As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
David Somers, GM, Talent Optimization at Workday (and co-founder of Rallyteam that Workday acquired) presented and demoed to me about their Talent Marketplace. It connects jobs and job seekers—giving you a place where can you mix project and gig employees into your talent strategy, and put the right skills on the right projects.
He kicks it off with their skills ontology - the Skills Cloud which they launched in 2018 has clearly come a long way. I had expected an explosion in skills as more customers added their own definitions but the ontology and machine learning is allowing for crisper definitions, and a focus on more relevant ones as skills rapidly evolve.
The initial use case for the marketplace is internal to Workday customers. To me, the real excitement would be to allow cross-customer sharing of talent. During the pandemic, we are seeing a bifurcated economy where some employers cannot find enough talent to hire alongside significant unemployment.
Even more ambitious would be something I had written about in one of my books. Singapore's Workforce Development Agency had an initiative over a decade ago called "Individual Learning Portfolio". It allowed citizens career planning tools and resources and in turn benefitted employers by providing visibility to talent sources and skills preferences workers were showcasing.
I have no doubt Workday customers will use its Talent Marketplace for innovative, even more challenging scenarios.
David covers a lot a ground in under 20 minutes. Very nicely done.
