49 - Transform Talent Insights into Personalized Upskilling with TalentGuard's Linda Ginac - podcast episode cover

49 - Transform Talent Insights into Personalized Upskilling with TalentGuard's Linda Ginac

Jul 24, 202422 minSeason 1Ep. 49
--:--
--:--
Download Metacast podcast app
Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

During this installment of the HR Tech Spotlight, we focus on TalentGuard. This company provides solutions to bridge skills gaps, enhance employee engagement and retention, and deliver actionable insights from workforce data to drive organizational success.

Joining the show to talk about TalentGuard is the CEO of the company, Linda Ginac.

Learn more about TalentGuard

Connect with Linda Ginac on LinkedIn

Think you'd be a great guest on the show? Apply here.

Want to learn more about our work at GrowthMode Marketing? Check out the website: https://growthmodemarketing.com/

Transcript

Deanna Shimota 00:00:05 Welcome to The HR Tech Spotlight podcast. I'm Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. The HR technology market is crowded, and we know it can be hard to find the best software solutions for your business in the sea of sameness. On this podcast, we shine a spotlight on some of the best up-and-coming technology options out there. Check it out if you are interested in learning about new, innovative solutions available in the market. And if you are with an HR tech company and interested in being considered for a guest spot, stay tuned for details at the end of the show. Hello and welcome to the HR Tech Spotlight! In this episode, we're shining a spotlight on TalentGuard, a company that provides solutions to bridge skill gaps, enhance employee engagement and retention, and deliver actionable insights from workforce data to drive organizational success. TalentGuard's AI platform transforms talent insights into personalized upskilling and mobility solutions, driving growth for both employees and organizations. Joining me to talk about TalentGuard is founder and CEO, Linda Ginac.

Deanna Shimota 00:01:15 Hello, Linda.

Linda Ginac 00:01:16 Hi. How are you?

Deanna Shimota 00:01:18 Good. Thank you. And thanks so much for joining me on the show.

Linda Ginac 00:01:22 Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Deanna Shimota 00:01:24 So let's start out. Tell us about your background in the HR tech space.

Linda Ginac 00:01:30 Awesome. I have been in the, I would say the career development HR tech space for almost 20 years. And prior to that, I spent most of my time in the tech space, but I was more focused on product management and marketing before putting a spotlight on the HR aspect of my career.

Deanna Shimota 00:01:55 And I can appreciate that. I come from a marketing background as well, but it's fun when you can blend both, right?

Linda Ginac 00:02:01 Yeah, exactly. I always said if I can market products and services, I can market people. And that's really how I started the transition into the career development side of things. And then that led me into more of the HR side of the house and then talent development.

Deanna Shimota 00:02:19 Cool. So let's talk a bit more about what TalentGuard does.

Deanna Shimota 00:02:22 Obviously, I gave a short intro, but I know there's so much more that you could say about your solution.

Linda Ginac 00:02:28 Yeah, because of my background in career development, I had a career coaching business for about 15 years, and as I was helping employees through these transitions, we were seeing a lot of success. And most of these employees were employed, and they really wanted to go back to their organizations to figure out how to manage their career internally. And as we were working with these individuals, I created and codified a methodology for how to successfully coach people. And that really was version 1.0 of TalentGuard, where we were helping the coaches help the employees better manage their careers. And as we started to engage in this process, we started doing some consulting gigs in these big companies and realized early on that they didn't have the infrastructure, the content, or the software to be able to support internal mobility. And I really got excited about that because I was very passionate about career development and helping employees to identify their own skills, identify where they had gaps, help them remove blockers, think about what's next, and then build a plan to get from A to B to C to D and continue on and then do that cycle over again, not just up the ladder, but across the ladder.

Linda Ginac 00:03:50 As we were working with these organizations, we created a process that would first version of TalentGuard, enable and enable these organizations to help their employees. And so fast forward later, we have a full talent management platform really designed around helping organizations better manage talent development within their company, and we do it in a very skills forward way, adding a lot of personalization along the way. Depending on the person's role, their career stage, and their aspirations.

Deanna Shimota 00:04:23 It's always so cool to hear the evolution that companies have along the way and how they shift as the market needs shift as well, and as they learn more about it. Yeah. What would you say is a big challenge or problem that you're seeing HR departments face today that TalentGuard helps support?

Linda Ginac 00:04:44 Gosh, HR is burdened with so much. They have so much on their plate, which is a challenge in and of itself. I would say that there are a couple challenges that TalentGuard looks at first, which is HR will come to us and say, hey, we're having issues with our employee engagement survey.

Linda Ginac 00:05:03 We're getting dinged for not providing career development opportunities internally to help build the careers of the workforce that we have, and so we need to find a solution that will enable us to support these career journeys. That's the first step. The first problem, and then the second big problem would be HR wants to deploy these solutions. But many organizations are not in a position to have the kind of data that is needed in order to facilitate these, these sort of career transitions. It's wonderful to think that there's a magic button and it's going to work overnight and you don't need any data, and that's not the case. So the data that is needed typically is some aspect of or some insight into their job architecture. Job architectures are oftentimes very out of date or career architecture, which is your job title, catalog and levels with some type of job description, maybe some skills attached to that. And that data lives in multiple different systems, both in digital form and in paper form, in lots of spreadsheets. They've grown through acquisitions, so they don't have really good a really good pulse on that.

Linda Ginac 00:06:19 So that causes HR to have heartburn over wanting to deploy a solution like TalentGuard, because the impression is that it's going to take a lot of time. It's going to take a lot of effort. It's going to be a lot of work. And just to get ready to start to implement the software, that state of not having the right data at their fingertips is the second problem that we solve, and that all we need is a job title, and we're going to do all that work by eliminating all that work from their desk, not only the HR, but the leadership team, because they have to review it as well. And we're going to build all that data in in minutes so that they can review it. We can put it in the software and we can go live quickly. So those would be the two reasons that customers come to us for help.

Deanna Shimota 00:07:05 And what would you say? Obviously there's a lot of different solutions across the whole landscape of HR tech. What makes TalentGuard different or how is your point of view in the market unique compared to some of the competitors out there?

Linda Ginac 00:07:19 I would say that TalentGuard is unique in that we are very skills forward. And I know some other companies would say that they are as well. A lot of them deal in what I would say, skill tagging, similar to some solutions that are out there. I won't mention any names, but TalentGuard. One of our points of differentiation is that we get down to the proficiency level and the behavioral indicators. So we help organizations help employees understand and managers what it means to have a basic level of communication versus an expert level of communication, because that level of expertise is going to be assigned or expected at varying grade levels throughout your career. So we really provide an objective, common language around, around that data so that we can really help organizations understand not what, not just what skills they have, but what level of expertise someone has with that skill. So that when I'm thinking about planning for the future work, I know the talent that we have and that we can do so we have that depth of skill data, which really means that we're building up a multidimensional profile.

Linda Ginac 00:08:25 I say an employee talent profile on steroids that's really looking at your skills, your proficiency levels, your experiences, your qualifications, your certifications, your preferences. Because all of those qualities are what make us unique. So we get really deep into the talent profile, and we do that by bringing in multi-dimensional data. So we're looking at employee data that's populated on sites like LinkedIn. We're looking at the company's data when we're building job roles. So any company data that they have that that is published on any job roles we're looking at that TalentGuard has proprietary data that we've built out in our large language models. And then we're looking at the labor market data, what are trending skills and job roles, what benchmarks should be set for the level expectations. So when we're evaluating, we're not only looking at what level the employee has, but what is the trending level. It's like a compensation benchmark. A marketing manager needs to have communication at a level two expertise, and then we're deciding and making benchmarks on whether that employee is meeting that benchmark below or above.

Linda Ginac 00:09:27 So not only are we looking internally, we're looking at how that employee stack ranks against everybody else in the market at any other company. So I think that's something unique that TalentGuard brings to the table as well.

Deanna Shimota 00:09:39 And what type of companies would you say are ultimately the perfect fit to work with TalentGuard?

Linda Ginac 00:09:45 There are companies that are that are needing some way to support career development. So typically I'm thinking organizations a thousand and above. And the reason why I say that, it's not that it's not good for smaller organizations, but typically when you're thinking about career development, you have to have enough opportunities in order to create an ability to have some type of internal mobility, meaning they have to be creating projects or gigs or opportunities vacancies where employees have the ability to move around and they need to be able to to plan for those types of moves. So organizations that are typically, like I said, that size and bigger are going to be a good fit for TalentGuard, especially if they're undergoing some sort of market transformation, digital transformation.

Linda Ginac 00:10:33 They have a real strong need to level up their employees to compete with the future of work.

Deanna Shimota 00:10:40 And what impact the clients that you have worked with, have you seen with these organizations as far as like working with TalentGuard and getting results within their own workforce?

Linda Ginac 00:10:53 Yeah, we look at a couple of different things. The first thing is we look at the internal internal transition rate. Typically, before we get started, we ask that we ask the organizations to find data, which is sometimes hard to find what their internal transition rate is. Meaning for any open rec, how many employees are internally taking that role versus filling it externally? And typically it's below 15%. Our goal is to get the organization up to 50%, internal transitions and then looking at internal. So we've achieved some of those rates. The other thing we're looking at is increasing the employee engagement score, where three thing that the third thing that we're looking at is reducing the time that it takes for HR and subject matter experts to create job and skill data.

Linda Ginac 00:11:44 And we're reducing that by over 24 x. So there's some significant value in time and resources being saved across those three spectrums. And then there are some other aspects that companies care about. Like how many skills is somebody developing on an annualized basis, how many learnings are they doing on an annualized basis? And we have some of that data as well. But our three kind of overarching goals would

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android
Open in Metacast