How AI Talent Intelligence is Revolutionising the Workplace
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, Jason Cerrato, former HR Tech Industry Analyst and Talent Management executive, who now serves as VP Market Strategy at Eightfold AI. Jason outlined how AI and advanced data analytics are elevating strategic talent planning to new levels across key areas like hiring, retention and growth.
We focused on key topics on how AI and data are revolutionizing talent strategies:
Use Data to Shift from Job-Centric to Talent-Centric Models
Rather than focus primarily on rigid job descriptions, forward-thinking HR leaders are shifting to talent-centric models that profile individuals based on their skills, interests and potential. AI makes this possible at scale.
Develop Meaningful, Rewarding Career Paths with Data
By analysing employee skills, progress and goals, AI helps uncover viable careers paths that align individual growth with organizational priorities. This promotes retention and advancement.
Align Talent and AI to Drive Business Outcomes
AI adds speed, objectivity and insight to talent decisions, but strategy must come first. Leaders must carefully define business goals, then use AI to identify and deliver the talent needed to execute.
Build a Flexible, Agile and Skills-Aligned Workforce
As business needs rapidly shift, a skills focus helps pivot the workforce to new opportunities. AI delivers real-time visibility into workforce capabilities, facilitating agile redeployment.
Episode Highlights:
How AI Talent Intelligence is Revolutionising the Workplace
How HR can use data to shift from a job-centric to a talent-centric planning model?
How to Use data-driven insights to develop meaningful and rewarding career paths
How to Align talent and AI strategies to drive business outcomes
Recommended Resources
Connect with Jason on LinkedIn
Learn more about Eightfold
Tune in to Eightfold’s Podcast
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🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript
Jason 0:00
When we talk about what is the benefit of talent intelligence, a big part of it is driving talent agility? Well, talent agility isn't just the ability to go fast. It's the ability to change direction rather quickly. This concept of work without jobs is how can I optimise my workforce and use the skills that I already have to potentially redeploy them into other areas or develop adjacent skills to address a business challenge or a pivot or a disruption that either saw coming or didn't see coming but wanted to prepare for?
Chris Rainey 0:34
Hi, everyone, welcome back to the HR leaders podcast. On today's episode, I'm joined by Jason Serato, who's a former HR tech industry analyst, and Talent Management and talent acquisition executive. Jason now serves as the vice president of market strategy at eight fold AI, the industry's first talent intelligence platform, just transforming how the world's leading organisations hire, retain and grow a diverse workforce. During the podcast Jason says how AI talent intelligence is revolutionising the workplace, how HR can use data to shift from a job centric to a talent centric planning model, how to use AI and data driven insights to develop meaningful and rewarding career paths. And lastly, how to align talent and AI strategies to drive business outcomes. As always, before we jump into the video, make sure you hit the subscribe button, turn on notification bell and follow on your favourite podcast platform. But that being said, let's jump in. Jason, welcome to the show. How
Jason 1:33
are you? doing wonderful, great to be here, Chris,
Chris Rainey 1:35
before we jump in and tell everyone a little bit more about yourself personally, and your journey to where we are now. Because you have such a unique background, which I think is really special, and it makes the work that you do even more valuable.
Jason 1:48
I appreciate the opportunity to join you in this conversation. And I've come to describe myself in the fact that I have a hybrid role with eight fold as a result of my hybrid career. So currently, I'm the vice president of market strategy, I sit within the marketing team, but kind of bridge, the marketing function, the product function, their customer success function, and the sales function to kind of translate between those worlds, while also working with prospects and customers on their transformation journey and collecting feedback both ways and trying to continuously improve what we're doing here at eight fold as organisations are trying to continuously improve what they're doing in the HR function out in the world. But I sit in that role because my background, I've been an HR practitioner, I like to say I'm a recruiter by trade. I started in recruiting when I entered the corporate world, because I really wanted to get into HR. And that's one of the more common paths where you're introduced into HR. But it felt right at home. For me, my background is in public relations and corporate communications. So there's that aspect of recruiting. But then I had also done a master's degree in organisational communication and technology, and talent acquisition and recruiting is very tech heavy. So it kind of was the culmination of a lot of my interests. And I fell in love very early and had been doing this work ever since.
