Placing the Right Employees, With the Right Skills, in the Right Jobs.
From TLNT Transform, TotalPicture Radio interviews Kurt Ballard, a principal and Chief Marketing Officer of ACT Bridge, a strategic human capital consulting organization that delivers evidence-based workforce solutions to help clients make informed talent decisions.
Click here to go to Part 2 of ?the podcast.
About ACT Bridge
ACT Bridge applies tools developed by ACT Inc., combined with their proprietary processes to ?better align people to workplace success.? As a Principal in the company, Kurt?s focus is developing business relationships and the company?s marketing strategy and execution. He has more than twenty years of successful, innovative marketing and sales to clients in technology enabled industries in the US, Australia and the U.K.
The ACT Bridge talent solutions including job profiling, cognitive and soft skills assessments, skills gap analysis, career wellness programs and targeted training, have been implemented by Fortune 500 clients to attain measurable and sustainable business results.
?Powered by ACT?s world-class talent development tools, our ideas for managing the movement of talent within your organization touch a normally subjective process with scientific precision. Backed by ACT?s 50 years of assessment expertise and supported by over 1000 psychometricians, statisticians and I/O psychologists, our process takes the guesswork out of placing the right employees, with the right skills, in the right jobs.?
Kurt Ballard Biography
As part of the founding team of ACT Bridge Inc., Kurt is focused on cultivating business relationships and helping clients reach their strategic workforce goals. Kurt is a talent measurement industry veteran with an extensive background of building cloud-based talent measurement organizations serving F500 and global enterprise clients. Kurt was a founder and Chief Sales & Marketing Officer at talent assessment leader PreVisor, Inc. where he helped the company expand internationally while launching new branding. The company increased market share through organic growth and a series of acquisitions that resulted in a global industry leader now a part of SHL. Kurt?s experience includes consulting and marketing for organizations including GM, Exult and Spherion. He?s an international industry speaker and past contributor to BusinessWeek, Call Center Magazine and The Human Capital Institute.
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Kurt Ballard TotalPicture Radio Interview Transcript
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Hi, this is Peter Clayton reporting from the TLNT Transform Conference here in Austin, Texas. I?m delighted to have on the show today Kurt Ballard who is the principal and CMO of ACT Bridge, a strategic human capital consulting organization that delivers evidence-based workforce solutions to help clients make informed talent decisions.
Kurt, thanks for joining me.
Kurt:?My pleasure, Peter. Thank you.
Peter:?Could you interpret what I just said.
Kurt:?Absolutely. Think of this in terms of workforce analytics. This morning we heard from Billy Beane about using data to drive decisions. We are also using data to drive workforce decisions so that employers and employees can better align themselves to jobs and skills that work.
Peter:?We like that. So unpack that a little bit more for us. How are you able to accomplish this?
Kurt:?We have a little process where we profile jobs and we break it all the way down to what I?ll call the DNA of the job, the specific tasks that are necessary to do the job. We do that through some interviews and some research and job shadowing, and we actually look at the critical tasks that are necessary for success in a job. We start at the job and look at the job first.
Then we start looking at the skill levels that are required to get those tasks done to level satisfactory for performance. We don?t even look at the people yet. We study the job.
The last step, and final step, is making sure we understand the business? objectives. Are they trying to increase productivity, are they trying to make better selection decisions whether on promotion decisions or hiring decisions, are they having some risk and reward issues, have their compensation design plans gotten way out of whack from the job? We look at all that data point first, then we measure the people and we kind of see who?s in the job now, how are they doing, what?s their skill set like, are there gaps, can we use those profiles to make better decisions around hiring people or promoting folks to leadership.
It?s all driven by data and it?s all driven by the tools of ACT.
Peter:?Tell us about your relationship with ACT.
Kurt:?ACT, everyone may know in the US for the College Entrance Exam. It?s a big educational body of work that?s been there, gosh, for decades.
ACT also has a workforce division side. For the last 20 years, they?ve been collecting data ? these job profiles I just described ? over 19,000 of them, over 46% of all the jobs in the US have already been profiled.
Peter:?Well, who knew? ?
Kurt:?That?s exactly right. Who knew? ? What we wanted to do is say how can we take this information to the business community?
ACT Bridge uses the tool that have been developed and validated and really stored away by ACT for decades. Now we?re refreshing that data, taking it out and working with organizations and Fortune 500 firms to help them increase productivity and to make better talent decisions.
Peter:?Are you in partnership with ACT, or is this a licensing arrangement?
Kurt:?No, we?re actually a separate organization. ACT is a non-for-profit. We?re very much for profit.
Peter:?Hopefully.
Kurt:?Hopefully. That?s the goal, at some point it?s okay to make some money if you can. We are distributors of their tools. Our process is proprietary, it?s our own and the platform that we?re delivering it on is also our own.
It?s a good partnership. They?ve given us access to tools. For a startup, like ourselves, it?s been great because the product is already there, it?s been proven. And to know that we?ve got the backing of one of the most respected organizations in the US helps us gain credibility in the market.
