On the show today, I am talking to Loïc Michel, CEO at skills intelligence and talent marketplace platform 365Talents.

Throughout this episode, Loïc and I discuss:

• How skills data can be used to improve employee experience and support successful talent management

• How advances in AI now mean that skills can be mapped in real time, overcoming some of the complexities that organisations have struggled with in doing this previously

• How skills data can be used for internal mobility and improving employee retention

• Loïc’s thoughts on the future of employee experience and how technology will support this. 


Support for this podcast comes from 365Talents. You can learn more by visiting https://365talents.com.

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.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Loïc Michel, CEO at 365Talents, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. It is great to have you on the show Loïc, can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and to 365Talents?

Loïc Michel: Sure. So I am Loïc, CEO at 365. We at 365Talents have one mission, which is to help HR leaders in global companies have a fast, positive, and sustainable impact on their employees career.

That being said, what 365Talents is, basically it is a talent experience platform that helps these companies have a better understanding of their workforce, have a better way to mobilise their workforce, and have a better way to understand and to anticipate the transformation of their workforce. So we provide great UX and great skills technology in the platform so that we could serve today, several hundred thousand users in 60 countries and working with customers like Societe Generale, Veolia, BearingPoint, EY, to name a few.

David Green: And it's been a bit of a story. I saw that you started the business in 2015 and you have just recently secured some series A funding. I would love to hear a little bit about the journey and obviously the funding and then what your plans are next. 


Loïc Michel: Yeah. We created the company a few years ago indeed, with my two partners, Paul and Mathieu. We were working in tech and consulting environments where skills is at the centre of everything. Skill is the business, in such industries. But it was all about Excel sheets on one hand, human capital management suites on the other, no connection between, no tech between and we thought there should be an answer to that. So we combined our forces. We worked on the product first. We have got some engineering background. We wanted to have a very good product and good technology, so we invested in R&D activities for a year and a half and we launched a product in 2017, with our first large enterprise customers. And so that was pretty much the start.

Then we progressively scaled the team and reached our solution and tech, I call it the north face of the Everest, the very large enterprise market and business, that is what we wanted to do because that is where we felt there was the biggest challenge and where we could bring more value with our background and our vision. And that is what we have been doing since then. The crisis, last year, was definitely here to accelerate our international go to market. We have users and employees in 60 different countries, with our existing customers, and we have got some very significant references in North America, in the Asia Pacific region and we want to invest more and more proactively in the Northern Europe geography, where we have a lot of traction and interest. 


David Green: It is such a huge potential market and obviously, you and your co-founders are quite visionary actually, because skills has increasingly become a hotter and hotter topic both for HR leaders, but actually more importantly for business leaders as well. And we are going to talk a little bit about the power of using skills data to improve talent experience today. 
So let's start with the skills data itself. Why do you consider skills data to be foundational to successful talent management? 


Loïc Michel: I could pretty much say that skills is the beginning and the end of this talent management space. Why the beginning? Because everything is tending to this skills notion itself. Let me give you one example. Pretty much one of the most search expressions on Google, for HR leaders, is skills gap. It has 3.7 million results on Google and it is even ahead of war for talent, which is 1.6 million.

So, skills gap is one of the leading expressions in these HR professionals minds. Why is that? Just because it is something which is occurring now and in the future, and everyone is very aware that there is this future skills gap, everyone is afraid of the future because we know that 85% of the jobs will be new in 2030, for example. So everyone has that in mind and everyone needs to solve this skills gap.

But actually everyone has another skills gap, which is the current skills gap, like today. Everyone is talking about agility, transformation, crisis, and we have been through a massive one and we are still in it, so you have to know what are your skills now and how you can match for skills in real time. And it starts now. Then if you are good at it now, you will be better for the future also. And then if you want to win the war for talents, you need to win battles. You can look for the skills externally or find them internally and try level up them, internally in your company, in terms of talent development initiatives. And I think this is a good end goal and a good battle to fight for, because if you want to have impact for both your business and your employees, then you have to focus your energy on your internal perimeter and environment. One last one on this. If you want to win battles, you need to know yourself, Sun Zhu the Chinese Master said that centuries ago. So you have to know yourself, but when you know that HR leaders pretty much only know 10% of their existing skills and capabilities in their organisation, you see that there is a challenge.

