HR Happy Hour 488 – Building Workforce Agility with Skills Insights

Guest: Yvette Cameron, SVP Global HCM Product Strategy, Oracle

This episode is sponsored by Oracle Cloud HCM – learn more at www.oracle.com/hcm

This week we were joined by Yvette Cameron of Oracle to talk about some of the latest innovation from the Oracle HCM Cloud group – Skills Insights – an AI-powered Dynamic Skills solution in Oracle Cloud HCM which allows HR leaders to identify skills gaps and foster career development for employees. On the show, Yvette shared why taking a skills-centric approach to talent management is critical for organizations needing to become more agile and responsive to meet changing needs and demands. For HR leaders, having an understanding of the skills possessed by the workforce is critical for talent planning, recruiting, development and more. For employees, being able to easily report their skills, to identifty opportunities to develop existing skills and acquire new ones, and gain insights into how skills contributes and supports their career plans is essential for employee engagement and retention.

Yvette also shared the three components of Skills Insights: Skills Nexus; Skills Advisor; and Skills Center – which work together to give HR leaders and employees tools and capability to transform the way they identify and grow skills. Learn more about Skills Insights here.

This was a fun show, thanks to Yvette for joining us! Remember to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript follows:

Steve 0:00
Welcome to the HR Happy Hour Show with Steve and Trish. Today is sponsored by our friends at Oracle. And we’ll be joined in a minute by our friend and returning HR Happy Hour guest Yvette Cameron, to talk about building a more agile workforce with Skills Insights, which is super exciting. And I can’t wait to talk about this Trish, because we’ve been talking about skills ourselves and on this show and some other places for a while. And it’s going to be great to dig into this and actually talk about how organizations can get better at understanding skills in the workplace, and how people can kind of empower their own careers with a better understanding of their own skills development. But first, Trish of course, we have a question of the day, which I wrote myself. Here is the question, what is one controversial opinion you have about anything?

Trish 0:49
Oh, my goodness,

Steve 0:51
You must have one. You must have an unpopular opinion, if not controversial.

Trish 0:57
I don’t know. I fight with you about just about everything. So that’s, you know what, lately, I will tell you lately, we were fighting over the whole Apple trying to get people to return to work on a certain day of the week. And I said, you know what, I’m for that if an if an employer says, you know, these people were hired at at five days a week, and you now you have to come in Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. I feel like that’s a gift. Let’s see. Now. You know what, though? Let me just put the caveat that makes me feel very old. I feel like that is what an an older leader would say. Like, it has to be like, I paid my dues.

Steve 1:35
Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah, we’re older Trish. I don’t want to go ages. That’s a traditional, it’s a more traditional viewpoint.

Trish 1:42
Traditional. Well, I I spent my first 10 years that, you know, public services firms, so yeah. Big for public accounting. That was, we felt like that. Yeah.

Steve 1:54
Semi-unpopular opinion. Okay.

Trish 1:56
I know, it’s probably very unpopular, but that is,

Steve 1:59
Yeah, mine Trish. It’s got nothing to do with work, but I think it’s going to be unpopular. I believe there should be no graduation ceremonies or celebrations for any type of graduation. Before say college.

Trish 2:13
I agree.

Steve 2:16
Yeah, before like Middle School Graduation should not be a thing. Kindergarten graduation, absolutely not a thing. We shouldn’t be selling high school, to me Trish, it’s the bare minimum. It’s the lowest bar we’re asking everybody to try to vault over to be a semi functioning responsible member of our society. I might make an exception for like a trade school like a welding school or something because that’s productive and good, too. But no graduation ceremonies from high school on down. That’s my opinion. There you go.

Yvette Cameron 2:47
Okay, so I have to jump in here.

Steve 2:49
All right, wait, before you come in off the top row. Let me quickly just reintroduce you. Yvette Cameron is with us. She’s a Senior Vice President of Global HCM Product Strategy at Oracle. We are going to be talking about skills and skills insights in a second. But I think Yvette wants to

Trish 3:03
She’s making a triumphant return.

