Episode 57: How Unilever has Created a Culture of Internal Talent Mobility (Interview with Jeroen Wels)

When the CEO cites the internal talent marketplace you have helped to create, as a major contributor to revenue during the company's quarterly earnings call, you know you have achieved something pretty special.

That is what happened to my guest for this week's episode of The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Jeroen Wels is the Executive Vice President of HR at Unilever and the architect of Flex Experiences. Flex Experiences is Unilever's thriving, internal talent marketplace, which is currently used by 65,000 global employees who are able to share their skills and experience with people in other teams and in other countries. During their quarterly earnings call for the first quarter of 2020, Unilever CEO, Alan Jope, highlighted how by using Flex Experiences the company had been able to redeploy over 3000 people from parts of the business with low demand, to the areas that were seeing high demand due to the pandemic. As you will hear from Jeroen in this episode, Flex is a standout example of a talent marketplace and the impact, both to the business in terms of agility and unlocked hours and employees in helping them discover their purpose and support their careers, is huge.

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, Jeroen and I discuss:

• The journey of talent marketplace at Unilever so far and what is coming next

• How the events of 2020 cemented the business case for talent marketplace in Unilever

• Jeroen’s horizon thinking approach to working with HR technology companies and startups

• Whether the talent marketplace will mean that jobs won't exist anymore

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in agile transformation, employee experience, learning and internal mobility. So that is Business Leaders, CHROs and anyone in a people analytics, learning or HR business partner role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by gloat. To learn more, visit https://www.gloat.com/.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today I am delighted to welcome Jeroen Wels, Executive Vice President of HR at Unilever to The Digital HR Leaders podcast. Jeroen, it is fantastic to have you on the show. Before we start, can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to your background and your role at Unilever?

Jeroen Wels: And I must say I have to make you a compliment already, David, because you are one of the few British speaking people that pronounce my name pretty close to how my Mum would pronounce it, so kudos to you already.

David Green: Thank you, I will see if I get it right for the rest of the time.

Jeroen Wels: Yeah, let's see, you are doing a great job already in that. I think my job is best to be explained by the three hats that I am wearing. So first and foremost I am Business Partnering our Beauty and Personal Care division, that we have. I am also Business Partnering our Chief Digital Marketing Officer for our Digital Transformation that we do. The third hat is a big passion point for me, which is heading up everything that has to do with talent in Unilever, probably the reason why you invited me to the show.

David Green: Wow so three hats, that is really impressive. Well I guess during the conversation, we will probably talk about things that relate to different parts of your role.

Jeroen Wels: Yeah, I am sure we will do so, David, sometimes it makes a lot of sense to wear those three hats. If you drive digital transformation, you want to do that in a core part of your business. Talent is involved in that, obviously, sometimes it doesn't make sense at all because then you are just way too stretched with all the accountabilities. But most of the time it makes sense.

David Green: I know today we are going to talk about something and we shared a platform actually, a few months ago at a conference, I think you spoke after me. I think the audience were waiting for you and the numbers went up quite significantly when you started speaking. But you spoke a lot about the talent marketplace that you have created at Unilever, Flex Experiences. I am lucky because you talked to me about doing this, two or three years ago as well. It is a real standout example of talent market transformations. Can you give our listeners an update on where you are currently in your talent marketplace journey?

Jeroen Wels: Yeah. So, we are now I think around three years in from where we first started, with a very small ID and a minimal viable product, tested in a group of a thousand people who were ITers that worked a lot of projects. We wanted to see if we could unlock the capacity on one hand while at the same time, making sure that people were able to develop new skills by being put on projects. We wanted to put an algorithm in place that would do the matching automatically of, here I have got a project with skills needs and here are the people that want to either offer new skills or want to develop new learning skills.

