How to Maximize Internal Career Opportunities to Engage and Retain Talent

Internal Talent Mobility is quickly being identified as one of the most important resources every organization has at its disposal. Studies have shown that companies who prioritize it not only bolster the likelihood of retaining their employees, but access to career opportunity also increases engagement and can help plug the ever daunting skills gap. But there’s an unfortunate reality – internal mobility is criminally underutlized. Or, the process is just not optimized properly.

We recently had the pleasure of chatting with Giorgio Benassi, Global Head of Talent, at the H&M Group, about this very topic. H&M is renowned for it’s stellar approach to internal hiring, and during our conversation we asked Giorgio for his insights on how to best approach this.

In this episode:

• What internal mobility looks like in H&M
• The positives and negatives of internal mobility
• The importance of learning and development
• How visibility impacts successful internal mobility programs

Key takeaways:

1. Mobility in H&M

In H&M internal hiring has been a source of their growth for many years. And development of staff is at the center of this. Managers and leaders are empowered to nurture their people and encourage them to take opportunities whenever they can. And you can see it in the DNA of the company – a lot of top management is made up of people that have been employees for 20+ years, having come from trainee programs or worked their way up from store level. Potential and enthusiasm is rewarded and has built this culture of internal mobility. H&M make roughly 90,000 hires a year, and in the office space, it is split almost 50/50 between external and internal. And this percentage increases the more senior you go. According to Giorgio: “historically, we have only looked outside if we are opening new areas of business and have had very limited knowledge.”

2. The positive impact of internal mobility

“We have an incredible history of giving chances to people, of giving opportunities to individuals that might not have the skills and the capabilities on paper for doing that specific job,” Giorgio tells us. This has put a huge onus and expectation on managers to take career growth seriously for their direct reports. And it’s created an incredibly positive culture from this perspective. Leaders are proactively talking about development and moving people around for different opportunities. It’s not just rhetoric either – bigger budgets and bigger investments are put in L&D rather than talent acquisition, demonstrating how the company plans to grow competencies from within.

3. What visibility really means when it comes to internal opportunity

Even though H&M’s numbers around internal mobility are incredibly high in comparison to the average, they still seek improvement. One area in particular is around the visibility of opportunities for employees. Given the size and scope of the organization, it’s difficult for the managers (who actively want to encourage growth) to know every area and every opportunity available. “They can’t possibly be the talent guides for every single person in their teams. They cannot coach them to the complexity and the totality of the organization because they might be very competent in an area, but they might not know enough or not have the right network and contacts to support them to move into a venture, or into another brand.” The future lies in a skills-based model on a shared platform that can improve visibility and also fairness in how talent is distributed within the company.

Our guest’s final piece of advice:

“We give lots of value to ideas. But the unsung hero is execution.”

Highlights:

• [7.38] Mobility in H&M
• [10.32] What percentage of H&M roles are filled by internal talent?
• [12.07] The positive impacts of internal mobility
• [14.01] What does L&D look like in H&M?
• [16.55] Building consistency with hiring leaders
• [18.04] Challenges of too much internal mobility
• [23.48] What does a healthy internal mobility process look like?
• [28.58] Visibility isn’t just about job titles
• [33.30] Culture challenges
• [37.10] The growth of AI

Transcript:

Johnny Campbell:

Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, depending on what time you’re listening to this at, where in the world, if you’re listening live. This is the Shortlist. I’m Johnny Campbell. I’m the host of today’s podcast and live broadcast on LinkedIn and YouTube, and I’m CEO of SocialTalent. You’re very welcome to episode, I think we’re on 138. Today, we’re going to be talking about internal mobility, which is a really important topic. We’ve covered it a couple of times before with different guests, but there’s just so much to it. It’s a really high level topic that a lot of organizations are talking about, concerned about today. It’s important when you talk about attracting talent because talent want to go work for a company that have career opportunities. It’s important about engaging talent because people want to be challenged by challenging work and see themselves progress. And of course that’s going to be very important in retaining talent. But it’s also important for inclusion as we can give more opportunities to perhaps underrepresented individuals within our organization who aren’t getting those opportunities. And it’s also important in the context of a world where skills are so in demand and there aren’t a whole lot of available skills externally, a lot of companies are looking to develop those skills internally.

