How to Build a Talent Marketplace in 2025
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we welcome Jean Pelletier, VP, Digital Talent Transformation and Global Talent Acquisition at Schneider Electric, to explore how AI is reshaping talent mobility, workforce planning, and career development.
Jean shares how AI-powered talent marketplaces are breaking down silos, democratizing career growth, and enabling a skills-based workforce.
She also discusses how data-driven decision-making is changing HR, why internal hiring needs a transformation, and how HR leaders can future-proof their organizations by rethinking talent management.
🎓 In this episode, Jean discusses:
How HR can use data to make smarter, faster talent decisions
How AI is transforming internal mobility and workforce planning
Why talent marketplaces are key to career growth and retention
Why organizations must shift from job titles to skills-based workforce planning
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Jean Pelletier 0:00
What I would say, in your marketplace, you want to make sure you have three things. And I always talk about the three things you have market intelligence, which should be provided by your vendor. You need the employee inventory, which is someone filling out their profile. And then you need that job architecture, like I said, which is the signal from the business that says, These are the important things. And those three things should work in concert, in the same tool.
Chris Rainey 0:37
Do you welcome to the show. How are you? My friend?
Jean Pelletier 0:38
Doing? Well, Chris, good to be here with you. How you doing? I'm good.
Chris Rainey 0:43
One thing I say about you really random, that whenever I connect with you on a call, you make me smile. Oh,
Jean Pelletier 0:48
same here. You know, there's something we just kind of, we just kind of like to chat. No matter
Chris Rainey 0:53
how our days are going or what's going, we lead with a smile. And I know whenever I'm gonna have a chat of you, it's always gonna be at the very least, we're going to have a smile and have some
Jean Pelletier 1:03
fun. Well, that makes me feel good, and I know we're going to have something, yeah, exactly,
Chris Rainey 1:07
before we jump in. Tell everyone a little bit more about you personally and your journey to where we are now. Yeah.
Jean Pelletier 1:14
So it's like, without, without belaboring, and I think, you know, reflecting on just how to answer this. You know, as a kid, growing up, I always was like, Oh my gosh, you know, I got to go somewhere else. I got to do something like you always want you always like, comparing yourself, maybe to others. And, you know, as I wake up in my adult life, and I'm like, I was really blessed as a kid. So I had, and I used to use the word I would have had a typical upbringing. But what Schneider has taught me, and this global exposure is your typical is very different than someone else's typical. So I would say I had a blessed upbringing. I lived in a loving home. I had two parents. Still have two parents. My mom was a teacher. My father was a police officer. I have two older siblings, and I'm the youngest of three, and I was able to roam my neighborhood care free, and it was just a wonderful upbringing. And of course, back then, as I'm playing with rocks and sticks, I'm like, Oh my gosh, right, we gotta make we gotta make up games using the stuff that was around us, like toys weren't, weren't, like running over, just a completely different time. Fast forward. Today, I am married. I have a great partner. It is our 30th year anniversary this year. Thank you so much. He is just amazing. And from that, we have two kids. I have a son and a daughter. My daughter lives in Wisconsin and is a civil engineer, and my son is currently studying in Rome abroad. And they bring me joy. I love the people they are. And talk about putting a smile on your face. You know, you know when you talk to Robin, your daughter, yeah, it's just fun to engage her at such a young age. My gosh, when they get older, they're both in their 20s, 23 and 21 respectively. And there, it's just a joy to hear their minds and and think about what it is that they're, they're thinking of, and who they're going to be as these young adults. Career wise, I started out in a trade school. I used to have to do recruitment for a trade school. Later I became the director of that trade school. Went on to have two consulting gigs, and then ultimately worked in corporate environment for the last 25 years. One experience was in a lottery company. So we called it gaming a lottery company. So it was very digital, very, very digital. In that one, all you do in a lottery company is you're doing transaction processing. So in the 90s, and I'm dating myself, I was talking about data centers and cloud computing, and I was actually in the technology team as kind of a consulting engineer, whatever that meant back then. But I was really kind of trying to bring business requirements to life and maybe translating the technical aspects for the common user right. So now we would probably refer that, refer to that as a user experience architect. I got reorged into HR because we were working well, well, I had a two year refusal. I was in denial for two years. I don't work in HR. I do not work in HR. And it came about because we were, we were implementing this thing called Capability Maturity Model Integration, which is a software discipline,
Chris Rainey 4:19
okay, which you needed right before lean, and like, no
Jean Pelletier 4:23
same time as lean, but it was for software developers, okay? But in that capability, what you needed is you needed a professional training organization. And that's where I started. Because of my school experience, my trade school experience, I started setting up curriculums and whatnot, and ultimately they reorged me over into HR because they're like, you don't belong in the technology team anymore. You have to come over into HR and integrate because that's where learning was. And I was like, Oh my gosh, what am I going to do here? And I really just loved the technical platforms and whatnot then, and spent 10 years there doing a variety of HR jobs. Worked in learning. Ultimately, I ran HR. Before I left, and then I left that organization and came to Schneider, where I've been for 17 years and have had the opportunity to move around like every four years. So loving my digital talent transformation job, which is, again, one of the crazy jobs, like
