Imagine if you could harness the power of AI to map out your career trajectory and close the skills gap within your organization. Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Join us as we sit down with Paul Courtaud, the co-founder and CEO of Neobrain, who has done precisely that with their game-changing AI-powered talent management solution. It's an enlightening conversation where we scrutinize the dynamics of the talent marketplace, the concept of internal mobility, and the ever-evolving landscape of skills. We also delve into the pressing issue of the skills gap, providing you with insights on how to identify, understand, and effectively address it.
In the second half of our discussion, Paul takes us on a deep dive into how Neobrain supercharges job rotation within organizations. He elaborates on how the platform empowers employees to identify their skills, design the most fulfilling and motivating career paths, and find opportunities that align with their career goals. Furthermore, we touch on how Neobrain's Generative AI helps managers spot the best candidates for job openings, despite not perfectly fitting the job title requirements. We round up our chat by discussing how Neobrain's platform can effortlessly integrate with HRIS systems, and how their mobile-first approach levels the playing field for individuals with varying qualifications. Grab a seat and buckle up as we navigate the fascinating complexities of the modern talent marketplace with Paul Courtaud.
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Imagine if you could harness the power of AI to map out your career trajectory and close the skills gap within your organization. Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Join us as we sit down with Paul Courtaud, the co-founder and CEO of Neobrain, who has done precisely that with their game-changing AI-powered talent management solution. It's an enlightening conversation where we scrutinize the dynamics of the talent marketplace, the concept of internal mobility, and the ever-evolving landscape of skills. We also delve into the pressing issue of the skills gap, providing you with insights on how to identify, understand, and effectively address it.
In the second half of our discussion, Paul takes us on a deep dive into how Neobrain supercharges job rotation within organizations. He elaborates on how the platform empowers employees to identify their skills, design the most fulfilling and motivating career paths, and find opportunities that align with their career goals. Furthermore, we touch on how Neobrain's Generative AI helps managers spot the best candidates for job openings, despite not perfectly fitting the job title requirements. We round up our chat by discussing how Neobrain's platform can effortlessly integrate with HRIS systems, and how their mobile-first approach levels the playing field for individuals with varying qualifications. Grab a seat and buckle up as we navigate the fascinating complexities of the modern talent marketplace with Paul Courtaud.
Listen & Subscribe on your favorite platform
Apple | Spotify | Google | Amazon
This is William Tyncup and you are listening to the Use Case podcast. Today we have Paul on from Neobrain and we'll be learning about the business case, the cost benefit analysis, the ROI, or what I call the use case, for why as prospects and customers use and choose Neobrain. So while we do introductions and learn a little bit about Paul and Neobrain Paul would you introduce yourself and Neobrain?
Speaker 2:Sure, so nice to meet you, william.
Speaker 2:So I'm Paul Poto, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Neobrain, and I founded Neobrain five years and a half ago based on one simple discovery I was trying to understand how the largest companies adapt to accelerated market changes.
Speaker 2:And I took the fortune 500 companies from the year 2000 and I found out that in the last, let's say, a little bit less than 20 years, half of them have either disappeared or left this ranking. So that's the moment when I tried to understand what made the difference between the successful half and the other one, and I discovered that they had the capacity to allocate the right skill in the right place at the right time. And that's how we basically defined the Neobrain's mission the right skill in the right place at the right time. And we then developed an AI-powered talent management solution that helps the employee to. We empower the employee and we want to help the employee take the ownership of his career and understand where he can contribute the most. We provide the managers the right tools to develop their teams, and then we provide the HR team. We give the HR team the right solution to align the available resources with the company strategy.
Speaker 1:Paul, I hate software categories, Despise them. However, a lot of HR budgets if not all HR budgets built in Excel or Google Sheets, so where do people tend to put Neobrain?