According to the data, and I’ll take a point from LinkedIn here, employees stay 41% longer at companies that have a lot of internal hiring versus those that don’t. So the data is quite clear on retention and maintenance of staff and keeping staff in your business. But so many companies just prioritize external hiring. They fall in love with the external candidates, and not the internal focus. Our guest today is going to talk about a company that perhaps doesn’t do that, who goes the opposite. And to dive into this, I’m really proud to welcome Giorgio Benassi, who’s joining us from Barcelona today. He’s a Global Head of Talent at H&M Group. Giorgio, it was such a pleasure to have you on this show. I wonder perhaps if you could introduce yourself. You’re a man who’s lived in many, many countries around the world, very international, and worked for lots of different businesses. Perhaps you can tell us a little about yourself and why this topic is important to you.

Giorgio Benassi:

Thank you, Johnny, and thank you to the listeners. Thank you for having me. First time I’m on a podcast, so I’ll apologize to your listeners and to the live audience if this is not as sharp as some of the amazing guests that you had on the podcast prior to this! As you said, my name’s Giorgio, I’ve been living across the different countries. I’ve been more in the TA space for more or less 20 years, give or take. I lived and worked in Italy, and the Netherlands, I spent the last eight years in Hong Kong, and I’ve recently moved back to Europe in Barcelona. I have somewhat the typical TA profile and background, stumbled upon TA by chance on the agency side, had some strong agency beginnings in the PageGroup and then moved to the corporate side when I was in the Netherlands, worked for Phillips, I worked for INFINITI Nissan, and then more recently, for the last eight years for the H&M Group.

And what I’m doing today is I’m heading up talent for H&M Group, which is a little bit of a pet project, if you want to call it like that. We’re in a journey of transforming our operating model in HR towards the COE model. And I’m heading up that journey for the area of talent acquisition, talent management, and employee branding, plus a couple of other smaller areas, like smaller teams rather than areas, they’re very important, but the teams are a little smaller, with employee engagement, early careers and strategic workforce planning.

Johnny Campbell:

Giorgio, most of our listeners, particularly those European listeners, will be very familiar with H&M, but for those who aren’t, because we do have a very international audience, tell us a little bit about H&M, what is H&M, where would you find a H&M store, and what kind of employee numbers do you have, how international is the business these days?

Giorgio Benassi:

Fairly large business, I would say. We’re of course in the retail space. H&M is a group, it’s a family of brands that has around about 4,500 stores in almost 80 countries all over the world, with 150,000 colleagues roughly. A lot of those are in stores, of course, which is the largest part of our workforce. We’re shy of 20 billion euros turnover on a yearly basis. But I think what’s interesting and sometimes rare to associate with the group is that it’s a very, very diverse type of company internally when it comes to the type of jobs and the type… Which I think is really connected to the topic we’re going to talk about today. Of course H&M is associated to the red logo and the big brand, which is still the large majority of our business obviously, but we have other brands, smaller brands, brands that in comparison to H&M might be perceived as small, but if taken in isolation, they aren’t that small at all, like COS or ARKET, or & Other Stories.

And then we have some very interesting new business ventures that we work with. We invest a lot in smaller startups. We have our own ideas that we develop, and then we have some M&As and ventures that we develop, or maybe we have businesses within the business that employ 10, 15, 20 people, and that feel like working in a startup or in scale up. And then you can work for the giant that employs that employs that many people. So it’s a very diverse group, and with a wide presence, but with a strong Swedish, Scandinavian soul and heritage.