So since then three years ago, fast forward to today particularly during the crisis, in less than a year we've unlocked half a million hours of people that raised their hands to get on projects. To offer their skills or learn a new skill. From a Team leaders perspective, we managed to offer those hours up to people that needed them, on projects that were of high strategic value for us, because they were really really urgent. So I would say we are now at a stage in creating a talent marketplace where the technology is working, people love the technology and give us positive feedback constantly. But more importantly, I think we are starting to really shift the culture and that has become much more focused on what type of people do you need on a project and where can I get them, creating that transparency. At the same time saying to people, if you join a project you learn much more about new skills or you can offer up your skills. So that is culture change and new ways of working, I feel quite pleased about it. So in a nutshell, that is where we are, but there is still much more to do David.

David Green: I bet. And remind me, how many people are at Unilever?

Jeroen Wels: We have got 260,000 people at a Unilever and there are a lot of people obviously working in the factories and all of our plantations as well. We have got 65,000 people that are working in the Salesforce for us, or have more office related jobs.

Currently the scope that we have is around the 65,000 people, where we create a talent marketplace and we are looking for ways to also unlock the people that are working for us in the factories. That is one of the next leaps that we want to make. So how can we really offer up the up-skilling for people that are actually in the front line and how can we prepare them for the future of work but at the same time how do we ensure that we also focus on their skills as they further develop them.

David Green: I mean, at the moment that is 65,000 people with a lot of skills across those 65,000 people. Some of which are almost hidden from what they do on their day job, if you want to call it that, with also a thirst for learning as well. With the talent marketplace, you are combining both of that, giving yourselves more flexibility and helping support projects for work that needs to be done now.

Jeroen Wels: Yeah, and I would say it's not only about skills. So we have a lot of emphasis that we put on developing new skills and trying to understand which skills we have but also which ones do we need to develop for the future. How can we close that gap, particularly because of the pandemic everybody is acutely aware what a massive shift we are going to see in the coming three to five years. To me and for us, that is not the only thing, it is also about the experiences that you have. Yes, you could have a skill but how do you make sure that you build the right set of experiences, where you can deploy those skills and create an all round professional or specialist in yourself, so that you can build a career. We actually try to take it one step further and actually we want to start there, what is your purpose and what is it that you want to get out of your professional life and out of your life? What kind of experiences do you want to have in work? What kind of skills do we need to build, to take on jobs and roles that are relevant in the future?

We turn it upside down in that sense, so it is not only about skills, start with purpose. Work through what kind of experiences you want to have i.e the direction you want to take your career and then make sure that you are relevant for the direction that you want to take. And that is what you do through your skills because then the skills that you build up become the currency, with which you can invest behind your career experiences and therefore fulfil your purpose.

That is what we are really after.

David Green: Wow, that is a very compelling way of putting it as well. It makes me wonder why talent marketplace hasn't been around for a lot longer. I guess, partly because the technology that is powering it now and the algorithms behind it, enable us to actually do the stuff that we would have wanted to do in the past but we weren't able to.

Jeroen Wels: I think we shouldn't be too harsh on ourselves either because a lot of companies that have had talent very high on their agenda, always and through more talent forums or talent processes, people were trying to create a marketplace, trying to break down the boundaries between functions, trying to break down the boundaries between a local organisation and a regional or global units. But as there was huge friction there in transparence, the visibility on where your talent sits, what kind of skills they have, you don't know what you have in one place that you could combine with another place. And algorithms if applied in the right way and machine learning can help you to unlock that. I call that the democratisation of the talent processes that you have. So the talent marketplace really is about the demand and supply. It starts from the ones that benefit from it, which is the Team Lead and the employee, because they put forward what they want to be matched from, whether it is a skill or an experience or what kind of needs they have, if you talk about a team need.

So I think we shouldn't be too harsh on ourselves that talent market places haven't existed. It was a talent marketplace with a lot of frictions. Technology can really put it to work for our employees basically. So I think it is a key example of how we can build company experiences, enabled by technology.

David Green: The great thing about it is also, I do a lot of work around the people analytics space, there is some concern around the data that the companies are looking at. What I always say is actually the most important thing is that there is a fair exchange of value, so that the employee gets value back from the data that they are sharing with the organisation. And this is, particularly the way that you have set it up and how it is linked to purpose and the experiences that you want, there is a clear benefit for the two audiences, the benefit for the employees but you also see the benefit for the organisation and the Team Manager as well.

It is the way people data should be used.