Speaker 2:If we look at the HR, take landscape we're part of the talent marketplace space. So, under the, let's say, like the talent management space, we're really focused on the talent marketplace, where we basically have to meet internal supply and demand of skills. Basically, yeah, that's our space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do some people think of that as internal mobility?
Speaker 2:Yes, One use case we're covering is to you need to link skills with internal mobility or carry path.
Speaker 1:So I want to get your take on skills and how, at least historically and how we look. I should look at them At least historically. You went to college, you got a degree in chemistry, you had the skills of chemistry, whatever those might be, and you might have those forever. So if you graduated 30 years ago and you had those skills, then you it was perceived that you still had those skills and I think pretty much that's been debunked through the last couple of years, where skills are more fluid, in a sense of you gain and lose skills all the time, your depth and breadth in the way that we look at tangential or contiguous or transferable skills. So why don't you just take a moment and just give us your take, neil Brain's take on just your skills?
Speaker 2:Skills because it has been here for quite a while. If you take the HR books from like 30 or 40 years ago, skills was already part of those books. But what really happened, I think, is that technology helped to scale basically skills management, meaning that for the largest companies, they were basically building skills framework on spreadsheet, trying to define the 10 most critical skills for each job and always starting from a blank page describing those skills. But as soon as they finished, they basically did this work. They have, everything is outdated and they have to rebuild everything again. That's what we see on the market and it's very frustrating for HR team. And now with technology, and especially with all the AI advancements, we have the capacity to screen the market and help the HR to always maintain an up-to-date skills ontology and with this skills ontology, they can then focus on where they want to apply skills. And indeed the first use case is definitely using skills to increase and enhance internal mobility, because when you describe your skills, the system can understand what's the potential next job that might suit your skills and aspirations. Yeah, that's basically how we see how skills are working right now and indeed skills are being challenged every day.
Speaker 2:New skills are appearing, many new innovations. When we talk with our clients, they have new things on their plates. Every quarter They'll have oh, there is this major innovation or there is this new big strategy. When we want, for instance, to be to have zero carbon emission by that's like in the next 20 years, how do we? What are the green skills? And, okay, or, genotvi is the big, the hot topic of today. What's the impact of GenoTVI on our skills? Yes, that's the kind of question they're asking, and they need a software that helps to basically answer these questions at scale.
Speaker 1:And one of the things I would assume that they care about is the skills gap, right. So inventory what they have versus forecasting what they need, and then seeing what the gap in those are and whether or not they have to go outside the firm or whether or not they need to train within the firm or promote within the firm. Once they have the insight, or once they have some visibility into what the gap is, then they can create a plan on filling the gap.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's totally right and I think what I mean another few major events that really put skills back on their desk, basically, and make this space very, very hot. It's basically we are living at some time a big talent shortage and we've been leaving the great resignations or the quiet quitting in Europe we're more talking about quiet quitting than great resignation, but we've been leaving those two events at the same time. When companies then were strong basically they were before that they were trying to hire as much people as possible and then they found out that perhaps the skills they're looking for are just basically not available on the market or not enough. So they started to think of okay, how can we basically build those skills internally? So when they think of their build by on borrow plan, they start putting more focus on the builds than by trying to identify how they can basically build those skills internally.
Speaker 2:And they found out that building those opportunities internally was also one way to fertilize their talents, retain their talent, because, based on when we just have had, look on the main, most important reason why people just leave their job there is the manager. Of course, we all know that we basically we mostly leave a manager. But there is also another second topic which is very present. It's the lack of visibility on their advancement. So they're like okay, if we build skills internally, we provide new opportunities for our internal workforce, and perhaps it's better to retain our people and just try to find other people on the market.
Speaker 1:And it's also what candidates are asking on the front end and recruiting. They're asking how are you going to develop me? So if you're not harvesting talent, like if you're not growing talent, you don't have plans to do grow talent. It's also going to be. It's also going to make recruiting problematic with the millennials and Gen Z, because that's table stakes questions for them. That how you're going to develop me is literally one of the first things that they ask, and if you don't have great answers, examples of how that happens, then you're pretty, they're going to move on to the next gig.