Chris Rainey 5:16
what you did earlier in the career. Would you say that that's really helped shape where the industry has moved now, because you were already playing around with some of these tools and technologies, and also the mindset that now only companies are really starting to explore the digital transformation and AI and stuff like that,
Jean Pelletier 5:36
spot on. And what it made me think about is that human resources, you need to think about your employees as customers, right when you design, and you should be designing for the employee at the center, not for auditability, right? Not for compliance. And that, I think, is the shift that's happening in human resources, which is one they need to be more digital. And leaning into digital has been difficult, I think. But yes, I got to kind of, I think maybe leap frog, that journey from where I came from, and that non organic movement, right? It wasn't my choice to come over to HR. I got reorged into it, and I did. I always felt like I was a different kind of spotted zebra. I was over there, and I'm like, Why aren't? Why aren't we using technology to do this? And people like, No, we don't do it that way. Ultimately got to Schneider, and they were far more progressive with being digital, as is the industry right was up and coming, and tools became more user friendly. So I do, I do think my early career influenced where I am today, greatly in HR,
Chris Rainey 6:37
love that, and Snyder has always been known for world class HR practices and always ahead of the curve as well. Very bias, yeah, my interaction with your team over the years, right? But what would you say that is the number one reason that kept you in your, in your organization for so long,
Jean Pelletier 6:58
you know? So I have to, I have to lend it to Schneider culture. What I won't say is the people, because everyone gives that answer, but the people are amazing. The culture they've created is that you can go off and kind of experiment. They are not sedentary in their thinking, and we're always thinking about the next thing. So they will allow for experimentation. So that experimentation has brought me into I've been on about five different jobs since I've been here, and at least three of them, I wrote my own job description. Wow,
Chris Rainey 7:28
I've always been fascinated by that, because, obviously I've known many of your colleagues as well. How did, how did they do that in such a large organization, and still, like you know, still have that on entrepreneurial mindset, yeah, maintain that, like, what? Like, break that down for, like, practically. How do they do that? Because, yeah, yeah,
Jean Pelletier 7:51
it's so. So, first of all, systemically, we do have what I would say is a very operational approach to how we kind of manage jobs that are in the mainstream. Yeah, I think what we are willing to do, and I'm going to break it down for simple terms, as if you can identify a problem you want to solve and be very articulate in that problem that needs to be solved. And then, in my case, I was like, we need to think about right, how we put the user in the middle of talent management, right? And we figure out that problem to solve. You can then write your job description from there, because you need someone to kind of be working on that problem. I did that actually. I was a talent manager for one of our divisions, which happens to be the largest R and D division, and it had 30,000 people in it, and it was just me, and I went to my boss, and now we have a bunch of HR business partners in the division. And we could have said, I could have said, Hey, I need a bunch of talent managers in the division. And I'm like, well, that's going to create complexity. And I'm like, No, we need to be a little more simple. So I actually came at it using data, which was unheard of in HR. I'm like, Guys, I need a data lake. They're like, what do you need? You know? And I'm like, guys, because we only, we only do one year look back in our systems. We need to look back three years. Look
Chris Rainey 9:05
at back then. Was it like a Microsoft a zero or something like that? What did you
Jean Pelletier 9:09
it wasn't even that. It wasn't it was probably SQL, okay, it because we had to do a proof of concept. So what I said to my boss, and he's a he was amazing. He's still in Schneider, and he's still amazing. I said, here's kind of how I need to look at talent management. I need data so I know where to spend my time, because it's only me, but, oh, by the way, I need at least one more resource. And the person I went and hired was very, not only HR savvy, he was very new to the company, and I had some interaction with him in another job, and he'd been through our HR rotation program, but he had a bent on analytics and data, and that's where we started saying, We've got to draw some insights. That was not very popular back when I was in this job. When I was in that job, they're like, What do you mean? You need data. It's all in the system. And I'm like, no, no, I need insights. I need insights. So when you tell me that someone's. Talent. I need to show that they've been, they've been proving that over a period of time, not just what happened last year, that's recency bias. We want to be careful with recency bias. So that was kind of one of the areas where it was a great example of my old life coming into my new life, and my boss going, all right, what's the job description look
Chris Rainey 10:21
like? Kind of that goes on problem to solve. I mean, kind of goes to your job. Now, there's not many VPs of digital talent transformation, right? That's, that's not a common title, right?
Jean Pelletier 10:32
So, yeah. So what's funny is, you will find one in a, in a, in MasterCard because they took my title. So I was working with a lady. She goes, I'm gonna take that title. But is it? It? Is it's actually a lady that works on her team, Heather,
Chris Rainey 10:50
I literally interviewed him last week. Did you really not even joke? So, yeah.