Chris Rainey 3:14
Man, man I'd love to and when we first spoke, I was really excited about that having you on the show, because you are in a unique position that you've seen this from multiple lenses, right? As you said, you're seeing it for the vendor lens, you've seen it as a customer, as a as a talent leader in an organisation, you've used the product, you've implemented the product. And you've also seen it from your role at Gartner, from the research where you've been close to the technology for many, many years and seeing how it's evolved, as well. So I know, I felt like it was destined to to end up in this place again, and I'm excited to share your insights with everyone. One of the things you said on the call, which I really want to jump into straightaway. First is you said you know, Chris, this is what it truly means to be a skills based organisation. Can you break that down? For me? What does it truly mean to be a skills based organisation?
Jason 4:01
This is something that's been a hot topic of discussion for the last two or three years or so. But it's not a new concept. Back when I was at Gartner, one of my favourite research articles that we wrote in this was finding talent in the digital talent ecosystem. And this was all about digital transformation and digitization. And what does it mean to now have highly technical processes and highly technical solutions in a very digital world with a digital workforce. There's a chart that's in that research report, that if you look very closely at the centre of the digital talent ecosystem, as people is talent, talent becomes the centre. And I say that to say we wrote that report in 2018 2019. Right and flash forward here we are now in 2024. So this isn't a flash in the pan concept. This isn't something new. But what's happening is what does it mean to become a skills based organisation, it really means to shift the balance have focus from a history in HR, or it's been heavily focused on jobs, and roles and technology built around jobs and roles, to one that is more focused on talent and people. And I refer to it as more of a talent centred design approach, where you're able to monitor what work people are doing, what training they're taking, what information they're adding to their profile, what are some of their hopes and dreams? What are the skills that they're gathering? What skills do they possess, even more importantly, of that list of skills, which ones do they want to emphasise and develop for the future. And all of this requires tools like AI to be able to gather this information and make sense of this information in real time. And one of the things about becoming a skills based organisation is it does kind of balance the focus between historically what we've thought about jobs, and the present day what we need to learn from people. But also, you need AI because this becomes increasingly continuous, and real time, whereas historically, a lot of our processes in HR were annual or cyclical, right. And it took so much time to gather the data, you couldn't do this on a regular basis. But now the world of work is changing so fast, and people are providing so much data, we now have tools that are able to listen and learn and glean information from that exercise, and then empower HR leaders and talent leaders to make decisions and understand their workforce in real time.
Chris Rainey 6:28
What's the biggest challenge moving from focus on jobs to focus on people?
Jason 6:33
So one of them is, you know, we've been trying to do this for the last few years with tools that use the job or the requisition often as the cornerstone right? I wrote a market guide on applicant tracking systems for Gartner did a tonne of research on all the applicant tracking systems in my professional life, I got a chance to design and deploy multiple applicant tracking systems. I was certified to do configuration and design. And so I have a little bit of a hybrid role between the practitioner and the IT world. So I feel very closely connected to those types of tools. But in working with those tools, the process almost always starts with the requisition as the cornerstone, what is this requisition? What is the job code? What department does it reside in? Who's the manager? What's the location who did this job the last time, all of this information is how you start the process. And that's the data you gather as an input. But then as a result, all the work that follows is built through that framework built around jobs. Versus if you take an approach where you're putting talent more at the centre, the inputs are very different. Who's the person? What's the persona? What are their skills? What are their interests? What are they capable of? What skills do they have that are adjacent to other skills? What skills do they have that allow them to learn other things very quickly, those inputs also lead to a conversation that is much more open, where once you understand what that person is capable of doing, you're then trying to find a home for them within your organisation. You know, I've been there at the career fair in front of the tablecloth, with the managers who are trying to recruit to a wreck, and they have a line of people standing in front of them, and they're reading a wreck and they're looking at a resume and reading a wreck and looking