Mark Hanson – HR Tech 2022 Series – Re-Skilling Employees in a Competitive Labor Market

Connect with Mark:

• 

Connect with Dwight:

• 
• dwight.brown@salary.com

Connect with David:

• 
• 
• david.turetsky@salary.com

 

Podcast Manager, Karissa Harris:

• HRDataLabs@salary.com

 

Production by Affogato Media

Resources:

• • Lightcast
  • HR Data Labs Season 5 Episode 16
  • HR Data Labs Season 5 Episode 14

• “The labor market is great for candidates right now—they have more power than ever.”
• “CHROs finally have a huge say in where [their companies] are going, and they’re going to have even more of a say in 2023.”

Announcer: 0:02

Here's an experiment for you. Take passionate experts in human resource technology. Invite cross industry experts from inside and outside HR. Mix in what's happening in people analytics today. Give them the technology to connect, hit record, pour their discussions into a beaker, mix thoroughly. And voila, you get the HR Data Labs podcast, where we explore the impact of data and analytics to your business. We may get passionate and even irreverent, that count on each episode challenging and enhancing your understanding of the way people data can be used to solve real world problems. Now, here's your host, David Turetsky.

 

David Turetsky: 0:46

Hello, and welcome to the HR data labs podcast. I'm your host, David Turetsky. Like always, we try and find brilliant people inside and outside the world of HR to talk to you about what's going on with HR data analytics, technology and processes. Today, we're still at the 2022 HR Technology Conference in beautiful Mandalay Bay Convention Center here in Las Vegas, Nevada. We're speaking today with my friend Mark Hanson was VP of strategy with Lightcast, which is formerly Emsi Burning Glass. So totally new branding. And if you want to talk about that you can, Mark.

 

Mark Hanson: 1:21

Oh, absolutely.

 

David Turetsky: 1:21

By the way, welcome.

 

Mark Hanson: 1:22

Yeah, no, thank you for having me again, this is so fun. And yeah, we're always excited to be here at HR Tech, always excited to talk to our friends, you know, with you guys and your company. It's been wonderful to stay connected throughout these years. So yeah, pleasure to be here. Yeah, like you said new name just rebranded a couple months ago, earlier in the summer, and we spent a year with a very awkward name of Emsi Burning Glass, but it was great for transitioning all of our customers and letting the market know that we're one big huge data set now when we got a chance to merge that together and kind of do the proper transition to get to a new name and did the proper research around that. And so now, you know, we're excited about the rebrand because now we have a simpler name, something that's very flexible and open that we can continue to add to our services and all of our solutions. And so it's a perfect fit for where we're going next. And really the theme is like how do we shed light on you know, dark places like like datasets, all that fun stuff? How do we how do we how do we surface all those insights? So that's where we're going

 

David Turetsky: 2:18

And you can find them at Lightcast.io!

 

Mark Hanson: 2:19

.io Yeah, that's that's the big the big one. All the dot coms are gone. So

 

David Turetsky: 2:23

All the good ones. So Mark, the one thing that no one knows about you.

 

Mark Hanson: 2:30

Ooh. So I'm super into cooking shows. And I don't actually cook I just love watching cooking shows. That

 

David Turetsky: 2:37

While you're eating popcorn,

 

Mark Hanson: 2:39

exactly, yeah, exactly. Well, I'm having a very simple meal. I watch fancy cooking shows. But no, I love love just the process. It's so relaxing. So that's how I unwind. And that's usually something I don't divulge to everybody, but yeah.

 

David Turetsky: 2:50

There you go. Now the world knows. Yeah. But by the way, my son was loves Gordon Ramsay, and loves watching Kitchen Nightmares.

 

Mark Hanson: 2:56

Yes.

 

David Turetsky: 2:56

And so we watch all the old seasons, even well the newer one. They're not on anymore, but we watch all of them. So, yeah,

 

Mark Hanson: 3:04

So good. Our kids are into it too. They love the British accent and Gordon Ramsay and gets all fired up. Perfect.

 

David Turetsky: 3:10

Gotta love Gordon Ramsay. Hopefully, we'll have him on the HR Data Labs podcast at some point. Hopefully he'll listen to this and then go, yeah, maybe it should be on it. I'm not trying to do a British accent at all by the way. So our topic for today, Mark, is looking at HR data in the world of 2022. What surprised you what didn't surprise you? And the impacts on HR technology and then looking at 2023 and putting on your prognosticator hat and predicting what's gonna happen in 2023.

