HR should stop thinking of employees in headcount—consider them as a collection of skills

What would the world look like if employees introduced themselves not by job titles but by their skills inventory?

While it isn’t realistic to introduce yourself in everyday conversations with, “Hi, my name is Stacey. I write code in Python. I design products. I’ve worked in software engineering for 10 years,” one author suggests HR pros think of their employees as these skills instead of just, “Stacey, the director of product design.”

Craig Friedman, a talent and skills transformation leader for the Illinois-based St. Charles Consulting Group, highlights the importance of companies becoming a skills-based organization in his new book Enterprise Skills Unlocked: A Blueprint for Building Skills-based Talent Management.

Friedman shared with HR Brew what people leaders will learn from his book.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What does a skills-based organization look like?

Skills [are] largely about data…and that’s one of the misconceptions around it…If we had skills not just tied to learning courses and on people’s profiles, but they were tied to everyone’s job descriptions, and especially tied to the work tasks, whether that’s in a workflow, or in a staffing assignment, or job posting…we can actually leverage a whole bunch of more adaptable, more efficient, more tailored talent strategies across the whole value chain.

We can create more personalized learning pathways, so we get [a] broader reach of learning, development, of leadership development, more flexible work design, more career mobility options for employees, [a] deeper reach for recruiting, more strategic workforce planning.

What’s an example of how HR can focus on skills for roles and projects?

One way that consulting companies are leveraging these concepts is through talent marketplaces. The core of a consulting business is getting people staffed on projects that are billable, and when people are not on projects, they’re essentially like inventory in a warehouse accumulating, carrying charges…So, anything you can do to get the right people staffed on the right projects more efficiently leads directly to revenue capture.

If they’re using a talent marketplace where they’re posting open staffing assignments, the machine learning in the talent marketplaces can scan across all of the employee profiles, find people who are the best matches. And, even if they’re not a 100% match, say you’ve got someone whose skills profile is a 90% match, the system can automatically tee up the project onboarding for that 10%. No extra effort on anyone’s part. No one has to create a project onboarding plan.

How can HR help their organization adopt a skills-first mindset?

You can make a lot of progress building in the long term a skills-based organization or skills-based enterprise one meaningful project at a time, and one of the best ways that I’ve seen companies do it is by finding a business issue that is tied to skills.

I had a client that worked in the mining industry. The market was changing in such a way that they needed to dramatically expand their copper mining business, and in order to expand their copper mining business, it so turns out that most of the copper that they’re mining today is near the surface of the earth. If they want to dramatically increase it, they need to dig deeper into the earth to get some more copper.

But underground mining is a completely different set of engineering practices than surface mining, so they have to develop a whole lot of new underground mining skills in order to expand their business. With the help of a skills-based organization, they can much more effectively find the talent that they need, define the skills that they need through a variety of different strategies.

They might do skills-based recruiting to get it from the marketplace…They might move people around internally, the build, buy, repatch, borrow strategy to try to meet that capability need and get to market quickly.

What role does AI play in skills-based organizations?

For most of the last 40 years, our HR systems have been all based at the employee level. We hire employees. We give them a job title. We give them a salary and benefits, and an email address and a phone number. Slot them into a job. Everything that HR does is focused at the headcount level.

Skills-based [strategies] takes that down a level of detail, and in taking it down a level of detail, it’s both more granular, but it’s also more informative. Because skills tell us not just that we have a person, but what that person can do, what work they can accomplish. So, it moves the whole exercise of talent management from being a headcount management exercise to being a capability development exercise.