‘Shift focus from degrees to key skills’
NEWAGE SKILLS To be a truly proactive, talent acquisition professional, it is essential to focus on refining three key skills: providing decision support with AI; contributing to social selling using design thinking and working agile
Amber Grewal is the vice president of Global Talent Acquisition at IBM, with over 20 years of experience in the art and science of talent attraction and management. At IBM, Grewal oversees the strategic vision for talent acquisition and is responsible for building strong, consultative departmental functions, talent technology, sourcing and on-boarding strategies, workforce demand, and employer branding in competitive and emerging markets globally. Recently, Grewal has been focused on introducing new technology, infused with artificial intelligence and predictive capabilities, into the recruiting function. Through this focus, she has enhanced and personalized the experience of job seekers, candidates and hiring managers throughout the talent lifecycle, as well as increased diversity and inclusion by removing unconscious bias during the sourcing, recruiting and interview processes. She also leads and participates in numerous activities supporting diversity, inclusion, and gender equality such as the Girls Who Code programme, where she encourages interests in computer science careers with middle school and high school girls, and the Grace Hopper and Anitab.org gathering of women technologists. Grewal is also responsible for recruiting talent for IBM’S “New Collar” program – comprised of coding camps, apprenticeships, community college courses, and innovative vocational schools – where people with the right set of skills, not degrees, earn the opportunity to start their careers with IBM. Outside of IBM, she is a founding board member of the IOT Talent Consortium, helping to innovate strategies to enable the workforce of the future to realize the value of the Internet of Things. She talks to Shine on a number of issues including her journey at IBM. Edited excerpts:
The driving factor in my journey to IBM has been my passion. From the beginning of my career, my passion has taken me places. Having worked in varied roles in boutique agencies, executive search firms and corporate functions, my experiences have always been centered around transformation. Although I have transitioned into many different industries throughout my career, each move has served as a platform for aiding companies in technology. I have a deep respect for the immense impact ‘talent’ has on a business. My career began in the services industry with Kpmg/bearing Point Consulting. During my stint there I supported their IT services and technology growth, as they were moving from a financial organization to a technology consulting company. After spending many years at KPMG rethinking finance through a technical scope, I joined Microsoft in Silicon Valley. My job was to rebrand Microsoft’s image to compete in the search market with Google, Yahoo, and other emerging technology companies. I spent many years building a new model on recruitment, prioritizing culture, talent and strived to expand this model on a global scale.
Thereafter, I joined Symantec where my focus turned to building a value proposition following a large acquisition. I focused on talent demand planning as a strategic function of the workforce, while simultaneously scaling employer branding. This set me up for success at my next two employers: Apollo and GE. Apollo wanted to rebuild education, perceiving it as a function of social impact; while GE wanted to transform the company from an industrial to a digital business. This involved blitz-scaling and hiring for skills which the com- pany never had. It was a massive cultural and behavioural change. This transformational experience wholeheartedly prepared me for my current endeavor at IBM. IBM reinvented itself from an infrastructure, software and services company to a cloud platform and cognitive solutions company. As an organization, IBM is leading the skilling and talent conversation with key alliances across the ecosystem – academia, government, corporates, start-ups and industry bodies. A new-collar approach focuses on skills, experience and aptitude vs. degrees alone. For example, Cyber Security is a critical part of the future, and by 2022 itself there will be over 2 million job requirements that will remain vacant. IBM is embarking on a journey that could meet this scarcity.
Personally, my time contributing to the transformation at IBM has been an inflection point in my career. I am assimilating everything I have learned so far and applying it to IBM to ensure a competitive advantage. The 21st century, talent acquisition professional must have an innate business acumen to predict problems before they surface; be proactive; add value to the business; nurture the candidate recruitment process…to name a few! To be a truly proactive, talent acquisition professional, it is essential to focus on refining three key skills: providing decision support with AI; contributing to Social Selling using Design Thinking and Working Agile. Ultimately, the implication of these changes will result in a Talent Revolution. Technology will augment talent acquisition to perform tasks faster, make better decisions, etc. to ensure a holistic candidate experience. Talent influencers will have more time, new skills will need to surface, making this a pivotal opportunity for recruiters to upskill. Utilizing data and AI will require recruiters to function as data poets, translating the company’s data into a cohesive story.
This talent revolution will shift the domain from the current model of posting a job with a generic job description, to a skills and relationship model. This will While there is irrefutably a plethora of tech skills that will be imperative to our future society, I believe the following will yield the most notable innovation: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & Robotics, Blockchain, Cloud, Quantum, Cyber Security, Virtual & Augmented Reality, to name a few.
Technology will augment talent acquisition to perform tasks faster and make better decisions.talent influencers will have more time, new skills will need to surface, making this a pivotal opportunity for recruiters to upskill
AMBER GREWAL, IBM
The workplace is fundamentally changing, both for the employer and the candidate. From a candidate’s perspective, the future of the workplace is about agility, communication, empathy, personalization and collaboration. One must ensure a balance between soft skills and technical skills. With the advent of new technologies, the role of the individual worker has begun to shift again, creating what has become the “new collar” jobs for today’s economy. While these jobs are highly technical, many of them do not require a four-year college degree. In addition to expanding STEM education in our schools, one way to close that gap is by expanding job opportunities for capable workers who have traditionally been left behind. This expanding talent pool is necessary to meet the growing demand for “new collar” jobs in areas such as cloud, security, AI and data science. The future workforce is a manifestation of skills, experiences and passion.