 

Mark Hanson: 3:45

Yeah. Well, it's so interesting, because, you know, coming off COVID And all of the transitions that had to happen for you know, even people analytics, just general HR teams in general of the pivot they had to make from basically halting all the cool stuff that they were working on. And they had to switch to safety dashboards, and how do we redeploy people to go remote. And so you took a lot of really powerful, you know, roadmaps and completely got disrupted. And so

 

David Turetsky: 4:10

Threw them out the window basically.

 

Mark Hanson: 4:11

Threw them out the window. And what was fun about 2022 is like, as they came off of that, and as restrictions opened up, and you know, people were getting back to work. It's like, oh, now we gotta go find people gain. Now we have to re energize, you know, all of our workforce, we have to go hire again, how are we keeping people and, you know, we dealt with a great resignation. And people are just, you know, desperate.

 

David Turetsky: 4:31

Government reporting. So they're just increasing wages, like salaries like crazy people are just getting poached. And so it wasn't people are quitting and not working anymore. It was people just jumping ship. So it was more of a great reshuffle is you know, some, some I've termed it. And now, all of the people analytics and talent, intelligence and workforce planning efforts have to be re energized. And so there's been a new new way to do that. And now, skill was the biggest theme that we saw is like, we had to halt all of our operations, we had many people doing, you know, kind of bootstrapping a lot of spreadsheets

 

Mark Hanson: 5:05

Yeah, bringing in the government reporting, you know, and doing the safety reporting. Well, now, we had people leave on our team, we got to get back more. And so everybody's been looking for more scalable solutions in the marketplace to say, we got to reevaluate our HR tech stack, we have to really think about scalable reporting that can react much faster, because nobody assumes that, you know, pandemics are never going to be a thing again, there's going to

 

David Turetsky: 5:29

Monkeypox has now gotten its first death in be some other disruption. California.

 

Mark Hanson: 5:33

Interesting. So yeah, yeah. So everybody's preparing for those disruptions, whether it's, you know, market troubles, whether it's pandemic, I mean, and so how do we position our workforce, and we need good data to make those decisions, and we can't get caught off guard like we did last time.

 

David Turetsky: 5:50

I mean, we're kind of living in a constant state of shock and constant state of reaction, whether it's natural disasters, whether it's droughts, whether it's floods, or storms, whether it's frankly, you know, Texas had a problem last year where it got really cold, all of a sudden, in their energy grid couldn't keep up with the demand. So all those things are interrupting the normal course of business, and HR has got to react to it.

 

Mark Hanson: 6:16

They do. And they're also just planning for their retention strategies. You know, it's like we not only do we need to react to the big things in the market, but it's like, how do we just keep good people? And, you know, and then if we need people, where do we go find them? Because it's getting harder to find people. One of the cool things about working for, you know, a data company is we have awesome economists that are writing really fun reports, and they're analyzing the market up and down from all the different areas, and they're like, you know, population trends for the last 50 years, we're not at the replacement rate, we haven't been at the population replacement rate for a long time. There's actually just not enough workers. Even if everybody started having babies in the in the next this couple of years, it'll be 20 years before they're before they're productive. Yeah. And so there's trends across the board that are making this talent environment, a struggle. And so as companies are thinking, how do we get more sophisticated? How do we link our systems so that we can have a good view into our current employee base? What skills do they have? How do we move them? How do we build talent? How do we upskill them reskill them when we need transitions? Because there's businesses are always in constant flux of, you know, business strategy change, open new market opened up, like they're shifting teams constantly. You can't get away with big riffs anymore. You have to redeploy those people where you can and getting the knowledge of what is that workforce capable of. Job titles are no longer useful. They're great for categorization and keeping your systems in order. But we need to have a more in depth view of what are these people actually doing? What are their capabilities? What are their skill sets? And how do we redeploy them in the right spots where we're growing? And where do we go?

 

David Turetsky: 7:49

Yeah, one of the things I wanted to touch on, as you were talking about that is thinking about the recessions that have we've seen in the past, which have led to lots of unemployment and lots of depression. So you know, lots of like feeling of, oh, you know, I'm not feeling great about my job, I might not spend as much we're seeing spending through the roof, consumer debt is through the roof. We're seeing unemployment at all time level lows, we're seeing tons of job growth every month, which is just not what you typically see in a recession. And so there's obviously mixed signals going on here. And our economists are like scratching their heads going, what the heck's going on? And if people are considering laying off, the one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is, should they reskill them and redeploy them, instead of letting them go causing more disruption in the market by letting them go and having those people start getting unemployment higher again?

