Building Better Teams: What an HR.com Webinar Reveals About Skills-First Hiring

Skills-first isn’t a slogan, it’s an operating system. In a recent HR.com webinar hosted by HiringBranch CMO Beth Thouin, three perspectives converged: Walmart’s real-world playbook for internal mobility, a technologist’s framework for where AI truly helps (and where it doesn’t), and a linguist’s method for measuring soft skills by analyzing authentic communication. Together, they sketch a practical path to higher-quality skills-first hiring at scale.

5 Top Takeaways for Enterprise TA Leaders

Our presentation was titled Building Better Teams: Unlocking Performance by Assessing Candidates Skills-First and was part of an all-day HR.com event about how to assess, test and screen the future of talent.

If you didn’t get a chance to watch the full webinar yet, don’t walk, run to HR.com now to watch the full episode (and get a practitioner's credit if you’re eligible!). In the meantime, here’s a summary of the discussion:

1 Soft Skills are Performance Skills

Walmart’s frontline model prizes communication, leadership behaviors, and what James Getz calls “care and kindness”—all of which show up in customer experience and engagement metrics.

“As I look at what soft skills are needed, it's not just technical hands-on, how to pick, how to walk quickly, or how to navigate through a Walmart store, you know, but instead we are reinforcing the behaviors around communication…around leadership.

…one thing that I'm really proud of as we think about what Walmart has gone after over the years, is just care and kindness for each other and for our customers.”
— James Getz, Walmart

High-volume hiring is accelerating, and so are expectations. Walmart’s experience shows soft skills are both measurable and stack-ranked to business results.

2 Measure Skills Through Realistic Scenarios

HiringBranch’s data notes that only ~30% of screened applicants typically meet the targeted soft-skill bar for frontline roles, underscoring the value of early, job-realistic assessments. HiringBranch’s assessments elicit how candidates respond, not just what they say; the most predictive signals are often small, observable behaviors (acknowledgement, paraphrasing, fluent communication) only seen through role simulation.

“There are very good ways to account for soft skills through language… the experience must be as authentic as possible.”
— Dr. Assaf Bar Moshe, HiringBranch

3 AI Should Carry the Load, Not the Judgment

Use AI to triage volume and generate job-realistic prompts; keep humans in the loop for final decisions and BS detection. AI can compress the grunt work (screening, prompting, summarizing) while humans make the consequential calls. The result: faster time-to-quality, clearer expectations for candidates, and teams built for real work, instead of death by résumé.

4 Future-fit ≠ IQ Arms Race

In the future of talent, especially frontline talent, IQ will no longer be as important as key skills. The durable edge for the frontline is EQ + LQ + RQ; emotional intelligence, learning quotient, and resilience.

“The impact of artificial intelligence means that we are all going to be learning for the rest of our lives, whether we want to or not.

We are all going to be learning at a pace that we haven't learned before. …We're going to need people who are far more resilient in their work.
— Simon Kriss, Simon Kriss AI

5 Bias Control is a Process, Not a Promise

Bias isn’t unique to AI; human interviewers are making judgments based on the data they have every day. To get as close to unbiased hiring as possible, consider the database you’re using or the one your AI is using. Make sure that no personal data or demographic data whatsoever is being used by your database to train or make decisions on. If your team relies on a third-party AI tool, make sure it has passed an independent AI-bias audit from a reputable firm.

For a full understanding of how to not get burned with AI, download a copy of our latest ebook, Buyer Beware: The Cautious Recruiters' Guide to AI Adoption.

Get More of This Discussion From HR.com

Forward-looking organizations are turning to skills-based hiring models that prioritize traits like communication, adaptability, and critical thinking, because these are the capabilities that drive retention and performance. Watch the full session to hear from our experts how validated soft skill assessments are being used to make faster, smarter talent decisions at scale.

Click here to watch the full webinar on demand.

Note: This Program has been pre-approved for 1 HR Credit award aPHR®, aPHRi™, PHR®, PHRca®, SPHR®, GPHR®, PHRi™ and SPHRi™ recertification through HR Certification Institute® (HRCI®).

Full Transcript 

Beth: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the Building Better Teams and Unlocking Performance by Assessing Candidates' Skills First webinar. I would like to thank HR.com for having us.

I am your facilitator for the day. My name is Beth Thouin. I am the Chief Marketing Officer at HiringBranch. And I'm really excited to have this wonderful panel with us today. We're going to talk about skills.

We're going to talk about what kind of skills you'd be looking for in recruiting, how you can embed skills assessments into recruitment processes, and particularly how to use AI with caution and without bias in your processes and your systems.