Johnny Campbell:

A lot of times when we talk about internal mobility in this show, we’re talking about how we need more of it. And a lot of our guests, if not most of our guests that have come on to talk about this topic have talked about how they’re trying to drive more internal mobility, that their company feels the need to focus on it, to get more opportunities for internal talent, that they’re too externally focused. That isn’t the case though in H&M, to the best of my knowledge. Tell me about mobility in H&M, and the roots of it, and what it looks like today.

Giorgio Benassi:

For us, it’s been a source of our growth for many years. Ours is an organization that is very people focused, and I’ll say the boilerplate line that it’s very value driven. But I’ve worked in different companies and I can tell you I’ve never experienced any organization that talks as much about their values, and that does the utmost to make sure that we leave those values on a day-to-day basis, than ours. In talking about those values, we have basically empowered our managers, and pushed them to develop their own people, to make sure that there was some form of growth that we were providing to our people. And that has worked exceptionally well in the years of growth because opportunities were everywhere. We have been growing very fast for quite many years. So opportunities were everywhere. And we’ve developed a lot of people from store positions into store management positions, into office positions.

A lot of our top management is made of people that have been in the company for 20, sometimes 30-plus years, and that have grown from either a trainee program, a high potential program, or simply having started in store, and worked their way up. That has served us really well, but it has also challenged us in ways that were surprising, at least to me. When I joined eight years ago, I somewhat realized that as an organization we ended up being very inward looking, if you know I mean. We tend to compare ourselves to ourselves, which is healthy in some ways, don’t get me wrong, but in some areas of our business, there’s been a phase in our growth, in our evolution as an organization that we have spent maybe a bit too much time looking at ourselves and how we could get incrementally better, and we missed a couple of trends that were happening out there that we could have caught if we had injected some of the competence from outside, or some of the knowledge from outside.

Johnny Campbell:

So when you look at the amount of hiring that happens in any given year, approximately what percentage, do you think, of roles are filled by internal applicants across the business?

Giorgio Benassi:

I think we need to make a distinction of course between what happens in the stores, obviously, and what happens on an office recruitment, if we want to generalize it. Stores, warehouses is where we have more of external hiring, a lot of temporary, part-time work. Think about roughly 90,000 hires a year overall. What goes into the office space is roughly split 50/50, internal/external, but if you look at the management layer, so people with people management responsibility, that moves from around 70% on the first level manager up to 90% for more senior leadership positions. Historically, we have looked outside only if we were, say, opening new areas of business where we had very limited knowledge, say, “We’re going into the homeware space, so let’s find some people that know about this space.” So that has been a little bit our approach, but the numbers are quite significant, I believe.

Johnny Campbell:

Focusing on the positives, how did the culture that does allow so many of your retail colleagues to have access to those opportunities, let’s say in head office or in new businesses, new ventures… Because honestly, that’s something that a lot of other retailers, even fashion retailers, don’t have. They wouldn’t necessarily have that type of opportunity. So focusing on the positive side, what are some of the things that the organization did well to drive that culture?

Giorgio Benassi:

I think we have put a lot of expectations on managers, on leaders, to develop their own people and to give them opportunities for growth, opportunities to take positions elsewhere. And we’ve really put pressure over the years on managers to do that. And that has created an incredibly positive culture from this perspective. You really see managers talking about development, talking about moving people around, giving opportunities to people. And when growth was really sustained, opportunities were there for everybody. And that was a fantastic time that a lot of my colleagues still look back with nostalgia. It has been fantastic. And I think that is still there. The conversations I have with business leaders are, “First, we need to look inside, who can do this? Who can we develop to do this? How can we grow this competence from inside?” Historically, we’re an organization that puts bigger budgets and bigger investments in L&D than in talent acquisition, which tells a story about how we plan to grow the competencies in our organization.

Johnny Campbell:

And do you have specific academies, for example, that retail colleagues or even head office colleagues can access? Is it self-directed learning, is it more the programs you mentioned high potential programs that they’re selected to be on, or is a combination of all those things?