Speaker 2:That's right, that's 100% right. And the second major yeah, second major element we see is that the new generation, especially when we're talking about Gen Z, so basically what we see is that change job or change assignment, or more frequently than even never before. So we need to rethink totally the way people acquire the skills, because they need to acquire them in very short time, I noticed, because they need to perform, so they cannot acquire the skills for six, seven months, when people will change job every year. So that's the first element.
Speaker 2:Second is, I think we're at a moment when a lot of companies are fractionizing, like the work. They're just splitting the work in many sub one job, in many sub gigs, basically just building jobs with different short term assignments. And that's where skills are very interesting, because if you shift, you switch from one assignment to another. It's also a way, if you link that with, if you connect it with all the upskilling programs, the learning programs, then you create opportunities for people to apply the skills on real projects. So that's why that's also major shifts, and we have a lot of clients that are very interesting in our gigs module, allowing to give people more time to work on different assignments that are perhaps not written in their, in the core of their job description?
Speaker 1:That's cool because they get to test things. That's one thing I love. I came up to the agency world where advertising, pr, web, interactive, etc. We got to work on a lot of projects. You could jump in and do media relations for one firm and then the next thing you were designing ads. You got to test all kinds of different things to see what you were good at, what you weren't good at, what really started to. I love this. I want to do this, so I love. First of all, I just love that companies are thinking about talent in that way and leveraging talent in that way and giving them opportunities to see other things. So I love that.
Speaker 1:You mentioned that something at the beginning I wanted to get back to, because you said, the intersection of timing and skills. We've talked a whole bunch about skills, which is super important, but I didn't want to get back to the timing part. So I'm assuming this is machine learning or AI in terms of understanding what the skills are, and then where do those skills need to be applied in terms of timing, but I don't know. So why don't you take us into that part?
Speaker 2:Yes. So first, the first step is to help people. Basically, where we actually apply AI. First is we help people describe their skills, because it's quite a complex exercise. If you had William to describe 15 most important skills you have, it's actually quite complex. It's much easier for people to describe what they do than the skills they acquired and they're mobilizing to achieve their daily tasks. So skills are sometimes a little complex to describe. So that's the first thing we help and we accelerate the skills identification among the different employees profiled within the company. So that's the first step. Second is we help the employees to find the best carry path possible, matching three main criteria their skills, their motivation and the business priorities of their company. So when we link those three elements, we basically train our AI to help each employee draw the best and the most rewarding and motivating carry path within their organization. And finally, we'll push relevant opportunities, whether it's trainings to have purchased the skills gap, or indeed like internal open positions or gigs that might be relevant so that you apply those skills or diversify your daily assignment. Basically, that's where we bring value.
Speaker 2:But we know that when we want to accelerate the job rotation time, we want people to move and to evolve within the organization. It's not. We always start with the employees, because we want to empower the employees. We are very employee centric, but then we also need to focus on what's the role of the manager, what's the role of the HR, and that's why we provided an interface to the hiring manager. That said, I'm looking for someone that I know, like an accountant, that has an experience in carve out OGT, for instance. I don't know, I'm taking this example, I'm just putting the information in the system and RAI will come up with a list of the six most relevant people. Wow, it profiles to match your need.
Speaker 2:And one very interesting thing is that we find out that, as an average, we would struggle to help manager see, have at least an interest on people that might not fit exactly the job that is requested, that perhaps haven't already experienced or don't have the exact job title that is from the expectation of the manager. So we have basically 2% of non-typical profiles that said that weren't people that had doing the exact same job, mobilizing the exact same skills, etc. So managers were basically taking 2% of non-typical people and we introduced, thanks to Generative AI, for this, short list of six relevant profiles. The Generative AI explained with four or five bullet points why those people were matching with the opportunities, so not, so shifting from just a matching percentage to a written explanation of why this person might be a good candidate. And we jumped from 2% of non-typical profile to 15%, because then managers better understand why someone might be the best candidate, even though the current job title of the person doesn't match the job description.
