How Digital Tools Give Talent Leaders More Time to Invest in Their Candidates
BY Jeanhee Kim July 16, 2024Innovative tools like AI not only help you get things done, but also free up time for you to reinvest in yourself. “It's important to be your authentic self. And to be your best self, you also have to take care of yourself. So if we can leverage AI and other technology tools to free up time, everyone has a choice to seek how to best reinvest that,” said Paul Phillips, global head of talent acquisition and onboarding at Avanade. That reinvestment can be taking a walk or spending more time with your kids, says Phillips, who spoke in a fireside chat at From Day One’s June virtual conference.Avanade is a joint partnership of Accenture and Microsoft focused on IT consulting of the Microsoft stack. With those credentials, “innovation is critical to our everyday business,” Phillips said. That means that job applicants must “feel and sense that they are working and operating with a leading innovator from the tech perspective.”AI is used throughout the Avanade acquisition process, beginning with writing the job ad itself. Using AI apps to craft the job description shaves 13 minutes off a task that had previously taken 15 minutes, he says. Then they use AI during the screening and evaluation process. The company does offer candidates globally the choice to opt out of the AI talent acquisition process, which about 30% do. But for the rest of the talent pool, the AI matching tool gives his team more precise matching of candidates to jobs and saves at least five days of traditional screening time.“When you multiply that by 5,000 hires, and multiply that by revenue per day, we’re talking multiples of millions of dollars that this is helping us generate on our top line growth,” Phillips said. Every applicant also has a human touch from his team, but the AI grading tool has proven to be very accurate. “It’s anywhere from two to five times more likely that anyone who is graded A or B is likely to get an offer,” Phillips said.Journalist Jeanhee Kim interviewed Paul Phillips of Avanade during the fireside chat (photo by From Day One)Technology is not the only way Avanade innovates, however. Phillips spoke about a change to the three pillars of their talent strategy. To the core talent acquisition goals of “attract, develop and retain,” his team has added “create.”“What we meant by that was our ability to actually create a new talent workforce within the Avanade ecosystem that could ultimately enable us to overcome some shortages of skills,” Phillips said. To start, Avanade began casting a wider net that looked for markers of potential to learn new skills and be retrained. “That means that we look for talent that maybe has not interacted with the Microsoft technology set, or those that may have been a performance management consultant so they have a lot of skills,” he said. And they train them, through a program called Avanade Academy. This hiring strategy has been a huge success from a diversity perspective, says Phillips.This all started in Brazil, where they hired 200 women to train in the academy a few years ago. “Not only did we see a huge spike in our diversity hiring percentage, we actually started to see a shift in the culture and the behavior of the business,” Phillips said. “Globally, in female hiring, we are striving towards parity. We’ve doubled in the last five years, from 20%, to 40%,” he said.Casting a wider net in hiring has other implications for the agility of a company, too. There’s an estimate that 85% of the jobs needed in the next five years are currently unknown. So for companies to stay abreast, hiring teams have to look for individuals who can “learn, unlearn, relearn,” and have “agility, courage, and resilience. These are different skills that we may have in the past overlooked or not seen as important.”Phillips had some comforting parting advice for those who may be daunted by the challenge of using technology in hiring and for hiring for skills that may not have even been invented yet. “Don’t be fully focused on getting it all right on day one,” he said. “We live in a very iterative world today. People are happy with continuous progress. Despite all the technology, we’re still human at heart.”Jeanhee Kim is an independent journalist who has worked for CoinDesk, Crain’s New York Business, Money magazine and Forbes Asia.
