Ever wanted to understand the game-changing power of a skills-first approach to talent development? You're in for a treat! We've got Leah Carr, the CEO of tilr, who has hired between 250-500 people in her career, to share her insights on this transformative concept. Leah talks about her intuitive hiring process and how it has evolved with the integration of data, owing to the digital era we are in.
We don't stop there! Uncover the magic behind tilr's innovative solution that captures a comprehensive understanding of an individual's skills. This is a game-changer in targeted training and aligning employee goals with company needs. Leah also lifts the veil on tilr's team dashboard, which provides leaders with visibility into the impact of training. We also navigate the choppy waters of measuring micro skills and language proficiency, and the revolutionary potential of a skills-first approach to internal mobility, compensation, and succession planning. Did we mention the exciting potential of crypto and the importance of adopting a new language when discussing talent-driven markets? Well, this episode has it all!
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Ever wanted to understand the game-changing power of a skills-first approach to talent development? You're in for a treat! We've got Leah Carr, the CEO of tilr, who has hired between 250-500 people in her career, to share her insights on this transformative concept. Leah talks about her intuitive hiring process and how it has evolved with the integration of data, owing to the digital era we are in.
We don't stop there! Uncover the magic behind tilr's innovative solution that captures a comprehensive understanding of an individual's skills. This is a game-changer in targeted training and aligning employee goals with company needs. Leah also lifts the veil on tilr's team dashboard, which provides leaders with visibility into the impact of training. We also navigate the choppy waters of measuring micro skills and language proficiency, and the revolutionary potential of a skills-first approach to internal mobility, compensation, and succession planning. Did we mention the exciting potential of crypto and the importance of adopting a new language when discussing talent-driven markets? Well, this episode has it all!
Listen & Subscribe on your favorite platform
Apple | Spotify | Google | Amazon
Welcome to Recruiting Daily's Use Case Podcast, a show dedicated to the storytelling that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better as we speak with the brightest minds in recruitment and HR tech. That's what we do.
Speaker 2:Here's your host, william Tin Cup, ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tin Cup and you're listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today we have Leah on from Tiller. We'll be learning about the Use Case, the Business Case that her practitioners and the customers and prospects use to build for Tiller. So, Leah, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself and Tiller?
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you so much for having me on today. Sure, yeah, so I am the CEO of a company called Tiller. We are based out of Toronto and we have built a skills first learning and development solution, and what that means is because we help you understand the skills of your workforce and the skills of your roles. We can deliver much more targeted training, whether it's closing skills gaps and upskilling, or it's aligning your employees' goals to the needs of the company, so that you both grow together.
Speaker 2:I love that. So you've always been in technology, but you haven't always been in HR per se, but you've hired a bunch of people, right?
Speaker 3:That's true. I think I've probably hired I want to say it's somewhere between 250 and 500 people. Okay, okay, more than 10.
Speaker 2:Got it? How did you back then, when you were doing that and you're still doing that now, with Tiller, of course. But how did you evaluate people's skills? What was your going to go to back then? What was your go to understand if they were, let's say, a Python developer, java developer, whatever the bit was? How did you understand the breadth and depth of their skills?
Speaker 3:Yeah, this probably isn't the right answer. I've always had it on intuition.
Speaker 2:Oh, there's a right answer. I'd like to know it.
Speaker 3:I'm just one of. I'm highly intuitive, it's one of my skills, and so I have done almost all my hiring on intuition, but I recognize that is not how everyone can do their hiring. When it comes to technical skills, I have led technical teams. I'm not technical, so you lie on the right people on your team to do those technical screenings. You can obviously employ tools to help you with that. I'm always a big fan of the human-to-human interaction and I've also seen a lot of good candidates get screened out of technical screens.
Speaker 2:See, I'm glad that you admitted intuition, because I'm also that way, and I think you live in an era now where you're like, no, it's got to be, everything's got to be, math oriented, that's it. I don't know if I believe that.
