Building a Bridge to the Future of Skills Based Talent Programs. With Christy Smith and Lauren Robertson

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Announcer:

Welcome to Science 4-Hire with your host, Dr. Charles Hander. Hiring is hard. Pre-hire talent assessments can help you ease the pain. Whether you don't know where to start or you just want to stay on top of the trends, Science 4-Hire provides 30 minutes of enlightenment on best practices and news from the front lines of the employment testing universe. So, get ready to learn as Dr. Charles Handler and his all-star guests blend old-school knowledge with new wave technology to educate and inform you about all things talent assessment.

Dr. Charles Handler:

Today on Science 4-Hire, I'm joined by Christy Smith and Lauren Robertson. Christy is the central market leader for career products at Mercer and supports the commercial strategy for Mercer's skills products in the US and Canada. Lauren is an organizational psychologist working with Mercer on their skills focused products and client projects. Lauren is developing strategies for linking skills identification and skills assessment to support talent acquisition and talent development strategies. They're joining me today to talk about everything skills. What are skills, why are we talking about them now, and how companies are thinking about advancing skills-based talent and pay practices across their organization.

Lauren Robertson:

Thanks, Charles. Hi everyone, I'm Lauren Robertson. Very excited to be here talking about this topic today. I am an organizational psychologist and I've spent my career working with organizations to develop and implement talent assessments, and I've had the pleasure of working with Mercer over the past two years on their talent assessment strategy as well as their skills focused products

Christy Smith:

And hello as well from me. So I'm Christy Smith. I am a central market leader within career products here at Mercer. I've been here about two years focused on both the assessment and skills commercial strategy, but I've spent the last 26 years-ish or so working the assessment space. So I've grown up in assessment even though I'm not an io, my guest talk like one speak, one on tv. So happy to be here talking about skills. It's a hot, like you said, Charles, it's a hot topic here at Mercer and one we're definitely very passionate about.

Dr. Charles Handler:

Yeah, I pick up on that for sure, and the work we've been doing together, the conversations we've had anyway, it's been really good. So let's talk about, as we get started here on our conversational journey, one of the things that I feel like I continually kind of have to do as psychologists that objectively define things, I think when we start out to talk about things, we want to all think that we're talking about the same thing or know what it is we're talking about. So skill, it's such a catchall term, right? I mean you can hear people call it one thing and it's really arose by any other name. I mean, we're talking about individual differences that people bring to the table, but when Mercer thinks of skills and you all build a skill model, explain a little bit about how you conceptualize the idea of a skill as a foundation for all the good stuff we're going to be talking about.

Lauren Robertson:

Yeah, I think in terms of how Mercers defined it, they've taken a really broad approach. I think that aligns with what you just spoke about, Charles. It's all individual differences. From a traditional org psych perspective, it's how we think about Ks, aos, it incorporates all of them. And I think this broad definition really drives home the importance of how you're defining the individual skills. And then that has implications for all the other things we want to talk about today in terms of what you do with those skills, how you measure them, and how you really make it into a skills journey. Well, let Chrissy say a little bit more maybe about what Mercer's doing.

Christy Smith:

We talk to a lot of clients who have come from the competency world. So yeah, that's the world that they are used to when they come into these conversations. And Lauren's right that we take the broadest definition of what a skill is that as they look at our skill data and the granularity of it, it incorporates all of those things that we think of as traditional soft or behavioral skills. It is the technical, those traditional hard skills as well as we consider qualifications. So things like a a CPA or a medical licensure and things like that as well when we talk about skills. So it is the broadest definition of skill.

Dr. Charles Handler:

Gotcha. I wrote in my notes here how about stuff people can do. Would that be work? Very happy. Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about competencies and skills though, because in my mind I would always just throw 'em together and say, okay, if you look at a competency model, adaptability and flexibility, and then you look at a skill model and it's adaptability and flex. So do you see any real difference between competencies and skills?

