Welcome to the Talent Development Think Tank Podcast, the
number one podcast for learning and talent development professionals.
Now, here's your host, Andy Storch.
Welcome to the talent development. Think Tank podcast. I'm your host, Andy Storch, and
I'm excited that you're joining me for another episode to help you up your game
and improve your capabilities in the world of talent development. And
I got to tell you, over the last several weeks, I've been interviewing lots of
different people from different facets of talent development, lots of great interviews we've
published, and many more coming. And I often ask people about the trend that they're
following or excited about. And it has been consistently
AI across the board for, I'd say the last three to four months,
if not longer. I've been doing this for five years, and I have never
seen anything like this in the past where everybody is
talking about the exact same thing. Certainly there's been some commonalities, there's been some
trends that are mentioned by multiple people, but usually
it's a smattering of lots of different things. Over the course of
several weeks, if I go back and look at the history of this podcast, people
have talked about lots of different things back in 2018, 1921,
22, as I was recording this. But in
2023, it has been almost 100% people
saying AI is the trend that is captivating them, which means that if
they're thinking about it, you're thinking about it. Andy, really, everybody is trying to figure
this out. How do I take advantage of this in talent development?
What does it mean for me in my role? How can we best utilize
this new technology that's out there's so many different platforms and
things going on. So I have two different things for you. Number
one is that I am hosting a webinar
coming up on August 29 at 01:00
P.m. Eastern Time with my friend Josh Ermler
about AI in talent development and how learning and
development professionals are using AI to get five X more work done and
lowering their expenses, all while developing a healthier work life balance.
This is going to be really fantastic. It's really the first time I've ever done
a webinar before, and hopefully you have time to catch it by the time you
hear this or at least come sign up and get the replay because we're going
to cover some great stuff. You can find out all the information for that at
TDT us slash AI. That's
TDTT us slash AI. And
then the other resource that I'm giving you is this interview today, because my interview
today is all about leveraging AI in talent development
and talent acquisition. My guest today is Sarah Tilly, who is the
Senior Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition and Development for
ServiceNow, the digital workflow company with over 24,000
employees. In her role, Sarah is responsible for leading a
newly integrated talent organization which includes all external
recruitment and internal mobility, learning and development inclusive
of leadership development, talent and succession planning, and all efforts to
lead ServiceNow forward on a skills based talent strategy. Sarah's
team is responsible for holistically looking across the talent lifecycle for
employees to ensure delivery on what matters most to them, while also meeting the
talent needs of ServiceNow's critical business priorities. Prior to
ServiceNow, Sarah spent 16 years at the Walt Disney Company, where she led enterprise
talent strategies and efforts including centralized talent acquisition and
sourcing functions, corporate talent management and diversity and inclusion, and the opportunity
to lead several company wide functional talent and talent acquisition strategies.
She has done a lot of really interesting stuff, and throughout her career, Sarah
has earned a stellar reputation for creating new opportunities for top talent and
fostering an inclusive environment where teams can thrive.
