Produced by the Human Resource Executive® Editorial Team

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ools for removing hiring bias, D&I best practices, data-analytics capability, talent planning, career-

pathing technology, workforce development—these were a few of the many themes that emerged

at this year’s HR Technology Conference & Exposition® at the Venetian in

Las Vegas on Sept. 11 through 14.

Throughout the HR Tech Conference, the Human Resource Executive® editorial team posted reports

from the event on www.HRExecutive.com. Now, in this special post-conference report, we’ve compiled,

for your convenience, our coverage of the event all in one place.

In addition to these stories, be sure to check out the video interviews streamed during the event at

http://hrexecutive.com/category/videos/

We hope you enjoy!

The HRE Editorial Team

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

4 .......... Why HR Needs to Make ’Experience’ a Priority

6 .......... Influential Women Making the Case for D&I

9 .......... ‘Most Admired for HR’ Leaders Speak Out

11 .............. Creating an HR Data Culture

13 .......... Reimagining the Career Experience

15 .......... Driving Bias Out of Your Hiring

17 ............. Keynoter Mike Rowe on Why Dirty Jobs Matter

19 .......... Randi Zuckerberg on Tech’s Future

21 Companies Shifting HR Tech Focus to Data

22 Big Data Drives Predictive Talent Planning

24 ......... Expo News in Brief

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WHY HR NEEDS TO MAKE ’EXPERIENCE’ A PRIORITY Josh Bersin gives HR Tech Conference attendees a preview of new research. David Shadovitz, Editor

t a general session on opening day, industry analyst Josh Bersin gave attendees a taste of what his latest research

project—the HR Technology Market 2019—will entail. Among the many HR topics covered in the soon-to-be-published report is the employee experience.

Bersin noted that the HR-technology marketplace has turned into a market that consists of three tiers: the core ERP and payroll system, the talent tools and a new layer focused on giving employees an integrated experience.

“Engagement is an outcome of building a great company with great management and meaningful work and good experiences for employees,” Bersin said. “So, the engagement industry, which used to encompass a small number of companies that did annual surveys with benchmarks maybe five or six years ago, has now turned into a massive industry of survey tools and pulse surveys.”

The next generation, he added, is going to include nudges, suggestions and action plans for supervisors based on data so they can manage their employees better.

HR, Bersin added, is moving away from simply being a platform to becoming a means for improving productivity.

“We have more technology, more tools and we’re constantly connected,” Bersin said. “We’re walking around with basically supercomputers attached to our bodies, yet we’re getting less work done per hour over time.”

Why is that? he asked. It’s because “we have created a very difficult work experience,” he responded.

It’s no one’s fault this is occurring, he added. “Rather, it’s just the way the world is.

“I had a meeting with the CHRO of a large global company about two weeks ago, and he was going through all the things he was working on,” Bersin said. “One of those was a wellbeing program. When I asked him, just out of curiosity, ‘Why are you doing a wellbeing program?’ he said that it’s very simple: ‘Our employees are exhausted; they cannot keep up; we have global operations; we’re sending emails; we have meetings.’ ”

The CHRO told Bersin that his company also had set a policy that prevented meetings from starting before 9 a.m. so employees could get up in the morning, get some exercise or go for a walk before they started work.

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Engagement, Culture and Employee Experience

If you walked around the HR Tech Conference’s exhibition, he added, “You’re probably going to find that most of the vendors have slapped the word ‘engagement,’ ‘culture’ or ‘employee experience’ on their products because they’re all trying to figure out how to improve the employee experience. This is the landscape on which vendors are developing their products today.”

Bersin suggested that if the tools you’re purchasing today aren’t improving workforce productivity, you need to ask yourself why you’re doing it. “I’m not saying everything in HR is going to have a direct impact on revenue per hour or customer satisfaction,” he noted. “But if you don’t get a sense that it’s moving you in that direction, then you’re going to find low levels of adoption. You’re going to find people don’t use the software. You’re not going to gain traction on the technology investments you’re making. You’re not solving the biggest problems you have.”

Over the next year or two, he predicted, HR is going to be viewed as a productivity-enhancing function, not just one focused on engagement and retention, “which, to me, is more of an outcome than a goal.”

Another challenge Bersin cited is the impact AI is beginning to have on HR and jobs. The research suggests that 40 percent to 50 percent of the jobs that exist today will be different in the future, thanks to robotics and AI.

Bersin noted that it’s about a 12- to 18-month learning path to reskill people into those new jobs. “Not 10 years,” he said, adding that HR needs to find the time to create an environment that enables reskilling to happen.

The research, Bersin said, also shows that graduates coming out of college today are not ready to go to work. “Companies are finding they don’t have enough problem-solving skills or collaboration and business acumen, so we have a lot of interesting challenges there,” he explained.

