Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. Today I speak with Chris Havrilla, the Vice President of Talent for Oracle Cloud HCM. In her job, she thinks a lot about data and experience, how to use them for attracting new talents and how to use them for managing existing staff. Let’s talk about all this and more on this edition of People Tech. Hey Chris, welcome. Now, I seem to be seeing a lot of articles about making HR more efficient lately, and I was just curious, is that a new thing or is it something that’s kind of an older trend that’s just gathering a new set of steam?
Chris:
Yeah, I think it’s an old topic that really probably needs to be restated, honestly, because I don’t think it’s really about efficiency. It’s about what is HR’s real role? And in my mind, it really is about how do we help them drive work, workforce, workplace issues, right? Because if they don’t, who does? And how that’s harmonized? That work, workforce, workplace, where’s the work done? How is it done? By whom is it done? All of that I think, really is more of the charter. So less about efficiencies in my mind where it’s maybe more about policies and compliance and transactional types of work that HR had traditionally always done. But really what is this notion of people and the role they play in the business outcomes of the workplace?
Mark:
I have to imagine Oracle has a point of view or a strategy for dealing with this. Can you tell me about it?
Chris:
Absolutely. I think our job is to ensure that HR has the tools and the data to do exactly what we just said. If that’s what HR function is, how do we support that notion of the harmonization of work, workforce, and workplace? Because data and technology plays a huge role in that. So I think part of it is what are our investment strategies? What are we going to deliver for them to do that? But also how do we think about those investment strategies in those overall goals that they have?
What are the big challenges they’re facing doing that, and then, what our investment strategies are to help meet that? So I think that’s kind of half of this role, from a product strategy perspective, is to help drive some of that. But the other side of it is how are we helping them think about applying that data and technology to do exactly that because I think tools don’t solve problems people do with tools in hand. So how do we arm our internal people and our customers and our external partners, all to help with that notion of how is it applied to get to those outcomes?
Mark:
Okay. Let me shift gears a little bit. I want to ask you about skills. That’s another sort of issue and word that’s all over the place in HR technology. And I’m wondering, with all that you’re trying to do with your platform, has the demand about skills affected Oracle’s approach to its solutions?
Chris:
Absolutely. It’s been a huge driver, and I’m a big believer in the fact that skills definitely needs to be front and center of all we talk about just because simply I think we’ve been making decisions, business and talent decisions for a long time on jobs and roles solely. And I think that’s limited organizations and frankly, people’s ability to think about the different ways their skills and capabilities can be applied.
So with this notion of everything changing, and I think we’re in another kind of “unprecedented time of change,” we’ve got this rapid evolution of skills, which is why it’s so front and center. But we also have a volatile economy so we’re hearing about headcount reductions in parallel with skills and talent shortages. But I think that’s a different conversation when we get down to the skills level and it really starts to become more about what are the skills and ability, skills and capabilities of people to get work done.
So I think that’s the next evolution of the conversation and why skills has become so prevalent. But I’m a big believer in it, but we have to capture that data to start talking in that language because right now, everything we have always done has been around jobs and roles. So getting down to that skills and capabilities level is hugely important but we have to create that vocabulary and that narrative for whether it’s HR, whether it’s the business, whether it’s the workers themselves, who [inaudible 00:05:41] maybe in a particular role. So I think it’s an incredibly important conversation, and one that for us, in helping provide tools and technology that capture this level of data, it’s got to be front and center for us as well.
Mark:
Now, Oracle Grow seems like it would have some kind of skills application to it, does it?
Chris:
Absolutely. So when we came out with our Oracle ME platform last year, one of the things that was prevalent about this is the people-centric notion of these solutions and grow is really the next evolution of that. And so what it’s doing is our new AI powered solution, bringing together skills and learning with people, jobs, gigs or projects, careers, mentors, ambassadors, all kind of discoverable in one place where every employee has visibility into career growth. And every manager to that end has a holistic view of skills development aligned with business goals, all kind of in one place. And so capturing skills is a huge part of that. Now we have our dynamic skills’ solution within the Oracle HCM Cloud Suite. And really what Grow is doing is kind of bringing all these different solutions in the Oracle Suite really in one experience for the user that’s very geared towards their growth.
So if I were going to talk about it in a different way, and I think this is true, especially for a lot of companies that maybe have vast different technology and their tech stacks, or whether they’re with a unified suite like us, there’s still different areas of the system. And so from a worker perspective who aren’t used to being in HR systems, how are they engaging with these systems to get the most use out of it? And I think that’s really one thing that we can do for a lot of these workers and businesses who are so overwhelmed with all the disparate tools and data sources.