Speaker 1:One I love that. One of the things that I love is for line managers and department managers etc. Is that they don't get a lot of training and to give them something that's really intuitive that they can then plug into and go yeah, this will help me, and I love that. I love that it's a wayfinding system. They can just say I need this skill. Okay, there's the short list of five. Great, here's where they are. Now I can go talk to them, etc. It's just really smart. Let me ask you a couple of buy side questions real quick. One is what's when you do, or your team does, a demo of the brain to a prospect? What do they fall in love with? What's that kind of an aha moment?
Speaker 2:I'd say one very important added value we bring, compared to other social on the market, is our capacity to take motivation into account, which seems to be quite easy when we set up, because we all know that if you're not motivated to mobilize the skills expected in a certain position, you might not want to move towards this direction. So that's quite simple and pragmatic. But we're the only software that really takes into account the motivation you have to develop each of your skills, which is the first element. The second element I'd say is that we are, and we try to be, as fully integrated in the flow of work as possible, meaning that what we're doing at Neobrain is we're fully integrated in all major HRES systems, such as SAP, success factors, workday, oracle, etc. And we basically embed our software into those systems so that you don't have an additional tool to use.
Speaker 2:And right now we're going even further, because we want to be fully integrated into Microsoft Teams, as an example, to make sure that people don't have an additional tool but you can write into Microsoft Teams hey, I'm looking for an accountant that has a strong mastery of Carvald's editing and the system will provide you the shortlist within Microsoft Teams, so you never have to leave the tools you're using every day, and that's, I'd say, like the second big asset.
Speaker 2:And the third one is the fact that we provide a mobile first experience allowing people that might don't have a desktop in their daily job, for instance, in certain industries such as retail, or in certain low-qualification jobs. Some, for instance, like blue cars, they might not have a laptop in their daily job or in logistics, for instance, and we think that if people like White Color might not have the same, they have more chances because they can access their carrier management software, when other people that have less qualification, those people, won't have access to the same tool. We might actually create two shows in the job market, and that's what we want to prevent by making sure that with one unique tool, you can actually access 100% of your place.
Speaker 1:Ah, okay, so questions that buyers should ask of NeoBrain and talent markets, let's just say talent marketplaces. What are the questions? If they've never purchased or never even considered purchasing, what should they be asking of you?
Speaker 2:Do you have a demonstration?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I know when they're, yeah, they're prospects, and so they've done the demo. They're thinking about okay, like what? And people buy ATSs all the time. It's a 50 year old software category so, yeah, recruiters in HR know what to ask of ATSs generally speaking, but talent marketplaces are a little bit newer. They might not have a great set of questions buying questions to ask what would you like to hear more from prospects?
Speaker 2:I think one very important question is how ATIC the AI is actually. Because you can make you can, based on the way you train your AI you can actually reproduce some bias or you can prevent those bias and try to increase, for instance, diversity in the profiles that are being selected. So I think the how is actually trained AI? How does it really work? And the vendor should, I think, be able to provide a very simple answer and try to bring some pedagogy and have at least thought about this question. So I think that's one one element.
Speaker 2:I think the second question is how automatized is the maintenance of the skills on top of you? Because if it implies some manual modifications by the HR team, then I think, okay, it will be great starts. You have six months to get ready, but then two months, two years later, the whole ontology will be completely outdated. So that's, I think, a very, I think, a second question to be asking to to vendor. And I think that the third question is perhaps not a question you should ask to the vendor, but a real question that you should ask yourself before considering purchasing a time marketplace is simply why? Because it's a very booming space, so sometimes people are like, yeah, I want a time marketplace. Okay, what's the real impact you want to have? Yeah, I want more internal mobility. Okay, but why and asking several times just why? Then you make sure that you really link the time marketplace to real business needs. Otherwise manager will push back those systems If it isn't deeply linked to a pain they already have and a business bottleneck they're facing.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's now pivot to, first of all, great questions, but let's pivot to some success stories that Neobranz had, without brand names, without getting into the weeds of who it was for, but just where y'all came into a situation and they didn't have a talent marketplace, they didn't have this vision for skills, et cetera, and some of the outcomes that you've seen.