And then, how to leverage skills, most importantly, across the life cycle of your talent. So welcome everybody. I hope you enjoy. Although this is a prerecording, we will leave time at the end for questions.

So joining us today for our discussion we have James Getz, Regional People Partner at Walmart. James has 90 different Walmart locations with 19 direct reports underneath him.

He has seen the benefits of skills-based hiring firsthand. And we're going to talk about that. He's a frequent industry speaker and brings with him today nearly two decades of HR experience with one of the world's largest enterprises, Walmart. Thank you for being here, James. 

We'll also be hearing from Simon Kriss. Simon is the Chief AI Officer of Simon Kriss AI. Simon is one of the world's most influential thought leaders on ethical AI adoption, with work spanning business and government across the globe. So Simon joins us today from Australia. Simon recently spoke at the UN in Geneva. He is the author of the AI Empowered Customer Experience and is the host of the AI in 5 podcast. Hi Simon. 

And lastly, we have Assaf. So we will hear from HiringBranch’s own Chief Research and Development Officer, Dr. Assaf Bar Moshe. Assaf's research focuses on linguistics and AI. He's been lecturing about linguistics at Oxford University and the University of Heidelberg over the past decade. At HiringBranch, Assaf builds soft skills AI based on linguistics and acoustics. Welcome Assaf. 

Okay, so let's get started with an icebreaker question for you all. I'm curious how you all are thinking about skills in the general field of hr. And let's start with Simon.

Simon: Yeah, look, soft skills are what make us human. And in the land of AI, that's the big differentiator. You know, a lot of people are talking about can AI really become sentient, really become human? I'm one of the people that believes that at this stage it can't. And so I think the soft skills are going to be super important. 

Beth: Absolutely, absolutely. Assaf, what do you think? 

Assaf: I'm going to leverage Simon's response and say that if we are talking about humans, one of our distinctive capacities is language. So as a linguist, I'm looking at things from the linguistic point of view always. And there are very good ways to basically account for soft skills through language. So this is the way I'm looking at things. 

Beth: Absolutely. And James? 

James: Yeah, Good morning, everyone. So at Walmart, you know, I'll tell you, skills-based hiring has really been focused on how do we remove degree requirements and more importantly, how do we use these soft skills that everyone's talking about so far this morning to really look at internal talent from promoting our bench to then focusing in on skills that help individuals grow their careers.

Beth: Yes, that's perfect. And so thanks everybody for kicking off this discussion. And skills, the perception of what skills are, and how to leverage skills, it varies tremendously. Often, we're thinking of skills as technical skills.

We're bringing to this conversation about people skills or soft skills so to speak. And you know, this kind of brings us to the heart of the discussion. And so James, I'd love for you to share, you shared with us a little bit before today's recording of, you know, your personal experience with skills-based hiring and how this supported your career progression at Walmart.

James: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Beth. And you know, as I think about my journey at Walmart, I've been with the organization for a total of 17 years, and sometimes in the media you may hear about Walmart leaders, you know, starting out as an hourly associate working in our stores. And that's me because I joined the company back in 2007 and actually started out as a part-time cashier, you know, working on the front line, serving and supporting our customers.

And over the years, you know, I've had an opportunity to grow my career, first in stores through operations, then transitioning into the people space, both as an HR generalist and an HR specialist. And as you mentioned in the introduction, you know, in my role now, I support, you know, over 90 locations throughout parts of Southern California and Arizona here in the United States.

And I did all of that with Walmart. Without a degree. You know, I did all of that with Walmart because of the focus on promoting the internal talent bench and you know, because of soft skills, because of the different things that we've been focused on throughout the organization, not just today, here and now.

But Walmart has always been a company that has had strong values, as we think in terms of internal mobility and again, that career growth. 

Beth: That's amazing. And so, you know, could you, could you provide a concrete picture of how Walmart, you know, looks at skills and leverages skills across the talent development?

James: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I'll tell you, as I think about the organization that I serve and support, 80% of my associates here in my region are hourly associates. So that varies from a part-time cashier to an hourly supervisor role. And then I also look after and support the salary leaders.

You know, I'll give you an example of, you know, soft skills kind of in the workplace here in a Walmart store because I think of, you know, our fulfillment associates, these are our frontline associates that are in our facilities looking after the digital growth. And this could include everything from, you know, picking personal shopping to dispensing groceries or general merchandise, with our customers, you know, out in the front of our store.

