Caitlin MacGregor - Advancing DE&I Requires a Talent Data ResetApply to Speak

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Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with a Talent Data Reset

Hello, my name is Caitlyn Mcgregor, CEO and co-founder of Plum. I'm excited to share with you insights on advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how it requires a talent data reset. Based on my experience building businesses and my work at Plum, I'm hoping to share valuable lessons on this essential topic.

Understanding Talent Data

As we navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of talent management, it's clear that traditional methods are no longer sufficient. Current talent decisions often rely on historical, out-of-date data that focuses on where someone has been and what they've done in the past. This data is usually scraped from resumes and job descriptions, turning hard skills and past experience into searchable keywords. But these parameters are embedded with systemic barriers and biases that dictate access to education, internships, and career progression. Therefore, they're not valid objective predictors of future success.

Redefining Talent Evaluation

For a valid, unbiased, and accurate talent evaluation, we need to focus on human potential. Human potential data gives us a snapshot of where someone could thrive if given the right opportunity. This data uses industrial organizational psychology, the science of measuring human potential, which focuses more on transferable soft skills. These soft skills have a four-times higher probability of predicting future job success.

The reality of the job market in 2021 is that "transferable talents" account for two-thirds of an individual's ability to predict future success. These talents include abilities such as communication, problem-solving, innovation, and more. They outperform past experience in terms of predicting performance. As long as these talents are recognized and nurtured, employees can succeed in new and unfamiliar roles.

Employing a Universal Talent Model

To succeed in identifying, developing, and matching potential to changing job needs, it's important to create a universal talent model. This model should consider a range of personality traits, problem-solving abilities, and social intelligence, which can then be transformed into transferable skills such as innovation, decision making, and execution.

Once we understand an individual's transferable talents and the necessary behaviors for a particular job, we can reveal where someone could be successful. This can lead to increased diversity and inclusion in hiring, as well as more efficient internal mobility and succession planning.

Case Study: Implementing Talent Data in the Hiring Process

Implementing talent data can yield significant results. A large Canadian bank, for example, saw increases in hiring from people of color and visible minorities after they replaced resumes with talent data at the beginning of the hiring process. They were able to achieve an increase in hiring from visible minorities to 60%, significantly higher than other banks pledging to reach 40%.

Companies can achieve similarly impressive results by identifying potential across their organization and matching it to future opportunities. As jobs dynamically change, companies need to lift and shift employees, moving them into different roles that align better with the company's future directions. This requires replacing arbitrary and static methods of assessing potential with objective, scalable data.

Conclusion

In conclusion, advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion requires a fundamental shift in the way we evaluate and understand talent. By utilizing an unbiased and universal talent model, companies can better identify, develop, and match the potential within their workforce and applicant pool. As we move forward, understanding and leveraging human potential will be key to creating more diverse, inclusive, and successful workplaces.

Feel free to reach out via email or LinkedIn if you have any questions, and don't forget to complete your own Plum profile to discover your unique talents. Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to hearing from you.


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