Jean Pelletier 10:55
So, so lovely, lovely partners. They are great. They're a lot of fun. Um, so what's funny is, so I left that talent management role, and because I had kind of a dotted line reporting. So the lady that was running talent management, when I come out of that business division, she's like, we've got to do some transformation, and not only talent management, but talent acquisition. And I saw what you did over here. Do you think you could come into this team and take on this additional talent acquisition responsibility? So that's where we wrote, again, that's where digital talent transformation came from, because it bridged TM and TA. That's why we use the word talent versus why distinguish them? What? Why is that? Why
Chris Rainey 11:37
was that such an important decision to bridge that gap? Because obviously, many companies, they're siloed. Why did you, why did the business decide this is the right way? Yeah,
Jean Pelletier 11:46
so I think what would be the selling part on that, and this is where starting to think like an ecosystem, right? And that goes way back to my early years, kind of in the technology group, and putting the user at the center. When you're attracting talent, you might attract talent internally or externally. You have internal and external candidates. We were very siloed in how we looked at that in broad terms. It's very different all over. Schneider, right? So what I would say is we weren't standardized with how we described internal mobility or managed it, which is really where you would say talent management comes in, because you're already here. And then when we looked at talent acquisition. Talent Acquisition was only focused on talents we needed to bring in. And I'm like, it's the same experience. You could have a candidate short list with both internal and external people, and we were treating them very differently. And I'm like, that's not a good user experience. That's confusing for everyone. Put the candidate at the center. It's a ton of work. It's a ton of work, and roles and responsibilities varied. If you put the candidate in the center and stopped trying to decipher if they were internal or external, you then start to design a process for candidates, and you have to use internal and external as requirements. So now you had to start thinking differently about how you're going to build that process and and thus the digital talent transformation title. So I would look across systemically. You need to think upstream and downstream. It
Chris Rainey 13:07
also sounds like, I don't know, you told me it's more equitable to look at it that way, because there might, because I don't have this, because I had a friend of mine, literally, last week say to me, he called me and he's like, you know about HR, Chris. I was like, Sure, yeah, sure. I get really random questions my friends, is like, they've kind of put a lot of their leaders at risk in the business, right? So he's AI not sure whether he's gonna keep his job. And they created these, like, five on five GM roles, and he was applying for them, but then he found out that they'd all just been filled without even telling any one team, because they were two separate teams. So one was looking external, one one team was looking internal, to your point, yes, and they hadn't communicated. So these employees and my friends, been there for 20 years, found out by accident that these roles, the roles that he was waiting to hear back from had just been filled. And it's like, this is someone who's been with you for 20 years, and they ended like, devastated, because it was completely separate those teams, if that makes sense as well, that's like, exactly
Jean Pelletier 14:15
where we were. It makes complete sense. And for and again, put the employee in the center. He's devastated, yeah, and it's like, so what was the process? How did that get missed? Right? And that's exactly what we were trying to solve for So, and I've talked about this quite a bit externally, but that's when we brought in an open talent marketplace, and that was, yes, that changed the game. Because, think about it, if he had one platform to go to where, technically, you're supposed to post all these roles, and you've got aI matching you, versus maybe the inherent bias of the organization, because you've been there for so long now, I make it sound like it works perfectly. It does not. There's pros and cons to not having one, and there's pros and cons to having an open talent marketplace. Yes, but we changed the game a bit because we brought AI in. It disrupted the roles of an HR BP. So for example, HR BPS used to make those connections for folks, and now they're only showing up when there's a conflict, when, say, maybe a manager doesn't want to release someone right, or an employee wants to leave ahead of time. So so we we had to kind of change the organization on and people could still debate whether it's the right process or not. But if you put the candidate in the center, who is your friend, what process would you have picked? You might have picked to have an open talent marketplace where he could actually feel like he had an equal chance. Which was your statement? Do you feel it kind of democratizes? Yes, the system, it does, but it assumes that you're posting all your positions. We still struggle there a little bit, but we we've gotten pretty good at at posting the majority of our positions. There's always a confidential situation here or there. So I never say it's all play. I never say it's an all play, but you have to have a philosophy that says, This is what we do, and that does help internal talents. Now you run the risk, though, too, of saying no to those internal talents. And the question is, well, you have to have the right delivery method for feedback, and then you have to have an ecosystem that says, well, if I'm not ready now, what do I need to do to get ready. Some of that comes with tough conversations, because maybe you're never really gonna be ready for a role. Or maybe it's like, here's the training you can take, here's the mentors you can take, here's maybe some jobs you should go take, and again, that talent marketplace can can play a play a game in that, or play a piece in that it's not all perfect. It's about timing, right? You need the right opening at the right time for the right person, but it does change the game a little bit, and it changes the conversations you're having internally. Rather than two departments didn't talk, and that's why I wasn't considered, yeah, and that's 20 years of experience, right? That you just kind of mess around with. But there's, you know. So now the now, the kind of the strategies, to me would be like, Well, why did they go and kind of put these five GM roles back out on the market? What's changing in their ambition to take over the market,
Chris Rainey 17:21
my friend, as well as like, You got to look beyond that, the rationale behind that, obviously, he's just annoyed and frustrated. And like, I wish he does that, which is too right? He should be as well. Yeah. I mean to your to your talent marketplace point, you know, so many you're quite advanced. So I think Strad Electric's quite well known in especially amongst the community, the HR community, for building incredible talent marketplaces. Do you use those case studies in many events and online as well, but like you said, it comes with its challenges. So first and foremost, you covered a few things. But what's the main benefit of a talent marketplace kind of the top three, top three reasons, yep. And then we can jump into some of the challenges.
Jean Pelletier 18:06
Yeah, sure. I think the first is democratization around the candidate experience. That's the first thing, yeah, that is, that is the that is one of the main goals, right? The second thing is, most talent marketplaces work with AI, and it's at scale. Now there's
Chris Rainey 18:21
no break that down, because we throw the word AI out. But what does that mean? We do?
Jean Pelletier 18:25
We do. So what's happening is there's no human intervention until time of application, right? So what happens is, I am going to get served up the opportunities that look at my current profile. So as much as good as I've made my profile, my desires and goals and the roles that I'd might like to advance to. So now I've got a I've got my profile digitized, and now I have what, whether it's a project, a mentor, right, or an open position, where the AI is starting to match me, not any human and it's taking down the borders of a department, a country, and all the silos that just kind of come pre packaged in an organization, especially as large as ours, right? Smaller organizations some, sometimes you just know everybody. But when you're 140,000 people worldwide with we have the the ability that at least 100,000 are connected. So these 100,000 users can sit on this platform and at least let the AI, they can do queries. It's kind of like going on LinkedIn and doing a query without any of the bias or the politics. So I think that second thing in AI is important. Now, of course, you're going to make keep making sure that your model is advancing. But I think the third thing, and I just kind of allude to it, is it breaks down the silos, right? You don't know where to go. Some people have left the company, and then they're like, I want to take in that job. They just had no idea that it was that it was posted. They didn't know where
Chris Rainey 19:58
to someone externally when that's. Yes, skills already exist. It exists in the company. You just didn't know, because you wouldn't have, how would you know? So
Jean Pelletier 20:06
actually, let me, let me say, You know what? It digitizes your entire employee inventory.
