Is talent experience matching up to employee expectation?

This article was originally published in Laurie Ruettimann's blog in December 2022.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen seismic shifts in work and how organizations strive to meet the growth and development needs of their employees. While the workplace has undergone extensive changes in the past few years, the importance of upskilling, reskilling, and ensuring talent can access career resources has not changed. So, how are organizations dealing with changes in talent management and how has talent experience technology evolved to address the future of the work?

These are just a few of the questions I dug into during a recent LinkedIn Live conversation with Karthik Suri, chief product officer at Cornerstone. We discussed a variety of topics, ranging from what talent experience really means, to how we can still upskill and reskill in a hybrid work environment, to how organizations can stay ahead of the ever-evolving transformations across the HR and Talent landscape.

Here are a few key takeaways from our discussion:

In my experience in HR, talent management has always been a fundamental aspect in the space, but talent experience is a newer concept. During my conversation with Karthik, he helped break down the distinction between talent management and talent experience, detailing that talent experience is the entirety of the “hire to retire” journey talent goes through, starting with recruiting, progressing to the first 90 days milestone, and cumulating when one chooses to leave the workforce. Talent experience is the personalized, engaging, and experiential process that enables organizations to unleash the potential of their people. Talent management is the foundational capabilities and tools organizations use to organize and develop their people.

Hybrid work is not going anywhere, so how do we ensure that those operating in a remote work environment are able to access the same resources for growth and development? This is a question Karthik believes all organizations need to be prepared to answer. As Karthik noted in our discussion, there are two key organizational changes that the pandemic exacerbated — (1) a digital transformation that incited a business model disruption and a (2) a dispersed workforce.

While in the past we learned primarily through in-person interactions with colleagues and managers, we are now largely learning through the digital landscape. Many individuals have become discouraged with how a company is investing in their skills and development, a term that Cornerstone coined the ‘skills confidence gap’. The skills confidence gap was a key finding from Cornerstone’s 2022 Global Skills Report research that compared how high-performing and low-0performing organizations are using skills to navigate the changing world of work. To bridge this gap, companies need to be intentional in how they are thinking about skills, assessing skills, and how they are implementing systemic and structured training to provide new, modern learning opportunities to their people.

And while organizations have historically taken a one-size fits all approach to learning, this is misguided. As Karthik noted in our conversation, today’s talent expects and demands personalized, engaging and experiential content. When seeking out a talent experience, people want something that aligns with their interests, desires, and career aspirations.

We must shift to think of our employees as consumers of modern content in the workplace. We are constantly inundated with tailored, on-demand content on entertainment platforms like Netflix and Spotify — why should learning content be any different? To be accessible, organizations need to create learning content that caters to the different needs and learning mechanisms of all learners. By using the power of data and technological infrastructure, like AI, we can create content that is personally curated, tailored, and engaging.

Karthik made an interesting point about how it is possible, and even common, for organizations to know more about a person the day they hire them than they do two years down the road when all of the information the organization has on them dissipates. This is counterproductive for organizations, but one key way to address this is by employing connectivity. Connectivity tools help to persist the context and history of learners, allowing administrators to extract what is relevant and create engaging next steps for learners to take.

As Karthik noted, when we apply advancements in technology responsibility, the world is a better place.

To watch the full video interview, you can view it on LinkedIn or watch it below.