force.

[00:18:32] And we found out that if they hired salespeople from this one particular competitor that had more than four years experience at that competitor, they failed in the first year.

[00:18:44] If they hired somebody from the same competitor with less than 18 months experience, they were the superstars top of the table.

[00:18:53] So I presented this to the global national sales director and he was just fascinated by it.

[00:18:58] And he's like what's causing that?

[00:19:00] I'm like I don't know and I don't care.

[00:19:02] Just stop doing this and do this.

[00:19:04] Who cares?

[00:19:05] Yeah.

[00:19:06] That's interesting.

[00:19:07] Maybe they were jaded.

[00:19:09] They went too far into the company.

[00:19:10] Yeah.

[00:19:11] They called it too much of that while how we did it there.

[00:19:14] That's exactly right.

[00:19:15] And they bring it over and you can't undrain.

[00:19:18] But there's just one example of, you know, the data that we have now at our fingertips to understand that stuff.

[00:19:24] There's sort of no excuse for getting it wrong really.

[00:19:27] Right.

[00:19:28] I mean we, you know, every staffing company on the planet, we're no different.

[00:19:31] We know when to make a call to a certain individual that's been in a certain company for how long?

[00:19:36] You know, when their peak of interest of making a move is.

[00:19:40] And you can track that by demographic, by skill set, by company, by geography.

[00:19:45] Right.

[00:19:46] All that.

[00:19:47] That's, we have the ability and I truly believe that technology has overtaken the human capacity to fully utilize it.

[00:19:54] I truly believe that.

[00:19:55] We've got to catch up.

[00:19:57] Do we get to a point?

[00:19:58] Go ahead.

[00:19:59] No go ahead.

[00:20:01] What do you think about the folks that want to hire for potentiality?

[00:20:04] Not the skills that they see, but the skills that they believe.

[00:20:08] Yeah, I think if you have the ability to assess that, I think that's okay.

[00:20:13] I think that, you know, our large staffing companies, we hire thousands of people out of college every year.

[00:20:20] Right.

[00:20:20] You know, and we're certainly not hiring them on their experience.

[00:20:25] You know, obviously, oh are they, you know, they're good team players or are they self-motivating or that sort of stuff.

[00:20:31] But really, you're trying to hire them against their potential.

[00:20:35] Right.

[00:20:36] Which used to be potential to pick the phone up now.

[00:20:38] It's probably.

[00:20:39] Yeah.

[00:20:40] Do you have the potential to call people?

[00:20:46] Yeah.

[00:20:47] Face rejection 98% of the time.

[00:20:51] Do we ever get to a point of, let's go back to your example of the salesperson.

[00:20:56] 18 months they were successful.

[00:20:58] Four years, don't touch them.

[00:21:00] Do we ever get to a point where they're, it may be not from employer to employer, competitor to competitor.

[00:21:07] But maybe in your situation or staffing, kind of like a staffing situation where there's a shared pool of candidates because you know so much about these people.

[00:21:17] You can say to client A, look, these guys, these people are good, but at the 24 months range, we're going to expect about a 60% attrition rate.

[00:21:27] We're going to assess for that.

[00:21:30] And then we're going to take these people that we find and we're going to move them into this company, but then you're going to go and you're going to be able to pull from these pools of companies.

[00:21:38] Is there a potential for that?

[00:21:39] I doubt the concept.

[00:21:40] No, we're not doing anything like that.

[00:21:42] But I like the concept.

[00:21:44] I think unfortunately most organizations, they want to take and not give.

[00:21:50] Yeah, they don't trust.

[00:21:51] Well, it's also internal mobility.

[00:21:54] Yeah.

[00:21:54] It's having the data.

[00:21:56] That's right.

[00:21:56] It's being able to interpret the data and do something with it.

[00:22:01] And that's a lot of moving parts.

[00:22:03] The companies haven't historically been great at.

[00:22:07] What causes quite a bit of that is, and I'll state this as a fact even if it isn't, I'm going to say this as a fact because I like it.