 

Mark Hanson: 8:43

Yeah. No, it's interesting, and as you mentioned, that they're scratching their heads for good purpose, because we've never seen this type of market dynamic happen at the same time. So, yes, and maybe definition it's a recession, but it's certainly not the same as it were, it's been in the past, because when you have millions of open jobs still, and they're seeing job growth, you know, inflation isn't helping them, you know, that's, that's part of, you know, companies are more in a wait and see mode right now than they are to like, oh, we gotta go lay off a bunch of people, because it's actually not that bad. And there's the potential for this could turn around because there's enough dynamics there that are keeping this you know, uplift, you know, obviously, the war with Russia and Ukraine doesn't help any any matters in terms of global supply chains and all the issues there. So

 

David Turetsky: 9:24

And midterm elections, by the way. Or upskilling other people to be able to fill in some of that?

 

Mark Hanson: 9:25

And midterm elections will be interesting and gas prices, all the all the fun things that everyone loves to talk about. But companies I think are more in a holding pattern. What's interesting is what we've seen from some of the layoffs of some of the big companies, we have customers that are cheering because they're like finally there's some labor that we can go after. And so somebody's you know, downfall is they're getting scooped up quickly because the supply is not there. So great for the candidates right now. They have more power than ever to, you know, find what they need. Companies are still hiring there may be pausing some of the open requisitions that they have to say, let's not hire too quickly because it must be in an essential job. So that's the general trend is we're in kind of a hold pattern. There's some companies, though, that are getting massive amounts of funding, because there's still lots of money to be invested out there. And they're hiring as fast as they possibly can with anybody that's available. And they're also offering crazy premiums. And so you're seeing really weird dynamics for some of the top well funded companies, the more traditional, you know, stable companies that are being very cautious. But yeah, for for layoffs, I think most HR leaders need to really think about before we do that, we need to be thinking a little bit ahead. We can't just react to a recession. Where does the business need to go from a strategic standpoint? What is the operations, you know, mechanisms that need to still operate? How do we lift and shift these people and be much more strategic? And again, it comes back to data? Do we have views into who's in our four walls? We don't want to go hire expensive talent, because it's getting extremely expensive, right? What are the levers that we can pull to keep them here? Is it better learning? You know, is Exactly. Yeah. So redeployment, I think is the name of the game right now? And how do you get a handle on you know, getting yourself in a position to have that talent data at your fingertips to be able to be yes, react when you have to, because we certainly will have to react to something. But how do we be proactive and be really strategic about how we're doing our talent management.

 

Announcer: 11:18

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David Turetsky: 11:29

So what didn't surprise you about 2022?

 

Mark Hanson: 11:32

Everybody's still looking for the best solution. Everybody wants the one one size fits all, you know, full end to end talent solution that can help them with, you know, sourcing and recruiting and advertising and, you know, candidate flow management and, and onboarding, and then get them in there have the perfect learning system and the perfect, you know, dashboards and all the analytics that and it's just not out there. And so a lot of companies are making some big strides. But it's we're excited to see that there's more integration happening, there's more focus on open source, which, you know, we're certainly all about participating in in the open source world, because it's the fastest way to connect good systems together. And a lot of these point solutions are getting well funded for a reason, because they're solving real problems that some of the big systems can't solve for yet. Because as you get big, and you're a huge company, it's hard to deploy every feature perfectly. And so that's what excites me about where we're at is there is this shift to say, we need to focus on our people in a different way. And the systems can help support, providing a better experience to retain them to grow them and make people's livelihoods better as an end result. So I think in the end, the employees and candidates are still going to be well taken care of in this type of market. And so the system issues haven't surprised me. And we're seeing really good innovation across the board, which is super fun to watch on HR Tech, to see all the fun stuff that's out there, and the new ways that people are solving really hard problems.

 

David Turetsky: 13:00

Yeah, I haven't gotten a chance to actually walk around the entire show, because it's just so darn big this year. And there's so many new vendors who had not been traditionally not just at HR tech, but in our space in the HR space. You know, we've talked to a few companies that are non traditional HR companies, they're not HR companies at all. But they've seen an ability to take what they've been doing for finance and accounting, and marketing and sales and looking at HR with that lens of hey, we've they've got data, we've got techniques to be able to utilize that. So let's go look at it. And one of the ones we talked about was transition. Sorry, conversational AI. Yeah, being able to use structured and unstructured data to tell employees and managers interesting things about their world when they need it by asking a question four to six seconds getting a response back.