Giorgio Benassi:

There’s a combination of things, and we are also, as I mentioned at the beginning, in this transition phase towards more of a centrally driven COE model. Historically, we’ve been a very decentralized organization, so you would have instances of all the things that he have said in some markets, but not in other markets. So it will depend a little bit on the situation.

But we have of course programs that we run centrally now for senior leadership, high potential programs, you name it. But a lot has happened more in the instance, in the moment, which is a little bit one of the challenges that we’re facing now. We’ve been very much reacting to an upcoming need or an upcoming short-term competence requirement that then we have worked towards a short-term development. We have an incredible history of giving chances to people, of giving opportunities to individuals that might not have all the skills and the capabilities on paper for doing that specific job. I mean, if you want to be self-aware, look at myself. Yes, I’ve worked in many countries, but the step from the role that I had before to this role is a huge step. And as I said to my manager and to the people that signed off on it, I said, “You could have found externally someone that had better skills, better capabilities, better knowledge of managing teams of this size.” Still the organization wanted to take a bet to someone they believed in, which I will be forever grateful for.

Johnny Campbell:

You mentioned the COE model, the center of excellence model, and trying to move away from the more organic decentralized approach. And Lisa, listening on YouTube, has put a question in as to how has H&M driven consistency, and perhaps this is more recent, of approach between hiring leaders around mobility, or what are your thoughts or what are your plans around that area to drive more consistency around mobility?

Giorgio Benassi:

Very, very complicated area. Now we’re doing some tests and trying some new approaches around some… So if we talk about specifically the tail end of that internal mobility process, so that more the recruitment piece against a specific vacancy, which for us is still determining factor, we’re now testing new approaches to that recruitment process that take the hiring manager a little bit further out of the decision-making. Not entirely, for us, managers play an important role and we’d rather empower them than… But we want to take a little step back from a hiring manager running the entire show to having more opinions brought in into that process, and wherever possible, wherever the skills allow it, a more factual assessment of the capabilities of that individual that does not rely on an individual’s opinion.

Johnny Campbell:

So that brings me to perhaps some of the topics you’ve begun touching on, which were around the potential downsides of too much internal mobility, too much internal hiring. And you mentioned the lack of a correct mix of external and internal, and then the impact on decision-making. So perhaps talk to me about what are some of the biggest challenges, and maybe what do you think is the more optimal balance between developing people internally, having that culture, which is also a very positive thing, to having new ideas, new ways of working from the external market?

Giorgio Benassi:

It’s hard to nail a specific percentage where you’re saying this is the right balance that everybody should follow. I think what we’re doing at the moment is, from a TA perspective, as a talent organization, we are taking that reflection into every conversation that we’re having with hiring managers, and then we’re looking at aggregating the data to see where the overall direction is going. So we’re still in a little bit of a reactive approach to it, but at least we are at the moment bringing that question, “Should this be an internal person, or would your team benefit from an external hire in this context?” And then we’re trying to aggregate the data and see in which professions.

A relevant example I think is the HR space where historically we have developed a lot of people out of stores into HR roles, and we’ve populated for many years most of our HR leadership organization with those competencies. That’s created an HR organization that was extremely close to the business, and extremely understanding of the business challenges. What has lacked to create is that specific specialist knowledge to then move the needle on certain areas. And so now we are analyzing how we want the team mixes, where do we want to bring the 20 years experience in the company coming from the store, which is extremely valuable to us, with the experts that comes from outside and that has seen different ways of doing things and can bring that. And then I think the challenge in general with this then becomes, how do you blend the two? Do they speak to each other? There’s a topic of inclusion in that, how do we bring different ways of thinking and different approaches to this into an effective team, and how do we make them work together effectively? It’s not always an easy task.

