The Ultimate Guide to Talent Management In The Age of AI

WHITE PAPER

Table of Contents

• The Ultimate Guide to Talent Management In The Age of AI

• Why HR Needs Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Big Data

• How AI Can Supercharge The Skills Of The Existing HR Team

• Five Strategic Talent Management Goals AI Supports

• What to Look for in a Talent Intelligence Platform

• End-to-End AI Coverage

• Adapts To Your Ecosystem

• Deep Machine-Learning and AI Expertise

• Demonstrated Results

• Eightfold Sets The Standard For Talent Intelligence Platforms

• Conclusion

1

2

3

4

9

10

11

11

12

13

13

The Ultimate Guide to Talent Management In The Age of AI

People are the biggest cost to an organization, yet they are also the most important investment for growth. People present the greatest opportunity for an organization to differentiate in terms of execution and performance. Still, too many businesses lack the tools, technology, and vision to truly maximize the potential of their people.

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the game by enabling People teams to maximize the power of people through machine-learning insights. By aggregating and understanding the massive amounts of people data in and around the organization, AI can drive the success of acquisition, retention, and performance management within the organization.

For innovative HR and recruiting professionals, it’s important to understand that not all AI-enabled solutions are created equal. They must learn how AI can be applied to maximize the performance of people initiatives, drive employee engagement, and make HR a more strategic part of the organization.

If you are a strategic leader within the people department and are looking to leverage AI in new and innovative ways, this guide will give you insight into the following:

Additionally, this guide will discuss the benefits of Eightfold, the first Talent Intelligence Platform that works alongside Workday, SuccessFactors, Taleo, Greenhouse, or any other HRMS/ATS, to transform the entire talent ecosystem with AI-driven, continuous-learning intelligence.

After reading this guide, you will have a full understanding of how Eightfold can help organizations drive the performance of all talent acquisition and engagement efforts and give Talent teams the intelligent applications needed to build winning organizations.

What To Look For In a Talent

Intelligence Platform

1

Why HR Needs Artificial Intelligence

in the Age of Big Data

How AI Can Supercharge Your Existing HR Team

Five Strategic Goals AI Supports

Eightfold Talent Intelligence

Platform Overview

Why HR Needs Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Big Data

Most organizations generate and possess a large amount of people data. This includes information about job candidates, past applicants, current employees, and alumni. Unfortunately, this data is often fragmented, and lives in a variety of tools, including applicant tracking systems (ATS), Human Capital Management systems (HCM or HRCM), disconnected spreadsheets, emails, shared drives, and file cabinets.

Additionally, important data about people exists outside the organization. If this data were accessible, reviewable, and actionable, it would help you make better hiring decisions and support your retention efforts. For example,

what if you knew that candidates connected to three or more employees on LinkedIn were more likely to reply to recruiter outreach? What if you could see a correlation between attrition rates of current employees and employee email open rates? How would these kinds of insights change the way you manage your recruiting and employee engagement efforts? There is so much to learn from the wealth of data inside and outside the organization, but until recently, there has been no way to make sense of it all. Fortunately, with the help of artificial intelligence, People teams are finding innovative ways to better understand their people and become more strategic in their organizations.

2

they need to focus more efforts on launching initiatives like branding and referral programs, early talent and Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DE&I) initiatives, philanthropy, and more. This is a huge change from the “old world” of HR, which involved hours buried in spreadsheets, filtering through piles of resumes, and managing the fallout of unwanted and avoidable attrition.

With the support of AI, HR teams will have more time to focus on the rewarding aspects of their jobs and becoming a more highly valued part of their organization.

How AI Can Supercharge The Skills Of The Existing HR Team

One reason that HR has been resistant to adopting AI-driven solutions in the past is the fear that AI will replace existing team members, but artificial intelligence and machine learning are no replacement for strong talent acquisition leads and HR business partners.

AI isn’t meant to replace HR—it’s meant to augment the skills of your staff, to help you more effectively leverage the mass of data about people that exists inside and outside the organization, and to free up time by automating routine tasks.