Christy Smith:

I think for some of them, and I'll let Lauren layer into this too, we think about it on a spectrum as we've tried to really make this easy for clients to digest how we think about skills. I've seen a continuum, so we might have a higher level competency like driving results or something like that. That's on this end of the spectrum. And then when you start getting more granular as far as what is the actual tasks that make up being able to perform that type of competency, we get down to the skill level. But we're really trying to address that in our skills taxonomy, the granularity of a skill, and then also pull it up to different higher level category of organization. Because when you start talking about other things like assessment tools, you know, can't necessarily assess at for all of the skills aligned to a job, if we can pull that up to a higher level, it makes those types of activities easier to do.

Dr. Charles Handler:

Oh yeah, they roll up, right? And even if you look at say, a lominger kind of model, I mean, there's so many things in there and when we, we've all built in our careers models, taxonomies and just the level of aggregation and the level of granularity, like you said, is it also depends on the situation and what we're trying to do ultimately. But you can get analysis paralysis if you try to break your job into so many things. One of the things though, as I've looked at what you all have been doing, I think it's valuable to share the background, especially as you productize this a little bit in the comp space and just what you've been able to do in the compensation and benefits space with skills that is really, I feel like it's fuelling what you're working on now. So I, I'd love to share a little bit about that, how you developed the taxonomy that you have and where it came from and how it's evolving.

Christy Smith:

So for any client who participates in the Mercer Compensation surveys, and I think that's probably where most folks know Mercer is for our compensation data, the backbone of that is our job library. So it's our job architecture, and for any client who is doing membership survey participation, they have to align their jobs to our job library. And it's quite detailed, it's four different levels with career streams within those levels. So we standardize. So the skills product, the initial skills product, which is our skills library, is how do we align the skills data that we have to the Mercer job library? It actually makes it really easy for clients who are participating in our compensation surveys. They've already got that kind of Rosetta Stone from their jobs to be able to easily identify skills because we have already have that linkage for them. That's really the first step, Charles, is that they have to know what the skills are to be able to align those to the jobs. And once they have that, we have additional products that can help them identify skill premiums. Then because we have skills data, we have compensation data, now we can start talking about what's your pay for skills philosophy and how can we help you do that? Because that is a very new area for I think outside of it. Yeah, I think it absolutely people are comfortable with that idea, but as you move outside the IT space, it becomes a more interesting conversation

Dr. Charles Handler:

And technology helps a lot with that, I reckon, and just being able to organize all this stuff because you can't, and when you talk about assessment, I mean you can't measure what you haven't defined, you know, can't predict things based on things you haven't defined. So it's that definition and that taxonomy. And Lauren, I know you've been working a lot kind of in the trenches with that. Yeah. I mean, how have you been able to start taking a look at, oh, we've got this amazing granular molecular kind of lexicon or taxonomy that's really based on realities. It's not just people making stuff up. So how are you working with that to start really underpinning outside of the world of compensation?

Lauren Robertson:

Yeah, that's a great question. One of the things I'll just add to what Christy just said that I think is really great about what Mercer's doing is they're not only doing the data scraping across reliable resources that are available like oned or the World Economic Forum, but they're also overlaying expert curation. And I do think that that's a really important piece so that it's not just the AI that's running behind the scenes. We have a lot of expert review happening, myself included. So we're looking at what are the critical skills, what are the overlap? What should that taxonomy or hierarchy look like? Making sure we have some good kind of decision rules in place for that. As you've talked about, there's no one right way. It can be complicated and you can really get in the weeds. And now what we're doing is looking at how we can measure those skills.