Speaker 3:I actually think it's limiting when you're not able to use intuition, at least to a degree. I worked in crypto in the early days and the people who wanted to work with us they were so passionate and the way we hired. I don't even think we ever looked at a resume. It was like someone would apply and they would tell us here's what I want to do, here's what I know I can do. And the resume didn't necessarily say they could do that, which means their experience didn't necessarily show they could do whatever the job was they're applying for. But sometimes all people want is that opportunity to prove that they can do what they know they can do, just because the resume, the piece of paper, doesn't say it. And so we hired people and we let them prove it. We let them be accountable. Let them. Maybe that's not the right phrase.
Speaker 2:I don't know I understand what I mean. I 100%.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it created the best culture, where it was a team environment. Everyone loved what they were doing, and I think that this is what everyone wants. We want to prove that we can do what we know we can do and what we want to do, and it's actually one of the best teams I've ever worked with, because we hired in a very non-traditional way.
Speaker 2:I think, especially at the early stages of crypto who had a master's degree in crypto. So it's okay. Who's the expert here? Obviously, there are people who are experts, but everyone else just. There's a lot of potential, a lot of potentiality, and there are a lot of excitement too. I think there's still a lot of excitement in crypto.
Speaker 3:That's exactly it.
Speaker 2:So Skills First, talent Development first of all. I love all of this because it helps with so many things. It proliferates. I came back from SHRM and it was exciting from this perspective. There were so many people and there were so many people in the Expo Hall that the Expo Hall closed at two on the last day and they didn't get everyone out of the Expo Hall until five.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 2:It was crazy. I've never seen anything like it, quite frankly, and I like that, and not everybody was buying, but there was a lot of shopping. There was a lot of people in there really talking to people, which I found great, and this was something that came up routinely was okay Skills First hiring, of course, like we talked about, but also skills-based everything. Okay. Internal mobility has this help us? Compensation, succession, everything it leads to, if we understand skills, it touches all facets of HR.
Speaker 3:It's actually crazy if you think about it. Why have we operated businesses for so long understanding the higher people to do but not actually understanding what they can do? Doesn't even make sense.
Speaker 2:We have no excuses. At one point 100 years ago, you could say I just have no idea. There's just no data and I'm really busy and I can't ask the people. Okay, good, fair enough. But we have plenty of access points, especially data-wise now where we can actually know these things.
Speaker 3:Exactly. We know these things and we're getting to the point that this isn't something you can do in Excel, and we talked to a 12,000 person prospect yesterday. That's how they were doing it. Excel it's limiting, because all they're able to do is understand a few key skills for every job family. They don't know the size of people and we showed them our product and they were like yes, this is what we want, because-.
Speaker 2:We can't make an Excel spreadsheet this detailed. I've joked about this all the time. Microsoft Office is the largest HR tech company in the world because people use Word, excel, outlook, some of the other products as well, teams etc. If you look at it and I actually talked to the HR tech the person runs HR tech for Microsoft. I did an analyst briefing with them at Unleash and I said why don't you just build it? It's not playing because we have no interest in building it.
Speaker 3:You're interested.
Speaker 2:She's from Seattle, she's close to you actually. She just said we have no interest, zero interest, in building an HR tech play because we have a consumer compact, if you will, that we don't want to ever want our covenant I think she uses the word we don't ever want to break that. We want to partner with other people that are building those things, that are taking those things to market. We have no interest, zero interest. I'm like okay, I got that answered.
Speaker 3:It's good know what you're good at and you don't bring in experts and partners. For the rest, I think it's good strategy.