Johnny Campbell:

I guess this is the principle of why so many companies focus on diversity, that the data suggests very strongly that diverse teams make better decisions. And what we think of typically as diversity from a very visual perspective, what looks diverse, diversity can be, have they spent 20 years in H&M, or have they worked in six other companies? That in itself is diversity because you bring different backgrounds, different experiences of how things worked, didn’t work, different systems, different challenges, which together, as you pointed out, with a team who have maybe the best of the external market plus the closeness to the business, together, they can do really well. I’m imagining, Giorgio, that one area that you’ve had to lean on external talent for in the past, and we haven’t discussed this in advance, so correct me if I’m wrong, has been the digital space. We’ve seen most fashion retailers move heavily into digital, Covid did the same for us, a lot of competition there. Has that been an area where you’ve been able to experiment as an organization between the blend of external and internal? And if so, how has that worked?

Giorgio Benassi:

Yeah. In that area, we have actually gone quite heavily externally. I mean, the focus has been primarily externally. We have had a series of waves of transformation in our digital organization, what we called our business tech organization, and we’re still going through some, unfortunately, quite painful exercises with that. And our journey in our minds has been to find all possible ways to develop competencies. But in our journey to digitalize our company, we have in the past decade, fallen a little bit behind compared to our competition. We’ve been a little bit late in that journey, so when we decided to make the step, we had to take a conscious decision that we would have to go more external to bring the competency. And it has proven, in our culture, quite a challenging task to do, because you bring a lot of external, you bring different perspectives, sometimes it blends very well and it delivers incredible value to our business, and sometimes it’s challenging and it clashes with all ways of working and all ways of thinking. But you’re spot on in saying that that’s been a focus area for us, but we’ve been mostly externally facing with that.

Johnny Campbell:

So I know you’ve been with the business eight years, but eight years ago you were the external person who came to it with fresh eyes, with perspective of Phillips and other backgrounds, Nissan and other industries, and agency background, and even different countries that you’d worked in. So when you take that perspective that you have, which is eight years of internal and many more years of external, and you put it together, when you start mapping out what a good process, let’s call it, a healthy process for mobility looks like, that balances somewhat the external and internal, what do you think are some of the critical areas to focus on? And yon this show, we’ve talked about whether it’s about awareness of the roles, the application process, the role managers have in being able to veto or hoard talent, et cetera. What do you think are the top three, four critical areas that anyone listening to the show today should be focusing on probably to unlock the right balance, the healthy balance between those two?

Giorgio Benassi:

I would say it most likely depends on what the pain points are for your own organization. For our organization, the pain points are primarily connected to a lack of visibility. So what we’re working on is to really give the keys of the career development and the growth back to our colleagues. And there’s a lot of things that we are doing in this space because historically, again, because of this emphasis put on managers rather than processes to guarantee this internal mobility, our internal mobility process has been primarily manager driven. So it’s not about knowing everything that is available in the company and deciding what’s best for you. It’s more your manager coming to you with the knowledge of an opportunity for you and telling you, “This is great, you should do this.” And then of course you have a say in it, but generally it’s well thought through because there’s a dialogue between the two and there’s a good understanding of what a positive development would look like.

So for us, that has been exceptionally good until the complexity of the organization growing to the numbers that I’ve shared earlier has made it impossible for managers to have the visibility that it requires. They can’t possibly be the talent guides for every single person in their teams. They cannot coach them to the complexity and the totality of the organization because they might be very competent in an area, but they might not know enough or not have the right network and contacts to support them to move into a venture, or into another brand.

And so now what we’re trying to do and working towards is to increase the visibility of opportunities, we’re planning to and outlining a move towards a skills-based model that helps us us move, visualize what are the skills, capabilities of our people out of just a manager assessment, create opportunities for growth and development on a shared platform, create a visibility for individuals of what their development opportunities are in terms of increasing the skills with an indication of what are the skills and the competencies that the organization is primarily focusing on. And in a time in which opportunities aren’t as many as there were 10, 20 years ago, creating opportunity for horizontal growth and development through internal gig work, internal project work that today happens but happens in the context of a network. I know Simon, that know Carl, that know Francesca, and she’s amazing at that. And that works, but it isn’t the fairest and it isn’t the healthiest way of stimulating and activating really the talent that you have inside the company.

