Making better decisions with Select for IBM

Hi everyone. So I'm Lee Andrews, head of talent acquisition for IBM Europe Middle east and Africa. As Jonny said, I'm going to talk to you a little bit today about a single element of the transformation that we've been on. But I'm just going to start by taking it back a little bit and talking about, you know, how we've gotten to the point that we have today. I think the same external disruptors that have prompted our transformation are probably the same ones that prompted digital transformations at all of your organizations as well. Just to put it into context, IBM as an organization is generating nearly half of its revenue now in areas that we weren't even operating in five or six years ago. And so obviously that's had a pretty significant downstream impact on us as a talent function. And when we assessed where we were in the market, with the competitor landscape exponentially changing, we just simply weren't set up to succeed in that market space. And so we started the transformation with really looking first at the skills that we had within our function, creating a new set of role taxonomies, looking at infusing new roles that we never had in TA before, things like talent scientists and looking at data poetry. And we really went on a journey to get the general baseline capability to a certain level before we started to embrace new ways of working and then layering on technology as well. Well, so once we've done that, the second thing was to look at new ways of working and we tried to do two things. So first of all, nearly all of our practitioners are enterprise design thinking qualified. So really trying to think in this day and age, talent wants to be engaged in a very, very different type of way to what we're used to historically. Let's put the user at the center of that process and let's go on a design thinking journey. So we really embraced that and have taken as many of our people through that as we could. And then the second thing was really around working agile. We have concurrently dozens of projects running at any one go, and it would be simply impossible for us to land any of that meaningfully if we weren't to do it in an agile fashion, bringing together the right people in a multidisciplinary way and trying to land things quickly, pilot, learn, iterate and move on. And then the third piece of the transformation is really around our technology stack. So we're very fortunate at IBM that we have an AI platform of our own. But the final piece of that was really to augment our own capability and our own decision making capability through the use of digitization and primarily artificial intelligence. And we've done that throughout the process, end to end. So our landing page, for example, you can now integrate and have a dialogue with Watson the chatbot. So instead of looking just purely for jobs, you can actually have a dialogue around what it's like to work at IBM. You can ask things around our remote working policies or maternity cover and these types of things, and a big piece of that. Now our latest initiative is select for IBM, which actually goes live tomorrow. So I'll be fairly busy straight after this. And essentially what it is is it's an approach, it's a platform, and it's a series of learning, education and enablement which is really going to help IBM and its managers make better selection decisions, and not necessarily just in the recruitment process. So it could be selection decisions around interviewing or who we offer, but really making sure that that extends beyond the candidate journey and into the employee journey as well. So it could also really create a framework for how we make selection decisions around who we invest in to send for education, for example, or who we want to promote. And maybe on the flip of that to validate some of our exit discussions as well. And really the aim of this is to create a framework. I'll come on to some of the user feedback in just a second, but create a framework, a behavioral difference, a cultural shift, and then really integrate technology with that to make sure that we're driving consistency of experience, removing bias wherever we can, and an effective rating system to go along with that. And that ultimately we're setting ourselves up to succeed in future by giving ourselves more data and insights in which we can predict future post hire success. It's probably too small to read here, but the different data points that you're looking at there is really. We're assessing what data can we collect, create and combine at various different stages to help us make better decisions, as I said, for those different steps. If you take it back a layer though, first of all, we recognize that we were starting to see some imbalances in terms of, you know, who we had in our teams, whether it be compensation or performance output, and seeing some inequalities starting to form. The costs of bad selection decisions obviously are significant. You know, not just talking financial costs, but the impact that it has on morale and engagement, which ultimately leads to productivity. And then you see that in reputational damage and these other things as well around your clients and your successes externally. We knew that we had to address this quite quickly to create that consistency of experiences and really try to drive a more meritocratic way of making our decisions around who we would hire or who we would promote. And speaking of the agile way of working that we've sort