The Use Case by RecruitingDaily
RecruitingDaily discusses with guests how practitioners make the business case or the use case for purchasing their technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better.
The Use Case by RecruitingDaily
Storytelling About AstrumU With Adam Wray
Ever wondered how AI can turbocharge your hiring process? Are you curious to know how a deep understanding of individual skills can revolutionize recruitment? Then buckle up, as Adam Wray from AstrumU joins us for a riveting conversation, shedding light on the potential of an AI data platform in skill-based hiring. He delves into how this technology identifies and measures skills. Moreover, he emphasizes its potential to bridge the gap between industry, education, and individuals - creating a clearer path for job seekers, employers, and educators alike.
As we journey through this discussion with Adam, we explore the value of non-traditional degrees and how they aid in nurturing critical thinking skills. We're breaking down biases and challenging the status quo. It's about appreciating the lifelong value of critical thinking, and how AI can quantify it. We also discuss the shelf life of skills and the importance of understanding an individual's unique skill set. Notably, Adam shares how AstrumU uses AI to assess and map these skills to suitable roles, aiding job seekers in making informed career decisions.
In the final leg of our chat, we take a deeper look at AI's role in identifying individual skills and how this can shape recommendations for learning or work. Here's a thought - what if we could use philanthropic dollars to fund training companies connected to HRIS systems, reducing the cost of upskilling individuals? We ponder this innovative idea, and discuss the potential benefits for organizations like the Texas Workforce Commission in understanding how military skills translate to the corporate world. So, join us for this enlightening conversation and get ready to rethink hiring, education, and skill development through the lens of AI.
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Welcome to Recruiting Daly'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. Here's your host, William Tincup.
Speaker 2:This is William Tincup and you're listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today we have Adam on from AstrumU and we'll be learning about the business case, so the use case for why, as prospects and customers choose AstrumU. Let's do some introductions. Adam, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself and AstrumU?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I'd love to. It's great to be here, and Adam Ray, based out of Seattle, we'll see you on the corner of AstrumU. We're an AI data platform company that focuses on understanding and extracting skills of individuals so that they can understand better what pathways are available to them through learning or working to get advancement and opportunity.
Speaker 2:That's nice. So the skills you're helping employees, not necessarily candidates, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so really it's fundamentally, if you look at the problem statement we're trying to solve, is there's this gap between industry and education on what's really created outcomes.
Speaker 3:The problem is that the educators have one point of view, the HR and the hiring managers have another and the individual has a third and nobody talks the same language and leaving everybody behind, right, and so you get a lot of inefficiency, a lot of waste, and so what we want to do is create, through data, transparency around that so that people can start to understand and ask a simple question what education short form, medium form, long form, etc. And I leverage to get the necessary skills to be successful on this opportunity in front of me, and that could be a person looking for a new job, is in workforce training to traditional degrees, or that could be a person within an employer's environment who's?
Speaker 3:sitting here and going. I want to upscale to the next opportunity and pathway, and so we have a data platform that is, a set of API services that people can build, lego block solutions to take on these problems and ultimately we're always extracting different skills so we can measure where the individual is and then we're matching that ultimately to an outcome through education, to an ultimate job or role. And for us, the uniqueness is when we focus not on the large cohorts, like everybody that looks isn't the same. We focus on the individual and we're after verified data such as their transcripts, hr information, etc. We can help to build a rich profile of the distances they've uniquely traveled so they can understand their skills.
Speaker 2:And so we're looking at skills where we're looking at skills three dimensionally, or we're looking at micro skills, transferable skills, tangential skills. The way that people talk about skills is fascinating to me, especially in this era, right now, the last year or two of our skills based hiring. So we've seen in our world. We've seen everything and hiring get flipped on its head and say we don't care anything, we just care about skills. It's okay, how do you measure skills? I had I hand coded HTML and 95. Do I still have that skill?
Speaker 3:You're an excellent developer. Still to this day, right HTML hasn't changed at all.
Speaker 2:No, not at all right. It's like when the WYSIWYG came along for HTML. I'm like I don't know what this thing is. This is crazy. It's crazy All these colors and things that kind of show me no, I just need to hand code it.
Speaker 3:But you know what my point is? Yeah, I was here when you were going. I think that the challenge here really is everybody says they want to do skills-based hiring and nobody out knows how to do it, it's because A.
Speaker 3:Nobody really has a common way in which they look at skills. Everybody has their own skills rubric, their own way of defining. We think this is the next new challenge because if we're really going to continue to grow as a country and society and also create more opportunity for people, especially for marginalized communities, we're going to have to figure out a way to start capturing skills that go beyond the pedigree we're going to need to get to the people who have other things that they bring to the table are highly valued by employers but they can't be trusted. So I'll give you a use case example Veterans. Veterans come out, they go through an immense amount of training that is captured in what's called the JST, a joint service transcript, and other documents that are military transcripts. But the employers have no way of understanding. They have no way of understanding the training they might have gone through, the experiences they might have gone through, and what those skills mean to that particular role and opportunity.