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Rita Mitjans, chief

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INFLUENTIAL WOMEN MAKING THE CASE FOR D&I Highlights from the 2018 Women in HR Technology Summit Danielle Westermann King, Staff Writer

irbags were invented in the 1950s, were standard in most cars by 1988 and became a mandatory safety feature in

1998. Around this time, however, there were more and more reported car-accident deaths—not from the accident itself, but

from the deployed airbags. Imagine that, said Rita Mitjans, chief diversity officer at ADP: a safety feature designed to protect people from dying was causing more deaths. Why was this happening? At the time, engineers designed the airbags to protect a 5-foot-9, 165-pound person—can you guess the demographic makeup of the design team? They were all male and, with no outside perspective, designed airbags based on versions of themselves. What if there were women on that design team? They could have avoided this mounting issue, she said, by explaining the size differential among men, women and children. Instead, manufacturers paid

female HR leaders to offer their insights and lessons learned throughout their careers—especially as women and minorities in a rather homogenously dominated world.

In Mitjans’ keynote, “The Business Case for Diversity,” she weaved in personal details about her career journey along with some disappointing statistics on the state of women and minorities in leadership and technology. For instance, she noted that more than half of all college graduates are female, but only 19 percent graduate with an engineering degree and 8 percent with a computer-science degree. These numbers are even lower for women of color (11 percent and less than 10 percent, respectively).

“What we honestly need to do is address this in the elementary- and high-school level. That is where it begins,” said Mitjans. “If young girls aren’t interested in or encouraged to pursue STEM, then there’s no way this pipeline coming out of college will ever change.”

There’s also the challenge of advancing women throughout their careers, she said. According to a McKinsey study, 36

diversity officer at ADP a steep price for not having diverse perspectives.

percent of white men begin their careers in entry-level positions and go on to hold 67 percent of all C-suite jobs. Those numbers stand at 31 percent and 18 percent for white women,

Mitjans opened the conference’s Women in HR Technology Summit, which brought together some of the most influential

16 percent and 12 percent for men of color, and 17 percent and 3 percent for women of color.

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Mitjans pointed out that, in 1990, women held 32 percent of computer jobs; in 2016, that number dropped to 25 percent. She said this is where inclusion comes into play, as it allows diversity to thrive. Research from the Anita Borg Institute revealed that 80 percent of the reasons women left STEM were because of working conditions—from lack of advancement opportunities to feeling isolated and not having career flexibility.

“[This] tells us that 80 percent of the reasons women leave tech jobs are under [HR’s] control,” Mitjans said. “It’s about creating a better environment and culture, which everyone in this room has control over.”

Mitjans cautioned, however, that diversity and inclusion cannot be just an HR initiative.

“The only way to drive it [D&I] in your organization is to get the business on board,” she said. “Leaders must be sensitized and understand why it’s important and what’s in it for them. D&I

leadership ladder and how to use analytics to drive gender equality, as well as pay equity, blockchain and more.

Evidence-Based HR and the Future of Work

The summit wrapped up with a closing keynote from Jenny Dearborn, executive vice president of human resources and global head of talent, leadership and learning at SAP. In “Evidence-Based HR: How Data Will Shape the Future of the Workplace,” she explained how HR needs to embrace big data and analytics to drive real change in an organization.

Dearborn noted that any tasks that can be automated will be automated, which puts 83 percent of jobs that pay less

must become part of your standard operating practice.”

To effectively implement real change, HR must look for ways to get women in front of senior leaders to showcase their

than $20 an hour at risk for automation by 2030. She says that it’s HR’s responsibility as the moral compass of

Jenny Dearborn, executive vice president of human resources and global head of talent, leadership and learning at SAP

expertise and give them a time to shine. Mitjans suggested putting women in charge of presentations, projects or even speaking at conferences to increase their visibility—because the only way promotions happen is when women are visible to decision-makers.

Following Mitjans’ presentation, six breakout sessions focused on issues such as how HR can help women climb the

an organization to look out for internal and prospective employees. This requires HR to tackle the enormous task of bridging the skills gap, which will continue to widen without any intervention.

What HR and other business leaders should focus on, she said, is nurturing skills that are innately human—ones that can’t be automated. The World Economic Forum created a list of 16

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of these skills, which include critical thinking/problem solving, creativity, collaboration, curiosity, adaptability, social and cultural awareness, and persistence.

“We must make sure we hire the candidates that are aligned to these skills,” said Dearborn. “We need to shape job descriptions and training to ensure they’re aligned to these skills.”

And the only way to accomplish this is with data and analytics, she said. HR has to think about the “entire chain value” of its function, which is to solve business problems. Dearborn said the seat at the strategic table will only open up when HR owns the business problem—which it can do because it delivers the people who help an organization function.

“HR has a huge fulcrum that we can leverage and can make more of an impact on social and other issues than any other

function within a company,” said Dearborn. “When it is done right, HR is a coach and advisor for all other parts of an organization.”

To drive this change, HR must focus on collecting the right data, disseminating the information and learning from it to put the right people in the right positions, she added.

“In HR, we are the conscience and we are the moral guide for our corporations, but we need to be more impactful,” said Dearborn. “Focus on the business outcomes, become data- savvy, align with the strategic business objectives and speak the language of the business. All of that will give you access to drive real change and enjoy the rewards of a meaningful career in HR.”

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‘MOST ADMIRED FOR HR’ LEADERS SPEAK OUT CHROs from the “Most Admired for HR” companies discussed their priorities. Andrew R. McIlvaine, Senior Editor for Talent Acquisition

his year, the HR Tech Conference featured its first-ever panel of CHROs from “The Most Admired Companies for

HR,” an annual ranking produced by HRE in partnership with Korn Ferry.

