Increasing Workforce Agility with Talent Marketplace
Prudential Financial have established a policy that requires a job advert to be open to existing employees within the company for at least two weeks, before it can be posted externally. Tangible policies like these are helping to promote internal mobility and capability building, central features of the organisation’s transformation journey, which prioritises talent agility.
“the HR team is front and centre in our transformation because we know it is about skills, about capabilities”
Wagner Denuzzo, Head of Capabilities for Future of Work, Prudential Financial
As a result, Prudential are seeing an 11% year on year increase in internal jobs being filled that didn’t require agencies or external posting.
David Green sat down with Wagner Denuzzo, Head of Capabilities for Future of Work at Prudential Financial, for a recent episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, to understand how Prudential are building workforce agility with talent marketplace. In this article, we’re going to look at a few of the key elements of their discussion, to understand:
1. How to identify skills for talent marketplace
Understanding and measuring skills data is one of the biggest challenges to organisations looking to implement a talent marketplace or skills-based workforce planning – but it is nonetheless a critical first step.
“nobody can start from not knowing and data brings the knowledge” Wagner Denuzzo
New ways to interpret skills data are helping to increase efficiency, for example using Big Data, AI and machine learning to elicit information from existing sources of data. IBM, for example, rely on AI and analytics to collect skills data passively, tapping into the employee’s digital footprint. Once this is complete, they use human experts to validate the skillsets inferred.
At Prudential, one challenge was the number of employees who have a long tenure with Prudential, who haven’t needed to update a traditional CV or Resumé in many years. To tackle this, their skillsets were inferred from different sources of information, including their LinkedIn profile.
Employees also have the opportunity to self-report skills directly into their talent marketplace system. They are encouraged to think broadly about how and where they have picked up new skills. For example, coaching their children’s sports team of writing a cookery blog all contribute to the development of skills that are relevant to work.
“All these skills you gain from your life experiences, we want you to add in because the work-life, workplace and personal lives blending are really conducive to creating new capabilities, if you ask me. I think it is very positive, actually.” Wagner Denuzzo
2. Why skills adjacencies are important for internal mobility and skills-based workforce planning
Traditional methods of connecting skills with job roles are unreliable. Research from Gartner shows that 40% of employees are frequently completing tasks outside their job description, proving that roles are ill-designed to capture the skills required for today’s workflows.
Using skills adjacency to inform internal mobility and talent redeployment in workforce planning activities is a significantly more agile way of connecting the dots between learning and work, that can accommodate the rapid changes impacting almost all organisations.
An adjacent skill is similar to a skill that you already possess and is, therefore, more straightforward to acquire. In a simple example, if you currently work with C++, an adjacent skill would be learning Java.
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The talent marketplace platform at Prudential is so intrinsically connected to learning and upskilling, that it is called “Skills Accelerator”. By understanding how skills can be transferred across tasks, roles and departments, according to skills adjacency, the talent marketplace platform can connect people to new opportunities that they are already qualified for. Or, if they do not yet have the requisite skills, the platform can support the individual in making a plan for their career and recommend learning opportunities to help achieve those goals.
Wagner shared an example of an employee who worked in customer service. She suggested that her in depth understanding of customer data and customer experience (CX) could be applied to HR, an area that she was interested in moving into. Not only is she successful in her new role as an HR consultant (called “Talent Catalyst” at Prudential), but her unique mindset challenges her colleagues in HR to think customer-first.
3. How to build sustainable employee engagement with talent marketplace
Employees require better access to information in order to understand the impact of the changing world of work on their own individual careers. Research from Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work show that the majority of workers (73%) depend on their employer for support in preparing for the future of work. Despite this, over half are concerned about their employers’ ability to do so.
Employees at Prudential are encouraged to own their own career, but the company is there to help them understand the changing job and skill landscape to inform their decision-making. Their talent marketplace platform showcases which skills are in decline and which emerging skills are necessary to acquire in a particular field or role.
Prudential supplement their AI-based talent marketplace platform with human experts in career management and coaching. Dedicated career partners are available to meet employees one-on-one, up to two times a year, to help identify individual career aspirations and related opportunities for learning and work.
“people see that now they have tangible ways of assessing their skills and tangible ways of seeing what is happening in the industry.” Wagner Denuzzo
4. The impact of internal mobility on culture
The typical benefits espoused by talent marketplace converts revolve around greater workforce agility and reduced recruiting costs on the organisational level, and better employee experience through increased opportunities and personalisation on the individual level (which leads to greater satisfaction, loyalty and performance).
Increasing internal mobility and depending less on external hires also has a notable impact on culture.
There is often a common misconception from business leaders that the workforce is easily replaceable and there is an available stream of highly qualified talent that can be turned on and off like a tap. This might be true for some highly specialised types of workers in niche industries, but in reality, it is incredibly rare. Therefore, the ability to successfully upskill and redeploy talent from within is increasingly important.
Regularly hiring people from outside also disrupts culture. With each new joiner, the culture of the organisation shifts, and it is easy to lose track of that culture if there is a great dependency on buying over building talent.
“You bring the talent that you need in specific roles that are critical for triggering new ways of working and doing things, but you cannot overload the organisation with all outside-in because then you lose track of your culture.” Wagner Denuzzo
As talent marketplace adoption continues to grow, a pervasive culture of mobility and agility will increase across the global workforce. Shifting roles every two years or so, moving horizontally as well as vertically for growth opportunities, and regular upskilling will become the norm. This is the only approach that will enable organisations to keep up with the rapid pace of change today.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caroline Styr is the Research Director at Insight222. She is a thought-leader, researcher and writer on people analytics and the future of HR. Prior to joining Insight222, she worked at the Center for the Future of Work where she was an advisor and in-demand speaker on topics related to the future of work. She has also held roles in digital services and transformation consulting at Cognizant. Contact Caroline at caroline.styr@insight222.com