SBO moves from theory to practice; AI matures as the tech enabler

As AI-driven HR technology advances, and as Skills-Based Organizations move from strategy to execution, the SBO workforce model is primed to mature in 2024. 

First, the technology.

Generative AI was the tech buzz of 2023, spotlighting its almost unlimited potential to automate tasks and streamline business processes. As such, AI has quickly become vital to the Skills-Based Organization workforce model; specifically in its ability to screen hundreds of resumes at lightning speed and to pull skills information from resumes, job descriptions, and any labor related content. retrain.ai’s Talent Intelligence Platform which was built on the next generation AI from the ground up, offers the Skills Architecture Module as the foundational element for managing the workforce and understanding the current organizational skills state, benchmarking it against the skills required in the industry and recommending which top skills to adopt and enhance, allowing significantly greater agility in acquiring, developing and deploying talent. 

Organizations enamored with the idea of AI for AI’s sake, however, can find themselves with more applications than are needed to address their specific needs, with the additional costs that come with them. In 2024, HR leaders will continue to evolve into more tech savvy professionals, collaborating with their counterparts to first identify problems to solve, and then carefully choose platforms that offer the right solutions to talent acquisition and talent management challenges.

Then, the data.

With the best technological solutions in place, HR leaders are on the right path to solving business problems. Ultimately, though, the goal is reached with data.

“We need to think less about platforms and more about data,” says Dr. Sandra Laughlin, Chief Learning Scientist and Global Head of Talent Enablement & Transformation for EPAM Systems. “As new tools are coming out, new and better data sources are revealed. Generative AI can offer feedback on things that are difficult to observe and coach.” 

To fuel efficient skill-based talent acquisition efforts, for example, AI-driven data insights enable precise candidate matching based on exact skills and attributes required for specific roles. Skills-focused data–and the lack of demographic and other potentially biased data–supports diverse talent pools and an inclusive pipeline.

“The big difference [between the types of AI companies] is that a great AI company is a data company. They get a lot of data, they know what the data means, they spend a lot of time making sense of the data,” says analyst Josh Bersin of The Josh Bersin Company. “They use the data in your company matched against (exterior) data so that the data in your company can be classified and used in a more and more intelligent way.” 

retrain.ai was honored to be recognized as one of the “built on AI” type of  companies, based on billions of labor market data points, with accurate and automated skills detection and assessment, enabling in-depth skills analysis and forecasts to inform and improve strategic workforce planning efforts, increasing quality of hire when used to match internal and external candidates to open positions, and empowering reskilling and upskilling initiatives to improve learning and career path recommendations.

Learn more about the power of retrain.ai’s Talent Intelligence Platform here.

How Generative AI Transforms Talent Intelligence

For businesses competing in today’s fast-paced landscape, leading the market means having the right people with the right skills in the right roles. Generative AI has risen to the top of this conversation as a way to more efficiently and accurately reach that goal. 

But what is Generative AI, and how can it revolutionize talent intelligence? If you’re a CHRO, technical innovation leader, or workforce strategist looking to harness the power of AI for HR, here’s what you need to know.

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating new, original content, rather than simply analyzing or processing existing data. Using vast datasets to learn patterns, relationships, and styles, generative AI technology is able to generate human-like content, whether it’s text, images, or even music.

Generative AI in Hiring

Finding the right talent has always been a critical challenge for HR professionals. When it comes to sourcing, screening and securing the right candidates with the skills needed for business success, generative AI can assist in multiple ways:

  • Skills Extraction and Matching: By analyzing resumes and job descriptions with unprecedented speed and accuracy, Generative AI solutions can quickly identify candidates who best match the required skills and qualifications for an open role. This means talent acquisition specialists can cut time and cost to hire by zeroing in on the right people to move through the hiring process.
  • Candidate Engagement: Chatbots powered by Generative AI can interact with candidates, answer questions, and schedule interviews, ensuring a seamless and efficient recruitment process while freeing HR leaders up to focus on more interpersonal elements of the hiring process.
  • Diversity and Inclusion: Generative AI can support a fair and inclusive hiring process by focusing solely on qualifications and skills, eliminating demographic and other information that can introduce unintended bias.