Now, in this example, I'll tell you, Beth, you know, as I look at what soft skills are needed, it's not just technical hands-on, how to pick, how to walk quickly, or how to navigate through a Walmart store, you know, but instead we are reinforcing the behaviors around communication, around leadership.

And then most importantly, you know, one thing that I'm really proud of as we think about what Walmart has gone after over the years, is just care and kindness for each other and for our customers. And so we are hyper-focused on that frontline leadership development. Even if you're not in a leadership role today, there are so many different opportunities inside of a Walmart store or across the Walmart market to have an opportunity to grow your leadership or grow your skill set.

Not just technically, but something as simple as, you know, coaching for improvement. 

Beth: Yes, care and kindness. That's fantastic. How would you measure that? 

James: Yeah. You know, the great thing about Walmart is that there's a KPI for everything.

Okay. But as I think about, you know, something as simple as care and kindness, you know, we are hyper-focused on our customer experience and our associate engagement. So if we want it to look in terms of, you know, how do you measure care? It could be care for each other, Walmart Associate to associate.

And we could measure that through, you know, a yearly engagement survey or maybe a quarterly pulse survey. But on the customer front, I'll tell you, we get feedback from our customers pretty regularly. You know, somebody once told me that feedback is a gift. Good or bad, we've earned it.

And so, you know, our customers are the ones that will make sure we're focused on the right guiding principles, whether it's in-person feedback or feedback via an electronic survey. 

Beth: Yes, yes, fully with you. Customer first.

That's wonderful. Thanks for sharing that, James, and congratulations on your tenure at Walmart. It's amazing. So let's keep digging into these soft skills. So we think about care, kindness. I heard from you, and I heard leadership skills from you.

Assaf, I'm going to turn to you now and think about the recruiters and all the talent acquisition folks who are listening to this webinar right now. How can they know which soft skills they should be hiring for? Okay, anybody can chime in at any time, please.

Assaf: Yeah, so, I mean, first of all, you'd be surprised to know that at least in our experience, many times they don't know. Yeah. So you ask them, yeah, what are the skills that you're looking for? And they are, many times, I would say, they know the basic ones.

Of course, they know, okay, it's a frontline role…we need basic communication skills. So that goes without saying. But if you ask them to deep dive into what does it mean? Many times they don't really know. Now there are taxonomies around. You know, you can find them even online in different books, etc. But, many times they are too generic and even not tested at all. But when we are looking at frontline jobs, especially the work that we've done, within HiringBranch, so we kind of know very good at this point.

What are the soft skills that are necessary for frontline jobs like customer service or sales? So, for example, we did one analysis based on 5,000 candidates who took our assessment, in both customer service and sales. And at this point we know quite well, through this exercise, what are the soft skills that are necessary to be a good customer service agent; What are the soft skills that are necessary to be a good sales agent.

Actually, in a very specific manner. And what we can do at HiringBranch in this respect is invite customers, companies to try our assessment as a benchmark exercise to basically define which skills that are tested in our assessment correspond well to performance in their, you know, in the kind of roles that they are hiring for.

So this is quite useful, I think. Yeah.

Beth: Yes. Thanks for sharing with us. Does anybody else have any experience there to share on knowing which skills to hire for that lead to performance? There's a lot of gut feeling, isn't there, in interviews?

James: Yeah, Beth, I'll jump in. You know, as I think about recruiting at Walmart specifically for positions that are, you know, in our stores. You know, one example that I know you and I chatted about previously again is that Frontline Fulfillment Associates, and you know, fun fact, to be a part-time hourly fulfillment associate at a Walmart store and work an eight-hour shift, you could vary anywhere from 15,000 to 30,000 steps a day.

So, as I think about you know, being skills first, something as simple as this on the job preview as part of the interview process, bringing the applicants into our facilities, and then having an active interview. You know, one example being if the position generally works, let's say 5 am to 2 pm, bringing the applicant into a Walmart store at 5 am to interview with the digital team, so they understand, you know, what the actual role looks like.

Taking them on a pick walk through a Walmart store, bringing as much of a realistic job preview as we can to the atmosphere, really has helped us, as we've not only focused on quality of hire, but again, going back to that skills-based hiring.

This gives our applicants from day one an opportunity to know what the role is going to be look like should they choose to accept the offer. 

Beth: Yes, yes. It's not only am I able to get up at 5 in the morning for my shift and walk 10 to 15,000 steps a day, and be kind and caring and et cetera, et cetera. But do I want to?

Yeah, in that job preview. Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. And of course, the downstream benefits there are, you know, better retention and job performance. Amazing. 

