MAX: All right, good morning, welcome back everybody to the Recruitments Hackers Podcast. Today on the show I'm delighted to welcome Wagner Denuzzo, Head of Capabilities for future of work at Prudential Financial, who has led some initiatives at Prudential around the future of work for the transformation of talent, is working on talent mapping for the future at Prudential. And we'll talk about organizational developments at Prudential and maybe go back to some of your work at IBM before, if you're willing to walk us down memory lane Wagner.

WAGNER: Thanks so much, Max. Nice to be here, and I'm looking forward to the dialogue. Thank you.

MAX: Thank you. So now future of work, I feel like nobody knows what it means. So perhaps you could start by telling us how this came about at Prudential Financial the decision to create a future of work group.

WAGNER: Well it's interesting because if you ask your audience, 'how many of their companies are going through a transformation?', probably everybody's gonna raise their hands. So transformation now is a continuous process of finding differentiation in the marketplace anyway. So Prudential embarked on a major transformation we knew we had to accelerate the way we engage with our customers, the way we offer services and start creating experiences for them. So that logically lead to, we need to focus on our people, do we have the capabilities to go through this transformation to be successful, what are the new ways of working, what are the new ways of designing your organization, what are the new ways that we can engage the right talent out there to come join us. So, all this came into fruition in the future of work. Today people say what's the future of work. To me, the future of work is nothing but creating the capabilities, to create a future-ready organization and future-ready requires you to be adaptable and be conscious that things are continuously changing, so that's the future of work. 

MAX: I mean we all have the same, we have a joint future hopefully. And our future, I think, is all kinds of pushing the marketplace towards the same types of talents, digital, good with numbers, creative, nimble and quick, these are universal qualities we look for. So, how much of that search will be recruitment lead versus development lead, because it's kind of like nature versus nurture debate. Are you adapting the organization, by changing your hiring practices, or is it more around training and development.

WAGNER: That's very interesting that you say that because in my view, everything is contextual. Prudential has a long history of employee-centric policies and strategies. So of course, as we evolve, as we create new capabilities, as things evolve and we need to shift to new higher value skills. We need to focus on upscaling and rescaling. But that does not necessarily meet our needs for fresh thinking and fresh skills that sometimes is much better for us to buy or borrow than build. So I think what you're saying is recruitment plays a key role here because now at least at Prudential we have a strategic workforce planning process that we are implementing now we're piloting phases, but it's very critical that the TA team starts getting acquainted with what the business needs are in terms of the capabilities they are building, because the roles are changing. My team does grow reimagining roles so we are deconstructing roles, we are rebuilding. There's so much technology now, that helps to rebuild roles based on skills and valuing skills. So even those traditional surveys that we use for TA, they are going to be outdated very soon, if we don't keep up with reinvention of roles, job descriptions are going to change. I always say in HR, for example I come from HR and I think we need the talent systems architect. What is that? I would create a job description immediately because I think we need it. We need a digital-savvy HR leader, we need an HR leader who is a synthesizer of analytics, we need an HR leader who is strategic in their thinking about the outside in. So, to be honest, it is a prime time for recruiters to reinvent themselves. 

MAX: Yeah. I think the recruiters that I'm coming across now, very different than at the start of my career when we were looking for pure sales guys, hustlers, people with charisma, the ability to remember people on a first-name basis, very naturally fluently and to go on. I live in Hong Kong where recruiters are working at the bars, basically exchanging name cards to create a portfolio of customers. Well, the bars were closed most of the year and today most of my customers, I see that they're more likely to be working on automated workflows, Excel sheets, can I deep thinking work, of course, it's also because it's the different nature of recruitment when you're doing with high volume recruitment versus the more white gloves service you would get in the financial services. But basically, I think it's the rise of the introspective deep thinking recruiter which I witnessed. Is that similar transformation that you're seeing at Prudential?

WAGNER: Yes, you know why because as you're speaking I was thinking, how important it is to create the right candidate experience nowadays, right. We can no longer just pretend that the candidate experience is not relevant to us because at least for Prudential a candidate that comes through our doors and is not hired, that's a lost customer if they don't have a good experience. So the idea that customers, the market you're serving, your candidates, your employees, they are one community thinks this way. We have one community of people who might be coming in and out of your ecosystem. So this creates a lot of complexity, and then deep thinking. If we talk about deep thinking I think about the tele marketplace. Every company is thinking about the tele marketplace. If you're not thinking about the marketplace you better accelerate your thinking, because we have about six or seven top-notch vendors out there, and they're all using machine learning, AI to really enforce skills and compliment the recruiters' savviness, right. You talk about the quality of the recruiter. Today a recruiter has to be a little more analytical in their approach. They need to understand the algorithms that are helping them source their candidates. So all this is very exciting but at the end of the day, you cannot benchmark your future, I truly believe in that. If you want to differentiate yourself, you go forward with something that is innovative and you build the future you want. So, I think digital platforms now are allowing us to do this. We enable ourselves with technology, with platforms, and then we create a special engagement. What I say is that systems of record are there, systems of insights are there now. Now it's time for us to create the systems of engagement, they are going to create a differentiation.  

MAX: The role that you just talked about earlier.

WAGNER: Talent systems architect?

MAX: Talent systems architect. That sounds good. I think I've seen a few of those but they were more like HRIS Manager, which is the old way of calling things I suppose. What I saw in the last few months from my very unique perspective, unique as in biased, from my angle of the world, was that with shrinking budgets for many companies that were going through cost reduction, came a desire to reduce all the fats in the system including all system integration, and to consolidate their spend with one or two vendors, one...