Episode 56: Why Are So Many Companies Building Talent Marketplaces? Interview with Ina Gantcheva
My guest on this week’s episode is Ina Gantcheva, a Principle in Deloitte’s Human Capital Practice and a leading authority on talent marketplace. In Ina’s words, talent marketplace has the potential to change the way organisations think about three fundamentals. One, work, by fractionalising work for increased efficiency. Second, the workforce, by unlocking greater potential and value. And finally third, the workplace, by breaking down silos.
You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.
In our conversation Ina and I discuss:
The four P’s of iterative dynamic talent marketplace design. That is purpose, plan, program and platform
The role of HR in supporting the transformation and associated change management involved in talent marketplace
Examples of companies who have implemented a successful talent marketplace and the benefits they are enjoying as a result
The opportunities that talent marketplace provides to employees
How the pandemic has helped reshape the approach to talent marketplace
Whether talent marketplace will mean that jobs won't exist anymore.
This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in HR transformation, internal mobility, workforce planning, people analytics and HR technology. So that is Business Leaders, Chief HR Officers and anyone in a people analytics, learning or HR business partner role.
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Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Ina Gantcheva, Principal in Deloitte’s Human Capital Practice to The Digital HR Leaders podcast. Ina, it is great to have you on the show.
Ina Gantcheva: It is great to be here, thank you, David.
David Green: I am particularly excited today because we are going to be talking about, I think, one of the most exciting concepts in our space at the moment, the talent marketplace. Ina, can you provide listeners with first of all, a brief introduction to your background and your role at Deloitte. And then we will start getting into the talent marketplace piece
Ina Gantcheva: Yes, absolutely. So my background is actually a broad background in organisation and workforce transformations. When I think back, it has been over 25 years working with global clients and I have helped transform their operations, very much with a focus on the workforce and the talent aspects of it. So pretty much the journey from talent development, talent management and now talent mobility and all the changes that we see future of work is creating now. So my role with Deloitte, is Principal in the Workforce Transformation Practice and leading also our services of how we help clients to enable talent marketplace as part of future of work and how to transform the operations to get the full value of it. It is a new and exciting place and I am very hopeful and excited about the opportunity it creates for our clients and for all of us, as both HR professionals and as the consumers of the consumer market.
David Green: It is certainly an exciting concept and we are going to talk through it for an hour, 45 minutes together. For our listeners who might not yet be familiar with talent marketplace or they have maybe heard different interpretations of what it is, can you give us a quick introduction as to what it is?
Ina Gantcheva: Yes. You also noticed there, we call it talent marketplace, opportunity marketplace is another label that we use at Deloitte. I will try to simplify and say what it is and why it emerged. It as a new operating model, in some places it is called new organisation design or next gen talent management. It is pretty much a different way to look at supply and demand of talent in the organisation. So it is based much more on market dynamics and that is why you see the marketplace label, with the supply and demand. The interesting label between talent or opportunity, it is because it is not just about the movement of people and talent, it is also the opportunities that people explore. So I think that both of those labels are relevant. Sometimes you see it in plurals and sometimes you see it in singular. I think we started with the marketplace as kind of establishing the foundation, but we also believe that as it evolves and more and more companies start to set it up, it also starts to evolve to talent marketplaces. Which will be more specific about the exchanges of particular activities and roles.
When we think about what is different about it and why did it emerge? We see a lot about the need to start thinking about work differently. Future of work has started to transform organisations, we talk a lot about digitalisation, which also drives the different way to talk about productivity and innovation. You have probably seen, Jeff Schwartz just published the book “Work Disrupted.” So we are moving to a very different direction on work. That is one part of what happens in organisations, right? We get work, if the work is disrupted we get new ways of doing it. Also we see the change in workforce expectations, we have been talking about longer careers, the 60 year career. But we also look from, you are probably familiar with the latest human capital trends we saw from last year 2020 and now in to 2021, the importance of how people want to have more belonging in the organisation, how to look at your potential. So it is probably starting to look at those people's expectations about what they get from their work experience. When we connect the work disrupted and talent expectations evolving, we come to a different way of how that connection happens and that is where I think talent marketplace becomes the next generation solution.