So skills are the centre of everything and if you start to know yourself, which is a great challenge, then you will be able to reinvent the way you are dealing with your talent management initiatives and talent experience in general. 


David Green: It is interesting because some of the previous guests we have had on the show, Anshul Sheopuri, from IBM, Ralph Buechsenschuss, from Zurich. Using skills data and enhancing skills data is a big, big, challenge, but they see it as something that can potentially pull together silos that we have had in HR. So whether that is recruitment, whether that is learning, whether that is internal mobility, which is obviously so important in terms of building your talent from within and helping it become mobile. Certainly when Anshul, from IBM, was talking about how they have actually moved from a pay for performance to a pay for skills, kind of process. Skills data then obviously supports your workforce planning for companies as well. As you said, there is going to be a lot of new jobs coming in because of things like automation, certain tasks being automated, but lots of new jobs being created as well. Understanding the skills that you need for, particularly those new jobs, is a real challenge for organisations and the skills data is at the heart of that to understand what is happening within the company, but also what is happening outside the company as well, and bringing that together to support workforce planning. That is essentially one of the things that you help do at 365Talents, yeah?

Loïc Michel: Yeah, exactly. That is where the tech has to come in place. You gave the example of turning a company into a skills oriented company, where it can go up to the compensation plan and the career path become all about skills. So it is making skills the new currency for talent, which is something everyone is talking about in good HR conversations. But that is more complicated to do than to say because the skills data is coming from multiple sources, in multiple languages, from multiple stakeholders. It is coming from the HR systems, from the business systems. We are not talking the same languages, even if we are in the same office, in the same business, in the same team. So there is complexity here and that is where the AI and the technology can help you solve this complexity challenge. When I talk about AI, it is skills inference models based on LAP models and these kinds of things. It has to work in alliance with the system base, in multicultural and multilingual environments. It is not good to have one talent management and skills management approach, so in the UK and the US in English, another one in Germany, and another one in Spain in Spanish, or in France in French, it has to be the same language. So this is a very tricky aspect of this skills technology that has to be solved and that is something we are very keen on demonstrating with our own technology because we are European company, so we started with several languages already. But that being said skills technology has to provide, in my opinion, something which is real time. So you have to be able to understand skills in real time, it is not once for all.

It has to be adaptive, meaning that it is not one big oncology, or framework, or technology, you can take from the outside and plug into your system and your ecosystem and your company and hope it will work, because that won't work. Your company is not the same as the other one, so it has to be adaptive. It has to adapt to your way of speaking and your way of doing your business.

It has to be multi layered. I sum it up with three layers, it has to be very precise and personal enough for each individual assessment. So any employee will have to be able to assess themselves in their own words, within their own activities and work, so that is one level.

The second one is, it has to be good so that you can do this matching between the offer and demand dynamically for now and for tomorrow. You talk about workforce planning, so that basically going to the third layer, which is, it has to be sufficiently high level also, so that you can make some C level decision on your workforce now and how it should be transformed tomorrow.

So it is adaptive real time and multilayered, that would be my definition. We have great stories about customers who pretty much have very good skills knowledge and approaches.

David Green: It would be great for two things maybe Loïc, one, what is the type of data sources where you are using EMI to infer or map some of these skills? Because I think that will certainly help listeners. I can think of a few examples, but I am sure you will be able to name much more than me.

And then actually hear some of those examples of some of the companies, that you are able to share, that are actually doing this really well. 