at a resume. And they're filtering people out versus taking a skills based approach on what someone is capable of, you're more attuned to filter people in and try to find them a home. So first, the conversation changes. Second, the philosophy and the framework changes. And third, you're able to capitalise on the talent in front of you much faster and quicker, versus trying to find a needle in a haystack, or like I said, you know, filter people out. So this has a multiplying factor. On the first thing, you're able to move much faster with talent acquisition. But on the on the second hand, if you understand your existing employees better, and what they're capable of, and what they're able to learn and what their interests are, you can understand if you're utilising them to their full capability, but also understand maybe what else they can do in your organisation. In a world that's built with requisitions. At the centre, whenever we have we have a shortage or a need or a gap. Often the response is, well, let's put out a requisition and hire someone. Whereas in a world where the person and the focus of their capability and their skills is at the centre, you could say, Who do we have an organisation that may already be able to do this, right? And how do we free them up to be able to either loan their talent, or borrow their talent or redeploy their talent, or maybe we're not using them to 100% capacity. And now we know that they have this other thing that they can offer us. Now we don't have to hire for everything in a very competitive world when it comes to talent acquisition. But also, as we've seen now, in the first part of 2024, some companies may have over hired, right and then you end up with layoffs and reduction in force. So all of this is coming to a head now with this capability of what AI can do what talent intelligence can do, and kind of shifting the focus have jobs, jobs, jobs to skills and talent people. First
Chris Rainey 10:03
of all, thanks for the detailed breakdown of that. Well, of course, we got yesterday because I was talking about it fall to one of the searchers was interviewing. And he said to me, Chris, I don't understand the role of AI. Like, what is the everyone's throwing around his word AI? Right? Everywhere you go, right. What is the role of AI in all of this? And how is how are you utilising a fold? So the
Jason 10:23
first part is not all AI is the same, right? Right. Now, we've been using this term interchangeably, yes. And you need to understand how it's designed, what data it's used to determine what outcomes it can gather, there's a lot of AI that really is automation, in hiding, whereas there's others AI, which is gathering understanding, and context and predictive capability and creating connections that you couldn't see otherwise, at a speed you couldn't accomplish manually. So there's a lot of different flavours and use cases and ways AI is being used. So it's really no longer a discussion of AI for AI sake. It's what data is involved, what information is being gleaned, what outcomes are being generated? What is it providing to us that we couldn't do otherwise, at what scale and at what speed? Right. So the first part is, we're moving beyond keyword matching and semantic understanding, and just gathering data to now being able to find relationships and patterns within that data. So it's no longer a data point. It's a data relationship. And when you get to data relationships and clusters, you're able to start to gather meaning and understanding of how these things relate. But you're also able to start to understand the meaning of how these things relate in the environment and the context where this data is being gathered and where this data resides. Right. So for example, one of the patents we have here at eightfold is the ability to accurately predict success in the next role. And part of this is because of our ability to use data to understand data relationships, data clusters and data patterns to understand context of where this information is coming from, who this information was gathered from, what is the scenario where this information is being presented? And what are the implications of that in terms of an insight or a recommendation, because ultimately, what our technology is designed to do, is it's designed to provide additional information to an individual a person to make better decisions in context. And across the lifecycle. That person could be an applicant applying to a job at a company using our technology, it could be a manager, interviewing someone, it could be a leader putting together a talent plan, it could be an employee, trying to understand all the places they can go within an organisation. So all of this is using AI in a way where it's continuously learning and recognising these patterns and these relationships to provide Explainable AI, to say, here's why you are being matched. Or here's where people like you have gone, or here are some skills were pretty sure this person has, here are some skills that you as a manager may want to validate. All of this allows the data to come along for the ride through the lifecycle, but also surfaces and explains to the user, what information we know about you how that compares to other people. And some information you should consider as you're about to make a decision.
