Workforce Transformation & Talent Strategy

Julia Nimchinski [ 01:00:32 ] welcome Tisha, we are transitioning to our next panel, I’m gonna be bringing our panelists from the attendees. How is everyone doing? I’m gonna be bringing Our panelists from the attendees, how is everyone doing? I’m hearing myself, that was weird. Justin Michael, how are you doing well? I was digging that panel, it’s really interesting right? Um, so many tech stacks, solutions, and the buying and selling AIs, so that’s something we’ve been predicting for a while now, um yeah this is gonna be a great one too. Workforce is changing, welcome! I like that. I got a promotion, I haven’t I gotten a promotion in a really long time, it’s awesome right? Kind of like yeah, for myself, I always feel like I’m demoting myself, so this is great. My self-esteem needed this. Thank you Julia. Awesome, um, while we are Waiting for Mary Shay, she’s gonna join us in a second. Let’s do a quick round of introductions. Mark, let’s start with you. Hey, I’m the uh chief marketing and AI officer at Competently, and I’ve also founded a B2B sales and marketing AI tool called Simplexity AI, and I’ve always enjoyed this hack skill exchange forum so Julia and Justin, thanks a lot for inviting me in. It was great having you here. Welcome Mary, you’re in mute

Mary Shea [ 01:02:54 ]… um, anyway, it’s great to see everyone and um, Julia, thank you, Justin, thank you for having me as always, I have been a huge supporter of everything the two of you have been doing over the last um, several years, and I just love to be part of the innovation and the innovation and the innovation but I want to thank you again for coming and I hope to see you again in the coming weeks, see you next week! And conversations that you all curate. So it’s a real honor to be here and I’m looking forward to a super dynamic conversation with some pretty exciting panelists here. Super excited to feature you always, Mary. You need no introduction in our community. We’re gonna be having a very exciting panel, workforce transformation and talent strategy.

Julia Nimchinski [ 01:03:38 ] And yeah, Mary, let’s set the stage. Tell us more about how you’re disrupting the recruiting space. Yeah, so thank you so much for that. And agreed, I don’t need an introduction because I’m very involved in your community. And yet I just wanna say that I’ve been following the marketing and sales technology landscape for just about 15 years now, Julia, right? And we’ve seen really exciting, exciting digital transformation and the adoption of at least rudimentary AI within the marketing function and sales function. And what I found as I was coming to the end of my time at Forrester was that I just kept leaning into this concept of, I wanna see what’s gonna happen in the future of work. Like the kind of transformation that we’ve seen and gone to market over the last decade plus is really ripe for the HR world.

Mary Shea [ 01:04:35 ] And so I now, I now find myself at the tip of the spear again at a company called Higher Quotient. And we provide a lot of different solutions for the HR professional. But what we find is that being an AI-first company, there’s great use cases for using generative AI models as well as advanced automation for sourcing and communicating with the best possible talent that’s out there. And as we start to think about, organizations of all shapes and sizes becoming more efficient, smaller, agile, enabled, and augmented with edge and other innovative technologies, having the right people in the right places are gonna be more important than ever. And so that’s kind of how I’m spending a lot of my time, if that’s helpful as just some context setting for the group.

Julia Nimchinski [ 01:05:29 ] Really exciting. Let’s go from the introductions, everyone. Brett. Found that mute button. Hi, everybody. I am Brett Sklar. I’m excited to be here. I think I spoke at one of the other sessions a while back and gosh, I hope that everybody enjoyed it as much as I did. And so glad to be back. My name is Brett Sklar. I run an organization of about 26 fractional chief marketing officers. And that company is called Grow Powered. I started it in 2020. We’ve had some great success, but really fueled our growth. Both in 2023 with the advent of AI. And I was able to grow and scale a business without a lot of operational overhead, thanks to the using the power of generative AI.

Brett Schklar [ 01:06:18 ] And in the last year, I’ve taken what I learned, packaged it up into a learning program called AI First Leadership, where I go to groups of CEOs and run workshops. And I teach them how to be CEO 2. 0 by harnessing the velocity of AI. And then I also go into companies and work with their entire leadership team to roll out what I call Leadership 2.0. And it’s again getting people unafraid, removing the fear of using AI, removing the fear of breaking stuff by using AI. And I’ve had a lot of fun and I’ve run probably 40 workshops this year. And I’m signed up to do about 60 of them next year, which is going to keep me pretty busy. So I’ve been having a lot of fun and that’s who I am.

Mary Shea [ 01:07:09 ] I was just sort of having a lot of fun to learn. Wow, I wanna come work for you, Brett. I know that’s not the purpose of this panel, channel, but you are at the heart of things. That’s so exciting. Who’s going to go next? I can go next. So I’m Mary Ellen Slater, and I’m the CEO and founder of RepCap. We’re a content marketing agency that’s been around now actually for almost 13 years, which I’m just going to keep saying until it breaks the superstition, like we have our birthday coming up. Before that, I was a journalist in the space and I worked for Smart Brief for many years on digital side. And then I was at the Washington Post for a long time before that, where I wrote as a financial reporter and I wrote a career advice column.

Mary Ellen Slayter [ 01:07:50 ] And this is important because I feel like I’ve now been telling, talking about the future of work for like 25 years, you know, and somehow where is my UBI in my, you know, four-day work week? It’s like none of these things have happened. None of these things have happened. I’m also quite bullish about AI, like in my work as a content person, and people are often surprised to hear that. I think it is changing the work. Absolutely. And like, you know, the other panelists, I actually spend a lot of my time now teaching other people how to use these tools ethically and responsibly in their work. And then the other piece of it is because I primarily work with HR tech companies, like those are our clients, is figuring out how to talk about the product and how to get people to use these tools in their work in ethical, responsible, transparent ways, because it absolutely has the power to make our work lives better.