Speaker 2:Isn't that interesting, because they could. I don't know if it would be that great, but they could build something. I want to get into the application itself. Skills first, talent development. At one point you got to do some type of inventory or audit. How do we know what someone has currently, maybe what potential that they have? What are we calling now tangential skills? Transferable verbal skills? There's a lot of different words that we use to convey the things that they don't have but could have. So take us into the app.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a great starting point and you're right. The core pieces are we need to understand the skills of your workforce and we have a really engaging, easy to use onboarding and it takes you through a few steps. Step one is we show you the skills for your existing role. Now we don't show you the proficiency or the importance they've been ranked because we don't want people gaining the system, but we'll show you first the skills for your role, then and so you can click on which ones you have, what your proficiency is in those skills We'll then take you through the skills that are important to the organization, because we want everyone talking the same skills language.
Speaker 3:We want to make sure we're noting which skills people have that are relevant to the role, and then we'll take you through job experience, education, volunteer and life experience. We don't typically think of ourselves as a collection of skills and we help people do that, and one of the things we've done that's so important is the volunteer and life experience, because we don't all have the same networks and connections, we don't all have the same opportunities, and it's really important that we allow people to bring their full selves, to work their whole experience so that we can create more equity and inclusivity.
Speaker 2:So skills versus competencies? Maybe it's not a versus what's, because some folks have grown up in the world of building competencies models and I've never seen I've seen a lot of people try. I've never actually seen them work and skills seems to be a bit more easier to approach. I don't know why that is. It probably might be, maybe it's just me, but what's been your experience with kind of people, how people look at skills and how people look at historically looked at competencies?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think one of the things we're seeing is that some people use them interchangeably and talking about competencies when they're using skills. But if we're talking about how we would view competencies versus skills, a competency would be a collection of skills. It can be easier to drill down to skill level and I think it's easier for the individual because, well, there are a lot of people who overrate themselves. There's a lot more people who underrate themselves, and I think when you give a competency and it's higher level, it's a lot harder to say, yes, I can do that, whereas when you break that competency down into 10 skills, someone who has eight of 10 may not have given themselves the competency, but you'll know they have the eight skills and so, yeah, and so I think it can just be an easier way to think of ourselves.
Speaker 3:And just a step further on getting accuracy as proficiency as another piece of this, your standard scale is beginner to expert. But what does that mean? We had a co-op student tell us they were an expert in coding language, and when we asked them what made them an expert, they told us well, I'm taking a course next semester. Yeah, exactly, there's just, there's no.
Speaker 2:No, the jaded part of me is going to go. I'm just going to say it. I think that candidate was male.
Speaker 3:It was. It was, of course, and but this is part of the problem. Right, you have women who are from a pretty deserving groups, who are under some of its humility too.
Speaker 2:I've also found this, and I know you're Canadian, so I'll say this to your face. I've also found this with Canadians as well, and not regardless of background or gender or the other things that most Canadian folks that interact with are super humble. You're not going to tell you how often you're going to be. Somebody on the other like 40 miles south.
Speaker 3:You know, someone will say to me like oh, you're a CEO. And I'm like oh, yeah, but it's a small company. And I'm like why do I keep saying that You're?
Speaker 2:right, it's just a small company, yeah, something, or just yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right we very humble.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so when it comes to competency, we have put a lot of research into it and we have clearly defined levels that also don't have judgment on them. So instead of saying one to five, or beginner to expert or no joke, I saw one that was baby chicken to ninja, we actually say we are, we say I have learned the skill.
Speaker 3:I have not used the skill I can use the skill with a little bit of help, Like we've just. We've made it so much easier to not over or underrate yourself, which is super important.
Speaker 2:So what you take on the life shelf of our exploration of a self and of a skill, and what I want, what I'm really trying to figure out my own mind, is this idea, concept of micro skills, things that you acquire, like every day we're building something, like we're using our mind to do some things where we're evolving some skill I'm not sure what it is, but something but also something's being diminished. I don't mean that in a bad way, just we haven't touched that in a while, so it's not. I think skills have historically been looked at as you've achieved them and then, if you don't ever do it again, you still have that skills. I struggle personally. This is my struggle I struggle with if you haven't touched Java in, let's say, 10 years, you're probably not still at that level. Yeah, you could probably ramp up pretty quickly, but you're not quite at that level. Like, first of all, am I off? You do this for a living. So, first of all, you're totally right.
