During this podcast, our experts will go over the essential soft skills that are crucial for government hiring, including communication, integrity, and safety behavior.
Shane Kordalski00:00
Good day everyone. My name is Shane Kordalski on behalf of Carahsoft technology. I like to welcome you to our SAP and Bryq webinar, cultivating soft skills for effective government hiring and talent efficiency. With that, I like to introduce the SAP and brick presenters, Eleonora Macrina, Rob Sharkey, and our first presenter, Mike Hofer.
Mike Hofer00:23
Thanks, Jane, I appreciate it. Definitely excited to be here today. And, and definitely expand upon our partnership with brick. A little bit about myself, I you know, as SuccessFactors transformation executive, I get to spend a lot of time with our existing customers and prospects and, and really coming alongside them in their journey of HR transformation. And through that, really learning what what it is that they're looking to achieve, aligning their goals and objectives, to not just the value benefit of what they want to do, but also to the financial benefits of what they get, and, you know, just just amazing information that we get from our customer base. So what I want to do now is let me pass it over to Eleonora. And then Rob, and I'll let you both introduce yourself and, in more detail, Eleonora. Thank
Eleonora Macrina 01:24
you, Mike. So hello, everyone. I am Eleonora, I'm an industrial organizational psychologist, and a member of the Iota team at break. I am very excited for today and looking forward to discussing soft skills with Mike and you all, of course. So, soft skills are very near to my heart and breaks actually. So I'm very excited to discuss more,
Rob Sharkey01:49
Rob. And likewise, Thanks, Mike. For the introduction. Rob Sharkey, Senior Vice President of Sales here at brick Macek Eleanor and my counterpart on the IO side, soft skills are very important and near and dear to my heart, as well the hearts of our customers with an increasing demand of interest in soft skills. You know, the world is very much invested in hard skills right now. But we're seeing a lot of people raise their hand and ask about how to validate and assistant for soft skills on both the private and the civilian and government side. So we're very, very excited to have this conversation and look forward to all the insects will get running. So
Mike Hofer02:25
let me just cover the agenda a little bit. So to get today, SuccessFactors, and brick really help customers drive more effective forward looking talent strategies. So by connecting the comprehensive foundation of enterprise and employee data, in SuccessFactors, with bricks, intelligent technology organizations can find and recruit the right talent faster, accelerate employee development and growth and promote internal mobility, and drive that organizational agility that all of our customers are looking for. So today, I'll be covering the collected success of our partnering with brick. And why we see brick as a game changer in the industry. Brick is going to share some strategies from cultivating and fostering skills in the government. They'll review some case studies and highlight the importance of hiring based on soft skills, focusing on success stories, where soft skills made a significant positive impact. And then we'll wrap up today with some Q&A. So on to the next slide. So collective success. What this this is definitely something that that is near and dear to my heart, and I apologize if this provides an age of who I am, but like the Chicago Bulls in the 90s or FC Barcelona in the 2000 10s. Each player brought a unique skill set to the table. So under thoughtful leadership, they work together proficiently, complementing each other's strengths and ultimately achieve achieving legendary success. Now, an example of that, you know, just coincidentally, Michael Jordan signed Air Jordan Thirteen's from the 98 finals NBA Finals, just became the most expensive sneakers ever sold, going for 2.2 million at auction just this year. As we transition to the next slide stronger together, in 1993, Barnes and Nobles and stars, Starbucks agreed that books and coffee go together. That's kind of obvious to me. But they partnered to provide a quality cup of coffee for readers to enjoy widely, while looking through the latest best sellers. They've really changed the world with their partnership. So I know for me I was just in Starbucks, or I'm sorry, target this weekend. And sure enough, I went and got the most, you know, the best holiday cup of coffee out there. And by by doing this they really, you know, you ended up getting a better experience of them working together. So the next slide would connect to that excellence. Let's think about at the Apple HomeKit, or Google Home or Amazon Alexa, it seamlessly connects smart devices. So thank you, your security systems, your garages, your appliances, where each smart device plays a harmonious role, creating a seamless and unified experience for users in their homes, making their homes smarter and more efficient. And then moving on working together with the diverse ecosystem. So now imagine the same level of synergy and collaboration applied to the world of enterprise software. And that's what SuccessFactors customer centric centric partner strategy is all about. Organizations are constantly evolving, we leverage partners like