Yvette Cameron 3:05
That’s right. I am I cannot, I can never not weigh in on your questions of the day because they are so fantastic. I think last time I was on, we talked about scars, and it was. So Steve, no graduation ceremonies before college. So I’m not sure if you’re saying maybe High School is the first but we’re moving to a more skills based economy, right where it’s not about degrees. And so you’re gonna see fewer and fewer people going through traditional college programs, maybe a few courses, and maybe they never quote unquote, graduate before gaining skills they need for fantastic contributions to the workplace. So if we’re not celebrating those earlier milestones, we may never be celebrating any of our education, then maybe we need to rethink the entire celebration process and it’s more about skill attainment than degree attainment. But this is the whole and changing.

Trish 4:03
I think I just created a whole new genre of Yeah, skill celebrations. I love that.

Steve 4:09
Yeah, I so maybe not as controversial as I thought I think I thought I was gonna get killed on that one. I thought there might be some, you know, oh, I want to see little you know, Mary, or Jimmy, you know, get that kindergarten diploma, you know, kind of thing. So

Yvette Cameron 4:25
Now I’m gonna see Jimmy’s science project and how he’s going to clean up water. That’s what I want to celebrate. Right? Not the time put in, impact versus action.

Steve 4:37
I’m with you on that. Alright, so you that is here to talk about a recent announcement that our friends at Oracle shared all around skills insights. It’s an AI powered dynamic skill solution in Oracle Cloud HCM, which allows HR leaders to identify skill gaps, which is important and we’ve been talking about that forever and foster career development for employees and this is really exciting. It’s been a lot work around skills recently, a lot of talk about it. Certainly prior to pandemic, I felt like that’s all I was talking about, honestly. But you bet it’s here to share with us some details around the announcement that released some of the capabilities. But before we dive into it, that maybe could you tell us why from your point of view, Oracle HCM point of view? Why is this really important right now? Like we’re, you know, what, why is this issue and the tremendous amount of resources you guys in time you spent building all this new capability? Why is it Why is important right now, for HR folks?

Yvette Cameron 5:32
Yeah, well, as you said, you were talking about skills even before the pandemic hit, and you were talking about it probably because organizations struggle with trying to keep up with their skills and competency taxonomies, right, the libraries that they manage in their systems, and they’re constantly out of date, organizations have for forever struggled with understanding the skills of their workforce, we all laugh about how our LinkedIn and other social media profiles know more about us than our own HR does, right. And what’s been happening even before the pandemic hit, is the pace of change in technology and the way technology is affecting our jobs. And what we’re required to do, has been, has been changing it at almost an exponential rate. And so the shelf life of skills is so small, you can’t keep track, you can’t keep up with it with those old standard competency libraries. So fundamentally, that when the pandemic hit, organizations found themselves right having to do massive furloughs, they weren’t sure of all the skills they were losing, they had some guests, as I were letting these people off in this job, we assume they have these roles. And then as they started to bring back very slowly, though, they’re key workers for the key skills, they realized they didn’t necessarily understand what their workforce had. So fundamentally, organizations have struggled for decades with the challenge of understanding the skills of their workforce, the pandemic has only accelerated and exacerbated that problem. And technology is now at a place where we can solve it in entirely new ways, never before imagined.

Trish 7:13
You know that I’m so glad that you mentioned, this is something that’s really been a struggle for years, because I think in, human resources, this has been a problem for definitely the last 20 years. And it was just never sort of the primary problems. So if you needed, you know, solutions for various things in human resources, that was just not something that you were going to be able to sort of go after. So I’m glad to see though, that whether it’s, you know, kind of come on because of the pandemic and the way that work is changing so rapidly and the need for agility. Or even I would imagine, actually, you all have probably been thinking about this prior, long prior to the pandemic, right, but, but it’s nice to see that it’s finally, something that’s really part of the way that HR leaders can work with employees and other leaders to make sure that they’re getting kind of the right people into where the business needs them. Because that’s been a really long struggle. I mean, can you maybe tell us just a little bit more about kind of how this all came about? How long have you all been thinking about this? And, and what really did kind of bring this about right now?