The panel included moderator and HR Tech Conference Co- chair Steve Boese, and panelists Jayne Parker, senior executive vice president and CHRO at the Walt Disney Co.; Peter Fasolo, executive vice president and CHRO at Johnson & Johnson; Ellyn Shook, chief leadership and HR officer at Accenture; Matthew Breitfelder, managing director and chief talent officer at BlackRock; and Joanne Smith, executive vice president and CHRO at Delta Air Lines.

Boese got the discussion started by asking the panelists what “great HR” looks like today.

“HR has evolved during the last five years to the point that it’s now all about human beings, as opposed to people being the subjects of the process,” Shook said. “We can have a very human experience in our companies today thanks in part to technology.”

Shook noted that, with hundreds of thousands of employees spread across the globe, it’s difficult to impossible for Accenture’s leaders to connect in person with employees at all of its locations. These days, Accenture’s leaders are

Pictured from left to right: Panel moderator and HR Tech Conference Co-chair Steve Boese, and panelists Jayne Parker from Walt Disney Co., Peter Fasolo from Johnson & Johnson, Ellyn Shook from Accenture, Matthew Breitfelder from BlackRock, and Joanne Smith from Delta Air Lines.

addressing that challenge by attending employee meetings around the world via three-dimensional holograms of themselves when they can’t make it in person.

“They can see our facial expressions, they can see our humbleness—it lets us create a more human experience,” she said.

Fasolo said great HR means “having a talent mindset at all times. HR leaders have to be very good at picking winners and getting them to join and stay.”

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At Disney, the HR focus is on ensuring that employees feel that their input is valued, said Parker.

“We define ourselves as a creative company, and so our employees have to feel their voice is heard,” she said. “We, as HR leaders, need to both understand the business strategy and ensure employees can have a voice in that.”

Building Cultures That Drive Outcomes

Boese asked the panelists what they do to ensure their corporate cultures help drive business outcomes.

“At Johnson & Johnson, we have a proud history of our culture being driven by our credo, which states that our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses, patients, mothers and fathers, and all others who use our products and services,” said Fasolo.

It’s critical, he added, for companies to ensure that the people they’re putting into leadership positions make it possible “for employees to bring their best selves to work every day.”

The panelists also discussed the importance of diversity and inclusion for business outcomes.

“When you dial up diversity, it leads to greater innovation,” Shook said.

As a “storytelling organization”—through its movie, television, theme park and other divisions—Disney knows it can’t tell great stories to a wide audience if the company itself isn’t diverse, Parker noted.

“The work of diversity is critical,” she said. “The Disney Co. cannot do what it’s supposed to do for its shareholders without a diverse group of employees.”

At BlackRock, the CEO has a “no-replicants” mantra, Breitfelder said. “If the people you’re hiring, as a manager, are just like you, then you have a problem,” he said. The investment company, which has $6 trillion under management for its clients, looks for diversity of background, education, race and gender in the people it hires, he added.

“We’ve found, for example, that people with liberal-arts degrees make excellent investors,” he said. “It’s important to identify the skills of candidates and get past the arrogance that says there’s only one model that succeeds. We need people to come to our team who will challenge and create tension because it works.”

Companies must invest in their employees’ knowledge, Parker said, even when it doesn’t have an immediate ROI to the workplace. This is especially critical in the media industry, which has changed dramatically within the last few years.

“We’re introducing a program called Disney Aspire, in which we’re going to pay for our 80,000 hourly employees to take college classes in whichever area they choose,” she said. Disney will pay the tuition upfront and will reimburse the employees for the cost of books and fees. The company plans to devote $150 million over the next five years to the program.

“Our goal is to set them up for success in the future,” said Parker.

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CREATING AN HR DATA CULTURE How GBW Railcar Services uses HR analytics to help managers in the field achieve better business outcomes Michael J. O’Brien, Web Editor

aving the right HR tools is great, but how do you get them to the people closest to the work being done, the ones

who can actually use them?

During a conference session titled “Empowering Managers: Using People Data Analytics for Retention and Business Growth,” Lisa Maxey, director of compensation and HRIS at GBW Railcar Services, explained how the company partnered with ADP to connect its managers and workers in the field with the right technology to improve business objectives like talent management and data management.

GBW Railcar Services was the largest independent railcar- repair network in North America—until this summer, when it was reabsorbed by its parent company.

“It’s simple—we fix trains,” Maxey said.

But the company was intent on fixing how managers attracted, managed and retained the right employee mix, especially for hourly employees who are critical to the organization’s success.

With $300 million annual revenue across 35 U.S. locations and 1,500 employees distributed remotely, the company employs a mostly non-desk population of skilled laborers. Indeed, 75

percent of all jobs are hourly positions held by “low-tech- savvy” men with an average age above 40.

The tight labor market and a lack of workers with the required skills for the job, such as mechanics and welders, added to the company’s challenges. “It is so difficult to find any type of workers that, if you are looking for someone, you’re trying to take someone from another job,” Maxey said.

Hiring and retaining workers with specialized skills is key for GBW, she said. “If you’re having a problem with turnover, it’s going to impact your other metrics because our employees are the ones generating the revenue.”

Before the ADP adoption, Maxey said, managers were lacking “visibility” in regard to hiring goals.