of adopted, we create what we call performance teams. So when we have an initiative or an idea that we really want to stand up or address or analyze, we form a multidisciplinary team from across the globe. It could be a mixture of roles, levels, bands, and we essentially tasked them with looking at and analyzing certain initiatives and interviewing was one of them that they kicked off last year. So we actually kicked this off. We pitched an idea right at the back end of last year and now just nine or 10 months later, we're ready to launch tomorrow. I hope the mvp, which is fully integrated, it will be going global. This will account for all new roles across all of our geographies, all of our lines of business. So that's a pretty agile way we deployed this. We've been road testing it, we're now ready to go. And I spoke about enterprise design thinking as well. I mean, one of the things that you can't do when you're thinking about addressing something like an interview process or something which has so many people who are impacted by that process, is try to make those decisions in a vacuum. You really have to involve the users and put them at the center of, you know, what is it that you're experiencing thus far and what is it that you need us to solution for moving forwards. And so we surveyed over a thousand of our hiring managers and candidates and new joiners and really tried to get, you know, a sense of what they were experiencing and some of their sentiments and as I said, really, you know, help us co create what we need to solution for, what the objectives are and then also how we get there. This slide actually pains me because it's the bit where we start to listen to what everybody says and I'm sure some of this resonates with you as well. But typically hiring managers, the biggest frustration for them was that they just didn't understand their role in the process. They didn't have a framework, they didn't have any ethical way of sort of rating or evaluating people consistently. They didn't know how to level set. What is it to rate somebody a three out of five versus a four out of five and how do we do this to take into fact different types of roles, different technicalities of roles, different geographies. And on the candidate side, I mean, the list kind of goes on and on a little bit, but the Biggest thing is that there just was no structure, strategy or consistency in terms of not understanding who was going to be interviewing. The feedback was disparate and intermittent. And one of the biggest things that was really concerning was that around actually setting an interview structure and strategy, we actually had feedback from candidates saying that they felt that they couldn't showcase their true abilities because the people who were interviewing them didn't know how to get that out of them. They either didn't have the right level of technical expertise to probe, or they simply hadn't prepared well enough to understand where they needed to go, to go deep and to go broad in terms of assessing their suitability for the role. So that's one thing the user research is obviously critical, but then the other thing is how well are we integrated with the other functions of our organization. We face so many bottlenecks at the back end of our process where we haven't interlocked with compensation, where our learning team hasn't really been involved. And so we start to have these internal dialogues way late in the process when it's far too late and we're losing candidates left, right and center. By bringing that conversation to the fore right at the beginning, we, we're able to make sure that we're all in complete alignment, that we've catered for the challenges and the obstacles that we're likely to encounter at the back end of the process and that we can make this more of an iterative co creative program that isn't going to become redundant in two or three years because everybody has contributed exactly what we need them to contribute to. So we're going to start with interviewing and obviously hiring. So we see this as a privilege to actually interview and to select somebody to join IBM. And aside from it feeling like a privilege, I mean there's some pretty big financial consequences as well for allowing a recruiter and a hiring manager to make a decision about who we invest in, particularly at a more senior level. And we've already seen the impacts of bad decisions in terms of productivity, engagement and morale. So we break this down into three segments. The approach, the learning and then the technology. And just very quickly a from and to. One of the big things is that this has always been exclusively owned by HR at IBM. And we need to make sure that we're creating dual accountability by bringing the business into a lot more of those conversations, particularly from a diversity and inclusion perspective. And I mean that's always, almost always saddled with HR as an initiative for HR to drive. But obviously we have to Put some emphasis back on the business to own this and drive this as well. And then the second piece was really around addressing that key user research feedback point, which was managers just simply don't know what their role is in this. They have no guidance, they have no frameworks, and they really don't have a consistent way of working. And education to help enable them to make our right decisions for us from a learning perspective, we've completely modernized the platform. The enablement, the content that's gone out, essentially we had a