Chris Rainey 13:21
So is it really moving towards me more predictive, and prescriptive, as opposed to you having to input information in order to get value from the system,
Jason 13:30
I think that's part of it. Also, you're able to pull from a broader data set. Right? So it's not just your information, it's what we know about people like you. It's not just your organization's information. It's what we know about your industry and what we know about the external talent market. The ability to do this at scale within your organisation, but also at scale with a broader dataset is part of the power of this. And it's the computing power, the machine learning the continuous understanding and honing of that recommendation, where it gets stronger over time as it learns. But again, this is shifting from a process that may have been annual or cyclical to something that's continuous, and creating an experience that is explainable and surfacing this data and surfacing these insights, but also learning in real time. So for example, let's say you're an organisation and you just hired three people into a role. When's the next time you're going to update that job description? When those people when those people leave? Yeah, most of the time? Yeah, unfortunately. Or, or if you're proactive, let's say six months from now, a year from now, like that was good behaviour. That was that was good data hygiene, right? Well, using a system like ours, not only do we know who you hired, but now we know what training they're taking, what work they're doing, how they're updating their profile, right? So when we look at that role, you also have the balanced conversation of the person in the role. It's not just our understanding of The job title and the job description. It's our understanding of the work that that person is doing and where they've taken that job where a lot of our systems historically have been built. If you were an HR leader, looking at your organisation through a data lens, you saw the job title, the job description, the job code on
Chris Rainey 15:16
that point, and what would you say some of the misconceptions people have about that at marketplaces that you hear? I
Jason 15:22
got the chance to go back and attend the Gartner reimagined HR conference now as a vendor. And as an attendee, I used to be a presenter on stage now the roles were flipped, and I got to see someone else present. One of my favourite sessions during the the agenda was there was an analyst saying, do internal talent marketplaces really work, or is this snake oil, and a couple of his conclusions are, they can work, if managed strategically, but also, if driven by AI, because part of this is you need that skills, intelligence, and that understanding of skills and that continuous holding of data, to be able to effectively create recommendations and nudges and insights, to drive an open talent marketplace. But also, if you think about how this was done historically, in a very static way, a lot of functions within a company would have built out their job descriptions, their job ladder, their job architecture, but they were built within that function. So first, they're not using vast skills information, and they're not using real time skills, intelligence. But even more importantly, they were never built with an eye over the fence to what's happening in that other function or what's happening in that other business line. And as a result, you know, there may be people doing similar work utilising similar skills, but the drought, the job descriptions are very different, the job titles are very different. So you would definitely be, you would never, you would never know, both as an employee, as an employee trying to figure out, how can I, you know, grow my career, or maybe cross train into another area, or as a manager or a leader to say, we have an opening for a business analyst in operations, who can we consider, they're always looking within that function versus the ability to look across the enterprise and say, Who else has similar skills in a different area, that I may be able to expand my cohort for consideration, but also, they have transferable skills for the majority of what I'm looking for. But they're also bringing something different from a different part of the organisation that may lead to innovation, and may generate new ideas as well. Yeah, and I think that's the exciting part about this kind of marketplace concept is, if done, right, with the right technology, you can have a grassroots ground up interest in managers creating projects, or creating jobs, and employees raising their hand to do things. But you can also have the lens of the talent leaders in the organisation looking into the marketplace, to either seed it with strategic assignments, and see and seed it with strategic work, but also have better visibility to how that movement is occurring in their organisation, or not occurring in their organisation. And ultimately, like this scenario, we just shared with that kind of business analyst story. That's where innovation and ROI and untapped capability is going to come from.