As a working mom, she understands the importance of flexibility and tailored career
paths for all people. And Sarah has a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from the University
of Arkansas and a PHR professional in Human Resources
certification as well. And Sarah, since she came to
ServiceNow, has really dived deep into all things AI
and how ServiceNow especially is using AI
to help themselves. Andy other organizations with talent development and
talent acquisition. In this conversation we are covering
lots of topics around this, like how organizations can
start to think about the skills that are needed in the future, how to assess
what skills are needed and what skills already exist in an organization, how you can
leverage AI for a talent. You know,
fair to note that Sarah comes from ServiceNow, which is
a big player in this space. They acquired a company called Hitch, which is
involved in building talent marketplaces and the platforms that
you may need to build your own talent marketplace inside your company. So
take it with a grain of salt. It is coming from someone in an organization
that is heavily involved in this, but I thought it would be great to talk
to somebody who's right in it, seeing what's going on in her own
organization with many thousands of people, as well as working with other
organizations as well. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. I'm going
to invite Sarah also to come speak in the talent development think tank community to
share more about what's going on, because just so many interesting avenues
to explore here. So keep an eye out for that if you're a member. If
you're not, come check us out. Our website is TDTT us
slash community. All right, without further ado, here is my interview with
Sarah Tilly from ServiceNow. All right. I'm joined now by
Sarah Tilley, who is senior vice president of global talent acquisition
and development for ServiceNow. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Andy. I'm thrilled to be here. I am really excited
to have you on because I know that not only are you in a very
senior role in talent acquisition and talent development, and
I always love interviewing and having conversations with people
who are in it and leading it and thinking about the strategy behind
it. Andy doing different things because that's what the show is all about, sharing the
strategies and the tactics that are working and even not working so that we
can help other people in talent development improve their skills and
abilities and find more success in their careers. But I'm especially
excited because I know that you have been heavily immersed in
AI and using that for developing, hiring the right
people, developing people, and identifying the skills of the future. And that's
something that's on just about everybody's mind, no matter what level they're
at. So I'm excited to dig into that. But before we do, I'd love to
just start with a little bit of background. How did you get into this field
of talent development and acquisition in the first place? Sure,
like, I think a lot of people, it wasn't the
career course that I mapped out for
myself. Found my way into talent acquisition, started
working on the agency side for a couple of years outside of
college, then moved to a large retained search firm, Hydra.
Andy struggles in their media and entertainment practice, then
in house for almost five years at Warner Bros. Entertainment. And then the
last well, not the last year and a half at ServiceNow,
but about 16 years at the Walt Disney Company,
where I oversaw a couple of enterprise talent
functions. So I think I've always had
1ft squarely planted in the talent acquisition side of the
house. When I was at Disney, there were some of the work that we did.
So, for example, centralizing the recruitment of
technologists across all of the business units. So if you think
about an engineer in our theme parks or
ESPN or Pixar, whatever, it was
basically realized that we needed to be a lot more
coordinated and organized. And as we got clear on how do
you compete for technologists from a hiring
perspective, we also realized, oh, okay, there's a lot that we need to do
from a talent development perspective to attract
technologists, to keep them, et cetera. So that sort of expanded my
role into some talent management leadership
responsibilities and then some other hats I wore on and
off in the HR function over the years. So made the
move to ServiceNow, as I mentioned, about a year and a half ago.
And it was really the experience with
the technology talent that made me kind of lift my
head up and think, all right, if I were to think about something
beyond Disney, which I absolutely loved my
experience there, and the people it was. Okay, I think I'm going to go
for a pure play technology organization and
got introduced to Jackie Kenny, who is the chief people officer. We know a lot
of the same people. And then the rest was history. Really? Yeah. Oh,
that's curious. You know, Disney has such a strong brand and
reputation, not just a consumer brand, but I think on the
working side of having a really strong culture that maybe some
people don't like, a lot of people love. And I'm sure there are many things
you learned from working in that experience. What are some things that you learned from
that very strong Disney working culture that you take
with you? Yeah, it's very strong.
A very strong culture in terms of, I
think the people dynamic of it.
Everyone really supports one another.
Andy, you're very much expected to
operate in a collaborative way. That's how the connected
business strategy comes to life. If you think about
intellectual property that sort of spans across
all of the different business units, trying to think of a recent one, and
Frozen keeps popping in my head, which is not super recent,
but it's a
film, television, consumer product, theme park
experiences, et cetera. So you have to really be connected to create the
franchises across all. So it's very collaborative, it's a very
optimistic culture, very polite. I think
I already mentioned the word supportive. And some of the things that drew me to
ServiceNow from a cultural perspective, what I definitely learned at
Disney is there's a very high bar for quality. So
everything that you do and it's something that you learn pretty quickly. In fact,
my first year, I thought, I don't know if I'm going to make it
because there's a lot of
attention to every detail, because the
creative process sort of bleeds into everything,
where you really have to have a high bar. And so
I would say that's definitely what I learned. Right? Yeah, it makes sense. I've heard
that about the culture, Andy, the standard of
quality and things like that, which comes with pros and cons. I'm curious
after moving to ServiceNow, if I understand correctly, it looks like
you started in running talent acquisition, but then picked up talent
development. I work with a lot of different organizations, and
often those two are connected but run by different people.
