#HRTechChat: Unpacking Skills Transformation with James Griffin

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James Griffin is a Principal Consultant at the UK-based Skills Collective. His work focuses on skills, enterprise SaaS (Software as a Service), talent transformation, and consulting, all of which revolve around the customer. His deep expertise lies in reimagining talent transformation strategies and understanding how to begin implementing skills-based approaches within organizations. He has positively impacted several SaaS organizations, including Degreed and Elevate Direct. With Principal Analyst Dylan Teggart, they discuss the shift from traditional job-based hiring to skills-based hiring, driven by the need for more tailored employee selection. James highlights the growing confusion in the software market, urging organizations to focus on tools that demonstrate clear value and align with corporate strategies.

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Transcript:

Dylan Teggart 00:00
Hi everyone. This is Dylan Teggart, here with another episode of the #HRTechChat Podcast. I’m here today with James Griffin. James is based in the UK. He’s Principal Consultant at skills collective. James focuses on skills enterprise staff, ballot transformation, consulting and really focusing on the customer. James, thanks for joining me.

James Griffin 00:29
Great to be here. Dylan, thank you for thank you for having me

Dylan Teggart 00:32
My pleasure. Do you mind telling people a little bit about yourself before we dive into the subjects of today?

James Griffin 00:39
Yeah, sure. I think, I think you did a pretty good job there to kind of explain, you know what I’m all about? Yeah, let’s say based in the UK, starting with kind of non work stuff. You know, I’m a married guy. I got a couple of kids live on the outskirts of London, a place called Twickenham, which is the headquarters of the English National Rugby team. We got a 90,000 seater stadium just over the way there. So sort of once in a while, or quite frequently, we get descended upon by lots of beer drinking men and women who are going off to enjoy the rugby, which is fun in some ways. I like the outdoors, like paddleboarding, like getting on my bike and, you know, going for walks with the kids and stuff like that. So yeah, nothing out of the extraordinary there. Guess I like to barbecue meat and drink beer. So again, pretty typical. But on the professional side, yeah, enterprise, enterprise, SaaS, with a with a strong dollar per skills, I guess is how you might put it. I started my career as a recruiter and working supply side into the city of London, into a lot of financial services organizations, and I switched to work for my first technology company in but I forget now it’s around about 2010 and, yeah, with, you know, a bootstrap startup. So I was doing a sort of little bit of every bit of everything. It was a disruptive technology in the in the talent acquisition space. And since there, I forged a career predominantly on that, on that customer side within SaaS technology businesses. So eventually, kind of building and managing customer success teams all the while within those tech companies that I work for, this skills thing was coming along, and, you know, it’s, it’s become quite a hot topic. It’s a pretty established concept now for organizations to try and understand the skills they have in their business. And you know, really, how they put them to work, back when we were building, you know, machine learning and AI technology in the in the 2010s what skills wasn’t really an established concept. It was. It was something that was, was still pretty innovative. So, you know, I guess I’ve been doing skills for, you know, longer than it’s been cool. And, yeah, my my passion around working in enterprises is really around the problem that the customer wants to solve. So how do you solve customer problems, you know, first of all, you need to identify what it is, and then you configure a solution to do that, and you have a measurable outcome. And I think this is something that’s always missing within a lot of a lot of narratives that I hear, and a lot of maybe HR functions that I’ve worked with, is that they, they don’t, they don’t they don’t align that well to the business strategy. They don’t align that well to a measurable outcome. And I think it’s really worth taking the time and investment to do that. It’s hard, it’s not trivial. But if you’re going to actually be able to talk about whatever you’ve done within your role, whether that’s procuring tech or optimizing it, or whatever, having a measurable outcome is going to be better than not. So I do think it’s worth the investment. So my passion is really to deliver value for those customers. And as you said, now I’m working for skill collectives, so I’ve, I’ve kind of switched sides. I’ve moved over into a consultancy business, a business services business, and you know, we focus on simplifying skills and skills technology for everybody. We think there’s a lot of confusion in the marketplace. We feel like buyers are struggling to get started with skills, or they have got started and, you know, maybe they’ve hit a few bumps in the road. You know, in this 15 years experience I’ve got working with skills in that space, I think really enables me to empathize with that buyer and to enable them to kind of strategize on on how to use skills as a force for transformation in their business. So that was a long winded answer, wasn’t it? I hope that was all right.