Chris Rainey 18:18
So what's the misconception to wrap that up, then
Jason 18:22
is that part of it is, you know, if you just turn this on and let it go, it's kind of work. It's gonna work. And, and if you only take one side of the conversation top down or bottom up, it can work, you kind of need both. So for example, during my time as an analyst, when I was advising some of the early adopters of talent, marketplace technology, some of the instances where it really did not go well, is that people were using a talent marketplace to create projects and, you know, assignments for work that no one wanted to do. Right, they were farming out non value add, you know, high transactional work that no one wanted to do. And then are you not surprised that people aren't volunteering and signing up to do more of this like, part of this is it has to be some value add, you know, Strategic Growth type of assignments. The other thing is they has to have some realism and reality of what is available. So I was also there watching this during digital transformation. And some of the early adopters with internal talent marketplaces, every department, every manager, every function wanted help with an IT project manager, right? So part of this is not everyone is going to be able to capitalise on a marketplace when everyone's asking for the same thing. And it didn't exist to begin with. Right? So there needs to be this two sided marketplace between the organisation and the employee. And between kind of the people doing the work and the people supporting and advising the work and you know, tools like ours give that visibility through all those lenses
Chris Rainey 19:56
that need to be quite nice. That's my next question because it's gonna ask you having implemented it seen from both sides, so many of our audience are in that process of either just starting, or they're thinking about building a talent marketplace, what would be the top three things, you looking back that you think they should focus their energy and time on? To get this? Right? The
Jason 20:14
Great question, I think part of it is you do need some oversight. But it really becomes a conversation of governance versus management, right? If you try to steer everything and, and have your hands on everything, and really put the rigour around it, you would in more traditional processes, you're not allowing the matching and the AI and the employee choice in the matter, for this to start to move. And it's you need to shift the mindset from one of trying to drive to one of trying to observe and learn. And as you observe and learn, then you can seed the marketplace with strategic assignments, you can see the marketplace with the appropriate training that aligns with some business strategy. But in the past, you know, we would often try to have both hands on the wheel and really guide towards a predetermined outcome. And part of the value of AI and talent intelligence is sometimes it surfaces, things you wouldn't have seen otherwise. And it creates these audiences, it creates these opportunities, it creates these paths, you wouldn't have seen through traditional measures. So that's the first part is kind of shifting the mindset. I think the second one is, you need tools like this, to be able to do this at scale. And a former life, I used to lead the leadership development programmes. And we used to do rotations, to try to develop these people to be able to take on anything within an organisation. But that was specific to a cohort, a very specific profile, a little bit of a pocket programme, a little bit of, there's always some elements of tap on the shoulder kind of stuff. This allows everyone to partake in something like that to develop themselves and have an opportunity. So both from an employee perspective, it opens up opportunity from a leader perspective and allows you to scale some of those things. I've said this before, and I really wish I knew the woman who made this statement, I was doing an executive roundtable and she said they're shifting the mindset of their culture to try to look beyond high potential, and the acronym hypo to how can they use technology in this better understanding of capability to help everyone become high grow? Oh, love that. That's, that's a mindset shift. Right? That's also part of driving cultural change, to then drive outcomes you may not have seen otherwise. We've all heard these wonderful stories of the person who got a job at an Oregon is a very progressive, innovative company, like a Nike or somewhere else. And part of their experience was their first year they got to explore the organisation and walk around and meet with different leaders, and then ultimately decide where they wanted to work. Yeah, that's, that's easier said than done. You can't do that at scale, and operate. Yeah, yeah, you can't operate your business like that. But with capability like this, you can start to do things that look and feel and ultimately result in something close to that, right, you're able to open up people's eyes to all the paths, they can go in an organisation, you're able to open up managers, consideration of people beyond their immediate team, right, and you're able to make these linkages of the work that's being done over here and the work that's being done over there, and how they never might have connected in the past. And now you can view these audiences as a cohort, or opened up career opportunities or influence succession plans. All of this starts to unveil itself in a way where you're getting deeper in the organisation and broader in the organisation.
Chris Rainey 23:43
Something I also wrote down, which is you mentioned to me before, which I think was, I think, really interesting for our audience is, you mentioned a shelf life of skills is getting shorter. Could you explain what you mean by that?
