October 5, 2023 • 25 mins
Welcome to our enlightening conversation with Mike Bollinger from Cornerstone, the brains behind the innovative Talent Health Index. This global research project is transforming the way companies understand and bridge the skill confidence gap between employers and employees. We're taking a deep dive into the four-level maturity model, an enlightening framework that guides organizations from foundational to transformative levels. We're also unraveling the seven dimensions of a healthy talent program, with key areas like culture, skills strategy, and learning and development under the spotlight.
As the conversation progresses, we take a closer look at how top-tier organizations are leveraging the Talent Health Index to reassess their skills strategy, content strategy, and gig assignments. We stress on the need for a holistic approach, employee confidence, and the role of technology in doing away with talent hoarding. The conversation then takes a futuristic turn with a riveting discussion on the inclusion of AI and machine learning in talent development. Join us as Mike unfolds how HR leaders can utilize the Talent Health Index to identify their organization's strengths and areas of growth, equipping you with insights that can revolutionize HR and talent management!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Recruiting Daily's Use Case Podcast, a
show dedicated to thestorytelling that happens or
should happen when practitionerspurchase technology.
Each episode is designed toinspire new ways and ideas to
make your business better as wespeak with the brightest minds
in recruitment and HR tech.
That's what we do.
Here's your host, WilliamTincup.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
This is William Tincup and you're listening to
the Use Case Podcast.
Today we have a good friend ofmine, mike, on from Cornerstone.
We're talking about the TalentHealth Index.
They've created a new product,a new bit, and they're always
innovating at Cornerstone.
I've known Mike forever and Iabsolutely love him, so this is
going to be a fun bit.
Buckle up and let's have fun.
(00:47):
Mike, would you do a favorBecause your title sometimes
changes and I can't keep trackof it Tell the audience,
introduce yourself and tell themwhat you do at Cornerstone, and
then tell us a little bit aboutwhat Talent Health Index is.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Mike Bollinger, global VP of Strategic
Initiatives, which sometimesmeans that I do stuff, but in a
variety of different ways, andat Cornerstone now, I've had a
couple of different roles.
I founded our advisory servicesgroup and so on.
I also founded the CornerstonePeople Research Lab, which is
what we're going to talk abouttoday with the Talent Health
(01:22):
Index, and then I also work in acapacity for our Chief Product
Officer on strategic parts ofthe Cornerstone portfolio,
primarily skills and end-to-endexperience and those kinds of
things the Talent Health Index.
When we founded the CornerstonePeople Research Lab in 2020, we
fielded some very specificfindings around just skills in
(01:45):
particular, and it was both anemployee and an employer
perspective.
And what we found and it wasglobal, over 1,500 employees,
over 800 employers and what wefound was something we called
the skills confidence gap and Ithink you and I have talked
about that already which was astatistically significant
difference in perception betweenthe employee and the employer
(02:07):
in terms of the investment thatthey were trying to make and the
ability of the employee toconsume that investment.
In 2022, we repeated thatresearch and added an additional
dimension to high-performingorganization, which was 16
different kinds of dimensionsaround not just HR kinds of
things, but profitability andcustomer satisfaction in those
(02:30):
kinds of things as well.
So 16 dimensions, and thatconfidence gap persisted.
So, as we got ready to fieldthis year's research, one of the
things that I'd always asked aswe did the research was what
goes into it?
What are the trends, what arethe techniques, what are the
things that we know?
And we knew from the researchthat high-performing
organizations did several thingswell.
(02:52):
Laggard organizations did not dothem, but what we did was we
built our own maturity model,like a classic maturity model,
but in most maturity modelsthere's not individual
diagnostic around dimensions,and so what we did with the
talent health index is we builtthe index on an overall maturity
model, everything fromfoundational to transformative,
(03:13):
but then we took it into sevenadditional dimensions of a
healthy talent program,everything from culture to
skills strategy and learning anddevelopment, to reporting and
mobility and those kinds ofthings.
So the notion of this, then, isthat we did this globally again
, with over 1,400 employees,over 700 employers, but we also
are making it available to theHR tech community so that you
(03:36):
can take it for yourself and getyour own analysis.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
And does it ultimately give you a score?
It does All right, tell us alittle bit about that.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
So the score itself is an overall score of the
individual dimensions, so thatoverall score is related to the
overall maturity model.
What was really interesting waswe found that, as you do any
kind of research, everythingfalls on a bell curve, right
Right, Because my average, oneof my deviations and we found
that the global talent healthindex average fell in the
(04:09):
administrative and its fourlevels foundational,
administrative, sophisticatedand transformative but when it
came to the high performers,they were 25% higher than the
laggards and 11% higher than theaverage organizations.
But overall, only 2% landed atthe transformative level, which
is a perfect score.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
So that's at the overall level, but then in the
individual dimensions there areindividual placements as well,
and the whole point of thetalent health index is not just
the overall score but using thedimensions to diagnose where to
go next.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
So, if I'm seeing it correctly in my head, it's a
heat map of where you're doingthings well and where the gap
where things are not being donewell Does it provide any action
layer, or is that kind ofsomething to be determined where
, okay, now you have a problemin this area, a particular area
of learning and development.
Now how do you solve it?
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Yes, the answer is yes.