And to me, this is the really exciting part where I get to leverage everything I know about assessments to come in and understand what are the different types of skills that we've included in our taxonomy, what are the best ways to measure those skills and how can we help organizations move along that journey where they want to move to a skills-based talent perspective and away from that job focus perspective. So we're looking at what the measurement opportunities are there, what is kind of the best practice that we want to incorporate going forward and how we can help organizations, whether that's for hiring talent or assessing and developing their own internal talent to repurpose them in other roles internally. Yeah,

Dr. Charles Handler:

Interesting. So you mentioned something too about, I think it's really important to kind of stop for a second too, when you talked about kind of AI-based skills stuff. So for the longest time there there's been natural language processing models that'll pull things out of resumes or job descriptions, and now there's platforms more than one that say, oh, we have a million skills in our database. And so I'm instantly a little skeptical in how many skills are there really? And if a skill is just the same label for something, those are often more of what, again, to your point Chris, you think in the IT world, it's like you want to break down all the languages or some of the things that you're able to do, and there's a lot of those, but still, it seems to me like if let's get real, I mean if you really break it down to individual differences in the workplace, there's categories, but are there more than 200 or I don't know, it seems like that's even a lot. I know you guys have a lot of skills in your

Lauren Robertson:

Model. I like,

Dr. Charles Handler:

Right? But I mean, again, it's all about those level levels of aggregation. You can say, well, here's a thing, and then you can start teasing it apart. But it gets so subtle when you talk about measurement. And so how do you actually measure that because it's bound up with other things. So as we start talking about skills in the workforce and really come on this, we talk about assessment here more than anything skills-based hiring is becoming a really important topic. Again, as somebody who's been in employment testing for a long time, we've been doing that for a long time now, but it's becoming more valuable as you start to think about, okay, well let's strip away educational attainment, let's strip away some of your past experience. What can you actually do that this organization needs? Or what can you bring to the table? That's kind of the new conversation.

So I've really started thinking about it as jobs to journeys. One of the first steps in that is transformation is should we rethink what a job is? I know that's really easy to say, and then the reality is we still have to have this language that we use. But in terms of skills based kind of hiring and everything, one of the things that I really like, and it's probably going to be difficult for you all to get into too much detail, but the, there's something in your talent trends report, skills-based talent practice maturity. So that really to me is a cool playbook of just how do you swallow the ocean of becoming a skills-based organization. Obviously it's a little bit at a time, but I know that's pretty, that could get very detailed. But in this particular venue, talk to me a little bit about skills-based talent practices and how you all see that going on in terms of we're hiring, we're doing a lot of other things. How are companies applying that?

Christy Smith:

So we conducted a survey last summer of organizations who are utilizing skills. We wanted to know how they're using them, what are they using them for, where, what's the maturity curve? And I would say of the participants who are using skills, talent, attraction and selection is the number one use case, but it's going to be within tech roles. That's where this is happening. And I think we could, nobody's going to be surprised by that because again, that's an easy place to talk about skills. People are very comfortable talking about skills in that way. And so I think the first thing is recognizing where organizations are in their skills maturity journey. And then knowing that you don't have to boil the ocean. You don't have to try and eat the whole elephant at a time, one bite at a time, because this is a complex topic because it incorporates stakeholders from across HR and across the organization. Change management around this is huge. It has to be a piece that's thought about. If you start with critical roles, critical functions, and you start building out scalable processes, scalable technology, I think from that place it becomes an easier way to get buy-in and move the change through the organization. Because I think it would be very difficult to try and do this for the entire organization all at the same time and move everybody in that direction. Yeah,

Dr. Charles Handler:

Yeah, no, yeah, it's like you pile there.

Lauren Robertson:

And I think the other piece is, and where Mercer is starting with a lot of their clients is do you have the right job architecture in place? And even though that's not maybe part of the skills journey that we want to talk about, that might be part of what we want to leave behind. I think that's a good starting point. Some organizations have a really good art job architecture in place today. Some need to actually build that, they're not even there yet. And then from there, do you have skills as part of that job architecture? Have you done the job analysis legwork to identify which skills are critical needed at entry and then building from there so that you have this almost skill mapping or career pathing tool that you're using. And then you can start to move away from the jobs as long once you have that, but you have to start with a foundation somewhere. And I think a lot of organizations haven't figured that out well yet. It's a big thing to tackle, as Christie mentioned. So you have to pick a starting point.

Dr. Charles Handler:

Yeah, it's kind of a chicken egg thing too. If you think about it, could we ever just not have a job? I'm not applying for a job, I'm applying for a bag of skills or something that doesn't, a job has got is a concept that you kind of need to have. But if you really too, in my experience, but more also just by reading and kind of conversations is a lot of times people will get hired for a particular job with a job description, which is not necessarily worthless, but it's like the job's resume. It's like what's really in there? But at the end of the day, they learn all kind, you know, start to see what people are good at, and you're like, oh wow, you're amazing at this, Lauren. Well I know it's not in your job description, but you sure can help us.

So as the longer you're there, you kind of make the job what you are, if you know what I'm saying. You kind of move your way into what's the best way that I can help this company? And then you might get noticed for, oh wow, she has this skill, we didn't even know about that, but this is a great job for her if she wants to develop that skill and move forward. So it's really like the jobs, your entry point, and then let's just talk about how can the skills be helpful. So yeah, when you think about assessments then assessments are pretty good help there because how the heck else do you know somebody has skills. So then let's talk a little bit about how you all are starting to see a hiring process that util it's skills based. We have all this stuff foundationally, we've talked about now helping companies with probably technology and the actual science part of it. How can assessments really start to help us not think about jobs as much and think about what is it that these people have that we need?

Lauren Robertson:

Yeah, well I think assessments traditionally have been focused on skills, behaviors, knowledge, abilities that you have anyways.

Dr. Charles Handler:

Yeah, exactly.

Lauren Robertson:

So they fit in really easily. And so if you have this role with a defined set of skills, we can match up measurement tools to those defined skills. And I think it allows for the opportunity to look at, do you have the minimum skills that we're looking for to screen you in through the process instead of sifting out of the process based on not having certain qualifications? And then what are we doing with that data once we've hired you? And this is where I think some of the talent marketplaces that are out there are doing some really cool things. You want to have a technology that's one, allowing you to assess, measure these skills, give you appropriate benchmarking and proficiency data, and then how's that data when you're on the job, just like you talked about. And then you want to be able to, once I've obtained additional skills or demonstrated them on the job, add those to my skill profile in the talent marketplace and then let me as an employee, see what other jobs or roles within the organization align to that skillset based on the skills that are tied to that role.

So I think assessment plays a big piece in helping us measure those skills and then benchmark those skills or understand what a proficiency level, someone's proficiency level is, and then how do you build that proficiency level and reassess it over time.

Christy Smith:

But that has to be defined as part of that upfront work. I, and of course that's Mercer is building proficiency. Our concept of proficiency around skills into our tools. And this is something we've struggled with because again, going back to that survey that we did, there was no common consensus as far as how many proficiency levels on skills people had, what they were calling them. So it was a bit of noise in the data, but in order to do any of these things, we're talking about assessment, pay for skills, whatever that may be as your use case, understanding proficiency is obviously very important.

Dr. Charles Handler:

We want to bring objectivity, right? I mean that's the thing. And if you start thinking about what are the signal, the sources of signal that you use when you're traditionally hiring somebody, it's going to be your resume. And a lot of times that's heavily loaded with your academic background or whatnot. And so there's a lot of subjectivity there. I mean, even interviews and stuff introduce subjectivities and that is a type of assessment. But I mean, at the end of the day, the more objective we can be about these skills that we've defined, I think the better it is for everybody. And we know that a good assessment program can do that can also help this stuff scale a little bit, I think if you're in a really big company. But connecting the pre and post hire to me has always made so much sense intuitively and it in practice, especially in big enterprise companies, some of 'em do a really good job, but it's hard to make that connection I think a lot of times because people under completely different departments, completely different technologies a lot of times. So the more we can centralize that and have some vision, and I think technology and the type of methodology that folks like yourself bring to the table, make it easier, right? If we can we build it, they will come, hopefully

Lauren Robertson:

