Integrating skills-first into the whole talent pipeline

- I'm curious how all of you who are out there talking to employers, truly with your peers, how are businesses starting to understand it? Are they starting to realize that's where things are going, that they're going to have to train to hire? Where are you seeing pockets of innovation? - I think it's train to hire a niche. And I also think it's train to advance. It's thinking about that entire pipeline development cycle. So it's pre-hire, bringing people in, it's thinking about apprenticeship and work-based learning as incredible ways to train and bring people into your culture and bring them in and put them on that pathway. But then beyond that, so many companies are thinking about how do we use education as a benefit? How do we build our own learning and development programs? Or how do we facilitate that for our talent pipeline? And really thinking about how do we create this sort of agile workforce that can learn and grow with us as we learn and grow as a business? Because business is in a really volatile economy and environment right now. And we all have to shift and learn and grow over time. And so businesses are getting in there and playing a role in preparing people for that. - I think it's also something that I mentioned earlier about bringing together your talent acquisition and your talent development functions because there's this sort of switching that's happening. It's usually we're sourcing here and bringing in hopefully skills and then we're developing skills, and what we're talking about here, it's like actually you're developing the skills to be sourced into the organization, and when they're in the organization you're up-skilling, you're re-skilling. So it's one complete talent motion. And I think organizations who are seeing skills are important, your skill strategy should mirror your business strategy, they're beginning to see that actually the value proposition of both of those functions actually are very aligned. And they need to think through an entire vision and strategy as one function, as opposed to separate functions. But what United is doing, I mean, that's cutting edge. And so it's really great to be able to learn and understand how to do that, how to do it for a smaller organization with fewer resources. I think there's a lot to be learned and borrowed for a talent strategy. - One dimension, I agree, what United is doing is very cutting edge. One dimension we haven't talked about yet that's really relevant I think on the skills-first hiring front is a focus on your hiring managers and making sure that you really invest in upskilling them and training them in how to hire differently. And we talked earlier about the role a centralized budget can play to de-risk this transition for them. But there's also just a really critical change management mindset shift piece of work for hiring managers who, even if leadership has said "We're shifting to skills-based," there's a process that hiring managers need to be brought through so that as the policy changes, the practice also changes. And we've seen with a bunch of companies that we work with sort of a phased process that unfolds of you articulate that you're going to skills-based, you remove degree, you go through the really critical piece of work of removing the four year degrees for a number of roles. You redo your job descriptions, and then the hiring does not change. The outcomes don't change. You're still hiring people that have a degree because that's where hiring manager's comfort level remains. And so really getting purposeful about training your hiring managers and I think setting goals and then measuring outcomes is a critical part of actualizing the transition to skills-based hiring. - It's such a good call out. I think the cultural shift and ensuring that there's rewards and incentives for that because it could feel scary. It could feel like there's fear and there's risk, and what if it doesn't work out? And the old way, at least I know that there was a way that was acceptable. So I think thinking through how do you need to shift as a culture and how do you make sure that the incentives are there, usually compensation, some sort of reward, some sort of bonus so that there's that feeling of psychological safety that there's support to hire in a different way. That's important.