There are some suggestionsaround that, but two things that
I call out.
There may be nuances, and oneof those is it's not us doing
that, it's the individualorganization, which is a good
thing.
It's not 100% when you standthere.
The other thing is not only isit, maybe here are areas where I
can improve, but also here areareas of my strength, so it
(05:30):
gives me, correctionally, thingsto think about in that regard.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
I can see consulting firms using this to help them
guide what to help a company getbetter.
Again, they need to have a baselaw and understand where the
company is currently and then beable to go to guiding them
towards transformative because,again, you might not ever get to
transformative.
Most do not yeah, but at leastyou should have a clear path,
(05:54):
like an idea of what istransformative and how to get
there.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Exactly, and when I built this index late last year,
I had that in the back of mymind.
How do you create aconversation internally or
externally around?
Here are things that I could bedoing next.
Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Obviously, with more people taking and getting more
people to, you can aggregate theday where you can start looking
at baselines for size ofcompany, industries, geography,
because it's global.
You can start looking at someof the things to see where
things are similar or different.
Based on, again, it's a 5000person healthcare company in
Tampa.
Okay, is that similar ordifferent to a 5000 healthcare
(06:36):
facility in San Diego?
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Agreed, and that's one of the reasons.
Obviously, the old joke ifyou're not paying for a product,
you are the product.
Obviously, as you take thissurvey, we're anonymizing data,
but we're capturing it as webuild out.
We've got this baseline that wecan explore.
But some of the interestingparts of that research also are
what are high performingorganizations doing well and how
(07:00):
do the employees feel aboutthat?
So those are other interestingareas to explore.
I'll give one quick example,which is when we looked at the
high performing organizations,one of the questions that we
asked is are you making aninvestment in house?
What kind of investment inhouse soon?
And the high performingorganizations said yeah.
91% of them said I'm alreadystarted or I'm doing it this
(07:22):
year.
Laggards was 51%.
Those are important call outsas well.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
If not now?
Do you feel cornerstone proper,using the town health index for
itself, not just its clientsand things like that, but for it
to use it itself to find outwhere y'all are doing well and
where you need to?
You're a big company too, soyou're going to need to.
Are you eating your own garbage, mike?
Speaker 3 (07:51):
You're eating your own champagne using the bell.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
It's a better way of raising it.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
Yes, there you go Because it's Ballinger champagne
, right?
No, the answer is yes.
We think of our HR organizationand what we do at Cornerstone
in some ways as customer zero,and so, absolutely as I did this
, the first thing that Karinasaid from our HR organization is
we want to do it too, andthey're going to use it as an
input to some of their futureplanning.
(08:14):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
So where do, when they, when people get the, when
they obviously they test out,they do the talent health index.
Where do they start?
Like what's the kind of some ofthe basic things that they
might?
When they get their scores andthey look back at their scores,
I would assume there's a littlebit of shock and awe.
Or maybe they know that theyhave these problems and maybe
there is less shock and awe.
(08:36):
But like, where do you advisethem to start in terms of, okay,
you know what Rome wouldn'tbuild in a day.
You're going to undo some ofthese things in a day.
Let's start with some quickwins.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Here's some things that that's a really in a really
awesome question, and one ofthe things to recognize is based
on the index.
Obviously, in the dimensionit's going to be a little
different by organization, butthere are some big key takeaways
.
One of those is the notion of askill strategy.
High performing organizationsscored very high in that
(09:08):
particular regard and then evenmore interesting was the content
strategy in line with that,that they were connected.
That's one.
The second thing to think aboutis that it's not just one thing
.
High performing organizationshave a tendency over the laggard
, significant tendency to domany things.
(09:28):
In other words, to recognizethat you're not just pulling one
lever, but it's an overalllever, and that's reflected in
the fact that 96% of theemployees in a high performing
organization had confidence thatthe organization was developing
them.
Also, that confidence gap wasliterally statistically
insignificant.
As well as they believed thattheir organization had their
(09:51):
back.
They believed their employercared about them and were able
to communicate them.
That's the second thing.
The third thing is that highperforming organizations again,
high difference between thoseand laggards allowed for gig
assignments, and when I say gigassignments I just mean internal
kinds of exploratory kinds ofthings, something we do at
(10:12):
Cornerstone as an example, aspart of the overall remit, so
they allowed for some of thatexploratory kind of an approach,
whereas laggards didn't evenhave it on the radar screen.
And then the last thing thatI'll say and it's a piece of
research also in our talentmobility, but one of the things
that we found was that employeeswanted to explore with the
(10:35):
technology first, tier zero,before they entered into a
conversation with their managerabout what they were going to do
next.
And we found that as a uniqueproposition to helping leaders,
managers in particular, who havean awful lot of work on their
shoulders, and it has a tendencyto eliminate talent hoarding.
(10:56):
Last thing I'll say is thatthere were two things where
everybody had a room to improve.
One of them was this culture ofcomplete support for employees.
That's an area where everybodyshould invest, not just on their
development but for theirsupport because of all the
things that we've all had to gothrough.
And the other one, which isreally interesting, is now I'm
(11:17):
not talking gen AI here, but AIand machine learning only 51% of
high performing organizationsare using it and leveraging it.
Not just using it, leveragingit for very specific use cases.