David Green: Great. Well, we are certainly going to get into the details as we continue talking. Obviously it has a big impact, potentially, on HR. Why should HR professionals pay attention to the developments in talent marketplace or opportunity marketplace? Why is it important?
Ina Gantcheva: It is one of the most exciting and novel ways for us, when you think about HR being at the forefront and HR driving the workforce strategy and the enablement of the organisation. This is where talent marketplace starts getting really, really relevant because how work is done and how people get the work done, is the intersection of what HR can enable.
So when we think about the benefits of what talent marketplace starts to create for the workforce about these new opportunities and use of skills. People bring a lot of experience to their current role, but most of the processes that we have been using so far, focus on somebody working in a role and then preparing for the next level role. And so you frequently, as we have seen into multiple statistics, if people don't see a way to grow and/or to find the next level role in their organisation, because there is no visibility, there is no no clear channel or they are not sure how to go about it, or they feel like they are going to be betraying their team or their managers with their desire to do something different. They will look elsewhere. And again, the cycle of how you get somebody faster productivity, especially as markets are so dynamic right now. This is one lens.
We also look at how HR can help the business be nimble and really reflect the needs of how the business is moving. This becomes another dimension. How can HR be on the forefront of thinking about the work, the changes to the market and the allocation of the work. Also another dimension is how HR can continue to innovate and have data to know where things can innovate. The talent marketplace gives this really interesting intersection about all these dimensions.
I was looking at some of the statistics that we were able to capture through looking at human capital trends and we noticed that when we talked about talent marketplace, internal mobility in the organisation seemed very important. Over 70% of those respondents said it is important for us. But only about 30 had things in place, like different programs in motion, to address that. So I believe HR is not surprised but actually HR is intrigued and excited. Probably the question we see most from our clients, is about how to go about it, what is different and also how to accelerate?
David Green: And I suppose if you look at what it potentially offers, it goes right across the whole remit of what HR offers. So, in HR, we are concerned about retaining our best talent. We are concerned about mobility, we are concerned about development. We are concerned about closing skills gaps. We are concerned around giving people opportunities in their careers to develop, we are concerned about giving them opportunities for rotation, for all these types of things and talent marketplace can encompass all of this.
Ina Gantcheva: Exactly, exactly and I am going to add also another component. There is a big component of the workforce and the talent, this is what you articulated so well right now. But this also brings the opportunity for HR to talk about how work is being done, which is the business side of the equation. About how we can conduct what activities need to happen, how we can organise work, not just in stable, static, siloed roles of processes. But how the work can be done, leveraging different expertise. When I mentioned earlier about people bringing a variety of skills to their roles, how can we tap into their entire experience? How can we help people build what we call, adjacent skills? Things that are easy to develop for people with a similar portfolio to continue to grow the capacity in the organisation. How to deploy that capacity fast. That is a conversation that HR can also start to own and drive forward which again, gets it to the next generation to a different platform. All of that is powered up by the way that the talent marketplace operates, the supply and demand of work and skills and also the AI that allows that matching to happen in a much more real time, with a lot more data and more analytics than any other time that we have had before.
David Green: The opportunity is big and the need is important but it is clear that implementing a talent marketplace or an opportunity marketplace, it is a transformation program. It is not a one-off exercise.
Do the organisations that you work with have concerns about the scale of the journey to shift to talent marketplace? And if so, how do you alleviate some of those concerns?
Ina Gantcheva: Yes, that is an excellent question because depending on how you look at it, it can feel like relatively easy and not that transformational. It’s like, yeah, we are just going to do a little bit more movement in the organisation, we already have some internal mobility processes, most companies have some programs around that. Then on the other end if you go scaled up, it starts to become so big, so complex, so complicated and so cumbersome that it can feel like is this the right time for us to embark on it? What we work on with our clients is actually trying to find the middle ground, to say it is a journey and as with any journey, it starts with specific steps. The opportunity of the journey, the opportunity of the benefits, which you can realise not only when you reach the destination, but also as you build it are enormous. It is very important for competitive advantage, for internal positioning, for just realising the value of the people capacity and the organisational capacity so again, going back to the very strategic role that HR can play. But you asked me, how can we guide? What we see with clients who take the journey, where they focus to minimise the complexity and make it organised. I would say there are probably two things when I think about it. One is start with a pilot of the MVP and have a roadmap because those are the two things that helps to organise how we are going grow up.
