Roughly three years ago, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, like the rest of corporate America, faced hiring and retention challenges during the Great Resignation, when droves of employees across all industries quit their jobs in search of new opportunities or more flexibility. Seeking to retain their workforce as employers waged battle with each other by poaching employees, and to attract new employees, HPE changed its hiring and retention strategy.
In an innovative approach, the Spring, Texas-based company decided to focus on a job candidate’s skills, rather than their education credentials and work experience — the more traditional approach to hiring. And for existing employees, HPE also used a skills-based recruiting approach to fill internal jobs, serving up training and development opportunities based on an employee’s current skills and the skills they want to learn.
The results of this skills-based recruiting and hiring transformation have been impactful. The technology and services titan has seen internal hiring for positions soar to 40 percent and resignations fall substantially below the industry average of 12 percent, says Sadie Bell, Vice President of Innovation and Deployment of People, Systems, Digital Experience, and Intelligence at HPE. Additionally, the company has seen a substantial jump in the number of outside job candidates, because it altered how it was marketing its job openings by leveraging non-traditional channels, she added. Those include software coding boot camps or hackathons.
Meanwhile, employee satisfaction has risen sharply thanks to a skills-based approach to employee growth, development, training and incentives, where employees own their own career growth and development.
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Can you tell me a little bit about your role at HPE and how it’s defined?
I’m the Vice President, Innovation of People Systems, Digital Experience, and Intelligence at HPE. People systems are all the systems you typically think about within the HR domain, and some ancillary systems people touch during their entire employee life cycle.
I never thought I would be an HR professional doing innovation at the cutting edge of innovation in HR. I’ve been in the HR function for about five years, and just under three years at HPE. It’s exciting to innovate and transform the employee experience and infuse artificial intelligence throughout the entire employee life cycle.
When HPE pivoted to a skills-based recruiting and training strategy three years ago from a more traditional method of relying on a job candidate’s education and experience, what challenges or problems did the company face that prompted this move?
We were seeing a common challenge that most industries and businesses were seeing across the board.
If you look at the traditional hiring methods, it relies on a person’s education and experience. It’s a barrier to entry into professional jobs if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, or a PhD under the old methodology. It might have been difficult to even find an employee like me with my educational background. I have a bachelor’s degree in secondary education with an emphasis in mathematics and a master’s degree in pure math and applied math, with a minor in management information systems. But you would never think to go and hire a person like me as a programmer, which I’ve been in my life, or as someone who does digital transformations — and nowhere did you hear in that spectrum HR. You may not look at my application beyond those few facts to see my experience in HR.
I’m using a personal example to highlight why HPE was looking at what’s the talent and skills that we are missing. What are those transferable skills that people pick up? You can have an extraordinary military career that may not have a traditional degree, but lots of experiences and skills that we desperately need to innovate and move forward.
Our businesses were looking for people who had certain skill sets and as we went out to the market to look for them using the traditional method, they were difficult to find.
…The decision [to shift to] skills-based hiring came from a lot of different directions, but really from a need to have and find skills that were difficult to find in the market under the traditional parameters.
When we look at skills and other facts, we can identify, both internally and externally, talent bases that were missing completely, or were hidden in pockets of the organization that are nontraditional, like a technologist in HR. It can also be the type of skills we’re looking for might be a new skill introduced to the market, where nobody even has those yet.
So the decision [to shift to] skills-based hiring came from a lot of different directions, but really from a need to have and find skills that were difficult to find in the market under the traditional parameters.
How did the idea to transform your hiring practices to a skills-based strategy happen?
…It was very much a collaboration between our head of business, the visionary nature of our CPO, and coordination with our IT and technology. We are looking at what we can do to know the skills we have, know the skills we need, and find those skills and bring them into the organization, or move them around as needed to support innovation as a whole.
It was a collaborative effort that then turned into how to build systems and emulate this process so it’s automated and not done on a one-by-one basis. One of our businesses internally was trying to figure it out for themselves. We found other businesses and functions were also trying to solve the problem one by one. We decided it was best to pull everyone together in a room, so it was putting our heads together and figuring out how we identify, both internally and externally, the skills we need individuals to have and recruit and retain the best and top talent in the world.