Chris Rainey 20:12
Yeah, your skills, right? Skills based organization. Yeah, you got
Jean Pelletier 20:15
it. So, so people are like, well, you're an HR, and I'm like, Yeah, I spent the first 15 years of my career, not in HR, yeah. So you know, as we, as we kind of open the, open the chat with so we only know our human biases. I know you as this individual in my organization, right, or I don't. I have recency bias. I only know you as the most recent role that you've had, maybe your friend, right? Had came, came through quite, quite an ecosystem of changes and had different roles along the way in his company. So those are probably the top three. I
Chris Rainey 20:47
love that. It's interesting because the traditional hate CMS and platforms, they're still going off your like original CV, yeah. And that's kind of laughable when you think about if I look at my old TV from when I joined, because I was in my last company for 10 years. So if you're looking at the skills that I walk through with, what I developed, right, and you're making decisions on, you know, my future at a business, it's just it's so out of date,
Jean Pelletier 21:15
yeah, and why didn't you do that? Right? Because those old hcms weren't inviting to go in and change your information. The talent marketplaces are and they're more like, I think of like, some streaming subscription. You can go in and tweak your profile anytime you want. Like, I'll actually get on the phone with people and be like, What job are you looking for? Well, let's go look at your profile. Well, let's make that profile work for you. Like, what you just mentioned these three key words. I don't see any of this in your LinkedIn
Chris Rainey 21:42
profile, right? Exactly, exactly, yeah, yeah. I love that I mean. And I think one of the cool things is, is, and I love to hear what your experience has been, is empowering our employees to take charge of their careers, like for me in my previous career, I think I went through maybe five or six years before I got my first promotion, and it was always like, I'm waiting for someone's permission. Yep. So, yeah, tap on the shoulder, right? You don't really feel empowered. And I can, I know, and what's the feedback that you get from employees? So
Jean Pelletier 22:16
it's still mixed. I gotta, I've got to be fair here, because it doesn't always work wonderfully, but I think to your point, what we've done is Permission granted. Right? That's the empowerment. By just launching the talent marketplace, we're saying we aspire right, to make sure that we're driving internal mobility in the organization. So we've at least put a stake in the ground and sent a message. So I think employees, sometimes, not every employee gets spoken to. That can be frustrating. So we work on kind of our architecture. Sometimes employees might apply for jobs they're not qualified for, right? And that can be frustrating for recruiters, right? So you have to think about it. But overall, if you know how to use the system, we've get, we get great responses, people that are like, I got it. I know what this tool is all about, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it work for me, right? Versus you're saying I'm waiting for that tap on the shoulder. You can start to tap on your keyboard and start to get things moving so employees do like it. And we've had folks going, I never heard back, or I got interviewed, and no one made a decision. Now you're talking about the end of the process, which is, well, how did we handle you during the interview process? How did we handle you during the screening process? And again, that's the building, the skill set within the organization to make sure that you're having a good experience. Some people are better at it than others, just like with interviewing, but overall, I think the organization, they like. We like it. We like the concept. We get it, and it actually fits with who we are, right, the ability. We want you to stay, we want you to learn and grow, and you should be able to kind of be in the driver's seat for
Chris Rainey 23:53
that. How does it work, in terms of, like, upskilling? So if, for example, if I apply for a job, and I, you know, perhaps the team sometimes says, hey, you know, you don't have these skills. How do you create upskilling opportunities within the platform? What does that look like? Yep,
Jean Pelletier 24:10
yep. It's not, it's not as systematized as I'd like it to be. So there's a lot of work that we're doing. So one of the things I haven't talked about is I talk about this open talent marketplace being a great place for employees. We still have a business to run, and that's where the skills come in, right? Yes, as we're growing and as we're trying to innovate. So one of the things we're working on is refining our career architecture to be more have more specificity in it, which that means you're managing more data. So we're working on that right now, and we're gonna, we're gonna figure out that interplay, and that's the way for the business to, kind of speak in the open talent marketplace, like, here's the roles we believe are important. So if you're a user on the platform and you see that you're matched with something, it will show you what your gaps are. And now we're working on saying, Okay, well, how do I go fill those gaps? And that's probably. Be the leveling up that we're doing in the talent marketplace. You don't just launch it and forget it. You constantly have to think about, how do I enhance this experience to not only deliver for the employee, but what the business needs at the right time? In this case, it may say, All right, I need to go learn negotiating skills. You could go click on that skill, and it could pop up a mentor that might be good at negotiations, or maybe an education class. The education we've been working on an integration for that, okay, it's more a deep link right now, but we've got some great plans once we bring in that job architecture that has more detail to it. Because right now we're using a, you got it. We're using a very high level architecture and business titles right now, and people are finding what they need, right? First was democratizing opportunities, right? And we did it progress over perfection. And now we're saying, Gosh, we need to get a little more precise so we know how to tell people to spend their time for up skilling. Here's the other thing too. Chris upskilling, generally, your experience, education is one part of it. Sometimes you need to go do it for a little bit. Yeah, right. You need to practice. So just because you take a class doesn't mean you're gonna get
Chris Rainey 26:11
the job. That's the practice. Yeah? Yeah,
Jean Pelletier 26:14
you know. But you can go do volunteer things, external ones, good as well. Mentorship. The projects. There are projects out there because you can
Chris Rainey 26:23
post gigs in there, I'm assuming, like, same thing, Yep, yeah. How did you manage the cultural change of leaders and managers being sort of moving from being talent hoarders to exporters? Yeah,