Sometimes our talent programs run as design and deploy, kind of like a one dimension, then talent marketplace is more because it has a technology component about it as well. It actually starts to come in waves, it starts in these agile projects when you start to build on each other. So when you start with each one of them, it is easier to build up.
And in the article that we published in September, we talked about those first four steps the purpose, the plan, the platform, the program. The reason we call them out is because we found that when you sequence each one of them in the right way it helps to address the dimensions and really becomes a roadmap.
David Green: And for those listening, we will put a link to that article in the articles that actually support this podcast as well, so you will be able to click into it. Yeah I guess if you spent years trying to create a talent marketplace and then tried to do this big bang implementation, you would already need to iterate and update it. So this new way of working with HR programs, which maybe hasn't been traditional in the past, is start with a pilot, get feedback, iterate, improve, communicate. It almost creates some excitement and some momentum around this as well and learn, learn from the pilot.
Ina Gantcheva: Yes, exactly. A lot of programs start with the pilot, so I don't want to say that the pilot is the new step because many, many HR professionals will be like, yeah we pilot a lot of things. It is about what you pilot and how you monitor it. I think this is the difference of what we see from just the traditional talent process and how dynamic the supply and demand dimension of the talent marketplace is. The importance to really stay very close to it, almost like a product launch, to fine tune, to get insights, to continue the momentum. You will hear me repeat it over and over again but we see this as the engine behind it, because the more supply there is of work projects, full time roles, depending again on the MVP as that becomes important as to where do you want to start, what you want to add and the match of people who are interested and able to complete that. So there is a win-win between the business leaders or the managers who are looking for help with their work and the employees who are looking for opportunities for growth, for expanding their skill-set, for additional allocation of their capacity again, depending on the MVP. That dynamic needs to be continuously fed because in any marketplace, you have probably even seen some of the materials we put out there, it is a true marketplace. When you have the goods and you have the customers, the more there is the proper exchange and the excitement, the more that happens. So the role of HR starts to change and one of the things that we noticed and that is important to emphasise is the importance of high customisation, speed and don't do it alone. Because HR needs to truly stay in the forefront to guide and to be visible. What we find is that when we work with our clients, we look at the opportunity of how we can help them accelerate support and how we can help with guiding them on their journey, so they truly can allocate their own capacity and their own insights in the fastest way.
David Green: And I guess, as you said, it is a product. So one of the key things about a product is people need to use it.
Ina Gantcheva: Very much so. It has product dimensions but it also also has CRM dimensions because when we talk about change management you hear many, many times people talk about it and we absolutely emphasise it because change management is absolutely critical. But it is the change management that brings the different dimension of much more of a brand and product launch, in addition to the classic change management of engaging stakeholders and the right messages. We noticed this, in Deloitte we actually have a talent marketplace. We launched it three years ago, so some of the lessons learned that we bring to the journey is not just from knowing how business operates it is also from us working on our own journey with that. We took a look at different users and the different personas of the new hire, who is ready to jump on a talent marketplace because they are excited and they don't have the solid network. To the person who needs additional time, because they want to make sure that they are fully utilised. To the person who wants to learn new skills. To the Manager who needs work. The skeptic who is never going to use it or to the person who wants to test it and the people who are also extremely tech savvy and have been using crowdsourcing and are excited to be part of it. Those people who are just starting to learn how to think and use some of these tools. So when you start approaching it from that angle, you start to see how different the customised approach is. One more thing to call out here is that the value and the beauty of talent marketplace, when it operates from an end user perspective, is the customisation. The highly personalised profile experience, which we see the AI enables and the AI and machine learning allow it to . Therefore how we enable it is also highly customised so this is probably the place that we see HR needing the most additional support because these are not necessarily capabilities that HR has or normally would have, to guide something to that fine tuning customisation, branding and positioning. But an injection of that at the beginning, that is what will start to drive the engine.
David Green: Certainly one question I know I get asked a lot about talent marketplaces is, what is the MVP? How do you get started? How do you come to the MVP or minimum viable products? Do you have any examples from your experience that you can draw on?