When HR can make decisions based on data, developing a true business partnership is easy. HR gets the visibility, trust, and budget

When you combine the power of people with the benefits of AI, the opportunities for HR are limitless. Not only do you see fewer mistakes, lower costs, and give your valuable staff more time, but you also achieve better precision and accuracy in your recruiting efforts, gain the ability to learn from data, and empower everyone on the people team to run faster. HR can take on more projects and focus on being a better partner to the business.

3

Five Strategic Talent Management Goals AI Supports

AI Enables A Better Candidate Experience

AI-enabled solutions provide unique benefits to HR. These benefits can prove to be differentiators when it comes to growing a thriving organization. With the power of AI, People teams can solve the most critical challenges of today, including candidate experience, diversity, sourcing effectiveness, and employee and alumni engagement.

In the face of a growing skills shortage, it’s more important than ever before to attract and retain the best talent. This means ensuring that every candidate who interacts with your brand has a positive experience even if they never take a job at your organization, and nurturing those who have the potential for future positions.

1

In the old world of recruiting, it was “okay” to go dark on a candidate, or to take several days to reply to a resume. But studies show that the first impression candidates have with you will shape their entire experience with your organization. If you want to have a winning brand, you must be responsive and friendly to candidates. If you want engaged, happy employees, you must accept that an employee’s sense of excitement is built from the very first moment that they see your website, and must be maintained through the phone screen, the interview, and onboarding.

If you have a busy team of recruiters managing lots of open roles in a global environment, it can be almost impossible to provide a personalized experience to everyone. When you have hundreds of candidates, you have a problem of focus. As a recruiter, how do you know which candidates are worth your time? Which are the best fit for the role? How do you know who to engage with, and how much effort to put in? And what message makes the most sense for which candidate?

These are all challenges AI can solve. AI enables you to scale personalization and to deliver a better candidate experience through the entire recruiting funnel. For example, using AI, you could segment and stack rank your candidate database very quickly to help your team prioritize which candidates must be contacted. If you can focus on the candidates that are the most qualified, you can put more time into each candidate and avoid missing hidden gems who otherwise would have been overlooked.

You also could leverage a system to help you identify which personalized email templates should be sent to which candidates. This

allows you to send more targeted messages more quickly, so you can keep more candidates engaged with less effort. Not only can AI help you determine which candidates should be grouped together, but also it can help you understand which messages are most likely to lead to a reply.

AI can be used to personalize the career site experience of a candidate, leading to more relevant applications. Research finds that more than 60% of career site visitors intending to apply for a job abandon the process because it is too burdensome. Often, visitors can't even find the best job to apply for. AI deployed on the career site can instantly match visitors to their best-fit open positions, and can capture nearly all required application details from an uploaded resume, greatly increasing the likelihood that a visitor will apply for a job they could be hired for. Used this way, AI can delight candidates and build confidence on both sides. What could be a better candidate experience than that?

4

AI Helps Eliminate Unconscious Bias2

Unconscious bias can be as simple as preferring candidates who come from East Coast colleges because you went to Boston College, rejecting candidates because you can’t pronounce their names, or overlooking candidates in the ATS because they weren’t good fits for a different role last year. Recruiters are limited by the information they know, so if a recruiter doesn’t

There is ample research to demonstrate that a diverse workforce performs at a higher level. McKinsey found that companies with diverse workforces are 35% more likely to outperform those without diversity initiatives.

Talent Diversity

Diverse workforces are 35% more likely to outperform competitors

set perspective—regardless of college, name, ethnicity, gender, and other characteristics. AI can also help you identify recruiting trends you may have missed—for example, understanding that a particular less-known school results in top-performing employees, or that your best business development representatives all share a particular skill, but don’t have anything in common in terms of work background.

AI-enabled HR software can learn from all publicly available information to help you find the best candidates available without sacrificing diversity. Some solutions can hide identifying traits that lead to bias, and also can reveal trends about your diversity hires, to help you showcase the power of hiring outside your “normal” profiles.