Generative AI and Internal Mobility

Fostering internal mobility is essential for employee growth and retention. In fact, it’s been shown that employees with a clear view toward future opportunities are more likely to stay with an organization, making proactive upskilling channels a business imperative. Generative AI can assist by:

  • Skills Mapping: Generative AI can help identify employees’ skills, capabilities and interests in order to more accurately suggest potential career paths within the organization.
  • Learning Recommendations: When opportunities are identified in the form of open roles, gigs or projects, Generative AI can produce relevant upskilling pathways to help them acquire the new skills required to pursue them.
  • Succession Planning: By analyzing employee data around skills, capabilities and aspirations, Generative AI can aid in identifying high-potential employees and preparing them for leadership positions.

Generative AI and Skills-Based Organizations

The traditional job-centric approach to workforce planning is quickly becoming outdated, as more companies shift to a skills-focused model. Generative AI supports this transition through:

  • Skills Gap Analysis: By powering a data-driven skills architecture, Generative AI can analyze the skills already present in a workforce, those needed in the future, and how to bridge the gap between the two with employee upskilling or reskilling recommendations.
  • Skills Tagging: Generative AI can automatically tag skills to employees based on their experiences and achievements, creating a comprehensive, continuously updated skills inventory.
  • Adaptive Training: Personalized training plans can be fueled by Generative AI, ensuring employees are continually developing the skills necessary to excel in their current and future roles.

Considerations for CHROs

While Generative AI holds immense potential to elevate HR functions, there are some critical considerations for CHROs when evaluating AI platforms for their HR technology stack:

  • Data Privacy: Ensure that data privacy regulations are followed rigorously, including the safeguarding of sensitive employee and candidate information.
  • Ethical Use: Develop Responsible AI guidelines to comply with regulations and prevent bias, discrimination, or misuse of technology in hiring decisions.
  • Integration: Ensure the AI system can seamlessly integrate with your existing HR software to maximize its efficiency and avoid the delays of a rip-and-replace solution.
  • Training and Support: Invest in staff training to help HR teams understand and effectively use Generative AI tools as well as welcome user feedback.
  • Continuous Improvement: Keep in mind that AI is not a static, set-it-and-forget-it solution. Technology solutions require regular updates and fine-tuning to remain effective.

By automating processes, reducing biases, and focusing on skills, Generative AI enables HR professionals to make more informed decisions and create a workforce ready for the challenges of the future. As a CHRO or HR leader, embracing Generative AI can lead to a more agile, efficient, and innovative HR function, giving your organization a competitive edge in the talent market.

 

retrain.ai is a Talent Intelligence Platform designed to help enterprises hire, retain, and develop their workforce, intelligently. Leveraging Responsible AI and the industry’s largest skills taxonomy, enterprises unlock talent insights and optimize their workforce effectively to hire the right people, keep them longer and cultivate a successful skills-based organization. retrain.ai fuels Talent Acquisition, Talent Management and Skills Architecture all in one, data-driven solution. To see it in action, request a demo.

AI’s Role in Revolutionizing Talent Acquisition and Retention

This article originally appeared in Forbes.

As corporations grapple with the challenging task of attracting and retaining highly skilled talent in an intensely competitive market, AI-assisted HR tools are creating a new paradigm. Of course, these innovations can create potential ethical issues during the recruitment and internal mobility processes. Here are things that HR leaders must consider when weighing the pros and cons of implementing these technologies.

AI In Talent Acquisition

Traditional recruitment methods, often laborious and time-consuming, require HR leaders to sift through hundreds of résumés for every open position. These processes can potentially cost thousands of dollars if a position remains unfilled, even reaching six figures when considering senior or technical roles. Furthermore, hastily rushing the recruitment process can lead to improper fitting, resulting in higher turnover rates. With AI-powered platforms, HR leaders can streamline their processes by ensuring a more accurate selection of candidates and accelerating the hiring timeline.

