Bill Kerr: Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m Bill Kerr. The following is a guest appearance. We occasionally bring you podcast episodes produced elsewhere that highlight research and expertise from the Managing the Future of Work Project.

My project co-chair, Joe Fuller, recently appeared on the Gartner Group Talent Angle podcast to talk about skills-based hiring, highlighting research conducted with the Burning Glass Institute. The discussion touches on degree inflation, workforce demographics, automation, employee retention, and how to move the needle on skills-based hiring.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Dion Love: Good day, and welcome to the Talent Angle. I’m Dion Love. You were just listening to the voice of Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. I was thrilled to welcome Joseph back to the Talent Angle to discuss his latest findings on the topic of skills-based hiring. There’s a lot of buzz, and we heard a ton about the potential of skills-based hiring, but so far, it’s proven easier said than done. Joseph outlines how organizations can advance skills-based hiring, in his words, “go from pronouncements to practice, and really make skills-based methods work for them.” Skills-based hiring can offer tremendous benefits to both employees and employers. If you’ve been wanting to get skills-based hiring up and running in your organization, but so far found it elusive, be sure to pay attention to this great conversation. Take a listen.

Well, hi Joe, and welcome to the Talent Angle. So glad to have you back with us.

Joe Fuller: Dion, delighted to join you and your audience.

Love: Great. Well, we’re here today to talk about skills-based hiring. Let me start with a pretty straightforward question right off the bat. Why has there been such high general interest in and optimism for skills-based hiring?

Fuller: Skills-based hiring has become a focus, I believe, for two reasons. The principle one is that in trying to explain anomalies in terms of what’s sometimes called “occupational segregation”—why various ethnic groups are overrepresented in various careers and overrepresented in the upper echelons of a company, specifically Asian Americans and Caucasians, relative to Hispanics and African Americans. A correlation was derived, which is the vast majority of people in those careers or who gain that level in an organization had university degrees. And, of course, university degrees are unevenly spread across the population. You are dramatically more likely to attain a four-year degree or post-college education, postgraduate education, for example, if you’re an Asian American, versus being Hispanic. Therefore, that university degrees being used as a requirement for a job applicant built a systemic bias into the prospect of advancement because people without them, disproportionately Hispanics and African Americans, were excluded from consideration. So, as DEI became a more and more important focus for corporate and governmental employment leaders, suddenly, what would you do other than rely on degrees became a subject of discussion. Opening the aperture on hiring to allow for more diversity was really the principal driver around the skills-based hiring movement, although this was also fueled by growing frustration with the lack of qualified applicants and the belief that current applicant tracking systems would undervalue years of work experience in instances where that work experience was gained by someone without a degree.

Love: As you talk about opening the aperture on hiring, obviously DEI also benefits in terms of better recognizing everyone’s prior experience that doesn’t come through necessarily in a degree. Are there any other benefits that you see to opening the aperture on hiring that are important, particularly now, that have brought skills-based hiring to the fore in such a way?

Fuller: Well, yes—although I hope this isn’t too obtuse. What’s happened over time, Dion, is that many, many companies are rather undisciplined about keeping their job descriptions and even their recruiting patterns up to date. A lot of companies, if you read their job descriptions, especially for entry-level or post-entry-level jobs, the job descriptions are often quite long and often feature all sorts of requirements or preferences that, when you have experience in working with companies who employ those types of workers, seem superfluous. And when you move to skills-based hiring, an effective organization is going to be disciplined about asking, “All right then, what are the skills one actually needs to be productive in this role? What are the skills that people need to demonstrate in this role to be considered as a candidate for advancement in our company in the future?” Not “What’s every possible skill or attribute that might be nice to have that we can jot down as if this is an eight-year old’s Christmas list and hope that, deus ex machina, a candidate with all these different attributes shows up. Implicit in moving a skills-based hiring for an institution that’s serious about it, I think, is exercising more thoughtfulness and discretion in terms of what they actually seek and linking that explicitly to patterns of success demonstrated by previously hired people that have been productive or advanced in the organization.

