The emergence of skills-based organisations in recent years has proven to be a game-changer for many employers. This total talent solutions model enables progressive companies to attract, retain, and develop talent by leveraging skills to their fullest potential. Empowered by innovative tech stacks and generative AI solutions, the skills-based organisation is poised to evolve further in sophistication.
However, we acknowledge that the true change-makers driving the workforce revolution are the bold HR leadership teams, creating value for their organisations and meeting current and future talent demands.
Our APAC & EMEA Managing Director, Steve Brown, had the privilege of interviewing Noel Brown, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at HSBC, to delve into how HSBC is reshaping its talent function to offer a more seamless, unified, and customer-focused platform.
Where is HSBC on its journey to build a skill-based hiring culture?
Technology and Data:
How are technology and data influencing how talent is acquired, developed, and retained?
Leaps in technology have fundamentally reshaped how we operate across the employee lifecycle. We have more information than ever before—greater insights into our workforce, the labour market, and the skills we need to make our growth strategy a reality. Most importantly, we can now bring all this together for our customers to enable business decision-making.
As Josh Bersin discussed with our team, our recruiting, selection, promotion, and demotion data is textual. We generally consider experience, opinions, and job-related tests to make decisions about talent. So, to analyse the skills (and, therefore, the potential) of our workforce, we need to decode work outputs, leadership frameworks, CVs, assessments, and business results.
This is where Generative AI and Large Language Models can help us make sense of the complexity. Use cases include creating content for job descriptions and onboarding tools, creating skill models and candidate profiles for recruiting, analysing and improving salary benchmarks and rewards, providing feedback for coaching and development, and knowledge management.
For the first time, our tools and governance can keep pace with work as it changes. They can help us define the work, match the person to the work, report on how the work is managed, and improve it.
Are any specific tools or platforms particularly impactful in this space?
We're right at the best part of our multi-year transformation - it's go time! We're radically changing everything from how we present ourselves to the world, who we hire, and what we look for to our foundational technology, processes, and operating model. We know that to maintain a competitive edge in a 'hot' talent market, we need to change what we look for in potential hires, be sophisticated and proactive in identifying talent, have the ability and brand reputation to attract the world's best people, and structure ourselves to 'follow the talent'.
A couple of specific tools and platforms have helped us make our ambitions a reality. Some of them are existing—we use Degreed for information on how our workforce is learning and upskilling and Gloat to provide a Talent Marketplace where our workforce can access new projects and learning opportunities. Both integrate with our existing Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to create a feedback loop for those who want to develop and grow their skills.
Some of our tools and platforms are new. We're bringing in SAP Recruitment as our new global ATS and introducing AI into our recruitment from Q4 this year. Leveraging purpose-built, deep-learning AI will empower our recruiters to act as career counsellors - using data-driven insights to match internal and external potential with opportunity at any point in their careers. We'll use AI to go beyond the resumé, shifting from hiring for just experience to hiring for skills as well. However, we're careful to balance opportunity with risk.
With the help of TechWolf, an AI workforce analytics solution, we've already trialled how we can gain intel on our internal skillset, harmonise our skills data with our existing tech eco-system, and stand-up a 'control centre' to maintain and ensure our skills data evolves with the market. We've inferred skills data at a global scale - developing our skills taxonomy and mapping skills to tens of thousands of jobs.
Finally, I can't understate how powerful a rigorous forward-thinking approach to demand planning can be in linking people strategy to business strategy. We've invested heavily in our hiring demand planning capability in an effort to hire 60% from plan by next year. This will help ensure bank-wide hires are strategic and proactive and enable us to flex delivery and experience accordingly.
The skills-based organisation represents a convergence of talent acquisition, talent management, and people & capability functions, leading to the potential integration of roles and evolution of the overall platform:
How have you seen talent acquisition evolve into HSBC's broader talent management strategy?
In our Talent function, we're working more closely together than ever before. With the partnership of my counterparts in People Capability, Workforce Strategy and Insights, and People and Organisation Strategy, we're breaking down historical silos to ensure that we can operate as a collective. From a customer perspective, we're already there - they want the Total Talent picture, and it's up to us to ensure their experience is seamless and unified. Our business leaders need help in making informed decisions from everything from skills to succession to investment choices.
We've already taken the opportunity to merge Talent Acquisition and Talent Management in a structural way. We have roles that span the two in some of our regions and business areas, which will continue to evolve over time.