Mary Ellen Slayter [ 01:08:38 ] But that’s a choice. That’s a choice, a set of choices that we’re going to have to make. So I was very excited to be brought here. And I love seeing the other panelists and I’m super stoked about this conversation. I’ll bring up the last slot then. So I’m Caitlin Clark-Zigmond . I’ve been an entrepreneur, part of three startups, four Fortune 500s, a career building multi-billion dollar products in the UCAS unified communication space, and then switched up into product marketing and marketing. Most recently building out like global demand centers and helping entities like Intuit, Intel, and others wrangle their portfolios and really take advantage not only of the solutions that they have, pull them together so that mid-market enterprise customers can understand them.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:09:29 ] And then in the middle of all that, do the MarTech transformation, bring in the AI tools, democratize the data, and actually build a go-to-market engine that product marketing, sales, and success use to work together and scale. So I’m really excited to be here. I was on the panel yesterday talking a little bit about what CXOs are interested in in AI and come 2025, and having been a leader and a builder of teams for a number of, sadly decades, or happily decades, depending on which end of the spectrum; essentially alternative. Yeah, exactly. I really want to talk a little bit about some of the United States, little bit about AI having seen the internet come

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:10:12 ] about watching mobile, you know, come about, you know, AI while you know is different it’s also the same in the sense that there’s the fear of where our jobs are going to be gone and look, the internet came about, and there’s lots more, you know, an opportunity this is going to be similar it’s not the same thing but it’s a similar thing and I think we need to get over the fear, understand how to embrace it, what it is, and what it isn’t. Um, you know, the internet we had the same thing and people thought it was going to take everyone’s job away and you know, it created lots of new ones and it changed what we could do. Just like we don’t I think I used this analogy yesterday; we don’t use washboards to wash our clothes, we use washing machines.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:10:53 ] Um, and yes, you could still go back and use a washboard but why would you, you know? So I think we all have opportunities here to take some of the drudge work that we have and put it aside, give it to AI tools, and leverage those things so that we can work on strategy better. Decisioning and taking our companies, or teams, along for a better, um, a better experience both revenue and from a work-life balance perspective. Um, so my name is Tisha Cable. Thank you. My name is Tisha Cable. I’m the CEO of a company called C Model Data, and we do something called decision intelligence which we believe is the last mile for artificial intelligence. So, we are all about helping business leaders to identify their problems first, and navigate from there into what solutions, including technology solutions.

Teasha Cable [ 01:11:47 ] We do that in a SAS platform, so one could use our tool to navigate through what their current process. Looks like what, um, so assess their current state then be able to determine where they’re going from there and what they need to do to get there. Uh, then measure their results in order to achieve their outcomes. The whole purpose was because when AI takes all of the repeatable and mundane tasks, the only thing that’ll be left for a business to do is to create something new, and so being able to continually create unique value, we believe is the most important asset of any business, and so we intend to help businesses to do that. Um, I got here from a 25-plus year career in everything from revenue operations, business operations, and Business development and product strategy, um, one of the organizations I worked for spent all of we spent all of our time on the business side of the business, uh, and this was years and years and years ago.

Teasha Cable [ 01:12:40 ] All of our time helping large large companies not be disrupted, uh, by exponential technologies like AI. So the conversation around this type of disruption is not, uh, new in my career space. I’m really grateful to be here because I talked to a lot of CEOs and CFOs right now just about the workforce and what they’re going to do because there’s a current disruption, uh, in the space. What an amazing panel, we’ve got 45 minutes. and the stage is yours thank you julia thank you so much um to the esteemed panel i’m just so thrilled to have you all here so let’s get at it um i’d love to start with mark um and we’re going to start broadly and and we’ll get down to um some things that very specifically focus on revenue and go to market but mark how do you see the future of the business and how do you see the future of the business and how do you see the

Mary Shea [ 01:13:36 ] future of work shaping up in the next five years the pace of change is so fast i can’t even imagine looking beyond that right now but you know there’s so many topics remote hybrid rto um partnering with the tech uh four-Day, week, work weeks like, how do you, how do you see this all shaping up um in the next five years give us your vision uh thank you um that’s a slow pitch over home plate because I’ve been working at this intersection of AI and organizational competencies for a number of years now and you’re right, I mean I think McKinsey described this environment as the Russian doll of change it’s just a layer on top of a layer on top of a layer and if you think of the direct and indirect costs of people in an organization for any organization it’s the largest expense, you know 40-60 percent of expenses or around people, and yet people right now Are flailing, and it’s just not because of AI.

Mark Ogne [ 01:14:43 ] You know it’s covet-it’s working from home remote workplaces. It’s like there’s so many things going on. You know a couple years ago we had silent quitting as a thing. You know it’s just I think people are just getting so worn out of of all of this change, and you know AI. I think is going to become one of those things where um you know it could end up being something like um you know the bring your own device. You know the bring your own AI uh which I think isn’t going to work. You know this is an organizational thing, it’s a skills-based thing and it’s not just technical skills. I think that many People look at you know, the typical paradigm people process technology, and it’s in an order like that I believe as an order of importance.

Mark Ogne [ 01:15:29 ] I think most people though are looking at AI from the reverse side, which is the technology. Then how do we train technology? Like there’s a large uh movement among the international consulting companies and they’ve tripled their revenue in the last couple years building processes around AI. But all of this now is missing the the denominator that goes across all of it, which is people. So how will we work with organizations to help bring people along into this new world? Well, it’s about agility you know organizational agility so i think the topic of ai is just the most current you know poster board of an of a larger transition of change that everybody has to

Mark Ogne [ 01:16:19 ] work with and i think it’s going to be one of those things where it’s going to either tip it over in the wrong direction or pull it into the correct direction i think uh to the major part of your question about how is the workforce going to change you know for me i look at it as i think there will become a transition from role-based to a more inclusive transition from role-based to a more inclusive organizational structure to skills-based i think that There will become something where people so rather than a four-day work week, I think there will be more agile and adaptable organizational structures that people rather than hiring and firing. Um, in fact, I just spoke to a woman the other day who was the top seller, that consciously moved into a new product line, and they had a riff; it’s like well, it’s just a new product line, and they had a riff; it’s like well, it’s just a

Mark Ogne [ 01:17:06 ] she had the lowest quota of everybody, but she was like the best and like her skills were such that they could have put her into any of these other roles. But the formulation as to how people make these decisions. Is wrong, so today I think HR decisions are going to be changed dramatically, uh, from that of being you know first in, first out or you know organizational structures. And in fact, I think quite ironically, this large structure of cost of a workforce being the one of the largest structures of cost is treated the most tactically today. So, you hear of organizations laying off 20% of their workforce. I will challenge any CEO to tell me if they’ve actually understood what they’re left with after that.