Simon: And Beth, I think the other thing to think about too is that you know, skill, the skills required to do work are changing, and one of the big questions I keep getting asked around AI adoption by recruiters, by HR teams is what should we be recruiting for in the future?

And that's going to come down to how much you're going to adopt AI and what are you going to do with it. But one of the big shifts that I see is a move away from hiring for IQ, because we're going to have AI systems that are going to help us through.

We don't need super high IQ; what we need is super high EQ, LQ, and RQ. And I'll go through those three. EQ is, of course, the emotional quotient. How good are people at being human?

Do they know the difference between empathy and sympathy? Do they know how to express that? Do they, you know? Or have they just become so robotic in their work that it's kind of a welcome to Walmart, welcome to Walmart. Rather than, you know, hey, I'm really engaging with the customer and what they're going through today, that then kind of leads on to LQ, which is a learning quotient.

So if you're someone who really enjoys their job, doesn't want it to change at all, and is just drifting along towards retirement, get out of the workforce. Because the impact of artificial intelligence means that we are all going to be learning for the rest of our lives, whether we want to or not.

We are all going to be learning at a pace that we haven't learned before. And that leads to the third one, the rq, which I call the resilience quotient. We're going to need people who are far more resilient in their work. If you think about those frontline, entry-level roles, where 7 out of 10 questions are, where do I find the mops and buckets?

Well, they're in aisle 10. Or where are the toilets in Heathrow Airport? The really simple stuff in the world of AI, those types of interactions are taken away. And so what used to be the one or two really meaty interactions that had a high emotive load and a high cognitive load, now 10 out of 10 interactions are going to be like that.

In a retail environment, we're going to have people walking up and saying, where's the so and so? It's supposed to be like this. And when the store person says, Well, I think it's so and so. No, no, I've got ChatGPT here. And it told me, it's going to be much deeper. And so our staff are going to have to be far more resilient in what they do.

So when you start thinking about those soft skills, you also need to be thinking about how we're going to measure the emotional quotient, the learning quotient, and the resilience quotient.

Beth: I'm just letting that sink in. So those four pieces, intelligence, emotional, we've heard those before. This learning quotient and the resilience quotient. That's meaningful. And how do you see the learning quotient being either assessed or coachable for Employees? 

Simon: Yeah, and here's the rub for companies like HiringBranch [laughs], how are we going to assess that learning quotient, and does a person actively want to learn? And you may not discover that, to James's point, until you bring them into the environment, watch them in that first introductory kind of shift, and think, hang on, this person just thinks they know all the answers and they're charging ahead. They're not stopping, listening, learning, and questioning. It is going to cause the role of the recruiter to once again change and morph to meet the new workplace demand.

Beth: Yes. Yes. Assaf, do you have any thoughts on using technology as a measuring stick for those qualities? 

Assaf: Yeah. So I think it has to be as authentic as possible if we want to try to measure how they're going to perform in real time. The simulation or the interview or whatever it is that we are adding to the recruiter funnel has to be as authentic as possible. That's what I would say is probably the most important.

Beth: Okay, thank you. Thank you. Simon, I had a question for you that maybe we've covered. So you let me know. Staying here in the pocket of AI, why does AI now become necessary for evaluating skills when we're looking at high-volume, frontline workers?

Simon: Well, it becomes important for a couple of reasons. Right. The first reason is just from a volume perspective. Trawling through 300 resumes is not a good use of a recruiter's time. It simply isn't. The idea of AI is that it takes away 90% of the heavy lifting to leave the humans free to value add, really be adding that top-line value. I'm seeing a lot of organizations that are completely scrapping the send us a covering letter and a resume because what's the point?

They've probably asked ChatGPT to write it anyway. And so it's not truly representational. And when was the last person, anybody in their covering letter listed three referees that were going to say they were rubbish. Right. They are only going to list people that are good.

So it's kind of getting to that point of okay, if we're not doing that, how do we use AI to try and trigger. And I'd love to see the use of AI in a real-life scenario. So instead of here's our templated situation, what do you do?

Let AI generate scenarios on the fly and work with the person to understand, play the role of an angry customer, and play the role of a compliant customer. Do those types of things so that we can assess in real time how the person's resilience is and how their customer service is.

Things that they're going to find hard to fake when they're doing it that fast. But ultimately, you will need a human because you can't let AI kind of do it end-to-end. We've already seen where a recruitment process was done, AI totally end-to-end. They hired somebody who turned out to be a complete fake person, and within one hour of being given their credentials, they had hacked internal systems and caused the data leak. So you still need that human there because one of the things humans are incredibly good at is BS detection.