So an opportunity is there foreverybody.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
So we're both of a certain age, and men of a
certain age should get certaintests right, let's just say,
colonoscopy being one of thoseto set test right.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
You would pick colonoscopy.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
I'm dark like that.
So there's guys you and I knowthat don't get.
They haven't gotten one andthey won't get one.
And so the question is why?
I know a lot of HR leaders likeyourself.
We run in some of the samecircles.
I can see some HR leaders notwanting to know, like I do.
(12:12):
If I just don't ask thequestions, then I can say I
really don't know the answers.
So how do we get them toovercome that and go?
It's better to know where yourdeficiencies are so that you can
fix them.
It's fix all of them at once.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
What I really like, and it's a good question.
One of those is I always thinkabout it around the what's in it
for me, and if I'm an HR leader, I'm looking for, obviously,
areas of disagreement within myorg.
Those are potential areas ofimprovement.
But I'm also looking for thecommonality and where we're,
(12:48):
where we are in agreement, and Iwant to leverage that the
Opportunity for me to identifythose things where I think I'm
doing well and double down onthose and then to be able to
understand areas where I mightbe able to improve and Work
through that with my staff.
I think is a very significantway for somebody who might not
necessarily Want to have theircolonoscopy.
(13:11):
They could start with someinitial findings where, yeah,
there's a few, we're gonna godark here, william, there's a
few pops, but they're not as badas you think that's right.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
That's right, you know what.
That's okay.
That's okay because you nowknow once quick wins.
I like the way that you put itin them, towards our, put it in
their court and say, hey, listen, you can actually be the hero
here.
Yeah, let's not get blindsidedby these things because they're
happening with you or withoutyou, so may as well have an idea
of what's going on and Then beable to adjust.
(13:43):
I love actually, that's justreally smart and it's, I think,
there's less barrier For them tofeel like a there's an affront.
I don't want you to know howthings are, how bad things are
at our company, so a, we're notin the business of judgment.
Be, it's bad at every company.
So let's just get through thatand see you need to know so that
(14:03):
you can do some of the quickthings, so that you can be the
hero that you are.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Great and remember.
Only 2% of the organizationFound themselves transformative.
Yeah, I'm from improvement.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Oh yeah, and I would assume is of those 2%.
That's for at a moment in time,I would agree.
Fast forward six months, ninemonths, 12 months, 18 months,
etc.
Things change.
They might not be astransformative as they once were
.
It's all kind of gets me to thisidea of talent as a competitive
advantage, and this is aC-suite and you and I talked
(14:37):
about this in the past indifferent ways.
It's okay.
We talked HR, we talked to thetalent and development people
learning, development, folkstalk to recruiting and at a
certain point they tap outbecause the conversation is it
is a much more significantconversation or should be I
should, for your phrase, that itshould be a more significant
(14:59):
Conversation for the board andthe C-suite to think of talent
like product or services, as acompetitive advantage.
And so what I like about this,what I like about what you are
doing, is you're giving theminsight into where they are and
then how to adjust, how to fixall those types of good things.
But also, if the those 2%they're transformative, they are
(15:22):
absolutely In my mind.
I don't have the empirical datato prove this, but in my mind
they're thinking about talent asa competitive advantage.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Oh, absolutely that in the employee sentiment on
those organizations and weanonymize so I can't tell you
which organizations but the 2%are are high performing.
The employees in the highperforming organizations are in
violent agreement and clearlyaligned with some of the
employee data we have.
So if you think about what youdo with talent as a competitive
(15:54):
advantage, think about where itimpedes the commitments that
you're making to your board orimpedes the commitments if
you're public that you're makingto the street.
So it's not just a competitiveadvantage, it's also an enabler
for the business outcomes thatyou're looking for and you know
me, william, that's like thesecond love of my life in terms
(16:14):
of talking business outcomes,but to me this is a way to
Indicate to yourselves that youare making progress and to speak
to those outcomes, particularlywhen it comes to the investment
component in this researchright.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
So let's go back to once.
They've done this.
They now have some insight andalso some action, and there's an
action layer.
Where does the data need tofeed?
So I'm always curious aboutokay, we do something here, then
we learn something, which isgreat, but how does that inform
other decisions and othersystems?
So how does it informsuccession or performance or
(16:53):
comp or, like I could go throughthe list, all of your products
Actually we could just go downthe list, but it's.
I can see this informingdifferent systems or different
areas of the companies indifferent ways.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
I think there's a couple of things in there.
One of those is there's a clearline between what's going on in
skills and the skills-basedsuccession planning, and the
skills-based workforce planningthat's going to come with that.
That's one.
The second thing is there was avery clear call to action
(17:26):
inside the research that said,high-performing organizations
saw a doubling down as aninvestment on insights and
analytics as their next biground of investments.
I think about that from ahave-want-need perspective.
If you think abouttransformation, they're focused
on how do I get around, what doI have?
Visibility is key here.
(17:47):
You can use these outcomes tothink about those kinds of
investments.
I'm not just talking aboutmoney here.
I'm talking about the processesand being able to feed back to
the organization.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
So some buy-side questions just for a couple of
moments.
When you and the team show atalent health index to somebody
for the first time, what's yourfavorite part?
You just can't wait to get tothis place and show them this
bit.
What's that aha moment for them?