Speaker 3:I think about myself. I went to French immersion from grade one all the way through to university.
Speaker 3:I went to a campus here I have a bilingual honors, but I have not really used my French since I'm going to date myself, but since 2006, essentially, and when it's spoken, I can understand it, I can read it, but if I were to go into a job and say I'm bilingual, it would not be the truth at this point. And could I have a refresher and get back up? Yeah, I've been playing around on Duolingo, so I think this is also part of it is being self-aware about. I might have worked in marketing for the first five years of my career, but now it's been another 15 years and I haven't used skills.
Speaker 3:Things change, and part of how our platform can pick up on that is that again, we're breaking it beyond the competency of marketing down to the actual skills and the skills change. If you haven't done marketing in 10 years, maybe you don't know how to use Snapchat or TikTok or one of these tools that are so popular today, and so you can pick up on some of it in that way. But it does require a certain degree of self-awareness, which is why we've got your individual proficiency ratings, but then we're also just about to launch manager proficiency ratings and then peer proficiency ratings, so you've got that little bit of a combo score because it'll just be that much more accurate getting the three views in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everyone lacks in training. So first of all say this about executives, board members, all the way throughout. Like everyone, there's a lack of training for everybody. But I've keyed in the last couple of months on online managers, mid managers, hiring managers, all the folks in the middle, let's say they don't get any training. It's just, it's really obnoxious. Like early stage employees, there is some training. You're about to do a job yeah, we should probably train. You got it. But at one point they get promoted to a level. Yeah, we just forget that bit, we just. Janet, you've been promoted. Great, go do it.
Speaker 3:Even your most basic level of training, which is onboarding, is missing. I'll tell you, I joined you in an executive level role but the lack of onboarding and basic things like tell me what each of these acronyms mean, I think it affected my productivity even two years into that role, where I wouldn't understand what's going on in conversation because of the way people were speaking. So I think basic level of onboarding is the most important training when someone's starting a role. But you're right about leadership. When we launch in a company, I'd say eight times out of 10 training leaders is the most or one of the most important priorities that the company has to start out with.
Speaker 2:So where do we, where does that data? Where does our data go? Like we're okay, so the four walls will tell her I'm totally good at it. But does it impact or does it give any information or visibility or insight into other platforms? Does it pull data from other platforms?
Speaker 3:We do pull data from other platforms. So we pull a lot of market data around. Which skills are the current let's say, trending skills for each role? Because we don't just want to set people up for success in the present and train them for their next career goal. We want to make sure that people are staying relevant. There's this corn fairy stat. I read that they're projecting $8.5 trillion of unrealized revenue in the US alone in 2030, because companies won't have the skills they need to compete. So we're pulling that market data. So on a quarterly basis, you can go and look at your roles. We'll recommend skills for your roles that we're seeing in the market so you can add them and start training people and making sure that you're being more forward thinking about keeping the skills you need in your workforce and in your company.
Speaker 2:Wow, Okay. So what's the challenge? Because everything makes sense to me so far. What's the objection that your sales team or some of your folks have? Once they've talked to somebody, they're showing them software. Everybody loves it. Why would they say no?
Speaker 3:So I think learning and development is an interesting space, because, well, we all know that the number one reason people leave their jobs is lack of development. Our answer has been this L&D perk, which is hey, here's $500 a year, and then people don't know what they want.
Speaker 2:They're learning, they're not going to the abyss of the LMS. And have fun, that's it.