Rick to quickly meet emerging needs, and to address market trends more effectively. Today, it's not just about one company competing against another. It's about your strong how strong your network is. So SAP works with over 20,000 partners across the globe. But it's partners like brick that helped to maximize the value of your investment. They impact each stage of your journey, we engage as one team with them for the beginning to deliver a superior customer experience. Before I move on, though, with the next slide, I want to take a pause. And I would love to run a poll if that's okay. And I want to ask, are you using an assessment for any of your talent processes today? And so if we could run that poll real quick, I would love to see what the feedback is from the audience. Any behavioral assessments, not just in the beginning of your talent experience, but overall in the hire to retire experience? We're asking this question just to just to see get a feel for the audience today to help us more effectively drive the conversation as we go through, kind of give us a balance. All right, so the answer's no. So the answer is So are you using an assessment for any of your talent processes today? No. So I'm actually glad you said that because when you get off this webinar, you're really going to be surprised at the value that a company like break can bring. So moving on to my last slide. When we talk about innovation, collaboration and growth. Our partner strategy is really built upon those three pillars, they deliver an unparalleled value to our customers. In such a fast paced business environment. staying ahead of the curve is essential. Brick brings new ideas, technology and HR NGRX best practices to the table that continuously augment the hire to retire process. Bricks specifically plays a critical role by combining your company's data with bricks, psychometric traits, soft skills and abilities that unlock powerful predictions for the right talent. That is the right fit for all your roles, your culture and your success. So what I want to do now let's transition over to Britt, the head of their IO psychology team. And let's hear from Eleonora about how BRIC is changing the world, Eleanor.
Eleonora Macrina 08:25
Thank you, Mike. So as a psychologist, I like definitions, right? So let's take a step back and start with a question. What are soft skills? While the answer may seem intuitive, you'd be surprised by how much diversity there is in our interpretation. So my definition of what being empathetic means probably different from yours, and yours different from the person next to you. And that could be fun. But we should all admit that this diverse conceptualization may add some bias to the process, which we definitely don't want. So before discussing more about the definition of soft skills, and deep dive into that, we would really like your take on that we have created another poll for you asking what is your definition of soft skills? So saying if we can have this poll great. And spoiler alert, there are no right or wrong answers here. So no pressure whatsoever. I'm going to let you know why they're not.
Mike Hofer09:34
Eleanor I think what was important about what you said was that there is no wrong answer. Of course,
Eleonora Macrina 09:39
there is intention. We are going to elaborate more on that. So we have the results. And what we see here actually, is a differentiation. We have almost equal percentages in all the answers. And that highlights my point. It's not only you that you have different views on Soft Skills definition. Research also has differentiated views. So some authors use the terms soft skills, competencies, interpersonal skills, non technical skills interchangeably, and we can see that in the next slide. So there are conflicting views in terms of that. However, research, systematic reviews suggest several stuff regarding soft skills. First things first, they're undoubtedly multifaceted constructs. They arise from the interplay between individual innate traits, the traits that we all have, and the surrounding contextual factors. So its nature and nurture. They also encompass the ability to self regulate in different situations and interact with others, aka they're linked both to how one deal with themselves and other people. By taking the plethora of this evidence into consideration, we would suggest a specific definition in the next slide. So the definition of soft skills is that there are a set of human qualities that go beyond technical expertise, and are not tied to specific functional demands. These are the skills that pertain to the people factor, and compass in both interpersonal and interpersonal attributes. In essence, soft skills enable individuals to adjust the their behavior, self manage, and interact effectively with other people. And this contributes to the overall performance in the work environment. So defining soft skills is one talents. But there are more things to consider, which we're gonna see in the next slide. So as we said, they're challenging to defined. And not only for you both for researchers and HR practitioners, of course. Secondly, they're hard to measure objectively. And I want to highlight that because it makes all the difference. And we are going to deep dive into that in the following slides. Last but not least, they change and it makes sense due to the changes in the environment, and of