When they see it for the firsttime, they're like oh okay, the
(18:24):
world just changed, Got it?
Speaker 3 (18:27):
I think a couple of things.
One of those is the employeesentiment that's so clearly
aligned from the skills gapperspective.
Now Come out of the talenthealth index for a minute on the
confidence gap, the clearalignment between
high-performing organizations,and I'll give you some quick
numbers.
In the confidence gap, thequestion is really pretty
(18:47):
straightforward, which is how doI feel confident in the ability
to develop my employee skills?
The countervailing question tothe employees I feel confident
in my employer's ability todevelop my skills.
So that gap is 29 percent.
But the confidence in both thosecohorts, even though the gap
(19:09):
has remained relativelysignificant and clean across
three years, it's just veryconsistent.
The cohorts themselves droplittle by little every year,
indicating to me a little bit offatigue.
Even more important is, in thelaggard organizations, the
confidence of the employers isactually less.
(19:31):
The gap is a little bit smaller, but it's only half of the
employers feel like they can doit, this notion of
high-performance being clearlyaligned with their employees.
One, two, that this confidencegap is not only persistent but
the cohorts are shrinking,indicating that we need to be
better about communicating thewhat's in it for me.
And then, three, that thelaggard organizations who, by
(19:54):
the way aren't investing in thenext three to five years.
We know that from the otherpieces of research have no
confidence in their abilities atall.
So that was one reallyinteresting finding for me.
I'll give you one other.
Go ahead.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
No, not fish with heart.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Then there was one other where the UK's results
were really interesting.
In that regard, the employeeswere saying several things were
important to them aroundlearning and around development
and around the content and so on, solutions, kinds of things but
the employers in thatparticular region and this is a
(20:30):
region by region phenomena hadnot made those investments at
the level that the employeeswere asking for it.
So, again, what I really likedabout this that particular point
was it confirmed what we'vebeen finding all along.
It's a great report and overthe last three years globally
it's gotten some very, very good, statistically significant and
(20:54):
confirmation that the modelworks.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
As you mentioned, communications I think of.
Okay, once they've done this,they're going to learn some
things.
How do they communicateinternally?
Is that go over to kind ofemployee communications?
Is it something that HR takeson and communicates some of the
findings?
Because, again, it's theinsights there.
Now, how do you get people tounderstand what they've got?
(21:20):
Where the roadmap and the planand all that other stuff?
What are you seeing thetransformative firms doing in
terms of they're doing this welland communicating internally?
Speaker 3 (21:33):
Give a read.
Crossing to Chasm.
Yeah, of course I should havewritten the darn book, because I
invented Bollinger's 2020-2020rule of adoption before the book
came out.
The first 20% they're the highperformers, they're the
achievers, they're earlyadopters, they're all over the
next 20%.
They're very competitive andthey don't want the first 20% to
(21:55):
get ahead of them.
The next 40% that's the way theworld's going.
We'll do it too, and it makessense.
And the last 20% they're nevergoing there.
Just accept that.
So the trick is get that first20%, celebrate them, and often
they exist within business unitsor within particular teams.
Celebrate them.
Celebrate them publicly,celebrate their leaders publicly
(22:17):
and let the snowball takeeffect from there.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
I love it.
Okay, last question, which is aquestion about questions.
If they've never boughtsomething like this or they've
never been down this path, let'ssay what are the questions they
should be asking of Cornerstonewhen Cornerstone reaches out
and say hey, we have this thing,blah, blah, blah.
What are the things that, ifyou could script it, the
questions that they should beasking of your team?
Speaker 3 (22:43):
I think you should be coming first with I have a pain
because, you and I both know,and Cornerstone probably fire me
for this.
I'm teasing, but technology fortechnology's sake is just
technology for technology's sake.
So why are you calling thatindividual?
Be very specific into whyyou're calling first off and
(23:04):
then expect Cornerstone to sayto you what is it that you're
trying to accomplish and howdoes that move the needle on
your business?
That's the first thing.
Or organization, should you notbe in a for-profit endeavor?
The second thing that youshould ask Cornerstone is where
do you see very specificadvantages in the organizations
(23:26):
that are using you from aprocess perspective?
Talk to me about some of thesignificant use cases that
you're seeing.
That's the second one, and thenthe third one is really related
to the relationship that youwant to have with your supplier.
There's an old joke Benderssell hot dogs, suppliers are
partners.
(23:46):
So ask the Cornerstone peoplehow they will engage.
What is the customer engagementprocess?
It's not just about thesoftware that you acquire, but
it's about the software and therelationship from there.
If you come prepared and youask those two questions, you
should yield some veryinteresting answers that
directionally give you theopportunity to go further.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I can also see people that are either new to the
organization so a new CRO atCompany X, or I can't say
Company X anymore because it'sAcme Corporation.
I can see someone new, or evensomeone that's stumped.
Maybe they've been there for awhile and they're just stymied
or stumped, not knowing where tostart and not even knowing
where they have the problem,Like I could see, especially in
(24:32):
that new position.
You just take over AcmeCorporation, the CRO, you're
like I have no idea.
I have no idea even before theproblems are.
I can see them using this as away of trying to figure out
where they should focus theirenergy.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
That was its intent.
Absolutely Give yourself abreak too.
It takes a little time tounderstand.
