Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how the job-seeking and recruitment
process is evolving into a more online and social-media engagement.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special
BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the
2014 Ariba LIVE Conference
in Las Vegas. We’re here the week of March 17 to explore the latest in
collaborative commerce and to learn how innovative companies are tapping
into the networked economy.
I’m
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at
Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.
Our
next thought-leader interview focuses on the fascinating subject of
preparing for the
workforce of the future. It's now clear that we are
entering into a very diverse and even unprecedented work environment,
something the world perhaps has never known. How do enterprises prepare,
and how do they create the means to analyze and manage the transition to
very different work environments?
To learn more about
hiring and acquiring talent and managing a diverse and socially engaged -- and even more knowledge-driven workforce -- please join me now in welcoming
our guest,
Shawn Price, President for Global Cloud and Line of Business at SAP, and the former President of
SuccessFactors, now part of SAP. Welcome, Shawn.
Shawn Price: Dana, thanks for having me.
Gardner: Now, this is a really fascinating subject for me,
this new diversity and this talent-oriented workforce. But companies
must be thinking, how do I reduce risk? How do I think about making this
an opportunity rather than a challenge?
Price:
Dana, if you think about it, what you have just described is the
company that has already started to take steps to make sure that they
don't get caught unprepared for the future.
A lot of companies are having to respond to dramatic
changes in their operating models, where they’re driving revenues
against the backdrop of a global economy. And companies are required to
deploy flexible workforces that can be engaged and can change with this
fast business environment that we’re in.
We have a
scenario here in the US market, in particular, where every day, 10,000
people turn 65 and that will continue for the next 19 years. So you have
an experienced staff that's leaving the workforce. Then, on the
front-end, you have a talent shortage. There just are not enough
millennials to replace that exodus that’s occurring.
The
astute companies of the future have mapped this out, have laid a plan,
have started to build warm pools of talent, and understand this in
everything that they do. They’ve tied their strategy to their people
strategy and acquisition, and they’re really managing it for the
cultural nuances that the regions that they operate in require, and
they’re pretty flexible and nimble.
More diversity
Gardner:
One of the characteristics, as I understand it, is that there is more
of a diversity in the ways in which employees or talent are engaged with
a company, many more varieties than the full-time, 40 hours a week,
9-to-5 employee type. This seems to have some upside, but it's
different. You don't manage folks in the same way when they’re working
through these different models.
Price: There’s a real
movement and emphasis on
personal brand. To a degree, you’re starting to
see free agents in the market. When you look at it on the retention
side, planning strategy to the right people, to the right place, and at
the right time, with a lot of millennials that are entering the
workforce there is a clear six month delineation. That is the greatest
risk for your company to lose that talent.
They’ve
come in, they’ve looked around, and they’ve decided whether they’re
actually advancing their personal brand, their knowledge base. It's less
about hierarchy and the old models of the past. They’re making a call
on whether they’re actually advancing and learning or it's more tenure
based. The way we measure is different as well.
One measurement that's completely different than anything that we’ve done in the past is your
engagement index: How much do you contribute? How much is your content consumed? How engaged are you in the day-to-day?
Gardner: I suppose there’s another complicating factor. I’ve read that by 2020, there will be
five different generations working together,
and each with a very different set of skills, experiences,
expectations, and behaviors. It means that companies can’t have a
one-size-fits-all approach to this. In fact, they might have to be able
to have multiple ways of engaging.
We need start to create a relationship at a much earlier point in order to create these warm pools of talent.
How
does that factor into what you’re talking about, the workplace of the
future. I guess we should talk about the enterprise of the future, and
that they need to have a diversified approach, not just a single way to
engage?
Price: You’re absolutely right. If you
look at talent acquisition today, it has shifted. The focus used to be
in the past on how do I put as many people as possible through my
applicant tracking system,
but today it's far more strategic. It's where do I need them and how
much do they cost. We need start to create a relationship at a much
earlier point in order to create these
warm pools of talent.
Second,
it's really asking who are my best performers, where are they from, and
how do I get more of them? If you have a particularly productive intern
program, for example, which college are you drawing talent from that's
performing the best in the specific function? So the workforce of the
future looks vastly different.
The power of how talent
is acquired has shifted subtly as well. It used to be solidly in the
hands of the employers, but today it's a two-sided equation. If I’m
hiring somebody, I often do interviews over
SMS or
text, because it's a stream of consciousness. It's not a prefabricated dialogue.
But I also look at their
LinkedIn profile, which is how they want the world to see them. I look at their
social media
profile. And then the most valuable thing to me is the peer references
that exist in my network that can validate that that individual is who
they’re representing themselves to be.