How Employers Are Boosting Internal Mobility and Career Development
BY Jeanhee Kim July 12, 2024Developing talent from within a company’s ranks simply makes a lot of sense. The benefits include greater productivity because employees are motivated to reach their goals, cost savings and time savings from the job search and onboarding processes, and increased employee satisfaction as workers feel they are valued.But as with all corporate practices, how a company puts an idea into practice makes a difference. At From Day One’s Manhattan conference, a panel of leaders spoke to the topic, “Creating Opportunity Within: How Employers Are Boosting Talent and Career Development,” sharing the thoughtful and effective ways their organizations are successfully promoting employees.The executive panel discussion featured five dynamic and creative business leaders who described their own career development and the ways they support and encourage the same for others.At Visa, the message that career development is a priority comes from the very top, says Melissa Fridman, head of people and global merchant sales & acquiring at Visa, North America. Ryan McInerney ascended to CEO in February 2023, after being prepared for this transition for two years, Fridman says. And among his first actions as chief executive was to promote others into leadership roles, which reinforced the message throughout the company that there was career mobility.Fridman described the company’s efforts as driven from the top down and intentional, and relayed how as a new CEO, McInerney blocked off a few days this year with his leadership team to discuss talent across the company. “And everybody knows that, so in advance all the businesses are spending time with their HR partners and their leadership teams talking about talent. That type of intention and knowing that we’re being deliberate about succession planning because of the robustness of those conversations, [leads to a lot of] follow up action.”But a bottom-up strategy also works. Penguin Random House adopted a growth charter a decade ago that “infiltrated through our personal development conversations and put the power back in the hands of the employee,” said Joanne Mallia-Barsati, vice president of global talent management and development. This growth and development methodology was designed to create two-way coaching conversations between a manager and employee to elicit “how people really think about their careers, how they own their careers and how they are equally responsible in thinking about their development at the company,” Mallia-Barsati said.Brent Vader, VP of HR at Verizon recognized that at a company with a large frontline employee population, internal mobility and career development might look different than at other organizations. “It was very difficult to figure out how to make the right connections, you don’t just want to post and pray and hope that someone recognizes my profile. There has to be something more deliberate,” said Vader.And so over the course of a few years, Verizon created a program called Journey Forward to map out how ambitious frontline workers can get ahead. “It encompasses everything that we’ve talked about, whether it's finding a network, making sure you have a sponsor, and understanding the right skills and experiences necessary to qualify you for that next role,” he said.The panelists spoke about the topic "Creating Opportunity Within: How Employers Are Boosting Talent and Career Development," in a session moderated by journalist Jeanhee Kim The point of the Journey Forward is to give employees a systematic approach for their development plan, as well as a plan for getting training and finding a mentor, to make it easier to scale to their next opportunity.This effort to develop talent from within is a shift from the more traditional practice of attracting new talent to companies. A tell-tale sign that a company is serious about career development is when its internal career page is as sophisticated and thoughtfully designed as its external one, said Marcus Strang, lead solutions engineer of recruitment marketing platform Clinch.“We’ve started to see a shift in the market. Companies are realizing that there’s a much better ROI in investing in internal resources like career portals, talent networks programs, where employees who already work for you can get excited about their next job with you, instead of thinking they have to leave in order to grow.”The cost-benefit analysis points in favor of career development. “If you invest so much in an employee, and then they go elsewhere, and they take all the learning and all of the investment that you've made and bring it to another company, that’s really a big-time loss,” said Rose Fass, founder and chair of leadership development consulting company FassForward.Additionally, retained employees attract talent to your company: “They’re really your best advertisement, aren’t they?” said Fass.Mallia-Barsati says Penguin’s global immersion program, which adds a global dimension to its career development efforts, has created new business opportunities as well. Spending time in a new location allows the employee to get to know the team, understand the business, build connections, and really understand the culture, she says. From this program, they’ve experienced numerous business achievements, “including new imprints created, book partnerships and acquisitions,” she said.Jeanhee Kim is an independent journalist who has worked for CoinDesk, Crain’s New York Business, Money magazine and Forbes Asia.
Bridging Business Goals with Human-Centric Hiring to Impact the Bottom Line
BY Jeanhee Kim May 30, 2024As a young finance and real estate professional who witnessed mergers and acquisitions fail from the inside, Stephanie Manzelli realized that a critical component of a deal’s success was in the aftermath: how well the people were integrated culturally into the newly merged workplace.With this revelation, she changed direction and embarked on a career in HR with an emphasis on talent management and acquisition. Now as the senior vice president of human resources and diversity, equity and inclusion at Lever, a talent acquisition suite and an Employ brand, Manzelli has developed key strategies for successful hires.I spoke to Manzelli during From Day One’s webinar, Intentional Recruiting: Bridging Business Goals with Human Centric Hiring to Impact the Bottom Line. During this fireside chat, she shared insights and advice, particularly on how to map out a company’s goals and influence leadership.Manzelli made it clear that knowing a company’s business goals is only one part of understanding its needs. She breaks down each business goal into a four-part roadmap that then allows her to analyze what skills and experience the company needs to meet its objectives. Manzelli calls this horizon mapping.Horizon mapping begins with the ultimate goal and then reverse engineers the interim horizons to meet that goal. She gave the example of a company that wants to go public in a few years. She sets that as horizon four. The three horizons before that are big goals, or “rocks,” the company needs to achieve to successfully attain horizon four. So horizon two might be a successful series A funding round. “Underneath each of these horizons, every business unit has deliverables that they must achieve,” she said.Once the horizon has been mapped, she does a talent gap analysis and develops what she calls a “make versus buy strategy.” ‘Make’ refers to developing skills within the current talent pool of employees at the company, whereas ‘buy’ is talent acquisition. Using horizon mapping, “we find the roadmap that we need to start to build out those talent pools and source the right candidates more proactively, so that we can fill those business needs before our business actually needs them. And that should be the North Star,” Manzelli said.Stephanie Manzelli of Lever was interviewed by journalist Jeanhee Kim during the From Day One webinar (photo by From Day One)Sometimes it’s not easy to know what the business goals are, Manzelli acknowledged, that it takes one-on-one discussions with key business leaders and skill to build the right relationships within the company and communicate effectively. One of the most effective skills she employs is influencing without authority, which requires “flexing your communication style to meet the needs of your audience.”Knowing the styles of your leaders is essential. For data-driven individuals, Manzelli comes to the conversation armed with reports, metrics and return-on-investment figures. Other leaders depend on their gut and intuition. Those conversations are easier, she says, and are based on relationships and trust. But to maintain that trust, she prepares the reports as backup.“I always enter an organization or a conversation as slowly as I can. I really like to build the relationship before we dive into the tasks,” Manzelli said. “It's not a thing that takes me a long time to do, but it does pay off on the backend, and ensures the people that I’m partnering with have the bedrock of a relationship with me.” That relationship building then allows the leadership to have more open dialogue about their goals.These skills, horizon mapping and influencing without authority, are key for any successful HR professional. “HR, right, wrong or indifferent, is oftentimes looked at as a highly administrative function where we’re often only engaged when people need help.”But she said knowing what your company’s goals are and how HR and talent acquisition can get the company to meet its goals is always in the back of her mind. “You always have to make that connection point for the business. That’s our responsibility.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Lever, an Employ brand, for sponsoring this webinar. Jeanhee Kim is an independent journalist who has worked for CoinDesk, Crain’s New York Business, Money magazine and Forbes Asia.