5

realize that Tsinghua University is a top-rated Chinese school, they may not realize a diversity candidate who attended Tsinghua is of the highest academic caliber.

Additionally, it can be tough to understand how different teams within the organization are embracing diversity initiatives. You may be very focused on your diversity initiatives at headquarters, but find out another location has been less successful in its efforts and needs support to adjust its sourcing methods.

Diversity initiatives are one of the ways that AI is most useful to a company. When AI analyzes a large database of structured and unstructured data, it can help recruiters understand which candidates are truly the best fit from a skill

AI Makes It Easy to Surface And Hire The Best Candidates3

On average, 250 resumes are received for each corporate job opening. This is an enormous amount of resumes to parse, and leads to an ad hoc approach to candidate vetting. The average recruiter spends a mere six seconds reviewing a resume before making a decision, which leads many qualified candidates to be overlooked.

Mistakes are made on the candidate side too. For example, the average job seeker spends just 76 seconds reading and assessing the description of a position for which they apply. A shocking 60% of candidates actually end up applying for the wrong role within the organization. With too many resumes to review and both sides not putting enough time into the application and review process, the best

candidates are often missed. This is another place AI can help.

AI can review a tremendous amount of unstructured and structured data in a very short time. When calibrated correctly for a role or an organization, an AI-enabled sourcing solution ensures that the very best candidates are surfaced and flagged for review. The best AI solutions can learn quickly from current employees and other “ideal” resumes that may have been flagged for the role, and can improve their ability to surface candidates in real time. The best AI solutions can also work from the candidates' perspective, matching willing candidates to calibrated roles for which they are a strong fit.

AI also helps recruiters solve the problem of candidates that apply to the wrong role, but are otherwise a good fit for the organization. For example, if a company has five “Marketing Program Manager” roles available across various product lines, which one is the best fit for Candidate A based on their past experience? And is the Program Manager role even the right position, or is the Campaign Manager role a better fit? AI can quickly match the requirements of roles to the abilities of candidates with a high degree of fidelity so candidates are routed to the best roles for their skills, and sets of candidates are ranked to ensure the best candidates are contacted by Talent Acquisition.

6

AI Helps you Engage And Retain The Best Possible Workforce 4

AI can be a powerful tool in solving the problem of unwanted attrition and lack of engagement. Employee turnover is costly: it leads to loss of productivity, disruption on a team, increased recruiting costs, and low morale. The average employee tenure was 4.2 years in 2016, and this number continues to decline.

The signs of approaching attrition can be obvious, yet rarely recognized in time to take action. Human beings are ever-changing, with capabilities, characteristics, and interests that evolve over time. But HR software treats people like “units to track,” focusing on past achievements while ignoring the future potential of job applicants and employees at an organization.

By centralizing, organizing, and making sense of people data, AI-enabled solutions can actually help companies and employees find mutually beneficial paths to more fulfilling work. For example, if you knew that the average tenure of an employee in a given role was below average, you could set goals to extend that tenure, or focus your efforts on finding better growth paths within the company. If you saw that a particular team had a longer-than-average tenure, you could analyze what led to the success, and replicate it across the organization. If HR could better understand the signs of attrition—like reduced referrals, lack of response to company emails, or LinkedIn profile updates—they could take action to support at-risk employees, and offer opportunities for growth or mobility.

LinkedIn found 40% of people said they would not have left their last job if there was another opportunity within the organization. This is another way AI can help. By matching employees against open jobs, then helping employees understand what skills they need to get these new jobs, AI can drive the success of internal mobility initiatives and improve employee engagement.

More companies than ever before are applying AI to Talent Acquisition to reduce the time and cost to hire. Longer-lasting and potentially more transformational benefits actually can occur when AI is applied on the Talent Management and Employee Engagement side.

7

Eightfold Talent Management

LinkedIn found 40% of people would not have

left their last job if there was another opportunity within the organization

AI Helps You Maximize The Effectiveness of Your Alumni Network 5

Finally, one overlooked benefit of AI is the ability to maximize the impact of your most overlooked resource—your alumni. These are people who, often, have an affinity for the organization and can be a great source of referrals, introductions, and even rehires.