[00:22:13] In most organizations, it is harder to apply for a good job than your own company than it is elsewhere.

[00:22:19] Oh, 100%.

[00:22:21] Oh, it's insane.

[00:22:22] Mostly because you don't know what to do or where to go.

[00:22:26] And there's no way to assess.

[00:22:27] You have to ask your boss permission.

[00:22:30] It's just too hard to go to a competitor.

[00:22:32] People ask me all the time, who does internal mobility well?

[00:22:36] I'm like, if you find them, tell me.

[00:22:40] Because even if someone's doing internal mobility, let's say pick a company, Black and Decker,

[00:22:49] you pick a company and say, they're doing it really well.

[00:22:52] They're not going to tell you that they're doing it really well.

[00:22:55] They're not going to be out on conference circuit writing books and stuff like that because that's their secret sauce.

[00:23:00] Now I happen to be in a company that we have amazing tenured alleges.

[00:23:05] It's just so unique for the industry.

[00:23:07] I'm 14 years in, I'm still the new boy.

[00:23:11] Most of my colleagues, we go on a pitch and they're like 28 years, 30 years, 25 years.

[00:23:15] It's amazing.

[00:23:16] So we passionately believe in internal mobility, but we can because we have amazing tenure.

[00:23:22] That is not the norm, particularly in our industry, it is not the norm.

[00:23:25] So it's very, very hard to even think about internal mobility because people are only there a couple years.

[00:23:31] I think a lot of that plays to leadership and the organization.

[00:23:37] If I come to my manager, Bruce, in your example, and say, hey, I'm interested in this role,

[00:23:44] there's a lot of ways.

[00:23:46] And these are my daughters, in example, she wants to do another job within her company.

[00:23:50] She's young, she's 16.

[00:24:19] She's afraid.

[00:24:20] She's afraid to ask because if her manager says no, they're going to think she doesn't like the role.

[00:24:26] And this is what she's battling right now.

[00:24:29] And we're talking like, come on, you're, it's a hostess versus a waitress.

[00:24:34] But still, that fear is real.

[00:24:36] The fear, yeah, it's real.

[00:24:38] How do we get past that?

[00:24:40] Yeah, that's right.

[00:24:41] I think it's a, it's definitely a cultural thing that making it okay and almost saying, hey, if you don't, that's not against you.

[00:24:48] We want it to be a musty in different positions.

[00:24:51] Sort of a better, better, better environment.

[00:24:52] You create a safe environment and there's no retaliation or any of that type of stuff.

[00:24:56] So it's values and culture and the ability to communicate where other people have been successful.

[00:25:05] Here was a person who was a bartender that wanted to be blah, blah, blah, a manager.

[00:25:10] Okay, well here's that success story.

[00:25:11] They tell that success story internally and then it allows people to understand there's a safe environment.

[00:25:17] These are people that care about us on our promotion track, blah, blah, blah.

[00:25:21] They can easily go to another restaurant if your daughter can.

[00:25:24] She can easily go to another restaurant and get that position.

[00:25:28] Yeah, well everybody's home.

[00:25:30] And by the way, Ryan, well done on your daughter, well done on you.

[00:25:33] I have seven children and every one of them have worked in service.

[00:25:39] I don't think after this experience, I'm not sure she's staying.

[00:25:46] She doesn't have to stay.

[00:25:47] The fact that she's experienced it, she will be a better customer going forward.

[00:25:51] Yes.

[00:25:52] I'm on the other end of the spectrum.

[00:25:54] Neither of my boroughs have worked a day in their life.

[00:26:00] So again, we'll see how the experiment plays out over the long term.

[00:26:03] We'll do the longitudinal study.

[00:26:05] I can tell you when we go to a restaurant, 20% is not enough to tip.

[00:26:10] She is very firm about that.

[00:26:13] Oh yeah.

[00:26:14] She's just, you don't know what they do in the back.

[00:26:18] And I bet she stacks all your plates up as well.