How did that come about, that you ended up overseeing both. Yeah, so I
definitely didn't expect, when I joined, to be
leading both, but there were some changes that happened in the organization,
and Jackie and I started talking about what we felt
were the benefits. Andy really just pressing ourselves,
like, does this make sense? Do we lose focus or
do we gain more by having an integrated organization?
And we really ruminated on that for a little while and realized, okay,
now we think we have a real opportunity, especially with
Skills. I mean, skills was kind of the motivating factor, too, as
we think about it, a skills intelligence strategy to say, all right,
what is the connected thread from
everything from branding to executive
development. Really?
Andy, we said, to your point, I think there was a lot of
collaboration that was happening, but we felt like we could drive
it a little bit further and a little bit faster with an integrated organization.
And I've realized it is a bit of a growing trend and
talking to some really talented colleagues in the industry. But I think a
lot of people are still trying to figure out how is it truly integrated
and not just on paper. And I do think the skills piece of
it is the key. Yeah, it's all part of the employee
lifecycle, right? You've got the acquisition, bringing people in, and then we want to keep
them not only engaged, but keep developing them so they feel like they're growing in
their careers and they stay engaged and with the organization longer. So
it's obviously all connected. You mentioned skills. This is something that's coming
up more and more often. Skills mapping, skills development,
identifying skills of the future. Another topic that has been coming
up almost every week when I run interviews is
AI, of course, right, in generative AI. And I know it's something that you and
your team has been leaning into and using a lot. So I'm curious,
how has AI impacted this and how do you think about
skills development in the workforce? So I think
it's interesting because this is
the topic of conversation. Right. I attended, iforcp
I read the white papers, all the
conferences, all the conversations that are happening. And at
first I was a little intimidated thinking some of these
organizations seem like they're pretty far along on their
journey. And then as you look under the hood a little
bit more, they conceptually know where they want
to go. Some organizations, I would say some just see it as kind of an
abstract idea that's elusive and they can't really figure out how to get there.
Yeah, we'll let others figure this out first or something. Yeah. I think
what has become abundantly clear is that you can't
do it without the underlying technology. I mean, that seems like a no
brainer, but I think a lot of people were starting from a very manual process
in terms of, okay, how do we actually
get to a set of skills as a baseline? Right? And I
think you've got to have a skills intelligence system
that helps predict, identify, and
ultimately tie to how you deliver the talent.
And so I think you've got to have a skills intelligence system that's actually powered
by AI and ML
and then that helps bring everything together and connect the various
systems and teams. So I think
if I'm going to get a little technical here, I guess I'm going to try
to keep it simple. And by no means am I the
expert. I think this idea of
skills intelligence strategy and how do you take it from
abstract into reality? First and
foremost, I think organizations, some organizations have realized,
all right, we actually do have a lot of information on the
skills of our employees, like a lot more than we
realized. And it sits in so many different places. But I'll take an
obvious example. So if you think about a job
description that correlates with someone in
role, so you can pretty much determine what are the
baseline skills that this person has because they're in this role.
And then using technology to
actually pull and aggregate to create a skills
architecture. And so I think it's like one using
AI to pull from all the existing places where, you know, you
have some information on skills. Again, there's external
resources and databases too that
hold information around skills. But at the end of the day,
what you're trying to do is break down every single job
description into a set of skills that ultimately rolls
up into the skills architecture and then break down
every individual into a set of skills. Like how do you
help them some of it has to come from them.