Jeroen Wels: It is nice that you say that David, actually, I have never thought about it like that. What I did think about is, how come the people didn't want to fill in their career plans? So everybody has a HR system where you can leave your career desires, but nobody fills it in because nobody knows who is going to use it, when it is going to be used or for what is it going to be to be used for. Now you have the opportunity to opt in for something. So the moment that you opt in for something, then you decide what kind of data about yourself you want to release and therefore you want to see something in return. That is the benefit of being matched against a project or a job of your liking or giving a bit of transparency about your data, your skills, what you want, for more transparency about the opportunities that are out there.

So it is a nice way of putting it, opting in I like. The same with our consumers, we are a consumer based company. We love our brands and our brands need to stay relevant for our consumers. Well, we as a HR function, well actually as a company more importantly than the function itself, need to stay relevant for our employees.

So that actually is the core of what drives me so much in creating the talent marketplaces, it was the democratisation of opportunities so that everybody can decide how he or she would want to develop themselves, is something that is pretty dear to me.

David Green: When did you know that talent marketplace or Flex Experiences was going to be successful at Unilever?

Jeroen Wels:  Well, the first time that I knew it was going to be a big thing was way back when the first project that we did, the first pilot, was successful and got positive feedback. We then created, we called it Bubbles at the time, to test out how we should create the solution. We opened up a bubble in our Foods and Refreshments Division and then those in Marketing and people working in R and D really liked it. Then I knew we had some gold in our hands, if I may call it like that. Both in terms of a positive culture that we could create around transparency around opportunities for people and people could develop them themselves.

The real breakthrough came a little bit to my surprise, back in I think it was April, where our CEO used our results on Flex Experiences, matching people that raised their hands for projects that under the Covid pressures needed additional resources. We had a campaign around that and used it for the investors to explain, this is what Unilever is about. We are agile, just look at what is happening in a matter of eight to nine weeks, we had a whole campaign launched. We had thousands of people already raising their hands that were a little bit under capacity, say I want to work on the high priority projects to keep our people safe, to keep our businesses safe.

On the back of that, not per se with the Flex platform, but because we had that urgency, because we had that culture, we were also able to move more than 9,000 people in total from one job to another job in around eight to 10 weeks. In those instances where we didn't have enough demands and in those parts of the business where we did have a demand. So restaurants were closed so our food service businesses saw a very dramatic situation but on the other hand, our hand sanitising solutions that we had and hygiene solutions that we were building, we couldn't have enough people to be put on there. So we made a lot of those shifts. Flex Experiences was one of the levers to drive that agility in the company, to help people to accept that they could move to another job very fast and for those that did have capacity, to raise their hands and other people to really benefit from them for temporarily incorporating those people and those products.

So that was a moment when the light bulb went off to me like, wow, this is something that can become really big.

We carefully built it up over time, so it was not a surprise that it was going to happen but then also when our CEO used it to demonstrate for our investors, that was a definitive breakthrough of, something that we have been dreaming of.

David Green: A really powerful example of how you have got the idea and the culture to deliver it, but then the technology and the capability to enable it as well. So it is really powerful example of how a talent marketplace can really drive the business.

Jeroen Wels: Yeah, sometimes we think too much in tools in HR and I still feel like that so that we come up with something that theoretically is a great thing to do. Then we may try to look for a business problem that fits that theoretical opportunity or a belief that we have, that the thing should be like that. With the talent marketplace you also run that risk and since the beginning, we have always been saying, it is not about the technology, it is about the culture that we want to create. A culture of becoming more agile, being more agile actually, the culture of stimulating people to work on their skills, lifelong learning is the theme that we use. The culture of living up to your purpose and you need to put levers in place that make it happen. Flex Experience is a tool that solves the friction of opportunities and where you want to develop yourself. So it was a module, a building block in that bigger vision that we had and if you do that, what we learned is that the adoption rate of the technology grows 10 X before you know it. That is exactly what we have been seeing in the pickup as well. So you keep feeding what is in it for you, how can we respond better, how we would want it to look and then develop the technology until it is perfectly fit for the circumstances and then you create a breakthrough.