course, the unique organizational demands of each organization. And why do these matter? Well, because we are living in a very dynamic business landscape, where things changing and soft skills can be found to be receiving a lot of attention nowadays. In fact, we can see in substance later research that factors such as automation, hybrid work models, changes in people expectations, among other factors, of course, radically change how talent needs to be managed. In light of these evolving demands in talent management, it has become evident that soft skills are of paramount importance. Let's explore why in the next slide. Sorry, research suggests that soft skills are essential factors to consider were trying to find the right people for the right job. A recent study of 2022 suggests that soft skills have a positive impact both on organizational commitment and job performance. And this is not only what research suggests, right, let's explore some facts that we have all witnessed. In the next slide. We have seen an expanding array of job roles, demanding attributes like adaptability, resilience, everyone is looking for this competitive edge, which requires the capacity to innovate, generate trust ideas, being able to resolve challenges. Also qualities such as open mindedness, agility, and the ability to empathize. Take center states, especially with numbers businesses operating globally. Again, I am referencing saps research because specifically for people manage managers, they suggest that cometan sets us communicating and influencing, demonstrating concern about other people, building a positive team culture are qualities that have become more important these few years, and they foresee that they will become even more crucial in the future. All in all, employers who want to have a competitive advantage have started to highly value professionals who possess a combination of strong soft skills along of course, with the technical expertise which is required for their roles, and that's where bricks brick comes in. But before we move on to that, we have another poll for you. We are interested to know if you use soft skills in your job descriptions So let's see any quality that comes to mind which is preferable for a specific position, adaptability being empathetic being a good communicator?
Mike Hofer15:12
Eleanor, I think it's interesting. You know, we spend a lot of time working with our customers and talking about skills and reskilling soft skills in combination with those hard skills are ever so, you know, critical for businesses, especially when you talk about competitive differentiation. So, just just so important.
Eleonora Macrina 15:32
Thank you, Mike. This is this is what we see as well. Yes. So we have a 94%. Yes, you use of skills in in your job description. And this is excellent, actually. Because that means that you identify their importance. I am interested to, to know more about how you do that. But before we move on to that, let's, let's discuss how brick ensures that soft skills are measured and are measured accurately. So as we said before, brick is a talent intelligence platform focusing on soft skills, objective measurement. And that's why why I wanted to highlight objectivity, as even if people can define the right skills required for a job, if they don't necessarily measure them in a valid and reliable way. And if they don't do that, maybe they're of little use. That's why we like to put science behind data. That's what we do. We measure personality cognitive ability, along with vocational preferences by utilizing well established theories, such as the 16 personality factor model, developed by Raymond Cattell. This is one of the most researched and widely used personality assessment tools with excellent psychometric properties. We also utilize the Austrian framework. This is a framework that most practitioners are familiar with, and can be used as an umbrella that provides a broader view of one's personal makeup. And lastly, we factor in vocational preferences. And we do so by utilizing the whole code theory in our assessment. This is important because it's not only about what someone can do, but also what they like to do. And that's how we start with a solid theoretical basis. But we don't stop there. We ensure that the assessment has good psychometric properties, which is why we conduct reliability and validity sex on a quarterly basis, to make sure that the assessment accurately measures what it's supposed to measure, and does that in an appropriate way for the intended use. If anyone is really interested in psychometrics as I am, we can of course, we have a very nerdy technical manual we can provide about that. Okay, all right,
Rob Sharkey18:04
just out of curiosity. Yep. Why are these three methodologies? What is it about these three that's most reliable?
Eleonora Macrina 18:11
Well, they're well documented frameworks with evidence on validity and reliability. In several meta analytic studies, these specific frameworks have revealed that have predictive validity and several other types of validity, and they are reliable. So we are, we are sure that we are measuring what we are supposed to measure. And what we like to measure is a combination of personality and cognitive ability, because these are the best predictors of future job performance, which is ultimately the goal in a hiring and talent management decisions.