[00:26:20] Yeah, they're not just bringing your food.

[00:26:22] They're doing this.

[00:26:23] I understand, honey.

[00:26:25] Yeah, I factored that in when I put the 20%.

[00:26:28] So one of the questions that just came up as it relates,

[00:26:34] have you done this analysis for Allegious in terms of who you should hire

[00:26:40] and the breakpoints and all that other stuff like skills that are important now

[00:26:45] and all that stuff?

[00:26:46] Yeah.

[00:26:47] And whatever you can talk about.

[00:26:49] We started the organization function by function, but we started in IT.

[00:26:58] We had to go first, so far to speak.

[00:27:00] And I'm slightly overshamed, but we might give you any secrets here.

[00:27:05] So I don't mind telling you that whereas we did the analysis

[00:27:07] across just a religious club of solutions, not a religious group,

[00:27:10] but just in the managed service business, we had 150 people that were in IT

[00:27:15] in some form.

[00:27:17] It set it in their jobs back.

[00:27:18] But they were distributed around the organization.

[00:27:21] The largest team we had was five.

[00:27:24] So, okay, well, that's learned.

[00:27:25] That's learned sort of something straight away.

[00:27:27] There's not much progression career wise there.

[00:27:30] So let's blow the whole thing up and start again and come at it

[00:27:35] from a work perspective, not a talent perspective.

[00:27:37] Right.

[00:27:38] So I, we held this in Phoenix, but a three day workshop,

[00:27:42] we got all of our, we got 12 people out of the IT function,

[00:27:46] flew in for three days.

[00:27:47] And I said, right, what we want to capture is what is the work

[00:27:51] that we get done as an organization that we need to get done.

[00:27:54] I know capture that work and then we're going to come back to it.

[00:27:57] Many, many times through the first couple of days,

[00:28:00] people fell in the trap of using the job description, not the work.

[00:28:03] Right.

[00:28:04] Oh yeah, we need a project manager.

[00:28:06] We need to manage the project.

[00:28:09] Oh yeah, yeah.

[00:28:09] Okay, okay.

[00:28:10] Oh, we need a solution doctor.

[00:28:11] No, we need somebody that architects solutions or the ability

[00:28:15] because it might not be a person to architect the solution.

[00:28:18] So what we learned in that exercise is actually when you go through

[00:28:21] this, if you get stuck just reverse the job title,

[00:28:24] set a project manager, you got to manage product.

[00:28:27] Anyway, we did this a lot of fun with it.

[00:28:29] We designed the whole thing.

[00:28:31] The upshot was as we invested in a dev center in Bangalore,

[00:28:36] which we've got a dozen people in, which will grow and grow

[00:28:38] and grow.

[00:28:40] Everybody in the IT organization is now in a better position.

[00:28:43] And we got, we increased productivity by 100% in three months.

[00:28:47] In three months.

[00:28:49] It was mind blowing how inefficient we were before we did.

[00:28:53] Wow.

[00:28:53] Yeah, I'm not sure what's better that you solved it or that you were so bad

[00:28:57] for so long.

[00:28:58] Well, we used to have to get smarter.

[00:29:00] That's a good point.

[00:29:00] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:29:02] And it's, and the biggest upside is actually it's increased the speed

[00:29:06] we can now develop our own platform, intelligent workforce platform

[00:29:09] that we're building.

[00:29:10] Right.

[00:29:10] So massive, massive success from, and the people's jobs are much better,

[00:29:14] more exciting.

[00:29:15] We've just finished in our marketing function.

[00:29:18] We now use far more freelancers in that function for digital creation,

[00:29:23] all that sort of thing.

[00:29:23] We're living, you know, we're eating our own dog food,

[00:29:25] as they say, or drinking our own champagne.

[00:29:28] But just incredible results, but literally just by thinking about

[00:29:31] the work instead of the job description, you've got to start

[00:29:35] with the work.

