Welcome to CPO Rising’s all-new feature, the Future of Work Influencer series, which will highlight innovative voices in the evolving world of work. This exciting new series will be a go-to spot for progressive thoughts on how technology, transformational thinking, and revolutionary ideas are changing how work gets done.
For the inaugural edition of the Future of Work Influencer series, we are excited to be joined by Chris Milligan, founder and CEO of Adepto:
Christopher J. Dwyer: Chris, thanks for taking the time to speak with us as part of our Future of Work Influencer series. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up in this industry.
Chris Milligan: I’ve been working in the industry for the last nine years, and the idea for Adepto (the HR tech company that I founded and run) actually came about whilst I was consulting in Australia. At the time, I was contracting for a number of different corporates on a variety of human capital-related initiatives and recognized the challenges they had with engaging with their external workforce (like me). Adepto was born out of this need. Of course, Adepto has applications beyond just the external workforce, and we’re now helping with total talent.
In 2015, we launched the first version of Adepto in Brisbane, Australia, where the company started in a tiny office (we all sat around one table). In 2017, after years of focussing our resources on testing and developing the platform, we set up our London, UK office due to international customer demand. Since then, the company has quadrupled in size, and has had to upscale three times into new offices. At the start of this year, we also expanded into the US, setting up our first presence in New York. I’m really excited with the pace that the industry is moving at.
CJD: One of the many things you and I have discussed previously is the concept of total talent management/total workforce management. Why do you feel that this is such an important strategy for organizations in the year ahead?
CM: Total talent management will be vital for all organizations in the year ahead for several reasons. First, the workforce and attitudes towards work have changed, but businesses have not yet adapted. Today’s workers don’t automatically want a permanent 9-to-5 position in a firm for 10+ years. Now, they are more open to flexible roles that fit in with their lifestyles and wider ambitions. This could be in one company or across multiple. Business leaders are recognizing this and understand that these drivers are drastically impacting the way we work. The only way to factor in this new drive for flexibility, and to understand the motivators is to look at all the talent available, internal and external.
Secondly, a number of industries are facing the skills gaps as technology advances quicker than learning. Traditional, centralized talent management processes are struggling to keep up, so the only way to manage is by partially divesting to the business, allowing self-service and self-direction. Total talent management allows organizations to find the best people for a task, regardless of their employment status, and helps everyone develop according to skills, demands and preferences.
Finally, and most importantly, disruption is now normal. Everyone is competing on a global scale. Plus, the uncertainty around political and economic events are putting more and more pressure on businesses. One way to respond is to create a more agile workforce that can quickly respond to market changes by scaling up or down. The first step to this is to get your total talent view in order.
CJD: What’s particularly interesting about the Adepto platform is that it offers so much more than a direct digital staffing portal. You enable hiring managers, HR executives, the CPO, the CEO, etc. with insights into both external and internal talent and resources. Can you expand on how the platform works?
CM: Organisations often face the challenge of trying to manage multiple core systems (such as VMS, ATS, ERP and HCM systems) whilst ensuring that the information they do have on their talent is up-to-date, and not missing information that restricts their view of all the skills and talent available.
Adepto acts as an over-layer across an organisation’s talent ecosystem: pulling all talent data into one place, integrating with existing systems, and providing a front door for external workers. Adepto provides an organization with full visibility over its entire talent pool, both their internal and external workers. In addition, Adepto enables organizations and their managers to better build, find, organize, and mobilize agile teams while cutting the costs of recruitment and workforce management. The end result is that the best people from a pool of employees, contractors, alumni or even hires that are yet to be found can be put onto projects that best suit them and their skillsets.
CJD: Tell us about how Adepto works for independent workers, as well, since this is a critical element of your solution.
CM: For independent workers (those that define themselves as contractors, freelancers or non-perm workers), the platform automates a lot of the work needed to be done around keeping in touch with a company or updating a CV/profile. Adepto works by pulling in relevant information from numerous sources such as a CV or from a project that someone has completed (via Adepto), automatically updating a profile accordingly. The system also notifies a candidate/s as soon as they’ve been matched to a job or project that fits with their skillset. This allows those organizations using Adepto to get an up-to-date view of all the experience and skills available in their total talent pool.
In addition, once someone has set up a profile on Adepto, if they later begin working for another company that also uses Adepto, they don’t need to create a new profile. Once an Adepto profile has been created, it can be part of any organization’s Adepto talent ecosystem. Each organization will only be able to see from an individual’s profile the information that is relevant for them. Although our system is new, we make it easy for enterprises to adopt us by working in their existing processes with our pre-built VMS integrations.
CJD: I’ve often said that the Future of Work is “the convergence of talent and technology.” How do you feel these two attributes intersect to continue to change how work is done across the globe?
CM: Technology is fuelling many of the working changes we are seeing. Without technology, much of the remote working that we see happening around the world would be impossible. Digital nomadism wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is today. It has also broken down many of the barriers to access that organizations have faced before. A company is no longer limited to hiring local talent. You could just as easily work with a developer in Singapore as you could with one in your offices. It has changed the way people see work being done. Someone being present at their desk in HQ no longer means that they’re getting work done; your remote freelancer could be achieving much more from home (with lower fixed costs).
Then there’s the rise of automation taking some tasks from humans and again giving business leaders another option for completing work.
Further changes are afoot: AI is gathering steam and will create entirely new roles that we cannot yet predict (as well as causing shifts and losses in some sectors). I think that in the next 24 months the focus will expand to being about how to best get work done, and talent will need to be re-branded to include non-human resources. Only then can we most effectively get any piece of work done.
CJD: Two-part question: 1) What do you feel the real impact of artificial intelligence is today? And, 2) how do leverage elements of AI in the Adepto platform?
CM: AI today is making many of the enterprise workflows more efficient. While in some cases this may negate the need for a human, it is often repeatable tasks that don’t require much brain power. I don’t believe we’ve seen AI doing the heavy lifting and thinking at scale just yet. That said, I think the considerations will be about how each business decides to structure and separate work. Over time, as I mentioned before, I think that AI could very well be a resource we allocate to a project or task, along with human resources. The difference being its capacity and availability is unlimited.
At Adepto, we’re very focused on providing the customer with a total view of the talent available to them and that means we prioritise building features to allow that. Part of this means bringing together a number of existing systems and new technologies in Adepto to optimise the process. As such, we’re partnering with Best-in-Class AI/ML services to bring them to our customer base rather than building our own. The key example of this is skills of a company’s total talent, being able to match skills to skills, tasks, projects, people, pay and eventually AI/bots.
To learn more about Adepto, please visit www.adepto.com, or contract Chris Milligan directly via Twitter: @ChrisMilliganTT.
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