Mark Ogne [ 01:17:53 ] Do they even have the skills necessary to achieve their business objectives? The chances are it’s probably not, but I think this um, this orientation around skills honing skills hiring for skills and adaptable workforces that could move with these market changes and i think also keep the the people happier in the short term and the long term the employees that’s a big meta movement that i just laid out there but i think that’s where it’s going i’m taking furious notes um i hear here mark because is it okay if i jump onto mark’s bandwagon because he had some really good really good yeah i was i was gonna i was gonna get there but i do have some

Mary Shea [ 01:18:36 ] something to insert first if you can you know just um hold your thought for a moment brett um i know i know we all um i want To have a question too so I know we all have have perspective here but what I wanted to just sort of pull out of what what what Mark had said was um this agility, you know, agility because that’s been on my mind a lot and I’ve been thinking more of agility around um the organizational structure and the sales force getting you know much much smaller and looking at um that force being completely augmented with tech and a movement away from the 80/ 20 model to the 80/ 100 model right um but I hadn’t really been thinking about this concept of the adaptable workforce and and skills and and really you know sort of migrating from department To department to role, to role based on how your skills are evolving and changing, and I think that’s a

Mary Shea [ 01:19:36 ] a super astute um a thought and uh I I love it so thank you for that. And uh Brett please jump in either you know amplify or take us in a different direction but I know you’ve got some big picture thoughts on on workforce transformation as well, yeah. And Mark brought some great points, great points, I just want to sort of uh really help you know uh with a couple of examples um you know Mark talked about it, you know not as a tech tool but as a strategy and so when I go speak to the groups of CEOs uh or I speak to leadership teams I’m always asked should i bring my it person and i answer sure but why right and in my experience um and this is not universal but in my experience um you know the the it organizations or the managed service providers tend to slow it down and it’s not a technology discussion it is a business operation and

Brett Schklar [ 01:20:36 ] process optimization discussion um so it’s an interesting observation when i tell people like you really don’t need to bring your it person unless they really have embraced you know generative ai and they understand the operations and the efficiency gains uh and and the return on ai that you know that the possibility you know can be there Otherwise, it doesn’t really you know they can come too, but we want your sales lead, we want your marketing lead, we want your operations lead, you know, we want your head developer, you know, we want your operations lead, we want your all these people that can rethink how they’re leveraging it in their organization. The second thing I’ll say is um one of my sales tactics uh for the fractional CMO business is to take every job opening that’s out there for a CMO or a VP of marketing and apply uh through our fractional CMos, and because I do that I get to see thousands upon thousands upon thousands of resumes for CMos and VPs of marketing nobody.

Brett Schklar [ 01:21:37 ] Is still, we’re still in a world where people are scared to say that they use AI. It’s almost like they feel like somebody’s going to look at them as a cheater, and that is a stigma that still exists. That I think we have an opportunity to really help overcome that, and what I say about that is it’s not cheating; it’s the ultimate cheat code. And so for anybody that might be in gaming or anybody that sort of thinks about it, you know, it’s a couple of things: first of all, everybody is doing it, and nobody is talking about it, right? So there’s probably other analogies to be drawn from that; um, secondly as of all these resumes I see they’re not I know how to use generative AI to help operationalize things and make things more efficient, and speed things along or do more with the existing team than anybody ever possibly could.

Brett Schklar [ 01:22:27 ] I just don’t see that yet, and that kind of makes me a little nervous that we’re not catching up as a as a business environment as much as we possibly could. The last thing um, you know, I’d like to say is, and I’m not the first person that said this, and I’m sure uh people who have um, you know, been in other sessions have heard it, but AI isn’t going to take your job. It’s the people who know how to use generative AI that are going to outflank. You know, whatever you’re doing if you’re not using it, and that’s an important differentiation, as it’s not going to take your job. You know, and back to your analogy,

Brett Schklar [ 01:23:06 ] it’s not going to take your job; it’s not going to take your job; it’s not going to take your job, but you know some are going to stick to the washboard and say this is the way I’ve always done it, and some are going to say, oh, there’s a fancy washing machine that actually does it all except I still have to fold it and still have to put it away and all that other stuff. So I thought that was a great analogy as well. Wow, yeah, so many great comments, um, Brett, and I think it’s interesting. and surprisingly, to me, that on these CMO resumes and profiles, you’re not I use AI generative AI for XYZ front and center on everything, which is actually shocking to me.

Mary Shea [ 01:23:43 ] So, to me, that is a very big takeaway from this conversation, which is everyone who wants to be highly valuable, employable, and um making an impact in the functional area of their business needs to be leading with that right now. Um, I think that’s really interesting what you said also reminded me of something I’ve been doing for a long time, and I think it’s really interesting to read which sparked some interest among you know some of the people I talk to on a regular. Basis I read an article where candidates were actually using AI live time to support them in interviews, and I almost thought, you know, is that cheating or should that person go to the head of the class because they’re using it more assertively than their competitors for the same position?

