NOW of Work

In this episode, we hear the story of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and it's a great one. Because their story is a people story. They've undergone tremendous transformation you might call Digital Transformation, but "digital" is a means to an end. At Vertex, transformation serves to amplify their tremendous culture and create talent velocity throughout the organization. Tune in to hear Kimberly Rose, Executive Director of People Experience, Analytics, and Digital Innovation in Human Resources ---- if a title doesn't illustrate the literal evolution of HR, we don't know what does. Kim shares how onboarding, career navigation, and managing people are all grounded in LISTENING TO PEOPLE at Vertex, and she reminds us one size does not fit all when it comes to employee experience.

Jess Von Bank is joined by guest co-host Tara Cooper, Market Analyst at Mercer. Together the duo tackle themes surrounding AI, HR technology, and community engagement. They share their insights on AI's impact on health and wellbeing, and the role of HR in navigating these changes. The discussion emphasizes the importance of education, inclusivity, and addressing disparities in wellbeing solutions, while also exploring cultural considerations in employee experience.

Our Now of Work community welcomed Stacey Harris of Sapient Insights Group, Zach Chertok from IDC, and Stacia Garr of RedThread Research to the meetup. This uber smart panel of industry analyst friends joins us at the onset of a busy HR Tech fall conference season to help SUMMARIZE 📌 2024 so far and LOOK AHEAD 👀 to themes and challenges promising to carry us into 2025. So far, 2024 has been full of AI buzz, skills chatter, increased HR Technology investment, consolidation and optimization of tech stacks, and conservative growth. The global labor market continues to be challenged by inflation, geopolitical tensions, and technology changes. Employers struggle to retain talent and curb jobs growth amid waning GDP growth, but they're also dropping degree requirements and training workers for skilled tasks. Artificial Intelligence and the transition to net-zero emissions will have the biggest impact on jobs in the short term. Whether you're on the conference circuit this fall or heads down in boardrooms setting strategy for 2025, conversations are sure to be full of AI as a DOMINANT FORCE, transforming daily work routines into intelligent business processes. As always, data privacy and security will require rigorous problem solving and governance. AI will drive innovation in predictive analytics for talent, and we'll leverage design thinking to consider human-machine teaming in blended workforces with AI and bots. One thing is clear: human-centered technology is the Future of Work, and HR are the primary stewards of the human experience of work. Exciting, heady stuff, but much work to be done. LEARN, WEIGH IN, GET INSPIRED

We welcome Madeline Laurano back to our Meetup!
Are we getting a little broad and loose with the term Talent Intelligence? -- YEP. Madeline will explain. She'll also share new capabilities around #interview intelligence, hot-off-the-press insights from Workhuman, and a new research effort with Torin Ellis on reducing #bias with #AI.

Jason Averbook and Jess Von Bank share personal and work-related highs and lows, exploring their experiences of success, loss and powerful spelling capabilities.

With a twist, Jaycee Grider, Visual Design Consultant and podcast producer at Mercer, joins as a guest to share about her upcoming, first-time trip to Burning Man.

Whether you're a word enthusiast, a fan of personal stories, or simply looking for a delightful conversation to brighten your day, this podcast is a must-listen.

Jason and Jess are joined by Dan Beck, President and Chief Product Officer at SAP SuccessFactors to chat it up about the perfect storm of skills, intelligence, data, AI, and what's on Dan's radar as he completes his first year in his newest role at SAP.

Together, they explain the importance of skills and re-skilling in the digital age as well as the need for a cultural shift towards skills-based planning and the use of AI to automate and enhance the skills development process. It's so important to make skills management easier for employees and to use the potential for AI to drive business value and improve the employee experience.

In this conversation, Jason Averbook is joined by Katie Jenkins, Global Product Portfolio Director - Work Architecture @ Mercer, to discuss the importance of skills in the workplace and how organizations can leverage skills to make talent decisions. They explore the difference between skills and competencies and the challenges and opportunities of implementing a skills-based strategy. They emphasize the need for organizations to identify their biggest problems and use skills as a lens to address those issues. The conversation highlights the iterative nature of building a skills-powered organization and the role of AI in inferring skills and they emphasize the importance of assessing skills to retain and engage employees, especially those with unique skills. The discussion also touches on the value of skills data and the challenges of using it effectively in recruiting.

Join us on Skool! https://www.skool.com/nowofwork/about

The Digital Meetup welcomes special guest Gerry Crispin.

Gerry has a bunch of well-founded data and well-formed suspicions about what education is likely to produce in the next 10 years if we don't intervene as employers.

Do we need to further pique interest? Gerry borrows from the 10 principles of Burning Man, including radical inclusion and transparency as a means to demonstrate fairness. Maybe this applies to his thinking around candidate experience and expectations, but what else does it apply to?

Takeaways

You deserve some TLC! Wind down from the work week with Jason and Jess as they catch up on their latest conference experience in Singapore, industry updates like the SHRM DEI announcement and, of course, a much needed Now of Work community check in.

As AI hiring tools have become increasingly more common and accessible, what does that mean for the future of work? Where does AI fit in a people-first recruiting approach?

BrightHire is an AI copilot for hiring used by hundreds of companies. Their platform transforms the quality of interviews with AI that builds exceptional hiring plans, guides interviewers, automates interview notes, enhances decision quality, and delivers new talent insights. With BrightHire’s unqiue data collected from 1m+ interviews, they’ve identified their clients have seen recruiters save 3-5 hours per week, and across a study of 25,000 candidates, they saw a 27% reduction in the # of interviews per hire and a 19% reduction in candidate drop-off. 

Ben Sesser, Co-founder & CEO, is joining today’s meetup to share his thoughts on 

1) How AI will change everything about knowledge work. 

2) One of the most important reasons to still learn foundation knowledge even in the age of AI will be to fact and error check outputs.

3) But it will be increasingly hard to get students and young professional to learn the foundational knowledge because there will be less of a forcing function to do so.