 

Mark Hanson: 13:56

That's amazing.

 

David Turetsky: 13:57

It is. But the data needs to be there. Or you'll get back sorry, someone will return your phone call shortly.

 

Mark Hanson: 14:06

Or you or you get the dreaded the spinny wheel of its thinking that was a new one. Yeah, we got to pop up some suggestions for you.

 

David Turetsky: 14:13

Right, exactly. Well, we can't find that. But here are three places you can go to get that data. Hopefully, it's not that bad.

 

Mark Hanson: 14:20

Exactly. No.

 

David Turetsky: 14:23

Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, Man, I wish I could talk to David about this. Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind. Go to Salary.com/HRDLconsulting to schedule your FREE 30 minute call today. So tell me put on your prognosticator hat. Let's talk about predictions for 2023 and where is the world of HR data going in 2023.

 

Mark Hanson: 14:59

Yeah, I think it's all about partnerships, integrations and bringing more of these systems together. And along with that, as more open system frameworks, how do we plug lots of things in together and be more of the house that plays nice with others? And I think a lot of that is really big customers forcing that on the HR tech vendors are no longer can you have this isolated, you know, maybe it's the, you know, the old school, you know, service providers and software providers out there that, you know, for many, many years had a monopoly on lots of this. And now, it's like, oh, we haven't pivoted fast enough to cloud or we haven't pivoted fast enough to, you know, these unique features and solutions that are out there to solve our talent management and acquisition needs. So that's, that's where I predict is more connectivity, more insights that are being centralized, you know, really cool data platforms that are making data lives easier, because you're gonna have to scale your teams, you can't just solve it with headcount anymore, you're gonna have to solve it with more AI, you know, advanced ETL's to transform that data and take unstructured data and make sense of it in, in essentially clean data faster as well. I mean, that's still a huge problem for most companies. Just because your two systems can connect now doesn't mean that that data is clean and ready for reporting.

 

David Turetsky: 16:08

Oh yeah I see it all the time. Yep. Especially between sources inside of a company like the GL and HR. And not being able to get the right data to the GL, or having to have companies do a lot of manual work to get one system to work with another. It is 2022 this shouldn't happen anymore. Yeah, we've called it democratizing data for

 

Mark Hanson: 16:28

And even simple things, like effective dates, you know, and getting dropped or, you know, missed, it's just, and you need that for trend data for everything. And so, yeah, a long time. And that means that the people who are able to see again, it's I think we're gonna see more of what we've seen already this year. I mean, there's nothing, you know, crazy the data can see the data when they need to make a decision. around the corner that I see that would, that would, that would change that flow, that talent shortage is still going to be here, we're still going to see companies trying to do more with less headcount. And so systems really can provide a good solution there. But not everything is going to be as easy as, as their marketing says. And so how do we continue to push for that, you know, the open nature of some of these systems so that we can play nice together and get the right insights to the right folks that need it so that our economy can still thrive? And gotta facilitate that, right? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And that's where we, we're big fans of, you know, open source and having standard language across that, because yeah, the more we can get people speaking the same language, the easier it is for, you know, the hard things of data that we can bypass that and get to the really cool things of, you know, good insights at the right time of delivery of decision making. And that's where, you know, a good challenge for all HR tech vendors. So how do we enable that because we all have a unique perspective, you know, we approach it from an external labor market data perspective, and try to bring those insights in, but we partner with really cool partners that are doing really cool things with, you know, payroll processing and talent acquisition workflows, you know, so there's, there's plenty of really fun ways to plug in together.

 

David Turetsky: 18:08

Yeah. And they all provide very valuable useful signals that help everybody.

 

Mark Hanson: 18:13

Yes. Yeah.

 

David Turetsky: 18:14

Not just HR.