Come. Well, and I think organizations are starting to recognize the importance of that connection and also the resources that it's going to take. So LinkedIn published a study where there was an 89% increase in postings for L and D professionals, for example. So there seems to be an increased focus from organizations on that need and having the right people to execute it, knowing that there needs to be maybe more manpower behind it. And I think that also leads to organizations recognizing that in order to avoid skill shortages or talent shortages going forward, they've got to start to build their talent internally and help their talent shift from one role to the next. Especially as we have these unprecedented events like the wonderful pandemic we all went through, I know you have to be able to shift your skillset, you have to be able to know quickly how to develop your internal talent to shift as their roles change or the skillset that's needed changes. And so I think moving along the skills journey together is really what's going to help them start to address those key goals going forward.

Dr. Charles Handler:

I mean, it provides a lot of versatility, that's for sure. And once your company can in index all the skills that you're warehousing in your people, right, too, that helps with the journey part of it. Not only knowing what skills have trended to be that people have to make them highly effective in different roles so that you can start to get vision early on of who you want to move through or aware, available openings match people. That part of it is really important too. So it really is holistic, it's assessments and especially in my practice over the years, it's been mostly pre-hire stuff and you know, get very focused on that. But it, it's important to think about it more broadly. But then again, we have a lot of work to do on the hiring front. So have you all worked with any opportunities or clients or whatnot where you've really seen companies, and you certainly don't have to name the name of companies or anything, but seen them say, what we don't care about degree attainment, we don't even care about where you come from and we don't even need your resume necessarily. If you can take this assessment and interview well and have some of these basic things we're looking for, we can use a person. Are you seeing some of that happening on your side?

Christy Smith:

I think it's more around with embracing the idea of skills. So then, and it's the future of skills. I think clients are very early in this journey about how skills can help move them along to that type of concept of being able to flow talent into the organization at the point that they need it, where they need it. So going back to that idea of the skills-based maturity, Charles, it's the fixed flex flow. And I think we're still so much in the fixed space of the idea of a job and the way we traditionally think about jobs, although there is appetite, no doubt about it to move to that. Like I said, that concept of being able to move talent, bring talent in and move it where you need it, when you need it there and of course know how to pay for it, know where it could be at, where you could develop it, all of these other use cases. I just think organizations are mostly still so early in these conversations they're still trying to figure out what skills do they need moving forward and they want to have good data sets to be able to objectively do.

Lauren Robertson:

And I do think where we're seeing a little bit more appetite is maybe not to get rid of some of those initial screeners that you mentioned, Charles, but how do we give them less weight? How do we give them less weight and how do we give some of the skills more opportunity? So I think there's an organizations that are interested in how do I change my interview process? Do I use something that's more similar akin to a work sample that we talk about in organizational psychology? How do I allow my candidates to demonstrate their skills earlier in the process.

And not put as much weight on their resume or what they put in some application blanks or what their years of experience are. I don't think they're getting away from using that, but I like where it's going in the baby steps of less weight and trying to have that more skills focused approach. But I think it's going to take time. So it's not going to be a quick journey. You're not going to rip off the bandaid and get to the skills side, but how do you take those baby steps to get there and make your leaders and your HR professionals, your legal team comfortable with what you're doing?

Dr. Charles Handler:

Yeah, well couple notes there too. So we talk about letting applicants or talent demonstrate their skills earlier. One of the other things that I continually talk about, people who listen to me talk about this stuff have probably heard me say it a million times, but really good research by the talent board where year over year they find in their surveys of job applicants, lots of 'em that job applicants want the opportunity to demonstrate their skills. They feel it's a more fair process, they're more engaged. So that's an important thing to think of. Everybody just wants to say, well, tests are horrible. Nobody wants to take tests, applicants won't take tests. That may be true. I still say, well, do you want to hire somebody who's not going to spend 20 minutes or 30 minutes telling you about them? But that, that's an interesting note just to say is that there's other benefits of doing this that are engagement around talent and people. And

Lauren Robertson:

I think to your point too, Charles, a test doesn't have to be a really boring, repetitive, multiple choice test. There are other versions of tests these days. We had some great evolution there, you know, and I have talked about all the different ways we can assess different constructs or skills. And I think the ones that are be going to become increasingly appealing are those simulation based tests.