Mary Shea [ 01:24:32 ] And I know there was a lot of dialogue which is like, now we need to go back and do in-person meetings. To me, that was like, wow, I’m just putting this person at the top of my hiring list because that’s pretty savvy. What are your thoughts about that, Brett? So what uh one of my one of the conversations I have during my workshops is I talk about generation ai um and you can look at it as you know gen x you know yeah you know millennials gen z and then the next generation is generation ai but you know i think that’s a really good point because i think that’s a really good point because

Brett Schklar [ 01:25:06 ] you can also look at it as far as how people are leveraging this in generation ai and by the way there’s a there’s a netflix documentary that’s going to come out i think um middle part of next year that i spend a lot of time talking about this concept of generation ai um but it’s the idea and and i i came up with this because i was having brunch with a friend of mine who’s a school teacher and she’s a high school english school teacher you can imagine that the smarter kids are the more clever kids the ones that are looking to sort of you know use the cheat codes are using generative ai to help them do their homework but the school systems still punish us for doing that

Brett Schklar [ 01:25:49 ] and so um that also creates a lot more fear and and i feel for education systems i feel for academia i feel for the people trying to put together standards and regulation because ai is is you know the the schools spend more money on uh finance and you know they use tools that figure out if you’ve used generative ai more than using generative ai itself but this generation ai is going to

Brett Schklar [ 01:26:19 ] be so much better at asking questions so much better at knowing the limitless potential of generative ai generation ai is going to they’re going to outflank everyone because they know how to have a conversation conversation aka prompting you know with all of the major tools um and they’re going to know how to train you know the llms the the large language models the databases of all the insights and information for companies and so the the people That used to be hailed as the heroes of data scientists are going to be replaced with the generative AI, you know, uh, power users and they’re going to get things done three times, four times, five times faster. So I’m excited about the the generation AI whether that’s a literally a next generation or it’s the people in in the business world who are taking advantage of it in a positive way as quickly as possible.

Mary Shea [ 01:27:17 ] I love that, um, you know, despite tenures we’ve all been in in in the work world for some time here I want to be part of that generation so I love what you’re talking about, you know, I write a lot of books and I’m a lot. And as a former analyst at Forrester, I was writing constantly. And now I just got cold and I use a range of different tools. And I was initially kind of like, ‘but’ I love to write, you know, and is this going to make me sound vanilla? Am I not going to sound like Mary? Am I not going to be punchy and provocative and all that kind of stuff? And what I realized is that, you know, the better I get at the prompt that I’m spending more time on the prompting than the actual writing, of course I am.

Mary Shea [ 01:28:06 ] And I’m infusing my voice and my ideas into things. And you have to do that. But the amount of time I spent writing and copy editing and sending it around to other people, now I’m just spending more time upfront, you know, kind of getting the questions right. And so that sort of struck me about what you said, Brett. I think it’s really, really interesting. I’d like to insert a point here, which is, I think one of the things that we have to be careful about as we look at the nature of the question about workforce is that we don’t create a class of haves and have-nots in organizations. That will really destroy the culture of an organization. And so I think that there is something here about the skills made.

Mark Ogne [ 01:28:52 ] The reason why I brought up that idea of skills-based is that it’s not just, you know, prompt engineering. Sure, I get it. But there are other attributes of organizations or workforces, cognitive agility, you know, communication skills, things like this that are softer skills that, you know, adaptability, the agility component there. If you don’t solve that, if you’re not helping to assess and train people on these more agile mentalities, you’ll end up with a system of have and have not. That will just erode the culture of your organization. Yes. And society writ large, right? Thank you for that comment. I’d like to move to Caitlin. And then here’s some other voices here as well. But Caitlin, you talked a little bit about work-life balance in your preamble.

Mary Shea [ 01:29:49 ] And I think when we think of innovative technologies and leading technologies, we always want to think of them as improving our lives. And sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. I think about, you know, mobile and being digitally connected all the time. Certainly, it’s great because you’re responsive and you can deal with issues very, very quickly. And then it can be not so great on the personal front, right, when it’s the first thing you look at when you wake up at three in the morning. Talk to us a little bit about how you see generative AI and AI agents really improving work-life balance and, you know, the life of the employee. Yeah. So I’ll take two aspects of that.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:30:36 ] So one is I think that it’s going to, so today when you want to go on vacation and you don’t want to shut off, it’s very fearful for a lot of us because they’re like, you know, the trepidation of how many emails am I going to, you know, face, you know, how people are going to continue to ping me. But I think that with the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, opportunities of AI, AI PCs, other types of, you know, all this things that you’re even seeing with SDRs, I think you’re going to see personal assistance, not just from a home, but a personal, but like a work perspective where a lot of basic questions, like, where do I find the FAQ for blah, blah, blah.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:31:18 ] Like some of the things that people need to ask you, you can set, you’re going to be able to have like bots who you can, that can answer maybe a lot of those things. And you, you can screen some of that. And so I think when you go on vacation, you’ll be able to have an assistant who’s actually doing more than just collecting the emails for you. You know, they’re actually maybe trying to respond, you know, to some of them and they can say, ‘Hey, this is Allie, Caitlin’s chat bot.’ And, you know, I saw your question, you know, she’s on vacation. She’ll be back Tuesday. Here’s what I found on that, you know, if it’s helpful.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:31:52 ] And so I think there’s going to be maybe some interesting sort of opportunities, you know, there, because, you know, I think that’s, I think that’s, I think that’s, I think that’s, I do feel like where you have great companies like Mercedes, for example, when you go on vacation, when someone sends you an email, it can’t be sent. It will not arrive in your inbox. You get a message that says this person’s on vacation until Tuesday. You can resend your email on Tuesday, right? It’s like, you cannot even engage or put that in the box. And so I feel like there’s going to be some more opportunities of how does the information come in and how can we shut off? Our personal time and put up some, you know, some edges around it to from an internal from a work perspective.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:32:35 ] I think that the, you know, we have, you know, we’re seeing like the whole work-from-home, the hybrid that’s in the office, and there’s definitely an amazing opportunity to be with other humans. So I think that’s a good thing, but I also feel that there’s just an, a large amount of time. And I think this is well-documented. And I think that’s a good thing, but I also feel that there’s just an, a large amount of time. Trying to find, trying to fix processes, trying to get to the answers to the things. And if you can just sit there and say, ‘Gosh, what was that slide that had the blue graph? I did around January, the one that had blah, blah, blah.’ And you can say that to your PC and it pops up and says, ‘Here’s the five ones that you did in January.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:33:20 ] These ones have blue graphs, you know, like you can, you can use your natural language to help, you know, pull that information.’ And I think that’s a good thing. That allows you to be more efficient, and that creates time that you can then spend, you know, picking your kids up from school or, you know, doing some additional, you know, learning. To go back, you know, to the point that Mark made though, I think in all of this is he’s absolutely right, from elementary school education, all the way up to the, our work lives, we have to figure out how to become skilled on these tools and how to bring them in. And it’s not to be taken over and have your life decided by AI.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:34:00 ] It’s about how to reduce the friction of getting work done, and you know, removing the, this is what the cloud has done. That’s what mobile did is removing friction. And in that process, it’s an evolution. It’s not going to be the best version of itself on day one. It’s going to take some time to evolve, but it’s going to get there just like we’ve seen with a lot of other technologies. Yeah. Thank you so much. I, I really love hearing about that. And I am one of those individuals that I’ve chosen to respond to my emails when I am on vacation, because it’s too difficult when I come back and, you know, it’s always a difficult conversation with your spouse. And it’s like, it’s easier if I just, you know, do it now.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:34:45 ] But I want one, I I’m first in line for that bot assessment when it’s ready. So yeah, I think you’ll see two things like in unified comms, like in these platforms, a lot more contextual data coming into the media. So right now you have to go to Figma, you have to go to Outlook, you have to go to this, go to that. But when this group of people gets together and we were a team and a company, it should have all of the, the chats, the work, you know, spaces, the content, the information just there. And if you’re using things like Plot and is listening to the meeting, it can start serving up and bringing up the files and doing the things to help you work your workflow.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:35:26 ] And I think that’s something that’s really important. And I think that’s something that’s really important. And I think that’s something that’s really important. And I think some of the other pieces that I think AI will, you know, be able to do probably more quickly than maybe some of the other, you know, bigger decisioning we’ll see with quantum and other things coming into play. Yeah, absolutely. And you start to reduce the time wasted on the toggle tax, which we can all use. I can already see the benefits in my work life by being so much more efficient than I have been in the past. But that sort of brings me to one other question. And I know we have a question from the panelists that I want to get to. That looks fantastic.