Love: I want to pick up on your point about committing to it seriously. There is a point that you make in your research about pronouncements on the one hand and practice on the other hand. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what you see as the distinction and why it’s important?

Fuller: Many, many companies with all the best intentions, in my view, embraced the need to move away from job requirements of applicants, like having a college degree, in instances in which that just seems superfluous. If you’re a cardiac surgeon or you are standing for the bar or you are an advanced analytics guru, in all probability you have a college degree. College degrees were being applied to all sorts of jobs that had not historically required a college degree. This move to require college degrees really gained momentum around 2010, 2011, 2012—not, as many people assumed, during The Great Recession. I think companies in a very well-meaning way said, “Let’s open the aperture.” They said, “Let’s be more welcoming of communities that don’t skew heavily to college degree holders, and we don’t really need this.” That’s a necessary but completely insufficient step. I don’t think that a lot of companies who removed these requirements were trying to virtue wash or make a claim that they didn’t tend to back up. I do think that many of them failed to ask what would be required for hiring managers to actually make different decisions than they’ve made historically when confronted with applicant pools and more-refined candidate pools that included a mixed population of degree holders with non-degree holders, who seem to have experientially based skills that would qualify them for consideration.

Love: Joe, one of the most interesting things for me as an adviser in this space was when I read in your research the scenario where a company takes away a degree requirement. They present a candidate to a hiring manager. They present another candidate to a hiring manager. The first one doesn’t have a degree, the second one does. But the second one is the one who moves forward in the hiring process because the hiring manager has hired based on degrees before, has a degree themselves, knows that they’ve got a pretty good heuristic in a degree as an indicator of someone’s analytics, someone’s ability to see things through, someone’s ability to think and to manage their time and work effectively. That was pretty much a punch in the stomach moment from me as I thought, “Gee, we’ve, with the very best intentions,” to use your phrase, “removed the degree requirement.” But we’ve defaulted back to the degree, anyway. Have I got that scenario right? And if so, how do you manage against that? How do you prevent that?

Fuller: Well, it’s a very useful way, I think, to reflect on what’s happening, Dion. These decisions are made by human beings, hiring managers. The hiring manager is trying to find a recruit that is going to, in that hiring manager’s estimation, be productive in the role that’s available. They are compensated, in fact, not to hire someone who’s going to be unproductive in the role in the service of some greater good. The failure to take into account the incentives and experience, as you pointed out, if a hiring manager is hiring for a job that they’ve selected previous candidates for over several years, and every previous candidate has been a university degree holder, college degree holder, what would suddenly motivate them to change? Let’s also fall back on a very important consideration. Let’s just imagine the scenario where, not only is the person selected not effective at the job, and either voluntarily or involuntarily leaves, but they’re associated with some pretty noticeable error problem, customer service event. The hiring manager who took the risk on hiring the experienced-based candidate, as opposed to going out and yet again hiring someone from a program at a university that multiple prior hires have attended, has actually incurred risk. Some of your audience will be old enough to remember where, in the 1980s and 1990s, people would say, “Well, no one ever got fired for hiring IBM.” Well, a hiring manager who takes a risk on a non-degreed candidate, and then that candidate for whatever reason is perceived as failing in the role, has incurred an incremental risk. What’s the repast when their supervisor says, “Well, who made this mistake?” And “Who is that person?” And “Where did they come from?” And “Well, you’re telling me you hired somebody that didn’t even have a college degree for this job?” It’s also, how do you get around that? Well, first of all, you have to acknowledge the dilemma that we just discussed. You have to acknowledge that I’m not talking here about conscious or even subconscious bias. The whole process by which candidates are selected from a larger applicant pool have been evaluated in the task. The criteria that are used to evaluate them have all been steeped in this history of looking for college graduates. Simply declaring, “We’re going to put some non-college graduates into the pool,” actually oughtn’t change the outcome until you start changing those process steps to reflect the expansion of the pool to include non-college graduates.