Johnny Campbell:

I know I had this similar conversation with Shannon over in Ikea who was on the show before with us, and she has a learning development for IKEA for Ingka Group, and one of the challenges they faced, I think very similar, was when they went to try and begin this process several years ago, they just couldn’t map the skills. And even when they went to market, and I don’t know if you’ve had this challenge, but they felt that there was a lack of tools to map retail skills in particular. There’s a lot of tools out there around engineering, around corporate roles, but there isn’t really a lot of focus or hasn’t been a lot of focus on retail skills, and then transferring those skills in a language that can be seen and matched to corporate roles or office roles, if you’d like. Has that been a challenge? Because visibility, I think, the folks listening to this might think visibility of jobs so that people can see what jobs are there, but I think what you’re getting at is it’s more than that. There’s a visibility to understand that a job title doesn’t mean a whole lot to me, could I even get that job? It’s trying to match that on scale for 150,000 people is complicated.

Giorgio Benassi:

It’s complicated. And we’re moving towards a competence centric model where the idea is to tell our colleagues, “These are the capabilities, the competencies that we’ve highlighted as being instrumental for our future and our development. Do you want to grow in those? These are the opportunities we’re giving you to increase your competencies in these areas and the space that we’re giving you to do so to give that possibility.” And that could be a learning journey, it could be a project, it could be a gig, it could be something. But that visibility, ultimately it’s information, it’s knowledge, it’s awareness of what’s going on in the company, it’s the ability to make decisions for your own career that aren’t just coming out of a hat or your own personal passions, but you can fine-tune them on the basis of what you know your company is moving towards.

And of course we want people to stay, not necessarily they will end up staying, but if I can provide them an opportunity to know what they should do to be able to stay and to be be successful with us, that is the kind of visibility and access that I want to build. And then of course there’s access to project work, and access to gig work, and the ability to apply for jobs, that is necessary in a lot of our organizational structures in companies. I mean, there’s not many organizations out there that have taken the skills-based model to a point where they’ve deconstructed the job into a series of skills and they attach compensation to the skill. We’re not there. We’re taking the first steps in that space. So that job is still very important in our context, but it’s not the main and only driver.

Johnny Campbell:

We have a question from James Mailley, who’s listening live on LinkedIn. Do you have programs that identify potential in the stores or warehouses that open up opportunities to progress to regional or head office roles? Maybe you’ve semi answered this already in terms of, I know you said it’s more local, it’s not across the company.

Giorgio Benassi:

Yeah, it is more local. We have some exceptional programs in the US for instance, that have delivered great value in this. We are now looking with our early careers team on how we can scale some of those successful initiatives to a larger group of countries or regions, and if we are able to build a scalable model to make sure that we have these programs on a global scale that are somewhat aligned and unified. But the skills mapping exercise that I was referring to, although not being a program per se, would give us the ability to understand hidden skills of people that maybe pass through our stores for a limited period of time when they are students, or just before their graduation. Some of them, they’re going to be software engineers six months down the line or 12 months down the line. This model combined with an expansion of our alumni program just to be able to stay in touch with these people, I think will give us the ability to tap into an incredible talent pool that comes from there.

And some of it is people we need to grow and develop into a certain competence, but others are gaining that competence through their studies today, and they’re working in our stores to make ends meet, finance their studies, or just get some pocket money. How do we bring them back in if they’ve had a good experience? We’re trying to design some programs that are going to help us do that.

Johnny Campbell:

So let’s imagine you’ve mapped the skills, you’ve identified it, you’ve built or brought in great software that can do the matching and notifications, talk to me about the cultural challenges that might still remain that probably have to be fixed as well if you’ve identified those.