Mary Shea [ 01:35:58 ] But I do want to just kind of, given that I, you know, I don’t want to be a contrarian, but I do think there’s an elephant in the room here. And so Tisha and Muriel, and maybe you’re going to get the tough question. So I’ll let the two of you figure out who wants to jump in first. But, and this is building off of what Brett said as well, which is the people who have the skills and continue to skill up and stay at the tip of the spear of learning how to use all of the systems that are going to make us successful with, using generative AI. They will win and their employers will win. But I do think the elephant in the room is that the workforce is going to be smaller.

Mary Ellen Slayter [ 01:36:39 ] And I don’t know, Mary Ellen, do you want to take a stab at it? Yeah, I do. I actually have a really strong, surprising opinion about this, perhaps for you. So one, I actually do support UBI. So I’m just going to come out and say, I do support UBI because I think there’s going to be messy. I think there’s going to be a lot of dislocation. And I think the social consequences of this, like we have really not prepared ourselves to deal with it. I do as well. I completely agree. I think in the long run though, I don’t believe it’s going to lead to people losing jobs. And here’s what, how many of y’all read Bullshit Jobs by the late David Gruber? Okay.

Mary Ellen Slayter [ 01:37:15 ] You should go read this because he talks about how most of what we do at work these days is actually in fact bullshit. And he classifies them. He’s an anthropologist and he classifies jobs into different flavors of bullshit. And I think one of the things that I walked away from that job, one of the examples, for example, there’s a type of job called hired guns. It’s a type of role that I have in my, that it’s a work that has to be done because my other people have it. So I, people always ask me why I get along so well with my competitors. And I’m like, well, we depend on each other. Like I basically, other people, they have to hire me because somebody else hired somebody else.

Mary Ellen Slayter [ 01:37:48 ] Like, so we’re there, we’re bouncers. Everybody has to have a bigger bodyguard, right? So that’s what people are really buying. But they’re really, when we think we have a job, like why did results, why did we have a job? Why did we have a job? Why did we have a job? Why did we have a job? Not just take off. Why don’t we have four day work weeks? Why hasn’t work shrunk? And that is because what people are paying for is not task completion. When we hire somebody, we’re not paying for them to complete our task. We’re not paying for outcomes. We’re not, we’re paying for attention. Human attention continues to be the most important, most precious of all things.

Mary Ellen Slayter [ 01:38:18 ] And so what will happen, I believe is like, and as I see this happen in my own work now, yes, I can write blog posts way faster. I’ve got some good tips and tricks for you, Mary, of like figuring out how to not spend so much time fussing with those prompts. I can make a bot for you. I can make a Mary bot. It’s, but what hasn’t changed is the need to have attention, right? Like so many of these tasks. So people, we will, I believe we will fill up those hours with other ways of giving attention. Now we certainly could choose to give attention to the arts, to give attention to caregiving, give attention to all those things. I don’t think that our employers are really going to go for that.

Mary Ellen Slayter [ 01:39:01 ] So I think it’s going to be slower to make that kind of migration just because any other technology that we’ve introduced hasn’t decreased our workloads. It has been a very long time since we have seen our workloads get decreased by technology. It’s gotten, I don’t see any reason to believe that this technology will be any different. I think that’s really, really interesting. So you, you started with saying, yes, it’s going to be messy. We’re going to have UBI. And now you’re saying that, Yeah. Other innovative technologies haven’t really, even though they create better efficiencies, they haven’t made the workforce smaller. They’ve just added and piled more work on us. Well, here’s an example of a job that is in high, high demand that is going to go away.

Mary Ellen Slayter [ 01:39:41 ] And the people who currently do that job are not going to be well-equipped to go do other jobs. So truck drivers, as we get autonomous vehicles, I grew up, my family, my dad’s a truck driver, my stepdad’s a truck driver. This is a job that has had a shortage forever. This is a job that has had a shortage forever. This employee has worked passionately connecting with one person. It’s cushioned the company and only that person will come back. This is why they’re so eager to eliminate it. I think rightly so. All those truck drivers. When they’re out of work, like they’re not going to magically be able to go get one of these other jobs. And we’ve already seen the rise in the caregiving economy in the service economy, another example would be developers.