Ina Gantcheva: When we look at the MVP, definitely the MVP has to be tied to the business needs. So we have talked about why we are doing it, what we want to accomplish and what are the immediate priorities and the longer term priorities tied to our business.
In our case, we were looking for ways to redeploy people faster and to utilise their capabilities. So there was a combination of both and we definitely need to look both at the needs and the leverage to get this for these people. But those were barriers because we looked at not only, what will enable people, which frequently we focus on. We actually looked at what will stop people using it. This gave us a very different insight, again the CRM approach to the process. To look at the business needs, the customer focus, to look at how we are going to tie to it. Very much focus on when you are looking at a MVP, what are some of the policies? And that is when we found a lot of the barriers. People were uncertain of what they could do or how they could do it and in some cases, we found when we worked with our clients, it was not that the policies are not available but that the people don't know what they are. They don't know where to find them or they do not reflect this dynamic ability. Very much about the need to do this rapid modification is very much part of the MVP.
So, those would be probably the key ones I am going to call out as most relevant because they start to generate a lot of insights of how to continue to scale it up.
David Green: Going back to the change management piece, just thinking obviously HR has got a central role in that, but I guess there is a huge change management around Managers. Managers need to be advocates of this presumably so that their employees or their team members that actually want to participate in this, can do so feeling that they have got the support from their Managers.
Ina Gantcheva: Yes, yes and yes. The reason for that is because Managers are one of the parties. They are the ones who generate the supply. They are the ones who need the work, they are the ones who also groom talent. So therefore creating value for Managers is important and helping them really be able to see the value for themselves and have the skills to think about it.
Earlier in our conversation I called out, work disrupted and how work starts to be done, not just in full-time roles, but also in projects or in supplemental activities. This is a new frontier for many organisations and for many Managers they need help to think about the work that way. This is where HR has a big role to help Managers to think about the work that way, organise the work that way, put the policies in that way. So therefore, when you have something to fill in, it is actually going to be easier to start the journey. Also the mindset shift about what the Manager can do and accomplish, become a groomer of talent, the ability to actually tap into a network of people. One of the stories that we heard from one of our clients was, a Manager was sharing their experience that they really needed a specific skill-set and when they eventually put the project on the talent marketplace, they were astounded by the talent that existed in the organisation to do that. They said, I would have always gone to my network and I felt like I am in the land of scarcity and most Managers operate with a lot of scarcity because our networks are relatively siloed. Our networks also stay within the people we know and in the functions we operate in. When you look at the land of plenty, which is actually what the talent marketplace creates, when you can look at all the capacity and capability in your organisation and who can step in and help you do that. That becomes a huge role for HR to support Managers.
The other part I want to call out about Managers and change management, is the voice of those who find success and the voice of leadership. I am going to bring it back to the MVP in the very pragmatic things that tied to change management to work. In our case in Deloitte, we found a significant uptake when some of our key leaders, our consulting CEO, our top leaders talk about my gigs not only about how supporting can visibly explaining it, because that is where we started, we started with the buy-in and the business reasons for that. But also they followed up on our next talent marketplace at our town hall with the stories about what happened between them asking people to join and what happened afterwards. The Leader was saying, we need to do some work and how about we test the talent marketplace and see what happens? Because employees saw the opportunity to it's okay and you can try and we can learn together. So that is where the value of HR in being enablers, finding what the concerns are and starting to address them, becomes so critical.
David Green: I think you have spelled some of them out already, but I think it would be helpful to maybe summarise some of the benefits here.
What are the benefits to organisations who implement talent marketplace? I think there is probably a lot, but I will let you talk about the main ones and can you draw on any examples as part of that as well?
Ina Gantcheva: Yes. First of all, let's talk about re-deployment and I want to call out re-deployment because it is particularly relevant right now as we go through the Covid-19 pandemic and how we can realign people to both during the crisis of the pandemic as we were shutting down, but also how now organisations and teams are going through the acceleration from where we recover and arrive at a different place. So access to knowledgeable skills are how you can re-deploy the skills and do this in a very organised way, we have data for that. So this is something that allows us to leverage capacity and put it in the right place.