Dylan Teggart 04:30
That was perfect. Yeah. So one question I kind of do have is he said it kind of emerged, not that long ago, this concept of skills. So how were people operating before it seems like it’s kind of a fundamental part of looking at someone’s talent. Yeah,

James Griffin 04:49
well, I think that. I think the job, if you want to look at it from a sort of data attribute and how we try to identify what somebody does. I. I forget about sort of how they do it, the tasks that’s that’s an that’s a whole nother kind of set of data, but for years, and I can think back to the work I did as a recruiter. We’re looking for a project manager, we’re looking for a software engineer. The job was the, almost like the most finite data attribute that, that you could use to try and understand exactly what we’re going to hire, and against that job, you would align it with a level in a in a hierarchy, in an organization that would come with, you know, a salary benefits, you know other, you know, reward and remuneration elements. And it would come with a, you know, a position in that hierarchy, a level of authority, direct reports, all that. And it was all just, it was all defined at the job. So I think what we’ve had is like legacy job architectures that have struggled to evolve from that to incorporate skills. And there were, I use the word evolve there, because I don’t think you need to chuck out the job architecture. I think you need to look at how you break down a job into skills. So that’s like skill to role mapping. And then you can do stuff with that data. So you know, you can use that for more targeted sourcing within your recruitment practice. You can use that within more targeted learning within your talent management practice. You can use that data use that data within your strategic planning function. If you have one to say, well, we should be hiring software engineers over here, or we’ve probably got too many over there and not enough over here. So gills is the most I think it’s the strongest and most reliable data attribute that you can measure in that way,

Dylan Teggart 06:47
interesting. So what do you think kind of brought that about? Was it just the people were finding they were hiring the wrong people, and this was a way to narrow it down to getting more of a, not a one size fits all type of person, and you were getting a bit more of a cornucopia of people coming into an organization.

James Griffin 07:08
That’s a great question. Yeah. I mean, I think people are still hiring the wrong person, you know? I think that’s not, you know, we haven’t solved those problems yet. I think your question was, how did it come about? I think if we, if we just forget about HR and HR tech for a minute, and if we think about what’s happened in the world over the last let’s say I don’t know. Let’s go back to the.com boom in the late 90s, early 2000s the huge point of disruption. Organizations didn’t know which way to turn like questions that CEOs were asking are being asked were, should we put a browser on this terminal, on our on our land, on our local network for our employees to be able to log in? Everything was client server. There was no such thing as, you know, a SaaS service through a browser. So those were, those were the big rocks that people were trying to move then. Then we had the onset of, well, we had, you know, these things. We had, you know, Steve Jobs came out with the smartphone. Prior to that, we had the iPod, you know, million songs in your pocket. But the iPhone and the concept of a marketplace in the app store, I think, really changed everything that that bought our consumer desires to the fore, like we can have anything we want downloaded from an app store, any kind of experience, and we kind of want that now in the corporate world as well, that’s kind of bled in from consumerism into corporatism. So, yeah, I think it’s, I think there’s other aspects that have hit the prevalence of cloud services. If you wanted to start a business before a technology company, you’d have to go and buy a bunch of servers and stick them in a garage and have some sys ads like actually look after them whilst your software engineers are writing the code. And then bring those two bits together. You’d have to do that. You can have a software engineer in Toronto, and you can have a server hired through Amazon or somebody else anywhere on the planet, and they take care of all of that for you. You just deploy your code through some very clever technology. So all of these things have come together that have really driven a different expectation for us as human beings. Now, not not looking to sound kind of ageist or anything, but I think it’s safe to say I got a few more years the new Dylan, so I’ve been through that experience, but, but some haven’t. You know, some have grown up in this digital world in in the middle of the last decade, the millennials made up the largest cohort of workers in most corporations. So your demands and your expectations around what is the norm have completely changed. And the final one here is, you know, I guess in sort of 2010 2012 like this whole onset of big data, machine learning, the ability to take. Take unstructured data, normalize it, get it into a schema, and ask it questions. Now, okay, that did exist before. That did exist in the, you know, even going back to the 60s, but not in a way that is available to now, like data, data as a service, machine learning as a service. You know, Microsoft provide that there’s a ton of providers out there. So coming back to your question around you know, how did it happen, and why skills? That’s why it’s because it is the lift to be able to do it now is so much lighter than it was before, and the expectations of the individual, as a professional person as an employee have completely changed to what they were even going about 15 years. So it’s quite a fast pace of innovation, and it’s only ever going to, only ever going to speed up. I think