David Green: So let’s take it back to the start again, we had a conversation I think I was at Unilever two or three years ago and you gave us a great talk around some of the things that you were doing in your area at the time. You said to me “I am off tomorrow to go and see a small startup.”

Obviously you are a very big organisation, Unilever, to see that you have this appetite to work with smaller technology providers as well, to help deliver the overall agenda that you are trying to deliver. For some of our listeners who also work at bigger firms, it would be interesting to hear about your approach to working with technology companies and how you balance up small versus large?

Jeroen Wels: Very nice question, David. So if you have another podcast to zoom in on that question alone, that will be brilliant. Actually I still remember the moment that you are referring to because I remember that I was a little bit nervous because I needed to talk to all these bright cookies that knew everything about people analytics, that is definitely my passion and interest, but it is not my strength, so to speak. I think at that time, what we did was we went on a, we called it a digital safari, just half a year before that. In the digital safari, we went to five cities, physically, can you imagine going to five cities physically.

David Green: I can’t even imagine leaving and going to five houses at the moment.

Jeroen Wels: Exactly, at the time you could still do that. We sent out teams to only talk to entrepreneurs in HR startups and you could talk to scale-ups, but not too much, because we really wanted to know what was happening there at the edge of innovation. What is it an entrepreneur sees that we do not see? Or what can they see that could be scaled up, that we currently are not comfortable with? Out of that safari, each safari team would pitch for two startups that we were going to set up some pilots with.

So we selected a few, after people had pitched in for it, Gloat was one of them at the time hence why I paid a visit to Israel to understand what it was and then see what kind of pilot we could set up. But what it helped us to do is to really think three to five years down the line. So often it is not easy, I call it by the horizon one, horizon two and horizon three thinking. One is, you need to deliver in the year to come and three, six, nine months are absolutely critical to create the business results. Then halfway through you to start thinking about the next year and the year after, what is it that I need to deliver? That is horizon two. You also need to let yourself be guided by what is possible in the future, horizon three, three to five years out.

Those digital safaris have helped us to create a very clear picture of what the future, most likely, was going to look like. We didn't know what kind of solutions, we didn't know what kind of players, but we started to see what we believed in.

So our strategy was informed by that. So that is the role of playing with startups. They have proven to be extremely valuable to us.

The other benefit of working with startups is that you can choose an area where you are not a hundred percent certain of, but you know that if you want to create a shift in culture, in the mindset, in different ways of working, then you can start small because you have got licence to fail.

So in the talent marketplace, I just explained that is exactly what we have been doing and then the moment that the technology takes off, then you exactly know how you need to drive that change.

So it was extremely helpful. I have to make one big remark for everybody who is listening in because we find it at the same time, extremely difficult to balance working with smaller entity, with smaller startup, with smaller providers and at the same time driving efficiency. Particularly making sure that you can do it at the right cost, like from big platform providers. So there is an equilibrium that you need to look for, how fast do you want to innovate? What are the areas where you want to be leading edge? Therefore you want to take a risk by going faster into the future, because if you wait until the big players have completely optimised their platforms, then you become one of the many that then is going to go into a difficult implementation and adoption of a technology process. So it is a very fine balance of what are the four or five areas that you really want to set yourself apart.

I think in Unilever, we try to do that on lifelong learning, hence we started a similar kind of process that led to our partnership with Degreed. We did that with Gloat, on talent at the moment and now we have a third leg which is, how can we create agility as a ways of working? But you don't need technology for that, but it is an area that we would like to become really known for.

David Green: Obviously we are going to get back onto the talent marketplaces, but the last thing on it really is, sometimes finding one of those smaller, at the time, startups it gives you that flexibility around a pilot because actually some of the bigger technology companies aren’t open to doing pilots and frankly aren't agile enough to do them anyway.