We actually did a study that’s kind of interesting, and you’ll see this come out with our product launch, but with so much data available, people are feeling overwhelmed with how to make decisions, how to take action. And we really do have an AI driven platform that supports taking all of this passive historical data and turning it into intelligence guidance, AI-based recommendations that guide workers and managers in this specific instance towards their growth and development.
And so I liken it to having a coach, really that is looking at all of these different things and bringing it together with a very specific goal of how do we help a worker master their current role, but also think about what the future holds. Where could my skills and capabilities be utilized in the organization that I haven’t even imagined? And from a manager’s perspective, how do I know what skills we have, what still needs to be developed, where those gaps are, and how to help guide closing those gaps?
Mark:
And how does it work? It sounds like it’s a pretty ambitious thing with a pretty ambitious job to do.
Chris:
I’d say it works as, again, how it’s experienced. As we bring all of this data together really in one place for this worker. You think about how companies are trying to manage this. Gosh, go manage your skills here in your talent profile, and maybe you go out and do your learning in this module or this system, how do we bring that and turn it all maybe inwards so that the worker is just thinking about what they’re doing in the flow of work. So they have the ability, we can give them just based on their role. Here’s things that you could be learning, here’s skills that are applicable to this role.
Is this what you have? What are your proficiencies in this? And inspiring them based on where they are in that moment. They can start to guide their preferences all in one spot. Maybe jobs that they want to follow, career paths they are interested in, gigs or projects that they might see in the organization that might be of interest. Again, their skills. And really just giving them a place to see all of that and start to say yes and have some agency and what those preferences are, and not just relying on maybe what we see on that role alone.
So what’s ambitious about it is really what our tech does well, and that’s look through all the data. We have one single data model across our whole suite of tools. So why don’t we put that to work for that worker, bring it together with the patterns and trends, and then let them also collaborate with the AI to make it smarter and better for them. So it really is just one area, one screen for them to be at to experience all this. So it’s really more of just bringing it into one experience.
Mark:
And it sounds like that one screen has an awful lot going on under the covers, basically.
Chris:
Absolutely. But the interface for them is very simple and clear. And that’s really what coaching should be about, is clarity. It should be with focus and intention and simplicity. Enough that you can make a decision very easily without being overwhelmed and I think that’s what we can deliver. And because it’s very specific, here are things that you’ve been assigned to learn now, but here are things that are popular in your role or based on your preferences, these are skills that you’ve indicated that you have or a [inaudible 00:12:41] or your manager has, or your peers have maybe, it takes a village to collect the data, but the data’s collected, let’s kind of put it out there for people and say, “Yeah, here are the skills you’re building. Here are the skills you already have. Here are things that are popular in your role or based on your preferences.”
Just like we would in Amazon when we were thinking about shopping. A little bit of that work is done for us, based on what the systems know about us and about others like us. Same thing with Netflix. But you might sit there and go, yeah, this is something I would like to watch, and this one doesn’t sound like it so much. So we’re training those models all the time, but we don’t realize it. It’s just very simple for a user to see and not need to see what’s going on behind the scenes that came out in those recommendations and guidance.
Mark:
So could you tell me about the genesis of the project? How did you come up with the idea for it and how did you flesh it out so it could be built to do the things you wanted it to do?
Chris:
Absolutely. Well, look, we know what the challenges are. We hear from our customers all the time what their workers are experiencing, what managers are experiencing. We even saw that in the data that people were overwhelmed. We had that global research project in play called Decision Dilemma, which had surveyed literally over 14,000 employees and business leaders across the globe. And some of those key insights that were coming out is we have more data than we’ve ever had, but it’s overwhelming. So 70%, or I think it was maybe 78% believe they’re getting bombarded with more data and more sources than ever before. They’re overwhelmed but I think it was like 88% of people just said they admitted they had ongoing decision dilemma. So we knew we had to start to make all this simpler for people. So we had workers who were overwhelmed and by the way, organizations who were empowering them to go learn, bringing them extensive content libraries and things like that.
And here you are, you’re empowered to grow your career, but with no real guidance. And so I think that was the things that we were trying to really solve for is organizations wanted to know what skills they had, what their gaps were, how to help deal with that because they needed access to talent. We’ve been hearing about labor and skill shortages for quite a while now, and they need access to those skills and capabilities to get the work done, but they’re operating in the dark a little bit because there’s just so much kind of overwhelming data to figure that out. Same thing with the workers. So that was really the problems that we were trying to solve for, is how do we make this simpler and easier for people so that they can get the data and have the tools and do the things they need to make decisions and take action on the things that we’re alluding them.
Mark:
Well, Chris, thank you very much. I appreciate all your time today. It was really great talking with you.
Chris:
Well, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Mark:
My guest today has been Chris Havrilla, the Vice President of Talent for Oracle Cloud HCM. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of Recruiting Daily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
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