Jean Pelletier 26:37
yeah. So we're still managing it. We're still managing so, you so, so we started with, there's pros and cons, right? There's pros and cons to not having this environment. There's pros and cons to having this kind of, you know, AI, democratization of of opportunities. And one of the things we needed to do is rewrite a mobility policy that we had used to have to stay in your role three years before you could move so we had to remove that barrier. So now we have no time and limit roles, right? You don't have to have a specific time enroll limit. Set that backwards time enroll limit. That doesn't make some people happy. They're like, I think that they feel strongly that you should have to at least be in your role for a year before you move on. And I'm like, Well, shouldn't that be ferreted out during the interview process? Yeah, right. It's we So, so should we actually filter you out systemically for that? So we do go over to the talent acquisition team and we're like, we need to find out, like, how long they've been in their role. If they're an internal talent, we should be screening for that, just like you would screen an external candidate, like, Well, tell me about your job. Now. How long have you been in that role? So it should be systemically managed. But some folks are like, No, you need to lock it down. And I'm like, so that's a con. So that was a cultural impact. You need to post the roles, like we talked about earlier. So we're getting better at that. Most people are posting the roles still probably permission
Chris Rainey 28:01
to promote post roles. Can anyone post roles? Can only certain, like managers, or just HR, when the talent So,
Jean Pelletier 28:08
yep. So when it comes to roles, that all comes from our applicant tracking system, okay, so nobody's in the open talent marketplace links directly. It links right over. Okay, so we're bringing in what's the demand, right? So a manager, you open a role, when you're a hiring manager, and you have a budget for that role, that's how you get open a requisition. So we know it's a legitimate role. And those just feed over, right? And then the AI starts to kind of source people that might not have been considered because we've got that employee inventory at play, and maybe I sit in marketing now, but you need my skill over in HR, well now we can do,
Chris Rainey 28:44
right? Yeah. So, yeah. So
Jean Pelletier 28:47
it's so it's interesting. So we had to change some policies. I talked a little bit about the changing and maybe your role, right? Like an HR BP was a connector, and now they're a conflict manager, and we removed approvals to apply for jobs from managers, not everybody, yeah. So again, pros and cons, right? So, yeah. So has everybody actually said this is a great idea? No, but we hold the line, you know, like they followed the process. So you, you need to understand that. And some people agree with it and disagree. And disagree, and we again, I can have examples on both sides, one where it worked splendidly, and one where it was just a disaster, but you don't undo it all because of that.
Chris Rainey 29:31
Yeah, I'd love, right, yeah. Well, looking back right for there's many leaders that are listening right now that are on that journey, early on, the journey of where you are. And by the way, like you said, it's there's no end destination. This is ongoing. But what do you wish you had known when you started that? You know now, yeah,
Jean Pelletier 29:52
we were rolling out country by country. It's hard to have an open talent marketplace where only one country is included. That's not really democratisable. Your experiences, but we were, we weren't learning as we went. So I wouldn't have done that. I wouldn't have you gotta, you gotta, kind of get ready for a big bang. And what I would have done is probably lunch mentoring first, because it's just pairing of people. It's easy, not easy, but it's easy. Well, it is easy. The AI is doing it, oh, it is easy. Okay, it is easy, right? So everybody kind of can, can have a flavor. I think the second piece is, when we launched, we thought there would be this wonderful shift in internal hiring where managers and candidates would just be talking directly. Well, we isolated the recruiters, and that just created complexity for no reason, like the example you gave. You got one group over here working on a list, one group over here working on a list, never the two shall meet, and somebody was left unhappy. So I would not, I would make sure that you understand the integration with your ATS, and that you include recruiters in this process, and they understand that their internal candidates are going to flow in. So those are probably the two main things that I would say, had we known when we first started, like, leap of faith, just do that. And then actually, there is a third one, which is, everyone's waiting for that perfect job based skills architecture we launched with business title,
Chris Rainey 31:17
yeah, I was gonna ask today, because, because many companies use that. They kind of wait until they have to have that in place, then they're going to do this. But then, to your point, you kind of start and then jump out the airplane and build your parishion on the way down.
Jean Pelletier 31:33
Yeah. So think of flipping a coin, right? 5050, so again, you're going to have some people with great experiences because they're seeing things. We've had a lot of folks go the stuff they're serving up to me doesn't even make sense, okay? But you can go find a mentor, still on your own right. You can do a key search and go find who you want. So again, make the system work for you. Don't think this is just figure out how to use it to your benefit. So it wasn't ideal, but my gosh, here we are, like you said, we're ahead of the market in many, many ways, because it's part of our ecosystem.
Chris Rainey 32:04
Yeah, even your peers in different companies, like reference Snyder ledger all the time in my conversation, not just saying that as a great example of a company that built a talent market. Because How long have you had it live now,
Jean Pelletier 32:16
since 2020 globally, we started back in 2018 and we were rolling it out, but things that we did, no time enroll, no manager approval. You have to post all your requisitions, and we launch with business title. When I speak to come Oh, and there's no performance data in the system, wow. So when I speak to other companies, they are skittish on those five points. They're like, Oh, we don't know if we could do that. And I'm like, oh, yeah, yes. So think about I came out of the technology team and I went into HR old practices. Of HR is that you need to manage someone's performance before they go looking. They have to be enrolled for so long you're going to disrupt the business. We've just proved all of those theories. Schneider has not collapsed because we don't have those rules in our talent marketplace, but the employees in the driver's seat.