What actions are you taking to achieve the skills-based hiring and training transformation? What is your playbook?
What were some of the challenges you faced in creating this skills-based hiring and training model and, more importantly, what were the workarounds for those challenges?
For challenges, I would say the first thing is we pivoted from a traditional review revision of how we look for talent. When we think about recruiting internally and externally, the keyword is change and change is something that’s always happening. And skills-based recruiting is a significant change.
Instead of looking for someone with 20 years of computer engineering experience, who graduated from Harvard with a PhD in computer science, I might be looking for someone who has artificial intelligence skills, who can build large language models, who, as a data scientist, maybe learned to do all of those things but not at a traditional university. Maybe they worked in the intelligence agency for the US government and don’t necessarily have a degree, but they have an immense amount of on-the-job training, experience and innovation, and the ability to do critical thinking, brainstorming, and problem-solving at scale. Those are the talents we need.
You need support from the top of the house to pivot to skills-based hiring. Antonio Neri, our CEO, is committed to looking at talent based on the skills that they have and what we need to grow, develop, and win in the age of innovation and technology. So, change is hard but having the sponsorship from the top of the house and coming together and collaborating was helpful.
It was also important to educate employees on why we did the pivot, and educate them on the “what’s in it for me” and breaking that down by persona. It’s not a cumbersome and hard process for employees to tell you what skills they have or to identify externally who might have the skills you want to market your jobs to. The challenge is breaking down skepticism, starting small, showing the quick wins and the value by persona of how they are going to benefit, then allowing the technology and the processes to take place in how we were attracting, recruiting, and selecting the best talent for the roles that we have. This has become part of the culture of who we are at HPE.
Even though you’re still on this journey of developing your skills-based recruiting and training model, what are some of the tangible benefits HPE has received since starting this transformation three years ago?
We’ve seen a massive increase in the number of employees or potential team members that we’ve been able to attract and reach, because we weren’t looking in the traditional channels.
We also saw internal hiring increase to 40 percent in 2023 – that’s an eight percent increase year-over-year from the prior two years. Our voluntary turnover rate has also decreased significantly. The industry average for employee turnover is 12 percent and we were significantly below that. I attribute that to the fact we’re attracting and retaining the right talent. We’ve seen our employee experience and engagement scores increase for internal recruiting and supporting our team members, as we focus on growing and developing employees once we get them. We want to keep the talent that we’re able to attract.
I think these impacts are directly related to our focus on a skills-based approach to hiring, growing, developing, and training our employees and offering incentives so they can own their own career growth and development. This has led to much higher employee satisfaction.
In going beyond the innovation you captured in your skills-based transformation, can you share how HPE is infusing innovation into the fabric of its operations?
We’re continuous learners. It doesn’t matter what your job is or your function, whether you are a research engineer or in our legal space, whatever it is, you can always innovate and innovate for success. It’s really a pillar of one of the things that we do internally. We offer a number of opportunities for our employees to grow and develop across their skills.
We say AI is for everyone, not for everything. Everyone needs a minor in AI and what is this for? It’s for innovation.
Our AI academy program is not only focused on our software engineers and technical talent, it is also focused on everyone in the organization. We say AI is for everyone, not for everything. Everyone needs a minor in AI and what is this for? It’s for innovation.
We also use some of the same technology that we use to identify and highlight skills in our organization to match employees to free training.
We have Tech Con hosted by our CTO Fidelma Russo, where it doesn’t matter if you are part of the organization’s technical talent. Regardless, you have an opportunity to apply to go to Tech Con and share the innovations that you’re working on. Several folks from our HR organization were invited to share what they’re doing in innovation at Tech Con. They get opportunities, with sponsorship support, to do additional innovation in the spaces where they have influence. You get an opportunity to network and mentor with others who are like-minded yet have different ideas and opinions.
I feel like I’m a broken record on culture, but we have a culture of innovation and it’s phenomenal. Anyone can come up with an idea and we have collaboration spaces where you can share it and it’ll be seen by our CEO…
I think we present a wide range of opportunities for all of our employees to grow and develop, and it’s one of the reasons that we see a much lower attrition rate than the industry average, in addition to very high employee satisfaction, especially when it comes to growth, development, and opportunities within the organization.
