Pivoting to a skills-based talent strategy helped this insurer save jobs and connect siloed HR processes

It’s 2020, Covid-19 is raging across the globe, and insurance provider Unum, like most organizations, needed to adapt its business to a rapidly changing environment.

In the early days of the pandemic, very few people were making vision and dental appointments, leaving the firm’s vision and dental claims specialists without much work and facing layoffs, according to Kimberly Bowen, Unum’s SVP of global talent and inclusion.

At the same time, the company’s benefits business was shortstaffed and working in overdrive to process the many short-term disability claims being filed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. Hiring during this period was challenging, so the HR team reimagined the workforce, she added.

“What if we can use these individuals? Maybe they need a little bit of upskilling from a product knowledge perspective, but the fundamentals of claims processing are the same,” Bowen said. “Let’s redeploy. Let’s do a quick upskilling, and let’s shift that workforce over.”

The team set out to understand the skills relevant for both groups of workers, identify which skills specialists working on vision and dental needed to acquire to support disability claims, and train accordingly.

It was a “very manual process of identifying” skills and competency gaps and training, but the work saved the livelihoods of 400 workers, met an urgent workforce need, preserved institutional knowledge, and set the organization on a path to focus on skills-based talent.

“We’ve got to really lean in here, and we’ve got to go figure out how we do this in a much more efficient way, because if we’re going to be doing this more frequently, we can’t be doing it manually,” Bowen said.

Similarly, the company redeployed recruiters—with a pandemic-limited scope of work—to support other units by identifying skills associated with their job description and determining which could be leveraged in other parts of the business.

“When you’re thinking about talent and you’re thinking about who’s equipped or who’s qualified to move into a role, your natural inclination as a leader is not to think, ‘Oh, my recruiters could be…a pipeline for my sales organization,’” she said.

As the organization began to understand the impact and potential of this work, it leaned in, so to speak. Unum teamed up with Workday and enlisted its skills cloud to organize and structure all of the operation’s skills by role.

“We realized we needed a mechanism with which we could actually do skill collection. That was the first step,” she said.

It was a big endeavor, but Unum was aided by Workday in designing a process that was “automated, but it walks the employee through exactly how to input their skills” in order to bring some 11,000 Unum employees into the skills journey.

Each employee ID’d a set of technical and “essential skills” (how Unum refers to what many call “soft skills”). The process paid off: 90% of employees participated in the skill-collection endeavor.

Armed with a fuller picture of the skills involved in Unum’s work, the HR team was able to use skills to thread together different siloed HR tech systems, bolstering its career development and learning and development offerings for employees.

“Everyone has an individualized experience when they go into our internal career side to look at job opportunities,” she said. “Not only can they better see what they’re qualified for based on their skills, through that AI, they can also identify skills gaps.”

If an employee is interested in a role but perhaps doesn’t possess all the needed skills, the integrated LMS can automatically “serve up learnings or courses that they take that will bridge those skills gaps.” It also offers employees more transparent insights into the hiring process, so they can better understand how the company selects talent.

“We tend to tell employees you need to be the CEO of your own career development. We can actually say that and mean it now, because we put the tools in their hands,” she said.

It’s not just a resource for employees—it can help managers identify the skills they need on their teams and consider different ways to acquire them, aside from hiring new talent.

Unravelling the old way of doing things has revealed some challenges. Like many orgs, Unum has a rigid jobs architecture that’s connected to salary banding, so the HR team is working on injecting some fluidity into that infrastructure to better align with this skills-based approach.

“That view then changes the job infrastructure,” she said. “Career architecture will be our next big shift, because ultimately, job descriptions, job titles, scope of responsibility, expectations for performance, all of those things need to evolve so that it really fits what we’re doing with skills.”