Use this as a directionalcompass and go from there as you
dig in deeper.
Absolutely Drops, mike.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Walks off stage.
Mike, thank you so much forcarving out time for the
audience.
I absolutely appreciate it.
I'll see you at the Internet.
I know I'll see you at theInternet.
Thanks to everyone listening,by the way, and until next time.
Always a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
You've been listening to Recruiting Daily's Use Case
Podcast.
Be sure to subscribe on yourfavorite platform and hit us up
at recruitingdailycom.
Welcome to Recruiting Daily's Use Case Podcast, a
show dedicated to thestorytelling that happens or
should happen when practitionerspurchase technology.
Each episode is designed toinspire new ways and ideas to
make your business better as wespeak with the brightest minds
in recruitment and HR tech.
That's what we do.
Here's your host, WilliamTincup.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
This is William Tincup and you're listening to
the Use Case Podcast.
Today we have a good friend ofmine, mike, on from Cornerstone.
We're talking about the TalentHealth Index.
They've created a new product,a new bit, and they're always
innovating at Cornerstone.
I've known Mike forever and Iabsolutely love him, so this is
going to be a fun bit.
Buckle up and let's have fun.
(00:47):
Mike, would you do a favorBecause your title sometimes
changes and I can't keep trackof it Tell the audience,
introduce yourself and tell themwhat you do at Cornerstone, and
then tell us a little bit aboutwhat Talent Health Index is.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Mike Bollinger, global VP of Strategic
Initiatives, which sometimesmeans that I do stuff, but in a
variety of different ways, andat Cornerstone now, I've had a
couple of different roles.
I founded our advisory servicesgroup and so on.
I also founded the CornerstonePeople Research Lab, which is
what we're going to talk abouttoday with the Talent Health
(01:22):
Index, and then I also work in acapacity for our Chief Product
Officer on strategic parts ofthe Cornerstone portfolio,
primarily skills and end-to-endexperience and those kinds of
things the Talent Health Index.
When we founded the CornerstonePeople Research Lab in 2020, we
fielded some very specificfindings around just skills in
(01:45):
particular, and it was both anemployee and an employer
perspective.
And what we found and it wasglobal, over 1,500 employees,
over 800 employers and what wefound was something we called
the skills confidence gap and Ithink you and I have talked
about that already which was astatistically significant
difference in perception betweenthe employee and the employer
(02:07):
in terms of the investment thatthey were trying to make and the
ability of the employee toconsume that investment.
In 2022, we repeated thatresearch and added an additional
dimension to high-performingorganization, which was 16
different kinds of dimensionsaround not just HR kinds of
things, but profitability andcustomer satisfaction in those
(02:30):
kinds of things as well.
So 16 dimensions, and thatconfidence gap persisted.
So, as we got ready to fieldthis year's research, one of the
things that I'd always asked aswe did the research was what
goes into it?
What are the trends, what arethe techniques, what are the
things that we know?
And we knew from the researchthat high-performing
organizations did several thingswell.
(02:52):
Laggard organizations did not dothem, but what we did was we
built our own maturity model,like a classic maturity model,
but in most maturity modelsthere's not individual
diagnostic around dimensions,and so what we did with the
talent health index is we builtthe index on an overall maturity
model, everything fromfoundational to transformative,
(03:13):
but then we took it into sevenadditional dimensions of a
healthy talent program,everything from culture to
skills strategy and learning anddevelopment, to reporting and
mobility and those kinds ofthings.
So the notion of this, then, isthat we did this globally again
, with over 1,400 employees,over 700 employers, but we also
are making it available to theHR tech community so that you
(03:36):
can take it for yourself and getyour own analysis.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
And does it ultimately give you a score?
It does All right, tell us alittle bit about that.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
So the score itself is an overall score of the
individual dimensions, so thatoverall score is related to the
overall maturity model.
What was really interesting waswe found that, as you do any
kind of research, everythingfalls on a bell curve, right
Right, Because my average, oneof my deviations and we found
that the global talent healthindex average fell in the
(04:09):
administrative and its fourlevels foundational,
administrative, sophisticatedand transformative but when it
came to the high performers,they were 25% higher than the
laggards and 11% higher than theaverage organizations.
But overall, only 2% landed atthe transformative level, which
is a perfect score.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
So that's at the overall level, but then in the
individual dimensions there areindividual placements as well,
and the whole point of thetalent health index is not just
the overall score but using thedimensions to diagnose where to
go next.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
So, if I'm seeing it correctly in my head, it's a
heat map of where you're doingthings well and where the gap
where things are not being donewell Does it provide any action
layer, or is that kind ofsomething to be determined where
, okay, now you have a problemin this area, a particular area
of learning and development.
Now how do you solve it?
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Yes, the answer is yes.
There are some suggestionsaround that, but two things that
I call out.
There may be nuances, and oneof those is it's not us doing
that, it's the individualorganization, which is a good
thing.
It's not 100% when you standthere.
The other thing is not only isit, maybe here are areas where I
can improve, but also here areareas of my strength, so it
(05:30):
gives me, correctionally, thingsto think about in that regard.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
I can see consulting firms using this to help them
guide what to help a company getbetter.
Again, they need to have a baselaw and understand where the
company is currently and then beable to go to guiding them
towards transformative because,again, you might not ever get to
transformative.