very static, transactional piece of education which walked through the process steps and then a few best practice sort of tips. And we've completely made that more real time and customized, really going deep on some of the important assets of the interview life cycle that you may need to go into. And we've made it a modular base, so it's much more consumable and it's much more easier to digest. And it's much more appealing when we're trying to sell the proposition of getting licensed to our hiring managers from a tech perspective. And the bottom point in that last one was actually in learning, but it's a really important tech piece. It's the fact that we're using AI as well. So it has the ability to sit in to interviews and listen in and actually provide prompts to hiring managers. And another key feature of it, which I'll come on to in just a second, is actually that it can generate questions, it can remove bias from interview questions in terms of the planning and preparation. And then also you can make sure that the whole end to end experience is digitized. Whereas previously we'd have sort of siloed artifacts or digitization at just certain touch points of the process. This is a fully bespoken integrated suite. Now I don't know if the video is going to play. It was just going to play behind me anyway, so I'll carry on talking. But really this was just going to give you a bit of a visualization of the app itself. It is an important feature. Obviously, when we started talking about this, my team thought that this was just a platform or an app. And it's been a big challenge for me to make sure that that isn't seen as the case. Because this is really a philosophical change and a cultural shift for us in terms of how we actually approach interviewing. What good looks like, how we align better, how we strategize better for how we want to actually create and conduct assessment strategies, and then the technology should really just be an enabler for that. And to drive a consistent experience, to enhance and create a more intuitive experience, but not to be built processes to be built around it within the app itself, as I said, it's fully integrated with everything that we have. So our calendars, our directory, our ats, our assessments and our cognitive gaming to help give us other insights and data points to support this. You can essentially every time a record is created, it enters into the select for IBM platform and you can start to add interviewers, you can start to add different skills that different people will actually interview for. So one of the big things that we've really driven around this is that we used to have a very generic skills profile which was the IBM skills profile and every role, all tens and tens of thousands of hires that we made, that skills profile was the skills profile that we needed to be successful, successful in our hire. Whereas now we recognized after looking through the volumes that 80% of our roles are accounted for by between 40 and 50 unique job roles themselves. And so what we've done is we've built between eight and 12 skills profiles which will really target those 80% of roles that we've got. And it will make sure that the questions and the outcomes are much more aligned to what is it that we know we need from individuals to be successful in this role, the skills and the behaviors, Taking away any of the other biased factors that we tend to make decisions on, but really focusing on someone's ability to come in and be successful in a role that we have. For the other 20%, there are some slides missing, so this is an old one, never mind for the other 20% of roles that we have, we've created a new and modernized, a refreshed skills profile. So this is looking at things that we didn't necessarily have before, but around being evangelists and ambassadors for diversity and inclusion, around having a growth mindset and embracing new ways of working, looking at agile and design thinking. So it's very different to the previous skills profile that we have. And when we can leverage some of the data insights that we have from the cognitive game scores, from the matching that we use up front to see somebody suitability and post higher success predictability from using AI, we can start to form a pretty good picture that validates our decisions. And it also gives us the ability to be able to say to managers, the decisions that you're making aren't being supported by the data. Somebody's CV looks good on paper. They've scored really highly in our tests, they've come through in flying colors in the Interview stages and we have all of this data mapped out and yet you've gone for an absolute left field candidate. It's really interesting data point for us to be able to go back and give some extra education and try to start to pick up retrospectively if we're seeing biases or if we're seeing some tendencies that we need to try and educate around. And of course, learning is a really big piece. So we partnered with a company, social someone or other, and we used the content, the platform, which was great. We were very cognizant of the fact that during this process we couldn't define what good looked like and what industry standards looked like introspectively. So we wanted to go externally and get some best industry leading thoughts on this. And one of my favorite facilitators and thought leaders, John Vlastilika, created some of the content himself. We've had some amazing feedback and we've essentially bundled that into two initial things for