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Announcer:
Welcome to People Tech, the podcast of the HCM technology report. We are recording from HR Tech in Vegas, brought to you by our friends and partners at Fuel50.
Here is your host, Mark Feffer
Mark Feffer:
Welcome to People Tech, the podcast of the HCM Technology report. I am Mark Feffer, recording today from the exposition floor of the HR Technology Conference and exhibition and with me is Larry McAlister.
Welcome!
Larr McAlister:
Hi!
Thanks for inviting me, I am glad to be here.
Mark Feffer:
Well, thanks for coming.
Could you take a minute and just tell us about yourself?
Larr McAlister:
Sure.
My name is Larry McAlister. I just left the corporate world after 30 years to start my own consultancy called a Corporate Humanist and it is really to help people with their HR talent strategy technology, which equals transformation and how to tie that all together. So I am helping some customers do that right now.
Mark Feffer:
There’s been talks about transformation for a long time. It seems like it’s picked up little momentum lately, maybe because of the pandemic, maybe not, but what’s your view?
Larr McAlister:
Yeah, I think the pandemic changed everything. I think the way talent looks at the market, the way they look at their employers is completely different.
There’s been a shift of power to tell it. They make their own decisions. So I think the reaction to that in this pandemic affected workforce is you have to do things differently and that leads to transformation.
Mark Feffer:
Now, another big thing in the business has been skills. Everybody wants to develop skills. Everybody, every employer is looking for skills.
What is your view about how an employer should holistically try to solve the problem of skilling?
Larr McAlister:
Yeah, I mean we say skills is the new currency. The more you have, the more you know, the more you can move, but I think when you take it above skills to what are you really trying to accomplish and there is two things normally that happens in a company:
One is, we are going from this kind of employee to this kind of employee and that is the quandary of now do we just go hire 500 people, do we develop these guys and you have to be really, clear what that is going to be the year after next because you are just building skills for now they are going to be outdated, so a longer term plan on skills is one.
The second thing that happens is there is a disruption in say, cloud or disruption in the way that all these small tech companies now are getting involved. So how you put your talent strategy with your tech strategy has to be driven by what skills you are trying to get to and what bus you are going to get everyone on to get there.
Mark Feffer:
Someone once said to me that the way to think of skills is that you either buy them, borrow them or build them.
Larr McAlister:
Yeah, that is great.
I love it. The three B’s, is that what…
Mark Feffer:
The three B’s I guess, right.
Yeah, but I mean that does on the surface make sense, but it seems like that would be a kind of tricky thing to envision and manage and plan for?
Larr McAlister:
It is.
The most difficult thing is we don’t know what skills people have and so a company like Fuel 50, you now know what people are good at, what they want to learn and that feeds your talent strategy in a way that we have never known to do that before.
So I will give you an example of a company I worked for, we were moving to more of a cloud company and we didn’t feel that the people who were not in cloud would be able to move over. So you go immediately to buy, let’s go buy a bunch of cloud engineers and sales people but what I think people often forget is that is a short term solution and so how are you going to build skills internally for two years or three years?
So then you are moving both wheels spinning at the same time and the only way really to do that is to know what the future is and know what you have in house now, which in the past have been on spreadsheets. So having a great HR tech platform that you can look at the entire company and around the world is at your fingertips has changed the way we looked at skills.
Mark Feffer:
I was listening to you talk and I’m thinking, well here we sit in the land of dreams where all HR technology works exactly as supposed to.
Larr McAlister:
Yeah.
Mark Feffer:
So what is the reality?
I am not trying to bash anybody, but the real world throws things at you. It gets in your way. So you might have a great HR tech system, but it’s not going to be perfect. It’s going to be clunky and you do that?
Larr McAlister:
So I think the core artificial intelligence in a lot of these new platforms works. It works, I say it gives you the ability to see the unseen. You can see things much quicker, get to the personal connection much faster with much more data.
Outside of the AI stack, how do they then deliver this stuff to you and every single one of their hundreds of tech companies sitting around us, they all do it a little bit differently and they promised a little bit differently. So I think as you are going into it, we did an HR tech parade where we brought in 16 vendors and kicked the tires for weeks and that really informed us of what’s out there, what’s real, what’s sort of a mirage and I advise HR people to feel their technologist and to really understand what this is but the core AI stuff is amazing and you have to have an HR tech stack in order to succeed and compete in the market.
Mark Feffer:
What is so amazing about the AI nowadays?
Larr McAlister:
So say on AI match, when you’re recruiting, it instantly matches people’s backgrounds to the job, so you don’t have to go searching for. It gives you advice on, will this person return your call based on their work history. Do we think this person is maybe an underrepresented group, right, that is stuff that you would have to go research and research and it gets to you like that.
Same thing in your career development, one of the cool things that we like at Fuel 50 is you could say one day I want to be a VP of marketing, and right now I’m an engineer. If you do the self assessment, it tells you your next three jobs that you could take inside the company to have a career path, which has been a myth in the past, now it is actually at your fingertip. So when you talk to your boss, your manager, about your career, you have real data to talk about it, it’s elevated the game.
Mark Feffer:
Yeah and do you think that the frontline managers are buying into all this?
Larr McAlister:
So the technology people are technology savvy. I mean, your phone is super advanced. I think the hard part is the change in what that means. So if this person comes to you and says, hey, I want to move to this next job and I know I can make it, people are afraid to be like, Oh, I don’t want my people to go. So it’s been a mindset change as opposed to a technology change.
Mark Feffer:
When I talk to people about this, it seems like the technology always sort of comes down to decision support and I wonder, do you think that’s true and how does a company forecast their future needs in a world like this that’s moving so fast in all of that?
Larr McAlister:
I think it’s a combination of what is the technology telling you about what’s going on inside of your company, what are your employees want, what are they working on, what do they want to be, then you have to marry that, where are we going as a company and before, without having the skills and the motivations and the passions in one spot, you are guessing. So I think it’s really taken a lot of the guesswork and flying blind out of what you have inside of your company as opposed to even five years ago and it gets you to a more meaningful conversation with more data.
Mark Feffer:
I would like to shift gears for a minute.
Larr McAlister:
Sure.
Mark Feffer:
Let’s talk about the show cause it’s fun here.
Have you seen anything, any themes among the vendors that seems kind of new to you or have we just evolved a bit from the last year?
Larr McAlister:
Yeah, I mean there is so many different ways people are going at it and there is a big focus on the employee experience.
So how can we use technology? So you like going to your job, it’s easy to do. If you think about it, we have been using our cell phones, our smartphones for years, and now you go to work and there’s nothing that is up to that technology. We are starting to see much more, better trends that are easier to use, better user interface that people want to engage in and your job I think an HR expert is to figure out what’s right for you and it’s usually more than one solution.
Mark Feffer:
It seems to me there’s a lot of focus on integrations now that there wasn’t eight years ago, so?
Larr McAlister:
Yeah, what I say is if you have artificial intelligence and an API, which means you can integrate to the bigger CRMs, you have a company. I mean you could sell, right, there is something there for you and so what I think we are seeing is integration is a must and I think some of these companies here are starting to realize, hey, can we be partners or co-competitors and work together to close the deal, cause our things are different but aligned. So I think the next trend is going to be more alignment around vendors to sell a whole solution.
It used to be, you had people suffer workday and that was it and all these companies come in and are so much faster and can integrate and those bigger companies are going to have a very difficult time keeping up with this kind of innovation, so they need integration as well.
Mark Feffer:
Last question.
Larr McAlister:
Sure.
Mark Feffer:
When you think about the next 12 months, what are the two or three things that you are really keeping an eye on?
Larr McAlister:
So one is how do you keep people feeling they are included in the company, if it’s a true hybrid where third of the people in a room or two thirds are not. The technology is one thing, Zoom or whatever is one thing, but how do you as a leader and a team make sure you are performing at your highest and there is some technology for that?
I think the next big wave of the post pandemic or the pandemic affected workforce is mental fitness. There has to be a much larger focus on mental fitness. It used to be you would never want to go to work and say, man, I am burned out, or I’m tired, it was shameful. Now we need to bring it to the front and be much more proactive in how we have mental fitness and wellbeing with our employees because we are at that stage of this pandemic where people just done and has to be a leading indicator as opposed to a lagging indicator.
Mark Feffer:
Larry, thanks for stopping by.
Appreciate your time.
Larr McAlister:
Thank you!
This was fun, appreciate it.
Announcer:
You have been listening to People Tech of the HCM technology report. This HR tech series is graciously brought to you by our partners at Fuel50. For all other HR sourcing and recruiting news, check out HCM technology report.com.
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