Jason 23:52
So part of that is, how viable and important are skills? And how long are those skills relevant before they change. But I'll also say even the ones that are staying, we're using them differently, because we're aided by technology and generative AI and hybrid work and all these different tools. One of the challenges we have is if you only have at historic view of jobs, when you're utilising skills to try to attract talent or create job descriptions, or build a profile, you have the potential to use a lot of jobs that might already be declining. One of the pieces of research I grabbed on to very frequently when I was with gardener was we were there when skills became a topic and we saw year over year that skills increasingly showed up on job descriptions, and that the number of skills listed on job descriptions had increased 30% year over year from like 2019 to 2020 to 2021. But one of the other things we saw was that of that increase in skills being listed most of the skills that were being listed has had been identified as potentially being out of date within a two to three year without a two to three year timeframe. So again, you're you're building a profile and recruiting for a skill set for how the job had been done historically, versus the ability to identify emerging skills and rising skills that help you more formulate how the job will be done tomorrow. And I think that has all kinds of impact. So for example, are you opening up your eyes to a broader audience for talent? Are you hiring someone who's already done the job, and then when they come in and start their first day of work, their first month of work, their first year of work, just doesn't feel different? Right, and I get burnt out and I all of a sudden, I want something new. And either I leave the organisation and it becomes a retention issue, or I'm upset and it becomes an employee experience issue, or are you also able to build for the future with where this business is going where this function is going? Part of that is, as recruiters there's this exercise called the recruiter manager intake meeting. And the recruiter would go to the manager and say, give me the profile. Explain to me what you're looking for, explain me what this person needs to do. And the manager would often describe the work for how they did it when they were in that role, which is
Chris Rainey 26:20
already so far out. And I never really thought about that, like the idea of how I'm recruiting right now. And I'm, I am honestly, I don't mind saying I'm one of those people I'm recording for what skills are required now? At no point? No, that was a thinking about what are the skills that are going to be? Where's his role gonna go and evolve and the skills required for the future? So that's good, that's just us sharing that with me, it's
fundamentally now changed my mindset or how I view view that and moving forward, I'll be thinking about that for every role, like what are the skills not just now but where's this roles going and functions moving to in the future?
Jason 26:55
And part of the way you get there is by looking at data beyond your organisation. So what's happening in my industry, what are some emerging skills are occurring that I should be paying attention to. But the other way you get there is, let's say you're adding to the team in a role that already exists, or you're, you know backfilling to the team to a role where someone's moving on, if you have the ability to look at the work that person was doing, and the training they were taking, and the things that they were updating their profile in real time, you at least have a better gathering of leading data versus lagging data, which is the job description. The job title,
Chris Rainey 27:30
do you have a thing I wrote down was, like you said, a great analogy around a three legged stool of a talent marketplace,
Jason 27:36
talent, marketplace and talent intelligence, I get asked this question a lot. What does it mean for you? How does this actually work? How would you describe it? And I think we've we've touched on some of the pieces here, but I'll pull it together. And in a nice package with a bow, what what talent intelligence means, especially through the eight fold offering, is you're expanding your dataset with an external view of the world for what's happening in your industry, what's happening with benchmark companies, what's happening in the world of work, you're also using AI to make better sense of the data that's already in your organisation. So we integrate with a lot of solutions, ATS, HCM, suite LMS, all different types of tools. We are we do really well in making sense of unstructured data and pulling in data from disparate systems to then be able to understand your existing data much easier, much faster in real time. But the third leg of the stool, is that experience piece, what is happening with people that are interacting with my system. And to that end, we're hoping that system is eightfold because you operate on the eightfold system. We have a personalised career site, we have career pathing, we have an internal talent marketplace, we have manager succession plans, we have employee skill development plans. And as people are using the product and interacting with these modules, we're also learning from the data we're gathering from that exercise. So there's operational data that comes from this, how does this organisation make decisions? Where have people in this organisation gone? Right, that looks similar? What are some career paths people have taken? What training have they taken along the way? And where are they now. So you get a broader data set, a faster data set and a real time data set, working together to again, bring that additional information to the person in that role, whether it's the applicant, the employee, the manager or the leader, to inform them on all the contexts they may need to make a more informed decision before
Chris Rainey 29:39