“We were terrible at it,” she said. “Our managers might hear about a hiring goal in a meeting once a year, but they’d lose focus because they didn’t see it every day.”

ADP’s Mobile Insights allowed them to see interactive, real- time dashboards on their smartphones because “90 percent of the day, most managers are away from their desks and out in the field.”

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Dashboards included metrics such as headcount, overtime, turnover and “cool” things like the average tenure of a team, all in real time instead of in a monthly report, she said.

Reducing Time to Hire

The company required its managers to log in daily to ADP Insights to look at time cards and job costing and to ensure they had everyone clocked in correctly. The organization also encouraged managers to “look at your dashboards and then you can say, ‘Maybe I need to get back to the recruiting team to schedule some interviews because two people just left unexpectedly.’ ”

The faster you can get people through the recruiting process, the better, and after it started using Insights, GBW was able to decrease the time between application and offer letter from 50 to 60 days to 20 to 30.

“We were able to really flatten it out to a consistent level,” Maxey said.

One of the lessons learned through the process, she said, was to ask if the company’s HR data structure is the right one.

“How does your business look at data? You should map [HR data] parallel to how your whole organization looks at data.”

Indeed, before the ADP adoption, GBW used 57 different operations codes to define separate job activities, including many for different—yet very similar—types of maintenance tasks.

“A high-level executive wanted us to use all those codes,” Maxey said. “But when the data showed that 30 of those codes hadn’t been used in the last six months, we were able to say: ‘I’m not just telling you it’s a bad idea [to have that many codes], I’m showing you it’s a bad idea.’ ”

The company now only uses about a dozen codes, she added.

As for the lower-level managers, Maxey said, they were initially struggling with the adoption because many were first-time managers and hadn’t gone to business school. “So, we learned you need to talk about the ‘why’ of the numbers, not just the numbers themselves,” she noted.

To that end, during rollout, the company focused on interpreting data with managers and business leaders, she said, and it made all the difference.

“You don’t have to be a data expert to use these systems,” Maxey said. “The front-line people are the experts, so leverage their experience and knowledge to achieve the outcomes your organization needs.”

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REIMAGINING THE CAREER EXPERIENCE Technology’s role in giving workers a clear career path Michael J. O’Brien, Web Editor

here’s a new workforce dynamic today, in which the power differential has swung over to employees.

That’s according to Anne Fulton, author of The Career Engagement Game and founder of Fuel 50, who co-presented a session at HR Tech titled “The Next Frontier of Uberization at Work: Career Pathing for a More Engaged Workforce.”

Thanks to that power shift between workers and organizations—due to the current talent shortage— employers need to redesign a career experience to fit the transformed world in order to combat rising quit rates and falling engagement scores, Fulton said. Indeed, according to Randstad, 86 percent of employees leave their jobs due to a lack of career development.

And the problem only seems to get worse with younger workers, Fulton said.

While two-thirds of millennials are expecting a better career- development experience than previous generations received, 70 percent of them will be working in jobs that will be “radically affected” by automation, she said, adding that McKinsey research shows 375 million workers globally could be displaced in their jobs by 2030 due to automation.

Companies are looking for new ways to “future-proof” their workforces in order to retain sufficient talent to be able to meet

their strategic objectives. But workers are seeing a “significant” disconnect between what HR is offering and what they need, Fulton said.

“While 60 percent of HR leaders think they’re doing a good job giving employees a clear career path, only 36 percent of employees agree,” she said. “So what we need to do is increasingly personalize the career proposition to meet the individual’s needs.

“We need to design careers around experiences, not positions, to increase satisfaction,” Fulton added.

To that end, her firm compiled its top best-in-class practices for organizations to deliver those experiences:

• invest in internal talent mobility; • help employees understand why career agility is

important; • enable career growth on all levels of the organization, not

just high-potentials; • help leaders do a better job of career coaching; • help leaders understand the importance of being “talent

agents” for their people; and • increase visibility of career paths and the internal talent

supply for leaders.

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“If you can do those six things,” she said, “you’re going to get the business outcomes you are looking for.”

Also, during the session, Shreya Nidadavolu, a career and team growth specialist at Indeed, shared details of her company’s MADE Inside Indeed career-development program and its four different learning tracks.

The first is called “Manifest Your Vision,” in which employees seek to understand what’s important to them and where they envision their careers going. Next is “Achieve Your Goals,” which allows workers to learn the “tools, tricks and tips to really

take a skills-based development approach to create dynamic action plans for themselves,” Nidadavolu said. The third is called “Dare to Ask for Help,” which provides employees with networking, mentoring and coaching opportunities. The final piece of the program is “Evolve as You Grow,” in which “Indeedians” can seek further experiences to promote continous growth.

“It all goes back to that HR philosophy: We care about what you care about,” she said. “We want to make sure what we do has an impact. And to me, there’s nothing better than a career success story.”

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DRIVING BIAS OUT OF YOUR HIRING What the first-ever Pitchfest winner is doing to address the issue of unconscious bias Michael J. O’Brien, Web Editor

tephanie Lampkin says that when it comes to hiring a diverse and inclusive workforce, “companies may be

investing in marketing to say they care about it but, if you peel it back, you see they haven’t done much.”

Enter Blendoor, which impressed the judges so much with its inclusive recruiting and people-analytics software that it beat out 29 other start-ups to win the first-ever Pitchfest at HR Tech.

