Welcome to the Talent Development Think Tank Podcast, the number one podcast for learning and talent development professionals. Now, here's your host, Andy Storch. Welcome to the talent development. Think Tank podcast. I'm your host, Andy Storch, and I'm excited that you're joining me for another episode to help you up your game
and improve your capabilities in the world of talent development. And I got to tell you, over the last several weeks, I've been interviewing lots of different people from different facets of talent development, lots of great interviews we've published, and many more coming. And I often ask people about the trend that they're following or excited about. And it has been consistently AI across the board for, I'd say the last three to four months,
if not longer. I've been doing this for five years, and I have never seen anything like this in the past where everybody is talking about the exact same thing. Certainly there's been some commonalities, there's been some trends that are mentioned by multiple people, but usually it's a smattering of lots of different things. Over the course of several weeks, if I go back and look at the history of this podcast, people have talked about lots of different things back in 2018, 1921,
22, as I was recording this. But in 2023, it has been almost 100% people saying AI is the trend that is captivating them, which means that if they're thinking about it, you're thinking about it. Andy, really, everybody is trying to figure this out. How do I take advantage of this in talent development? What does it mean for me in my role? How can we best utilize this new technology that's out there's so many different platforms and
things going on. So I have two different things for you. Number one is that I am hosting a webinar coming up on August 29 at 01:00 P.m. Eastern Time with my friend Josh Ermler about AI in talent development and how learning and development professionals are using AI to get five X more work done and lowering their expenses, all while developing a healthier work life balance.
This is going to be really fantastic. It's really the first time I've ever done a webinar before, and hopefully you have time to catch it by the time you hear this or at least come sign up and get the replay because we're going to cover some great stuff. You can find out all the information for that at TDT us slash AI. That's TDTT us slash AI. And then the other resource that I'm giving you is this interview today, because my interview today is all about leveraging AI in talent development
and talent acquisition. My guest today is Sarah Tilly, who is the Senior Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition and Development for ServiceNow, the digital workflow company with over 24,000 employees. In her role, Sarah is responsible for leading a newly integrated talent organization which includes all external recruitment and internal mobility, learning and development inclusive of leadership development, talent and succession planning, and all efforts to
lead ServiceNow forward on a skills based talent strategy. Sarah's team is responsible for holistically looking across the talent lifecycle for employees to ensure delivery on what matters most to them, while also meeting the
talent needs of ServiceNow's critical business priorities. Prior to ServiceNow, Sarah spent 16 years at the Walt Disney Company, where she led enterprise talent strategies and efforts including centralized talent acquisition and sourcing functions, corporate talent management and diversity and inclusion, and the opportunity to lead several company wide functional talent and talent acquisition strategies.
She has done a lot of really interesting stuff, and throughout her career, Sarah has earned a stellar reputation for creating new opportunities for top talent and fostering an inclusive environment where teams can thrive. As a working mom, she understands the importance of flexibility and tailored career paths for all people. And Sarah has a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from the University of Arkansas and a PHR professional in Human Resources
certification as well. And Sarah, since she came to ServiceNow, has really dived deep into all things AI and how ServiceNow especially is using AI to help themselves. Andy other organizations with talent development and talent acquisition. In this conversation we are covering lots of topics around this, like how organizations can start to think about the skills that are needed in the future, how to assess what skills are needed and what skills already exist in an organization, how you can
leverage AI for a talent. You know, fair to note that Sarah comes from ServiceNow, which is a big player in this space. They acquired a company called Hitch, which is involved in building talent marketplaces and the platforms that you may need to build your own talent marketplace inside your company. So
take it with a grain of salt. It is coming from someone in an organization that is heavily involved in this, but I thought it would be great to talk to somebody who's right in it, seeing what's going on in her own organization with many thousands of people, as well as working with other
organizations as well. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. I'm going to invite Sarah also to come speak in the talent development think tank community to share more about what's going on, because just so many interesting avenues to explore here. So keep an eye out for that if you're a member. If you're not, come check us out. Our website is TDTT us slash community. All right, without further ado, here is my interview with