How do you help them break down their experience, their
capabilities into a set of skills? And then you use
AI to really ensure that you're doing all the things that you want
to do for them, for their leaders, and
ultimately for the organization. Yeah. And because you're
talking about new skills that are being identified and needed
in the future as things continue to change, it's not just what
skills already exist in the organization, right, but what potential do you have,
what are people interested in? You really need to find out from the people
that work in your organization. So you've got to find a way to create
some type of talent marketplace or platform where people can
identify and look for those roles or those
upskilling or development opportunities. Right. Do you think about how do we take the people
that we have and help them get to where they want to go in roles
that will also provide more value to our organization? Yeah,
100%. So there's some of the back end work that is
required that I was referencing and then
ultimately you're using that to feed into or we are right,
and we do have the very fortunate benefit of
having the ServiceNow platform. And
we acquired a company called a Hitch last year which
had already figured a lot of this, how to leverage
AI to match skills to roles, to
trainings, to opportunities, so that you can more
effectively and intentionally develop the talent, the
skills that they want right. For today and the skills that the organization
needs for the future. So we reengineered
the Hitch technology into our platform. So I
think that is part of the reason that we are so far in front of
this and ahead of the game is because we have that advantage. But
ultimately all of that, our platform feeds into
apps that do what you're talking about. So they create a connected
experience for employees to say, all right, because here's the
skills that we have. Right, and so to your point, it's matching to existing needs
if I'm our CTO and I
say we need to strengthen our cybersecurity, I'm making this up, right? We need to
strengthen our cybersecurity skills, then today you're limited to those people
that have that title, right? And this is going to open
up a whole world of people that have some skills
that wouldn't be reflected in their title. So you can use it to help
meet the business needs of today. But to your point, then you
can see, all right, ultimately
organizations will have the inventory, a full
picture, what skills exist across the organization,
and then where the gaps are. And then in turn, you can also use
the skills intelligence for people's aspirations. So
here's what I have today, here's what I want. Oh,
boom. AI serves up well, then
here's how you can develop those things, whether it be content from a training
perspective or programs or serving up matching
mentors, et cetera. So I think it's meeting
the needs of today but also tomorrow. And that's really
how we think about it. And of course, naturally, because and I'm not trying to
shamelessly plug service now, but we can't talk about it
without talking about our platform because it's underpinning everything we're
doing. But then we're also selling it to customers. So we think about it, of
course, from an employee perspective and also
from a manager hands on manager perspective.
And then at the C suite level, organizations.
So how are you quantifying within
those three areas and what are the priorities? Because I think
there's a lot of emphasis on the employee experience,
naturally. So tremendous benefits that are being less talked
about for leaders and C suite
executives. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. CEOs even,
right. It's every level, but especially at the top. And
I didn't realize I should have done more homework. That ServiceNow
had acquired hitch. We had the hitch. Founder
Kelly Steven Waste. Oh, I know Kelly well. Podcast quite a
while back. I looked it up, episode 164 that was published
in June of 2020. So just over three years ago,
she was on here and has obviously done some remarkable work there in
developing that platform. Andy, of course, we've been talking with other people about
different platforms and companies that are looking to develop their talent
marketplaces. Talent mobility being a hot topic. Getting back to
skills for leaders and talent development
professionals, listening and thinking about this, what's the best way for them to
go about maybe don't have all the technology yet, but how can leaders assess
the level of skills and what's needed for the
future? That's a good question.
We're customer zero for ourselves on some of this stuff,
too. But I think it really is about
starting to get your arms around
what intel you have already. Because I
think about some of the conversations that I've been in over the
years, and I think a lot of organizations sort of default
to self reporting, right, for individuals
from a skills perspective, which I think is a
component in it. But I think it's again starting
to think about how do we stockpile what we
already know about all of our
employees. I know you said without the technology,
but I think if without the technology, it's going to
be years and years of a very manual
process. So of course I think ours is the best.