Chris Rainey 33:04
And also, as you said, back to the business point, it gives the business to competitive advantage and the speed to be able to adapt in this marketplace, which is constantly being disruptive, constantly being you cannot afford to not have the capability to be an agile organization and create those gigs and move talent around and tap into different skills. It's kind of like a, kind of like table stakes at this point, and also the attention and the retention. Have you seen? What have you seen in any of your attention data since you
Jean Pelletier 33:35
Yeah, so I'm gonna sound like a financial analyst, because one of the, one of the things, when you think about the challenges right that we went through. We started this during COVID, like that's really when we went global, because everybody had to shelter in place, and we were worried about our retention going up. Because you're looking at the quiet quitting, you're looking at the great resignation. Our attrition stayed flat. So it's like when I asked my financial advisor one year, I go, what was the best year you ever had? They're like, the year we lost negative 2% and I'm like, what? They're like the market lost 10 and I'm like, okay, so we were able to be very stable during that time. There's more work for us to do, right? We need to bring in. We do have that skills based architecture that we're getting ready to really integrate at scale with speed.
Chris Rainey 34:21
How are you thinking of approaching that and creating that skills taxonomy? Because there's so many different approaches.
Jean Pelletier 34:28
Yeah, this is, this is definitely you cannot do it alone. Um, couple things is, we did partner with an external firm to kind of help us get over our own bias. But you need rewards. You need your you need your rewards team with you. You need your talent management team with you, right? You need your talent acquisition team with you. This is really a systemic change for us, and it took us a while. We've been at it for probably two and a half to three years, and we're getting ready to launch early next year, which we're excited about, because it's the backbone of every. Think we do. So I believe we've done the right impact analysis systemically, looking from how does this, how does this kind of structure go through the organization, learning, right learning. You just said, how do you up skill learnings like, I got to go look at my catalog now and make sure everything aligns back. We're scrubbing massive amounts of data and bringing it all back. So it's no under it's no small undertaking. But we're also looking for ways to bring in predictive analytics. We're looking for ways to, you know, again, optimize what's going on in the open talent market advancement. So it's, it's been a journey, and we're getting ready to launch it, and we're super excited and that that will bring new challenges, right? Because now it's not this open business title approach, it's far more detailed and decomposed. And in this case, I have a lot of folks that go, we talk about job codes a lot. We have 850 job codes in our current library. Today, we're going to, like, 3500 and I have a lot of people that go, that's not simplification. And I go, ah, let's talk about what simplification means when we design these things. I'm like, simplification is the fact that we had three or four of these catalogs swanning around, and we're now making it one unified catalog. Yeah, when you look at technology and the advancements in technology. If we were humanly managing 850 job codes, that would be a problem. We have technological advancements now that allow us to manage the 3500 right? And I go so simplification was around the standardization, the centralization and the democratization, right of this in our ecosystem, it sounds complicated because you're going you went from 850 lines to 3500 texts. There's no context. I said it looks complicated if you're the individual going row by row, yeah, but that's not, we're not going to go row by row, right? We need intelligent solutions that say, what are your questions? Who do you need? And here's the people you should be looking for the job code. So it's a shift in mindset again, that says maybe your job is going to change a little bit.
Chris Rainey 37:06
One thing we didn't talk about is communication. And how you communicate this, if you're talking about the talent marketplace, how you communicate it, brand it, launch it. What would be your best advice to people about how you launch this, right? Because you got to build a one excited about you got to educate people, you know? Yeah,
Jean Pelletier 37:26
so I'm actually going to go back to kind of like a transformation lead, right? Because it could be an open talent marketplace. It could be something you're doing and learning. It could be something you're doing for like agile HR. First of all, it's exhausting, right? Because you're constantly selling your story, and you're not selling it once to an audience. You have to be in front of them at least three times. It needs to be simple and it needs to be clear. And the one thing I've realized, for example, I spent some time in Chicago recently with a with a group in talent acquisition, and they're amazing people, and I had to go back to step one of some of the transformations we're doing in talent acquisition, because it's not something they touch every day. So sometimes the leaders and the people in the central team are like, Oh, we know what we're doing now, and they send the message out once, and they think it's done. I'm like, That's not change management. So at the open talent marketplace, right? We needed champions. We needed all the right materials. Those materials are constantly changing. What we didn't need was job aids, right? Because the tool should be that simple. You don't need a job aid. But we had to talk about why we had certain features. We had to talk about some roles that would be changing. And you're constantly talking to people about that, because people are constantly shifting roles in the organization, right? And they may be a manager, in one instance, a consumer of the tool. In the other instance, a recruiter. In another instance, a new employee, an employee that never logged in. So you always in transformation. Have to go back to the original messaging of the why and what problem are we trying to solve? Let me tell you why we're here today, and it gives a user a little bit more context. So transformation is super exhausting. There's several steps to it, and you find yourself you're constantly just going back to the first step. So we had changed management. We know all those plans, and we find ourselves still dusting off the original decks today and going into groups and talking about
Chris Rainey 39:25
it even five years later. How long years later now? Yeah, it's
Jean Pelletier 39:29
fine. It's close to five, it's five, it's five. We just started. But, um Yeah, because guess what, there's new leaders. Always new people have joined the organization and they're like, What is this like, how does this work? Your our our original intent of putting employees in the in the driver's seat for development hasn't changed. Yeah, our behaviors are slowly coming along with it. But like I said, pros and cons, not everybody's not everybody. That's all.
