Warren Buffett once said, “In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats.” In today’s business economy arguably the strongest moat fortifying great companies is the concept of talent. To gain insight into how the landscape of talent acquisition is changing, on June 15, 2016 I moderated a discussion with three of the most respected companies representing healthcare, financial services and technology. They are:
Chuck Columbus, Senior Vice President and CHRO,
Matthew Owenby, CHRO,
Carol Gordon, Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition,
Robert Reiss: What is the future of talent acquisition?
Carol Gordon: We’re starting to leverage cognitive in our selection and assessment tools. We believe, at some point very soon, Watson may actually interview candidates which would be a great way for potential candidates to directly experience our cognitive capability, while enabling us to better match them to roles and predict the sort of people who are most likely to be successful. We are not just looking at the right skills, but the whole person, “the talent,” to ensure they’re going to be successful in our Company and culture.
Matthew Owenby: The future may well become on-demand workforce. This means providing a workplace that’s flexible enough to allow for a generation of workers that want to work when they want, with non-traditional working hours, a non-traditional job profile and job description. It’s going to take a lot of mental gymnastics for most corporations to get their minds around. But if your workforce ultimately is not prepared to work nine to five, including from a location perspective, we may be embracing a workforce that is primarily dominated by people that control parameters.
Chuck Columbus: In the future, health care and services will be provided in innovative ways — outside the traditional hospital and office visit settings — to meet consumer preference and needs. We already are seeing a rapid movement toward e-visits with physicians and skilled clinicians taking the place of traditional office visits. Our mini clinics in retail settings are generally staffed with one or two multi-skilled people. They rely on technology to connect in real time with other skilled clinicians to supplement their capability to serve the consumer needs. It will continue to be critical to help people considering job opportunities to understand the mission of the organization — how we serve a greater purpose to give meaning to the work. In health care, the traditional ways of working — the services we provide and the locations for care and service — are changing to improve both quality and customer convenience. Services will be provided in a more dispersed fashion, which will present challenges to sustaining a team oriented culture among the workforce. In view of these changes, we must continue to ask how can we engage the current and prospective workforce to think creatively about providing their skills and talents in a team-oriented way?
Reiss: What talent acquisition metric is most important on your dashboard?
Owenby: Quality of hire. How effective are they? How well did they integrate into the culture and what are their long-term prospects here?
Columbus: I would say the diversity of our pipelines. To best serve the diversity of our communities with cultural proficiency our workforce must be supported to bring their diversity of background, thought and perspectives every day.
Gordon: I've got three: speed to hire, quality of hire, and the hiring experience. We’re all in the business of finding the best talent as quickly as we can and making sure they're successful, how we do this – the experience we create, is very important to us.
Reiss: What’s a practice you use to identify the best talent?
Columbus: We are piloting an approach started by a group of millennials in our organization that uses an application to match people within the organization interested in working on a project or initiative outside their departmental sphere. This allows them to develop broader perspectives on our business, builds their network, accelerates their development, allows us to assess them in different settings, and breaks down traditional organization walls. It will help us learn new ways of resourcing key programs and improve talent readiness. This should prove to be an approach that we will leverage in our recruiting efforts, particularly for millennials.
Owenby: When you join Aflac domestically or globally, we want you to have a truly customized employment experience. Through our Career Success Center, we create a long-term career/relationship opportunity for you and engage as equally with you as with our customers. What matters in the future is relationship and how we’re going to differentiate ourselves. It’s not necessarily some clever use of technology, but some meaningful use of building and maintaining relationships, and that’s probably one of our big advantages.
Gordon: We’re looking at more non-traditional ways to find the type of talent we’re after. We find social forums and communities where target candidates hang out. Then we host coding challenges and hack-a-thons, to get them excited and engaged with our technology and to understand what it means to work at IBM. We also recently launched a way for candidates to upload their resume or CV giving Watson information to match them with relevant job opportunities and IBM careers.
To hear Robert Reiss interviews with top C-Suite executives go to www.ceoshow.com.