You know, the little hairs go off on the back of your neck. There's just something you don't like about this person, something that doesn't resonate. And that's the big difference between humans and AI. And we kind of need to lean into that. So there's a great position for AI in this, and then there is that very final value add, true decision-making capability that still needs to rest with a human.

Beth: Yeah, yeah, that's scary. That is scary. And I know on our side at HiringBranch, it's important for us to not only assess a candidate in a live and real-world scenario, you know, but also to give the leeway to know who might not have 100% of the skill today, but is coachable and trainable to get there. So that we give every candidate a fair opportunity. 

Simon: Also, just the diversity of things. You know, sometimes AI will say, Well, they kept looking up when we ask a question. So they're lying. Well, maybe not. Maybe this person has a twitch where they look up while they're thinking and things like that.

And humans are better at detecting that sort of stuff. AI is great at pattern recognition and doing things that way. So like I said, I think there is a place for both. But AI is definitely changing the recruitment process for the better.

Beth: 100%. Yeah. Nice. Okay, so James, how has Walmart embedded AI at all into the recruitment process? And I know many recruiters are looking to AI to help them be faster and save time. And so, how is Walmart thinking, or actually practically doing that?

James: Yeah, great question. And I won't speak on behalf of all of Walmart, but I'll tell you, you know, here in my region, as I think about the teams that we serve and support. A couple of things that we really have looked at, I think, both from a recruiting standpoint, but then also practical, you know, recruiting-wise.

This idea of AI is actually not new to Walmart. You know, I can recall being in an HR specialist role six, seven years ago, and we were dabbling in AI and machine learning to help make recommendations on quality of hire based on assessments, based on maybe geography or applicants' availability.

And so the idea of AI is not new to Walmart. But I think in my mind, you know, as we apply AI and machine learning both day to day, we do less of recruiting with AI and more of that hands-on, practical. And so, you know, I think in terms of performance evaluations or performance feedback, whether that's a, you know, coaching for improvement session or a quality conversation with a direct report, you know, Simon hit the nail on the head.

There's always going to be a human element needed as we think about being in the people function. And so, you know, my team and I are leveraging AI: one to help sift through the data. You know, I joked about it earlier, but at Walmart, we've got a KPI for everything. On a given day, there could be 10, 20, or 50 different KPIs that we are looking at. So something as simple as leveraging AI to really sift through all of the numbers, all of the KPIs, and narrow the focus. You know, I use it as I'm sitting in the parking lot of a Walmart store.

You know, I could be out and about, going to visit a store in Southern California, and I'm leveraging our internal AI system to say, Hey, I'm walking into a store in Anaheim, California. What should I be looking at? And our internal engine at Walmart will tell us everything from sales to profit growth to things like hourly turnover rates or you know, different factors that may impact, you know, what a good store visit looks like.

And so there are so many different ways that we can apply it. I think this idea of giving time back, you know, in my mind, the plate of an HR BP is always going to be full. There is always going to be a shiny object or something new that we are going after.

And so I've challenged myself and my team to not only leverage AI in the workplace, but also in their personal life. Because I'll tell you, and I'll be very frank, Beth, you know, six months ago, 12 months ago, I was someone who maybe didn't use AI every day. And as the conversation started, to drum up. I found myself forcing to use it at home or forcing myself to use it at work, but not building a bridge and connecting the two to really maximize the value. And here, over the last six months, as I've participated in many conversations like this, you know, I have found that the best way to encourage the usage is to use it every day, whether it's at work, to write an email, or even at home.

Yesterday I was buying a pair of shoes and I used ChatGPT to find me a coupon because who doesn't like a good deal? And so there's just so many ways to apply this foundation in our everyday life. And I think when you find the balance between home and work, it really does work.

Beth: Thank you. That's, that's, that's. We should, we should go back to HiringBranch staff and remind our team to make sure you're using it. That's so cool. So, Walmart is entrenched in AI clearly, and it's not new.

And today I was reading that 87% of companies are using AI in recruiting. And so, Simon, back to you. Since the adoption is now here. What is the biggest security risk or cybersecurity risk to companies when using AI, specifically with recruitment? And I'm thinking, you know, there's internal risks. You know, it's your internal AIs like at Walmart, and then there's your external risk with vendors. 

Simon: Yeah, look, your external risk, anytime you face AI externally, you're going to have a risk around, whether that is trolls trying to coerce the bot to do something using inverse engineering to get, you know, rag poisoning, any of those types of jailbreak activities create a risk.