The flip side
But
the flip side of that is we have websites that allow the applicant to
look into the leadership style. They can connect to their network of
people that may have worked for that leader in the past. They can see if
the culture that they’re espousing is working.
So you
have the fundamental shift in how you’re attracting, retaining, and
working with talent that is completely different from things in the past
and the way that we have done it.
What the future will
hold is that we’ll go to a point where you will carry your composite
profile of who you are and that will be made up of both social media
external to the company, the LinkedIn profiles, and in some cases, even
your performance reviews, where it's appropriate to externalize it. All
of that will go in your employee record that will follow you throughout
your career. Systems will automatically update that, and so it will be
much more consumable.
Smart companies that are
innovating are redefining the processes by which they engage. In retail,
for example, you have seasonal workforce, and that seasonal workforce
typically has to go through the entire recruiting process again if they
come back the following year.
We’re encumbered in many ways to systems and thinking of the past around
some of these talent acquisition processes that are so core to
delivering on the strategy.
Maybe I had a good
experience year one. If I reapply, now I’m going through the website,
now I’m doing verifications. Why can't we re-imagine the on-boarding to
be, “Dana, you worked with us last year. You did a terrific job. We’d
like to have you back. Is everything the same?” In fact, you can put an
application on your smartphone with which you can make sure that the
information is accurate, and then turn you on as an employee in the
system automatically.
Instead, we’re encumbered in
many ways to systems and thinking of the past around some of these
talent acquisition processes that are so core to delivering on the
strategy.
Gardner: Shawn, thinking about the
past, I suppose we used to measure things pretty directly --
productivity measurements, top line, bottom line. Is there a new way to
measure whether we’re doing this correctly, whether we’re getting the
best workforce and best talent, ramping up to give ourselves the
resources we need as organizations to meet our own goals? Should we not
think about this in productivity terms? What's the right set of metrics?
Price:
It's funny. We will always be top-line and bottom-line driven to some
degree, but the measurement isn’t necessarily productivity. Maybe it’s
rethinking processes that can have a material impact. One is this
learning management notion, where I was describing engagement. Imagine
you are on-boarding to a new company. The most important thing for me as
that hiring manager is to get you up to speed and, in your words,
productive as quickly as possible.
How did we do that
in the past? We put you in a training course or maybe state-of-the-art,
an online web-based training course that would run days, if not weeks,
on end to try and have you assimilate everything that we needed you to
learn.
Moving ahead
The
new world, which is not based on that, is trying to move that
on-boarding and productivity ahead. The way that we’re doing it is we
are saying, “We already own all of the subject matter expertise required
to on-board somebody. Wouldn't it be cool if, before you even join the
company, you could connect by a social network, not one of these
isolated ghost towns that stand on their own, but a social network
connected to HR or connected to Ariba?”
We could have
you engage with somebody doing your same job, so you could ask that
person anything you want before you got there -- what should I read,
what should I learn, who should I talk to, what's my first week like?
That engagement was already occurring.
Then, when you
arrive in the company, it would be your compliance learning, and the
normal HR functional learning, but you would also take advantage of
subject matter expertise.
Today, the way that we learn is not in large chunks of data. Think about
YouTube.
It's web downloadable, consumable in five minutes on my mobile device.
That content that I need in order to be enabled and to thus be
productive is available from my coworkers in the form of a five-minute
video. Or there's this advent of massive online communities that are
producing content. Or I may choose to bring in an expert from outside
the company to create content.
The visualization that I have is
Khan Academy,
where the most complex topics are searchable and digestible via mobile
in 15 minutes. That's where we’re seeing the shift from just pure top
line and bottom line to rethinking what on-boarding and engagement look
like, and what does that ultimately do to the acceleration of someone’s
comprehension? There are many, many examples.
Many times social networks are established as standalone entities and they become ghost towns after a while.
Gardner:
It seems like so much of what's going on now is vetted through a
community of some sort, and that a great deal of emphasis and trust is
developed in this group setting. On one hand, you’re looking to the
social networks to learn more about hiring prospects. The hiring
prospects, of course, want to look back into that social environment to
learn about you and your company.
Are you saying that
companies need to start to become more open and social and create
content and the media and mechanism, so that they can be in a sense part
of this community? And how far along are companies in actually doing
that?
Price: Many times social networks are
established as standalone entities and they become ghost towns after a
while. You kind of lose interest because they lack content and context.
When
you attach it to an actual application, you can publish dynamically to
that community, and you can search and see, for example, what was the
number one search content today, this week, this month.
Increasingly,
I’m starting to see things on people’s resumes like their engagement
index, which says, “I was the number one producer of content for my
company that was consumed by the social network.” You’re seeing stack
rankings of that nature and form.
