Companies sit on a goldmine of untapped talent. But many employers don’t know how to access it

Fortune recently gathered a group of CHROs of large organizations for a virtual discussion on “tech-enabled workforce strategies.” The conversation centered on how business leaders can look to technology for innovative and new ways to plug holes in their talent gaps, such as utilizing AI to better assess the skills of prospective employees. But interestingly, most of the leaders on the call focused on using technology to determine the skill set within their existing workforce.

“So many of us realize that we’re sitting on talent gold within our organizations, but we don’t know how to tap into it,” Sarah Tilley, SVP of global talent development and acquisition at enterprise software maker ServiceNow, told the group. “There are a ton of critical skills that are under-tapped in organizations because they lie beneath the surface.”

To be sure, getting a good gauge of a company’s current skill set is easier said than done.

“People [in our organizations] have grown and developed additional skills, either through schooling or through other aspects of their work, and those become latent skills, which are not very obvious to us,” said Suzan Morno-Wade, EVP and CHRO of Xerox Holdings Corp. “So one of the things that we’ve been talking about is, how do we capture the whole individual?”

Unearthing those so-called latent skills takes time and, not surprisingly, technology: “I think it’s matching both what people share with us but also data mining and scraping information—when someone goes off and gets a certification, you know they probably publish that in whatever social media group they choose,” said Morno-Wade.

Lucrecia Borgonovo, chief talent and organizational effectiveness officer at payment giant Mastercard, shared that her team has been experimenting with an “internal opportunity network” called Unlocked. The platform helps match employees to all sorts of openings and projects within the company based on skills they have or want to develop.

“This idea was born out of the pandemic when we basically engaged our employees to help us tackle the biggest problems,” said Borgnovo.

But thinking about internal workforces flexibly—not the traditional model, where employees are more or less confined to their JDs—requires a bit of a cultural shift. It can mean creating more multi-disciplinary teams and empowering employees at different levels to make more decisions, not just exposing them to other parts of the organization but actually paving the way for them to shift into new roles.

“We’re spending a lot of time as leaders asking ourselves how we can break down barriers for every level of the organization,” said Kelly Baker, EVP and CHRO at financial services organization Thrivent. “As we continue on this journey, it’s surfacing the amazing strengths that we have. But it’s also exposing growth opportunities for our organization.”

Assessing those internal strengths and weaknesses was a top priority for all CHROs in the “room,” who agreed that better harnessing internal talent can lead to better outcomes for their organizations and shareholders. Naturally, the topic of return to office also came up later in the conversation—and just as naturally, the opinions on RTO were much more divided.

Michal Lev-Ram
michal.levram@fortune.com

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