[00:29:35] You know, it's a good friend of mine, John Boudreau,

[00:29:37] when he wrote the book, Lead the Work, all those years ago.

[00:29:40] He was absolutely right.

[00:29:42] And one of the biggest challenges we have, I think, in organizations

[00:29:46] is no managers are being taught how to lead the work.

[00:29:50] They've been taught perhaps how to lead the people,

[00:29:53] but you really understand how they can stick down with the project

[00:29:56] and we call that the workforce business partner role,

[00:29:59] where they act like almost like a quantity surveyor.

[00:30:04] You, quantity surveyor will look at a blueprint picture of a house

[00:30:07] and they'll tell you how many bricks you need,

[00:30:09] how much cement, how much glass, how much wiring,

[00:30:11] the order how to do these jobs, how much it will cost

[00:30:15] and how long it will take.

[00:30:17] That's what we need inside organizations.

[00:30:19] That's what we call the workforce business partner

[00:30:21] that somebody can go to them.

[00:30:22] So this is a big project I'm trying to get in on next year.

[00:30:24] Okay, let's break it all down and then come back

[00:30:27] with a work design and all design approach to that.

[00:30:30] What can be automated?

[00:30:31] What can be off-shored?

[00:30:33] What can we bundle up and give it to a service provider?

[00:30:35] What can we use contractors for?

[00:30:38] Very last thing.

[00:30:39] Okay, it looks like we're going to have to hire a couple of people.

[00:30:42] Right, right.

[00:30:43] So if you could...

[00:30:44] Without that, I don't know if you could hire people.

[00:30:46] Now I don't know if you can, but if you could,

[00:30:49] how many, if you could put a number to it,

[00:30:52] how many work points or jobs,

[00:30:56] not sure really how to describe that,

[00:30:58] jobs or work points that your current team was working on,

[00:31:02] did you remove from that process by doing this

[00:31:05] or bring outside the organization?

[00:31:08] I mean, tell you some guests would be 30% when...

[00:31:11] They were just doing stuff because they were used to...

[00:31:14] Yeah.

[00:31:14] Or accustomed to doing stuff.

[00:31:15] Yeah, you know those reports that nobody looks at,

[00:31:17] they're like, what?

[00:31:18] How do you know those?

[00:31:20] Oh, you just sent them to me.

[00:31:21] I thought you sent them to other people as well

[00:31:22] because I'm not a looker.

[00:31:24] Yeah.

[00:31:24] I'm just kidding about it.

[00:31:26] That's...

[00:31:27] I've actually seen that.

[00:31:28] I've seen that from sales, actually.

[00:31:30] Marketing, citizen spreadsheets from a conference

[00:31:33] of all the leads.

[00:31:34] They just delete them.

[00:31:36] Because they assume that other people were getting them

[00:31:38] as well or they're in the system.

[00:31:40] It's like, okay.

[00:31:42] Yeah.

[00:31:42] So as a cross-organization,

[00:31:45] we partnered with UIPath to do all of our

[00:31:48] automation stuff and we've automated 12 million actions

[00:31:52] now last year that people used to be doing.

[00:31:55] And not only that, when you go through the process

[00:31:57] of actually drawing out those workflows of what happens

[00:32:00] when we're trying to chase time sheets in a VMS,

[00:32:05] for example.

[00:32:06] Although at a different point you start realizing

[00:32:07] that some of them could be...

[00:32:09] You don't need to automate.

[00:32:10] They mean just cross them out.

[00:32:11] So just even if you didn't automate,

[00:32:14] there's still massive value in just going through the process

[00:32:17] as if you were going to.

[00:32:19] Right.

[00:32:20] That in itself saves money and increases efficiency.

[00:32:22] What's your take on when you hear people talk about

[00:32:25] upskilling and rescilling and all the other ways

[00:32:28] that you can say skill?

[00:32:30] Yeah, I think it's fantastic.

[00:32:33] I think we need it as a society.

[00:32:35] If you look at the skills mismatch now,

[00:32:39] it's not that we haven't got enough people.