Algorithms can process vast amounts of data swiftly, eliminating the painstaking manual review of résumés. By leveraging natural language processing and machine learning, AI-powered tools analyze and use skills extraction to identify the most relevant skills for a given role. These systems go beyond simple keyword matching; they can apply context to infer skills that aren’t explicitly mentioned in résumés. Semantic skills extraction reduces missed opportunities that occur using only keyword search, creating a selection process that’s more comprehensive for recruiters and more fair to candidates.

At a time when enterprises are rapidly transitioning to skills-based models, introducing an AI-powered platform can help HR leaders quickly assess and rank internal and external candidates based on their skills and capabilities. This not only saves time by revealing best-fit candidates faster but also goes even further by enabling role matching.

Finally, recruitment professionals can use AI to enhance the candidate experience with personalized interactions. Tools like chatbots and virtual assistants provide real-time updates on application status and offer tailored job recommendations, reducing candidate effort and time.

AI In Employee Retention

High employee turnover can significantly impact a company’s bottom line. A survey showed that 63% of employees changing jobs cited lack of advancement opportunities as a main factor. In this context, AI can help HR leaders understand their employees’ needs and aspirations better, then use that knowledge to enhance their journey within the organization.

With AI platforms, talent management teams can analyze large volumes of data to gain insights into factors contributing to employee attrition, such as job satisfaction, work-life balance and career growth opportunities. This personalized insight, regardless of workforce size, allows HR professionals to identify and address at-risk employees’ concerns proactively. For example, an employee who’s remained in one position for a long time may have unrealized potential to succeed on another team in the company. A proactive HR leader will capitalize on AI-driven insights to spot that opportunity and present it to the employee, offering a new challenge and possibly keeping them from looking elsewhere.

Performance management and feedback systems receive support from AI technologies that provide objective evaluations of employee performance. This can help HR leaders and people managers provide personalized coaching and development plans, enhancing overall job satisfaction for employees.

Ethical Concerns And Potential Biases

While AI technology offers numerous advantages, it does raise ethical concerns that HR leaders should stay aware of. These systems can unintentionally perpetuate biases and stereotypes present in historical data. In 2018, Amazon came under fire when it was revealed that an AI-based recruitment system discriminated against women when hiring for technical roles. The platform sought top candidates by positions on their résumés, and considering women had held only about 24% of STEM jobs in the U.S., the majority of résumés fed into the system were from men. As a result, the algorithm developed male preference and gradually deprioritized résumés from women.

Clearly, unintended bias like this can have devastating consequences for an enterprise on several fronts beyond skewed workforce growth. The ripples can be felt throughout brand reputation, customer backlash, candidate trust and more.

Such dangers have prompted an increase in regulation around responsible AI, including Local Law 144 in New York City. The new law requires independent audits of what it categorizes as automated employment decision tools (AEDT) used in hiring within, or from within, New York City—an expansive reach, given the city is a global business hub. While it can be argued that AI-driven platforms don’t automate decisions but rather inform humans’ decision-making, the systems present within an organization’s HR tech stack are included in the regulations.

To remain compliant, HR leaders must ensure diverse and representative training data for any AI systems they implement. Additionally, systems should comply with the five pillars of responsible AI: explainability and interpretability; bias mitigation and fairness algorithms; data robustness and granularity; data quality and rights; and accountability through regular audits and monitoring of the AI’s decision-making process.

HR innovators looking to employ responsible AI-based systems will benefit from first researching available platforms and asking potential vendors the important questions: Is your solution transparent? Can you easily explain how its algorithms work? What bias mitigation is in place? What client onboarding experience can we expect and what training is included?

AI Is Here To Stay

Artificial intelligence is undeniably transforming the world of HR, especially in talent acquisition and retention. The benefits of AI, like streamlined recruitment processes and improved employee engagement and satisfaction, are significant for organizations. By employing ethical, responsible AI-driven systems, enterprises can future-proof their workforce and reap immense benefits.