Cloud strategy
Social
will become, and has become, an enormous component of
our cloud strategy. In fact, today, we sit with more than 12 million subscribers
on our social platform.
We have a large hotel chain
that is actually using it to manage contract labor and part-time labor,
because they want the engagement. They want the connection, but they
want to be able to connect differently to them than the employee who is a
full-time employee. And this hotel chain has over 170,000 contractors
in their communities, and they’re grabbing information and all the
expectations.
The other part of social, of course, is
the mobile side of it. Our networks and our access to vast amounts of
skills that would have in the past been hidden are now available to
peruse, almost like a skills catalog within your own organization.
You’ll find things that you didn’t even realize you had in pockets of
the globe. People’s skills that you wouldn't necessarily have on file
even are now apparent through that dialogue.
Gardner:
Shawn, what about organizations that have moved beyond the nice-to-have
phase of understanding this and are becoming more serious -- but maybe
don't know how, perhaps it isn't in their DNA, it's not something they
have done traditionally. How do they begin the journey to be more
social, to predict the workforce of the future and their requirements,
and how to stay out in front of it so that it does remain an opportunity
and not so much a challenge?
For many companies, they visualize this at the top line and the strategic level, but they also visualize it as a process.
Price:
Most companies are going through this transformation in HR because of
the macro trends we’ve been describing. What they’re ultimately trying
to figure out is how do I create a strategy? How do I build a set of
applications that allows me to execute against that strategy and measure
whether I’m performing? And how do I drive cost out of it?
For
many companies, they visualize this at the top line and the strategic
level, but they also visualize it as a process, and they think of that
process as recruit to retire. We believe that you can start anywhere,
but you’re going to end up with this process that's interconnected.
Maybe
your starting point is recruiting, because you have a lack of talent or
you’re opening or you’re expanding. Maybe you have a learning
management on compliance, or maybe you have performance and goals where
you’re actually measuring the progress. You can start with any
application and interconnect it over time.
We have
actually
completed the entire portfolio of applications end to end in
the market. Think about Ariba’s connection with HR, which seems like a
funny thing to say. On the
Ariba Network
today, we have 1.5 million connected companies. We’re adding one every
three seconds. Imagine in that supply chain, in that labor pool, what
would be available to you if you were to publish a job requisition, for
example.
So we look at it as recruit to retire. Where
the world is going though is our cloud applications. Today, we manage in
excess of 35 million subscribers, the byproduct of people working with
us like that is two-fold. One, they tell us very quickly what they like
and don't like, which allows us to innovate very quickly. But the other
side that you raised is the predictive side.
Predictive analysis
HR
is really wide open right now for predictive analytics, and the only
way you get there is by having scale of people using your system. Today,
for example, we have built 2,000
key performance indicators (KPIs)
and benchmarks to be able to tell us things like, what is my management
bench strength, today, 30 day, six months, and a year from now? Who is
ready and who is going to be ready, because of course that’s dependency
to your strategy?
Or what's the
voluntary turnover rate?
We talked about five generations in the workforce. For experienced
workers, what's my voluntary turnover rate versus the millennial
workforce?
Where we’re getting to is really being able
to correlate multiple indexes to give us a predictive view of what's
going to happen. And that’s pretty exciting. That’s a pretty big
breakthrough that we’ve seen.
Gardner: If I
understand you correctly, Shawn, we’re talking about being able to
analyze what's going on inside your company across many aspects of the
business to better know what your requirements are going to be vis-à-vis
talent and in human resources. But you’re also analyzing externally
something like the Ariba Network and/or social environments so that you
can then, if you can't hire, you can procure, or perhaps the boundaries
between them are shifting as we get into more services procurement and
we automate.
The community component of this is really fascinating -- contributing best practices in new ways.
But
the key here, I think, is the analytics. We need to analyze better what
we’re doing and how we are doing it, but we also need to analyze what's
going on externally. Sometimes, that’s difficult without a third party,
a partner, or a platform. How do you advise companies to be able to do
this sort of comprehensive analytics capability?
Price:
It's a great point. We have analytics on a particular application. So
if you want to instrument learning, that exists. There is analytics that
cross the recruit-to-retire spectrum.
But then you
hit on a really good point. How am I in category, in mining for
retention for this cost of worker, or how am I for recruitment and
retention ratio relative to a 100 other minds? You’re absolutely right.
You can do it within an app, across an app, and using the power of the
35 million subscribers look at patterns that exist within an industry or
a best practice.
The community component of this is
really fascinating -- contributing best practices in new ways to look at
things and new indexes that companies build and publish to the cloud so
our communities can consume those new ways of looking at a particular
process is an exciting time. The byproducts are 2,000 KPIs that you
subscribe to, to not only give you what is best in category in your
industry.