Mary Ellen Slayter [ 01:40:14 ] Like there aren’t many. A tier of developers that using AI, and there’s a whole lot of coders, rank-and-file coders are about to be there. Their jobs, as they know, it will not exist. And it is not easy. I mean, ah. Already know how hard it is to take somebody from one language, when coding language to another coding language. Now imagine guys, I know that your job involves staring at a screen and troubleshooting and working in this particular way that’s no longer a thing so y’all are you interested in nursing bedside nursing? No they’re not. Are you interested in becoming a consultant and giving and teaching? No they’re not. Right and so they some of them could like I think we’re going to require upskilling and reskilling to a degree that like we’ve never had in history and at a faster pace.

Mary Ellen Slayter [ 01:41:00 ] We’re going to ask these middle-aged people who should be kind of coasting and teaching the kids how to do the job to basically reinvent themselves, and somebody’s got to pay their bills. No right there’s no coasting and somebody we in the time when they’re learning this is something I think we saw a beautiful experiment during COVID actually. I’m going to tell you where everybody would tell when restaurant restaurant people used to complain about wages and tips and work conditions and everybody said, ‘Well why don’t you just get a different job if you’ Don’t like it, get a different job; that’s what they did. You went and got different jobs, they used the UBI which we paid out during COVID to go get trained for different jobs, and now there’s no one to work in restaurants, yeah very very challenging.

Mary Shea [ 01:41:42 ] Thank you, thank you so much for that, like so many interesting points of view I’d like to put a pin in getting access to the MaryBot so let’s talk after this but I’d love to, I’d love to get to Tisha so you know I’d love to hear your thoughts, I mean what I’ve taken away from what Mary Ellen’s said and and Brett’s been sort of texting me behind the scenes as well is that there’s it is going to be Messy, and we’re going to see some really big shifts. So, I see you know companies, and I’m not going to name any names, but maybe they’re laying off seven percent of their workforce. And I’m not going to name any names, but maybe they’re laying off seven percent of their workforce.

Mary Shea [ 01:42:22 ] And I’m not going to name any names, but their CEO is making maybe 38 million annually, and well, I’ll stop there because I don’t want to be too revealing. And what they’re really doing is moving financial and human assets around, right? And I think we’re going to see lots of big movements, and some people are going to be going by the wayside or leaving the company. And some people are going to be moving within the organizations, and I think we’re going to see lots of big movements, and some people are going to be. I think Brett’s point is so well taken, which is like you know CEOs, CXOs out there before you lay off folks, let’s investigate what their skills might be or what their appetite is for upskilling versus you know getting rid of people and then putting all of your eggs in some sort of new group that’s going to drive innovative processes and things of that nature.

Mary Shea [ 01:43:14 ] So, yes, I think it’s it’s going to be interesting and messy, and Tisha, I’d love to get you in and and see what your point of. View is on sort of workforce dynamics and the moving around of you know human, human capital and financial capital and what that’s going to look like, what’s your take, yeah! One is, I think it’s going to be imperative to make a new space for people as as the not only is the landscape for the business itself changing but leaders are going to have to change how they actually lead and how they’re going to be able to do that, and so I think this is why what we do is so incredibly important because frameworks are incredibly important for making change right; so when we focus on um outcomes and I know that it seems simplistic and theoretical Um, but practically, we found over time that our knowing what it is that you’re trying to achieve can lead to a completely different set of actions.

Teasha Cable [ 01:44:13 ] So instead of people spending and wasting time searching uh for answers in data, we can compile all that data warehouse linking into our LL M, ask necessary questions that are all about identifying specific opportunities. Why is that important because when I think about people, people uh I don’t want to let go a bunch of people uh in the company who might have a subset of skills that we’ve been able to capture and date over the course of time uh because they are they fit into the Category of people who can be upskilled, right there might be a group of people in there. Well, you know, the tough decisions do have to be made because not only are they going to be able to do that but they’re going to have to; not only do they not fit the outcomes that we’re after, uh, moving forward, they don’t fit our financial dynamic, because we also know that to achieve those outcomes we have to maintain you know a certain amount of profitability or uh revenue increase.

Teasha Cable [ 01:45:06 ] Make it up, but more importantly, um, they may not have the capability or capacity right to actually move into uh, that next particular area, and those are some of the Harsher, uh choices that have to be made. Some people you can put them in a classroom and they can learn how to either do problem engineering or they can learn how to make the company more productive. I mean, but these are all things that are going to require some level of assessment. But in order to even get to that assessment, the way that people think about leadership is going to have to be more purposeful and intentional. So, that alone has nothing to do with artificial intelligence, uh, at first right?

Teasha Cable [ 01:45:47 ] It’s all about them knowing what are they actually doing, like, what business problems are we actually trying to to solve so I bring it full circle back to that that people are the core of the whole thing and that before we start making any sort of decisions about what to do with those people we have to be very clear about what it is um that we’re trying to achieve and this is from the largest to the smallest uh of organizations thank you so much for those comments and I you know I wholeheartedly agree with you I spent a lot of time recommending technologies to large companies and I think that’s a really important thing to do and I think that’s

Mary Shea [ 01:46:21 ] a really important thing to do and I think that’s a really important thing to do and you can pick the very best and you Can pick the very best technology, and then the rollout can be a failure it’s not about pressing buttons; it’s about the people that are involved in doing the work and working with the tech. So, thank you for that. We’ve gotten some really broad-brushed wonderful ideas, and I’ve got so many notes here for myself as well. But I want to take a moment to now start to get a little bit more granular and a little bit more tactical. And I think it’s a great time to take a question from one of the attendees in the audience if you have any questions, or questions, I’d love to hear from you, audience.