Love: I want to come back to some of those potential solutions in a little bit, but before I do, I’m interested in what you said about these perceived risks. I don’t know if I’m contradicting myself here in saying real perceived risks, but they are real perceived risks. You hire someone who doesn’t fit the traditional profile. Things don’t go so well, your decision is called into question. Those real perceived risks are leading to some significant inertia. How do you see this reflected across organizations overall? I think, if I remember correctly from your research, there were three distinct groups that came out of the hundreds of organizations that you studied. Can you tell us a little bit about those and what you see they mean for the prospects for skills-based hiring today?

Fuller: Well, we looked at a large pool of companies that had removed degree requirements and declared they were pursuing skills-based hiring. That was a large data set. Working with my co-author, Matt Sigelman, and my colleagues at the Burning Glass Institute, over the period of time since those degree requirements had been removed, we found there were three types of companies. One, that we unoriginally called “leaders,” were companies that there had been a reasonably material shift in the background of the people hired post removing of the degree requirement as a policy. So you regularly see the change in ratio in certain jobs being on the order of 10%, 15%, 20%. Rather than 100% of people being hired were college degree holders, all of a sudden it was 75%, and across whole companies—companies like Yelp or Cigna Insurance, would be good examples—we saw the ratio of college degree holders falling reasonably precipitously. It was certainly not to zero, but often 10, 15 points of the people hired obviously in a very well-established and well-regarded company like Cigna—we’re only talking about people hired since they removed the degree requirement, not their entire workforce. Then we found a second category of companies that, once again, we rather unoriginally called “in name only,” where they made the announcement, but really the math didn’t change at all. It’s pretty much made modest changes—often an initial surge of change, and then it would flatten off. There was a real commitment, and we saw some progress, but it didn’t really get to anything like approaching the level of the leaders. Then we had a third category that we called in retrospect, I think, a little bit unfairly, “backsliders.” But it did describe what had happened in the company, which is that an announcement was made, they made some progress, and then not only did they end up returning to their previous performance levels, actually the ratio of college graduates being hired grew a bit. Now when I said, “Perhaps that’s a little bit unfortunate,” you have to look at specific companies in these settings. One of the backsliders is Delta Air Lines. Delta Air Lines has an excellent multistep program for building diversity in their workforce. I don’t know the CEO there, Mr. Ed Bastian, but he is a consistent leader in the public space. Talked about the needs for this. So I sincerely believe Delta’s got a commitment to this. It’s not showing up in their numbers, and my only question to Mr. Bastian or to his team would be, “We’ve done the math here. We’ve done it consistently across multiple industries and companies. This is how you grade out. You may want to look into it.” But I think the most important thing is, across all the companies, it looks like something on the order of 3% of the positions that were once covered by college degrees requirements, that are no longer so covered, have changed. After that change, they went to people without degrees. And that’s a real number—3%. I’m sure all of us can go back to high school or college days and think that the difference between the 89 and 92 on a test is pretty important. But it’s certainly a very limited initial shift, and we ought to be asking, “Why is this proving to be so hard to operationalize the well-meaning pronouncement?”

Love: The backslider is just the one that, I guess, we all want to understand. We all want to understand what’s going on there and what might be causing them to net out at a result that is actually worse than where they started. Was there anything you learned there that HR leaders should be aware of? Or is there anything that you are trying to understand in your research moving forward? I would expect an HR leader listening into us today would be pretty happy to know if we are going to make this pronouncement that we are removing degrees from this role or these roles that we’re not actually ultimately going to end up with more people with degrees being appointed in these positions. Is there anything you learned that they should watch out for?