Loïc Michel: So to be concrete on the sources, basically connect three different sources. The first one is HR system, HR sources, that is pretty much 20% of the global and final output, but it is there and it is good to be there. And there is a lot of thinking, a lot of investment on these, usually in your own skills framework or in your talent management or succession planning processes. Not perfect, but it is existing and good, so that is for one.

Second source is business sources. So you can connect your project management systems, internal social network or employee experience portals, your knowledge sharing environment, also your planning system for your workforce planning activities and then you can know who is working on what, in which team, and who is developing knowledge in another area. So, you are an expert in sustainable energy but you are interested in cryptocurrency in the social network, for example. Then it is interesting to infer that you might be interested in a position with cryptocurrency analysis, for example. 
So that is a very simple example, but that is how you connect business and HR data so that it gives your talent data more sense and it tends to be more adaptive and we assist them on this.

So a few examples. I know in the oil and gas industry, the guys from Schlumberger are working a lot on skills, they are a very skills oriented company, and it is definitely multi-layered and adaptive because it has to be the reflection of their exact roles and positions and the way they are dealing with skills is multilayered. It is for employees, it is for HR decision, it's for matching. I can mention Société Générale, very adaptive also, because they are in very transformative environments, they know they have particularities in their business, in their organisation, so they wanted to be able to map in a very adaptive way, all the skills and then to be sure that it is comprehensive so that it is adaptive and comprehensive at the same time.

And in the end, that was my story about my background as a consultant, companies like EY or BearingPoint, they are leveraging skills because it is in real time and they need some real time insight on their consultants skills, and they need some real time insights also on their market demand. What are my customers or future customers, currently looking after in terms of skills or capabilities? And if I know that, then I can add some insights and adapt my workforce in real time also.

So different examples, which show that you need to have a very particular skills approach and it tends to be successful. 


David Green: So it is bringing all that HR data, as you said, from various systems in HR that we use, business data, and then the third piece is the external data, as you said. So understanding the market demand for some of these skills as well because then, if you see what your competitors are doing or you see what your customers are doing, like in the example you gave with EY or BearingPoint, then you can make sure that you are either buying those skills in, or building those skills through training.

Loïc Michel: And actually, there is one that I missed because it is so big that I missed it, but it is the crowdsourced data. You can handle all your employees, your different stakeholders internally, managers, HR leaders, C level, and if you crowdsource data dynamically, then you would be able to generate a lot of intelligence and that is definitely a key source of any information. So you have to be able to grab this information and that is not as easy as it seems because, UX is complicated. It is a whole area for research and development, but if you want to help anyone fill information and feel at ease by providing information and data, you have to create a particular experience and profile. How do I engage on my profile? How do I assess myself? How do I update this information? And many aspects that are really tech driven and UX driven there, that is key to sourcing of the data. 


David Green: And I guess, as you said, that is another one of the challenges, you are bringing data in from a number of different sources, some data that is already located in systems, some data you might be crowdsourcing, external data, and then you have got to make that data adaptable for employees so they can use data to support learning or mobility. For managers, so they understand where they are and what they have got in terms of being able to deliver now, but also to be able to deliver in the near future. 
And then as you said, senior leaders, so they can make decisions as well. Those decisions could even be things around mergers and acquisitions, for example. 


So one of the key use cases for skills data is internal mobility, which I know is something you support at 365Talents. Can you explain for our listeners, the power of internal mobility for improving the talent experience? 


Loïc Michel: Yeah, sure. Talent mobility, I think, is the heart of the talent experience and engagement because it solves pretty much all the skills gap challenges that we have just described.

It solves the current skills gaps, you match offer on demand, in real time, so you make one very capable employee move from one position to another. So you solve your challenge now. But actually it solves your future challenge also because by doing that, you provide a new opportunity for this employee in particular and you disseminate his or her capability or agility, in a new environment. It goes one step after another, but then, it is preparing your company for the next phases where you will need to have a more adaptive and more agile organisation also. 
So it solves your challenge now. It solves your challenge for tomorrow. It is good for the employee directly, so definitely the talent experience is enriched and it will provide more engagement in the end. And it is good for your company because you are leveraging your skills and capabilities in one environment into another one and it prepares your company for such moves in the future also. 