Rob Sharkey18:49
Book, it's always fun to see if I can stump you. What what correlation with predicting performance that something like this have versus say, interviews and residents.
Eleonora Macrina 18:59
So according to research, resumes, and interviews are poor predictors of performance. So we have done our literature reviews, and we have seen that tests that combine several phases of assessing one's profile are the best predictors of what they can do in an actual job setting. interviews that are neuroticism is not that much there is there is very low or non correlation to that.
Rob Sharkey19:31
It's interesting since there's so many people here who maybe aren't using assessments in the process, and I used to be one of them, right? So I worked at Verizon Wireless for gosh, nearly 10 years, and I interviewed 1000s of people hired hundreds of them. And with limited training and limited resources and limited understanding what actually made a good employee and a sales leader. I think I'm pretty keen on what makes a good salesperson but when it turns out that I learned about this a decade or so later, Not to date by itself. You figure out that maybe your intuition, maybe your gut instinct, and maybe the collective wisdom of everybody around you isn't so accurate, because aren't there something like 180 cognitive biases, and they're all formed to help keep us safe right over over eons of time, we've learned to associate with people that look and sound like ourselves just to make sure that we can survive back in time, or we were fighting for every, every nut and every Berry. So it's really, really interesting, especially for somebody coming into this business, from decades of maybe not doing it wrong, but doing it in a way that was less efficient and less objective learning about this over the course of the last few years. And so it's very, very interesting, and I hope a lot of people get more out of it, but back to you.
Eleonora Macrina 20:48
And to add to that, all these things may sound overly technical to people right, you are not obliged to care about reliability and validity metrics, I get that but ensuring the precision and reliability of measurements is of paramount importance when it comes to other things like legal defensibility, for example, which we are going to discuss in the next slide. So, we are all living in the age of AI right. So addressing bias, for example, is of utmost concern, making objectivity, a critical aspect in ensuring fairness. So as we discussed, our objective maintains objectivity through robust theoretical foundation and psychometric evaluation. It inherently avoids characteristics that could introduce bias to the process, because it is agnostic to any discriminatory characteristics. And most importantly, it has undergone third party audit for bias for adverse impact, according to New York local law 144. Of course, we have comprehensive documentation available for those seeking further information. I really want to highlight that because being compliant when it comes to bias is important. And also some we should all work with organizations that have taken the necessary steps to ensure that because we need to be fair in the process. Eleanor, of course, Mike, of course, as
Mike Hofer22:25
I as I stated early on, I do spend a lot of time with our customers, and especially in the regulated industry space, we definitely see compliance as a main driver for being a successful agile organization. And, and this having you being one of the only partners in the space that have passed that audit, and really working with the President's AI execute ex Executive Order, is absolutely a differentiator. And I just can't stress that enough.
Rob Sharkey22:57
It's funny, my you know, this legislation came out in November of 2022. And this is how new it is for everybody. This sound new AI decision making isn't it's, it seems, we've only been in it for a few years, and I've worked in AI in previous organizations, but this is all just surfacing. And it's very, very new for people. We spoke to the goat good for the good folks at Deloitte today and, and even they're a bit confused, and their clients are a bit confused. So So trickling down to the government space where your options are limited, it's really important that you comply with all of those laws. But then how do you do that you really trust your third party partners to be the ones they were watching out for these new laws, like Barnes, Executive Order, which we are addressing with holistic AI, that has broad spanning characteristics across a number of different industries, especially from government. And so being the only one of the only SAP partners in the space that's actually gone through this audit, we feel pretty strongly and I can tell you, it wasn't the easiest audit, they actually changed all of the characteristics and requirements of the audit five times over a period of seven months. And that is, again, because this is very new information for people. We happily went through the audit all five times throughout those changes, and launched our public response to that back in May, even though the law actually went into effect on July 5 of 2023, after about seven months of deliberation. So all of this to say there are wonderful people like Eleanor that are working on a daily basis to make sure that our processes and our platform and our instrumentation, meet standards, not just for you, but actually for the most important people which are the candidates that are going through the process, the hopeful candidates that are going through the process that they might get noticed and might be the right fit for the job. That's really who we're here for and who we serve.