Mary Shea [ 01:46:51 ] So thank you for that. And here’s a question for the panel. What does a resume look like in the new AI-augmented world? Or where does the expectation of where and how you use AI-enabled tools in the role? Resumes are about a bunch of outcomes and experiences. Does this shift to something else? Yeah. Does anyone want to take a crack at that? I feel very strongly that it shouldn’t be about bots evaluating, bot-created resumes being evaluated by bots. At our company, at Higher Quotient, we have a solution that helps talent acquisition leaders source passive and active candidates, rank and rate those and shortlist those candidates, and then communicate with them in a hyper-personalized way across multiple channels. We do that with the software because that’s where you’re going to find manual, repetitive, and administrative activities.

Mary Shea [ 01:47:51 ] But we believe philosophically that that’s just the downstream stuff that should be taken off the recruiter’s plate so that they could spend way more time on the human connection and relationship building and prepping folks on the interview loop and doing more strategic activities. But to be practical, we’ve got folks here that are looking for jobs. What kind of advice do you all have on the panel around how to make your resume? And I want to ask you a question. I want to ask you a question. I want to ask you a question. I want to say, I almost feel like resumes are a bit obsolete, so I want to say profile because there’s so many different areas that you can present yourself to the working world.

Mary Shea [ 01:48:30 ] What does that look like and what should folks do? Anyone want to weigh in? I guess I can as the career advice person, right? If I had my job right now, like if I were giving career advice, I would say, thinking going back to the skills thing we talked about, it is about collection. How do you demonstrate your skills? I don’t think the résumé is the only thing that I would say is the résumé. The résumé is totally dead, mainly because we haven’t found a good way to organize that. I mean, I do fantasize about this future that is basically blockchain organized, where you’ve got a skill and you can verify it. And so like that’s, and that can be updated pretty quickly. And that’s somewhat in play with like certain certifications, you know, and things like that.

Mary Shea [ 01:49:08 ] But I think that you still have to do something. And I’m going to say something a little bit, probably also a little bit contrarian, a little bit surprising. I love cover letters. I don’t require them. When people apply for jobs at our company, I give them the ability to basically give me your LinkedIn. You can give me your resume. Like, I don’t really care. Like, here are these questions I’m going to ask you, and you should expect it for me to get detailed information. But when I see a cover letter, it’s weird. It stands out so much to me now. Like, and if I can tell that they’ve really taken like a minute, don’t care if they use chat to help them write it, don’t care.

Mary Shea [ 01:49:40 ] But as long as they took a minute to connect who they are with what we’re doing, I’ll read it. I’ve never not read a cover letter. I’ll always read them if you write one. And I think that’s. Yeah, I love that. And it’s just like, because that sort of gets to the heart of, I’ve always been about blending old school and new school. It’s like, you don’t have to do all or nothing. And you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? Use the best. And that’s a really interesting way and wonderful way to distinguish yourself. Brett, I know you’ve got some thoughts on this as well. Do you want to weigh in? Sure. Just really quickly, I think two thoughts and love what everybody’s, you know, shared here.

Mary Shea [ 01:50:20 ] And I’ve taken some great notes and learned a lot myself in the two thoughts. One is, you know, I see the resume process and the job hunting process as a game. It is a game of people submitting databases, prioritizing and people getting hooked on something they see in a resume or in a one line in a database of hundreds or thousands of resumes submitted. It’s a game. And I don’t think we’ll ever have that game go away, but like any good game and I’m not a gamer, so I don’t know why I’m doing all those gaming analogies today, but like a good game, it’s going to change. It’s going to evolve. And so those of us that know that it is a game of which we know it’s careers and it’s very important, but when you unpeel it all, it’s really a gamification of resumes, resume building, instead of it being SEO optimized resumes that we know is the key to getting triggered.

Mary Shea [ 01:51:19 ] And so I think it’s a game. And I think it’s a game. And I think it’s a game. It’s going to be used thing use or Trello or anybody that you would probably be triggered to look at in these major databases. It’s going to now be using and infusing generative AI into that entire process. Again, it’s a cheat code. It’s not the cheat. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. I would say you’re going to see a lot of mixed, more mix media and other things coming out here. Yeah. Differentiate. And that, you know, we already know that, you know, applying online is only only 10 or 12% of jobs are ever, you know, gotten away anyway, and that the networking is the thing.

Mary Shea [ 01:51:57 ] And so I feel like the instead of just, you know, sending emails about different things, and, you know, so on and so forth, I think you’re going to see a lot more, you know, you still have this human connection of networking, of being able to get that, that referral link, you know, and other things that are they’re going to help, you know, with that prioritization, because I completely agree with Brett, it is a game. But I feel that, you know, you’re going to have to be more creative about how you submit and that, you know, cover letters differentiating, videos are differentiating. I think the other thing that you’re going to see, like even beyond the resume is a lot more companies want to assure that you are capable of the job, you know, even from that.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:52:46 ] And so I think you start seeing a lot more go in the interview process. Here’s a here’s a scenario, craft a, you know, a PowerPoint or presentation that you’re going to give in your interview over, you know, to seven people for an hour about how you’re you’re thinking through this, because they actually want to know how you think and break down problems, and so on and so forth. So I think, besides just the paper of the resume, there’s also the process of the hiring. And I think that goes to your earlier skills based conversation, what kind of experience do you have? And it that to will lend whether or not if you’re using these tools, and you can produce, you know, high quality outcomes or output quickly, like that’s those are the things that are going to differentiate you.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:53:37 ] Like if you’re going to use AI in your interview, okay, that’s one thing is probably better than bringing your parents, which we’ve heard is happening. I think that may be passé now. I, but you know, seen some of those stories. I was like, wow, yeah, I’ve definitely had to, you know, as a as a hiring manager, call parents and sell them too. But anyway, that’s super interesting. You know, my observations are, you know, folks need to be as specific and granular as they can, on their profiles. Because, you know, AI is going to be looking for, you know, do I know that? Do they know this development language? Have they, you know, do they work, you know, do volunteerism? Are they, you know, there’s like, as specific as you possibly can, I think that’s going to serve you well.