We're also approaching Talent Management in a cohesive way for two of our key candidate segments - leadership and executive and emerging talent. We now understand critical roles and succession in detail to be able to fill needs (internally and externally) for our senior leaders. Our graduate cohort for 2024 (freshly onboarded this month!) will also benefit from a skills-based, joined-up view of talent. They've been attracted and hired based on skills required for success on the programme. Their on-programme development journey will advance existing skills and establish additional skills required for 'destination roles' defined for each business area. This unlocks greater talent mobility, scalability, and intentionality for our proposition.
What factors are driving this shift towards a more holistic talent management approach?
Both external and internal factors are driving us towards holistic talent management.
Externally, we know that falling birth rates, early retirements, and lower labour force participation will soon cause a deficit of millions of employees worldwide. There are a record number of job openings, and not enough people to fill them. And this 'demographic drought' is about to get worse - by 2030, Korn Ferry estimates a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million - or $8.5 trillion in unrealised annual revenues.
Internally, HSBC has a laser focus on efficiency and productivity - meaning we have a clear mandate: hire less but better. Our Global Head of People and Organisation Strategy recently led a bank-wide exercise to define our 'future-state workforce', helping us understand the shape of the bank out to 2028. Doing so has highlighted the need to think about talent differently - with a greater emphasis on talent cycling, internal mobility, and upskilling/ reskilling. We've benefited from a wonderful partnership across the Talent team - joining the dots for our customers to cohesively inform their buy, build and borrow strategies to achieve their growth strategies, partnering closely with our Global Head of Inclusion to ensure a DEI overlay.
What aspects should HR and Talent Leaders consider if they want to integrate the specialisations to offer one holistic talent management approach to the business?
The key point of convergence is a shared outcome. We know our job as an HR function is to create value and enable a highly skilled and highly productive future-state workforce. Importantly, we also know (and can communicate outwardly) how we will achieve it: the advisory role we can play to the business and the clear set of products and services on offer that reflect and represent the employee lifecycle.
We've also created the guardrails to make sure we remain unified. Our Talent Design Authority meets monthly to provide Talent-wide oversight over the critical decisions and workstreams that will shape our function and workforce. Recently, skills have been the focus of many of these discussions. Through skills, we find a common 'Talent currency' through which we can link the future-state workforce 'blueprints' with our nearer-term hiring and capability demand plans.
What are the benefits to business leaders, the organisation, and the talent management community as a whole of converging roles to offer a more holistic approach?
I see three key benefits in a holistic approach:
1. We can better enable business strategy. Together, we can join our planning and investments to provide value for the organisation in a more directed, intentional way - for a better bang for our buck.
2. We can provide optionality for our business leaders. We can now offer a complete Talent picture, giving leaders the visibility they need to choose where to place their bets.
3. We can provide opportunity for our community. Linking up helps us provide a better offering for our workforce. Focusing on skills and skill adjacencies will help us connect our people with short—and longer-term opportunities internally—anywhere in the business and anywhere in the world.
Measuring Success:
What key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics could be used to evaluate effectiveness?
For me, the biggest performance metric is talent vitality. How can we improve our succession management, quality of hire, quality of pipeline, speed to productivity, and diversity of candidate/ new joiner through the combined benefits of the work we're doing across the function?
Right now, I'm also questioning how we can think of productivity as a Talent function - linking FTE to revenue. I want HSBC to be market-leading.
Future Outlook:
Are there any emerging trends or developments within talent acquisition and talent management that you believe will have a significant impact in the years to come?
I believe a couple of the trends I've mentioned above will continue to have a significant impact: AI will continue to disrupt the industry, sunsetting some skills and sunrising new skills that are harder to automate; talent will continue to be scarce, meaning that we'll have to be creative about a) attracting and winning the talent we need in the market, and b) unlocking potential within the talent we already have.
Another trend I'm anticipating is the evolution of our workforce composition. The gig economy is on the rise, and this time, it's likely to stick. With remote work more accessible than ever and ongoing economic disruptions (not limited to the pandemic), we're seeing younger workers are especially seeking the flexibility and autonomy that independent work can provide. The question for me becomes - how do we tap into this growing demographic?
Skills (again!) seem to be the solution. Skills are by no means new. They are, however, a good way to decouple work from the job - and capabilities from the worker. By atomising our jobs into projects or tasks or broadening them to be focused on problems to be solved or outcomes achieved, we can more fluidly match individuals' skills and interests to evolving business priorities. Skills are also transportable. They can move between employer and industry and between our internal business lines. Reducing barriers to entry can only be a good thing - setting us up for a more scalable, manageable and equitable way of working.
Finally, I'm interested in seeing how culture plays into talent acquisition and management. With an increased focus on what skills, traits and attributes can predict performance in-role, we're seeing things like curiosity and learning agility come to the fore. I'm excited to see how we can create a value proposition where HSBC attracts and encourages our next generation of curious workers.