Dylan Teggart 10:54
it’s very interesting through line, how you did, how you put that together, and it makes a lot of sense, kind of going from the consumer market to the corporate market, and how people demand things or want to purchase things, or, let’s say, be a talent or like a phone, it’s much more, I guess, you could say, on demand, but also bespoke in a way where you can kind of get whatever you want, whenever you want, how you want it. And but what, what kind of butts up against that, I find is a little bit is, you know, because our our desires as the human beings are so different, person to person and organization made up of people. What kind of butts up against that, for me, a little bit is the AI infusion of that, because AI does run on a bit of a homogeneous kind of methodology, find something that works, and then it kind of sticks to it until you tell it to stop. So with skills based hiring being infused with kind of artificial intelligence. Now, are we? How do we kind of keep that in check so you don’t avoid just hiring the same person over and over again, or the same type of people over again?

James Griffin 12:03
Well, I mean, there’s, there’s, there’s a few answer, there’s a few truths here. There’s, there’s more than one truth. The reality for some organizations is they didn’t, they didn’t they. They trained AI, let’s say, a sourcing solution, so it can automatically source or shortlist people based on the historical data that they had, and that data had bias in it. So the AI confirmed that bias, and it was trained on data that basically just manifested that bias in a more prevalent way. Now there’s, I’m not going to name any names, but there are great examples of this on the internet. You know, one of them is a very well known global e commerce platform, and they did that exact same thing. They hire at scale seasonally, and they made a mistake, and they had to row back from that and turn it off. So how do we prevent that happening? So I actually think this is the job of of many people. I think it’s the job of product owners and visionaries and the innovators in the world, you know, the Mavericks, and there are organizations out there who are pursuing an ethical AI approach. You know, there’s a great, you know, skills management and sort of talent marketplace software out of Australia that, you know, they their positioning and their messaging is very strong around ethical AI. And then there are policy makers here. You know, there is a lot of compliance that is here, particularly in North America. New York State has a law that you know, around that exact use case of candidate sourcing. So unless you want to get a big fine, you better make sure that you’re compliant with that regulation. I think Colorado has a similar one that’s more to do with compensation. So there are various elements of compliance depending where an organization operates. Most of the clients we work with the global so they have to take a global compliance viewpoint on what they’re going to do with AI. So it is, it’s not known. Yeah, there’s, there’s no one size fits all solution for that. But, you know, be super, super diligent. Don’t take any risk on it. And you know, think about the value of what your artificial intelligence is supposed to deliver. I get, I get a bit of a B in my bonnet about AI, because it seems to have been this year’s big label, big sticker. And you know, for the last couple of years that big sticker was like, skills. We do skills, you know, stuck on the wall. We do AI stuck on the wall. And it’s like, so what like? What does your ai do? What benefit does it have, if you’re a technology vendor? Is it enabling your users to be more efficient, to save time, which essentially equates to money? Are they going to be able to give laborious, repetitive tasks to the AI? And focus on higher value items themselves, which makes them more productive in their work, and probably do provide do better in their performance reviews, and maybe get up for a promotion. There’s a lot of AI for AI sake. Like, I say this, this big label approach. So I think before anybody’s like, we’re going to do AI, it’s like, what problem you solving with AI, and how’s it of value to the user?