Jeroen Wels: Although you do see that more and more. So if you really say I've invested in your platform, be it Workday, be it Microsoft with Teams or Degreed, as thats not small now either. It is very recommendable to then say, let's innovate and look at your roadmap together and then bring in the smaller pilots from the big tech firms, into your company, if you have the space for it. But you have to be choiceful because if you are going to experiment with everything, then you are going to create chaos. I have found that of the Microsofts, of the Degreeds, of the big players are more and more open, particularly Microsoft I would say, to partner up with you and to experiment with you in house so that they can also learn faster than they have done before. I find that actually intriguing and very fascinating to see how that currently comes about.

David Green: I think you said, don't start with the technology, start with what is the business or business challenge you are trying to solve. Which is definitely what we are saying in people analytics, what is the bigger picture and how can technology help?

So what are other examples of some of the business challenges that Unilever has tried to tackle with talent marketplace?

Jeroen Wels: I think the big one, apart from creating transparency, is how can we become more agile? That is a big friction point I would say. Maybe I will translate your words a little bit into what is the friction points that you want to resolve? Because then technology comes in to play. So it is still what is relevant to the business, definitely, but we combine that with what is the friction that you want to resolve for because then you can do it in a more efficient and more cost effective way if you think about it. So probably more agile definitely is one, because you want to be able to, in a less hierarchical environment, shift resources faster to where the growth opportunity or margin opportunities are. And with resources, I don't mean money alone, I also mean people.

So what agile really is about is what is your biggest growth opportunity and how do you prioritise that? So you have to have a less hierarchical culture for that, if everybody is ring-fenced and is looking into the pyramids how can they make their career and only paying service to the boss or the boss of the boss, then you become completely stagnant in a way. But if you say this is the value, these are the kinds of skills that I need to tap into that business opportunity that I have, so where are the people that can flow to that work that needs to be done? How can I dynamically allocate resources towards that, money and people? That is a big friction point that we want to resolve. So there is almost like a Holy Grail because on one hand, you know you need to have new skills, so you need to make sure that you let people experiment with building new skills or where they can have their skills being deployed for the bigger impact for the company. Also as a company, you want to be super agile to move people around, to grab those opportunities.

So those two friction points of closing the skill gap and creating a more agile company, they are glued together. That is why I believe that a talent marketplace is going to be critical for every company to really understand what it can bring.

David Green: Great. If you could put your Business Partner hat on now, how do HR and the business work together, I don't think HR is separate from the business, but how do the HR team and the teams in the business work together to ensure the success with talent marketplace?

Jeroen Wels: So if I look at my own patch, Beauty and Personal Care, I can mention two examples. I think working on the culture, the mindsets and the interventions on how to do dynamic resource allocation. We did that in March/April a lot. So literally workshopping through, with our top leadership, to say what are our priorities on innovations? Which ones do you need to bring forward? Which will make an impact this year and where you see the growth opportunities? How can you bring your innovation projects that are too small and starting to become irrelevant, given what the pandemic is doing to us, and then shift your resources even across categories.

So out of Oral Care into Skin Cleansing because that is high growth. We didn't have the muscle and we are still building up that muscle because it is very tough. If you imagine that skin cleansing is a four billion Euro business, all our categories are roughly like that, so how do you move people then out of one patch into another? You think it is big so surely you have got enough? No, the bigger it is more people defend it almost because they see big business opportunity. So how do you do that from a leadership perspective because it requires a lot of top leadership that works with one another, together. So that is what we did a lot in April/May. Then out of that become a roll of projects, once you have made the choices that you then can more flexibly start up with people. So that was an area where Flex Experiences has proven its point.

The other one was, sometimes you don't have resources. So, we have a concept called Excavator, which is basically we want to support smaller companies that have beautiful, but small brand ideas, to serve our consumers, particularly in the beauty space. And this is an example out of China, we wanted to make sure that we understood and can support those entrepreneurs in the field, of what kind of brands they were creating, because it creates a lot of insights. It is almost like understanding the trends of where is consumer behaviour going towards, what are they liking etc. But we could also support them because if we support them with our knowledge, with our skills, with our understanding it would help them to grow. Then in return, we could either invest in that business or when they are big enough for our scale, we could even agree to maybe buy them. So, you want to create a relationship with those entrepreneurs. So we call that the Excavator. We have one director that is working on that and a team of zero, it is interacting with 150 entrepreneurs at the moment. What has that person done? She only has defined projects on how to serve those entrepreneurs and those projects she staffs up, through the Flex Experience platforms, for people that want to step in for a couple of weeks, a couple of hours, couple of months, because they are excited about an opportunity, they want to have a new type of experience and on the back of that, learn a new skill.