Sarah Tilly from ServiceNow. All right. I'm joined now by Sarah Tilley, who is senior vice president of global talent acquisition and development for ServiceNow. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Andy. I'm thrilled to be here. I am really excited to have you on because I know that not only are you in a very senior role in talent acquisition and talent development, and I always love interviewing and having conversations with people who are in it and leading it and thinking about the strategy behind
it. Andy doing different things because that's what the show is all about, sharing the strategies and the tactics that are working and even not working so that we can help other people in talent development improve their skills and abilities and find more success in their careers. But I'm especially excited because I know that you have been heavily immersed in AI and using that for developing, hiring the right
people, developing people, and identifying the skills of the future. And that's something that's on just about everybody's mind, no matter what level they're at. So I'm excited to dig into that. But before we do, I'd love to just start with a little bit of background. How did you get into this field of talent development and acquisition in the first place? Sure, like, I think a lot of people, it wasn't the career course that I mapped out for
myself. Found my way into talent acquisition, started working on the agency side for a couple of years outside of college, then moved to a large retained search firm, Hydra. Andy struggles in their media and entertainment practice, then in house for almost five years at Warner Bros. Entertainment. And then the last well, not the last year and a half at ServiceNow, but about 16 years at the Walt Disney Company, where I oversaw a couple of enterprise talent
functions. So I think I've always had 1ft squarely planted in the talent acquisition side of the house. When I was at Disney, there were some of the work that we did. So, for example, centralizing the recruitment of technologists across all of the business units. So if you think about an engineer in our theme parks or ESPN or Pixar, whatever, it was basically realized that we needed to be a lot more
coordinated and organized. And as we got clear on how do you compete for technologists from a hiring perspective, we also realized, oh, okay, there's a lot that we need to do from a talent development perspective to attract technologists, to keep them, et cetera. So that sort of expanded my role into some talent management leadership responsibilities and then some other hats I wore on and
off in the HR function over the years. So made the move to ServiceNow, as I mentioned, about a year and a half ago. And it was really the experience with the technology talent that made me kind of lift my head up and think, all right, if I were to think about something beyond Disney, which I absolutely loved my experience there, and the people it was. Okay, I think I'm going to go for a pure play technology organization and
got introduced to Jackie Kenny, who is the chief people officer. We know a lot of the same people. And then the rest was history. Really? Yeah. Oh, that's curious. You know, Disney has such a strong brand and reputation, not just a consumer brand, but I think on the working side of having a really strong culture that maybe some people don't like, a lot of people love. And I'm sure there are many things
you learned from working in that experience. What are some things that you learned from that very strong Disney working culture that you take with you? Yeah, it's very strong. A very strong culture in terms of, I think the people dynamic of it. Everyone really supports one another. Andy, you're very much expected to operate in a collaborative way. That's how the connected
business strategy comes to life. If you think about intellectual property that sort of spans across all of the different business units, trying to think of a recent one, and Frozen keeps popping in my head, which is not super recent, but it's a film, television, consumer product, theme park experiences, et cetera. So you have to really be connected to create the franchises across all. So it's very collaborative, it's a very optimistic culture, very polite. I think
I already mentioned the word supportive. And some of the things that drew me to ServiceNow from a cultural perspective, what I definitely learned at Disney is there's a very high bar for quality. So everything that you do and it's something that you learn pretty quickly. In fact, my first year, I thought, I don't know if I'm going to make it because there's a lot of attention to every detail, because the creative process sort of bleeds into everything,
where you really have to have a high bar. And so I would say that's definitely what I learned. Right? Yeah, it makes sense. I've heard that about the culture, Andy, the standard of quality and things like that, which comes with pros and cons. I'm curious after moving to ServiceNow, if I understand correctly, it looks like you started in running talent acquisition, but then picked up talent
development. I work with a lot of different organizations, and often those two are connected but run by different people. How did that come about, that you ended up overseeing both. Yeah, so I definitely didn't expect, when I joined, to be leading both, but there were some changes that happened in the organization, and Jackie and I started talking about what we felt were the benefits. Andy really just pressing ourselves,
like, does this make sense? Do we lose focus or do we gain more by having an integrated organization? And we really ruminated on that for a little while and realized, okay, now we think we have a real opportunity, especially with Skills. I mean, skills was kind of the motivating factor, too, as we think about it, a skills intelligence strategy to say, all right, what is the connected thread from everything from branding to executive development. Really?