But whatever the approach, I don't think you could do it
without a digital platform to help sort of pull,
aggregate, analyze. But I think it starts with getting your
arms around all of the information, just really
thinking creatively about all the places where you already have
skills, intel. You need some form of data analytics, basically like take, let's
take all the data we have, whatever technology or platform you're using, find
somebody in your organization who has some skills around analytics so that we can
look at this data and see, okay, what skills are becoming more valuable?
What are people talking about, what are leaders asking for? What's more common
in the roles that we're posting? Are there ways that we can leverage the skills
and abilities and experience we already have in this organization before we start looking to
hire from outside? Yes, that's right. So I'm
curious, I know you work obviously there directly
running talent acquisition, talent development there in HR, but also
talk with people from other organizations. How are the best HR
leaders using AI powered skills
intelligence or AI tools in general to be more effective in
what they're doing? Well, I think what we've obviously
seen is that where I see
the most obviously is organizations that
are using our platform. But I will
say it really is about, okay, there's the
skills piece of it, right? But even if you were to do something and
this is where I think organizations I was just having a conversation this
week, organizations
recognizing that there has to be,
even if it's a portal, right, something way more simple for
people, to employees to access all that's
available to them. So I think one is, even
without the skills intelligence piece of it, how are
you getting a more coordinated sort of
approach to everything that's available to
employees, to leaders? And I think there's some creative things
that some organizations are doing in pockets to use AI
for that. I had another thought too on that and
I forgot it. I think
what I'm seeing too is people are getting a lot
smarter about how to build
the business case for it. So I think,
again, I can't give a lot of examples of like, all right, this is
where it's really cutting edge outside, of
course, the work that we're a part of. But I
do see more and more people getting smarter about
how to articulate the business case
for gen AI, for a skills intelligence
strategy. And I think it is
A, acknowledging that HR
is moving away from being transactional,
like difficult to measure and
really understanding. Okay, we've got the skills
shortage. The reality is we have that globally
and helping the most senior business leaders in the
organization understand, hey, the business strategy is the
talent strategy, and the talent strategy is the business strategy. And without
this, we're not going to get very far on our business
strategy. So I'd say that's kind of the thing that
I'm impressed by in my conversations with
organizations. Yeah. And I think it's going to be interesting because
we're talking about leveraging AI in talent mobility
and hiring and talent development. And I want to get to talent acquisition in a
moment. But I'm also thinking that with AI being
such a hot topic, every organization is scrambling to figure out, okay, how do we
leverage AI better? Not just in talent development, but in everything that we do.
And we need more workers who are skilled and
knowledgeable on how to use these tools right. And how to leverage these tools so
we can grow our organization. And that's becoming a huge need. And
then we need to figure out, okay, how do we identify the people that either
have the skills, which they're probably not enough of right now,
or can develop those skills pretty quickly to be able to help
the organization leverage AI more. Yeah,
that's a great point too, because interestingly,
as we're standing up this skills intelligence strategy,
one of the questions that we're asking ourselves is what are the baseline
skills that we think most every employee in the
organization needs to have? Right.
Some of them can kind of skills can
span across attributes, capabilities.
It's interchangeable to a certain degree if you're talking about
technical skills. Yes. How do we equip
employees and leaders with more from a gen AI perspective, but
it's also a mindset too. So it's like if you're
sitting in finance, right. What is the
fundamental knowledge you need to have, even no matter what
role you're in from a gen AI perspective? So we've said, okay, one of the
core skills that we know we want to equip everyone with
is exactly to your point on this topic of gen
AI and then to what degree where,
right? So where do you go deeper, et cetera. But I do think there
has to be for us and for a lot of
organizations, a really coordinated effort to make sure
everyone has the fundamental skills on the
topic or else it's going to get stuck in places in
the organization. So we are definitely spending a lot
of time on, okay, yeah, we've got the engine going now, right? What do we
want to feed into the engine? Ironically, the first thing is gen
AI, right. How do we get the right people there and find the
people within our organization? And then obviously, if you're
growing or you don't necessarily have the skills in your organization, then
you've got to go and hire from outside so let's talk about talent acquisition for
a moment. I know this podcast is mostly about talent development, but there are a
lot of our listeners who are involved in talent acquisition in some way or some
that manage both like you do, especially in smaller organizations. So
how can skills intelligence enable recruiters to
match candidates with job requirements more effectively,
leading to making better hires? Essentially, I mean, I would
imagine everyone sees the opportunity from an objectivity
perspective, that's one, two
is it opens up the pool. You sort of touched on this earlier.