Chris Rainey 39:57
Is there a name we like specifically we call. An
Jean Pelletier 40:00
open OTM, open talent market. We call it OTM, yeah, okay, cool, yeah. We're working on, we're working on a little bit more branding. Yeah, when we bring in that job architecture piece, the more, the more precise job architecture. So people get re because now we have to, now we have to continually sell to ourselves, right? You've been using, you've been using it in 1s I'm like, Okay, now we're leveling up. Yeah. So now we have to sell, we have to we have to sell it all the time. It's like a product. It's like, why should you use us? Why should you call us? But it's OTM. We call it open town marketplace. So I probably mentioned
Chris Rainey 40:33
everyone listening, because I know the chats already gonna be like, what tough. Where is this? So it's close, right? I just realized that we haven't said it, and I know I'm gonna get loads of comments. Loads of comments. How easy is it for you to integrate the DOB architecture into globe? Super
Jean Pelletier 40:50
easy. So they did not have this offer when we first started. Oh, okay, interesting, right? So even gloat has come along with its features and functionalities, and you see everyone else trying to trying to race in the market to do it as well. What I would say, in your marketplace, you want to make sure you have three things. And I always talk about the three things you have, market intelligence, which should be provided by your vendor, which gloat has you need the employee inventory, which is someone filling out their profile. And then you need that job architecture, like I said, which is the signal from the business that says these are the important things, and those three things should work in concert, in the same tool, I found that if they're you're going to separate them, you're going to need more integrations, you're going to incur more tech debt, and you really kind of need that ecosystem at work. So they've got gloats, got a lot of competitors. Now, I think they were first to break them
Chris Rainey 41:43
out. They're
Jean Pelletier 41:45
coming out. Well, you said it earlier. It's table stakes now. Yeah, right. It's table stakes now. So people are going, Wow, this is, this is pretty cool. And if I want to retain my employees, I need to show them what opportunities we have and how they can develop right at scale. So, yeah, gloat have. They've been great partners on the journey, very open to listening. But they've got competition nipping at their heels, for sure, because everybody's like, Alright, now I get it, but I'm like, look for those three things, for those
Chris Rainey 42:15
number two and three. Why is number one so important the market intelligence? Yeah. And what do you mean by that? Just for people listening, yep.
Jean Pelletier 42:22
So, so let me think about so the market intelligence is you taking an outside in view of what's happening in the market, and it's bumping up against your job architecture. So for example, how, how we've been been working right with our vendor is, when we post a job, they help us understand what other jobs are out there that are most like that job, and what are those job titles called. And also, at the skill level, they'll be like this skill is on the rise in your community. This skill is on the down slide in your community. So now you're getting signals, so let's be an employee. Looking at my profile, and I look at all the skills that I've rated, and I see that 80% of them are on the decline. That's a big signal for me to go figure something out, right? Yeah, if I am sitting in that job architecture piece, and everybody calls it something different, if I'm sitting in that job architecture piece, and I'm trying to open a new role, because I think I need this new role. And I realized that, wow, I'm trying to open this role in HR, but the finance team, their data analyst, has an 80% match in skills. And I'm like, Aha, do I need a new role? Actually? Might I already have some internal folks that can fill it, and can I go maybe discuss how I work together as is an ecosystem? Here, the other thing that, if I'm learning and I'm looking at this business architecture space, I can see the mass amounts of skills that are going up or going down, and I can start to say, what program should I build around them. Now, Chris, that's my QB state. I still need to get that job architecture in, but those are some of the dreaming things that we're doing. And our vendors are well aware. I'm like, we need to be able to see this. And so think about it. If learning can look at your entire employee inventory, look at your market intelligence on what skills are on the rise. See that there's a miss maybe in your business intelligent group, and it's like you guys all need to go start learning this new thing. Could be more less predictive. Little more predictive when you when the whole time is super excited about bringing that whole triangle together.
Chris Rainey 44:35
I need you to make it like a little infographic for LinkedIn. Yeah, you should like, no one's, no one's your ones. No one's posted that yet. Yeah. I'm like, This
Jean Pelletier 44:46
is what we got to do. This is what we got to do. Oh, I've got it on some slides and stuff. It's never pretty. But I'm like, Guys, this is, this is what you need. This is what we need. Yeah, you know. And again, that has changed the game for talent acquisition. How? You now, everybody uses the word internal mobility. And I'm like, Well, stop and Schneider Electric now we're like, How is this all gonna work? Right? That we've got all these people now applying for internal roles. Like, what type of service do we give them? Because they're now all candidates slash employees, kind of interesting. So again, upstream rewards. Are you making us competitive in the market? Right? We've got this talent market please. We need our job architecture for the business needs rewards to make sure we're competitive. You put it all in the open talent market forum as well as in our applicant tracking system. So now we get internal and external candidates. Then how do we bring them in, onboard and keep them up? It's a whole systemic view of what we need to go do, and we're working on pieces of it. And I would say in in Schneider Electric, why I'm excited is we have a bunch of smart people. I get to be here with you talking about this. There's a bunch of peoples way smarter than me, right? That we get to partner with every single day. And have these have these conversations, and they're like, what if? What should you know? And it's a, it's a wonderful, it's, it's a wonderful exchange to actually see a solution come together. Because we're really, we're really coming up with, like I said, some end to end solutions, because everyone's going, I see it. This is where we're going. And again, starts with that problem statement. What problem are we trying to solve? I love the
Chris Rainey 46:21
UA just ended with that. By the way, that's such an important piece of people. Yeah. One more question on this that we didn't cover is, how does this, how does this change the role, and how does this change the role of a recruiter?