Most HR systems don’t give you visibility into what happens after someone leaves your organization, but this insight can be incredibly valuable—for example, knowing what happens to alumni after they leave your company can be a great selling point when they go on to do great things. Organizations could promote alumni achievements much as universities do—if only they had the data.

8

Your alumni network can help you broaden the reach of your company’s employer brand and present great opportunities, not just for HR, but also for other teams like Sales and Marketing.

spend, ensuring inbound candidates are directed to the right roles, managing referrals, and showing you what attributes can predict the success of a candidate in a role over time.

Talent Intelligence Platforms also make it easy to understand engagement levels in the organization, maximize loyalty and retention, and give HR a clear view into the top drivers of avoidable attrition.

Finally, a good Talent Intelligence Platform will help you understand overall strengths and gaps within the organization, reveal how teams are tracking to key initiatives, help you improve the strength of the employer brand, and maximize the ROI of your people investments.

What to Look for in a Talent Intelligence Platform

There are many ways that AI can be applied to people data to bolster your recruiting efforts, help you understand your current employees, maximize the effectiveness of your alumni network, drive diversity initiatives, and help you assess overall company health.

However, many talent management and HR solutions leverage AI as an afterthought and don’t fully maximize the capabilities of this technology to support strategic initiatives. At best, many legacy technologies leverage the automation and efficiency aspects of AI, not the predictive and prescriptive powers of machine learning.

There are a host of emerging point solutions in which AI has been applied, but most of these solutions focus on solving one problem at a time. While this can help with specific tasks, AI is more effective when it’s applied across the entire employee lifecycle.

Today, in order to find, hire, and retain the best talent, People teams are adopting Talent Intelligence platforms, which can be used alongside traditional Talent Management or Human Capital Management Systems to bring machine learning insights and artificial intelligence to the Talent Management process.

Talent Intelligence Platforms are designed to bring efficiency to the entire recruiting process—from helping you understand which source pools provide the best candidates, to calculating the effectiveness of recruiting

Organizations that use Talent Intelligence Platforms benefit from applying AI to attract, develop, motivate, and retain happier, more effective employees, while gaining efficiencies and reducing costs across the entire employee lifecycle.

9

End-to-End AI Coverage

There are more point solutions than ever before. But, with so many different solutions for niche problems, many HR teams rely on spreadsheets to connect the dots. That’s why true Talent Intelligence Platforms provide end-to-end visibility throughout the employee lifecycle—the employee journey from interest to candidate to hire, performance management, promotion or role change, and transition to alumni status.

Because each phase of the employee lifecycle is impacted by the phases before and after, it’s important to see how all the phases of the lifecycle are connected. Imagine knowing with a high degree of fidelity which source pools provide the highest quality or the fastest converting candidates for every role in

10

your organization. Imagine being able to see how time-to-hire correlates with candidate engagement, or how specific resumes and career paths predict performance on specific teams.

Knowing how to maximize your workforce isn’t just about focusing on one stage of the employee lifecycle, it’s about understanding how everything works together to drive engaged, high-performing employees. Eightfold connects data from the entire ecosystem to give organizations a full picture of their workforce.

Talent Acquisition

Talent Management

Talent Diversity

All-In-One Platform

Adapts To Your Ecosystem

Deep Machine-Learning and AI Expertise

Most HR teams are already buried in technology, but how many of these solutions actually solve a problem? And how many spreadsheets and workarounds are required to get anything of value out of these systems? When adopting new technologies, it’s important to prioritize solutions that reduce the noise—not add to it.

Your Talent Intelligence Platform should easily integrate with your current databases, reduce solution fatigue by being the point of truth, and help you maximize the performance of the tools you currently use—such as LinkedIn or your ATS.

Eightfold combines analysis of publicly available data, internal data repositories, HRM systems, ATS systems, and spreadsheets, and uses an API-based integration strategy to connect with legacy back-end systems, so all critical data is available and actionable on one, cloud-based platform.

