Trend 3 HUMAN+ WORKER #TECHVISION2019 Unilever has revamped its entry-level hiring process that developers write, but also on variables like In such programs, transparency is key. Accenture with this in mind. Interested candidates begin with a passion, teamwork, and the effort they put into staying employees receive information about how their screening process that includes a series of short current with their skills. specialization was derived, how the algorithms work games, designed to assess a person’s potential fit and how to immediately update their specialization if based on traits like memory, acceptance of risk, and In the war for talent, leaders are recognizing that the they disagree. Areas of specialization, learning whether the person is more likely to read contextual or most important thing about employees is not where opportunities and advancement are also part of 9 emotional cues. An AI-based tool reviews the results, they come from, but how far they can go. ongoing, real-time conversations that people have with eschewing traditional résumé-based evaluation in career counselors, helping them to remain relevant. favor of optimizing for potential. There’s no “wrong” Internally, companies can adapt their technology result; the trait profiles help Unilever better match strategies to seek out the untapped talent in their Used responsibly, workforce data can unlock people’s candidates to open roles. internal human+ workers as well. Businesses have long potential and drive greater value for individuals and the 12 sought to hire and promote from within, both to business. Following an initial effort in North America, Unilever maintain institutional knowledge and to avoid the time saw its applications-to-jobs numbers double within the and expense of an external search. But the methods By adapting their technology strategies, companies first 90 days, and the average time to hire a candidate used for internal sourcing pre-date the technology can identify strong internal candidates for open roles, drop from four months to four weeks. It also saw innovations that have made today’s workforce so and later, match employees with the training needed higher acceptance rates for offers and a major mobile and capable in the first place. to prepare for a role switch. Most importantly, leaders increase in diversity among new joiners. After one can begin to offer employees a consistent experience year, the number of universities represented among Instead, organizations are turning to new solutions that from the time they join the company all the way entry-level Unilever hires increased from 840 to 2,600. can draw upon a wealth of workforce data streams, not through their career—knowing individual workers’ The company later expanded the hiring approach and just self-reported skills and experience. As part of its skillsets and goals, while helping them to better program to 68 countries. talent transformation, Accenture debuted its connect with internal opportunities and resources. “specialization at scale” program: with 469,000 Tech-driven solutions also allow for increasingly employees, the company needed a robust and agile powerful passive recruitment. Cloudflare and Medium way to ensure that the right team, with the right skills, To learn more about using workforce data responsibly have adopted this approach with Aevy, which offers an is ready at the right time to spark innovation. Rather to elevate trust and unlock value, see Accenture’s AI tool that crawls the web to identify good candidates than having employees self-report on skills, artificial report “Decoding Organizational DNA: Trust, Data and for developer positions, analyzing people’s work and intelligence infers an employee’s skills and Unlocking Value in the Digital Workplace.” interactions on GitHub, Stack Overflow, and other specializations. In pilot programs, employees www.accenture.com/workforcedata 10 respected code repositories and developer forums. confirmed that this new analytics engine identified 11 Aevy bases its recommendations not only on the code their specializations correctly 93 percent of the time. 49 TECHNOLOGY VISION 2019 THE POST-DIGITAL ERA IS UPON US