HumAIn Resources: How Artificial Intelligence Can Close the Skills Gap

An interview with Alexandra Levit

“Adopting an AI-driven approach to talent management is a great idea because it can target bias at the beginning of the hiring process.”

As humans become more reliant on technology, what does this mean for the world of work? Will machines eventually replace people? Or is a more harmonious partnership possible?

Despite not being able to look into the future, we can make predictions based on historical trends and data. This is precisely what Alexandra Levit does — especially by leveraging her experience as a workforce expert, speaker and writer.

In 2004, Alexandra founded Inspiration at Work, a consultancy that helps to future-proof businesses and their employees by ensuring that they remain competitive. When she isn’t busy being a CEO, Alexandra produces ‘The Workplace Report’ for the Wall Street Journal and conducts proprietary research on behalf of Fortune 500 companies.

I quizzed Alexandra about the latest addition to her collection of bestselling business and career books, Deep Talent: How to Transform Your Organization and Empower Your Employees Through AI. The book’s co-authors, Ashutosh Garg and Kamal Ahluwalia, are respectively CEO and President of Eightfold AI.

As we transition into a post-pandemic world, we’re seeing an increase in resignations and radical career changes. What should organisations be focusing on to attract new talent while retaining current employees?

It’s important to recognise that we’re at a societal and technological inflection point. Many business leaders acknowledge that recruitment and professional development are big challenges. We’re seeing skills gaps, talent shortages and high staff turnover. Organisations are under increasing pressure to manage employee expectations in line with post-pandemic norms.

It’s widely known that top talent tends to leave an organisation within 2 years, but that’s not necessarily a foregone conclusion. If they are provided with sufficient training and development opportunities, most people will want to continue working for their current employer. A lot of young people also prefer stability to jumping between jobs. However, as organisations grow and hire hundreds or even thousands of employees, it’s natural for them to lose track of people’s skill sets. They don’t know what their staff are doing now or what they’re equipped to master next.

So, in order to grow and retain existing employees, organisations need to recognise that the skills gap can be resolved. There’s not a lack of available jobs or people, and it’s not necessarily a Human Resources or workflow problem. Instead, it’s a case of matching the best people with the most critical jobs you need to fill. This is something that Ashu, Kamal and the rest of the Eightfold AI team have been trying to solve using technology. It’s what our book, Deep Talent, is all about.

What are talent intelligence platforms and why have they become so popular in recent years?

Talent intelligence platforms provide a solution to the matching challenge that organisations face today. These platforms harness a form of artificial intelligence called deep learning to assess skill adjacencies (i.e. if you’re good at skill A, then you’re likely to be good at skill B). For example, if you understand algebra, then it stands to reason that you can also grasp calculus. Taking adjacent skills into consideration can open non-traditional pathways for candidates who lack experience but have a related skill that is equally valuable.

Deep learning can determine organisational capabilities and future needs. It can do this at scale by analysing a global dataset of standardised job descriptions and requirements. Humans have no way of digesting all of the information in the world, but artificial intelligence can make inferences from millions of people’s data to understand the skill adjacencies within a workforce. Not only can it analyse your own workforce, but a talent intelligence platform is also capable of extrapolating information based on patterns in a larger, global dataset. It mines data from external sources like Google and LinkedIn, which host an astonishing amount of information about people’s skills and career trajectories.

The more we use technology in the workplace, the more people worry about being replaced by machines. How can artificial intelligence support and empower employees, rather than making their roles redundant?

This is my favourite question. At the end of the day, whenever you insert AI into a traditionally human-driven process, you still need a person to develop it, manage it, explain the results to decision-makers and fix it when it breaks. The implementation of any kind of AI is likely to require more human intervention and oversight, especially in sophisticated cases.

In the Human Resources function in particular, AI enhances the participation of human talent by removing some of the routine work — which people probably don’t enjoy anyway — and enabling more strategic hiring processes. If anything, I think artificial intelligence actually empowers HR professionals to do their jobs in a more effective and meaningful way.

As a researcher and author, I’m interested in the partnership between humans and machines. While I don’t see HR professionals disappearing any time soon, I think they need to recognise how technology can help them rather than being threatened by it. If they aren’t willing to develop applied technology skills, they’re going to be left behind.

Your book features case studies and first-hand research to showcase the benefits of introducing an AI-driven strategy in a business. Can you give an example of a success story?

Deep Talent contains tons of case studies from both the public and private sectors. I’ll use the example of Prudential Financial because I love the internal mobility aspect, which is more important than ever after the pandemic.

Prudential is an American Fortune 500 company that provides insurance, retirement and investment management to retail and institutional customers around the world. Like many organisations, they were grappling with a talent crunch; they decided to use internal mobility to upscale and rescale their existing employee population because they were struggling to get people from outside. They built skill profiles to develop their current employees, using talent intelligence to identify areas where people could be redeployed internally. They then created a policy for this internal talent marketplace, ensuring that every opportunity was available for 2 weeks in order to democratise the application process.