But those are, I find, two lovely examples of where the business actually has figured out that it was a requirement that they had and we had a solution available already. This is how you can do it, this is how we try to bring that to life and once you have got such an example, you put a spotlight on it and then more teams will want to join in.

David Green: I am sure you have probably got a queue of people lining up now. Since there is a growing awareness, from everything you have said this is obvious anyway, there is a growing awareness that implementing a talent marketplace isn't a one off project clearly not. It is a transformation, it requires a significant cultural shift. How have employees and Managers responded to talent marketplace? How do you get away from maybe a culture of talent hoarding, for example, amongst Managers? I suppose you have to show the benefits to Managers so that they then play, effectively.

Jeroen Wels: I wouldn't be too scared about talent hoarding because first you have to break down the barriers of that talent can make the jump to water in the first place. For me, that is showing that it is reciprocal because as a good team lead, you need to develop the people. How can you best develop your people for the real work.

When you are a busy team leader, you are always short of resources. So that is the moment that is the click, that if I allow my people to develop themselves, then they can get more opportunities of getting the right people on the projects as well. I think at least in our company, Unilever, people are starting to be fed up with a process of it being chopped up into pieces. People hate bureaucracy. What does digital transformation do? It helps you to understand how end to end a process needs to be organised. So therefore breaking down the functional barriers where they don't make any sense, other than building up expertise, people quite quickly jump on that.

And the moment that they realise that that is the case, they also realise that they constantly have a need of multiple skills to get increasingly more jobs to be done, really done.

So yeah, it is education in a way. It is also learning yourself, how to do it and then breaking down the barriers as you go. But the moment that you are in a tipping point, then it is almost automatically. Tipping points are being created by a unique moment where the business sees its benefit. We had that in April, when top leadership saw what the benefits could be, or when employees see that there is a friction that has been resolved for them and therefore generates the benefits for them.

I think talent hoarding, I am not so afraid of that, I was actually taken aback when you were saying that, talent hoarding. You open up opportunities for people, so you still need to be selected in. The opportunity is there, you can put yourself forward and you will see more opportunities, but you still need to be releasable, as they say.

So for the people that are going to hop from one project to the other, from one job to the other, you also need to deliver consistently in a job and so I am not so afraid of that, to be honest. But it might be the next lesson learned as we go into the next phase of more and more people getting on Flex Experiences.

David Green: I think as you were saying, quite rightly, that the Managers get benefit as well. As you said, you always feel under resourced as a Manager. You have always got projects that you need to deliver on and you might not always have easy access to those skills within your team. So actually having the ability to bring people in to support those projects, it is a bit of give and take isn't it, at the end of the day.

Jeroen Wels: Before you go on David, I have one thought that you just triggered that I think is relevant for this. What we haven't figured out yet is who owns your career? Is it your boss or is that a career coach? What does it mean for the job title that you have? So are you an Assistant Brand Manager for Dove in the UK or are you a Brand Manager with a spike in innovation, that can be deployed on Dove or on something else? And so creating pools of people that can flow to the work. We are entering this phase now at Unilever, where we are starting to explore and understand what it means for the career proposition to people and we are only scratching the surface, to be honest, If there are any listeners that have cracked that nut already, then please let them be in contact with me.

That is what the talent marketplace and working in a less hierarchal environment and moving into agile is going to provoke. So who owns your career, yourself, but who helps you with that and how do you define the responsibilities of your job around the skills and experiences that you actually want or have, at a certain moment in time. I am actually quite curious how that is going to unfold in the coming 12 to 18 months in Unilever.

We have a couple of experiments that we have set up around that. Being agile is now taking off so fast that we really need to lean in to give guidance to people and find out what does it mean for them? Including pay by the way, so how are you going to be paid for a skill that is now unique for that critical and strategic project, but may be not so much in two to three years time? I don't know how to resolve for that.