We were talking about not just looking for
a line for line match to a job description
against someone's resume, which I think is what we've been
trying to do in the Ta function for many years and
through a somewhat subjective lens, right? Because this is human beings
that are trying to do that. So I think know
a lot of organizations are pretty early on. Some are worried
about kind of the compliance and ethics
issues of it, which we all should be. But I think
there's just some really basic things too that we can
do to ensure that we're getting some of the manual labor
out of everything from the actual initial creation
of a job description to ensuring
that actually what is listed as a
requirement can truly be vetted as a
requirement. And that we are looking at
an individual relative to a set of skills as opposed
to a collective body of experience that they have.
And so ultimately, I think it's going to
remove a lot of the biases in the process and
it's going to open up a big pool of talent. So, for example,
we have an initiative called Rise Up, which is basically
there's a number of different components to Rise Up, but one of
the things that we're looking to do within Rise Up
is take individuals from
less traditional paths
and get them on a career path to be a
technologist, which they may not have access to. And
so to me, it's a really fascinating thing to think that
corporations or even gen AI can help to address some of these
social issues that get in the way of people having access to
opportunities. Because ultimately, if you say, okay, here's someone who
didn't have a traditional four year degree, right, didn't go to a school
that we all recognize and know, but they did
gain a set of skills through alternative methods. For
us. It's the Rise Up program. And historically it's been really
hard for leaders to then figure out, well, how do I translate
this? And it feels risky, right? Because I can't really
validate whether or not they've got the
basics to do this job well. So it's taking the risk out of it
for leaders and therefore opening up new pools of talent,
which I think even before the market turn last year,
organizations, I should say even after the market
turn last year. Organizations still recognize there's not going to be
enough skilled individuals on the
planet to meet the needs of corporations if we don't figure
out a way to get more people
into the workforce. Right. There's so much in the news
about AI taking jobs, and yet all these new jobs are
being created all the time, and we don't have even enough skills and
experience or people to fill a lot of the jobs that are going to be
needed, especially if things start ramping back up in the economy.
I always chuckle a little when I hear about some of the fear
around that because I feel like since the beginning of
time, there has been
new skills that are needed to do whatever
fill in the blank is required. So whether it
be from way back in the agriculture,
at every point there's new
skills and of course, in recent decades, new
technology that's introduced that makes
some other skills outdated. And so it's not a
new sort of concept that there's this coming into the
marketplace and that people are going to need to
people organizations are going to need to reskill upskill.
I do think the irony is that Geni is going to help
organizations do that a lot more effectively. So it's like, okay,
before it would be like, well, now here's this scheme that has a
set of outdated skills and we don't know what to
do. Right? Well, it's like you're going to be ahead of that
because you're going to see the trends using the analytics that you
referenced and using AI to say, okay, here's what we've
got, here's what we need, here's where we got to go.
And so I actually think it can be used for good
in so many ways. Oh, totally. And you brought up
skills. I think that we are sort of entering a new
era where the skills, because it can be more proven and identified,
like you said, by AI, become more valuable. And
we might be sort of at the end of a 50 to 70 year era
where getting a college degree was sort of table stakes to get any type
of professional role. People
can debate the value of college degrees and what that's going to look like in
the future. I'm sure they'll be around for a long time. But the
fact is there's alternatives now. And I think more organizations
are coming and saying like, oh, it'd be great if you had a college degree,
but if you have these skills that's actually more valuable to us because
at the end of the day, the degree doesn't really matter. It's what skills do
you bring to the table that can help us, that can provide more value to
the business? 100%. I remember
we were talking a little bit about this. I'm a razorback.