Eleonora Macrina 24:51
Thank you, Rob. So yes, we legal defensibility is something very important for us and we strongly believe that if it has to be important for everyone else, moving on, we have discussed soft skill definition we have discussed challenges and the importance of objectivity right. So, let's discuss public sector. Now, how can all these be applied in the public sector and generally talking traditionally, the public sector has been characterized by Employment Security, lifelong careers, a tradition of equal equality of treatment and development opportunities. However, we see that this approach is under present for a number of reasons. There is a trend in many countries to reduce the size of the public sector and increase privatization, we see a shift from permanent to more flexible contracts, there is an increased pressure for accountability and the need to create value and all these in an environment in which goal ambiguity is common. Because goals might be less tangible and more difficult to measure, which in turn, makes the implementation of talent practices more challenging, particularly when there is limited flexibility of course. In the next slide, we can see some soft skills that we have identified that are of major importance in today's public sector. These relate to integrity, accountability, empathy, communication skills, teamwork, resilience. And all these may make perfect sense, however, our analysis so that these may be a simplistic way to look at things as what being a great accountant, for example, in one of the public sectors or organization may be completely different from what a good accountant means in another organization of the public sector, right? Hence, we believe that we should tailor workprint, what predicts success based on the unique needs of each public organization. So let's move on to bricks tailored way of tackling soft skills. And let's put this into practice. Let's suppose that you work in the human resource department in the public sector organization, and you are looking for a great accountant, let's use that example. What's probably interesting to you is first, how to know which soft skills are important for an accountant in your organization. And second, how to measure the soft skills and incorporate this information to hire more great accountants in the future. So to create successful teams of good performers, so how does break tackles this, we first take the break results of your existing accounting team. Then based on your criteria, and by the way, that can be anything from tenure to safety behavior to culture to emotional intelligence, we do a local validation study what we like to call as role validation. In role validation, we can assess not only what a good accountant needs to you, but what differentiates the great accountants from the underperforming ones in your organization in your environment, then, an optimized profile is created instantly. And this can be used as a baseline during the hiring process, empowering targeted hires during the acquisition process, I mean, or during internal mobility incentives. So this is a very brief overview of how we do it. What we have seen so far, are fantastic results with high predictive validity. And I'm sure any member of the brig team will be happy to let you know more about all of our case studies. But today, we can start with Rob, who has some nice examples to share, I think,
Rob Sharkey29:09
so many examples. And so the the the example Eleanor that you give is great, and it displays exactly what we were talking about, right? There's probably an element of, of accounting, that is what how good are you with numbers, but there's also an element of maybe, Can you are you a perfectionist? Do you have a tight tolerance for flex or for disorder? Or do you not tolerate disorder? Do you trust things as they are? Do you are you very, very skeptical? So there's a whole host of personality characteristics that will help you with accountants? But extrapolate this? If you start thinking about the areas that have behaviors that maybe save lives, or are the difference between fast response and a slow response? What scenario Do you have where you'd like to understand the characteristics of top performing behaviors versus maybe on the desirable ones. Now, Eleanor happens to live in Athens, Greece, I live here in the states where you can't turn on a new station without hearing about. And if you think about it really deeply, some kind of soft skills or cultural mismatch. How nice would it be able to be, by the way, we've proven this, if you knew the difference between a firefighter who would last 20 years on the job and can handle the stress and the rigor of a position like that, versus maybe somebody who would be better suited to work in an emergency response center, answering emergency phone calls, this isn't just about predicting who's going to do better, and who can't make the grade. This is about finding a home for people and their unique set of attributes, and how it helps that actually perform the functions of a job. Vocational preference is a real thing. I am an introvert, it takes a lot of energy for me to be here in front of everybody, and actually speak. But I've developed Kokott coping mechanisms over time that helped me actually do that and to understand my own behavioral