Lampkin is the CEO and founder of the three-year-old company that currently employs seven workers in its San Francisco headquarters. Her team created the app that aggregates diverse talent from multiple sources to broaden a company’s talent search and then uses blind reviews and analytics to mitigate unconscious bias from source to hire.

As the inaugural Pitchfest winner, Blendoor was given the opportunity to present at the conference’s “Next Great HR Tech Company” session, won booth space at the 2019 event and received a $25,000 prize donated by the Randstad Innovation Fund.

“We’ve already used half of the prize money on developers,” Lampkin says, adding that the company will soon release its next version.

(The fund also awarded a $5,000 prize to Talvista for being named the best diversity solution at Pitchfest.)

Diversity in hiring is a topic Lampkin knows all about. Even with a degree in management science and engineering from Stanford and an MBA in entrepreneurship and innovation from MIT, she encountered difficulties trying to find work in Silicon Valley after graduation.

So when she learned through that experience that many tech companies were having trouble sourcing qualified female and minority candidates, she set out to create a solution.

When companies use the Blendoor app, it presents recruiters with candidates who are sourced from strategic partnerships with universities and groups such as the National Society of Black Engineers and the Society of Women Engineers. The candidates are presented to recruiters without a name, photo or any age-identifying information (such as a college graduation date).

“We are tapping into those member databases, and we’re hoping to become the largest depository of diverse talent,” Lampkin says. “We see an opportunity to unearth signals correlated with future performance, which don’t necessarily reflect historical data, and we’re bullish on how effective we’ll

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be for candidate job-matching given that we have such a diverse dataset.”

Once the candidates are presented to a client, Blendoor integrates with the company’s HR systems to track candidates based on demographics to identify where and how bias happens.

“This transparency drives accountability within organizations, teams and even individual hiring managers,” she says.

Lampkin says Salesforce will begin using the app this fall for its Futureforce recruiting strategy. It will also promote the app to potential candidates on college campuses to improve its own employer branding while also capturing more comprehensive data around the source of diverse candidates.

Meanwhile, AOL solicited Blendoor to implement an internal matching system for incoming interns this past summer. The most attractive feature of the app, according to AOL’s Technology and Talent Integration Leader Alicia Anderson, is the ability to match candidates with hiring managers based on pre-populated structured data rather than traditional resumes and job descriptions.

In addition to measuring bias in hiring, Lampkin says, Blendoor also provides metrics that demonstrate the ROI of diversity

and inclusion initiatives, adding that those metrics can be monumental when trying to convince a skeptical C-suite.

“Executive buy-in is usually the challenge” when it comes to implementing D&I initiatives like diverse hiring programs, Lampkin says. “The heads of D&I are always really passionate, but the C-suite or board doesn’t often match that passion, and you need that level of buy-in.”

One of the newest features Blendoor is currently beta testing is BlendScore, a diversity and inclusion rating of companies based on demographics of the company’s leadership team, retention statistics and strategies, recruiting practices, bias and social-impact initiatives.

“We want it to be sort of the U.S. News and World Report ranking on diverse hiring,” Lampkin says, adding that it creates “a competitive landscape” for companies looking to hire a diverse and inclusive workforce.

“We want highly qualified candidates to go into interviews and have that score [for a company] so they can ask recruiters about it,” she says.

Given the prevalence of news headlines about race and diversity issues, Lampkin says, the timing for Blendoor seems optimal.

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KEYNOTER MIKE ROWE ON WHY DIRTY JOBS MATTER The TV host and producer of shows like Dirty Jobs called upon the audience to recognize the importance of skilled labor. Andrew R. McIlvaine, Senior Editor for Talent Acquisition

ike Rowe says he’ll never forget a certain poster that his high-school guidance counselor showed him as he was

trying to convince 18-year old Rowe to enroll in a four-year college. One side of the poster showed a smiling and optimistic man in a business suit, the other a downcast-looking man dressed in overalls and carrying a wrench. The poster was captioned: “Work smart, not hard.”

“We’ve promoted one type of work at the expense of the other,” Rowe said during his opening keynote at the conference.

That attitude, he said, is partly responsible for the enormous skills gap that exists in the U.S., in which vital and necessary blue-collar work is considered inferior to jobs that require a four-year degree.

Rowe himself has become a celebrity thanks to his shows, most notably Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel, which celebrate the men and women who hold unglamorous jobs. During his talk, Rowe recounted in hilarious detail the battles that took place between himself and the management team at Discovery, who wanted Dirty Jobs to focus on trendier topics such as artificial intelligence.

“I said to my longtime producer, ‘Hey, they want us to do a show on AI,’ ” Rowe said. “He replied, ‘Artificial insemination?’ ”

Rowe said the remark gave him an idea, and a week later he and his production team flew to Texas, where they filmed at a ranch that breeds Brangas beef cattle via AI—artificial insemination, that is. Rowe, who tries to perform the duties of each job he profiles as part of the show, found himself tasked with artificially inseminating 75 cows and “stimulating” one very large bull named Hunsucker Commando.

“He still calls me—‘When you coming back to Texas, big fella?’ ” Rowe joked.