We also see companies that look at how you can partner within the organisation, but also across organisations and do you have actually the opportunity to think about balance across different companies. We saw a lot of this happening at the beginning of the pandemic, with re-aligning employees from different areas.
The other place that we talk a lot about is actually, I am going to call this the dimension of belonging, of actually retaining talent. Even though we are going through another, very different market conditions, retention of talent is going to be a very big priority, especially key talent. So what we found is that people start to look for different roles, especially people who have been in their roles for three to five years, because they are ready for the next challenge. And we anticipate that Covid-19 is giving a lot of opportunity for people to think about what they want to do, how to do things next. The virtual work is starting to affect how people plan their next steps in their careers. So how can you retain that talent and give people the opportunities to find ways to develop. So that the different skill allocation, the retention of talent, the opportunity to really break organisational silos and this is something that companies have been struggling and working with for many, many years. This is another dimension and another lever to do that. Because in this case, you look across the organisation. The ability to support diversity and inclusion efforts and to give access to diverse talent because here you are really breaking the networks wide open and you are looking at what people bring to the table.
So those are some of the very quick ones about, collaboration, networking, breaking of silos, better utilisation of talent, increasing productivity. You have probably heard a lot of stories about how clients talk about the improvement of the capacity in your organisation, that unleash productivity. One of the consumer goods companies that talks about it, they unlocked almost 20,000 project hours when they started looking into talent marketplace.
Those to me are such exciting moments and such exciting stories. When you can hear the individual stories saying “I was able to find a dream job and I don't have to leave the company and leave my team” to people saying “we have actually tapped into capacity and we were able to redeploy our people.”
David Green: And I guess it is speed as well, isn’t it?
Ina Gantcheva: Speed comes, yes, definitely. Access to data so we can make decisions based on data, I think that brings the speed and also the ability to see how things react. And course correct, how people react, how the program is going, that is another thing that brings speed.
David Green: So you mentioned one example, they are a consumer goods company that unlocked 20,000 project hours, which is pretty impressive. What does an effective opportunity marketplace or talent marketplace look like? And how can we measure it? Obviously that is one way, what are some of the ways that we can measure it?
Ina Gantcheva: Yes and then that question of measurement is always very, very important of where you start to look at it.
So on the capacity side, you can definitely look at productivity hours, you can look at new projects and you can look at retention. Also then you have to think about what do I start to track so I know if my talent marketplace is getting the right momentum. When we talked about the viability to start the supply demand engine and you start looking at data such as, the number of new registrants, the profiles that people completed. In your target population, how much is your adoption? How many projects were posted and how many hours are those projects actually being allocated? How close is the matching, what is the length of time a project is staying open before it gets closed or gets abandoned? The diversity of users, when you look at how people look for different business units.
So it gives you a variety of statistics that you can start looking into how can I look at the measurements and therefore drive the results.
David Green: And I guess ultimately if you are looking at one of the big challenges for organisations, if we are thinking about skills, is they don't necessarily know what skills they have got in the organisation. I guess talent marketplace can help provide more information around that and that obviously informs strategy around build versus buy, in terms of talent, but also potentially around acquisitions and location. So it really opens up and provides information that supports all of those really big business decisions.
Ina Gantcheva: It does and it really opens the door for another conversation and that is something that is very hot off the press on our end, when we talk about workforce ecosystems. We talk about build, buy or borrow in the workforce and with the talent marketplace and this insight, HR and business leaders will be able to look at the workforce that is available within your organisation, but also talent and skills outside your organisations. So the boundaries of not only organisational units get blurry and dissolve, but also inside, outside your organisation. When can you bring in that expertise, how you can deploy it. So you have access, when I talked about the land of plenty, you have access to skills and capabilities that are way more than what you can see immediately just in your department or the people who are in a similar department in another company.
David Green: So we talked a bit about measurement. Obviously implementation is a big challenge around this, we talked about ways in which you can do that, piloting and starting small. What are the key actions that you have seen in standout implementations, especially after maybe the talent marketplace has been launched, in order to maintain momentum? So I won't put words into your mouth, but I bet some of this is probably about communication.