Gardner: I don’t want to go too far
afield, but it seems to me that IT has a role here. We’re talking about
levels of analytics across organizational boundaries, joining
information and data types that may not have been joined before, or
couldn’t be brought together in any way.
So is there
an IT or a technology aspect to this? Is the old way of doing technology
no longer appropriate? What should we be thinking about in terms of our
requirements for the technology to accomplish what we want in order to
have that best workforce in the future?
Ultimate measurement
Price:
If you look at where we are, the ultimate measurement of a customer
achieving value with your application is that they use it. With HR,
there is one side which is the logical. Do you have the feature and
functions? There is another part, though, which is the connections and
the emotion to use the software.
We’ve really taken
much of the older model of IT’s involvement in the creation of data mart
and a report that takes forever, to putting that power into the hands
of the employees and managers for self-service, and that’s an exciting
trend.
So we’ve tried to remove the friction of
deployment. We’ve tried to create modularity, and we have tried to
abstract all complexity possible, so that we get to a point where there
is minimal IT involvement required.
Gardner:
Are there some examples of being able to create campaigns that start to
pull this together? It seems to have an impact across many parts of the
business. We need to think about change. We need to put in the
technology. We need to think more social, engage people in different
ways, and think about sourcing of talent in different ways.
We’re at a state in the market and the technology today where it's really a matter of imagination more than anything else.
Is
there any precedent that you can point to of a campaign of some sort
that has begun to make the shift? Perhaps there’s a methodology that we
can look at.
Price: We’re at a state in the market and the technology today where it's really a matter of imagination more than anything else.
If
you take retail, they have always had a historic problem of getting the
right amount of talent, in the right place, at the right time, as
seasonal as they are. They may have two weeks of hyper growth and they
may have a great season or a bad season, but if they’re slow, they can't
hire enough talent.
So retail has re-imagined hiring.
Of course it doesn’t fit all, but in some large global multinational
chains, they found that the actual people that shop in their locations
is the same demographic of people that work in their locations.
So
they said if we can build a smartphone app that would allow you to
apply while you are in the store, and the manager in the store at that
time can see your resume or your LinkedIn profile, we can put you
together and collapse this formal hiring process of weeks into
potentially hours. This is just a complete re-imagination of recruiting.
They collapsed all of their hiring from weeks to days.
We’re
seeing this across all areas of the business, the ability to transform
and visualize data. Where did I get that last recruit from that was so
exceptional, and what is the profile of that individual? Talent doesn’t
necessarily look like we think it looks from the past. Talent comes in
every gender, every diversity, and from every corner of the globe. So
what patterns do we have in our workforce that we want to replicate? The
impact isn't just productivity, as we described. It's the engagement
and contribution.
Creating a connection
Then,
if you think about some of the other areas, you just follow this
example. If I’m joining a company as a new sales rep, that application
should be smart enough to look within my company for people who have
worked with me before, create a connection over social and say, do you
want to go for coffee, congratulations.
Maybe it goes
out and sources over the Ariba Network for all of my laptop, my mobile,
everything that I need. And if it's really smart, it takes all of my
contacts and pushes it into my customer cloud, because I will have been
selling to the same people over and over. That’s an example of a process
that will run across four legs of the application stack. We’ve never
been at a more exciting time -- ever.
Gardner: When you were speaking, you reminded me of the mantra several years ago in
customer relationship management (CRM) of know your customer well, know them end-to-end. It now sounds as if we need to apply that to the employee.
The informed companies of the future will know their workforces better than anyone.
Price:
Absolutely. If you don't, and you don't really have the engagement
level, you’ll probably have a talent shortage, because you’re not
measured hierarchically any more. You’re not measured on the old
traditional way. It’s about what you get in your personal brand. The
informed companies of the future will know their workforces better than
anyone and know how to replicate and scale them up or down at will and
on-board them instantaneously.
Gardner: Perhaps
the corporation of the future isn't a single brand, but an amalgamation
of many thousands of brands for all the people contributing to their
common goals?
Price: Absolutely.
Gardner:
I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been talking about the
fascinating subject of preparing for the workforce of the future. We
have seen how some new approaches and technologies are coming to bear to
prepare for this diverse and potentially productive workforce,
unprecedented in its scope, but uncharacteristic when you compare it to
the past.
So a big thanks to our guest, Shawn Price, the President for Global Cloud and Line of
Business at SAP. Thank you, Shawn.
Price: Thanks so much for having me, Dana. It was a pleasure.
Gardner:
And a big thank you too to our audience for joining this special
podcast, coming to you from the 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.
I’m
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host
throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.
Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.
Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how the job-seeking and recruitment
process is evolving into a more online and social-media engagement.
Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.
You may also be interested in: