WIP Johnny C Tayor

Taylor: If employers don’t invest in their employees, workers will go elsewhere to get the skills they need to remain competitive in the workforce

A conversation with Johnny C. Taylor, president & CEO, SHRM
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In this episode of Work in Progress, I’m joined by Johnny C. Taylor, president and CEO of SHRM – the Society for Human Resource Managment – from their annual conference held last week in Las Vegas.

There was a lot of talk at the annual conference about skills-based hiring and skills training, notably from guest speaker former president Bill Clinton and from the SHRM leadership, including Taylor.

“We shouldn’t require a college degree if the job doesn’t require it. There are a lot of benefits to going to college that go way beyond economics, but we shouldn’t make our economy less efficient by lowering workforce participation when we have 10 million open jobs,” President Clinton challenged the in-person audience of 21,000.

That’s a message we have been hearing a lot lately in workforce development, so I took the opportunity to ask Taylor a question that I have been thinking about: If you don’t use a college degree as a proxy for what a job seeker knows, how does an HR professional screen for skills and talent?

“It’s really hard and it’s time consuming. It’s not efficient. Part of the degree requirement was it was efficient. I could weed out people who didn’t have it. A proxy for smart was what the degree was. Well, now that means HR’s got to go back to the fundamentals, and that is interview people,” Taylor tells me.

He says that those HR managers need to ask questions that show just how curious and smart an applicant is.

“We need smart people. Smart doesn’t mean you went to Harvard and have a college degree. Can you figure things out? During the interview process, HR people are trying to figure out how does your mind work. I’ll ask you questions. How can you solve problems? And are you curious? That’s real big,” Taylor says.

He adds that being a team player and having the willingness to work hard are equally important.

“There’s nothing that you can communicate better during an interview to a hiring manager more than the fact that you’re willing to work and you’re going to work hard at it and work smart. If applicants will get that across – hiring managers, if you’re looking for those things – we can almost train anyone to do anything.”

And that brings us to the next big question: How do employers attract and retain talent?

“One of the issues that’s top of mind right now is training and development. Given that 50%, even as much as 70%, of the jobs that exist today won’t exist five years from now – or will be so meaningfully reconstituted that they won’t exist – if we are not investing in our employees’ professional development…then employees will leave because they’re going to go where they can get the talent to remain competitive for decades,” says Taylor.

He the companies that are succeeding in attracting and holding onto the talent they need see upskilling and reskilling as essential, and they are offering education benefits to their workers as part of their benefits package.

“The first thing that companies are saying is, ‘This training is for both of us. It’s not just for you and it’s not just for us; it’s for both of us. We have to give you skills that will make you competitive in a rapidly-changing economic environment, and you need them just in case things don’t work out here and you need to go somewhere else. Even if you leave me, it’s yours.'”

Taylors says this is important because America has a worker replenishment problem and it’s everyone’s problem.

“I often say this, America is browning and graying at once. We just don’t have enough children out there ready to be the future workforce so we’ve got to get people to remain in the workforce longer and we’ve got to ensure that they have the skills to remain in the workplace longer. It doesn’t matter that you want to be in the workforce, and that you need to be in the workforce, if you don’t have the skills that we need. And that’s the problem.

“We’ve got 165 million jobs. The struggle is a lot of those people are leaving the workforce. The labor participation rate is down, inching up a little bit, but it’s still down. And it’s down because people want to work, but they know they’re not qualified to do the work. And that’s a struggle.

“More and more companies are saying it’s not just government’s job, it’s just not even higher ed’s job, it’s our job to bring people in, even if they don’t have the skills that we need, and we’ve got to give them to them. And we’ve got to constantly update them so that they are ready to be our workforce for the future.”

You can listen to the full interview here, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode 277: Johnny C. Taylor, president & CEO, SHRM
Host & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch and Melissa Panzer
Theme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4
Download the transcript for this podcast here.
You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.