Andy, we said, to your point, I think there was a lot of collaboration that was happening, but we felt like we could drive it a little bit further and a little bit faster with an integrated organization. And I've realized it is a bit of a growing trend and talking to some really talented colleagues in the industry. But I think a lot of people are still trying to figure out how is it truly integrated and not just on paper. And I do think the skills piece of
it is the key. Yeah, it's all part of the employee lifecycle, right? You've got the acquisition, bringing people in, and then we want to keep them not only engaged, but keep developing them so they feel like they're growing in their careers and they stay engaged and with the organization longer. So it's obviously all connected. You mentioned skills. This is something that's coming up more and more often. Skills mapping, skills development,
identifying skills of the future. Another topic that has been coming up almost every week when I run interviews is AI, of course, right, in generative AI. And I know it's something that you and your team has been leaning into and using a lot. So I'm curious, how has AI impacted this and how do you think about skills development in the workforce? So I think it's interesting because this is the topic of conversation. Right. I attended, iforcp I read the white papers, all the
conferences, all the conversations that are happening. And at first I was a little intimidated thinking some of these organizations seem like they're pretty far along on their journey. And then as you look under the hood a little bit more, they conceptually know where they want to go. Some organizations, I would say some just see it as kind of an abstract idea that's elusive and they can't really figure out how to get there.
Yeah, we'll let others figure this out first or something. Yeah. I think what has become abundantly clear is that you can't do it without the underlying technology. I mean, that seems like a no brainer, but I think a lot of people were starting from a very manual process in terms of, okay, how do we actually get to a set of skills as a baseline? Right? And I think you've got to have a skills intelligence system that helps predict, identify, and ultimately tie to how you deliver the talent.
And so I think you've got to have a skills intelligence system that's actually powered by AI and ML and then that helps bring everything together and connect the various systems and teams. So I think if I'm going to get a little technical here, I guess I'm going to try to keep it simple. And by no means am I the expert. I think this idea of skills intelligence strategy and how do you take it from
abstract into reality? First and foremost, I think organizations, some organizations have realized, all right, we actually do have a lot of information on the skills of our employees, like a lot more than we realized. And it sits in so many different places. But I'll take an obvious example. So if you think about a job description that correlates with someone in role, so you can pretty much determine what are the baseline skills that this person has because they're in this role.
And then using technology to actually pull and aggregate to create a skills architecture. And so I think it's like one using AI to pull from all the existing places where, you know, you have some information on skills. Again, there's external resources and databases too that hold information around skills. But at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is break down every single job description into a set of skills that ultimately rolls up into the skills architecture and then break down
every individual into a set of skills. Like how do you help them some of it has to come from them. How do you help them break down their experience, their capabilities into a set of skills? And then you use AI to really ensure that you're doing all the things that you want to do for them, for their leaders, and
ultimately for the organization. Yeah. And because you're talking about new skills that are being identified and needed in the future as things continue to change, it's not just what skills already exist in the organization, right, but what potential do you have, what are people interested in? You really need to find out from the people
that work in your organization. So you've got to find a way to create some type of talent marketplace or platform where people can identify and look for those roles or those upskilling or development opportunities. Right. Do you think about how do we take the people that we have and help them get to where they want to go in roles that will also provide more value to our organization? Yeah,
100%. So there's some of the back end work that is required that I was referencing and then ultimately you're using that to feed into or we are right, and we do have the very fortunate benefit of having the ServiceNow platform. And we acquired a company called a Hitch last year which had already figured a lot of this, how to leverage AI to match skills to roles, to trainings, to opportunities, so that you can more effectively and intentionally develop the talent, the
skills that they want right. For today and the skills that the organization needs for the future. So we reengineered the Hitch technology into our platform. So I think that is part of the reason that we are so far in front of this and ahead of the game is because we have that advantage. But ultimately all of that, our platform feeds into apps that do what you're talking about. So they create a connected experience for employees to say, all right, because here's the
skills that we have. Right, and so to your point, it's matching to existing needs if I'm our CTO and I say we need to strengthen our cybersecurity, I'm making this up, right? We need to strengthen our cybersecurity skills, then today you're limited to those people that have that title, right? And this is going to open up a whole world of people that have some skills that wouldn't be reflected in their title. So you can use it to help
meet the business needs of today. But to your point, then you can see, all right, ultimately organizations will have the inventory, a full picture, what skills exist across the organization, and then where the gaps are. And then in turn, you can also use the skills intelligence for people's aspirations. So here's what I have today, here's what I want. Oh,
boom. AI serves up well, then here's how you can develop those things, whether it be content from a training perspective or programs or serving up matching mentors, et cetera. So I think it's meeting the needs of today but also tomorrow. And that's really how we think about it. And of course, naturally, because and I'm not trying to shamelessly plug service now, but we can't talk about it without talking about our platform because it's underpinning everything we're
doing. But then we're also selling it to customers. So we think about it, of course, from an employee perspective and also from a manager hands on manager perspective. And then at the C suite level, organizations. So how are you quantifying within those three areas and what are the priorities? Because I think there's a lot of emphasis on the employee experience, naturally. So tremendous benefits that are being less talked about for leaders and C suite executives. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. CEOs even,
right. It's every level, but especially at the top. And I didn't realize I should have done more homework. That ServiceNow had acquired hitch. We had the hitch. Founder Kelly Steven Waste. Oh, I know Kelly well. Podcast quite a while back. I looked it up, episode 164 that was published in June of 2020. So just over three years ago, she was on here and has obviously done some remarkable work there in
developing that platform. Andy, of course, we've been talking with other people about different platforms and companies that are looking to develop their talent marketplaces. Talent mobility being a hot topic. Getting back to skills for leaders and talent development professionals, listening and thinking about this, what's the best way for them to go about maybe don't have all the technology yet, but how can leaders assess the level of skills and what's needed for the
future? That's a good question. We're customer zero for ourselves on some of this stuff, too. But I think it really is about starting to get your arms around what intel you have already. Because I think about some of the conversations that I've been in over the years, and I think a lot of organizations sort of default to self reporting, right, for individuals from a skills perspective, which I think is a
component in it. But I think it's again starting to think about how do we stockpile what we already know about all of our employees. I know you said without the technology, but I think if without the technology, it's going to be years and years of a very manual process. So of course I think ours is the best. But whatever the approach, I don't think you could do it without a digital platform to help sort of pull,
aggregate, analyze. But I think it starts with getting your arms around all of the information, just really thinking creatively about all the places where you already have skills, intel. You need some form of data analytics, basically like take, let's take all the data we have, whatever technology or platform you're using, find somebody in your organization who has some skills around analytics so that we can look at this data and see, okay, what skills are becoming more valuable?
What are people talking about, what are leaders asking for? What's more common in the roles that we're posting? Are there ways that we can leverage the skills and abilities and experience we already have in this organization before we start looking to hire from outside? Yes, that's right. So I'm curious, I know you work obviously there directly running talent acquisition, talent development there in HR, but also
talk with people from other organizations. How are the best HR leaders using AI powered skills intelligence or AI tools in general to be more effective in what they're doing? Well, I think what we've obviously seen is that where I see the most obviously is organizations that are using our platform. But I will say it really is about, okay, there's the
skills piece of it, right? But even if you were to do something and this is where I think organizations I was just having a conversation this week, organizations recognizing that there has to be, even if it's a portal, right, something way more simple for people, to employees to access all that's available to them. So I think one is, even without the skills intelligence piece of it, how are you getting a more coordinated sort of approach to everything that's available to
employees, to leaders? And I think there's some creative things that some organizations are doing in pockets to use AI for that. I had another thought too on that and I forgot it. I think what I'm seeing too is people are getting a lot smarter about how to build the business case for it. So I think, again, I can't give a lot of examples of like, all right, this is where it's really cutting edge outside, of
course, the work that we're a part of. But I do see more and more people getting smarter about how to articulate the business case for gen AI, for a skills intelligence strategy. And I think it is A, acknowledging that HR is moving away from being transactional, like difficult to measure and really understanding. Okay, we've got the skills shortage. The reality is we have that globally and helping the most senior business leaders in the organization understand, hey, the business strategy is the
talent strategy, and the talent strategy is the business strategy. And without this, we're not going to get very far on our business strategy. So I'd say that's kind of the thing that I'm impressed by in my conversations with organizations. Yeah. And I think it's going to be interesting because we're talking about leveraging AI in talent mobility and hiring and talent development. And I want to get to talent acquisition in a
moment. But I'm also thinking that with AI being such a hot topic, every organization is scrambling to figure out, okay, how do we leverage AI better? Not just in talent development, but in everything that we do. And we need more workers who are skilled and knowledgeable on how to use these tools right. And how to leverage these tools so
we can grow our organization. And that's becoming a huge need. And then we need to figure out, okay, how do we identify the people that either have the skills, which they're probably not enough of right now, or can develop those skills pretty quickly to be able to help
the organization leverage AI more. Yeah, that's a great point too, because interestingly, as we're standing up this skills intelligence strategy, one of the questions that we're asking ourselves is what are the baseline skills that we think most every employee in the organization needs to have? Right. Some of them can kind of skills can span across attributes, capabilities. It's interchangeable to a certain degree if you're talking about
technical skills. Yes. How do we equip employees and leaders with more from a gen AI perspective, but it's also a mindset too. So it's like if you're sitting in finance, right. What is the fundamental knowledge you need to have, even no matter what role you're in from a gen AI perspective? So we've said, okay, one of the core skills that we know we want to equip everyone with is exactly to your point on this topic of gen AI and then to what degree where,
right? So where do you go deeper, et cetera. But I do think there has to be for us and for a lot of organizations, a really coordinated effort to make sure everyone has the fundamental skills on the topic or else it's going to get stuck in places in the organization. So we are definitely spending a lot of time on, okay, yeah, we've got the engine going now, right? What do we want to feed into the engine? Ironically, the first thing is gen
AI, right. How do we get the right people there and find the people within our organization? And then obviously, if you're growing or you don't necessarily have the skills in your organization, then you've got to go and hire from outside so let's talk about talent acquisition for a moment. I know this podcast is mostly about talent development, but there are a lot of our listeners who are involved in talent acquisition in some way or some
that manage both like you do, especially in smaller organizations. So how can skills intelligence enable recruiters to match candidates with job requirements more effectively, leading to making better hires? Essentially, I mean, I would imagine everyone sees the opportunity from an objectivity perspective, that's one, two is it opens up the pool. You sort of touched on this earlier.
We were talking about not just looking for a line for line match to a job description against someone's resume, which I think is what we've been trying to do in the Ta function for many years and through a somewhat subjective lens, right? Because this is human beings that are trying to do that. So I think know a lot of organizations are pretty early on. Some are worried about kind of the compliance and ethics
issues of it, which we all should be. But I think there's just some really basic things too that we can do to ensure that we're getting some of the manual labor out of everything from the actual initial creation of a job description to ensuring that actually what is listed as a requirement can truly be vetted as a requirement. And that we are looking at an individual relative to a set of skills as opposed to a collective body of experience that they have.
And so ultimately, I think it's going to remove a lot of the biases in the process and it's going to open up a big pool of talent. So, for example, we have an initiative called Rise Up, which is basically there's a number of different components to Rise Up, but one of the things that we're looking to do within Rise Up is take individuals from less traditional paths and get them on a career path to be a
technologist, which they may not have access to. And so to me, it's a really fascinating thing to think that corporations or even gen AI can help to address some of these social issues that get in the way of people having access to opportunities. Because ultimately, if you say, okay, here's someone who didn't have a traditional four year degree, right, didn't go to a school that we all recognize and know, but they did gain a set of skills through alternative methods. For
us. It's the Rise Up program. And historically it's been really hard for leaders to then figure out, well, how do I translate this? And it feels risky, right? Because I can't really validate whether or not they've got the basics to do this job well. So it's taking the risk out of it for leaders and therefore opening up new pools of talent, which I think even before the market turn last year, organizations, I should say even after the market
turn last year. Organizations still recognize there's not going to be enough skilled individuals on the planet to meet the needs of corporations if we don't figure out a way to get more people
into the workforce. Right. There's so much in the news about AI taking jobs, and yet all these new jobs are being created all the time, and we don't have even enough skills and experience or people to fill a lot of the jobs that are going to be needed, especially if things start ramping back up in the economy. I always chuckle a little when I hear about some of the fear around that because I feel like since the beginning of time, there has been new skills that are needed to do whatever
fill in the blank is required. So whether it be from way back in the agriculture, at every point there's new skills and of course, in recent decades, new technology that's introduced that makes some other skills outdated. And so it's not a new sort of concept that there's this coming into the marketplace and that people are going to need to people organizations are going to need to reskill upskill. I do think the irony is that Geni is going to help