Dr. Charles Handler:

Oh

Lauren Robertson:

Definitely. How you're providing an opportunity if we think about coding simulations for example, or other work sample related tests where you can demonstrate the skill in a scalable fashion for the HR team. And then I think the other point that came to mind as you were talking is just how much this focus on skills. The other benefit is how much it's going to broaden your talent pool. So there's some really cool organizations out there. I know you shared with me the paper ceiling org that I was, yeah, it was really interesting to read what their mission is and what their focus is. And I love what they're doing in terms of drawing attention to folks that have achieved skills in a non-traditional way and how you can also start to leverage that talent pool, which is immense. It's immense if you have the skills focused and you're assessing for skills and allowing for the demonstration of skills earlier in the hiring process.

Dr. Charles Handler:

Exactly, yeah. It's like half the workforce or something. Yeah, and this is really great because my thinking again is just I think in models, simple models, but the transformation we're talking about, it's really all about changing the definition of a job then it's changing. Where do you go find talent? So if you start to say jobs are more skills, well then where do you go find the skills? It takes a concerted effort, you know, got to get break out of the same mold that you've been doing. So I've seen so many really cool programs that various clients over the years have done or things that I've read about where they go into the community and they find the type of skills that they want in unlikely places or they even hire people from different backgrounds that increases so much of the diversity of thought that's going on, diversity of experience.

So I think that's really important. And to the point of it's just not going to happen by itself is as an organization, what are you doing to think about where you go find people differently? And I think even organizations that are prestigious or have a really big brand name and they probably have tons of applicants, doesn't mean they're the right applicants. I mean, that doesn't mean you should just sit back and say, we're just going to take what right comes in. There's this proactivity about it. Hiring is a statistically numbers game, and if you're not putting the numbers of what you're looking for at the top of the funnel, you'll never get 'em back out. So even before you're in the proper hiring process, the stuff that you do around skills and around what we're talking about is critical. And the third leg of my model there is how are you evaluating talent change how you evaluate talent?

And we've already talked about that with assessments quite a bit. So those things all are essential. If you just do one of 'em, that's helpful. But if you really want to transform your organization to saying, you know what, we're going to not only find more talent, that talent's going to have more stuff that can help us, we're going to put together a system that helps us figure out who the right people are there. So I think that stuff is all absolutely fantastic. And we talked a little bit about just getting started. I know that can be overwhelming, but there's a certain amount of just cutting the cord, if you will, that you got to do. And what I've seen is companies doing that in a more piloted fashion. We have a neurodiversity hiring initiative and I think it takes time for the companies to tell those stories internally for stuff to grow.

Christy Smith:

Absolutely.

Dr. Charles Handler:

Is there a particular program or thing that you all have been associated with in the realm we're talking about that you're really proud of, that you've seen somebody take some good steps forward? Again, you don't have to name any names, but interested in your experiences in applying this? Are you still in the back room making the stuff and haven't had a chance to get it out there as much?

Christy Smith:

When I talk to clients about these journeys, they are usually multi-year journeys, and that's not anything that anybody wants to necessarily here because they want to move quickly, which goes back to your point Charles, of why I think they pilot things. So they're doing that to think about all of the mistakes that could be made and account for those and get it right with a smaller critical mass of people. But I would say it because, so Mercer's products in this space, I think we're about two and a half years in at this point in time, and it's still still many clients who are still in the back room putting together the job architecture, the skills taxonomy aligned to that thinking about technology because that is so critical for being able to socialize this internally and change management processes. So I'd say we're maybe just starting to see some clients on the cusp of really taking this out and really making it sing. But most clients are still very, very early stage in the journey.