Yvette Cameron 8:21
Yeah, so certainly, this is something that has been years in the making. And we have been using artificial intelligence, deep learning engines, matching and recommendations in our applications for many years. And we continue to improve the underlying technology behind it. Several years ago, we did start focusing on the concept of skills, right, recognizing this problems, hearing it from our customers in the market again and again. And so we set about to develop a two prong approach one first and foremost is to make sure that we develop that deep learning engine that would understand all of the skills associated with jobs and job titles, the associations that relations between different skills, how some are directly related, some are tangential in their relation to the associations between them, etc, and build a master ontology in a way that is constantly changing based on it being fed additional information as well as the way users learn it right machine learning is all about getting smarter as people use it. So our concept years ago was to develop at this deep learning engine around skills and so we we did have our first prong approach is to develop the skills Nexus this this global ontology and taxonomy around skills to really understand. And so again, this this started years ago, we have you know, we’ve now launched it in our in our recent release, we’ve been working with customers, but that’s phase one. That was the first prong.

Yvette Cameron 9:57
What really matters is relevant. Then say to organizations, so it’s great to have a skills inventory that’s dynamic and changing and has, you know, hundreds of 1000s of skills. But if when I deploy it in my organization, you know, you mentioned healthcare, I think, and the recommendations are coming up all over the board for me from not just a few healthcare things, but nuclear science and professional services and sales, and I don’t have a sales, I mean, I need those recommendations and the insights to be relevant for my business for the people and the various types of workers I have for the industry. And I’m in and also from the language and skills DNA of my company, I might call just like, we know that not every company calls their employees, employees, they call them associates, right. And that’s, that’s the kind of knowledge that an NGO would need to know, we might not call our skills, we might not call, for example, innovation, that we might instead call it creativity, or brilliance or some other really interesting word, but we want those words to be understood no matter how they’re presented. So we can find those who have that innovation or that that creativity, peace of mind or capability. So our approach was developed this global ontology, and then ensure when customers implement it, we spend the time it takes about five days to seven days to tailor it directly to them, so that from day one, it’s relevant to them when it’s making matching and recommendations, etc, etc. So that’s kind of the heart and soul of the dynamics skills are so much more under the covers. But you asked, Why did we do this? And how are we doing it? I mean, at its Crux, we’ve been working on this engine, and now working with customers to make sure that they’re getting that relevance right away.

Trish 11:43
Right, thank you for sharing that I have to tell you, Steve and Yvette, I think, you know, again, thinking back to when when I was doing this, I really needed this, right? This is something that if you have this sort of tool at your fingertips, being able to identify those skills that people have globally across your organization. I mean, I can think of examples through my career where it would take maybe a week to find someone, or maybe we’d even be looking to hire externally, when we had people right inside the organization that had the skills we needed, but we just didn’t have these capabilities. And so kind of take that and now add on the AI aspect of it as well. I mean, I think that this is really like groundbreaking, for organizations to be able to quickly assess the skills within the organization. And like you said, like kind of the DNA, right of the entire company, in order to be able to move people appropriately is different, you know, work opportunities or projects arise.

Yvette Cameron 12:39
Exactly, you know, I’ve done the same thing Trish, I’ve, I’ve hired people, eventually, from other parts of the business that I had no idea I’ve been in product management for 20 years. And you know, other people that I had no idea had those skills, but hidden under the covers in previous jobs that we hadn’t been paying attention to or because they were in finance, right and who is a finance head product project product management capabilities. So the skills Nexus and our customer tailored version of the skills Nexus, right, able to look at your current job, previous jobs and understand the relationship between jobs and various skills associated with that, bring it associated with others in the role and, and, and that again, that the language of the company and how different skills and jobs referenced and things like the SEC filings for your business, your job descriptions, your performance reviews, whatever documentation that starts talking about your company culture skills, jobs, goals, etc, etc. So yeah, it’s it’s really fantastic. I one of the biggest things, right, the dynamic skills approach is is really two sided, right?