Fuller: Since this sample cuts across multiple industries, one has to be a little cautious about offering generalizations. But let me offer two that I think are durable. The first is, this is very reliant on who you happen to be hiring at this point in time. People don’t hire in the same ratios across position, period over period. There’s, let’s say, a sudden need for... Let’s go back to Delta Air Lines. Even though they have a corporate, they’ve removed the corporate policy requiring any employer or any employee to have a college degree, what if suddenly they’re hiring a lot of pilots, and qualified pilot applicants skew heavily to people with four-year degrees, as a for-instance. The second thing is, what’s the available labor pool? Let’s say you’re hiring for cybersecurity techs or software engineers—not IT help desk personnel but software engineers. They’re just not that many non-degree-holding qualified software engineers in the United States, and you could be out there looking for them, but your applicant pool might skew very heavily or exclusively to college graduates simply because the pool of talent without such a degree is tapped out. And that may be increasingly the case when we talk about companies wanting to compete for diverse talent. The attention they pay to retaining the diverse talent they have in the types of positions that do generally or have historically generally required degrees may inhibit the movement, not through some malfeasance or machinations, but they may pay closer attention to reducing the turnover of those candidates because they want to keep them with more focus because they’re meeting an additional corporate objective like DEI. Who you’re hiring and who’s actually accessible to you in your local labor market that’s got the skills profile really does influence the outcomes for these backsliders. We do, though, want to challenge them to confirm that. In a lot of the research we do here at the Project on Managing the Future of Work and some of my research with Burning Glass Institute, we consistently see that senior executives often have a much more self-validating view of what they’re doing than the data actually suggests. Their own estimates of how well they’re doing at certain fronts are often pretty rosy, relative to the actual performance. And once again, I don’t think that’s a cover-up or some effort to obscure things. I just don’t think a lot of senior executives, up to and including CHROs, are really steeped in a lot of the ongoing details.

Love: Obviously, we want our parting thought to be those who are the skills-based hiring leaders, and we want to understand what it is that they’re doing. And what are some of the things that either they are doing directly, they’ve already established practices or reestablished practices, as you’ve suggested, the in name only might need to do. But I know that you’ve also done some subsequent work or reflection on what are some of the things—I think there are about five or six of them—that companies can do to overcome that scenario that we first started speaking about: A hiring manager with two candidates. You don’t have a degree requirement for this role, but one of your candidates has got that degree, and because of the perceived risk of going with the one who doesn’t, you go with the one who does. Right? There are a number of things as you’ve thought about this more and continue to research, that you are advising or that you are suggesting HR leaders consider, as they want to build their skills-based hiring approach and see themselves more preferably in that leader group than the in name only or the backsliders. Can you talk a little bit more about those? I think the first one, for example, was saying to that hiring manager, “Hey, here are our successes.” I think you say celebrate success, and show your hiring managers what’s possible, right? Be very vocal about how this is working, and that perceived risk is maybe not as risky as they think it is. Can you talk a little bit about that and the other examples that you shared?

Fuller: Well, changing the way managers think about outcomes and really trying to change the cultural undercurrents at work is an important part of this, because companies just generally—it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about business strategy or customer service or hiring—they all develop, for lack of a better term, “the way we do things around here.” And if you can, through championing success stories and, I think, importantly understanding the success or the attributes that led to that success story, reverse engineering, where did these highly successful employees come from who have progressed in the company, been promoted, maybe even to senior management, but up and down the ranks are highly rated, highly productive. Very often companies, they don’t do the type of supply chain management analysis to say, “It’s interesting. Of the X number of non-degree holders we’ve hired into frontline supervisor positions, 75% of the success stories were noncommissioned officers in a military branch. Oh, maybe we should be hiring more of them.” Or “Oh, maybe there are other people with a military background who would be successful in other jobs.” Or “Oh, many of these people turned out to have had a career break—let’s say for childcare or senior care—and have been out of the workforce or not in a full-time job for eight or 10 years, but now their life circumstances have changed.” Understand what the indicia are of success and put more attention on getting more candidates like that. I think, though, that we have to come back to this question of the actual process that the hiring manager is going through, literally in terms of record keeping and describing what they’re looking for, and emotionally and intellectually. Simply saying to someone, “You are free to hire on a skills basis. You no longer have to require a college degree,” that may be liberating, that hiring manager may be confusing. Hiring managers are busy, and their objective in hiring is to get somebody in the position who they think is qualified as fast as they can if it’s an open position. As fast as they can, because they have work to be done. As fast as they can, so if there’s a hiring freeze while their job’s open. And so they’re obviously going to quickly default to the heuristics they’re most comfortable with, which are the established heuristics. You have to cause them, you have to help them understand what a skills-based hire looks for... looks like, rather. What are the skills you’re actually looking for, and what is the evidence that would make you comfortable as a hiring manager that this non-degree holder will be able to do a good job? If you don’t set up a process that causes them to do that pretty hard thinking and to document it, the tendency to revert to that old style, unless there’s a very active incentive to hire differently, —which very few companies have, and after the Supreme Court decision, I think none will have—you are really asking them to take a leap of faith and you’re showing very limited sympathy for the way the actual day-to-day hiring managers’ experience of recruiting goes. Lots of signals that this is acceptable, but you have to take it down to the process level to help those hiring managers realize how to execute this policy change.