I graduated from the University of Arkansas wupe Suey
with a degree in psychology. And I knew pretty quickly after
I graduated or actually while I was still in school, I was like, I don't
know that this is the path that I'm going to take. Not quite sure what
path I'm going to take, but I remember so many people telling me, you've got
to complete the degree, even if the major is
not relevant to the direction you're taking. Because it's one of the few
things that employers can use to gauge whether or not you have the ability
to complete something like significant like this. And I was like, oh,
that's the indicator that companies are using. But it
was quite some time ago.
But it's true, I think that was like without
experience, you're naturally going to default to other
indicators that help you understand whether or not someone has the
skills and capabilities. And that's all going to change now. Again,
it's subjectivity in the process. Yeah,
I know we talked about I went to a rival, big state university
and when I graduated, I don't know if I really had any skills other than
being able to party five, six days a week. Well, I mean,
I may have obtained those skills as well. Social
skills are important. We're learning, right. More and more. Josh Burson calls them
power skills, right. Like it's our people skills that are going to actually be the
differentiator in the future. But getting back to hiring
and skills and you talked about in the past
identifying people who went to the name brand universities that we know and
love. Obviously there are lots of people who have not had access or the
ability or maybe the knowledge to get into some of those schools or to go
to college. And yet they're now able to gain
skills in different ways. So you say that AI also has the
power to kind of level the playing field. Right. Andy eliminate some of
the bias that's out there and increase diversity. Right? I
mean, again, I'm a
big de andy advocate. I had the
ability and what's the word, the honor
really to play a role at Disney for a number of years,
helping to lead the corporate de I function. And you know,
it was apparent to me pretty early on
that again, sort of if corporations aren't
helping to solve some of these social
issues that get in the way, we're not going to make progress.
We're just not as a society, as a global
community, right. We've made a ton of progress. There's still a lot of biases
out there. Right. And if we can use technology to
eliminate those and really level playing, that's kind of the goal in the end,
right. We want the best people and the best jobs. We want equal opportunities, right?
That's what the E is all about. And create more diversity at all levels. So
it sounds like there's tons of potential there for this. Yeah,
data is the key. Let's just get back into
development for a moment here. One of the goals I think for a lot of
people in talent development is creating a better employee experience, improving
productivity and engagement, and helping people grow in their
careers so that they are engaged and want to stay around a lot longer.
And AI is certainly the topic
that is being brought up over and over again with people wondering, okay, how can
I leverage this better? Can AI help us improve our
productivity and engagement inside organizations as well?
100%. This kind of goes back to what we were talking about in terms
of the different prongs. Right? So
employees, of course, we've talked about the employee experience. They can track their skills,
they can express their aspirations, they can build personalized growth
plans. And then AI again helps
recommend the relevant trainings, mentors, mobility opportunities
based on the skills they have andy what they need. But
organizations, I think, can build a much more data
driven talent management strategy that ensures
that the investments we're making from a human resources
perspective are actually helping us
to have employees that now can
demonstrate they have the skills that we need and the greatest impact
on the business and closed skill gaps. But I think,
again, managers with
AI, you can really do a lot more in terms of optimizing your
team performance, your team engagement, your team
output. Again, we kind of touched on ta everything from hiring for
relevant skills, but then also
it enables you to see again, what
do I have? What do I need? And you can also
actually measure manager sort of
effectiveness if you will too. Right. Are managers, you've got
these tools that help support what we call quarterly
growth conversations? Are they happening? Right. Which managers are
actually spending the time doing the things that
we know make an impact on an employee experience
and ultimately an employee productivity because
the two go hand in hand. So I think it is
definitely managers
and ultimately organizations.
My team is close to 400 globally, right?