Why College Prep for Teens May Become the Next Workplace Benefit
BY Jeanhee Kim April 30, 2024Employers offer a wide variety of benefits for the working parents of young children, from onsite childcare and paid leave to fertility and conception benefits, but what about support for parents of older children and teens? During the teen years, “There's a massive emotional strain between parents and teenagers that folks are way too familiar with. There's financial uncertainty,” said Jonathan Murray, head of Empowerly for Employers. And “college prep is a major source of stress for these parents and has a significant impact on workplace productivity.”Murray ticked off some compelling statistics from a survey of 1,000 working parents that Empowerly commissioned to explore the value of an employee benefit for college prep. A full 95% reported that they are nervous about their teen's future when it comes to college prep. Fifty percent of them said that college prep was a constant stress and 88% of the 1,000 parents said that they use time at work to help their teens with college prep. One in four of these parents admit to using from six to 15 hours a week.“It’s not surprising that parents are looking to employers to provide help, and looking to employers to provide college prep benefits,” said Murray. “It's the number two benefit that was requested by parents of teens,” after financial well-being, he said.I interviewed Murray and Theresa Shropshire, an enrollment expert and college consultant for Empowerly, about the compelling reasons for employers to support their workforce during these critical years in a From Day One webinar titled, How Employers Can Ensure Continuity of Care for All Families.As a working parent of a teen who just went through this process, I can attest that the high school years and the college prep and application process are unlike what I experienced myself as a teen college aspirant. The competition and pressure for teens to perform at a high level academically, athletically and even socially is astonishing. The private college counseling industry has boomed as overwhelmed parents seek to navigate these unfamiliar demands.Shropshire described the types of services college prep companies such as Empowerly now offer, which range from the familiar, such as helping students craft compelling college application essays, to the less well-known, such as helping students choose everything from courses, extracurricular activities, and selective summer programs beginning as early as eighth grade. “A lot of the parents that I speak with are actually first generation in the U.S. Or maybe they went to college outside of the U.S. The process here is very, very different. It’s not all about grades and test scores.”Journalist Jeanhee Kim interviewed Jonathan Murray and Theresa Shropshire of Empowerly during the From Day One webinar (photo by From Day One)Many of the services save parents’ decision-making time, such as counseling parents and teens on how and when to take advantage of early action, early decision, and regular decision college application options as well as evaluating and comparing costs and financial aid packages when a fortunate student is deciding among multiple college acceptances.While college prep is an emerging employee benefit, Murray described how the realization that teens need more support is beginning to permeate society. He pointed to the recent partnership between New York City and TalkSpace, the mental health app, to deliver free mental health care to teens from age 13 to 17.“It really hits to the heart of what benefits are truly for,” said Murray. “They’re the ability for an employer to step in and help their individual employees or their employee families with these large problems that impact them, impact their families, impact the organization, and impact the communities.”College prep services like Empowerly not only help teens, Murray says. “There’s benefits for the parents, and then downstream, that benefits employers and communities.”There are different options for employers as well, says Murray. He described tiers of benefits that begin at no cost to either the employee or employer. Empowerly would partner with employers to offer no-cost access to college prep resource materials, such as samples of successful college essays. Options then level up to one-on-one consulting between the employee and college prep service at a cost that could be borne directly by the employee or by the employer.He emphasized that Empowerly would work with employers to craft plans that satisfy the employers and provide real benefits to employees. “We can provide ROI on it. It’s just so highly bespoke based on the needs.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Empowerly, for sponsoring this webinar. Jeanhee Kim is an independent journalist who has worked for CoinDesk, Crain’s New York Business, Money magazine and Forbes Asia.