Mark Ogne [ 01:54:31 ] I want to go to Mark, because I know you have a point of view. And then we’re going to wrap up with a speed dating format where each panelist is going to give the audience their best piece of advice. And God help the last person because this is a smartest panelist. But, Mark, I know you want to weigh in on the topic. So please do. You know, the resume with AI is becoming something where you can tailor, create a resume on the fly to mimic back to a recruiter what it is that they had in the job posting. It I think the importance of the resume is going to be declining significantly. And Mary, with higher quotient, you’re probably like really good at that. And you’re going to be able to do that.

Mark Ogne [ 01:55:11 ] And I think really on the front edge of skills-based recruiting and things like that. So at Competently, we’re all about, you know, competency assessments, which include ranges of skills. But we partnered with an organization. They track 50,000 skills. And so what this is now is the front edge of understanding either stuff coming at you or proactively reaching out to people, you know, to say like, ‘hey’, Mark, I can look at, you know, LinkedIn and other social interactions and figure out he’s worked with, you know, Marketo, Salesforce. Com, you know, blah, blah, blah. Like, so he has skills in these areas. Like, he has proven ability to have at least worked with those things in the past.

Mark Ogne [ 01:55:55 ] So this is providing kind of a filter over the top to say, okay, well, you tell me that you do all these things, but is there a third-party source that you, you can bounce that off of? Because it’s, I think the rough thing now is it’s so simple to create a resume. In Mary Ellen, the idea that people don’t put cover letters in there. I mean, it’s so easy to create that. Now, the hard part that I’ve heard from a lot of people is that it’ll say, like, ‘Dear first name, you know, and like not even change the name of the person there. But try a little harder than that, right? Try a little harder than that. I appreciate much effort to effort, you know, like I do. I read them all.

Mark Ogne [ 01:56:34 ] I read them all. So, well, anything that makes you stand out. And I think, you know, the resume is becoming, it’s not obsolete. It’s a part of the process, at least as it sits today. But I agree with the point that I think the importance is dropping because you can tailor a resume to just simply reflect like a mirror what the person posted on the job on the fly. And that was really hard to do three years ago. Today, it’s super simple. You can do it in minutes, right?’ You know, if you’ve got all your tools and you’re ready to go, so well, the questions keep coming in from the audience. We’ve got some amazing questions. And I’ve only scratched the surface on one macro topic area and theme that I wanted to cover in this session.

Mark Ogne [ 01:57:21 ] So I have to say to Julia and Justin, like, we need to do this again because this is absolutely fantastic. I think I feel like we have the best minds in the business here. And there’s so much more I’d love to get into. And so stay tuned. I’ve got some ideas for you all. But being mindful of our audience, I would like each one of our panelists to give one hard-hitting piece of advice that is actionable today. So I’m going to start with and use your lens, obviously. But Caitlin, why don’t you start off? And let’s leave the audience with something that you think is highly actionable. That’s good. I’m going to position them extremely well in the workforce for the next five years. Yeah.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:58:10 ] So I’m going to take this from the vantage point, I think, of, you know, kind of leaders and leadership in companies. And that is that by 2025, Gen Z is going to be more than a quarter of the global workforce. And that these folks have expectations and priorities around purpose beyond profit, around fair compensation, around a culture of belonging. And that in, you know, the way that we’re thinking about how we move these businesses forward, whether we’re leveraging AI or not, you know, we have to adapt the talent strategies to really connect with these folks and really bring them in, get them incorporated into our organizations as quickly as possible. And that’s not AI specific, but I think that it’s going to be exponentially more important because that’s where we’re going to be; that ferocity of how AI is going to start impacting the speed at which the exponential growth and transformation that’s going to happen.

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond [ 01:59:12 ] We need to embrace these younger Gen Z folks and really understand how we’re going to personalize the hiring and their long-term professional growth, which I still think we’re stuck in old ways of doing things. So I would say a culture of belonging, you know, a purpose beyond profit and making sure that you’re compensating people truly for learning and being curious long-term. I love it. Brett, you’re up next. Be generation AI. Don’t be the other people. I love it. Short and sweet. I want that in a t-shirt and some swag, Julia. Let’s see what we can do. Tisha, what’s your piece of advice? Some hard-hitting advice for the audience. So I’d say that in the future of work, retention of employees is going to be the most important strategy to develop.

Teasha Cable [ 02:00:10 ] So just like our consumer needs change, so do the needs of our people, as we just heard. But in order to manage that, I think developing, just like you have a customer journey, developing employee journeys is going to be something to support retention issues. Awesome. Mary Ellen. I’m going to say this. I’m going to say this about customers, but I’m going to say this in general. Get closer to your customer. Get closer to other people. If I love AI and I love this tech, but when I’m about to use it for something, I ask myself, is what I’m about to do going to get me closer to the person I’m trying to build a connection with, or is it going to be further away from them? So that is my advice.

Mary Ellen Slayter [ 02:00:55 ] Get closer to your customer. Get closer to your teammates. That’s it. I love that. All right, Mark, bring us home. Okay. I’m going to echo mostly Tisha, but some of what Mary Ellen had just said. This is really about people. AI is just the most recent poster child of a Russian doll of change, just layered on top of this. And unless we address understanding the competencies of people that work for you, how to help them. How to help them survive and thrive in these changing environments and to I think the concept of skills-based roles or skills-based organizations where people shift around is going to be something that will become a way to help people, help retain people because you’re using the things that they’re best at and helping them find value in an organization.

Mary Shea [ 02:01:53 ] Love it. Love it. Love it. Absolutely beautiful. And you’ve heard from me a lot, already, so I’m going to keep it short, but I would say stay focused on your own humanity and the humanity of the people you work with and interact with, and use the technology, but find more humanity in the process and the activity and the outcomes of what you’re trying to do. And I want to just make sure we don’t lose that because that’s really, really important for the world that we live in and for the workforce today and beyond. So, with that, Julia, this absolutely exceeded all of my highest expectations, and I want to thank you for the opportunity. Pass the baton back to you. Thank you so much, Mary. Made so many notes.