David Green: As you say, clearly if you give employees mobility options, it supports engagement, supports retention, it helps you close gaps as an organisation and of course, one of the challenges that, that we have when we are looking at employee data, is the topic around ethics and privacy. And obviously, I know as a French based organisation you will know that well with works councils, with privacy, et cetera.

Of course, if we can provide benefit to employees and there is clear benefit to employees by providing them with opportunities to develop their career, talent experiences as you call it, it is a really good way of using that data and creating value for employees. I would love to hear some examples around how skills data can lead to better employee engagement and retention, if you have got any examples you can share? I think it always brings it to life for our listeners. 


Loïc Michel: Yes, I can share are two stories of customers who started with a skills data approach and then turned progressively into talent first or skills first organisations.

I can mention Allianz, the insurance global leader. We started working with this company with a very skills oriented approach and that was pretty much my pitch, I think. I remember when I talked to them for the first time, I said “you need a Google of your skills” Which was a weird pitch, but you don't know where they are and you don’t know what they are, so let's start with this. And they were all in for that. They then made the move progressively. It started from skills, then mobility. The platform is providing very good results, 30% in mobility in some different regions or businesses. And then they are thinking about next steps in terms of talent experience, around mentorships like mentors and mentees and different things around dynamic career path.

So it is a work in progress, but they started from skills first. I can mention Société Générale, the global bank. It has 140,000 employees in the world. They started exactly the same way with skills. They wanted to know more about their skills, then mobility, then the global experience. So it started form skills and that is foundational. You start from there, you know you will be reinventing your talent experience in the end because you are turning the whole process upside down and it is very innovative in one sense and it transforms all of your talent experience and talent development initiatives from the root. I think they are very significant examples.


David Green: And I think the other thing around mobility it supports, is if I know if you wanna bring a project team together, maybe from, especially if you look at Société Générale or Allianz, big companies in multiple countries, maybe that project is six to nine months work, maybe you want to pull people in with specific skills that might only be a day a week or two days a week, and these sorts of platforms can help you to do that quite quickly, in real time, and pull together that team quite quickly. They might be spending three or four days doing other things within the organisation, but you can pull that project together. 
And I guess that is the power of some of this technology, isn't it? 


Loïc Michel: Yeah, exactly. Actually, when we talk about internal mobility, it is not only one thing. This mobility can be short, medium, long term, so it can be full time, part-time and if you combine all these different ways of dealing with internal mobility, then you provide a very rich and personalised talent experience. 


David Green: And of course, I know we are still in the pandemic, but certainly over the last two years, I know organisations where having these sort of technology in place, it has helped them redeploy talent from one business unit that maybe is in lower demand because of the pandemic, to other business units that are in much higher demand because of the pandemic. I guess banking would be a good example of that, where you have got customer facing staff and suddenly they are not seeing customers physically now but they are seeing customers digitally or via the phone. 


Loïc Michel: Yes, exactly. We can talk about examples in the energy sectors also, where it is all about transformation, transformation of the business, because they will be 100% renewable energy orientated in 10 years from now. So they have to switch their whole workforce and their whole model. You can do that by planning and imagining what you should be doing, but you can start now and just mix the capabilities of your different entities and in some cases you can even have some major acquisitions and new dynamics in the company, you have to be able to mix all these capabilities right now, it is not like in two years from now. The pandemic has brought us exactly this, the need for speed. You need to do it now, you don't have to wait until you full talent management roadmap is defined and your full HR tech strategy is defined and rolled out, you need to implement something faster.