Management at Discovery was less than elated with the footage, Rowe said, but the episode ultimately aired and attracted record ratings. Discovery then decided that Rowe would film similar episodes at livestock operations and farms throughout the country.

Shortly after the last of the “AI” segments aired in late 2008, Rowe said, the economy crashed and the unemployment rate soared into the double digits. And yet, he said, even as the ranks of the jobless swelled, “Help Wanted” signs remained

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a common sight at the farms, factories and machine shops where he filmed the show.

“We keep sending kids off to four-year colleges to accrue lots of debt while studying for jobs they’ll never get,” Rowe continued. “Meanwhile, there are 6.6 million unfilled jobs in the U.S. that don’t require a college degree and, in many cases, pay north of 100 grand per year. And yet we’ve eliminated shop class from so many high schools.”

High-school students are being pressured to enroll in four- year colleges without understanding what they’re getting themselves into, he said. “When I was 18, I didn’t know my own ass from a hot rock,” Rowe remarked.

Recruiters and hiring managers try to minimize the risk that they’ll be blamed for a bad hire by requiring all candidates to have a college degree, Rowe said. “Then they can say, ‘We checked all the boxes; it’s not our fault,’ ” he said. “I understand the rationale behind credentialing. But I think credentialing is hurting us and widening the skills gap.”

To address that issue, 10 years ago Rowe started the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, which awards scholarships to

help students pursue careers in the skilled trades. It’s part of an effort to reorient the nation toward a more positive view of blue-collar jobs and address the skills gap, he said. “We want to prepare people for jobs that actually exist,” said Rowe.

Rowe noted that many of the people he’s profiled for Dirty Jobs are actually happier in their work than their desk-bound counterparts. “They enjoy their work and, at the end of the day, they’ve clearly accomplished a task, whereas your desk at the office typically looks the same at the end of the day as it did that morning,” he said.

The much-derided millennial generation has a legitimate beef, he said.

“We’ve laid out a roadmap that says the best path for most people is also the one that’s the most expensive,” said Rowe. “We like to complain about millennials, that they’re snowflakes with their safe spaces and ‘crying closets,’ and yet we ourselves are the clouds from which these ‘snowflakes’ have fallen.”

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RANDI ZUCKERBERG ON TECH’S FUTURE Keynote speaker Randi Zuckerberg discussed her predictions for the future of consumer technology. Danielle Westermann King, Staff Writer

hat’s the best way to get ahead as a woman in the male- dominated world of technology? According to Randi

Zuckerberg, you need to have a masculine first name. Joking aside, she said that during most of her career, particularly during her time at Facebook, she fielded many questions such as “Where’s Randi? I thought I was meeting with Randi.”

Gender expectations were among the many topics Zuckerberg addressed in her opening session, “Future Consumers: Decoding the Trends and Opportunities Today,” in which she traced her whirlwind career. After studying business marketing at Harvard University, Zuckerberg moved to New York to work at a well-known advertising

Once she arrived on the West Coast, she said, she saw there was something truly inspirational about the scrappy start-up. The small team had a real passion; they truly believed they’d change the world. At the time, though, they were competing with already established tech giants that offered employees fancy lunches and amazing (expensive) perks. How could Facebook compete for the best engineering talent?

The team decided to use its passion of entrepreneurship to attract talent. They would host all-night hackathons for everyone in the company to join so that they could all feel like entrepreneurs. The submissions had to be passion projects that were separate from contributors’ everyday jobs.

Zuckerberg presented one of her ideas during a hackathon, which was met with skepticism. She wanted to know what it would look like if everyone using Facebook was his or her own broadcaster. So, she set up a mini-studio in a closet and broadcasted herself in real time on Facebook. Both of her

Randi Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media

agency. One day, her brother Mark called and said he was working on a start-up and wanted her to be the

parents tuned in—and that was the end of Facebook Live with Randi Zuckerberg … or so she thought.

team’s digital marketer. She intended to spend about a year at the start-up her brother was calling Facebook and then return to the Big Apple.

A few weeks after the failed broadcast, Katy Perry’s team called Zuckerberg and said that Perry wanted to launch her world tour on Facebook Live with Randi. She says she considered how her male colleagues would respond to the request.

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“Would they say, ‘Sorry, Facebook Live isn’t a reputable show?’ ” Zuckerberg recalled. “No! They’d say, ‘Sure, come on in,’ so that’s what I said, too.”

In 2011, Perry delivered the first Facebook Live broadcast, which became a hit. President Obama later asked to do a Facebook Live Town Hall, which turned into a weekly White House live broadcast. And now, there is a Facebook Live button on 2 billion profiles around the world.

“I didn’t see myself as an entrepreneur when I went out to Silicon Valley. I was a supportive person in marketing, ‘supporting’ the entrepreneurs,” said Zuckerberg. “Every one of us is sitting on that 2 billion button idea. It depends on if you’re encouraged to take risks and not be afraid of failing in pursuit of your idea.”

Bringing More Women to Tech

After her massive “failure” turned into a success, Zuckerberg did what any profitable executive would do … and left her job at Facebook. The reasons, she said, were complicated and included a desire to research how to bring more women to the leadership table at tech companies.