organizations do that a lot more effectively. So it's like, okay, before it would be like, well, now here's this scheme that has a set of outdated skills and we don't know what to do. Right? Well, it's like you're going to be ahead of that because you're going to see the trends using the analytics that you referenced and using AI to say, okay, here's what we've got, here's what we need, here's where we got to go. And so I actually think it can be used for good
in so many ways. Oh, totally. And you brought up skills. I think that we are sort of entering a new era where the skills, because it can be more proven and identified, like you said, by AI, become more valuable. And we might be sort of at the end of a 50 to 70 year era where getting a college degree was sort of table stakes to get any type of professional role. People can debate the value of college degrees and what that's going to look like in
the future. I'm sure they'll be around for a long time. But the fact is there's alternatives now. And I think more organizations are coming and saying like, oh, it'd be great if you had a college degree, but if you have these skills that's actually more valuable to us because at the end of the day, the degree doesn't really matter. It's what skills do you bring to the table that can help us, that can provide more value to the business? 100%. I remember
we were talking a little bit about this. I'm a razorback. I graduated from the University of Arkansas wupe Suey with a degree in psychology. And I knew pretty quickly after I graduated or actually while I was still in school, I was like, I don't know that this is the path that I'm going to take. Not quite sure what path I'm going to take, but I remember so many people telling me, you've got to complete the degree, even if the major is
not relevant to the direction you're taking. Because it's one of the few things that employers can use to gauge whether or not you have the ability to complete something like significant like this. And I was like, oh, that's the indicator that companies are using. But it was quite some time ago. But it's true, I think that was like without experience, you're naturally going to default to other indicators that help you understand whether or not someone has the
skills and capabilities. And that's all going to change now. Again, it's subjectivity in the process. Yeah, I know we talked about I went to a rival, big state university and when I graduated, I don't know if I really had any skills other than being able to party five, six days a week. Well, I mean, I may have obtained those skills as well. Social skills are important. We're learning, right. More and more. Josh Burson calls them
power skills, right. Like it's our people skills that are going to actually be the differentiator in the future. But getting back to hiring and skills and you talked about in the past identifying people who went to the name brand universities that we know and love. Obviously there are lots of people who have not had access or the ability or maybe the knowledge to get into some of those schools or to go to college. And yet they're now able to gain
skills in different ways. So you say that AI also has the power to kind of level the playing field. Right. Andy eliminate some of the bias that's out there and increase diversity. Right? I mean, again, I'm a big de andy advocate. I had the ability and what's the word, the honor really to play a role at Disney for a number of years,
helping to lead the corporate de I function. And you know, it was apparent to me pretty early on that again, sort of if corporations aren't helping to solve some of these social issues that get in the way, we're not going to make progress. We're just not as a society, as a global community, right. We've made a ton of progress. There's still a lot of biases out there. Right. And if we can use technology to eliminate those and really level playing, that's kind of the goal in the end,
right. We want the best people and the best jobs. We want equal opportunities, right? That's what the E is all about. And create more diversity at all levels. So it sounds like there's tons of potential there for this. Yeah, data is the key. Let's just get back into
development for a moment here. One of the goals I think for a lot of people in talent development is creating a better employee experience, improving productivity and engagement, and helping people grow in their careers so that they are engaged and want to stay around a lot longer. And AI is certainly the topic that is being brought up over and over again with people wondering, okay, how can
I leverage this better? Can AI help us improve our productivity and engagement inside organizations as well? 100%. This kind of goes back to what we were talking about in terms of the different prongs. Right? So employees, of course, we've talked about the employee experience. They can track their skills, they can express their aspirations, they can build personalized growth plans. And then AI again helps recommend the relevant trainings, mentors, mobility opportunities
based on the skills they have andy what they need. But organizations, I think, can build a much more data driven talent management strategy that ensures that the investments we're making from a human resources perspective are actually helping us to have employees that now can demonstrate they have the skills that we need and the greatest impact
on the business and closed skill gaps. But I think, again, managers with AI, you can really do a lot more in terms of optimizing your team performance, your team engagement, your team output. Again, we kind of touched on ta everything from hiring for relevant skills, but then also it enables you to see again, what do I have? What do I need? And you can also actually measure manager sort of
effectiveness if you will too. Right. Are managers, you've got these tools that help support what we call quarterly growth conversations? Are they happening? Right. Which managers are actually spending the time doing the things that we know make an impact on an employee experience and ultimately an employee productivity because the two go hand in hand. So I think it is definitely managers and ultimately organizations. My team is close to 400 globally, right?