Yvette Cameron 13:54
It’s about helping organizations find and uncover their talent, and make sure that they know that the learning and the Career Mobility options are, are certainly tailored and personalized for individuals, but also aren’t just the obvious opportunities. They’re the things that are adjacent we understand your skills, we understand skills that are adjacent to that, have you considered these things so from a business perspective, super important and and and impactful that we’re using AI in this this technology to help organizations better manage their workforce and be more agile, but it’s also very much for the individual. Right, we deliver to individuals, the skills recommendation and those matching capabilities that help them understand how do I present myself better for opportunities by look at my resume, I probably got the, you know, same 30 or 40 skills spread out through my resume as a product strategy, Product Manager person, but there are so many other skills that I haven’t bothered to put on because I’m thinking hey, this is my career path. But if those were added as the skills engine will will make the recommendations. Imagine the different career opportunities that could be presented to me to keep me engaged and excited. I can give you feedback loop etc. I’m just really excited about how this serves the individual employee as well as organization.

Steve 15:17
Yeah, Yvette, thank you so much for sharing that because it just made me think of something that bothered me forever. Maybe it’s another controversial opinion. But all the all the job search coaches out there, every single one of them I’ve ever read, they always tell people, oh, you must tailor your materials and your resume for the specific job you’re going for. Right? They always say that every single time is it’s been that advice for like two decades. And I’m sick of all of them, by the way. But like, that approach, though, is very limiting, right? Because what you’re describing is that about how we were what we’re really after, as an organization, and hopefully to help individual employees, and in some examples, maybe even candidates potentially, is to really understand themselves holistically. So the skills that they have, and they believe that they have and then maybe they’ve demonstrated either in past jobs, or with very specific training or experiences that they’ve had, but also what they also might be also good at that they don’t even realize it yet. Like let’s look at the person. And let’s understand them much more fully, I think to provide them hopefully the best opportunities for themselves moving forward, but also to provide the organization the insights, its needs, right on where they need to make investments in growing the skill in the workforce. I think it’s great. I think it’s super empowering for individuals, which I think is a really important part here.

Yvette Cameron 16:37
I love your your comments and observations, Steve, I mean, we’ve been struggling with employee engagement for years. And as part of that struggle that we’re we don’t know our workforce well enough. And we present them what we think they need to hear here are the careers we think, you know, here’s the ones that we know that we need, but how about the ones that are going to inspire and really motivate individuals. So, you know, what I love about this approach is, you know, I can add my skills, they can be professional, they can be personal, I can say that I’m an artist, right that I paint, or I’m a gardener, I can say that I’ve taken a Java class, even though I’m not you know, an engineer by trade, but all of these things tell a bit about who I am. And then the the not only the skills, Nexus and its capability to surface additional, you know, adjacent skills to me, but the skills advisor, another component of our offering, looks across the various gigs and jobs that we have in the organization, different learning courses, even coaches and mentors. And it can make recommendations to me based on my unique skills profile, and the intelligence of the of the dynamic skills offering to say, you know, yes, here are career paths, and here’s learning, etc, that you would expect because of your job, etc. But here’s other stuff that’s going to help keep you motivated and engaged and maybe open up new career opportunities for you that you hadn’t even considered my finance person that I hired years ago into product management. You know, it took me a while to find them that I was very lucky. But that should be an automatic process helped me uncover the talent and tap into those those resources that don’t look obvious, necessarily, but bring really unique value, right? It’s just part of it.

Trish 18:20
Yeah, you know what, that it’s, such a good example, too. And I know that if anyone’s listening, and you’re working in HR, we can all probably point to one or two of those examples in our career. But I mean, especially as you’re talking about the skills advisor, for example, just making those recommendations for you, once it has that information. You know, I was thinking back to back working in healthcare, I had a floor finisher, he had worked there over 20 years. And it turns out, he really enjoyed writing like on the side and his personal life. And he wound up helping with this huge HR project. He wrote up the whole thing, it wound up going into the entire the newsletter went out to like 32,000 employees, the president of the hospital called me because he thought I wrote it to congratulate me on such a good job. And I said, No, this is our floor finisher who did this, you know, and he couldn’t believe it. And from there, yes, he still remained in, you know, his floor finisher role. But he became like the spokesman for the 200 +, you know, housekeepers and floor finishers in the hospital. And we tapped into him all the time with it for his writing abilities. But we would have never known that was is quite accidental. So my, my point is, I love that you can have something like this solution where it’s actually taking that information, seeking it out, having people updated, and then making those continued recommendations for opportunities.