Speaker 3:So we started a pilot with the Army at Fort Riley in Kansas and a Transition Assistance Program TAP basically to start breaking down soldiers JSTs and their other transcripts that are from the military, such as ERBs or ORBs that capture an Army, all these things that they do and learn along the way, which the world doesn't know what it means to them, but they're real valuable skills communication, leadership, logical allocation, cognitive, analytical skillset from the durable to a technical.
Speaker 3:And then we compile those all into a profile after we actually extrapolate out the transcripts themselves, what their skills are, and then map it automatically to a role and opportunity, so that the soldier can know two things One, what's the top three roles I'm available for right now in the civilian world that I didn't realize my skills were applicable? And two, what are the top three roles I could get to? That there's a skills gap that education could specifically be recommended to go address, and so that's how we hope to enable more people to transition back into civilian workforce, to have opportunity to scale and grow, because they bring a lot of value. But right now society just has a hard time understanding the package.
Speaker 2:So, inside of a corporate environment, what is actually a you? What is it connected to? Is it connected, is it thought of or connected to the learning and development? Is it internal mobility, like I know the audience is going to wonder? Okay, sounds great, totally get it needed, because it's where it's the future, of course. Now, where does it get data from and inside of that environment, the HR platform, etc. All of the technology that HR has, and recruiting to the sub-degree what does it need to be tied to for folks?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, that's a great question. So, obviously, thinking back to the fact that we're putting together a data platform with a lot of API services that use cases can be built on, and some of those use cases are repeatable ones that we're scaling out, others can be- an employer or a university doing something specific to their needs, just with different APIs.
Speaker 3:What we've been doing historically is we've done some point projects with CERNR and T-Mobile doing an analysis on skills, building the profiles, feeding them back in, and they've used that typically in their HRIS system.
Speaker 3:We've actually got experience through that process translating, breaking down HRIS records, ats records and corporate learning management systems records, feeding it back in a scalable, systematized way.
Speaker 3:We haven't done yet, and so one of the things we just announced less than a month ago was a strategic partnership with CERNR, which I'm sure you'll know very well.
Speaker 3:We're working with the CEO and his number two over there, nick Schach, specifically on a project that we're teaming up the systematized workforce training, and what we mean by that is we want to index all of the workforce training type content based on skills and the individuals coming out of those programs and line them up in a way automatically to the opportunity and the role that the company has and then feed those individuals directly into the HRIS system, and so that could be a work day or an Oracle over time. So this is work we're going to go forth and do and we're actually putting a lot of great groundwork right now. But the goal here is that companies want, if they're going to do work skills-based hiring, they're going to need to be able to understand non-traditional paths where people are picking up these skills and working to break that down form so that they can then enable. And then CERN wants to be in a position to help hiring managers and HR begin to understand how to do skills-based hiring at scale.
Speaker 3:So you could think, if you play that over time, I'd expect we'll see things like certificates around skills-based hiring and skills-based knowledge, so that people can start to say, hey, the degree is important, but guess what? It's just part of a journey. People might bring a lot of experience and workforce. It doesn't directly translate, but if we can break those skills down through verified and then we have a way to process it into our HR system, then we have a way to hire these people and take advantage of that opportunity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think also in the traditional sense it also as we dig in we learn what we probably don't know about those things. So you got a degree in communications. One would assume you have the skill of writing, but that's just an assumption.
Speaker 3:Yes, there's some. I've met a lot of communications majors, yeah. And I'm not talking about my niece right now, by the way OK, Sorry, I didn't realize when I was getting you right and drove up the family.
Speaker 2:That's all right.
Speaker 2:But, like when you say the non-traditional, I really love that because, again, it unlocks a bunch of things where people didn't take a college route. Ok, great, there's all kinds of cool stuff that they've done. They've garnered these skills. We can test them. I have an understanding of what they have, what they don't, what's close to them. I love the living. People talk about contiguous skills. It's like you have this skill, but really you have this skill over here they just call it something different. Oh, ok, all right, that's cool.
Speaker 2:But when you mentioned the traditional sense, I thought to myself you know what? Especially, the further you go away from a degree, the further one drifts away from the degree one way or another. When I went to the University of Alabama, my career services person told me she said, listen, one in four, this is 91. So one in four graduate working their major. And I'm like say that again, 25%. I'm like 25%. And she goes yeah, and so really it's about getting a degree that you like, that you think that you're going to thrive in, and then something that's interesting to you. I'm like OK. So I picked art history and of course all my family was really very upset with me for a long time. What are you doing? Why are you going to college? Why are you spending this money on this? But yeah.