 

Mark Hanson: 18:16

Yes. Oh, yeah. I mean, when you mentioned before, you know, HR having a more prominence in those full operations discussions, we're still seeing that of the people analytics getting elevated, you know, CHROs finally having a huge say in where they're going. And they're going to have even more, say, in 2023, as the talent shortage is actually real, they're going to feel the pain of not being able to hire, they're going to feel the pain of their payroll, and you know, wages going up on their books and saying, like, how can we sustain this, our margins are being squeezed? And then of course, everything else is more expensive with with inflation, how do we think about this? And so the people expense, I feel companies are going to have to have a whole new approach to that of how do we continue to operate well, but how do we maintain those margins? And so the more strategic you can get about where do you find people? How do you optimize your hiring to not just go buy everybody, because you can't afford that strategy. The build strategy is going to have to be front and center for redeployments for internal talent marketplaces for, you know, splitting jobs apart. You know, looking at gig work looking at how do we rethink jobs in general, when we can we get to part time people that do that, and so one full time people, that workforce planning exercise is going to be

 

David Turetsky: 19:27

But it requires then the manager to think more prominent. totally differently, to have that ability to search his skills taxonomy to say, well, I need this and this and this. And that's all I need. And then send it to HR and HR go, oh, you know, okay, well, that's a gig worker, we can find that gig worker on Fiverr. Or, you know, wherever, and you don't need to hire someone for that. How long do you need them for? If we asked that question, or how long do you need this job for? How long the need is? What's the project length?

 

Mark Hanson: 19:57

Yep.

 

David Turetsky: 19:57

Well, if it's only five months, then we don't need to hire somebody, we can hire a gig worker for that. And then that gives them that opportunity to think differently about the team and the cost structure underlying it. Not everybody needs to be a knowledge worker. No, not everybody needs to have that intellectual property. And of course, they can be all under NDA, but no one needs to have that intellectual property that you have to retain.

 

Mark Hanson: 20:19

yeah, you're right. I mean, where, you know, robotics and AI can solve a lot of things, but they can't solve everything. But a lot of those repeatable tasks are short term projects. Yeah, let's bring in the extended workforce solution to be able to do that with contractors or gig workers. But you're right, the whole underlying structure of how we think about work needs to be flipped around a little bit, because we think in terms of headcount, and we think of filling a seat, and we don't want to lose that budget, and we got to fill that seat. One of the things I love about how much focus around skills is going on, especially at the conference, and the customers that we have is, you can finally break down your jobs much easier into understanding what's actually needed todo that, where do we need to go hire that externally? Is it hard to find skill set? Or can we find a couple part time people to maybe do this together? Or can we totally put it into a project or a gig sort of work environment. And we need to stop thinking about headcount and more about how the work gets done, and what what needs to happen in the structure in place to enable that.

 

David Turetsky: 21:28

But one thing I'd add on to that is thinking also about the AI as being a potential for that worker, right? It may cost us a lot of money upfront to get the capability in house. But if we can think of that as an investment in the future, for when that skill is required, again, granted, maybe there's a way of gig working AI, I don't know. But but but we have to think about that capability of being able to deliver that productivity other ways too.

 

Mark Hanson: 21:56

Absolutely.

 

David Turetsky: 21:57

Other ways. You mentioned the other ways, but but also adding AI and robotics into that.

 

Mark Hanson: 22:01

Oh, yeah. In Yeah. What's what's automated? Or automatable? If that's a word about this role, how can we split this apart? Because you certainly need, you know, domain knowledge to exist to feed AI models into it to make it work, right. And so you can't just let go of everyone and expect the computer that needs to be trained somehow. So how do we convert some of those roles where we can say, hey, let's take a part of your role. Let's advance it, it theoretically, it should advance their pay as well, because it's turning them more into a knowledge role and less into a repeatable task role. And so let's find those experts. Let's retain them, let's keep them around. But also let's let's make work, you know, more advanced, more fun and more valuable and use those headcount more wisely.

 

David Turetsky: 22:40

Or train them as gig workers to solve the AI problem based on their experience. Let them go and let them be for your competition. They're going to set up that same stuff for your competition. Yep. Something to think about at least.

 

Mark Hanson: 22:59

Exactly.

 

David Turetsky: 23:00

Mark. It was a pleasure. Anything else that you wanted to talk about? For 2022? Or 2023? Before we close?

 

Mark Hanson: 23:08

No, I think it's it's always a pleasure to come by and chat. And it's fun to be in sunny Las Vegas, although I haven't really been outside yet. It's been a busy busy meeting. But no, it's always a pleasure to be here. And yeah, it's fun to chat, talk shop. It's been a pleasure.

 

David Turetsky: 23:23

Mark. Thank you very much. Hopefully, we'll get to talk soon.

 

Mark Hanson: 23:26

Absolutely.

 

David Turetsky: 23:27

We're definitely going to talk at next year's HR tech, so we can go and check your predictions.

 

Mark Hanson: 23:30

100%. Let's do it.

 

David Turetsky: 23:32

Thank you very much, Mark, take care and stay

 

Announcer: 23:34

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