Giorgio Benassi:

Our main cultural challenge still remains is the central role that managers play in every… And it’s a blessing and a curse. But because of the history and how we got here, there really is this approach of this heroic, I call it heroic management leadership, where we do expect managers to be at the center of everything and they’re moving cards and making sure that people have the right opportunities and so forth. And that is a significant cultural barrier to go against, especially when you think that our senior management is all coming from that journey. So when you go and announce programs or design programs, historically, I think now with the shift towards the COE, things are significantly changed, but historically those programs have been met with skepticism, and more with the approach of saying, “Well, do we need all this red tape? Do we need all of this admin work?” Much as you want to minimize it, some of it is still going to be there. “Do we need to formalize all those things? Ultimately, if we just be better leaders like we used to be 20 years ago, like we used to be 15 years ago, everything would be amazing like it was.” And that is a significant cultural challenge because these people have all experienced these wonderful times, and the human tendency is to go back there in your thoughts, and in your hopes, but we’re getting there.

Johnny Campbell:

It is a challenge that most companies are facing. The last decade in particular have seen enormous changes, but we’re also going into a potentially new era with generative AI in the last six months in particular, and it’s potential changes. I know I listened to a good podcast from Andreessen Horowitz two weeks ago, a16z Podcast, that talked about the impact of generative AI on businesses like H&M, and Zara, and Zalando, particularly around how it potentially might completely disrupt the world of modeling, because obviously e-tailers, particularly fashion e-tailers, spend a lot of time and money on models and photography and photo shoots to display their clothing in the right way on their websites, and that changes quite regularly. But the latest generation of generative AI tools, if you believe what folks are saying, and an article that was published in New Yorker even back in 2019 hinted at this, that you can now get 10,000 images of different models that may not even be real people modeling your clothing perfectly with the right creases, and camera angle, and 10,000 images costs 60 cent. And that level disruption, we’re going through, we’ve gone through additional transformation in the last 10 years that maybe is about to accelerate exponentially in the next couple of years with more generative AI that I think in your industry there’s going to be huge impacts.

Is that something that the organization is quite conscious of, is it something you think of in terms of as an opportunity even to solve some of these problems?

Giorgio Benassi:

Yeah. Our core focus on our strategic workforce planning line of work, which is where we are trying to look at the big shifts that our organization needs to make from a competency perspective and to plan those long-term, our number one focus is the AI space. And we see it from a business perspective and of course it has ripple effects in our talent function. We have a clear map from a business perspective of where we want to go and the capabilities that we need to build. And we’re now looking into structuring it in a little bit more formalized way with a good clear location strategy, hub strategy, so that we can activate that from an overall, I wouldn’t even say from an overall talent perspective, this is an exercise that will take talent, will take L&D, will take a rewards function, will take our people relations function on a journey of prioritization towards this. What you’re saying is the opportunities and the potential challenges of generative AI are significant for our business and significant for our professions, so we’re definitely looking at that very closely.

Johnny Campbell:

I know the Unleashed conference in Vegas there last month, I think the winner of the startup award was a company using generative AI to map skills, where it was being… Most competitors to date, including the big HCM tools and CRM tools are building models in the old-fashioned way, bit by bit, and building complicated models of skills that take a long time to try and normalize. And generative AI is just doing this on the fly, because it thrives on massive data sets, like 150,000 employees, 100,000 hires a year between all of the retail stores, that huge mix of skills, the enormous amount of applications you must get, the huge amount of alumni you have, the variety of roles, as you said, it’s almost perfect for something like this. But a horrible pain to solve without tools as advanced as we’re seeing in the last few months.

Giorgio Benassi:

We’re exactly in that conversation with a company on specifically this topic, because where we started on our journey of determining our competency model, then of course we ended up talking about our skills taxonomy, and our competency framework, and if we would go the traditional way, we would spend three, four years discussing with business stakeholders building this competency, how is it going to be called? Is it going to be part of a larger project management thing? And you spend years of meeting time trying to determine competencies. And some of the solutions out there, they have these incredible capabilities of building skills maps of your workforce. Of course, there’s an ethical element to it that needs to be worked very carefully, we’re very serious about that aspect, but you can’t brush it off, can you? These are things that are so important to be on top of.