Announcing the retrain.ai Partnership Program

NYC / August 9, 2023 – retrain.ai, a leading AI-driven Talent Intelligence Platform, has announced the launch of an exclusive Partner Program available to consulting and recruiting firms. The company describes its new offering as a way for exclusive partnership with premier firms to bring their prospects and clients into the future of work with an AI-fueled, data-driven understanding of what they need to become a Skills-Based Organization.

The company uses a data driven, Responsible AI-driven operating model using billions of data points to help enterprises achieve a Skills-Based modality. 

“Becoming a Skills-Based Organization is the key to success for today’s enterprise HR leaders, but many don’t know where to start. When they ask a consultant for guidance on transforming to an SBO model they may get information, but not the tools they need to get started,” says retrain.ai Co-founder and COO Isabelle Bichler-Eliasaf. “We provide those tools, along with the expertise to optimize them for success.”

To accomplish this, retrain.ai centralizes data to create an adherent skills strategy to unify and standardize data sets to remove silos within HR functionalities.  This unified data set, paired with the company’s Responsible AI, equips HR’s to move faster and with more agility and efficiency. The platform continuously updates to eliminate future skills gaps within the organization where it is already implemented. 

Consultants in the retrain.ai Partner Program will have access to the talent intelligence platform’s Skills Architecture module to generate a skills-map of an enterprise client’s workforce, including unified skills language and agreed-upon job architecture. With better visibility into their employees’ strengths and skill gaps, HR leaders can spot hidden talent, reveal internal mobility opportunities and deploy talent efficiently during times of rapid change.

“Our platform provides HRs with a comprehensive understanding of their workforce and the right data to align with organizational goals,” says Bichler-Eliasaf. “Once our partner consultants provide their enterprise clients with a comprehensive skills catalog of the core competencies, technical proficiencies, and soft skills needed for each role in their organization, they can begin to strategize an SBO operating model.”

 

retrain.ai is a Talent Intelligence Platform designed to help enterprises hire, retain, and develop their workforce, intelligently. Leveraging Responsible AI and the industry’s largest skills taxonomy, enterprises unlock talent insights and optimize their workforce effectively to hire the right people, keep them longer and cultivate a successful skills-based organization. retrain.ai fuels Talent Acquisition, Talent Management and Skills Architecture all in one, data-driven solution.

The Great Resignation: What Does it Mean for Your Organization?

Anthony Klot, an organizational psychologist, coined the term “The Great Resignation” (or The Big Quit) to adeptly describe the trend of employees leaving their jobs voluntarily. Starting from March 2021, 19 million Americans have quit their jobs. Six months later, this “Great Resignation” continues to grow.

Continue reading “The Great Resignation: What Does it Mean for Your Organization?”

Upskilling at Scale – Three foundational strategies (part 2 of 3)

This article was originally published on Forbes.com

In a recent article, I shared my thoughts about the implications of the rapid adoption of automation and Artificial Intelligence, bringing to the labor market unprecedented upheavals. I analyzed how the rise of new occupations and the growing demand for new skills create a skills-gap that continues to widen, creating systematic unemployability for those who stay behind, and a growing shortage of qualified labor, which limits business outcomes for talent-starved businesses worldwide.

Continue reading “Upskilling at Scale – Three foundational strategies (part 2 of 3)”

Should I stay or should I go? Here’s why employees are leaving your company

From layoffs, outsourcing, and cost-cutting measures, transformations in the workplace have left organizations scrambling to manage their existing workforce. Layoffs and lack of career opportunities and support contribute to decreased commitment and lower engagement and well-being, making employees wonder, should I stay or should I go? More often than not, the answer is –go.

Continue reading “Should I stay or should I go? Here’s why employees are leaving your company”

What if we could navigate careers like we navigate traffic?

This article was written and originally published by Medium.

After 100+ years of hiring with a mass production mindset, it’s time to apply personalization to managing the workforce.

Continue reading “What if we could navigate careers like we navigate traffic?”