In this News Desk interview, which was recorded on-site at Oracle CloudWorld in Las Vegas last week, Wayne Sadin, CIO/CTO/DCO, Via Group, CEO/Board Advisor, Acceleration Economy Analyst, and Chris Havrilla, VP, Product Strategy, Talent, Oracle, discuss how Oracle is using artificial intelligence (AI) to leverage talent.
Highlights
00:08 – Wayne introduces Havrilla.
00:25 – Havrilla says she has never been a vice president of product strategy and talent before now. She says there is a notion of enduring human capabilities that must be focused on within the world of work. Havrilla’s role is about helping companies with Oracle technology to bring about insights and value.
01:03 – Wayne asks Havrilla how she views “the human capital in today’s world.”
01:32 – Work feels as though it has become “a little bit more of a marketplace,” or exchange between skills and capabilities for the work that needs to be done, says Havrilla. She says that in today’s work world, people are “accessing experiences and maybe not self-identifying in jobs anymore.” In turn, Havrilla says that organizations must learn how to access talent and understand how to collaborate regardless of employment type, focusing more so on skills and capabilities.
03:25 – Wayne asks Havrilla how hiring managers and talent management professionals can work better to attract the right talent.
03:43 – In response to Wayne’s question, Havrilla says that it requires busting down the silos that keep people comfortable. She says it requires a shift from a focus on output to a focus on outcomes, which does not follow the previous process map. Overall, Havrilla says that data and technology play a huge role in this shift, but the human element cannot be replaced.
05:47 – Wayne says he interprets her comments to mean that now, hiring managers should “hire whole people, not just task robots.”
05:59 – Havrilla agrees with Wayne and says that even if a machine is brought into the workforce, organizations must understand how to collaborate with them and best leverage these new technologies. She says that companies must broaden their minds to various types of workers.
07:24 – Previously in human resources, Wayne says that hiring managers would “make a checklist and ask people yes or no questions.” He said the employee who was hired was the one who had the greatest number of checks. He asks Havrilla how this concept changes the recruitment process and how Oracle software and tools help talent management to move away from this process.
07:48 – Havrilla says that Oracle’s software and tools allow hiring managers to create data around skills and capabilities. Oracle Dynamic Skills is a “clear path to bring people into thinking about this,” says Havrilla. She says that AI can be leveraged to make sense of structured and unstructured data that will inform the hiring process. Havrilla says that Oracle enables hiring managers to “do this organically,” and utilizes the power of AI to “help make those matches.” Oracle Dynamic Skill Center is a way to give insights and value to “everybody, not just HR managers, leaders, and workers,” says Havrilla.
10:30 – Havrilla says that Oracle Dynamic Skills allows for other employees within an organization to “hydrate the profiles” of talent within a company. She says that this allows workers to “tell the system what to do,” so that it can help a company with this work, thereby enabling technology to be a collaborator.
12:14 – Although it is exciting to have a system that helps realize human potential, Wayne asks Havrilla if there is a downside to this that “employers have been concerned about.”
12:32 – Havrilla says that “the only downside is thinking the AI is automagical.” She says the danger is in humans losing their skills and capabilities — most notably, curiosity. She says the importance of AI is to feed the system suggestions to prevent technology from thinking for humans.
13:48 – Wayne asks Havrilla if this process can be applied across different employers.
14:04 – While Oracle is not delivering this ability currently, Havrilla says she thinks the technology is there to do so. She says there are three points of entry to the notion of work as a marketplace — a focus on internal mobility; a focus on developing skills and capabilities; and a focus on applying the former approaches to external candidates.
15:51 – Wayne referenced Larry Ellison’s comments from his keynote presentation earlier in CloudWorld about building a global health information system. He asks Havrilla if this idea could become a part of Oracle Dynamic Skills.
16:22 – Havrilla says that “anything and everything is possible” and notes that it would be interesting to see how the global healthcare information system could be modeled in Oracle Dynamic Skills. She says it is about finding ways to use the brokerage marketplace mentality to find new talent and leverage skills.
18:10 – Wayne asks Havrilla how “Oracle lured her here from a global advisory firm.”
18:20 – Having moved from IT to HR, Havrilla says she knew that data and technology play a huge role in how the world thinks about harmonizing the workforce. She says she is always trying to find a better way to do this. Havrilla had the opportunity to study the tech landscape and wanted to model her findings, which led her to Oracle. She says for “an AI geek” like herself, it was “magical” to see how Oracle uses cloud infrastructure to develop an array of applications. She says she was inspired by the organization’s desire to use technology to solve people’s problems.
20:36 – Wayne asks Havrilla his final question — what does she want the audience to know about her, Oracle, or the field?
20:57 – From the perspective of Oracle, Havrilla wants people to pay attention to what the organization has done, how they have done it, and the work the individual is trying to do. She encourages companies to have a strategy and understand what the outcome may be.
22:26 – Wayne thanks Havrilla for the interview and thanks the Acceleration Economy audience for tuning in.
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