David Green: So let's turn to talent experience more broadly. Why should organisations be laser focused on talent and experience, moving forwards? I guess we have all been hearing about the great resignation, so I guess that is one thing, but I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

Loïc Michel: Yeah, that is one aspect and one challenge that the talent experience is solving because you provide more interest in the job. If you just invest in the conditions of the jobs, like the office and the time, so it is all going hybrid and you can work remotely. That is very good and I think large employers in the world have that in mind now. So they are fully hybrid and it works well. But if you only focus on this, it is pretty much, I would say employee experience, so it is just your everyday activities, admin stuff, and your conditions. It is good, but definitely not enough. You have to invest on the mission. So, why I am here? Why I am doing? And actually, I am not even going to the office so if I don’t know why I am there then what could be the different missions I can have in the company now, perhaps I will move in two months or one year. If you provide some very personalised approach and personalised career development opportunities, 100% personalised approaches and opportunities, 
then I think you definitely can engage these people more, even in complex and hybrid modes like today. I would like to say also, that from a business standpoint, when you provide this great talent experience, then you get some great talent engagement and great talent data and insights, then you can build some great talent intelligence also. 
So from talent experience to talent intelligence, there is a very logical process. And with talent intelligence, you can work on your strategic workforce planning, imagine how your company will be transforming in the coming years and you don't have this very precise information, data and insights because you don't have a good talent experience generating this data and insights, then I think you won't be that good at making good decisions.

So I think it is fundamental that you have this talent experience, plus for you as an HR leader you can provide more impact to your employees.
I think talent experience brings everything a HR professional is looking after, more engagement, more agility, for the business, more diversity in the work place also because it is all about mobility being skills oriented, and skills first is driving into this direction and it provides more impact on business outcomes for both the employees and for the company. 
So it is definitely an area of investment. 


David Green: Yeah, definitely. And you talked a little bit about personalisation. If we think about our experience as customers, Netflix and Amazon being the most obvious ones. We get served up recommendations based on what we have bought, what we have been searching for before and I think I have read somewhere, a few years ago now so I don’t know if it is still true, but 30% of Amazon revenue comes through its recommendation engine, which is pretty significant when you think about Amazon's revenue. We talked a little bit about this today, but I would love to bring it together as one answer really. How can skills data help to personalise the talent experience?

Loïc Michel: Definitely, by providing this common language on one hand and providing a single point of entry for all the different opportunities that the company can give you. So if you have the skills data and talent data, which is very dynamic and adaptive and real time and multilayered, then it can fuel your different activities and processes in particular, all the recommendations and the suggestions you can make to the employees. So by talking the same in a single language, you are able to provide this full personalisation and it is going to be multi layered as we say, so it is going to be adapted to your own job and skills architecture on one hand, that will be adaptable with this new skills framework that is crowdsourced. So, it is not going to be one global and only one approach for these jobs or positions, it is going to be very much more personalised. That is AI driven also, where you can infer some things and you can integrate different criteria and your matching algorithm also. But the base essence of it is definitely skills data. 


David Green: I suppose if you think about it, the better the quality of the data you have got and your understanding then of what you need from an organisational perspective, you can drive personalisation around learning, around mentors, mentorships, mobility, projects that you might want to get involved in. Again, you can actually get to the point where, I think you said earlier, you can help people understand the value of their skills within the organisation. For example, I have got skills one to five and because I have skills one to five our data tells us that it will be quite easy for you to acquire skills six to seven. And if you do that, It opens up these career opportunities for you and these sort of salaries, et cetera, et cetera.

So all of that personalisation piece is so important. Isn't it? But it is not easy because you need good data to do that.

What advice would you give to organisations that are looking to improve talent experience or are wanting to better understand what skills they have got, what are the gaps, and then how you can use that skills gaps.

Where should organisations get started?