[00:32:40] We just haven't got the right people for the right jobs.

[00:32:42] In some cases, people are overeducated

[00:32:45] and they don't want the blue collar jobs.

[00:32:48] And in other cases, our immigration policies

[00:32:49] and everything else has to go down that path.

[00:32:51] But it's just a mismatch of what's going on at the moment.

[00:32:55] So we have to, we need to upskill and reskill people.

[00:32:58] And we have a company that we own called Queer Circle

[00:33:01] that does that predominantly around bringing women back

[00:33:05] to work or be underprivileged.

[00:33:08] So we have a deal with Google and Salesforce.

[00:33:11] We train these people to be Salesforce administrators

[00:33:12] and thousands of them.

[00:33:15] So I think that's a really, really good societal thing

[00:33:19] that's happening right now and it's very real.

[00:33:20] All right, so this might be too broad of a question.

[00:33:25] But when we initially started talking,

[00:33:27] we were talking about AI changing skills-based recruitment.

[00:33:32] So I know we can't solve this problem in a call or a question.

[00:33:36] But how does an organization who's stuck in recruiting from 2005,

[00:33:43] how do they begin that process?

[00:33:45] What did they need to look at?

[00:33:49] Yeah, the approach would be to start with the work, not the jobs.

[00:33:54] Think about what work does that function do?

[00:33:57] Capture that work, then break down that work into tasks.

[00:34:01] And then task by task saying, is this, can this be fully automated?

[00:34:05] Can it be augmented with AI?

[00:34:08] So in other words, if humans still doing it,

[00:34:09] but they're using AI to be more efficient,

[00:34:12] always at a purely human job.

[00:34:14] And then if you look at an old job description,

[00:34:16] you can then start pulling those pieces out

[00:34:18] and putting them in those relevant buckets.

[00:34:20] And that will give you then a guide to deconstruction.

[00:34:23] But literally, unless you're using a tech platform,

[00:34:27] if you're doing that manually,

[00:34:28] you've got to go through 1,000 job specs.

[00:34:32] That's why you need to put some technology behind it

[00:34:34] because the tech is out there

[00:34:36] and there are plenty of technologies out there.

[00:34:37] We created our own, but there were plenty out there

[00:34:39] that can do that now.

[00:34:41] Do that deconstruction for you.

[00:34:42] That's the good thing about starting from there.

[00:34:44] But the part of that is,

[00:34:48] and we're probably using AI more than anywhere else.

[00:34:51] We don't use it in selection, by the way.

[00:34:53] We've taken a stance.

[00:34:55] We deliberately don't select candidates with technology

[00:34:58] because the bias and everything else,

[00:35:00] we've put that in the too risky, too hard bucket.

[00:35:04] We use AI everywhere else.

[00:35:05] But our biggest use right now

[00:35:06] is to help organizations understand

[00:35:10] how to distribute the work.

[00:35:13] Because when I touched on it earlier,

[00:35:15] there's big project need doing.

[00:35:16] Once you've broken that down,

[00:35:18] you can then start to make a decision on,

[00:35:20] I want my better to do this with employees.

[00:35:22] Have I really got the skills internally?

[00:35:24] Do I bring a bunch of contractors in

[00:35:26] that I'm going to have to manage

[00:35:28] against a timeframe and hopefully get done on time?

[00:35:31] Or do I bundle it up,

[00:35:33] put a price ticket on it

[00:35:34] and bid it out to the market?

[00:35:36] If you think about that difference,

[00:35:38] let's say it's a piece of, I don't know,

[00:35:42] API integration or something and you say,

[00:35:44] okay, I think six contractors for this period of time,

[00:35:48] that'll cost me a million bucks.

[00:35:49] If I can manage them, direct them and everything else.

[00:35:53] Or I could give it to this IT services company.

[00:35:57] They want 1.2 million.

[00:35:59] Guarantee to deliver on this time with penalties.