Too many companies today say that they use AI, when in reality they use keyword matching, pre-coded workflows, human review, or other non-AI technology. You should be able to ask your AI vendor, “Where is the AI?”

Because AI is such a new technology, it’s important to make sure your AI partner truly has a vision for the future of AI. This is one strength of Eightfold. Founders Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia have 6,000+ research citations and more than 80 search and personalization patents between them, and they have hired a team with deep expertise in applying bleeding-edge technology to HR challenges.

Before you buy any Talent Intelligent Platform, ensure you’re getting the best-in-breed solution. Ask your vendor what machine-learning platform they use and what kinds of models the platform employs. Best-in-class vendors combine supervised and unsupervised machine-learning models with deep learning, and have controls to avoid adverse impacts and mitigate bias. They should tell you in advance what data the solution needs to function properly, how it learns and makes decisions in real time, and the current accuracy of the matching algorithms. Asking questions up front can ensure you’re getting the most powerful and scalable AI solution available.

11

Demonstrated ResultsAI is meant to be a transformational tool. When looking for a Talent Intelligence vendor, the proof is in the pudding. A potential vendor should be able to work with you to assess your top talent acquisition and management challenges, and give you insight into specific ways the solution can solve your problems.

For example, one technology company uses Eightfold to select candidates and personalize InMail messages sent through LinkedIn. With Eightfold, the company sees a response rate above 20% for these messages—seven times the rate they achieved previously. A services company uses Eightfold to match inbound candidates to best-fit roles. Since deploying the platform, the company has seen qualified inbound candidates increase by 69%. Eightfold customers report that on average they are able to identify instant pipelines of qualified candidates for 70% of roles, reducing the time spent sourcing candidates by up to 90% overall.

Eightfold customers also see benefits in talent retention and diversity recruitment efforts. One technology company used Eightfold to select

individuals for a diversity event; getting three times more RSVPs than they had ever achieved for past events promoted through other channels. A global communications company set up a site to match employees with internal job openings. Within one month, 7% of the company’s staff had used the site to apply to new roles, unleashing a potential wave of cross-company collaboration and improved retention.With a powerful AI engine, Eightfold

enables customers to make use of all the available data to identify highly qualified and retainable candidates for their open positions, reduce churn of talented employees, and meet diversity and inclusion goals. In short, Eightfold allows companies to hire, engage, and retain best-fit candidates to support business goals.

12

Conclusion

In order to gain competitive advantage, organizations are beginning to invest more in Talent Management technology and resources. The most innovative organizations are using Talent Intelligence platforms to drive the success of initiatives across the entire employee lifecycle. AI can be a powerful aid in driving better candidate experience and higher quality candidates, increasing diversity levels, and creating more engaged employees and alumni. The best AI solutions work to connect data across the entire employee lifecycle, and can integrate with existing tools and processes. The best AI vendors demonstrate deep expertise in machine learning and have a proven track record of results. Eightfold offers deep expertise, a proven track record, and world-leading technology.

If you are interested in learning more about Eightfold, request a free demo at https://eightfold.ai/

13

Eightfold delivers the Talent Intelligence Platform™, the most effective way for companies to identify promising candidates, meet diversity hiring goals, retain top performers, and serve their recruitment needs at lower total cost. Eightfold’s patented Artificial Intelligence-based platform enables more than 100 enterprises to turn talent management into a competitive advantage. Built by top engineers out of Facebook, Google and other leading technology companies, Eightfold is based in Mountain View, California.

About Eightfold

Eightfold Sets The Standard For Talent Intelligence Platforms Eightfold is the world’s first AI-powered Talent Intelligence Platform. It revolutionizes the talent acquisition process to help organizations maximize the potential of their people. Eightfold integrates with any HRMS or ATS system to allow teams to amass all relevant and externally available data in one system of record. Organizations using the Eightfold Talent Intelligence Platform™ quickly achieve improved candidate response, faster hiring cycles, reduced attrition, lower cost-to-hire, and other valuable outcomes.