Love: Joe, we’ve been talking quite a bit about building the organization’s comfort with skills-based hires, and in building that comfort, we can mitigate some of the risks—the risks of hiring managers continuing to hire the talent that has the degree, continuing to hire the talent that they’ve hired in the past. In that context, your next recommendation, I think, is really interesting, because it even potentially takes us out of the world of talent acquisition or at least external talent acquisition. The recommendation I’m looking at specifically here is build experience with skills-based promotion before trying skills-based hiring. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you came to that and how it also helps to build the comfort of the organization with skills-based hiring, ultimately?

Fuller: Dion, a few years ago I published a paper called Building From the Bottom Up, which looked at low-wage workers and what explained workers that had been earning less than 200% of their local poverty line, who transcended that barrier and got into a more lucrative household-sustaining career, versus those who didn’t. We isolated about four variables that explained why some people transited that barrier and got into areas of more economic security, versus those that didn’t. And they were things like getting regular clear and actionable feedback from the supervisor; having internal opportunities for skills building and credential obtainment by the workers within the corporate context to get advanced; that there was someone mentoring them. A few other commonsensical outcomes. What that also showed us is that most companies... As you go down the ranks of a company in the U.S. economy, every step you take down the hierarchy, the next layer becomes more diverse—more ethnically diverse, more gender diverse. Most big companies are sitting on big populations of diverse talent, and when they’re saying, “We need new types of skills in the organization,” I believe their first resort should be—rather than go out and play the spot market for talent and speculate it through a recruiting process, we can get someone—“Maybe we ought to be asking who do we have in this organization that we can make an informed decision to invest in, to cultivate the skills we’re seeking in our company.” Make an investment of that type—let’s say, in training or in sponsoring someone to go and get an added credential. I’m not necessarily talking about university degree, although we see more of that than we have in corporate America as a benefit, but maybe a specific course. “We’re going to sponsor to go to local community college to take a basics of business financial management, because to be a supervisor, we think that you need to bolster your understanding of that.” You’re making that investment based on a personnel file, on an attendance record, promotions, performance evaluations, cultural fit. Is this someone that plays on the softball team that has always have to roll over the maximum number of holiday days. That you showed up during the blizzard when half the workforce just said, “Forget it. It’s too much hassle. I don’t want to have a two-and-a-half-hour commute home.” Rather than saying, “We’re going to hire our way to a more diverse workforce with higher levels of equity inclusion,” what about promoting our way out of that? And rather than having a skills-based hiring philosophy, have a skills-based advancement culture across the board. It doesn’t matter about your educational attainment level. We do that constantly with higher paid people. We say, “Dion is an outstanding performer, and we’re delighted to have him, but we really can’t promote him into this role, because he’s lacking a marketing background or a finance background.” Well, give it to him. Given advancements in online learning, given the adoption of some very good corporate learning systems, like Degreed, the tools are there for companies to really expand their aperture in a different way, which is, “I’m looking for talent. There are certain attributes of that talent I’m looking for. Diversity is one of them. I’m looking at the population of accessible diverse talent—new hires and people internally I can advance.” Why do we draw a distinction between the new and shiny and the known and familiar? I don’t know, but I think it’s time to put it aside.

Love: Joe, I don’t want to put you on the spot, but I got to admit, I’m curious now, if I’m an HR leader, and I have a choice of doing skills-based hiring or skills-based promotion, are you going to advise me to do one, versus the other?