So ultimately I can see
using AI, like the aggregate sort of output of the
manager behavior, the sentiment of
employees and all the correlating sort of factors
there. Yeah, that's interesting. The last thing I want to ask about is this idea
of career development. We talked a little bit about talent mobility and putting people in
the right positions. Career development is something that I think a lot
about and work with organizations on, especially the mindset side of teaching
employees to own their careers. I know that the number one thing that people want
is to know how can I grow in my career here? Right? How am I
going to grow if I work here, if I stay here?
How are you using AI or how can people use AI
to guide employees andy managers through career plans,
development goals? You mentioned kind of measuring, are they having more of those career
conversations? But we want to make sure that people are putting some type of goals
or plans together and taking advantage of the resources that
are available so they are able to continue to grow and develop in their careers.
Yeah, I think we've touched
on the AI in terms of underpinning all of
that. To your point, it's what,
today or yesterday, I should say, for
us, you would have a campaign, right?
So let's say we're going to push out the latest manager
excellence training, right, to everyone that fits this
persona. And so it's a very kind
of manual effort to figure that out. Whereas
tomorrow, with an AI sort of powered, it's all
automated, really. So it's like you've
captured what your aspirations are. So if the
goal is to be moved laterally or into a different area
or to move up, AI is serving all of that
up. Now, I do think that there's an important
overlay to all of that, which is something that we spend a lot of
time on, because you can build it, right. But you still have to
bring people to it and they still have to be inspired by it.
And so I do think that it requires kind of a
consumer grade marketing strategy on top of
it all, to your point, to create awareness, but it is going to be a
lot more automated. So if, Andy, you
decide you want to be the SVP of Talent Acquisition and
Development ServiceNow and
you capture that as your Aspiration, then it's a lot more automated
in terms of how it's served up to you. Yeah. 100%. I
can see that as we continue to develop more of these
tools, there's so many more things available. I know it can seem
overwhelming to people. Sometimes they're like, oh, where do I start?
But you got to start somewhere. Start with the data you have, start with the
objectives, the goal, the problem you're trying to figure out. Ask your colleagues, talk
to friends, listen to this follow up, look for other guides and
resources. Our community, we're talking about this all the time in the talent
development think tank community. What tools can we use to
better development, provide development opportunities to our people,
to develop our managers, to help people continue to grow
so that they're moving into the roles, Andy, that we need, developing the
skills we need to be more successful in the future of work? 100%.
Well, Sarah, this has been really great. I appreciate you coming on. I have probably
20 more questions, things we could talk about, especially with related to
AI and talent mobility and the work that you're doing there at ServiceNow.
But this has been a great start and I really appreciate you coming on and
I look forward to talking more soon. Thank you for having me, Andy, truly.
And we're deep in this journey right now. We're learning,
we're capturing sort of our learnings and our journey. So
if you want to reconnect in the coming months, we could share more
about where we are because it's coming to life in real time.
Yeah, for sure. Well, we've got our Bonus Q A, and I'd love to have
you come speak in our community as well and get a discussion going about how
we can better leverage these tools. So we'll talk more about that soon.
Sounds good. Thank you, Andy. All right, take care.
All right, that will do it for my interview with Sarah Tilly from ServiceNow. I
hope you got value from that interview from that conversation. We certainly
covered a lot of ground there with regards to using AI
in talent development. And I want to remind you that in addition
to all the great content you got here, I'm also hosting a
webinar with my friend Josh Urmler about AI in talent development.
And it is coming up next week on August
29 at 01:00 p.m. Eastern Time. If you want to register for
that for a link in the show notes or go to TDT
Usai. That's TDTT
usai. I'm also going to be inviting Sarah to join us in
the talent Development Think tank community to speak about using AI in talent development.
Josh will also be doing a follow up session in the community about
using AI in talent development, so stay tuned for those. If you want to find
out more information about the community that's at TDT us slash community.
If you have any questions, reach out to me. I hope to talk to you
soon and stay tuned because next episode, it is my Bonus Q Andy A with
Sarah Tilly, and it is a good one.