Speaker 2:Okay. So a few examples. I'll provide you an example of a very well-known brand which is the Group LVMH. It's like Louis Vuitton, christian Dior, tiffany, et cetera, so it's this group. So we basically work with 150,000 employees. So we work at scale with the Group LVMH and we so it's a big they basically gather 75 of the biggest luxury brand in the world. It's a most valuated European company, so it's a pretty big company.
Speaker 2:What we've seen is that when we started working with them, we started on parts of the whole scope of Neobrain, but when we started working with them, they basically had few I think it was close to 20,000 people that weren't basically accessing any HR software because they just didn't have a laptop. So the first step was to make sure that all employees have the same accessibility to carry opportunities, the capacity to describe, to define their care path, the care aspirations, to make sure that they also have accessibility to their performance management software. So we basically work with the LVMH to make sure that all their employees, they were able to individualize and have an individualized connection with each of their employees. So that's, that's the. That was the first big challenge they had. So that's one example.
Speaker 2:I'm providing you the second one which is closer, which is for big big banks at this school. Actually it's called NetXIS. They actually have 15,000 employees and they were struggling because when we started working with them they had one job out of eight that was filled by the internal candidate. 12 months after the deployment they went from one job out of eight to one job out of two filled by the internal candidate. The outcome is the reducing. They basically reduced the turnover of the company because the first reason, as mentioned earlier, the first reason why people were leaving the company when they were doing the exit interviews was the lack of visibility on the internal opportunities on their next step. So by having more people feeling internal open positions, they actually reduced the overall turnover and retaining their employees.
Speaker 1:So, first of all, wonderful story, and I'm sure you got a litany of those. The last thing I just wanted to get into with you is just what's NeoBrain's, what's success for you all for the rest of the year? What are you obviously pushing and it's a hot category, both skills and AI so you're in a great place, but how are you? What's go to market for you? What are you trying to accomplish by the end of the year?
Speaker 2:I'd say like if you give more context on where we are and where we're heading in 2023, for instance, like at the end of June we have done basically more in six months than in the last five years, so we're really going super fast. Right now, we're 140 people working at NeoBrain. I think we'll be close to 1000 in the next three years. So we're living in very strong growth where we'll be breakeven by the end of the year. Oh, that's fantastic.
Speaker 2:So we want a sustainable growth, which is also very important because we work with large companies that want to work with startups that will still be here.
Speaker 1:Stability is yeah, I've seen startups get ruled, the better technology just get ruled out because they don't have the stability. So I think that your point about being profitable is going to help land even more business in the future because you can add points when you need to be audited. Yeah, we don't need to raise another 30 million or 50 million or whatever it is. We don't need to do that.
Speaker 2:Yes, so that's, and we want to. So that's the first thing. So that's the first thing is we want to be breakeven by the end of the year. We want to be breakeven by tripling our revenue, because that's what we're doing this year. We're basically tripling our record revenue. This year We've done several. We've done two acquisitions in the last eight months, so we basically acquired two companies from the industry in the last eight months. We have other, we have plans for other acquisitions. Our goal is to be at least reaching 60 million euro in the next three years. The path we're following right now yeah, so that's the next step. And right now we're investing a lot in the US market. So that's why we opened an office in San Francisco, one New York, and we are building a local team to accelerate our US Prince Awesome.
Speaker 1:I love what you've built. I love just everything you've talked about today. So thank you for your time and thanks for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, William.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and thanks for everybody listening Until next time.