[00:36:02] Now, as a manager now,

[00:36:04] I'm the leader,

[00:36:04] but I can make a decision on that 200,000 delta.

[00:36:08] Is it really important to save that money

[00:36:11] and therefore I only do it myself

[00:36:12] and take the risk?

[00:36:14] Or do I want to get off my books,

[00:36:16] give it to that organization who are proven,

[00:36:19] et cetera, et cetera,

[00:36:20] and pay the extra 200,000?

[00:36:22] We're now in a world where we can actually

[00:36:24] put that data at the managers' fingers tips

[00:36:27] to make the decision.

[00:36:28] We haven't been there before.

[00:36:29] So that AI is incredibly, incredibly powerful

[00:36:32] to do that and to actually understand

[00:36:35] the best channel to put this work down.

[00:36:38] And then we're partnering, you know,

[00:36:39] from a pure tech play,

[00:36:41] we partner with Globality where

[00:36:43] that platform actually helps the manager

[00:36:45] write the scope of work,

[00:36:47] like chat GPT-type experience.

[00:36:49] You start writing it and it's filling it in for you.

[00:36:51] Putting all of your legal and regulations

[00:36:54] already compliance, already built in.

[00:36:56] You could build an S&W in 30 minutes

[00:36:59] on that platform, sort of the average of six or seven days.

[00:37:02] Send it out to those providers

[00:37:04] that the technology is finding in your supply chain

[00:37:07] of who's done this before,

[00:37:09] who's got their best truck record.

[00:37:10] Do a light by light comparison on the platform

[00:37:13] and then choose Boom.

[00:37:14] Negotiate with the contract.

[00:37:16] So as you're doing it, as you're sending it,

[00:37:18] you're not wasting your time?

[00:37:20] Yeah, literally changing the water procurement.

[00:37:22] Because now organizations can manage

[00:37:25] all of that tailspend

[00:37:27] because it doesn't take the time.

[00:37:29] That's why organizations,

[00:37:31] oh anything below half a million we don't, you know, tailspend.

[00:37:34] Well now you can actually bid that

[00:37:35] and when you bid, you know,

[00:37:37] according to SIPs you say 14%,

[00:37:39] we think it's more like 20%

[00:37:40] just by competitively bidding

[00:37:43] instead of giving it to that same provider

[00:37:45] every time.

[00:37:46] So that's where AI is truly transforming

[00:37:50] the work world as we see it.

[00:37:52] My favorite takeaway so far is

[00:37:54] getting people to stop thinking about

[00:37:55] the job description

[00:37:57] and the description of work.

[00:38:00] If anything, for the audience,

[00:38:02] I mean they're going to learn a lot

[00:38:03] but just that mentality,

[00:38:06] the shift of like,

[00:38:07] especially the way that we've created

[00:38:09] job descriptions in the past, cut and copy.

[00:38:13] I think this has been responsible for it

[00:38:14] when you write, absolutely.

[00:38:16] Must have a minimum of 6 to 7 years.

[00:38:19] Hello, is that if you hang on a minute?

[00:38:21] You can't have a minimum of 6 or 7,

[00:38:23] the minimum is 6

[00:38:24] while you say, oh 7.

[00:38:25] Yeah, or 7.

[00:38:27] Or when there's a new,

[00:38:30] I remember when

[00:38:31] some of it, you know,

[00:38:32] from tech recruiting days,

[00:38:36] 5 years in this business,

[00:38:38] it just is brand new.

[00:38:40] Technology has to be around for 12 months.

[00:38:42] Like 12 months.

[00:38:43] I guarantee we could go on

[00:38:45] any job board right now

[00:38:47] and find a

[00:38:49] GenAI prompt engineer

[00:38:52] that has 10 years of experience.

[00:38:54] Yeah, it's not just that.

[00:38:57] And, uh, good, well

[00:38:59] we talked to Brian, you brought up Unicorns.

[00:39:02] There you go.

[00:39:03] Unicorns might exist on better job boards.