Dylan Teggart 15:27
Yeah, I think I completely agree with that sentiment. I do think it needs to have a value tied to it in order to be relevant. Otherwise, it’s just kind of like you said, AI for AI sake, kind of leads me, leads me into something else I want to get into, which is something we talked about in our first conversation, which wasn’t recorded everyone you didn’t miss something was kind of the bleeding of thought for categories into one another, and how that kind of leads to buyer confusion. Do you mind talking a bit, a little bit about that, and how do you think that happened, and what can we do about it? And what’s the landscape, I guess, given that

James Griffin 16:07
it’s an interesting one, yeah, and, you know, in the work that I do for skill Collective, we consult on both the enterprise side and we help large enterprises do stuff with skills, but we also consult on the vendor side. So, you know, we work with SAS technology vendors, and we do a bunch of stuff for them, whether that’s within their go to market, within their customer journey, you know, whatever it might be. So we it’s our job to kind of understand the market at a pretty good level, much like yourself, I guess. And I think the the way to and recently, I’ve done some work where I’ve been trying to visualize the software categories, been trying to visualize the HR market. Really, it’s just getting harder. It’s just like there’s so many different software categories now, and there’s so much overlap between them, like you say, the software categories bleed into one. Previously, you had talent acquisition, you had the ATS, you had possibly a CRM solution that it integrated with to allow your recruiters to be able to do stuff with it. You had the ATS, which enabled people to apply for jobs and enabled the organization to publish jobs for people to apply to. So, you know, that’s still known. Software category is pretty well established. You know, some major players still in that space, but kind of close behind that, you’ve got the the talent intelligence category, and you know, they typically are pursuing quite a strong skills strategy or skills kind of management capability that they want within their platform, and some of them provide you with the ability to publish jobs and provide the ability for people to apply for jobs. They also provide you with the ability to share jobs internally. So you know, you probably got an intranet, and you previously had a career site that’s evolved now into what’s often called the talent marketplace. So you’ve got this software category that sits in talent intelligence, which bleeds, overlaps the TA ATS software category and also overlaps the talent marketplace category, which was a category that seemed to gain a really strong foothold in the pandemic as organizations were looking to maybe reskill, but certainly redeploy large cohorts of workers as maybe their retail operations got closed and they had to move sales to a remote call center type environment. So there’s a couple of examples. So you know, from, you know, the talent acquisition to the talent management, but now we’ve got another category just right in the middle that bridges, that bridges both of them. So, you know, you could, you could carry on into, you know, the rest of the talent management sphere, into learning management systems, which are traditionally for compliance based learning, and the evolution of the learning experience platform, and how that some of those have also provided the opportunity to provide not just learning opportunities, but the opportunity to go and practice what you’re learning on an opportunity marketplace, which looks very similar to a talent marketplace. So there’s another overlap in that talent management sphere. So I think from the buyers that I was at an event earlier on this this summer, and there was a chat there, and he had a he had obviously had an ATS, he had a talent intelligence solution, and he had an LXP. So he had those three, but he nonetheless, we had a very deep conversation about the overlaps between those two. So his the reality for those vendors is confusing. Messaging in the market has led buyers to procure stuff that they may not have understood. So now they’re under pressure from their CFO or from their CHRO to rationalize spend. So let’s be fair, the macro economic environment is still not wildly positive, and spend is being scrutinized in, you know, still being scrutinized a lot. It’s been a difficult sort of 12 months, and I think that will persist. We’ll see what happens in November in North America and whether that changes anything. But, you know, CFOs are kind of looking saying, Well, what is this thing? What does it do? What’s the ROI? And people can’t evidence it. They can’t say, well, we’ve been able to move even an HR metric. You know, often they can talk about an HR metric. Maybe they’ve been able to reduce voluntary attrition in an area where critical roles exist. So you know, they haven’t had to go and buy those skills from the market. They saved money. But ideally you want to be talking about that in a business metric. So okay, what were we what new products were we able to launch quicker? How did it increase sales? How did it make us more compliant and avoid fines, whatever that business outcome is so to come back to your question, I think the, I think vendors are under pressure. Technology vendors are under pressure to try and come up with the next bit of innovation. It’s, it’s the pace of innovation, again, that I talked about before. We’ve constantly got to be innovating. Constantly gotta be innovating that enables them to differentiate, although I don’t think many of them differentiate that well, but that puts buyer, because the buyer doesn’t buy you for innovation. Doesn’t buy you for roadmap items. It buys he or she buys you for what you can do now to solve the problem they procured you to solve if you don’t solve that problem, and you’re constantly focused on the innovation and bleeding out into other software categories. You just have unhappy buyers are used to manage customer success teams. Your CSAT will go down, your NPS will go down, your your churn rate will go up. You know, your net recurring revenue will go you know, upsells that will that will go down. You know, all those metrics will be impacted. And what does that mean? That means unhappy investors. That means more reductions in force that we’ve seen over the last couple of years. So I think it’s a, it’s a complicated question to answer, and, you know, I’ve said a lot just there, but I think that it’s, it’s the it’s the reality of the HR tech market. It’s so confusing that buyers are just a bit like, Meh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m maybe I’ll just rationalize and just use my core HR system and all their little module plugins to do everything, and I won’t have any best of breed point solutions anymore. I could just go with Workday or SAP or something. Yeah, I might sacrifice a bit of user experience, but at least I know that I’m going to have consistent data and that, you know, everything will work, whereas I’m trying to build this ecosystem approach, and I’m not getting the value out that I thought I would. That’s the big problem. Yeah,