all interviewers. They have to be licensed to interview, so they have to go through this training. There's 10 modules and a test which effectively takes them through the nuts and bolts of what we're trying to do from a cyclical type state. So how to prepare for, conduct and close an interview, but going much deeper on some of the things around, giving tips and pointers as to the things that we shouldn't be doing at interviews. I've sat in on interviews where it just smacks of a legal case for some of the ridiculous things that a hiring manager comes up with. So this gives some really, really useful pointers as to, you know, how to handle conversations around compensation or accessibility for, you know, candidates with disabilities and lots of different other sensitive subjects, which frankly I quite often don't trust to a hiring manager. And then the interview license is one stage, but then the second one, which is applicable for all hiring managers and the recruiters, and we've lost this one as well, is to the license to hire. So it's essentially the same interview bundle, but then it goes much deeper into, okay, how to actually evaluate the consensus, how to kick off in the first place by having a really effective and thorough sort of strategy, alignment, meeting, how to make sure that we have the right process figured out for how are we actually going to define what the interview process looks like? Is this a panel? Is it a one to one? Do we need multiple stages, four or five stages, or are we going to really make sure that we're being concise and getting what we need from a two or three step process and not just number of steps, but making sure that our interviewers have very clear aspirations and goals as to what they're assessing for and that then they're very well planned for in terms of the questions that they're going to ask and how we go deep and broad, as I said earlier, to make sure that we're actually assessing the suitability of those skills and behaviors and not just thinking back to oh, somebody's done this for 10 years, so they're probably quite good at it, but actually validating through, you know, good use of situational and behavioral type questions. And one of the other biggest things is really on that interview alignment. It's so important for our credibility as an organization as well. Within IBM, the TA function, the learning that we've seen through this already has shot up our hiring manager mps and this is just on the pilot because instantly hiring managers give us a little bit more credibility. They actually come to the table listening to our ideas. We've removed things like the word intake from these strategy meetings just to make sure that we're not seen as those order takers, but that we're actually consultative and coming to the table with ideas and with intel to really drive a meaningful discussion. I'm not sure which slides are actually missing, but on this final one I'm just going to wrap up with a couple of key takeaways and I think that they're actually really applicable to this as a program, but also pretty much to any other program or initiative that we have running at the moment, particularly when it factors in technology. The first of which is the enterprise design thinking, just to make sure that you center your research and your solutioning around what people are actually experiencing. It's so easy to run off assuming that you know what you need to do based on your own assumptions, but you need to validate those and you need to co create those directional narratives with the people who had impacts. In this case, it could be hiring managers, it could be the candidates, it could be the people who've already joined that have had an experience, compensation, learning, leadership development, all of these different people. The second one is around Agile. There's no way we could have done this if we hadn't operated in an agile way and piloted really early and taken away the massive learnings and the massive failings that we experienced as a result of that as well. Only 10 months on we have an MVP which will no doubt need iteration. Of course it will, but we could have spent two and a half years planning this with the technology, with the education, the enablement, building out something more marketable from an approach and a strategy perspective. And then by the time we actually landed it in two, two and a half years time, it may have become redundant or irrelevant already by that point anyway. And this gives us an iterative way of making sure that we remain relevant and that we can bring in the right people to iterate at the right times. And then the third thing I'd say is, and this is a real bugbear of mine, and I have to try and be the voice of logic and reason, but it's don't get carried away with shiny toys. I mean, so often we'll have a leadership meeting and somebody will say, I've seen a great product or I've got an idea for a tool. And then we try and reverse engineer processes or experiences based on that. Whereas it's so imperative, in my opinion, and in all of the products that we've launched across the lifecycle, this has been validated, that you have to design your processes with experience in mind first, and then your tools, your technology to layer on top of that, have to support that or enhance that or drive consistency of experience and not the other way around. So I'm not sure how that was, I'm not sure how long that was because the slides are missing. But thank you very much and I'll be available after.