Most do not yeah, but at leastyou should have a clear path,
(05:54):
like an idea of what istransformative and how to get
there.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Exactly, and when I built this index late last year,
I had that in the back of mymind.
How do you create aconversation internally or
externally around?
Here are things that I could bedoing next.
Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Obviously, with more people taking and getting more
people to, you can aggregate theday where you can start looking
at baselines for size ofcompany, industries, geography,
because it's global.
You can start looking at someof the things to see where
things are similar or different.
Based on, again, it's a 5000person healthcare company in
Tampa.
Okay, is that similar ordifferent to a 5000 healthcare
(06:36):
facility in San Diego?
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Agreed, and that's one of the reasons.
Obviously, the old joke ifyou're not paying for a product,
you are the product.
Obviously, as you take thissurvey, we're anonymizing data,
but we're capturing it as webuild out.
We've got this baseline that wecan explore.
But some of the interestingparts of that research also are
what are high performingorganizations doing well and how
(07:00):
do the employees feel aboutthat?
So those are other interestingareas to explore.
I'll give one quick example,which is when we looked at the
high performing organizations,one of the questions that we
asked is are you making aninvestment in house?
What kind of investment inhouse soon?
And the high performingorganizations said yeah.
91% of them said I'm alreadystarted or I'm doing it this
(07:22):
year.
Laggards was 51%.
Those are important call outsas well.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
If not now?
Do you feel cornerstone proper,using the town health index for
itself, not just its clientsand things like that, but for it
to use it itself to find outwhere y'all are doing well and
where you need to?
You're a big company too, soyou're going to need to.
Are you eating your own garbage, mike?
Speaker 3 (07:51):
You're eating your own champagne using the bell.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
It's a better way of raising it.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
Yes, there you go Because it's Ballinger champagne
, right?
No, the answer is yes.
We think of our HR organizationand what we do at Cornerstone
in some ways as customer zero,and so, absolutely as I did this
, the first thing that Karinasaid from our HR organization is
we want to do it too, andthey're going to use it as an
input to some of their futureplanning.
(08:14):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
So where do, when they, when people get the, when
they obviously they test out,they do the talent health index.
Where do they start?
Like what's the kind of some ofthe basic things that they
might?
When they get their scores andthey look back at their scores,
I would assume there's a littlebit of shock and awe.
Or maybe they know that theyhave these problems and maybe
there is less shock and awe.
(08:36):
But like, where do you advisethem to start in terms of, okay,
you know what Rome wouldn'tbuild in a day.
You're going to undo some ofthese things in a day.
Let's start with some quickwins.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Here's some things that that's a really in a really
awesome question, and one ofthe things to recognize is based
on the index.
Obviously, in the dimensionit's going to be a little
different by organization, butthere are some big key takeaways
.
One of those is the notion of askill strategy.
High performing organizationsscored very high in that
(09:08):
particular regard and then evenmore interesting was the content
strategy in line with that,that they were connected.
That's one.
The second thing to think aboutis that it's not just one thing
.
High performing organizationshave a tendency over the laggard
, significant tendency to domany things.
(09:28):
In other words, to recognizethat you're not just pulling one
lever, but it's an overalllever, and that's reflected in
the fact that 96% of theemployees in a high performing
organization had confidence thatthe organization was developing
them.
Also, that confidence gap wasliterally statistically
insignificant.
As well as they believed thattheir organization had their
(09:51):
back.
They believed their employercared about them and were able
to communicate them.
That's the second thing.
The third thing is that highperforming organizations again,
high difference between thoseand laggards allowed for gig
assignments, and when I say gigassignments I just mean internal
kinds of exploratory kinds ofthings, something we do at
(10:12):
Cornerstone as an example, aspart of the overall remit, so
they allowed for some of thatexploratory kind of an approach,
whereas laggards didn't evenhave it on the radar screen.
And then the last thing thatI'll say and it's a piece of
research also in our talentmobility, but one of the things
that we found was that employeeswanted to explore with the
(10:35):
technology first, tier zero,before they entered into a
conversation with their managerabout what they were going to do
next.
And we found that as a uniqueproposition to helping leaders,
managers in particular, who havean awful lot of work on their
shoulders, and it has a tendencyto eliminate talent hoarding.
(10:56):
Last thing I'll say is thatthere were two things where
everybody had a room to improve.
One of them was this culture ofcomplete support for employees.
That's an area where everybodyshould invest, not just on their
development but for theirsupport because of all the
things that we've all had to gothrough.
And the other one, which isreally interesting, is now I'm
(11:17):
not talking gen AI here, but AIand machine learning only 51% of
high performing organizationsare using it and leveraging it.
Not just using it, leveragingit for very specific use cases.
So an opportunity is there foreverybody.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
So we're both of a certain age, and men of a
certain age should get certaintests right, let's just say,
colonoscopy being one of thoseto set test right.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
You would pick colonoscopy.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
I'm dark like that.
So there's guys you and I knowthat don't get.
They haven't gotten one andthey won't get one.
And so the question is why?
I know a lot of HR leaders likeyourself.
We run in some of the samecircles.
I can see some HR leaders notwanting to know, like I do.
(12:12):
If I just don't ask thequestions, then I can say I
really don't know the answers.
