Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics analyzes data to reveal Inferred Skills

You're a visionary people leader or HR professional in a trending industry, entrusted with securing top talent to sustain your competitive edge. Do you have the workforce insights you need to make appropriate investments across your team, including swift reskilling/upskilling, aligning with business goals, and responding to the dynamic industry landscape? Can your team run day-to-day operations, recruit talent, set up project teams, and successfully guide career paths? Can they answer the following critical questions with confidence?

• What's the difference between a software engineer and a front-end engineer?
• Is it a good idea to hire a sales engineer as a developer?
• Can a business analyst be promoted to an associate product manager?
• What's the path to success for an up-and-coming marketing manager?
• Does a team have the required skills for the project?

If the answer is “maybe,” you may not be making optimal decisions for your organization's growth. 

Innovation in technology means it's easier than ever to make data-driven decisions across various business functions. However, people leaders and HR managers continue to face challenges in recruiting, deploying, and developing their workforce. These challenges persist for several reasons:

• Skills data remains outdated: Many intranets and HCM systems offer a way for employees to highlight their skills. However, very few employees are proactive and understand the value of sharing their talents and skills or seeking opportunities to utilize them.
• Job titles are getting blurred: With changing industry trends, jobs are evolving fast, and employees with the same titles in the same industry and region might have expanded their skills beyond their initial responsibilities. Titles are changing too - a title may have different meanings in different industries and geographies, and creative titles are often used for the same job. This makes it tough to rely on titles as a clear indication of responsibilities.
• A surplus of applications but a shortage of jobs: The pool of resumes for a job requisition is often much higher than the capacity of the recruiting teams to review them. Additionally, the quality and fit of each resume varies, and finding the right candidate is challenging. As a result, recruiters now need to dedicate additional time to review applications to ensure hiring equity.

Recent technological advancements, especially in unstructured data analysis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, can help overcome these enterprise-wide challenges. 

Introducing Inferred Skills, a new addition to Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics driven by machine learning

Talent is a prime organizational investment, and skills form the core of talent analysis. Fusion HCM Analytics’ Inferred Skills capability delivers dynamic skill management to employees and managers. It utilizes machine learning (ML) to identify, enrich, and augment existing skills from diverse sources, automatically uncovering and highlighting new possibilities not just for individual employees but for teams and organizations as a whole. These are skills that are not found on employees’ talent profiles but they should be a part of the profiles according to the ML model. Employees get new perspectives on career paths, while managers can effectively make informed decisions for recruiting, internal mobility, retention, and addressing skill gaps.

Inferred Skills can offer significant new value

Maximize employee potential with better skills utilization

Inferred Skills enables employees to discover new skills to help grow their careers. Managers are better equipped to assess individual and team readiness for a project, connect skilled individuals with the right opportunities, and quickly leverage internal talent to fulfill urgent needs.

Drive strategic workforce planning with better skills-to-title mapping

Skills can span varying business requirements. Inferred Skills refines skills-to-titles alignment, thereby narrowing the pool of applicants for specific job needs. For instance, granular roles such as Recruiting might share skills with broader functions such as Human Resources. Inferred Skills furnishes a detailed recruiting skillset, serving as a reference to distinguish HR generalists.

Adapt to industry trends with agile upskilling/reskilling

With Inferred Skills, leaders can track and analyze employee skills and address skill gaps at any time. They can gain insights into skill penetration at every level, from the entire organization to specific employees, and can make insight-driven decisions regarding the skills they need to develop or invest in. This, in turn, aids workforce planning, enabling organizations to better recruit, train, and retain the right talent. 

Hearst pilots Inferred Skills

Hearst is one of the country’s largest media and information services companies and operates over 360 businesses globally across the health, transportation, television, newspaper, and magazine industries. Hearst sees the value of Inferred Skills and is excited to pilot this new capability and its potential to enhance HR and business operations.​

Hearst continuously evaluates new technology to improve analytics and operations.  Over the past year, the company has embarked on a mission to profile talent and gather skill-related data, including conducting numerous training sessions. These sessions emphasized the importance of complete talent profiles for improved employee development and internal mobility. While monitoring the data collection through initial reports, it became evident that although operational measures can encourage completion, a significant gap remained due to incomplete skills information.

“Being able to intelligently supplement data we have about employee skills could help us make more strategic decisions in employee development programs, ensure we have the right people for the work that needs to get done, and ultimately help with key HR outcomes like boosting employee engagement and retention.”

Christin Friley, Director of HCM Analytics, Hearst

Inferred Skills emerged as a way to meet Hearst’s needs to supplement the data gathered from employees, with the following potential benefits:

• More comprehensive employee data
• The ability to conduct more robust analytics
• An enhanced ability to support employee development and retention
• Better insights for internal mobility

Hearst will continue piloting Inferred Skills data and hopes to use it to enhance reporting and analytics in pursuit of better supporting employees and business outcomes. 

Conclusion

With Inferred Skills, people leaders and HR professionals across the enterprise can gain insights into employee skills to drive better talent-to-business alignment. Additionally, they can contribute to growth by helping employees recognize their skills, offer related guidance for learning and certifications, and create career advancement opportunities. Finally, they can work to gain a competitive edge by forecasting future skill demand for evolving business objectives and aligning talent through adept staffing of skill-specific teams.

Watch Inferred Skills demo video on YouTube.

Learn more about Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics.

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