let you go. You're covered so much. So first and foremost, so amazing. I'm sure our audience have got so many great insights and takeaways, I'm probably gonna have a lot more questions. So I'll warn you now that we're probably finding you on LinkedIn. They say use the messages, but what's sort of the one thing that you know, when it comes to talent marketplaces that people aren't, in your opinion, aren't talking about enough but really shouldn't be. I'm
Jason 29:58
gonna I'm on a break. Got up into two pieces, one of which is there's a number of jobs that are popping up that never existed before. We're seeing all these titles, even in the C suite of things that never existed before chief wellbeing officer, right, Chief remote officer, right? I just saw one with tick tock the other day chief Child Safety Officer, where are those jobs coming from
Chris Rainey 30:21
engineer, right, that wasn't even the right engineer
Jason 30:23
role there. Those those roles never existed before. And when we look to fill those roles, and we think about the skills that someone is going to need to do those roles, they're probably coming in a very hybrid career path, like mind pulling from someone who may have touched a variety of functions. Because these new roles kind of sit between worlds, right, they sit between HR, they sit between it, they sit between finance, they sit between other areas. So part of it is you need to have an understanding of skills and the work that someone's going to need to do and the tasks they're going to need to do to then determine what is this role actually going to be? What is the true job description? What is the profile? So part of this is the first thing is, when you think about becoming a skills based and becoming more talent centred? The conversation truly needs to be what is my talent capable of what is the work that I'm being asked to do? And what are the skills that are required? And how can I act as a talent advisor, to identify that talent and nurture that talent, until I formulate this work and this person into an official role. So again, going back to how we started the conversation, historically, a lot of HR work required the requisition at the beginning to get started. Some of this work with more of a talent centred approach, you're advising the talent and a process that more likely ends in a requisition right. And by by doing that, you're able to identify talent and nurture them until you feel comfortable that this role has been identified, and it's needed, and it's, it's verified. So it gives you the agility to prepare and adjust until the future unveils itself. Another another part of this is there's a lot of discussion going on around skills based organisations. But if you're also paying attention to the same conversations, and some of the books that are on my shelf back there, there's a lot of conversation around work without jobs. And I think the I think the conversations are somewhat hand in hand, because what we're doing is, as the job is changing, we're watching transformation right before our eyes, as the jobs are changing as the way in which we work, are changing the way in which we manage and lead has to change as well. And increasingly, when we talk about what is the benefit of talent intelligence, a big part of it is driving talent agility? Well, talent, agility isn't just the ability to go fast, it's the ability to change direction rather quickly. And this concept of work without jobs is, how can I optimise my workforce and use the skills that I already have to potentially redeploy them into other areas or develop adjacent skills to address a business challenge or a pivot or a disruption that either saw coming or didn't see coming but wanting to prepare for? I think that's a key part of this initiative around skills based organisations and talent marketplace, and understanding your skills inventory and developing people as a talent advisor. It's shifting the conversation, shifting the framework, changing the background for how you're making decisions, and then the ability to unlock value in an increasingly horizontal organisation. That is, learning from work and tasks at a much faster way than our historic record keeping of jobs and job titles and job descriptions has ever kept up. So this is what it means to to be aI enabled and have a talent intelligence layer, and to be doing a lot of these things continuously in real time.
Chris Rainey 33:46
Man, I love that. And especially in sort of the VUCA world I say that we live in right now you you have to be agile, to remain competitive, and to keep your own talent, right? To that point at all. Honestly, I feel like this is the tip of the iceberg, we need to do part two. So before I let you go, where can people reach you like personally? How can they reach out to you if they want to have any interesting questions? And also, where can they learn more about eightfold? So
Jason 34:11
a full day is the website we have tonnes of information on there, we have an entire learning library, white papers, case studies videos, we have our own podcast. It's called the new talent code, which helps organisations how to think differently managed differently and operate differently in this new future for talent. I'm the co host of that so you can find me there we release episodes every two weeks. We're recording Season Two right now. And as you mentioned, you know, just like most people in HR, you can easily find me on LinkedIn happy to connect answer questions, do any follow up, but it's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for the opportunity, Chris.
Chris Rainey 34:47
I appreciate it. And as always, everyone listening all of those links in description wherever you're watching listening, just click link in description. There'll be a link to the podcast the link to connect with Jason on LinkedIn and check out eight fall but honestly man, I really appreciate you coming on the show and I wish all the best until next connect I'm definitely got a new subscriber in me for the show as well thanks a lot
Jason 35:06
right until Until next time
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