Speaker 3:The Renaissance education.
Speaker 2:It was Ironically enough.
Speaker 3:It served you well. It served you well, I just put.
Speaker 2:Most of my conversations, especially business conversations, will be more creative than they are about when I was in my MBA, more about formulas and platforms, rubrics and things like that. So it's actually funny, but anyhow, the traditional stuff. I'm assuming that we test out of these things and make sure that they the person with a communications degree actually can write.
Speaker 3:So there's. So I'm gonna answer a question, but I will digress back to your earlier comment on the Degree in your liberal arts background. Look, I run an AI company. I've been, I've been in cloud services, ai, distributed data and he's managing and leading engineering teams and data science teams. I've been in this stuff for the last 20 years, since before that wasn't an AI, was cloud services, then it was yeah, asp, let's go way back.
Speaker 2:Software developed over the end and delivered over the internet. What that can't?
Speaker 3:be done.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Followed by degree which I had to work two jobs. To go through school again Is an English degree with a minor in German and history.
Speaker 2:The humanities. The irony of the humanities degree is people look down on it, but it's the. It's actually the degrees that make you think.
Speaker 3:No, I agree I agree.
Speaker 2:Preach critical thinking is. What else do you need? You do, yeah, you need a lot of things, but critical thinking. They don't teach that in finance, it's another tactical skill.
Speaker 3:The biggest example is it's a. They're teaching you durable skills, yes, that have a period and the compounding value proposition as you you walk into more, whereas when you go finance or you go become an engineer, they're teaching you hard skills, but they have a shelf life. That's right that shelf life expires quicker and quicker the farther we go along Going on, whereas durable skills never expire. Yeah, it's like more valuable.
Speaker 2:It's like Moore's law applied to skills. Yeah. You know saying it's just a pace Today. It's just happening so rapidly that those skills that you learned last year they're not out of date but you're just not being used, especially in development languages. I found that you find somebody that's just they've learned, let's say, python. They learned Python, got deep into it, did a bunch of projects, are really great at it and all of a sudden they're almost out of work.
Speaker 3:Yeah, many people moved on to something else couple that up with what is large language models and generating To developers, I think you're gonna see a lot of entry-level roles, trinket size and options hundred percent.
Speaker 2:I'm sure it's gonna be. It's gonna be more of a architectural type of job where people again, if I can code using generative AI, why do I need to learn the language? Yeah, that's actually quite fascinating you.
Speaker 3:I think, like general AI is we. As soon as some of the stuff was available, we were all over it for automation and streamlining. But in answer to your earlier, question in regards to how we're understanding proficiency level. We have a lot of things we do to get at proficiency.
Speaker 3:And we think of this as a never-ending journey of us continuing to find new ways to parse out data that we can then extrapolate skills so that we can then make a matching learning or working recommendation. And so, underneath that concept, the traditional thought process is most proficiencies understood through direct assessments Right. Whereas everything in our engine is in direct assessment, we're using the inference-based engine.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting, so it can run behind and to the side of them. They don't have to do stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly. So, we're trying to use the experiences they bring, normalized against other verified data we can find, to get a sense of what level of proficiency first, what skill they have Right, then over time, what level of proficiency can we actually ascertain so that we can then say, hey, this person really does bring with a statistically relevant signal, this percentage of probability of skills for confidence. So we are always trying to get it down to a confidence score, which really is this what we know of you so far?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, based on the data is and your alignment to this opportunity, and based on the skills they need, but that we can see in real time in the industry. This is our confidence score. You're aligned in match.
Speaker 2:When individuals first see their astromuze scores, are they shocked. And what's there? I didn't know I had that skill, or we might know that I should have more of those skills. Is there anything that's off there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, so it's really been fun with soldiers because we're starting to really help them understand. I can't answer you. They've been surprised, I think, with a lot of people in traditional. We'll probably find over time but it will vary, but I really were. I think we help over time. It's especially going after answering your question indirectly but, yes, shocked. My best example of shocked was the amount of options available to Lieutenant Colonel, who is managing an entire Army base and he did not realize just how many different things he could do. He was actually aligned and successful for it because he was getting ready to matriculate out and he was actually incredibly concerned that he's going to only be able to flip burgers. And this man is running a base of a billion dollar budget and I'm like I admit you can actually do a little bit more than that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:In fact, we have a job opening. So a couple of tactical things Industry is there any particular industry that we care about? Market in terms of enterprise, global enterprise, mid caps, small and medium, SMB, etc. And my dreaded software category. I despise software categories at them, but I also know that a lot of these budgets are built in Excel. And so the budgets got to come from somewhere being called something. So let's start with. Is there any industry where we're playing first?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the industry playing first. We are focusing when it comes to the HR and corporate side of the world. We're focusing heavily on workforce training.