Peter:?Do you have exclusive access to this data through ACT?
Kurt:?Yeah, we pretty much do. So anybody that wants to do workplace work inside company to company, has to really talk to ACT Bridge because we?re the ones that bring those tools to the business world.
Peter:?Can you give us an example, Kurt, of how this comes into play within perhaps one of your clients or someone that you?ve tested this with?
Kurt:?It?s interesting. There?s really three areas that we work. It?s recruitment and selection ? that?s the first area.
Performance and productivity is the second area.
The third would be the risk and reward area.
I?ll focus on the middle for just a second and talk a little bit about performance and productivity. This week I?ve been talking to senior HR executives who are actually pretty pleased with their turnover rate, they?re making good decisions on who they?re hiring, their employee engagement scores are right where they want them to be, but they?re asking me ?Kurt, how can I get my workforce to the next level of productivity or performance?? That?s where we can come in. We can actually study the job, review the skills required, analyze the skill sets of the incumbents of folks doing the work now and produce a skills gap analysis with some prescriptive paths to enhance training around the areas where they?re weak.
A good example might be one of our assessments measures something as fun as workplace observation. Now, if workplace observation is a critical task, maybe it?s a welding position, or maybe it?s a position where you?re dealing with information to fulfill a subscription. Workplace observation can be very important, and if you need a level 5 to be successful and thrive in the job and your workforce is at a 3, how do we get that workforce up a level? That?s where we come in.
We measure the skills, we apply training to the skills gaps and all of a sudden now we can move the needle for you. And we don?t even get paid until we move the needle.
What?s unique about us is we don?t take any money from our clients until we decide what we?re going to do for them, what area do you want to move the needle, and then we?ll figure out together what our competition might be if ? and only if ? we?ve improved your performance or productivity.
Peter:?That?s a pretty unique approach.
Kurt:?It says we?re serious about it. We?re going to put our money where our mouth is. And honestly, I don?t want to get paid if we haven?t helped your business improve.
Peter:?I think this is a pretty unique approach is to go and really assess what skills are needed to do a particular job, and I would imagine some of your clients are learning a lot of things about those particular functions that they didn?t even know before.
Kurt:?One of the things that?s so fascinating is jobs are changing at a rapid pace right now. Gosh, with technology and innovation, jobs are changing very, very quickly. And a lot of organizations struggle keeping up with the job. What do I mean by that?
The job descriptions get old, the tasks that are listed on them are no longer relevant; they?re just not necessary to do the job well. Innovation has taken place where the people doing the work today have found a better, smarter way to do it, and a lot of HR organizations have not yet captured these innovative ways of accomplishing the job. Compensation has not been aligned. We?re paying people to do things that, quite frankly, the data says aren?t that important.
Talking to Billy Beane and listening to him today was Sacrifice Bunt; everyone thought it was very important, it didn?t correlate positively with winning games.
We?ve seen in our own research with some Fortune 500 companies that are best places to work that their compensation design is actually paying people to do tasks that are not related to the successful completion of the job.
Very interesting.
Peter:?That?s really fascinating stuff. That would certainly get the attention of most CEOs out there.
Kurt:?Well, it can because a lot of CEOs, they?re visionaries. They and their executive team will come up with strategies, and they want to execute the strategies to propel their company to a new performance level, maybe enter a new market, launch a new product ? whatever it might be. But for a lot of them, they fail to take that necessary step that says do I have the talent on board to accomplish this strategy in which we?re about to embark.
Well, unless you?ve got some real data, some objective data points, how will you know? And because a lot of organizations have forgotten to measure skills, they forgot to measure the task being done, they say that workforce is the most important asset. We do financial analysis every month, we do performance appraisals maybe once a year. There?s not an alignment in the value statement.
So a CEO that wants to go forward with a strategy, has to have data to make this decision. That?s where we come in.
Peter:?You mentioned that skills and jobs are changing rapidly. Companies are changing rapidly too. Just to your point, look at Apple; the iPhone in 2007 completely transformed that organization and now they have skill sets that they didn?t even think about five years ago.
Kurt:?That?s a great example. Another one is this whole social media, new media.
A few years ago, everyone thought of things like Facebook and Twitter and even LinkedIn as novelties and really didn?t pay much attention to them. And now we see that they are powerful tools for commerce. They?re great to connect teams, they?re great to connect people to roles in companies to performance. We see companies actually having new media departments.
Just a few years ago, these skills were not known, they weren?t quantified and they had nobody coming out of school that could do them. Now big organizations are recruiting people to handle their new media area. Companies like Kodak, a very stayed organization you?d think, they?ve been around forever, they are huge in new media. They are huge in Twitter feeds and Facebook and YouTube. A company like Kodak where 80% of their sales comes from products that didn?t exist 2? years ago. Think about that for a minute. That?s staggering.
Peter:?Right.
Posted on Apr 9, 2012 in Blog, Podcast, Portfolio, Strategy, Videos |
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