Johnny Campbell:

Well, facing the taxonomy and technology challenge plus the cultural challenge, it’ll be brilliant if generative AI at least solves one of them, so you can get on with solving the other very big problem, which is how to change long withstanding behaviors and norms of an organization that have such a tight culture to basically adapt to perhaps new values, to open their mind to a new world and new possibilities, to take advantage of external and internal talent and bring them together.

Giorgio Benassi:

Yeah. And if I can add here, I think those type of technologies, the one you bring is just an example, are, for an organization like ours, critical to be able to bypass, to some extent, the business, I sound horrible, I’m going to get calls after this, but bypass the business to build the foundation of something so that you can deliver value to them in a quicker way without spending too much time trying to build the structure that works and so forth. You have a product very, very quickly that delivers value back. That creates a light bulb moment that then gives you an opportunity to go through that cultural change. So there’s great ability in that.

Johnny Campbell:

But this is the megatrend we’ve been going through for 20 years in HR. Since you and I got into this game. The trend has been to move from where HR was a department who did all these things to empowering these super managers or super leaders, as you mentioned, to be able to do those things for their team, but without having to do all the admin, without having to do all the hard work. This is where HR, pardon me, becomes less of a team that does the work for you, to a team that enables you to do it. And I think what you’re saying though, Giorgio, is saying part of that enablement is making it simple. It’s like, “You don’t need to get caught up as a leader in the hard work of taxonomies and getting it right, we’ll just bring a solution to you. We’ll make sure we’ve asked you the right questions, taken in your opinion, but we bring you the solutions so you can get on with doing what you need to do, which is making your team successful.”

Giorgio Benassi:

Exactly. Don’t focus too much on this, we got you covered.

Johnny Campbell:

Well, Giorgio, it’s been a pleasure. I really, really appreciate your honesty, and for sharing with us your thoughts. It’s been fascinating, as Arron Daniels says, great conversations, and I know he is talking about you and not me when he says that. So really appreciate that feedback, Arron.

We’re at that time where we got to draw this to a close. I think we could go on several topics, but maybe we’ll take it offline, and go to the next topic, but hopefully we’ll have you back again, Giorgio, to tell us maybe in a year or two, how the journey’s progressing, how you solve the problem, what it looks like now, what new problems you’re moving on to. But before you go, I really hope you would leave us with a piece of advice for our listeners that we can add to our shortlist of advice that we’ve gathered over the last few years. And it can be something that you’ve gained from your own experience or was passed on to you from on high from another leader or colleague. But what would that one piece of advice be, Giorgio?

Giorgio Benassi:

Hard to choose, and hard to add value after 138 shows with pieces of advice. But I think where I would like to take this is, I don’t know if it’s influenced by the culture that I live in, but we seem in our society to give a lot of values to ideas, idea generation, innovation and so forth, and there’s great value in it, but what I’ve learned in the last few years is that the unsung hero of all this is execution. How do you bring those ideas to life? How do you turn your incredible idea into something that works? How do you turn your startup into a company that is successful. Execution, focusing on execution without rethinking your ideas too much too many times and focusing on bringing them to life, I think it’s something I’ve learned the hard way.

Johnny Campbell:

As Phil Knight said when he came up with the famous slogan for Nike, “Just do it.”

Giorgio Benassi:

Just do it. Exactly. Just make it happen.

Johnny Campbell:

Well, Giorgio, I have immense faith in you making it happen with your team across the business over the next few years. It’s a fantastic challenge to have. I wish you every success, and thanks so much for joining us on the show.

Giorgio Benassi:

Thank you for having me. Thank you.

The Shortlist is a workplace, thought-leader focused talkshow that broadcasts every Wednesday. You can watch it live on LinkedIn and on YouTube. Or, why not stream as a podcast after?