Speaker 3:Someone goes and learns how to play guitar. They come back and want to play guitar for the company and you're like, but we don't need someone to play guitar. And then you just create frustration. And then you have leadership and finance who want to cut back these L&D budgets because they're delivering no results, no retention results, no growth results, they're just not getting a return on that investment. And so it's a big mindset shift to say, hey, now we're going to move to this method, we're going to be able to do everything. So we do often get people who are like I'm obsessed with this, I want it. They try to go sell it to leadership and it seems like a bigger undertaking than it is, even though, honestly, we've made it so easy. And the other objection we are facing a lot and this is temporary is HR budgets Like they are the first to be frozen, even though in my opinion they should be the last to be frozen. Like, without your people, you are nothing, and so that's that's so.
Speaker 2:I give you a. I'll give you a hack on that and you'll hate it, but I'll give you a hack on that. So, even in a recession, there are three things that don't get cut from HR's budget. Okay, payroll, payroll technology, benefits technology. Now, some of those are reduced. We just laid off 10,000 people. Yes, you're using less payroll software, but you're still using payroll software, less benefits management software and anything targeting high potentials, high performers. So the hack for you, your hack, the hack for your team is you stop talking about employees and you literally just start talking more about your high potentials. You can't lose your high potentials, this is the future of your company, etc. And then, once the market comes back to you, then you can talk about everybody. But those are the three things. Historically, last 25 years I've been studying this those are the things that don't get cut during recession.
Speaker 2:That's a good tip We've got to change our language a little We'll have a different call about that. But yes, that's ultimately why we're going to this relief. It's a weird recession because, okay, the market's crazy, but yet unemployment in hourly and in some pockets of the market it's still crazy low and so it's not a real recession, not a recession that we've seen historically. Normally, when we have a recession, we have a talent surplus period. That's it. The market goes down, a lot of people are out on the market and we have a surplus of talent and so hiring becomes what's historically been called an employer-driven market and when it's tight it's then a candidate-driven market. I've basically, in the last year or so, I've just gotten rid of those words because it's like just talent drives the market period, whether or not you're in a recession, because Gen Z and millennials choose not to work. So those historical kind of ways that we've looked at things and supply and demand they're outdated because the talent has decided to work differently. So really you don't vacillate between employer and candidate anymore. It's just a talent-driven market period in the story.
Speaker 2:We could talk about that forever. Two buying things that definitely. I want to ask you One is your favorite part of the demo Tiller? So when you, on the occasion, get to show people Tiller for the first time. What's your favorite part?
Speaker 3:My favorite part changed yesterday. We launched something new to production.
Speaker 2:Alrighty, here we go.
Speaker 3:Which to me, is a little game-changing, which is a team dashboard, which means that, as a people leader, I can view my team and listen. I can view it in different ways. I can view my whole team. I can view by people leader, I can view by department, but I can view my team and I can go and see the impact of the training currently being done, ie, are people working on closing skills gaps and upskilling or are they working on things unrelated to their current job? I can see-.
Speaker 2:And unrelated. To just be clear, unrelated isn't necessarily bad.
Speaker 3:No, absolutely not, Just for the audience. Yeah, so that's a great question. If you have 10 skills gaps on your team and there are five people learning and three of five of them are closing skills gaps, great. You also want people working on their goals on items for succession. But if you have 200 skills gaps and only one person's closing one, that's for you. So you have to use the data, but it's-.
Speaker 2:But looking at this, you can see everybody in totality. You can see what we're actually doing as an organization and what's not being worked on worked versus what's maybe being over indexed.
Speaker 3:That's exactly. You can see that piece of it as well. That's interesting. The heat map Interesting. Yeah, we have those heat maps for you. They're right, they're writing more dashboards of the product and that is cool. We'll also show you the impact that investing in each individual has on the company high, medium, low and the impact investing on your team has on the company, so that when you're asking for money, what sort of impact you can make. We will show you and you can sort your team by who has the highest skills gap? Who would have the highest impact? You can also sort by skill when is my biggest gap in terms of skill? And then you could develop a course around your top two skills gaps. And it really just allows people leaders to invest in their team to help their people succeed and to help them achieve their goals in the company. And, as someone who has loved being a people leader because I love helping others achieve it's just such a great way to actually understand how to invest in people and help them grow.