[00:39:05] I think there's prompt engine,

[00:39:07] this is getting into philosophical

[00:39:09] in your world, William, but

[00:39:11] there are people that I talk

[00:39:13] to that I know you're probably one of them

[00:39:15] to be honest.

[00:39:16] That you can prompt people to do things

[00:39:19] and say things they didn't really think they were going to

[00:39:21] or want to actually say.

[00:39:22] The 10 years of experience that people need

[00:39:25] in prompt engineering right now.

[00:39:26] That's humanities degrees, is what that is.

[00:39:31] Bruce, the last question

[00:39:33] for me is I'm interested to get your

[00:39:35] thought on technology's

[00:39:37] role in making

[00:39:39] the hire. So I know

[00:39:40] you said, Allegious does not

[00:39:43] intervene at that point.

[00:39:45] We know some technologies

[00:39:47] do, but they don't

[00:39:49] view themselves as actually making

[00:39:51] a decision, but they are influencing

[00:39:53] in my opinion I should say.

[00:39:55] The decision.

[00:39:56] Yeah, thank you, it goes to shortlisting.

[00:40:00] Yeah, yeah, you're kind

[00:40:01] of telling me don't look at the rest of the 300.

[00:40:03] Right? So I'm

[00:40:05] curious to get your thoughts on that.

[00:40:07] Yeah, I think that the

[00:40:10] one of the answers is the human

[00:40:11] element. I mean the,

[00:40:12] there are things you can use the technology

[00:40:15] for to make it easy so you're not looking at

[00:40:16] such a big list. You can start

[00:40:19] with a smaller list by using

[00:40:20] the technology to do

[00:40:23] the clever stuff like, you know, this

[00:40:24] free text of show me

[00:40:27] all the engineers within a

[00:40:28] 15 minute commutes of Google's

[00:40:31] headquarters. There you go, there's

[00:40:33] 20 of them. Let's use

[00:40:35] technology so now you only have to look at 20

[00:40:36] not trying to work out how long

[00:40:39] does it take if you live here versus there.

[00:40:40] So there's different ways AI can help recruit

[00:40:43] us now. It might

[00:40:45] be that show me all the

[00:40:47] people that have come through

[00:40:49] the engineering background to

[00:40:51] get into this type of role. That

[00:40:53] free tech search now is now

[00:40:55] very, very available

[00:40:57] on most databases, you know, ATSs.

[00:41:00] So I think that

[00:41:01] that has, it's certainly

[00:41:02] making a massive difference to our

[00:41:04] recruitment delivery sensors that we have all over the world.

[00:41:07] You know, thousands

[00:41:08] of people that are doing that top of the funnel

[00:41:10] type stuff, getting it down to the short

[00:41:12] list that they can then pass through a recruiter.

[00:41:15] But they're using

[00:41:16] it top of the funnel not bottom of the funnel I guess

[00:41:18] is the short answer.

[00:41:21] So do your

[00:41:22] does your team get asked a lot about

[00:41:24] augmentation versus automation?

[00:41:27] Oh yes. Yeah.

[00:41:29] Yes. Yeah seems to be a theme

[00:41:30] that's it. Yeah.

[00:41:32] Yeah. My my father-in-law

[00:41:34] who's in his eighties said to me recently said,

[00:41:37] are you using about any

[00:41:38] of the A1 stuff? Yeah, on every

[00:41:41] stake that I absolutely

[00:41:42] know we now use that term

[00:41:44] internally and we've actually been

[00:41:46] using it for augmentation. So it's AI

[00:41:48] or it's A1 of his augmentation.

[00:41:51] Oh, that's genius.

[00:41:53] The last thing for me is when

[00:41:54] you were talking about skills being

[00:41:57] we have some of the skills but like in

[00:41:58] the example of the person that's got

[00:42:01] degrees but doesn't want to take a blue

[00:42:02] college job. I had a guy

[00:42:04] this is 100 years ago

[00:42:06] but he said we don't

[00:42:08] in the global we don't have

[00:42:10] a hunger problem. We have a

[00:42:12] logistics problem. Right? Yeah.