So ultimately I can see using AI, like the aggregate sort of output of the manager behavior, the sentiment of employees and all the correlating sort of factors there. Yeah, that's interesting. The last thing I want to ask about is this idea of career development. We talked a little bit about talent mobility and putting people in the right positions. Career development is something that I think a lot about and work with organizations on, especially the mindset side of teaching
employees to own their careers. I know that the number one thing that people want is to know how can I grow in my career here? Right? How am I going to grow if I work here, if I stay here? How are you using AI or how can people use AI to guide employees andy managers through career plans, development goals? You mentioned kind of measuring, are they having more of those career
conversations? But we want to make sure that people are putting some type of goals or plans together and taking advantage of the resources that are available so they are able to continue to grow and develop in their careers. Yeah, I think we've touched on the AI in terms of underpinning all of that. To your point, it's what, today or yesterday, I should say, for us, you would have a campaign, right?
So let's say we're going to push out the latest manager excellence training, right, to everyone that fits this persona. And so it's a very kind of manual effort to figure that out. Whereas tomorrow, with an AI sort of powered, it's all automated, really. So it's like you've captured what your aspirations are. So if the goal is to be moved laterally or into a different area or to move up, AI is serving all of that
up. Now, I do think that there's an important overlay to all of that, which is something that we spend a lot of time on, because you can build it, right. But you still have to bring people to it and they still have to be inspired by it. And so I do think that it requires kind of a consumer grade marketing strategy on top of it all, to your point, to create awareness, but it is going to be a
lot more automated. So if, Andy, you decide you want to be the SVP of Talent Acquisition and Development ServiceNow and you capture that as your Aspiration, then it's a lot more automated in terms of how it's served up to you. Yeah. 100%. I can see that as we continue to develop more of these tools, there's so many more things available. I know it can seem overwhelming to people. Sometimes they're like, oh, where do I start?
But you got to start somewhere. Start with the data you have, start with the objectives, the goal, the problem you're trying to figure out. Ask your colleagues, talk to friends, listen to this follow up, look for other guides and resources. Our community, we're talking about this all the time in the talent
development think tank community. What tools can we use to better development, provide development opportunities to our people, to develop our managers, to help people continue to grow so that they're moving into the roles, Andy, that we need, developing the skills we need to be more successful in the future of work? 100%.
Well, Sarah, this has been really great. I appreciate you coming on. I have probably 20 more questions, things we could talk about, especially with related to AI and talent mobility and the work that you're doing there at ServiceNow. But this has been a great start and I really appreciate you coming on and I look forward to talking more soon. Thank you for having me, Andy, truly. And we're deep in this journey right now. We're learning,
we're capturing sort of our learnings and our journey. So if you want to reconnect in the coming months, we could share more about where we are because it's coming to life in real time. Yeah, for sure. Well, we've got our Bonus Q A, and I'd love to have you come speak in our community as well and get a discussion going about how we can better leverage these tools. So we'll talk more about that soon. Sounds good. Thank you, Andy. All right, take care.
All right, that will do it for my interview with Sarah Tilly from ServiceNow. I hope you got value from that interview from that conversation. We certainly covered a lot of ground there with regards to using AI in talent development. And I want to remind you that in addition to all the great content you got here, I'm also hosting a webinar with my friend Josh Urmler about AI in talent development. And it is coming up next week on August
29 at 01:00 p.m. Eastern Time. If you want to register for that for a link in the show notes or go to TDT Usai. That's TDTT usai. I'm also going to be inviting Sarah to join us in the talent Development Think tank community to speak about using AI in talent development. Josh will also be doing a follow up session in the community about using AI in talent development, so stay tuned for those. If you want to find out more information about the community that's at TDT us slash community.
If you have any questions, reach out to me. I hope to talk to you soon and stay tuned because next episode, it is my Bonus Q Andy A with Sarah Tilly, and it is a good one.