Speaker 2:I love this is eventually, if not now, this data can be used on the front end in terms of acquiring talent, and even internally it can help promote people into positions where there's gaps.
Speaker 2:So you can look at this and say you can look at this and say, okay, we need to acquire, we don't have this skill. No one's actually moving, making movement into this skill. We need to hire for that skill. That kind of makes sense. But also the internal mobility part of then saying, hey, we have this gap. We now can recognize that we have this gap and no one's making a real clear movement. Oh wait, a minute, Sandy's made fantastic movement to that we can promote Sandy and like we can cover that. It's like coverage. We can now cover that gap with someone that internally that has already acquired those skills or been working on those skills, et cetera.
Speaker 3:I love this. I think one of your favorite parts of the platform would be we have a Boolean search so you can find people based on skills. So if you have a project or you have an open role, we can show you who matches. But you can toggle between who has the skills and who wants the skills. So we also help you build project teams and use work as a development opportunity by saying, okay, I need three people. I'm going to put these two people that are pretty proficient and this additional person who wants to learn the skill. So we already have some of what you're talking about, and I could talk forever, but I have really great ideas of what we want to do for the hiring space as well.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So last question is a question in the sense of what would you, if you could script questions for practitioners when they're evaluating skills, for talent development platforms or suites of products, et cetera? What would you have them ask you? Because this is one of the reasons I started this particular podcast was I wanted to help educate practitioners as to what should be asking Like when you're evaluating software. It looks great. I think we have the problem. What questions would you love to field in your sales team and everybody Attila? What should practitioners be asking you?
Speaker 3:I think they really need to ask and drill down on the skills piece.
Speaker 3:Ai is super hot right now, but one thing that is really important to remember about AI is it's great when the use case is there, but when we're talking about skills, I see a lot of platforms that are doing AI inferred skills. But when AI is inferring skills, that means that if you and I both had marketing manager job titles, ai is going to infer skills based on that. You could be doing social media and I could be doing it home, but we're going to land the same skills. That's not valuable. So I would definitely encourage, if you're evaluating a skills-based solution, to ask especially if it's AI inferred like how are you going to capture the unique skills of an individual rather than generalize skills based on their job titles? That, to me, is one thing that's really important. And then also, like with many things, ask about how the platform has built in the ability to be equitable and inclusive, because there's a danger that if that hasn't been thought about, the things could actually be worse than they are to be put in.
Speaker 2:Try it. And then we saw that in the Amazon when they did their first kind of AI on the hiring side. It failed and I didn't take them to task for that. I'm like it's going to fail, it's supposed to fail, that's okay. Everyone lashed out of it and was like, oh, they use it and it predicted that white men and they're like, okay, yeah, it's going to fail. It's artificial intelligence. It's not quite intelligent yet, so give it a break. It's kind of infant level. It will get intelligent over time.
Speaker 3:I think it's hard when you don't work in the space to remember that I'm reading a book right now called AI 2041. We are still years away from a lot of the AI use cases Now. It's made a huge leap recently. We know that, but that doesn't mean it's going to get everything perfect for many years.
Speaker 2:We set the bar very high with artificial intelligence. Artificial, yes, good, good word. Intelligence, that's a high bar. That's a high bar for humans, yes, I'm going to use that line.
Speaker 3:That's a really good point.
Speaker 2:It's artificial, almost better than humans. Okay, good, now we can move it and change it and rebrand it over time. We started with this high bar. It's artificial intelligence. It's artificial for sure. Yeah, I've got that, leah, I could talk to you forever. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for having me today.
Speaker 2:And thanks for everyone listening Until next time.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Recruiting Daly's Use Case Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite platform and hit us up at RecruitingDailycom.