David Green: No, it certainly becomes far more complex. That might not be a bad thing to go away from the kind of rigidity of the past. It is not agile to be rigid, is it, so that is really interesting.

We talked a little bit about skills and how it is not just about skills, of course. I think you mentioned skills almost as a currency, as well.

How difficult is it to understand your workforce in terms of skills? What advice would you give to organisations embarking on a journey to map their workforce skills?

Jeroen Wels: I think that the technology companies are much better at that because the skill is more measurable, because literally it is a technical skill. For us, it is a little bit more difficult because we have got more soft skills, so to speak, that are also creating value for us. Think about creativity when you want to create a marketing campaign. Then you get to the point of how do you measure it and what are the levels of skill efficiency? We are experimenting a lot with that. It is not easy. Do you do that together with your team leads or do you do that on your own, or do you need to have the expert point of view in that, which then makes it a very lengthy process. So I think technology companies are definitely a lot further in the game. I think we are halfway to understanding how we need to do that.

What we have done, however, is we made it obligatory literally this year, we started last year already, and everybody has a future fit plan. In that future fit plan, we want you to think about what your purpose is. So ideally you have it already and you have been on that journey, we want you to think about the type of roles that you would want to do. Also the ones that you could dream up in the future that might emerge and then we want you to think about, what are the three to five skills that you need to develop to make yourself a future fit. Not everybody likes that word, but I like it because you just want to make sure that you are fit for the future, literally what the word says. So instead of therefore looking backwards of what skills do we have for making a success in the past, you try to not bother too much about that. It is important, but more important is, can we see what people are developing for and then we can match what people want to develop themselves for, with what we consider to be the critical skills in a certain area. I almost used the word function by the way, but i shouldn't use that word function, but in a certain area.

If you are a Brand Manager, what is the three to five skills which when you were a Brand Manager with a spike towards innovation will be different to that of a Brand Manager role with a spike for advertising, engagement and digital interaction. So when you see those role plans, what kind of skills do you need for those types of roles that you would want to play in the future? Or you want to become better at it, then you can define what is my skill gap? And when we have an overview of the skill gaps of our people, we can match it up with where we think we need to be in the coming three years.

That is what we try to do, that becomes a very healthy insight in to what we need to sell in better in terms of critical skills or where I need to put more online/ offline training courses. Also if one particular skill is very popular, what is behind that? Is it because everybody is attracted to that or is it because we have got a serious gap in that?

That's how we try to do that future fit plan. Assessments are still important, but it moves you more forward and it becomes more strategic than when you want to really draw a baseline and then you might be looking too much towards the back rather than looking into the future.

David Green: Brilliant, unfortunately we are coming towards the end of our time but I have got two more questions.

First one is, where do you think you go next with Flex Experiences?

Jeroen Wels: I think external, to be honest. If I look at horizon two, in 18 to 24 months, definitely external. I think we have got a very strong user base now, so around 40% of the people are heavy users, as we call them.

That is a good base and they do that on projects. We are now also scaling up the way that we post jobs, so we are rolling out the more traditional jobs and the projects in one so that that becomes one blend, including opportunities to be mentored and then linked into Degreed to get to the offerings on learning. So it will become more of a fluid way of developing yourself.

But I think the next Holy Grail actually is to connect that with external. So we have got pieces of work that are still in the experimental phase where we want to offer up what we train our people internally up for but we also will offer that outside.

I don't know if you have seen the launch of the social commitments of Unilever, but we committed ourselves to train up 10 million youngsters that run the risk to become unemployed even after they left school. So we want to offer up our training modules externally to prepare them better for an entrepreneurial life or a life in the government's NGO, but also for companies like Unilever. So we want to offer that up. That is very linked to what we try to do with our platforms like Degreed and our platforms like Gloat and our philosophy of when you know your purpose, what kind of experience you want, then you need to understand what kind of skills you will build. So we want to offer that up. The moment that you offer that up, you can connect that with your talent marketplace internally, so that internal, external marketplace becomes the same.