So how do we get them toovercome that and go?
It's better to know where yourdeficiencies are so that you can
fix them.
It's fix all of them at once.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
What I really like, and it's a good question.
One of those is I always thinkabout it around the what's in it
for me, and if I'm an HR leader, I'm looking for, obviously,
areas of disagreement within myorg.
Those are potential areas ofimprovement.
But I'm also looking for thecommonality and where we're,
(12:48):
where we are in agreement, and Iwant to leverage that the
Opportunity for me to identifythose things where I think I'm
doing well and double down onthose and then to be able to
understand areas where I mightbe able to improve and Work
through that with my staff.
I think is a very significantway for somebody who might not
necessarily Want to have theircolonoscopy.
(13:11):
They could start with someinitial findings where, yeah,
there's a few, we're gonna godark here, william, there's a
few pops, but they're not as badas you think that's right.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
That's right, you know what.
That's okay.
That's okay because you nowknow once quick wins.
I like the way that you put itin them, towards our, put it in
their court and say, hey, listen, you can actually be the hero
here.
Yeah, let's not get blindsidedby these things because they're
happening with you or withoutyou, so may as well have an idea
of what's going on and Then beable to adjust.
(13:43):
I love actually, that's justreally smart and it's, I think,
there's less barrier For them tofeel like a there's an affront.
I don't want you to know howthings are, how bad things are
at our company, so a, we're notin the business of judgment.
Be, it's bad at every company.
So let's just get through thatand see you need to know so that
(14:03):
you can do some of the quickthings, so that you can be the
hero that you are.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Great and remember.
Only 2% of the organizationFound themselves transformative.
Yeah, I'm from improvement.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Oh yeah, and I would assume is of those 2%.
That's for at a moment in time,I would agree.
Fast forward six months, ninemonths, 12 months, 18 months,
etc.
Things change.
They might not be astransformative as they once were
.
It's all kind of gets me to thisidea of talent as a competitive
advantage, and this is aC-suite and you and I talked
(14:37):
about this in the past indifferent ways.
It's okay.
We talked HR, we talked to thetalent and development people
learning, development, folkstalk to recruiting and at a
certain point they tap outbecause the conversation is it
is a much more significantconversation or should be I
should, for your phrase, that itshould be a more significant
(14:59):
Conversation for the board andthe C-suite to think of talent
like product or services, as acompetitive advantage.
And so what I like about this,what I like about what you are
doing, is you're giving theminsight into where they are and
then how to adjust, how to fixall those types of good things.
But also, if the those 2%they're transformative, they are
(15:22):
absolutely In my mind.
I don't have the empirical datato prove this, but in my mind
they're thinking about talent asa competitive advantage.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Oh, absolutely that in the employee sentiment on
those organizations and weanonymize so I can't tell you
which organizations but the 2%are are high performing.
The employees in the highperforming organizations are in
violent agreement and clearlyaligned with some of the
employee data we have.
So if you think about what youdo with talent as a competitive
(15:54):
advantage, think about where itimpedes the commitments that
you're making to your board orimpedes the commitments if
you're public that you're makingto the street.
So it's not just a competitiveadvantage, it's also an enabler
for the business outcomes thatyou're looking for and you know
me, william, that's like thesecond love of my life in terms
(16:14):
of talking business outcomes,but to me this is a way to
Indicate to yourselves that youare making progress and to speak
to those outcomes, particularlywhen it comes to the investment
component in this researchright.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
So let's go back to once.
They've done this.
They now have some insight andalso some action, and there's an
action layer.
Where does the data need tofeed?
So I'm always curious aboutokay, we do something here, then
we learn something, which isgreat, but how does that inform
other decisions and othersystems?
So how does it informsuccession or performance or
(16:53):
comp or, like I could go throughthe list, all of your products
Actually we could just go downthe list, but it's.
I can see this informingdifferent systems or different
areas of the companies indifferent ways.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
I think there's a couple of things in there.
One of those is there's a clearline between what's going on in
skills and the skills-basedsuccession planning, and the
skills-based workforce planningthat's going to come with that.
That's one.
The second thing is there was avery clear call to action
(17:26):
inside the research that said,high-performing organizations
saw a doubling down as aninvestment on insights and
analytics as their next biground of investments.
I think about that from ahave-want-need perspective.
If you think abouttransformation, they're focused
on how do I get around, what doI have?
Visibility is key here.
(17:47):
You can use these outcomes tothink about those kinds of
investments.
I'm not just talking aboutmoney here.
I'm talking about the processesand being able to feed back to
the organization.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
So some buy-side questions just for a couple of
moments.
When you and the team show atalent health index to somebody
for the first time, what's yourfavorite part?
You just can't wait to get tothis place and show them this
bit.
What's that aha moment for them?
When they see it for the firsttime, they're like oh okay, the
(18:24):
world just changed, Got it?
Speaker 3 (18:27):
I think a couple of things.
One of those is the employeesentiment that's so clearly
aligned from the skills gapperspective.
Now Come out of the talenthealth index for a minute on the
confidence gap, the clearalignment between
high-performing organizations,and I'll give you some quick
numbers.
In the confidence gap, thequestion is really pretty
(18:47):
straightforward, which is how doI feel confident in the ability
to develop my employee skills?