[00:42:14] Right. We make it a food

[00:42:16] worldwide. It's just

[00:42:18] not in the right spots.

[00:42:20] So again, I don't know if he

[00:42:22] was right or wrong on that but

[00:42:23] it did make me think

[00:42:26] do you think that's do we have

[00:42:28] that in skills? We

[00:42:30] absolutely do and it's you've touched

[00:42:32] on a soapbox of mine so I'll keep

[00:42:33] it for a while. No, no.

[00:42:36] Roll on. I've been

[00:42:37] writing for 10 years now that Africa

[00:42:39] is the next frontier and it will be

[00:42:42] but at least

[00:42:43] they were in my lifetime. They need to get on

[00:42:45] with it but you know we've got two of the top 20 universities

[00:42:48] in the world now in Africa

[00:42:49] it's starting to happen between the massive

[00:42:51] investment Microsoft just made

[00:42:53] the billions of billions of dollars in

[00:42:55] Traffica so but the answer

[00:42:57] will be we've got to find the way

[00:42:59] to send the work to Africa not trying

[00:43:01] to get Africa not those people in here

[00:43:03] and we're now living in a world where we can

[00:43:05] send the work to people. We don't have to send

[00:43:07] the people to work so it will definitely

[00:43:09] happen and by the end of this

[00:43:11] decade a third of the world's

[00:43:13] working population will be living in Africa

[00:43:16] which will help.

[00:43:17] We're not sending work there what the heck are

[00:43:19] we doing? Right. You know

[00:43:21] you've seen the the GCC

[00:43:22] growth in India now with

[00:43:24] it's phenomenal what's happening

[00:43:27] because that source I call it

[00:43:29] outsourcing 2.0 because

[00:43:31] back in Y2K when we all

[00:43:33] thought the world was going to end and we sent all that work

[00:43:35] to India to add the two extra zeros

[00:43:36] you know but then

[00:43:39] it just became a back office

[00:43:41] thing so WIPRO, the TARDAS

[00:43:42] and I don't care. I don't care

[00:43:45] outsourcing my back office. This is

[00:43:47] now front office R&D

[00:43:49] high-end

[00:43:50] AI that's being built in India

[00:43:54] and to do that companies

[00:43:55] don't want to outsource it so they're building their own

[00:43:57] in partnership with companies and we do a lot of that

[00:43:59] obviously to build those teams

[00:44:01] that are like quasi-offshore

[00:44:03] but actually owned by the organization

[00:44:05] you know this thing now called 2box

[00:44:07] leadership which is

[00:44:09] building a global

[00:44:11] headquarters in India as well as the US

[00:44:13] right and you watch

[00:44:15] the leaders now I mean there's already

[00:44:16] you know very very large

[00:44:19] technology companies who have an Indian

[00:44:21] leadership. Oh 100%

[00:44:22] and that is going to continue to grow

[00:44:24] and I think that can only go for the world

[00:44:26] it's certainly helping India get out of poverty

[00:44:28] but you know the long shot will be

[00:44:30] we've got to find ways

[00:44:32] to fix that. It's just a

[00:44:34] long-place problem. We've got to send

[00:44:36] the work package it up and send it around the world

[00:44:38] much more easy. Well glad

[00:44:40] I asked the question because

[00:44:43] it's been perplexing

[00:44:44] for me but you just made it really

[00:44:46] easy so Bruce

[00:44:48] Ryan thank you very much for your time

[00:44:50] this has been wonderful. Thank you guys

[00:44:54] and thanks for the audience. What do we say

[00:44:56] Ryan? Subscribe

[00:44:57] and love us everywhere

[00:45:00] yeah they go

[00:45:01] yeah and

[00:45:04] we will be travel we'll be out in a lot of

[00:45:06] places coming up especially in September

[00:45:08] October so if you see us

[00:45:10] come see us. Come say hello