Loïc Michel: I think starting with skills is always a good start. And we talked about these different customer stories. They wanted to turn into talent first companies and they start with skills, I would say that is an easy step to do. Even if it is not intuitive because everyone thinks, oh, okay, we want to talk about skills management and projects or we have to work in house with probably a consultancy or whatever, for six months or nine months, and then build our job and skills architecture and then we will be able to rethink our global talent management approach. It will take us 36 months in the end. I would suggest you don't have time to wait until 36 months before implementing something new, in terms of talent experience, because all the acceleration we have just discussed, this transformation, this crisis. So you cannot say, okay, there is a great resignation, it won't have an impact on me this year or next year, that is not true because it is happening exactly now. You have to implement new stuff and it has to be implemented in weeks instead of years. There is a new standard that has to be set and at 365Talents, we invest in these standards so that we help HR leaders to have a very fast impact on their employees and talent experience. 
And fast is from four to eight weeks of implementation, not more. Because it is tech driven, there is a good implementation framework, good integration into the HR and workforce ecosystem, so basically it is something that has to be started now and that would be my recommendation. 
Don't wait.


David Green: And that is probably the difference, isn't it? From when you started the company to now, technology platforms like 365Talents are there in place so you can do this relatively quickly, because you have the data in your HR systems, you have your data and your business systems, there is external data out there you just need to pull it together to get that understanding. And you can do that, as you said, relatively quickly now, whereas six or seven years ago, you would have had to go and ask your employees what skills they have got. A] that takes a long time. B] you question how valid it is. And then C] it is not real time, is it because once you have asked a question it is out of date.

Loïc Michel: Exactly and actually you have got new technologies serving this one goal of assessment and validation and certifications of skills. It sounds a bit weird, but we are talking about blockchain, to validate skills and crowdsource skills information, and that is interesting. I don't think any company in the market today, any HR leader, is mature enough to implement that, but that is enriching the future we have for skills. 
A couple of years ago, companies needed to digitalise their talent management processes. They invested in very good tools in talent management platforms, which are very HR oriented and good for all the different processes, performance, compensation, recruitment, learning, but I think it is now time to invest in the talent experience and you don't have time to really implement something that will take you two years. It is an easy step. So that would be my recommendation.


David Green: That leads us nicely to the final question, Loïc, this is one we are asking everyone on this series. It is a slightly broader topic but I should think you will have a very good answer to this. 
What is the role of technology in supporting employee experience?

Loïc Michel: I think I can definitely say that skills technology is at the centre of it and we have spent a very good time having a conversation on this exact subject. Then if your skills technology is able to provide you some matching of the offer and demand of skills, in real time, then it brings you some more mobility and agility. So that is a very good level also.

And then as I said, technology brings new talent experience way faster than it used to think about it. So in a few weeks you can have a new talent experience in place and it will generate you some new data, the new data will bring you some new intelligence so you can make better decisions in the end. So it is tech driven, definitely. And if you make better decisions, then you will be able to enrich even more your talent experience and your employee experience, so that is a very virtuous circle. I haven't been talking about the blockchain validation of skills, which is another topic and another technology that we could be discussing in the future. 
So technology is everywhere in this talent experience world. 


David Green: So in a way really, you have got your business strategy, you have got your people strategy, and having the skills data helps you to understand the gaps and what you need to do to close those gaps potentially. What technology helps to do, is bring that to life and make it agile, make it easy, help support decisions, help employees with personalised recommendations related to their career. So the technology is the glue that brings it all together. 


Loïc Michel: Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

David Green: Loïc, it has been a fascinating conversation. I have really enjoyed it, thank you so much for being on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, and find out more about 365Talents?

Loïc Michel: You can definitely use my email loïc.michel@365talents.com You can ping me on LinkedIn also.

You can grab a lot of information in our resources or customer stories on our website 365talents.com. And we will be present at different shows, in different regions, in the coming weeks so we will have a chance to meet in there.

David Green: And isn't it going to be good? Hopefully 2022, is the year we get back to face to face conferences. There are lots of exciting technologies and stories for us all to catch up on, in the HR sphere. Loïc, thank you so much for being a guest on the show.