Ina Gantcheva: It is about communication and I am going to call another one, it is also about innovation. So the communication is about obviously visibility of success and the stories, because a talent marketplace as in any product launch, you want people to use it because they hear positive things about it and they hear those specific stories.
Earlier I mentioned all these types of personas and those users, the skeptic and the fast adopter, but there are so many nuances there. The more people hear stories and the more people can be very tangible of how the unique problems get solved, that gives hope and it gives the opportunity to pick up some interest. When the information is available and it is easy to access, which means some reminders, some continuous easier workflows to get to that information. Adding it to the flow of work makes it easier for people to use it.
The innovation I want to call out is because when people ask the question, well we have a well-functioning talent marketplace, so how do we know what is next? The next is actually the talent marketplace starts to open new doors for using that supply demand in a different way and in very different areas for the very different capacity. That is why we call it the next generation because if you start seeing that innovation, that will also continue to drive adoption. It becomes very much a cycle when we have the dynamics of end user value, to business process value, to opening new doors. So that is why at some point it becomes much more self-sustainable and that is why I want to call HR to be at the forefront of it, being able to really drive it and being able to accelerate that journey. That will create a huge benefit to your organisation.
David Green: We have already talked a little bit about the pandemic, you obviously highlighted the benefit of redeployment because as you said, that is really pertinent to the moment. When we actually caught up a week or so ago, you actually made an interesting observation about how the pandemic has changed the way that talent marketplace should be approached. Can you expand a little bit on that for our listeners?
Ina Gantcheva: The pandemic created so many disruptions, disruption is an understatement, it both created the opportunity to know that work can be done differently and remote work is possible, but it also made it so important for us to know how you maintain your network, how you maintain opportunities in a virtual environment. How do you really think about doing work being a remote worker and staying connected to the organisation. How do you maintain the culture, how do you have access to the mentors or to people that you would normally meet during the course of your day or the insights that you get just being at work now that everything is going through zoom or different channels. So that kind of combination between how to get this paradox of there is more, but the old ways don't work. That is when a talent marketplace can help because a talent marketplace is not only about work and finding projects, it is also about ways of thinking about skills and building those skills. It is also opportunities to be a mentor or to search for mentors and get connections. It is an opportunity to put your own skill set and your own interests out there and see how the engine will help you find the right connections. A lot of the work is being done through AI, which is something that we never experience when we are in the same marketplace, but virtually, it works really well. It also starts to break the pockets of people that we normally interact with and to me the last thing is it is the invisible dimension that we bring our past experiences. We talked about skills and how skills become so important, we see the skills usually tied to a current role or to the way we experienced the person in our latest interactions. What else do they bring and how can we connect those dots?
David Green: And I guess, it is probably dangerous to prophesise what might happen when hopefully the pandemic is over, but it is probably safe to assume that we are not going to go back to the old ways of working and we are likely to be depending on the roles and skills that we have got. Companies will likely be working in a more hybrid environment, so I am guessing that this is going to evolve the talent marketplace, maybe speed up some of the ideas and concepts that we were thinking would be coming next. Are you seeing some of that playing out already?
Ina Gantcheva: I would say yes, because we see that work is done differently. People have different expectations. We talked about work disrupted, that we will see work being done in a re-engineered much more modular different way. So that is not going away. So we need to have a technology, a process, a platform to capture that. People's expectations about unleashing their potential, this is one of the big times that they are talking about how you realise your potential, how you start to learn in the flow of work, how you start to have this continuous growth. Even the short life span of technical skills as they evolve. The importance of these innate human capabilities. How can we connect that continuous dimension, this continuous development, in a way that both meets the needs of the business and meets the individual perceptions and the individual needs. Those things will continue to drive it and therefore when I think about the talent marketplace, it becomes really the underlying accelerator, the underlying enabler.
David Green: I couldn't agree more. We have looked at talent marketplace, quite a lot from the perspective of the organisation and of HR. Also we have touched on what it means from an employee perspective, but let's dig in a little bit more around that now. What kind of development opportunities are workers today looking for, because I think it is pretty broad, isn't it? How are careers evolving to meet the demands of those workers and then how does the talent marketplace support that?
Ina Gantcheva: So it is interesting that you ask this question because depending on which group of employees you look at, those needs will be different and they will be shifting. There will be people who are looking to build more skills and expand their skills.