Our talent intelligence platform was able to uncover a lot of skill adjacencies within the organisation, revealing that Prudential employees had a much broader skill set than anyone had realised. In terms of practical impact, it enabled people to transfer into different roles and departments. Prior to the use of talent intelligence, Prudential had an internal mobility rate of about 30%. Today, it hovers around 55%, which is really high. Another benefit is that managers can move people around within their own teams; this is hugely important because the biggest barrier to internal mobility is a reluctance to let go of good people.

I think this is an awesome success story and I’m proud of Prudential for taking the leap, because this stuff is still very new. If you’ve got loyal employees who are doing a good job and probably have untapped skills, why risk hiring someone external?

DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) is a major concern for businesses at the moment. How can deep learning and talent intelligence help companies foster a more accessible and inclusive culture?

There’s an entire chapter about DEI in Deep Talent. Traditional hiring processes are subjective and prone to unconscious bias, which means that people can fall through the cracks. This complicates access to opportunities, especially for people of colour.

Talent intelligence helps employers to access skills in a more credible way by encouraging objectivity. Implicit bias is not as much of an issue if your assessment is based only on someone’s skills or adjacent skills. There are other technologies that do similar things, but I think adopting an AI-driven approach to talent management is a great idea because it can target bias at the beginning of the hiring process.

I’d like to talk about your co-authors, Ashutosh and Kamal. What does their company, Eightfold AI, do? And how did their insights enhance your expertise?

Eightfold harnesses artificial intelligence to solve the talent gap — a societal problem that Ashu in particular has always been very passionate about. The name is inspired by Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path, as Ashu believes that everyone has the right to choose how they want to earn a living. Ashu and some of his colleagues from Google and Facebook had left those companies to create the first talent intelligence platform. Their goal was to marry internal company data with the information available in the wider market, so that they could match workers’ skills with the capabilities that organisations required. Ashu met Kamal towards the beginning of Eightfold’s journey and they were like two peas in a pod. Kamal grew up in India, but many years working in Silicon Valley had given him a so-called talent obsession.

I was attracted to this project after studying the talent gap for more than a decade. I was intrigued by the possibility of technology that could do this at scale, because I had only studied it from a human perspective. Ashu and Kamal wanted to make talent intelligence accessible to organisations all over the world, and I was eager to get involved.

You’ve been described as a ‘futurist’. Can you explain what this means? What do you think the future holds for the world of work?

‘Futurist’ sounds like a complicated term, but it just means someone who looks at trends in the marketplace, society and — in my case — the workforce. As a futurist, I try to determine what has the greatest potential for disruption in 5–10 years.

In terms of what the future holds for the world of work, I would say that the demand for skilled workers is growing rapidly. Around 7 in 10 employers are struggling to find workers with the right mix of skills and individual capabilities, which is where the collaboration between machines and humans comes into play.

Burnout and the mental health crisis will continue to plague us for the next couple of years, especially because only some organisations are answering their employees’ calls for help.

The permanence of distributed hybrid work is forcing us to redesign jobs so that they align with digital transformation. We will have to wait and see how the overhaul of the physical workspace plays out — especially in terms of redesigning cities and the introduction of the metaverse. I’d love to see how this turns out because there are currently a lot of empty office spaces.

Other future trends include the customisation of the employee experience according to the unique journeys and requirements of different groups. Companies need to talk to their employees on an individual or small group basis to find out what works for them. I think we’ll move away from the one-size-fits-all model in the next 5 years.

Finally, I see HR compliance reaching a whole new level of complexity as the number of employment policies continues to rise. This is something we’ve witnessed over the past year, and I think it’s going to get even crazier with increased unionisation in certain countries.

Could AI help with HR compliance?

Definitely, but I think compliance will be regionalised or nationalised. This is another area that will require substantial human oversight, because it’s going to depend on geography and context.

Can you offer 3 key takeaways from Deep Talent?

The future is always uncertain, but we have reason to be optimistic.

Talent intelligence is a great development that has the potential to facilitate a meaningful career for everyone. This technology will help leaders and HR professionals understand how to fuel their employees’ skills and passions, driving the careers they’ve always wanted but didn’t know how to find.

Although business and market conditions are evolving at an unprecedented speed, talent intelligence provides the tools to quickly develop the required skills in our workforce. Soon, skills gaps will be a thing of the past because we’ll be able to source talent on demand. I think it’s going to become easier than ever, so the future is bright!

5 of Alexandra’s books are available to read on Perlego:

• Success for Hire: Simple Strategies to Find and Keep Outstanding Employees (2008)
• They Don’t Teach Corporate in College: A Twenty-Something’s Guide to the Business World (3rd edition, 2014)
• Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future (2018)
• They Don’t Teach Corporate in College (4th edition, 2019)
• Deep Talent: How to Transform Your Organization and Empower Your Employees Through AI (co-author, 2023)