Dylan Teggart 22:53
I think that’s a very valid point, especially given the kind of the economic slumber in right now, I guess, or approaching slump, or whatever you want to call it, yeah, but as that happens, people were to want a one size fits all product more and more most likely, just so they have to pay less people, and they’re like you said, they’re really going to justify every decision they make. And like, is that one specific tool really worth it, if it’s like kind of used sometimes, or is it kind of like if it dilutes the water too much for user experience? Yeah, people are gonna have a bad sentiment about it, and maybe they may not keep it on board, just for that reason alone.

James Griffin 23:34
But it comes back to what I said before. Is, is, you know, when I introduced myself, I talked about my passion, and in the post sales, you know, customer journey that that I would, you know, manage and understand, was all about value. It’s all about solving a problem. It’s not about the leading KPIs. How long did people spend learning in an LMS? You know, how many jobs did you publish? It’s about the outcomes of the people got hired into those jobs. You know, how, how quick did they get to productivity? Again, that’s an HR metric. How do you, how do you evolve that into a business metric? Well, they became productive. And also we could launch new products quicker, or we could move into an adjacent market quicker, or we could defend ourselves against a competitive threat quicker. You know, those are the business outcomes that people want to get to. But I see that vendors, that’s not what technology companies are bought for. The specialisms within a post sales customer success team is really around a playbook to get the technology configured, deployed, adopted, and working the strategy that they’re going to use that technology for, I think that’s really down to the business and to make their investments internally. And maybe too much pressure has been put on vendors. So I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. Maybe vendors have invited that, but I think there is this disconnect between what. The buyer expects he’s going to get, what she’s going to get they are going to get, and the reality of what the vendor is going to provide, and that is that’s a gap to close during a contract cycle, and it really, really happens.

Dylan Teggart 25:17
That’s a good point. So one final question for you before we wrap up, I know you look at talent transformation quite a bit, so let’s say, you know you’re not, you’re the CEO of or you’re, I’m the CEO of an organization. Let’s say I’m not happy with the people, what my workforce has become like, who I ended up with hiring. Maybe I use too much AI, and I have all too many gyms on staff, let’s say. And what is, what does day one look like? Of like me, getting back on track, and where do I go from there in terms of talent transformation? If I’m not, if I’m like and James, I gotta, I gotta sort out my workforce. It’s out the thought of I’m not hiring the people I want. I haven’t been hiring, if people haven’t wanted to hire for two year, and I want to change that so

James Griffin 26:07
you’ve just laid this out for me. Didn’t even have you to give a big skills plug here.