Jean Pelletier 46:37
Ah, yeah. So it varies depending on your model, right? So I'm going to give the example of Schneider Electric, because I think it's a good contrast. Is in some parts of our world, recruiters did not manage any internal hiring. Okay? That was handled by an HR BP. We now the change in Schneider is that recruiters will handle not only internal hiring, but external hiring. So now that means the role of the BP is slightly shifting. The HR BP would work with talent management. Now you have the recruiter working with talent management and the managers. So the recruiter really needs to be a talent advisor. They need to be informed of like, well, wait a minute, what job are you trying to hire? Is it the right job for you? What skills do you really need? Right? Are you willing to develop some of those skills along the way? And if you are, I might go source in different pools. Like, do you need a four year degree for this? Could we go to a trade school, so the recruiter now we also make sure that our ecosystem is sound. The open talent marketplace is one part of the ecosystem, but like we we do work with LinkedIn, and we have LinkedIn talent insights. The recruiters all have access to that. They need to be informed consultants. When they're meeting with a hiring manager. They're not order like, they're not order takers. And I would say, 10 years ago, it was like, range
Chris Rainey 48:05
like, I mean, it's a huge change. You must have invested quite a lot then, in terms of the training and development we did,
Jean Pelletier 48:13
we did so that's the second half of my role, right? One of the first things I came over, remember, I shifted from that organization of being a talent manager. And I came over and I worked with the lady that is actually head of many, many things. It was learning D, E and i, t, m, t, a, she's like, I need you to figure this out and make this ecosystem work. I'm like, okay, and not just me. She's got a smart team with her, right? But she's like, You got to help me a little bit with the tech. Bringing in the tech means I've got to upskill the recruiters and change their behaviors right now, the more data and intelligence we give them, they now need to know how to translate that for the managers. Huge transformation still going on. We have a wonderful leader. So since that time, TA is kind of split out from under that ecosystem, and I'm playing in the TA space right now, and have a wonderful new leader there and I, we did transformation 1.0, with this first leader, which included open talent marketplace. We're now doing transformation 2.0, which is really now focusing on a brand to hire funnel perspective. We call it our bold strategy, and really looking at data, using me and the data, what does it look like? Just like we're a marketing and sales team, right? I get a lead. How do I keep it warm? How do I take it through the funnel? How do I give it personalized content? How do I eventually convert it into an employee? That's the mindset shift of a recruiter. So it's pretty intense, and it comes along with employer branding, people, recruitment, marketing folks, sourcing folks, and we are touching on every single one of those changes, I will tell you. One of the things that kind of helped us underpin where we needed to go is I did use the Josh Burson maturity model for TA, if somebody's going, I don't, I don't know where to begin. It's a good place to go. And just read that. He's got a couple of info graphs and kind of a four. A level maturity scale and where I think we're tapping into level three, four right now,
Chris Rainey 50:05
nice scale. We'll have to do a part two, because we've even got into the ATS yet. That's a whole another podcast. Yeah,
Jean Pelletier 50:13
that's my current crazy. Yeah, that is my current crazy. I
Chris Rainey 50:16
love, love that we went down this rabbit hole. I mean, that's a fun I mean, honestly, I mean, like it was already been an hour time just went by so fast, but we had fun. I knew it from the very beginning. I appreciate Absolutely. I appreciate is there anything that we missed that people should know about, anything that we missed that you think actually, Chris or Richard, we should talk about this?
Jean Pelletier 50:37
No, they just need to make sure that they continue to attend your events, right? Because it's an incredible learning experience, right? It's a great exchange of ideas. Chris, it really is. I mean, there's so much we could talk to. I am happy to speak with anyone in and kind of riff about what's going on. I have lots of, lots of pals around the world, right, that I talked to, and it's great. They're like, what did you do? And how did you do? We haven't, we haven't cracked the code on a lot of stuff. But we're trying, right? We're trying. I'm like, we need to experiment. That's where I say HR is, is, at least my experience, not only in Schneider Electric, they were really kind of lean on experimentation, right? Because there are people at the end of this. So don't ever forget. You need to. Need to remember that we work with people in HR,
Chris Rainey 51:25
yeah. But there was also this sort of this perfectionism, though. That was that people kind of getting in their own way, like that's not launch until we have everything perfect and the business plan and all these things just never it's not gonna happen. It's like you just need to jump, you need to jump in at some point, yep, and learn to swim. Just, just gonna fall behind. And that's gonna call more cause more problems as well. You know, people ask me and Shane, did you have a business plan for HR leaders? Our business plan is that we just started, and we listened to people, we got feedback, we listened to customers, and then we iterated, and we built products based around what people wanted. We could have sat down right all down, or what we think what it was, or how we thought it was gonna go. And trust me, it went up, down, left, right, forward.
Jean Pelletier 52:15
You need customer you need real time experience and customer feedback, right? You just, you just need it in everything that you do. And I think you're right. I think people try and plot and plan, and I always say progress over perfection. I have since I love that like as a little kid, I'm like, good enough. I'm not so sure everyone else loves it. My
Chris Rainey 52:36
ones fell forward, but your one sounds a bit more positive. My ones fell forward because people was like, Crystal, you're so good at these things. I'm like, No, you just didn't see me fall over 1000 times before I was good. Yeah. And you have to be willing to fall over and not lead with your ego and let that get in the way as well, and understand that it's okay to fail. And actually, that is progress. It's defined as well. But listen, Michael told you very well. I gotta let you go, but I love our conversations. Congratulations to you and the team on the journey so far. I know it's just the beginning when you, when you do the skills taxonomy we do in part two,
Jean Pelletier 53:18
we're getting there. We're getting there. We are like on the on the cusp of launch. So best to you. And Shane, right, and thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Had a great time. Appreciate it.