Yvette Cameron 19:45
Accidents are great, but they happen too infrequently, and they’re not scaled. It’s like when we used to Herald you know that, oh, you’re the HR hero. You went out of your way and you did this above and beyond. That’s great, but it’s not sustainable. So that’s what we’re using technology for. And you know, what I love about your story is you just uncovered, probably one of the most, I think exciting and important aspects of this kind of approach that we’re taking with dynamic skills is that we are removing bias from the way we were offering promoting people. It’s now skills based, what are your capabilities? We don’t care what degree and or graduation ceremony, Steve, that you went to? what school you went to? Our question is, do you have the skills and capabilities to do this and to help us be there in the future, and as long as people have an intuitive way to, you know, receive recommendations to expose more of their their background and capabilities and be nudged and prompted kind of a gamification approach, then we’re going to have more of those wonderful accidents that are actually happening on purpose, right, because that’s the application of this technology. So I love that at the, you know, as companies are deploying this, I think we’re going to see much less bias in our processes, and really embracing the, the the diversity, the full diversity of our people, not just in sex and religion and, and race and, and physical and mental capabilities. But Wow, how about diversity in job titles? Right, let’s have the floor, the floor polisher do the writing. I mean, it’s just it’s fantastic. It’s diversity at every single level based on skills. I love it.

Trish 21:30
Absolutely.

Steve 21:31
We’ve all been around HCM tech long enough to know kind of like, employee profiles, right? In HCM systems have been around for a long time, it’s not a new thing. And even the employee, their own ability to update their own profile, also, not a new thing also been around for a while. But the knock on it, and I was my experience, certainly from the different roles I’ve had in the space was, there wasn’t a lot of incentive for employees to keep these things updated. Keep them current, to spend time on them at all, honestly, because it didn’t really feel like well, this I’m just doing this because someone’s telling me to nothing’s going to happen, I get no benefit out of it. Right. So it we don’t really do it. We were joking prior to turning on the record button that I haven’t updated my LinkedIn profile and like 100 years, not not so much for job titles, or even pictures, like those kinds of things. But just, I feel like I’ve learned something in the last seven or eight years. But yet, I have not updated my LinkedIn profile accordingly. Right. And maybe it’s because I see no value in that right now currently, in my current life, right, I’ve just not, I don’t have that right incentive to go keep that thing up to date. But what I like what we’re talking about here is there’s not just incentive for employees to keep their profiles up to date, we’re going to help them through technology really understand how to sort of develop and grow in their careers and find that next right opportunity and sort of empower them with the resources that they need to actually make that happen. Yvette, I’d love for you to comment a little bit on that maybe slightly, generally, but then more specifically around the new capability in the skill center, like how are we going to really how can organizations leverage this technology to actually help people really achieve their own personal goals, which then, of course, hopefully support the organization in meeting meeting its goals.

Yvette Cameron 23:18
Thank you for asking that. The skill center is the third major component of our offering. And this is where all of this wonderful technology comes together. And it’s very intuitive for the employees. There’s a version that’s coming for the managers and etc. But really, from the employees perspective, I can see always, I call it the river of skills, right? The AI engines always surfacing up recommendations, and I can type in my own, but it’s always giving me these intriguing options to add my skills. But what’s more important is I can see, hey, if I add the skill, if I develop the skill, here are opportunities that could be available for me in the organization, here are new jobs you’d be available for there’s good work that’s underway, that we can help you craft and develop these skills and that you could you know, take this job on later. Here’s additional learning and opportunities that you know will help you develop people to connect with groups, etc. So, we’ve actually taken the technologies that I think some organizations are buying individually as niche vendors were buying that are bringing together our opportunity marketplace, which you know, a lot of talent marketplaces are bought as standalone solutions. We’re bringing our LSP and our learning together with with its recommendations and, you know, the coaching and mentoring which again, could be oftentimes purchased separately from some beach vendors.