There will be people who are looking to deploy their skills and get more fulfilling, more utilisation of their current skills. So when we look at the range, we see people are starting to look at ways of how they can continue to expand what they already have and get more momentum with the work they can do. And this is where we think about projects and ready now talent for certain work. That definitely was one of the lessons learned that we had in our own piloting of the my gigs and also looking at the lessons learnt as we continue to scale that.
There is also the need to say, I want to test different areas. So I am looking for learning opportunities. I am looking to supplement, to be part of a project, to be a component of something that will give me the exposure and will help me learn it. This is an interesting dimension because what we found is that it is important also to position the mix between Managers looking for the, ready now people and when you have the situation in which they have access to learners, there is a disconnect with a mismatch of expectations and vice versa. Learners are looking for quick projects or hours allocated to something so that they get the exposure and everything they find is full time or a long term project and they are like “I am not ready for it” or “I’m not interested in that.”
So that is why when we went back to the conversation about how HR can help to have the range of options, that becomes really important. When we have this mix of both, what can I deploy now and what can I learn for the next level? What insight I get about my readiness for the next level role, that is another dimension. We talked about it very briefly, the career dimension, because people are interested in exploring different careers and the beauty of the talent marketplace is that it gives insight into how good of a match you are to different careers, different roles or different tasks. Therefore how it can inform your development plan and how it can inform it to learning, so there is a really good connection about what resources I can tap into. How can I best spend my time in up-skilling myself and which people or which projects can help me to do it, through mentoring or learning on the job. That full cycle about learning when we talk about, how can I learn in the flow of work, how can it be very pragmatic? That is another dimension and depending of where employees are in their own development, that becomes another insight, another plan, another opportunity to connect with their Leader, with their coach, with their own network and plan how they can grow in their organisation.
David Green: I just think the opportunity it offers to employees is so much because we are moving from what has traditionally quite rigid. You know, you are doing a certain job, you have got certain skills, you can apply for another job within the organisation. You generally won't get it if you haven't got the skills, you need to learn the skills. Whereas here the opportunity is much more fluid. As you said, that ability to learn in the flow of work, do a stretch assignment for example. Look at, as you said that the technology is helping you understand the adjacent skills, so if it is not too much of a stretch then that works quite well. I guess then we have got the analytics that you can have underlaying that so actually you understand how successful are people in the stretch assignments with these skills? So it sort of opens up a whole Pandora's box of data for the analysts to get into as well.
So really, really exciting stuff which leads quite nicely onto the final question and the one that we are asking everyone in this series. Will talent marketplaces mean that jobs don't exist anymore?
Ina Gantcheva: This is a very provocative question. That is an excellent question. I going to go back to the conversation about jobs. We talked about work disruption, work will be done differently so jobs will start to change and they will be done differently. So they will evolve with the new skills. They will allow us to deploy them differently. Work again, will look in to a range of projects to full-time roles, to full time projects, big assignments, therefore what work we do and how our job looks, would be different.
Are we going to be a full-time employee for something, a full time dedicated resource, a gig worker, an advisor, a mentor. Those will be multiple hats that we can wear as employees in the future and the talent marketplace will allow that fragmentation and also enrichment of work and of jobs together.
So I find it very exciting. I find this a very fulfilling experience and I think it is an amazing opportunity for HR to both support and guide this journey.
David Green: Well, it has been an absolute delight to talk to you, Ina. Thanks for being a guest on the show. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and follow you on social media, if you do the social media stuff?
Ina Gantcheva: Well, first of all, thank you for having me. Excellent questions and really a topic that we can continue to talk about and hope we will continue to talk about in the coming years.
The easiest way to get in touch with me is going to be through LinkedIn. It is a wonderful platform that we can all see the latest in eminent resources, things that I find exciting, it is also very easy to connect with people through my Linkedin connection.
David Green: Okay, we will put those details in the copy around the podcast. Ina, I would love to talk to you in a year's time and understand the evolution of talent marketplace, because I think they are going to develop quite quickly and at pace. Particularly perhaps running into some of the issues that we talked about coming out of the pandemic. So, thank you very much.