Dylan Teggart 26:13
Well, I think we’ll head to the credits after that.

James Griffin 26:17
Well, I think so forget about skills. Let’s say let’s just part skills. Let’s consider skills as a component of the data that your organization should have at its disposal to be able to make decisions. Okay, let’s look at an example. Let’s look at, let’s look at digital marketing. Let’s look at the marketing industry. So I think probably back in the late 80s, 90s, maybe mid 90s, you know, chief marketing officers were under pressure. It’s like, well, what are these guys? These guys are spending a ton of money. Like, what are they doing? Like, what return are we getting from this? Oh, well, we put adverts on, you know, the television and on, you know, the underground network, and we sell more stuff. And it’s like, well, how do you know that? How do you know there’s a strong inference there? But now look at digital marketing, through the use of data and the internet and mobile networks and a ton of other clever technology. They know so much about their organized their potential customers that it’s a little bit frightening, but they’ve done that good a job that they can probably predict who is going to buy something and who isn’t, and when and at what price point, whether they’ll buy the first version, whether they’ll wait and get it on sale, that they they’re able to profile people in this way. We haven’t done that in the corporate world, yet we spend more or almost an equal amount of time of our lives using technology in the corporate environment that could enable us to build an incredibly data rich picture of our employees, so that we could make Decisions about them, and they could make decisions about us. The CFO, when it comes to, you know, doing the accounts very data driven, a brilliant data management practice where, you know, you get that wrong, you go to prison. So you know, that’s probably why the investments have been made there. But HR has not done this. So your question, what does the CEO do? The CEO needs to actually provide HR with the tools. Part of that is data literacy and other elements around data management to enable them to deliver on that kind of solution. And that’s where I’m going to come back to skills. That’s what skills are all about. Skills are about understanding people at a more granular level, so that we know if they’re a good fit for the organization or not, or we know if they could move into this adjacent role over here or not, or we know if they might be a flight risk, or we know if there’s some other issues around them. So it to me, it’s, it’s about data skills. Data is a component of that. And I think that the marketing story is a great example, because most people understand that, or they’ve lived it, you know, they’ve seen the change from, you know, kind of analog esque marketing to digital marketing now, and how sophisticated that is, the opportunity for the CEO to work with these HR leaders to be able to provide that within their organization and within her organization is genuine. The technology is out there to do it. But you know, I’m pleased that you chose the CEO, because it takes that level of advocacy for this stuff to happen, and it needs the CEO to say, right, I am going to align this with our corporate strategy. This is something I’m going to report on in great detail to the SEC. This is something our investors are going to consume. So then you have to budget. And you have to go on that strategy accordingly to provide that data back to the CEO so he can do all of those things. So it’s, it’s a journey. You can’t just flick a switch, but day one probably looks level of commitment, that level of understanding, that we can do what you know, you know a targeted ads company does in the online advertising world, and we can do that for our employees. We can understand, comes back to the consumer analogy again, we can understand our employees like they understand their consumers. And

Dylan Teggart 30:37
that makes a lot of sense. Well, James, thank you so much. It’s been a really insightful it’s been a pleasure. Before we wrap up, is there any final point you want to get or anything anywhere people can reach you if they want to reach out to you. Oh, yeah, great.

James Griffin 30:52
Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I mentioned skill collective a couple of times already. We’re a boutique consultancy. We’ve got people on the ground here in the UK, but also North America. So you can catch me at james@skillcollective.co.uk Excuse me. I’m also on LinkedIn, as you’d imagine. And my handle, if you know, after the linkedin.com bit, is just James the Griff. But you could probably find me by typing in James Griffin and skills. And I reckon I’ve come up. But you know, anybody who’s watching listening today, any questions on anything that was was brought up, you know, love to chat. You know, no commitment, just let’s chew the fat. Get some other opinions on the table, you know, and see where it goes. So, yeah, it’s been a pleasure dinner. Thank you so much for having me

Dylan Teggart 31:34
My pleasure. Thanks so much. All right, take care everyone. Bye, bye.

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