The bigger risks for me are, like I said, if you use AI to its nth degree and you allow it to make the final hiring decisions and it hires the wrong person, as we've already talked about and seen, that's catastrophic.

But it does increase your surface attack area, so there are more people giving more information. And as humans, we're starting to pull back on wanting to give AI some of our critical information. You're often in a recruiting process, it says I need your name, your address, your Social Security number…your this, your this, your this, your this, your this. And you know, candidates are kind of pulling back, so you need to balance that, that data, gathering and the cybersecurity risks kind of together. The other thing would be to talk to the partner that you're using.

You know, if they're European-based, are they GDPR compliant? Are they HIPAA compliant? You know, have they gone through SOC 2 certification or whatever that might be, whatever level it is that your organization demands of that data. And then finally, of course, you'd want to talk to your partner about known biases in there.

And although that's not a cybersecurity risk, it is still a risk that sits within AI. Most AI, actually all AI is trained on human data by humans. And so bias is just always introduced. It's not necessarily a bad thing, depending on how it's controlled.

But what we see is a lot of people blindly running into AI rather than stopping and asking the questions of what the known biases are and how to compete with them? And that may be that for the first 20 questions in the process, we don't even ask you your name because the name alone may be enough to cause bias in some models, maybe not in others.

Maybe it's a field that's grabbed, but AI is told to ignore that field, things like that. So there are a few things that can go on in there. 

Beth: Yeah. Thank you. And, Assaf, it would be fun to give an example of HiringBranch to let the audience have an example of how a company can review, validate, and report on biases. If you could speak to our process a little bit. 

Assaf: Yeah, sure. So, I agree with Simon that it's very difficult not to let bias creep in. And this is something that everybody needs to be aware of, especially because, as Simon mentioned, the data is processed by humans or reflects some kind of human thought.

Right. So, there are different ways in which you can, you know, try to make sure that it's not happening. It starts with the databases that you're using. Yeah. So we at Hiring Branch, we make sure that no personal data whatsoever, demographic data or anything like that is even inside the databases that we are training with.

Another thing that you can do, and this is something that I think every company or entity that is searching for an AI solution should do, is see whether the service provider has actually successfully passed an AI audit.

So there are companies and entities around the world whose entire expertise is in auditing AI. Yeah. So, making sure that the company does not add biased data, that there is no bias in their results in their AI, etc.

We at HiringBranch did this exercise a few Months ago. We are doing it on a yearly basis. And I think this is really, really, really important because, you know, you can trust the. The what?

The, you know, the, the, the person in front of you is telling you, yeah, we don't have bias. But when it's done by a third party. Yeah. And it's audited properly according to industry standards; this is something else. So I really encourage companies to make sure that their AI providers have this kind of certification, from a formal AI auditing firm or entity.

Simon: And for vendors, Beth, it's probably worth pointing out too, when it comes to bias, this isn't unique to AI. Right. But, you know, people shouldn't now step away from AI because it has bias. Every human on the planet has bias. It's how we deal with an uncertain world.

It's just a heuristic that we kind of use. You know, some people will look at a CV where the person's changed jobs every year and go, oh, gee, they really don't stick with a job for long. But somebody else will look at it and go, Wow, look at the breadth of experience this person's got.

Like, there are multiple ways of looking at these things. And if there is any recruiter on this webinar who thinks they're not biased, well, they have a biased view that they don't have bias. So it's a part of everything that we do all the time.

So it's not something we should shy away from to Assaf’s point. It's something actually that we just need to test for in a, in meaningful way and, you know, know that we're working within the boundaries of being safe and being ethical and responsible.

Assaf: Yeah. And I would say more than that, in a certain way, AI actually solves the bias issue of human beings. Right. So, to a certain point, of course, not everything you need to. As I said, it's good if it's being audited, etc.

But to a certain point, human bias, especially in recruiting processes, is a big factor of unfairness. Right. So AI can actually eliminate that to a certain extent.

Beth: Yeah. Okay, thanks, everyone. Let's come back to skills. I'd like to talk a little bit before our time ends about leadership skills.

And James, I'll defer to you for that one. And then we'll come back and talk about some advice for the audience vis-à-vis skills and recruiting. So, James, you mentioned earlier leadership skills, and I know that promoting from within, and you know, leaning heavily on soft skills for leadership is important to you all. What is the principle behind that, and how do you do it? 

James: Yeah, so I think a couple of things come to mind, Beth. You know, I think something as simple as a job title has shown the evolution at Walmart. You know, an example being in years past, our hourly supervisor role was called a department manager.

And their primary responsibility was to manage freight or merchandise. And in today's operating model, we have team leads. And so not only has the position evolved, but the work that our frontline hourly supervisors have also evolved.

So I think about being the people leader for a team inside a Walmart store. You know, I always challenge my team to put the box cutter down. I don't need leaders that are great at building a feature or an end cap or making merchandising look amazing.

I need leaders who have skills to motivate and inspire, and leaders who are able to make a difference in someone's life, not just once, but every single day. You know, the average Walmart associate, based on their time and tenure, may have one leader or 10 leaders based upon mobility, and you know, how quickly they want to move throughout the organization.

And the challenge that I've always given my teams is, you know, every leader that you work for and work with is going to be a little bit different. Take the good, take the bad, because we're not all perfect, and ultimately use that to build on your own leadership skill sets. But I'll tell you, as I look for leaders in my region, you know, we are hyper-focused on those leaders who are positive.

Are these leaders willing to embrace the change? Because the retail landscape is changing. I mean, I've been with the organization for 17 years, and you know, brick and mortar will always be a huge part of who we are at Walmart. But it's been really fun to watch the evolution of the business in the fulfillment space, you know, to see how we are being nimble or agile and meeting our customers where they are.

And so I need leaders, both hourly supervisors and salaried members of management who are not afraid to change, who have strong communication skills, and folks who are naturally going to become students of the business.

Because if you just stand still. What I've seen in my time in retail, Beth, is that retail is going to keep moving, and if you're standing still, it's going to move around you rather than with you. And that obviously can be problematic. Yes, yes. So leadership skills.

Beth: Yes. And so, Assaf, maybe we can speak a little bit. I have the list here of skills, for frontline folks, that we have found, and these are all correlated to performance. So, employees on the job, top employees have these skills.

Why don't I read them out, and we can speak to them, and maybe we can speak to a little bit about leadership skills as well. So what we look for in an applicant could be months before there's even an opportunity to uplevel an employee. But what are these baseline skills that we are looking for? When we think about service, providing an empathetic human connecting service, the top skills are acknowledgement, paraphrasing, delivering difficult messages, positive language, and fluent communication.

So those all make sense. Right. And so now it's, now it's, how do you do that? How do you build those in systematically and find the diamonds in the rough? We actually know from our Data that only 30% of screened applicants have the soft skills that you're looking for.

So, when we think of the funnel, top of the funnel, this high volume of applications, and then there's screening, and then who actually has the skills, and then who do we pass into an interview, and so forth and so on, can be quite challenging. And so, Assaf, maybe you can speak a little bit to the leadership skills that we look for, we look for in our in our leadership test, our teamwork test.

Assaf: Yeah. So, just maybe a comment about that. So it seems as if we have a recipe for customer service and maybe sales. And these are the soft skills. And I would say, yeah, we probably have a good recipe, but it might not fit 100%.

All the companies. Yeah. So, building upon what James said earlier with the KPIs. Yeah. So what we can do is have candidates take the assessment and correlate the results on the different skills to their company KPIs.

And then sometimes we find very, very interesting things. Right. So what correlates with performance? I don't know, with revenue, increasing the revenue of the company, or absenteeism, or things like that. Sometimes it's simple things like saying thank you.

Yeah. Or, you know, their spoken fluency. Yeah. Things like that, that are very basic and simple, but these contribute to performance. So, the recipe, we do feel that we nailed it, more or less.

Yeah. But there is still, I would say, a place for improvement and for customization, in specific cases, and then going on to leadership skills. So our approach to assess these skills, all the skills, is through communication. Basically, we build scenarios that the candidate needs to respond to in their own voice or by writing or whatever it is. And we basically check or measure what they said and how they said it.

Right. So when James was talking about Walmart and the different positions and now the responsibilities are, I was already thinking about what kind of scenarios we can write to elicit these kinds of skills within communication. So when we are talking about HiringBranch, we were focused in the past few years on frontline jobs like customer service and sales. But we are exploring other fields as well.

So, for example, just right now we've released a new assessment for in-person service within retail shops, and things like that. But also, we've been experimenting with leadership skills and teamwork skills, basically building scenarios that are workplace-related, to see how candidates react to this scenario.

So things like are they able to receive feedback, to give feedback in a positive manner, in a constructive manner, things like that. And we do find our, I would say, initial finding is that this is valid through communication, and we can do something about it.

So we are quite positive that we can build an assessment around this as well, with scenarios that elicit this. I would say advanced human skills, people skills, as well as communication. 

Simon: Thanks, Assaf and Beth, if I can add to that… I love both of those examples. I hear a lot of recruiters now starting to talk about empathetic triggers. That is, do you recognize something that should trigger an empathetic response?

But the second part of that is, was that response appropriate? So you know, for James, if someone comes into the store and says, Oh look, I bought this tricycle, but it only had two wheels, he doesn't necessarily want the staff to (Not that that would happen, James) necessarily gather around this person, give them a group hug, and Kumbaya. You know, that's just not an appropriate response to that situation. But if you're working for the cancer advice line and somebody calls up about their dying parent, that's a very different emotional response.

So not only can you recognize the trigger, but can you have an appropriate response to that trigger? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of that involves active listening and what comes naturally. 

Beth: Thanks, Simon. Thank you, everybody. We only have time now for one more question. So we'll do a roundtable question, which is advice. So, what advice would you all give to the audience today around recruitment, leveraging skills? Let's start with James. 

James: Yeah, I think a couple of things come to mind, Beth. You know, as I look at the landscape, whether you're in hospitality, whether you're in retail, financial institutions, etc, we are all fighting for the same talent at different times and in different ways.

And so, you know, the talent landscape has significantly changed. Coming out of the pandemic and the last five years, you know, at Walmart, I've seen applicants come from organizations that maybe historically would not have thrown their name in the requisition for a position at Walmart.

And so there is phenomenal talent out there. And whether that talent is looking for, you know, a store manager position, an hourly supervisor, or a market HRBP role, you know, the opportunity at Walmart is endless. And so, you know, I really believe that as we think about what the next five years look like, I think the workforce is only going to continue to change.

You know, as we think about generational influence and generational education, there are so many factors going into applicants looking for jobs today. And, you know, while the job market may not be ideal in every pocket of the world, you know, I do believe that we are all looking and fighting for the same talent.

And so, you know, a lot of the things that we touched on today go back to humanity. And I mentioned it in a very early question, but this idea of care and kindness is something that, you know, I'd encourage us all to practice. You know, whether you're a recruiter, a hiring manager, an HRBP, or a manager of people.

You know, at the end of the day, how we show up to serve and support those who serve and support our customers. Our business is so important. You know, we are all human. And I think the times that we get away from that humanity, is where I start to get a little bit worried about organizations, or, you know, where we're going from here.

But at the end of the day, I think if we stand tall and if we practice this idea of caring and kindness, I think we all have the opportunity to continue to move forward as the world does. Because, you know, the world is evolving and we have to evolve with it. 

Beth: Beautiful. Thank you.

Assaf: Yeah, I would maybe like to talk to the recruiters that are not necessarily, you know, high managers or in management positions. They know their pain points Best. Yeah.

And many times we know that they are too shy to voice them to their management and, to you know, demand some solution for these pain points. So I would encourage them to identify these pain points, to search actively for a solution.

Yeah. So you can use LLMs or just Google some solutions. There are so many out there. Yeah. For each and every sub-subfield within recruitment. There are so many solutions. It's very difficult to find a suitable one for you.

But if you do, you know, if you, if you look into that and search into what you are really after and what really can relieve your pain point, you can find a suitable one, or you can even try it.

Yeah. So we at HiringBranch allow customers to try it for a while and see if it's a good solution for them. If yes, good. If not, no hard feelings. Yeah. So it's also fine. So if the pain point comes from the recruitment, to the managers, if you pitch it to your managers, and you'll be confident about it, maybe you'll find a solution to your pain point. So I really encourage them to do that. 

Beth: Thanks. And Simon?

Simon: I'm going to be a little controversial here, and quote Steve Jobs, you need to think differently. And I mean really think differently. The challenge I would throw out to recruiters is that you are going to shape the future of your organization. Depending on who you bring in and how you bring them in determines whether or not your organization is going to grow and thrive in the digital age or whether it's going to languish where it's always been.

So there's an incumbent upon the recruiters to think differently, to think differently about the skills. Stop looking for an MBA that's listed in a resume.

It doesn't mean anything anymore. I can, to Assaf’s point, get a large language model that will tell me more about your subject than if you have a Ph.D. in it. That's not what's important here. It's how are you going to interact with other humans?

How are those skills going to be there? How are you going to assess for this EQ, LQ, RQ? 

Beth: Thank you. Thank you so much, everybody. And with that, I would also like to thank HR.com for this opportunity to speak.

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Image Credits

Feature Image: Unsplash/Branko Stancevic

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