Fuller: I think it depends on the skill set you’re looking for and the demographics of your workforce. If you look at industries, for example, like the defense sector, the workforce skews pretty old. If you go to one of those big production lines, the workforce looks a lot more my age than yours, Dion. I think in a sector like that or the electrical utility sector, how do I cultivate a younger population? Develops some talent pipelines? I maybe want to over index toward new hires. But if I’m in a services industry—let’s say I’m Bank of America. I’m employing hundreds of thousand people in the U.S., and I’ve got lots of diversity in my frontline and one level up workforce. What a rich population to pick from people who already know policies and procedures, have a sense for how we do things around here, like I mentioned earlier, and have shown commitment to the company, where you’ve got performance reviews that talk about their aptitude, their engagement, their capacity, their ambition. Much easier to make a decision on that basis for an incumbent worker. But forced to choose, I’d say start with grow your own first. But one observation: Generative AI is going to be immensely helpful in this regard, because the ability to link our performance management system data with our corporate learning data with what we can scrape off the web about what competitors are looking for and what their job descriptions are emphasizing, versus who they hire by surveying a LinkedIn, we’re going to be able to see patterns, like that patterns about understand where your internal successes came from, in a much broader way. I think we’ll get more granular understanding of experiences and combinations of attributes that explain success, and that will allow us to move from wandering through a big cornfield with a metal detector hoping to find some expended ordinance from the Civil War to be able to do the kind of rear radar from a drone, where we can see the entire field with great fidelity because the technology is going to allow us to go from mucking around on the ground to having that type of capability in the air.

Love: Joe, we spent a lot of time on skills-based hiring—what it is, what it can do for you, where companies are now, what’s holding them back, and what some of the factors of success might be, specifically your recommendations for moving forward with skills-based hiring. I want to take us quickly to your last recommendation, is to acknowledge that many jobs do require a college degree, and this relates to the question that I had for you. What are the limits to skills-based hiring in your view?

Fuller: Well, there are a lot of jobs that require either so much specificity of knowledge or such broad array of skills that both, someone that’s been through additional educational experiences that have allowed them to grow, learn more, and certainly gain skill specific credentials, become compellingly attractive, that the risk of hiring someone that doesn’t have that credential is an unreasonable one to inflict on the hiring manager or, for that matter, the company. Similarly, there are certain jobs, over time they may be reduced in number, where essentially the population of people that meet threshold characteristics is essentially 100% college degree holders.

Love: Quick follow up to that one. Are there any roles that you find are particularly well suited to skills-based hiring for HR leaders to keep in mind as they go forward from this conversation?

Fuller: I think a lot of first-level supervisor jobs for people who have been in the next role down for an extended period with a good work history—really any supervisor job, whether it’s an office manager or a sales regional or district manager or the manager of a facility with that experience worker—is one. A second is someone that has demonstrated a lot of competence but has just one or maybe two voids in their background that are disqualifying, such as... I gave an illustration earlier that if you’ve got someone who’s a very good facilities manager or a very good, let’s say, regional manager for sales, doesn’t have a degree, and they’ve got the personality and the track record and the credibility in the organization to advance, but they’re very nervous about their business numeracy. They don’t really understand budgeting. They don’t really understand charts of accounts or cashflow statements. Well, that’s highly teachable. And these days, you can get fantastic educational assets on the web to teach that. Look for high performers who are blocked by one or two deficits and how you can backfill those and direct them to that. Give them specific feedback that, if they went through this program, either maybe you’d reimburse them for it or if they use the corporate learning resources and pass something, they’re going to be viewed based on their previous contributions as qualified for consideration for that promotion the next time when it comes up. And so many of your listeners, of course, they’re in big companies. I’m not suggesting a needle in the haystack. How do you create a specific opportunity for one individual in a large company? But if you’ve got dozens and dozens and dozens of store managers, let’s say, for a mobile phone provider, you will see that there’s a histogram of reasons why they don’t get advanced, and that’ll parade over very heavily. Why don’t we take the first two or three disablers and eliminate them?