Yvette Cameron 24:39
We bring all of this together in one common experience, but we don’t just say you’ve got to come to this skill center and make it happen. AI is driving recommendations and nudges. Hey, we see you’ve completed this course or we see that this thing has happened. Would you like to update your skills and then and then when you combine it with journeys, which we’ve talked about before, the whole employee experience. And again, nudges and prompts to say, we see these things are happening, we’re monitoring you past this your milestone, you got this particular performance review, maybe now it’s time to update your skills or connect with this mentor, etc. So it’s a very integrated, holistic approach to understanding the individual and giving them guidance, whether they come to the come to the skill center, or the journeys, or we bring it to them, working with them where they work, right to drive opportunity. So really, again, I think it’s, turning our approaches on its head or from a top down, here’s what we think employees need to, you know, you tell us as you interact with the system, we learn more about what’s valuable to you. And we’ll continue to bring more and more of that, of that forward for you to drive, you know, your skills, capabilities. It’s a different mindset.

Trish 26:00
It really is. Thank you for sharing that Yvette because I think that that is really a true differentiator, like you mentioned, there might be different niche vendors who do little components of this, but the ability to have that connection, for those recommendations to come to really show employees why they’re valuable. I mean, Steve, you joked a few minutes ago, sort of about LinkedIn. And it’s true, I think a lot of people only look at LinkedIn and certainly only updated if they’re looking for work. Well, by then if you’re the employer, it’s too late if your employee is out there on LinkedIn updating skills, right. But if you’re getting them a reason to keep that updated, while they’re an employee, it’s serving up opportunities for them, it’s serving up learning opportunities, it’s serving up different jobs that they might not have considered. I mean, I think I would expect that in the next couple years, you would see your customers really start to have an impact on the retention, right is would be the goal.

Yvette Cameron 26:53
So it’s not, of course, we would expect that to be developing the skills you need for your organization, etc. But as you’re offering individuals, more diverse career opportunities, and good diverse learning opportunities, you know, for use within the organization, or even as they leave and take their newfound skills to other organizations, right, because we are one global community, the retention absolutely should be an end result here. And I just wanted to come back to your comment about LinkedIn. So some people use LinkedIn, others do not. But what’s really great is that we do actually have a unique integration with LinkedIn where, you know, we’re all used to applying for jobs with with our LinkedIn profile that just speeds it up. But you need to Oracle and LinkedIn is that we allow employees to bring their LinkedIn profile and their skills into Oracle as many times as they want. And so organizations can use that knowledge to say, Hey, you know, they can, they could be actually looking and monitoring what’s happening out on the social media, say, Hey, we just updated your profile, once you bring your profile in, and we’ll show you all the new opportunities available to you. And even if they’re not monitoring, right, encouraged through various nudges, etc, hey, you know, keep your social and your work up to date. Here’s examples of new opportunities. Again, it’s just a way to get that richer experience. And the more we know about individuals, the more we can offer them just really, really interesting and diverse opportunities in the organization. And the benefit, obviously, for companies is, again, as we said, better skills development, better insight into the skills of the workforce, better preparation for the future. And, you know, basically more resiliency is hopefully, you know, things change, but hopefully not pandemic but we need to get these things.

Steve 28:43
Well, I guess I’d say right, if folks have managed to get all the way through to this point, right, there’s nothing that can’t get any rougher than it’s been in the last 15 or so months. Right? We are 16 knock on wood. Yeah, this is really steep. And we’ve, I’m glad that we’re continuing the conversation around skills. Like I said, we’ve been everyone, really, lots of people have been talking about it. But this is different. This is a really holistic approach. I think there’s huge benefit another show entirely, but I will bang the drum for any organization of any size, really, I don’t care what kind of organization you are, how big you are. I’m an advocate of centralizing or consolidating as much as your HR tech stack as you can with the fewest amount of providers possible. I think there’s huge value. And I’ll tell you that I think you believe this too. There’s huge value in having all of the applications and the coverage that Oracle Cloud HCM has for folks. So you’ve got the recruiting, you’ve got the learning, right? You’ve got now the skills insights, right? You’ve got it’s all opportunity marketplace. I’ll throw that in there as well, right? You’ve got it all on one platform, which means it all talks to each other seamlessly and natively right so it’s, I can’t overstate the value of that for organizations, that’s so important.

