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.

With every period of innovation, throughout all of human history, the global workforce expands. In other words, new innovation creates new industries. Fact!

Does that seem counter-intuitive? Shifting of jobs to new industries, we understand. But we might also expect contraction of the global workforce when technology drives efficiency and new ways to create value. Shouldn't we need fewer people to get work done? Or does innovation not do that?

We're welcoming an expert on labor demographics and the working population of the world to help us understand.

BONUS: Guess which two segments of the workforce are growing the fastest?

In this episode, Bradley Schurman, Founder and CEO of Human Change, joins Jess and Jason to discuss the need to redefine productivity and effectiveness in the context of an aging workforce. The conversation touches on the challenges and opportunities of an aging population and the need for organizations to adapt to this demographic shift. They explore the relationship between technological advancements, such as AI, and the expansion of the workforce. Additionally, delving into the societal implications of an aging population, including appearance bias and the need for family-friendly policies

Could AI be like the Olympics? 🌐

Similarly, AI has various disciplines, lots of winners, even more losers, international collaboration, and strict governance. Success is measured by multiple metrics and there is no single finish line. Or is it a zero sum game? You either win or lose, game over.

While some aspects are still unfolding, we can already identify clear winners in this tech race. Companies like Apple, NVIDIA, and Microsoft are medalists to be sure. However, what happens when Apple doesn’t need their OpenAI band-aid, er, partnership, any more? Where does Alphabet Inc. net out in all this? What happens to applications, platforms, point solutions, and market places? What does all of this have to do with HRTechnology and your experience architecture?

HR, the latest AI developments have EVERYTHING to do with your experience architecture. When Sam Altman called this a "printing press moment" before Congress last year, he meant the opportunity of technology to become a significant change agent in tipping the trajectory of things. We're already seeing proof in the world of work.

Jason Averbook and Jess Von Bank go over all the latest AI developments, share high-value use cases for Human Resources and the workforce beyond the obvious and they provide demonstrations of some of the best innovation we've seen.

Meet David Gloss, Head of Team Effectiveness at AIIR Consulting!

As most of us may know, burnout has become more prevalent than ever before. And the solution isn't to avoid it, but rather it's about finding ways to mitigate its impact since it's something that everyone will experience. Teams, whether they are intact or cross-functional, play a vital role in shaping a company's culture and productivity levels. This has always been true, but as the pace of change continues to accelerate, the ability of teams to establish connections, build trust, and adopt healthy ways of working becomes an even stronger indicator of employee health and performance.

David Gloss, Head of AIIR Consulting's Team Effectiveness Practice, leads a dynamic group that is dedicated to helping clients assess, measure, and enhance team performance across enterprise systems. Whether clients choose to tap into the expertise of AIIR's exceptional Consultants & Coaches or opt to license their Enterprise Team Effectiveness (ETE) system for internal use, they can rest assured that they have a reliable and trusted partner by their side. 

Dave's 15-year career as a business leader, has been driven by successfully scaling venture-backed tech companies and creative agencies. He's gained invaluable insights into what it takes to both succeed and come back from failure in rapidly changing industries and markets. He leverages the psychology of high performance to empower clients with the knowledge and strategies needed to overcome challenges such as difficult acquisitions, managing big personalities, revitalizing frozen teams, and breaking free from stagnant growth.

Meet Will Sealy, Co-Founder & CEO, and Daniel Macklin, President of Summer!

Summer is a certified B Corporation combining innovative technology and policy expertise to serve student loan borrowers across the country. Built by borrowers, for borrowers, Summer provides an end-to-end workplace student loan solution that is proven to reduce employee turnover and guaranteed to save employees thousands by simplifying student loans for everyone.

Summer partners with employers to deliver a tailored benefit that empowers employees to save for education, better manage their student loans, find forgiveness options, and lower monthly payments.  Summer has helped over 148,000 borrowers save an average of $333 per month on their student loan payments and save over $45,000 over the course of repayment. In addition, Summer recently announced $1.15B in total projected savings for members.

Their company has made huge progress since its founding, and continues to make great strides amid a complex and critical landscape.

They covered:

John Land, a Partner at Mercer, is an experienced HR & Workforce Transformation and Global Rewards & Recognition Practice Leader/Consultant with a demonstrated history of building and leading transformative HR functions; including program/process/organization design, technology enablement, upskilling, and performance improvement. He is skilled in mergers and acquisitions (due diligence through integration/standup), HR digital transformation, and building highly effective teams. John is passionate about leveraging technology to drive employee and organization innovation and improve customer outcomes by creating people-centric experiences.

David Landman, an HR executive with 20+ years of experience driving business performance by enabling people to be their best selves at work. David is passionate about supporting the visionary founders, investors and innovators who are redefining what it means to thrive in the workplace and he is a prominent leader in the HR executive, startup and venture capital community. 

Based on John Land's client experience as a Total Rewards practice leader at Mercer, coupled with David Landman's role running Talent programs at Goldman Sachs and now advising startups on their value and position in the evolving landscape of people and work, what is our current thinking about TALENT and ORGANIZATIONAL strategy? How do we think about keeping people (important) and keeping them happy (big difference)?