Lauren Robertson:

And I think that's a good thing too. It makes me a little nervous to just run after it. And there's a lot of new vendors popping up in this space that I'm, that are using skill as their catch term and I'm curious to learn more about them and are they meeting our expectations from a sound development measurement perspective that we think of as organizational psychologists. So I think there's a lot out there if you want to run towards it, but I appreciate the organizations that are taking a step back, still relying on their best practices, making sure that they have kind of that foundation in place. I think where you do see maybe more leaps forward more quickly is what you were just talking about Charles. So specific initiatives that they're running within hr, but those are really focused in my experience on their sourcing strategies.

So they haven't yet pulled those further into the hiring process, but I think that's the right place to start, right? Because I mean we were just talking about the benefit of broadening your sourcing strategies. And so that's where they're looking at new avenues for reaching out to possible candidates. How can they broaden who knows about their certain roles or that they are desired for certain roles. And then I think the skills-based assessment piece honestly will, and whether that's assessment like an online test or an interview or a work sample or something, will really help to bring those diverse candidates through the hiring process in a better fashion than they might have been five, 10 years ago.

Dr. Charles Handler:

For sure. I mean, I feel like it's really a necessity is the mother of invention thing here too. If you're in a company and you're like, we're not able to staff these jobs properly, I would hope that you would say, well, maybe we need to think about doing something differently. Maybe we need to think about adapting a little bit. And I think it's going to become a competitive advantage for companies that are really able to think on their feet and say, you know what? There's got to be a different way because you hear about a talent shortage all the time and the war for talent, air quotes, I remember 15 years ago people were talking about that. So I guess there's always going to be a world

Christy Smith:

Do

Dr. Charles Handler:

People move in and out of jobs. You always want the right person in a job, the wrong person can really hold you back. And there's a million reasons for this stuff. Really what keeps me going in this is that people are all so different trying to predict what people can do and then the environmental influence that you might have and just where you live or anything like that can have an impact. So it's really just about thinking about things differently. And the pandemic sure did help us do that, but there's plenty of talent out there. You just have to look for it. There's lots we can talk about with this stuff. We could talk about it forever. And it really is not just in hiring, but that's how you start people in your company. So that's a very logical place to do it. It's transformational. Technology's going to definitely help us, but so is science. So I would love, as we kind of play it out, any closing thoughts? And then I'd just love for you know, all to provide any kind of plug for how people can stay in touch with you and the great work you're doing.

Christy Smith:

Yeah, well I would just say Mercer is continuing to put out different thought leadership about this. We have a lot of different resources just available on our website. Would love to have a conversation about this. As you said, Charles, this is something we're very passionate about, so can talk about it all day. And it's easy to find me on LinkedIn if anyone would like to have a further conversation about it, that's the easiest place to find me. Cool.

Lauren Robertson:

I personally think this is really exciting. I've heard some organizations start to talk about skills as the quote, great equalizer. I think there's a lot of potential there, excitement, but I think there's a lot that you have to turn around and action on to back that up. We've talked about a lot of that today in terms of what your sourcing is, how you would think about hiring, developing your talent. And I'll make a plug for organizational psychology. It starts with the job analysis and identifying those skills and go back to the nerd roots there. But yeah, I think it's really exciting. I hope organizations continue the conversation. I hope they continue to engage the experts in this space. There's a lot to be done and I know it can be overwhelming, but we can always find a place to start and as Christie said, come find me on LinkedIn and happy to have continue the conversation.

Dr. Charles Handler:

Yeah, you know, it's funny, every guest says Find me on LinkedIn, but that's pretty much given, right? Because I find everybody still, you all are there. And I would also just put a plug in. The talent trends research that you all publish is really good stuff and it, it's many organizations like you that have access to so many companies and so much data, it's great to see them actually take that, put it together, look at it and come out and say, this is real, data is real. And these are some of the real trends that are happening. And obviously off of that, you identify skills are important and you double down and really invest on. Absolutely. That's really good stuff. So thank you all so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thanks.

Lauren Robertson:

Charles. Thanks.