So that when I am a team leader, I think of the next Holy grail, when I am a team leader, I want to look at skills and experience of people whether they sit internally and are already on the Unilever payroll or is part of our outer circle, as we call it. People that have been in contact, that like the Unilever's purpose, mission and our brands, then we can tap into them as well, so that you can quickly onboard them even if they come from the outside. We can then tap into that flexible layer in a much more seamless way.

So the next big thing for me is how can you resolve the friction of an organisational boundary? And if we translate that to the talent marketplace, how can you resolve the friction of an internal talent marketplace with an external talent marketplace? And if we do that, I think we open up the real future of work. Offices, we don't have to have any longer, but then there is organisational boundary shift, so we shift and we get much more opportunities for people to develop themselves in a way that they want and in a way that drives business so that you can create wealth for people and society. And then the circle is closed again.

David Green: I suppose you could take that even further, you could connect with internal marketplaces in other companies, maybe not direct competitors, but in other companies where there is a complimentary set of skills, if it were, and you can kind of borrow from each other. But you are enabled by this technology that helps you to do that.

Jeroen Wels: That is yet another podcast that we can dive into David. There will be some cool future of work initiatives and very specifically zoom in to our factory employees. So we have got experiments, for example, currently in Argentina, which we call a consortia that we have created. We have done that during the pandemic where people were without work and we needed work. So they broke down the boundaries of collective labour agreements and they said, okay, temporarily people working in automation factories are going to work in the Salesforce in Unilever and other people being deployed in other companies as part of that consortium of six companies. So they started to offer up opportunities temporarily, just because of the crisis, but the learnings that we get out of that of one skill needed in one place not needed in another place. So we really put spotlights on those experiments. We call that the future of work and then all of a sudden you transform lifelong learning into creating employment opportunities for people, because then it is no longer you are being employed by Unilever alone you are being employed by Unilever and the consortium of which it makes part. Then all of a sudden the world is a much friendlier place to work because then you can move around from one company to another company in a much more flexible way, whilst you are developing your skills, optimising the friction again, between demand and supply of people that have skills to offer.

That is another way of where the talent marketplace will go, in my view. So maybe we need to mark this date David, that in three years time, you invite me again on to the podcast and say do you remember, we spoke about how we can use a talent marketplace to actually fix employability issues that we have in society.

That will be a great dream if we could establish that.

David Green: It will and I think this leads very nicely onto the question that we are asking everyone on this series. Will talent marketplaces mean jobs won’t exist anymore?

Jeroen Wels: The answer obviously is No. Jobs will exist, they definitely will be much more broader defined. Like the point I made earlier know, you are not the Assistant Brand Manager of Dove in the UK.

You are a Brand Manager with a spike and you have got a clear purpose, you want to build your experiences and you are going to refresh your skills along the way. That is what I think the future of creative development is going to be. And then jobs where you do it, you will match your purpose with the company or with whatever the organisational entity is going to be called in that consortium, to move around, to achieve your purpose.

That is what I wish for everybody. Not ring fenced jobs where you need to be just working in a process, that is what every HR professional wants. Right? You want to unleash potential in people, that is why you chose the profession. Well let's then understand what your purpose is, understand what kind of experiences you want in a professional life and then how we can help you with building the skills to get those experiences, have a fantastic professional career and use it outside of your profession as well.

David Green: Well Jeroen, it has been a fantastic conversation and I think we definitely need to have you on, maybe even before three years, again. But thanks for being a guest. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you?

Jeroen Wels: LinkedIn, drop me a connect and I will respond to it, that will be fantastic. Very keen to get ideas from listeners that are provocative and that can help us to accelerate some of the ideas that we have. We are very willing to collaborate with everybody who has a great idea.

Thanks for all the questions they were quite provocative David, it also helps me to formulate my own ideas as I go. So I wrote down two or three things and I need to dig in a little bit deeper with the teams. So thanks a lot.

David Green: I think you might be the first company where we have had two people from the company on the podcast. We had Leena on 18 months ago now. But Jeroen, it is always fascinating talking to anyone who is working in HR at Unilever, you are doing some amazing things. So, thanks very much.

Jeroen Wels: My pleasure, have a great day.