Speaker 3:So this is a real workforce development challenge in Conundrum, that the companies are trying to understand these people that are coming through non-traditional pathways. How am I going to understand their skills, alignments, my opportunity, and how am I going to understand which workforce training program, when everybody says they're the same great stuff, which one actually is the right one, aligned to me, based on quantitative data? So that's our area of focus, that budgetary work. This is just being very transparent back when we think we've been seeing companies take the HR teams, take these out of analytics.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But? But we've also seen an intriguing trend where we're in some of the conversations we're having with chief people officers, as well as even their CEOs, where they're looking at, because we have a lot of nonprofit partners that we work with like, for example, who's a large profit partner and they have a lot of foundation there's actually a discussion around hey, this stuff is needed at scale. Maybe we should be funding through the workforce training companies to buy your asset and connect it into us, because then they can tap into their philanthropic budgets that they're already giving for upscaling individuals and training as well as economic developments in their region. We're looking at that template of either how much of it has to be HR versus how much can it be tied back to putting ROI into philanthropy and they can fund these training companies to connect directly into the HRIS system and the bulk of the cost actually will go through philanthropic dollars.
Speaker 2:Well, no one likes to resell to government or NGOs things like that. But I'm thinking about I live in Texas the Texas Workforce Commission who helps people get jobs. They help people that are unemployed. I've interacted with them on a lot of different things. If they could actually understand, especially those translatable skills from the military to the corporate world, I think the good that they could do is exponential.
Speaker 3:I think there is a lot of dollars desperate to be able to crack these codes. If we put ROI behind those dollars, they tie back to not only the mission components of how do we help more people find the economic mobility, but the impact in the region, which is an economic development story of how do companies get people from their backyard. They have the skills necessary to do the role so we can grow. It's a powerful statement.
Speaker 2:If someone's never bought, I might ask you some buy side questions real quick, yeah, no, love it. If someone's never bought something like Astramu before, what are the questions that they should be asking of you?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the questions they should be asking of me is okay. Why are you unique in understanding these skills to be able to make these recommendations versus, say, a labor market analytics type firms or firms we've used to have.
Speaker 3:AI, such as an eight-fold AI. The question always comes down to the simple. Our approach to this balance is very unique and you should want to understand that we're verifying an individual skill at a micro level versus the macro. You truly understand the skills they bring to table, match to your particular role and opportunity, and our objective is to systematize that over time so you can ingest that into your hiring process and ultimately even apply it to your upskilling internal process. But we aren't doing that yet, but we have aims for it.
Speaker 2:All right, I see a lot of the internal mobility plays. They approach skills from a testing perspective. So they go to the individual. They test that person, whether or not it's on a scale of one to ten, whatever, which is great, but they're not really unpacking all the other stuff that's around that Also. I think that test just my own opinion. I think that test has the shelf life.
Speaker 3:Oh, agree, I agree with Laura and I would also be. It's terrible that, unfortunately, for example, so we've been some bad economic challenges in the last year or two, right, and so the what is the first thing? Every company cuts their training budget.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they immediately slash that because they consider that extra.
Speaker 3:I think we need to get to a point, based on the rapid change in technology, where companies are going to need to understand that investing in their own employees for upskilling is not an extra. It is an ROI differentiator that is critical to the success and longevity of your company.
Speaker 2:So when you get, so go finish your thought.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm just going to say so.
Speaker 2:We want to put a number to that Vigil so that they can do targeted it's almost in real time too, so that they understand, like a market index, that they can see where they're at with their skills. But they can also see they haven't done something in that skill. It's diminished, it's over time that degrades. I guess is a better way of thinking about it is skills can excel and they can degrade. And knowing where you are as an individual, where you are with those particular skills, is, I think, first of all, it's useful to understand the value you bring, because that could affect negotiations, compensation, internal mobility, going after a different job. So I think it's helpful for the person to understand that, hey, I haven't done that particular skill in a long time and it's degrading. That's not necessarily a bad thing. You did it at a certain point. You're great at it at a certain point. You don't need to be great at it now. The last question is when you get to show, people Ask from you for the first time what's your favorite part of the demo?
Speaker 3:So the favorite part of the demo is just showing them how we're extrapolating out things that they never even realized had value someplace else. If you go to our website, it starts right off with a video of Skill Set, which is our app that actually allows individuals to upload verified data sources, like transcripts, and immediately start to get a sense of where their skill base is and what options are in front of them. And I just get a kick out of that because I think people just don't realize how much their value they're really creating through their journey of life and they don't have a clue of how to apply it. We need to turn that into a quantitative discussion if we're going to really open up more opportunity for everybody.
Speaker 2:Jobs. Mike walks off stage. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been great.
Speaker 3:Hey, I really enjoyed it, William. It was a great conversation. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and thanks everyone for listening. Until next time.