Love: Joe, I want to thank you for your time with us today. It’s been a fascinating conversation as always to hear about what you’ve learned about where skills-based hiring is and what it needs to do in order to advance. What’s one piece of closing advice that you’d give to HR leaders?

Fuller: I always hesitate to be so presumptuous, but I think, given the demographics in the workforce, the workforce is not growing. The college educated workforce is skewing ever more heavily to women. The probability of a forward-looking and sensible immigration policy, at least in the United States, is negligible currently. You have to really go back to some first principles. You cannot incrementalize your way to success. That requires a better grasp of what it’s going to take to advance people. That’ll be a big premium on growing your own and a big premium on understanding what dissuades people from applying to your establishment or causes people to leave, which is going to lead you into areas like care obligations, learning voids—not degree voids, but a lack of confidence or aptitude in very specific areas. We really have to reengineer these processes for a post-industrial society with demographics that are quite unlike workforce demographics across the Western world as we’ve ever seen. The days of, “There’re plenty of applicants for jobs. They more or less look alike and sound alike, and I’m just picking the best, picking the best of the litter over and being more nimble and more tailored in our approach and much more open to experiment and innovation,” I think, is going to differentiate the HR leaders that are celebrated for really being that strategic partner from those who are doing a great job just administering the current system, but aren’t being that change agent, which HR is positioned to be today as never before.

Love: A lot of exciting and challenging work ahead in skills-based hiring. What’s one thing you’re looking for or you are going to be watching in the year to come?

Fuller: I’ll be watching to see a couple of things. One is, when we can get some more data about the actual impact of skills-based hiring from companies and also from governments. We mentioned earlier, graying workforces, and a lot of jurisdictions, state and local government, skews old. And the number of states, starting with Maryland, certainly Utah, Colorado, New Jersey, have implemented skills-based hiring. What would be very interesting to see is, even employers with a more direct mandate toward things like DEI actually executed. Similarly, I’d be interested to see... What I’ll be watching more than anything else is, when we look at some of the tools out there, whether it’s the Gloats of the world, the Eightfolds the world, or some of these new very vibrant AI-based companies like AdeptID or SkyHive, are those technologies continuing to penetrate the market, get adopted and lead to process change? Wonderful work being done by some of these companies. Take TechWolf, for example—really breaking the back of challenges and having a coherent taxonomy and the ability to relate skills and experience to tasks at work. We’re making a lot of progress. Do people embrace that? Do they use it to really drive change or are they going to adopt it on being very cautious, “Well, what we’ve got now, works fine. How do I know this is going to work?” The people that embrace this wave of really exciting tech that’s going to make the management of human assets both more effective in commercial sense but also much more effective, I think, in terms of matching and retention, is going to be phenomenal. I’m going to be watching how fast it evolves and who are the early adopters. I’m not a betting man often, Dion, but I see some big companies making early adoptions. I might buy 100 shares, see what happens.

Love: Joe, as always, your reflections are insightful. We thank you for sharing the details of this fascinating work that’s so important to not only where we are, but where we’re going in talent management and human resources more broadly. Last question for you. Where can our listeners go if they want to learn more about your work—the work that you’ve done and the work that’s to come?

Fuller: Well, we have a website for our Managing the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School. You just Google my name and Managing the Future of Work HBS. You’ll get there after a couple of sponsored ads for future of work services. There we always post our research. As you know, Dion, we have a podcast of our own, which talks to leaders in the field, and we have a newsletter you can sign up with so you can see what we thought was great published recently or what we’re reading or what we think the biggest issues are. Similarly, I co-lead a project at Harvard called the Harvard Project on Workforce that has a broader array of activities and materials posted on it, since that involves faculty at three of our other schools. If you’re interested, you can find us at one of those two sites. And actually on the Harvard website, HBS website, you can find there’s an avenue to send me a short message. If someone has something very specific they want to talk about, they should look for that.

Love: Joe Fuller, thank you for that invitation, and thank you for joining us today.

Fuller: My pleasure, Dion.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.