The countervailing question tothe employees I feel confident
in my employer's ability todevelop my skills.
So that gap is 29 percent.
But the confidence in both thosecohorts, even though the gap
(19:09):
has remained relativelysignificant and clean across
three years, it's just veryconsistent.
The cohorts themselves droplittle by little every year,
indicating to me a little bit offatigue.
Even more important is, in thelaggard organizations, the
confidence of the employers isactually less.
(19:31):
The gap is a little bit smaller, but it's only half of the
employers feel like they can doit, this notion of
high-performance being clearlyaligned with their employees.
One, two, that this confidencegap is not only persistent but
the cohorts are shrinking,indicating that we need to be
better about communicating thewhat's in it for me.
And then, three, that thelaggard organizations who, by
(19:54):
the way aren't investing in thenext three to five years.
We know that from the otherpieces of research have no
confidence in their abilities atall.
So that was one reallyinteresting finding for me.
I'll give you one other.
Go ahead.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
No, not fish with heart.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Then there was one other where the UK's results
were really interesting.
In that regard, the employeeswere saying several things were
important to them aroundlearning and around development
and around the content and so on, solutions, kinds of things but
the employers in thatparticular region and this is a
(20:30):
region by region phenomena hadnot made those investments at
the level that the employeeswere asking for it.
So, again, what I really likedabout this that particular point
was it confirmed what we'vebeen finding all along.
It's a great report and overthe last three years globally
it's gotten some very, very good, statistically significant and
(20:54):
confirmation that the modelworks.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
As you mentioned, communications I think of.
Okay, once they've done this,they're going to learn some
things.
How do they communicateinternally?
Is that go over to kind ofemployee communications?
Is it something that HR takeson and communicates some of the
findings?
Because, again, it's theinsights there.
Now, how do you get people tounderstand what they've got?
(21:20):
Where the roadmap and the planand all that other stuff?
What are you seeing thetransformative firms doing in
terms of they're doing this welland communicating internally?
Speaker 3 (21:33):
Give a read.
Crossing to Chasm.
Yeah, of course I should havewritten the darn book, because I
invented Bollinger's 2020-2020rule of adoption before the book
came out.
The first 20% they're the highperformers, they're the
achievers, they're earlyadopters, they're all over the
next 20%.
They're very competitive andthey don't want the first 20% to
(21:55):
get ahead of them.
The next 40% that's the way theworld's going.
We'll do it too, and it makessense.
And the last 20% they're nevergoing there.
Just accept that.
So the trick is get that first20%, celebrate them, and often
they exist within business unitsor within particular teams.
Celebrate them.
Celebrate them publicly,celebrate their leaders publicly
(22:17):
and let the snowball takeeffect from there.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
I love it.
Okay, last question, which is aquestion about questions.
If they've never boughtsomething like this or they've
never been down this path, let'ssay what are the questions they
should be asking of Cornerstonewhen Cornerstone reaches out
and say hey, we have this thing,blah, blah, blah.
What are the things that, ifyou could script it, the
questions that they should beasking of your team?
Speaker 3 (22:43):
I think you should be coming first with I have a pain
because, you and I both know,and Cornerstone probably fire me
for this.
I'm teasing, but technology fortechnology's sake is just
technology for technology's sake.
So why are you calling thatindividual?
Be very specific into whyyou're calling first off and
(23:04):
then expect Cornerstone to sayto you what is it that you're
trying to accomplish and howdoes that move the needle on
your business?
That's the first thing.
Or organization, should you notbe in a for-profit endeavor?
The second thing that youshould ask Cornerstone is where
do you see very specificadvantages in the organizations
(23:26):
that are using you from aprocess perspective?
Talk to me about some of thesignificant use cases that
you're seeing.
That's the second one, and thenthe third one is really related
to the relationship that youwant to have with your supplier.
There's an old joke Benderssell hot dogs, suppliers are
partners.
(23:46):
So ask the Cornerstone peoplehow they will engage.
What is the customer engagementprocess?
It's not just about thesoftware that you acquire, but
it's about the software and therelationship from there.
If you come prepared and youask those two questions, you
should yield some veryinteresting answers that
directionally give you theopportunity to go further.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I can also see people that are either new to the
organization so a new CRO atCompany X, or I can't say
Company X anymore because it'sAcme Corporation.
I can see someone new, or evensomeone that's stumped.
Maybe they've been there for awhile and they're just stymied
or stumped, not knowing where tostart and not even knowing
where they have the problem,Like I could see, especially in
(24:32):
that new position.
You just take over AcmeCorporation, the CRO, you're
like I have no idea.
I have no idea even before theproblems are.
I can see them using this as away of trying to figure out
where they should focus theirenergy.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
That was its intent.
Absolutely Give yourself abreak too.
It takes a little time tounderstand.
Use this as a directionalcompass and go from there as you
dig in deeper.
Absolutely Drops, mike.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Walks off stage.
Mike, thank you so much forcarving out time for the
audience.
I absolutely appreciate it.
I'll see you at the Internet.
I know I'll see you at theInternet.
Thanks to everyone listening,by the way, and until next time.
Always a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
You've been listening to Recruiting Daily's Use Case
Podcast.
Be sure to subscribe on yourfavorite platform and hit us up
at recruitingdailycom.
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