tendencies, and understand my vocational preference is important. And so understanding that for the people that you're bringing into your organizations is important as well. How do you identify good leaders? How do you succeed people in the organization, understanding what the unique leadership competencies and aptitude for learning drive people forward in your organization is important too. And so if it comes to saving lives, if it comes to driving safely, if it comes to making sure that the ground is leveled, before we lay a building, or lay a street, these are all important things to understand about your individual teams, and from one division, or from one city or county or from one business to another. What makes a good firefighter or EMS response person might actually be different. We think about this all the time. There are pretty substantial differences about how people respond to people in Texas versus New York, or Florida versus Washington state. And so you can imagine that it probably differs for a firefighter from Seattle, the Tampa where I am, we can do that. And we can do that at scale. And with the velocity that government criers, oftentimes, we have a project, where we have an issue that we'd like to repair, or address or an initiative that's important to us. But because of the limitations of technology and psychology, oftentimes, those initiatives fall behind others like budgeting. So having a tool that's universal in nature, and validity are valid by the very nature with which it was developed, helps you answer these questions in a very short amount of time. And so velocity may have been the thing that's been missing, and helping everybody understand how to use soft skills in a more valid way.
Mike Hofer32:49
Okay, well, thank you so much for the presentation today. I think everybody got a lot of value out of not just learning about brick, but really kind of the secret sauce behind it. So thank you, Eleonora. And thank you, Rob. I think what we'll do is we'll start now with some Q&A, if there's anybody in the audience that wants to ask that, and we'll go from there.
Shane Kordalski33:13
It looks like we have our first question. How long does a solution like brick typically take to implement? And when should someone anticipate seeing results?
Rob Sharkey33:24
That's a great question. And I'll go ahead and take that one. So for brick, we actually have a dedicated team of experienced resources here. Our customer success team is made up of HR representatives are former HR representatives, or VP of Customer Success. Lena, she comes from a very long history of successful HR roles within organizations. And we actually dedicate teams who are dedicated teams, bio resources, much like Eleanor and her counterparts. To help teams onboard, you can use brick, almost out of the box, we see most organizations start actually putting us in their hiring process. Within the first couple of weeks of onboarding, there's a few things in the platform that might take a bit longer things like the local validation studies or row validation studies, like Eleanor is talking about, but even those are massively accelerated, just by the way that we built our technology. So instead of waiting 360, even 12 months for a roll validation, you may have those results back from the first month that using brick, so time to results, time to revenue, as we would call it on the sales side. As you guys know, I'm a sales guy. But time to getting those results is very, very fast.
Shane Kordalski34:34
And we have a follow up question to that. What kind of results do some of your customers see?
Rob Sharkey34:42
So there's, there's, there's a few different ways that we look at results, right? There's there's business results, and there's HR metric results. And so if you put brick into the hiring process, some of the things that we see are cutting down hiring times in half, or reducing the amount of interviews that you actually have to do To find the appropriate candidate, because we're identifying people and prioritizing candidates that are closer to the profile, that's predicting performance. And so on the HR side, enhancing the hiring process and filling the funnel with more qualified candidates that are likely to proceed in the process and also likely to accept the offer and show up on day one are things that we can help with immediately. More interesting business type metrics, if I think about some of the work that we've done with a few municipalities and hiring contact center representatives for emergency response, extending length of employment is something really, really important for those frontline roles for those roles that actually deal with the general public and our high stress, firefighters, police, EMS emergency response and contact centers, we're seeing length of employment increases, we're seeing decreases in attrition and increases in retention. We're seeing higher alignment to cultural values across organizations. And we can measure that quite objectively over time, using the objective measurements that we actually have for culture. And so when we think about this in two different ways, we've got ways to improve the HR metrics that we're recording on to many of our county, city and local boards. And we're also improving business metrics that are important, just for making things run much faster.