Yvette Cameron 30:06
Yeah, thank you for pointing that out. And then of course, it expands to, you know, supply chain and manufacturing and projects and finance and the ability to have that those skill insights, as you’re looking to staff, your your projects, professional services is your staffing and manufacturing line. And, you know, you’re hiring for those things. I mean, this is an enterprise wide play, certainly across HCM, but across the enterprise as well. So, yeah, it’s a, it’s going to be an interesting, I think, next year is we come out of the pandemic, and organizations are looking to hire back the right people, the right talent, really look to understand the skills and how can we make that easier to translate the way skills are presented on a candidates resume and make it look more like the language of the organization, and to your earlier example, Steve, not just present them with, you know, the jobs that they’re looking for, but so many others that, you know, might be of interest that the candidate wasn’t specifically looking for, so we can bring the right talent?

Steve 31:12
And again, you mentioned reducing bias, Yvette, but I’ll just last thing I’ll say is, that’s a huge play to you. Because there’s there’s hard data that shows that women for sure, and probably even other underrepresented groups won’t apply for jobs, if they feel like their credentials, or their experiences and or skills that we’ve been talking about aren’t perfect match are really, really close match. Whereas, folks like me, I’ll just go ahead and apply anyway, because we’re arrogant, or we just, I don’t know, that’s less of a barrier. So I think that’s also that that those capabilities also can take take a step towards reducing bias and improving things like D&I.

Yvette Cameron 31:52
I love your point, I did a whole show on mentoring and and women in mentoring and the difference between how men and women interact with their mentees. And that was exactly one women want it to be perfect. Men oftentimes do not the way that they engage mentors, which is another thing, right, so now we’re connecting people through our solution to mentors, and hopefully will, you know, bring more of that coaching and, and conversation forward for for the overall, the overall goodness, you know, I do want to just say, really quickly, I’m as excited as I am by these technologies. And there are other vendors in the market that are delivering different approaches. I do believe strongly that that that insight across the HCM across enterprises is important. But as I said, also, at the start of this, tailoring it to customers, we’re hearing is talking to organizations talking to, you know, different experts in the market. If I’m deploying these kinds of technologies, and it’s taken me months, you know, six months or more to get personalized recommendations, how good is this technology? Really, right? So I hope that organizations are really looking for, you know, that understanding of their industry and their language, because that’s what that’s what technology should bring that that very personalized experience, not just for individuals, but for companies, right? We’re used to it as individuals on shopping. I want that same level of personalization when I’m at work, and the organizations need that same level of personalization as well. I think that’s a big factor that a lot of the market is not really paying attention to yet. We are.

Steve 33:30
Super. Yvette, thank you for sharing that I have a great conversation. We’re excited for the launch. Congratulations to you and the entire team. Over at Oracle HCM lots of friends there, you guys have plowed through the pandemic continually, continuously innovating and supporting not just your customers, but the broader community. We talked way back about some of the efforts Oracle jumped in very early in the pandemic with some of the applications that they made available to the community for support. So great job by you guys. And you bet. Thanks for taking some time to come back on the show and share this exciting new release and this new announcement and we’ll share some links in the show notes so folks can learn more about skills, insights and everything else that’s happening at Oracle HCM and we’re excited to see where this goes. This has been a great conversation.

Yvette Cameron 34:19
Thank you guys. I always enjoy the conversation with you both Trish, Steve. Thanks again.

Steve 34:23
All right, our pleasure. All right. Again, great stuff. Thanks so much. Yvette Cameron, put some links in the show notes to everything we talked about today. Trish loved it. I love the conversation. I love the technology. I love the focus on skills. It’s been absolutely fascinating to me.

Trish 34:37
Great. Thanks so much. And look forward to the next conversation with Oracle.

Steve 34:41
All right.

Yvette Cameron 34:41
Thank you guys. I enjoyed it.

Steve 34:43
We will see you next time on the HR Happy Hour Show. Catch all the show archives at HR Happy Hour dot net.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai