The one with Ian Addison Smith from EY

Talent Intelligence Collective Podcast

Welcome to the 16th episode of the Talent Intelligence Collective Podcast!

Or should I say welcome back?

We owe you all a big apology. It's been faaaaar to long since we released one of these. To the point that our last guest - Randy Bailey - messaged us last week asking whether he'd killed the podcast forever.

Thankfully not. It's alive and kicking, and we're pleased to release our latest episode!

In this one, myself, Alison Ettridge and Toby Culshaw co-hosted an episode where we spoke to Ian Addison-Smith of EY. And it's a goodun!

We started off the episode in our typical fashion, with Toby updating us on the happenings within the world of Talent Intelligence. Unsurprisingly, 'quite a lot' has happened.

The first piece of news that Toby was quite excited to talk about was how the scientific 'war for talent' was heating up as the pandemic restrictions continued to ease.

After a brief discussion about the warning issued by US economist, Francisco Mary Daly related to Covid undermining female participation in the workforce. We moved to a rather interesting study about how important it is to be born at the right time of year.

The study claims that young people born at the beginning of the year do significantly better in the labour market than their peers born later in the year.

The final piece of news is about the new piece of tech entering the market, The Korn Ferry Intelligence Cloud. An AI-trained cloud powered by external market intelligence and 4 billion Korn Ferry datapoints on work structures, roles and employees' skills and motivation.

I’m comforted by it, to know that the choice is there. But I completely agree, the word that kept screaming in my head was benchmarking. How much is it based on real tangible recent data?

Ian Addison-Smith

Absolutely, the is not one answer to this. And rightly so, teams are taking the multi vendor approach. No one is the single source of truth, so cross validation is the approach to take at the moment.

Toby Culshaw

At which point I felt like we had heard everyone's opinion about the world and its news, but we were eager to find out more about our guest, Ian. His world, his background. So I virtually passed the mic onto our only resident hard-hitting interviewer extraordinaire today - Alison.

As someone who currently works in Talent Attraction but is building out a Talent Intelligence team, do you see insights applicable? And how would you envision them being used?

I think with Talent Attraction, the way that a lot of teams operate has become really transactional. Which does delivers results. But it creates a blind spots as to how skills are evolving. While talent Intelligence has an ability to broaden the skills discussion and offer a more sophisticate voice, specifically when it comes to diversity.

Ian Addison-Smith

With enough time for one big final question, as we were approaching our 1hour cutoff mark, Alison asked Ian's top tips for creating a Talent Intelligence function.

Don’t rush. Don’t build it on the fly. Take time and assess what is your definition is of Talent Intelligence and what kind of questions are you seeking to answer for your C-suite and other departments.

Ian Addison Smith

As always, we hope you enjoy the episode. A review or a share on social really does go a long way in helping us reach as many ears as possible.

Till the next one – stay intelligent!

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