On that front, Zuckerberg created Sue’s Tech Kitchen, a pop- up that aims to get more women and girls interested in tech. She spent time researching the exact moment when girls often lose interest in tech—age 9—and set out to create a dessert café featuring robots, 3D printers and science experiments, among other offerings. She wanted the kids to play with their

food while learning about tech, showing them that tech can bring a family together instead of keeping them apart. The most popular items in the café have been the 3D-printed S’mores and pancakes made by robots.

“We had all these families that hadn’t pursued STEM or tech come, and it opened up opportunities to talk about AI and robotics and skills they need for their careers in a way that feels non-threatening and non-overwhelming,” said Zuckerberg.

The venture is among a huge surge in pop-up experiences— restaurants, stores, photo opportunities. Apart from that trend, Zuckerberg shared four predictions that she said will shape the future of tech: Consumers of tech will see everything as media; they will value scarcity and experiences; they will think about their careers differently; and finally, they will want a healthy balance of technology.

“Every one of us is a media company. If you reach even one person inside of your company online with the tools you’re building and communication, you’re a media company,” she said.

The spirit of entrepreneurship, she added, can help bring to fruition that “2 billion button” idea we all have within us—but getting that idea to surface in the first place is something uniquely HR: company culture.

“It depends if you’re in the right atmosphere where you’re encouraged to be creative to let those ideas out.”

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COMPANIES SHIFTING HR TECH FOCUS TO DATA The latest Sierra-Cedar HR Systems Survey finds more companies are using HR tools for data analysis. Michael J. O’Brien, Web Editor

verall HR-tech spending is increasing, according to the results of Sierra-Cedar’s 2018-2019 HR Systems Survey,

which was released during a session at the HR Tech Conference.

Stacey Harris, Sierra-Cedar’s vice president of research and analytics, said that increase also comes with more value per dollar.

“In other words,” she said, “more modules, more capabilities per dollar spent per employee.”

The challenge with that, she noted, is that “we’re also seeing a lot of organizations that are struggling with the skill sets and capabilities inside their companies to use all these assets and tools. So, we have a real adoption issue that’s going on in organizations: HR technology outpaces the skill sets of the current technologists or tech roles in many of these organizations.”

To overcome that challenge, the survey found that 25 percent of all large organizations plan to add more HR-data-analytics workers, compared to 17 percent of medium-sized companies and 7 percent of small companies.

Harris said the report also highlights a shift in HR tech from a focus on the process and practices of HR to a focus on the data that are required for HR and workforce intelligence.

“And that shift has been pretty a long transition,” she said, “but

that are starting to make that shift and how they’re changing how they think about their HR systems.”

The 21st annual edition of the survey is the latest research installment of the longest-running research effort in the HR industry. It was conducted from April through June 2018 and is based on 1,312 unique organizations representing a total workforce of 17.7 million employees and contingent workers.

According to the report, only 17 percent of surveyed organizations felt their HR systems “always” met their business needs. But for the other 83 percent of organizations, the No. 1 issue identified across all application areas by almost 50 percent of organizations was configuration and customization limitations, followed by functionality gaps (44 percent). Internal knowledge and skills were a major gap identified by 24 percent of organizations, giving vendors and system integrators an opportunity to address issues beyond technology.

Among the surprises in the report, Harris cited a 72 percent increase over last year in the number of organizations that had a “rip-and-replace” model in place.

“That shows that if you haven’t made the transition yet or have a strategy yet, you’re behind the curve,” she said. “If you haven’t thought about how to update and upgrade your HR technology in some way, you’re no longer going to be at the

this year we’re definitely seeing the outcomes of organizations head of the pack.” NEXT ARTICLE

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BIG DATA DRIVES PREDICTIVE TALENT PLANNING How Accenture uses big data to build a robust talent pipeline Michael J. O’Brien, Web Editor

ow do you decide to invest in different talent trends?

At Accenture, the professional-services company with 449,000 workers in 120 countries and $33 billion in revenue, big data are helping provide the answer to that question, according to Mike Gabour, a next horizon skills lead with the organization.

“Tech is changing at an exponential pace,” he said during a conference session titled “Hiring for the Next Big Thing at Accenture: Big Data Drives Predictive Talent Planning.”

“Gone are the days when you had 10 years to respond to a new tech trend. These days you’ll be lucky if you get two,” he said. “So we always have to look ahead to stay ahead.”

But what if you could use that same technology to predict those next trends?

About two years ago, Gabour said, Accenture teamed up with researchers at MIT, “dumped a boatload of data on the conference-room table and asked them one question: ‘How do we make sure we don’t miss the next trend?’ ”

After the MIT team looked at job-posting data and talent- pipeline data, they were able to understand those trends

markers and successfully be able to see what was coming up. But they soon realized they were missing a key component: What was happening outside of Accenture’s internal data?

And that’s when they turned to Burning Glass Technologies to dive into the larger world of human-capital data to get answers to questions like: How do we validate what we’re seeing internally? How do we make sure we’re not missing what’s happening in the external marketplace? And how do we look to the next one to two years and predict what those future trends will be?

But human-capital data are “super-unstructured and very messy,” said Enrique Cruzalegui, vice president of strategic accounts at Burning Glass Technologies, adding that people use the same words to describe completely different concepts, such as “associate” at Walmart versus the same title for someone at McKinsey.

To create order out of all that chaos, Burning Glass collects data from 50,000 sources and has nearly 1 billion jobs in its database going back to 2010.

“What that data contain is essentially very coded job postings from wherever that data live, combined with government data, educational data,” Cruzalegui said, “and we have mapped that to a taxonomy that we have developed internally.”

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This approach allows them to see job skills in context and make appropriate comparisons between two companies in the same industry in order to get an accurate look at the companies’ “talent shape” and evaluate the skills for which the company is hiring.

Through this approach, Cruzalegui said, Burning Glass has defined four different skills categories. Escalators are growing fast and build on existing technology, but “it’s not going to shake your world up,” while disruptors “could potentially really change the way you do business.” Stabilizers “might be a type of day-in, day-out type of skill, such as data manipulation,” while challengers are skills that “you know you’re going to need, but they’re just hard to find, such as data architecture.”

This information is critical for companies like Accenture, Cruzalegui said, because it has to be able to forecast the skill that “hasn’t been invented yet that’s going to revolutionize how you do XYZ.”

But tracking disruptions across multiple dimensions means not only looking at job descriptions but also keeping an eye on “internet chatter,” as well as maintaining a large database of resumes that Burning Glass uses to validate its findings and

“see how people are moving across their career pathways,” he added.

Using this information, Gabour said, allows companies like Accenture to identify where those future skills gaps will be and how to invest in learning, as well as where to focus on hiring.

Accenture was also able to answer some key questions for its leaders, Gabour said, including: Which skills are growing fastest? Which skills are growing faster than expected? Which skills are declining in the marketplace?

“Using this information can really help inform our decisions and prioritize those investments we need to make on a quarterly or annual basis,” he said.

As an example, Gabour noted that when working with Accenture Security, the team found that cybersecurity skills were far different than information-security skills.

“It’s at this level of specificity that those insights can be actionable,” he said, adding that, “without that tangible information, it’s really difficult for a business leader to make those decisions.”

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EXPO NEWS IN BRIEF Workday, Businessolver, SilkRoad, Achievers and Cornerstone On-Demand were a few of the vendors that announced new solutions at HR Tech. By Danielle Westermann King, Staff Writer, and David Shadovitz, Editor

Workday used the HR Tech Conference as a forum to discuss its shift away from standard annual performance evaluation to “performance enablement”—both in terms of its internal practices and its client offerings.

Rather than checking in with employees once a year, Workday’s performance enablement strengthens employees’ autonomy and allows them to connect with their managers whenever they may need.

By empowering employees to take control of their careers, the approach seeks to increase engagement and promote collaboration, flexibility and coaching.

Businessolver, meanwhile, unveiled its free Empathy Index, a tool anyone can use to see where their organization falls on an empathy scale. The Index uses three years of research to examine empathy from both the employer and employee viewpoints. It is quantified across five key pillars: behaviors, communications, company values, culture and corporate philanthropy.

Once a score is received, the tool suggests how to increase empathy, says Businessolver Vice President of Marketing and Communications Cynthia Phillips.

Businessolver found that 87 percent of CEOs believe that empathy is tied to a business’ financial outcomes, making empathy a key performance indicator that shouldn’t be overlooked.

In addition, the company announced that its personal benefits assistant, Sophia, is now capable of managing workflows, which expands her service reach. Since Sophia was first launched in 2017, she has increased her knowledge by 250 percent (she learns from every single customer interaction) and has significantly decreased customer wait time.

SilkRoad discussed at the show the findings of its 2018 Global Strategic Onboarding Report, which surveyed hundreds of global executives and found that most of them want to improve new-hire engagement.

Lilith Christiansen, vice president of onboarding solutions at SilkRoad, points out that the survey highlights the importance of onboarding, noting that the ideal length of time for onboarding a new hire should be around one year. During that time, she says, the new hire should be introduced not only to peers, but also to potential mentors as well as executives.

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Further, Christiansen adds, coaching should be emphasized during that period and compliance paperwork should be spaced out so that onboarding isn’t just two days of paperwork followed by, well, nothing.

Achievers, meanwhile, released as a standalone solution Achievers Listen, a continuous employee “listening tool” designed to ask questions and engage with employees in a scientifically validated way. It incorporates always-on employee listening through Allie, an intelligent digital chatbot “coach,” which gives employees an outlet to share their feedback anytime.

To “influence lives, you need to provide data that can be acted upon,” says Achiever’s Chief Workforce Scientist Natalie Baumgartner, noting that the tool enables managers to identify what their people need—and then deliver.

On day three of the event, Cornerstone OnDemand announced its acquisition of Workpop Inc., a provider of web

and mobile solutions for candidates and hiring managers in the retail and hospitality sectors.

The acquisition further accelerates Cornerstone’s efforts in recruiting, says Cornerstone CEO Adam Miller.

The company also announced Cornerstone Frontline, a recruiting solution aimed at companies seeking to hire local, entry-level and frontline employees, such as store managers recruiting new cashiers, supervisors seeking seasonal warehouse employees and healthcare providers looking for administrative staff.

At present, Miller says, Cornerstone has about 1,000 clients that use its learning and performance solutions, but not recruiting.

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Founded in 1997, the HR Technology Conference is the world’s leading event on HR technology covering all the latest trends in talent acquisition, employee engagement, diversity & inclusion, Big Data and more.

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