Why HR Leaders Must Pivot to Skills-Based Talent Management with Shrikant Pattathil, Harbinger Group

The future of workforce efficiency is skills-based, and organizations that fail to make this pivot risk being left behind. Shrikant Pattathil, President and CTO of Harbinger Group, joins Bill Banham to unpack why skill proficiency has become a critical metric for organizational success in today's hyper-personalized, hyper-automated workplace.

Shrikant reveals that companies implementing skills-first approaches are seeing dramatic improvements, including 25% faster hiring processes. But the benefits extend far beyond recruitment, touching everything from internal mobility to workforce planning. The conversation explores the complex question of AI-driven job displacement, with Shrikant estimating that while 70-80% of employees can be upskilled for evolving roles, organizations must prepare for 20-25% of positions to undergo complete transformation.

The episode takes a deep dive into the architecture of effective skills-first platforms, outlining six essential components including AI-driven skills graphs, gap analyzers, and personalization engines. Through real-world case studies, Shrikant demonstrates how these systems have transformed recruitment processes and leadership development programs. He emphasizes that building a skills ontology isn't a one-time project but an ongoing commitment requiring continuous adaptation to organizational needs.

Shrikant Pattathil also provides practical guidance for HR leaders navigating the build-versus-partner decision when implementing skills platforms. He advocates for a strategic approach that balances custom development of core components with partnerships for standard functionalities. The conversation concludes with insights on incorporating contingent workers into skills frameworks and how centralized skills management serves as the ultimate insurance policy against future disruptions.

Ready to transform how your organization approaches talent development and workforce planning? Subscribe to the HRchat Show for more conversations with innovators reshaping the world of work, visit hrgazette.com for additional resources on skills-first transformation and learn more about the services offered by Harbinger Group. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Skills-First Talent Intelligence
• 3:26 Skills as Currency for Workforce Efficiency
• 5:05 ROI of Skills-First Strategies
• 8:29 Building Blocks of Talent Intelligence Platforms
• 14:07 Build vs Partner Technology Decisions
• 16:47 Real-World Skills-First Transformation Examples
• 18:34 Future-Proofing Against Disruption
• 22:18 Closing and Contact Information

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom and visit hrgazettecom.

Bill Banham: 0:26

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, Bill Bannam, and in this episode we're going to discuss why HR tech platforms should consider pivoting to skills-first talent intelligence. Listen as we consider such factors as what are the building blocks of a skills-first talent intelligence platform? What is the greatest source of ROI when companies implement skills-first strategies? What role does AI play in a skills-first talent intelligence platform or learning approach? And joining me on the show today is , president and CTO over at Harbinger Group, a global tech company that builds products and solutions transforming the way people work and learn. Srikanth, welcome to the HR Chat Show. It's a pleasure to have you joining me today.

Shrikant Pattathil: 1:19

Thanks, bill. It's a pleasure to be here talking to you as well, so looking forward to the conversation.

Bill Banham: 1:26

So, beyond my intro just a moment ago, why don't you start by telling our listeners a bit about yourself, your career background, what you get up to at the company, and also something that gets you up in the morning, something that you're inspired by that gets you up in the morning?

Shrikant Pattathil: 1:46

why that gets you up in the morning yeah, thanks, bill, for the for for the introduction and, um, yeah, just to add to that, uh, you know my uh passion over the years has been to work with the companies to turn their you know ideas, uh, innovations, into real products. And, uh, over the years, you know, I have been excited about all the emerging technologies because that opens up a lot of new options into how we build new solutions, how we help customers do better and things much more efficiently, innovatively, and so forth. So, be it emerging tech or be it like a new go-to market or a new feature, those are the kinds of things that really excite me and bring the best out of me, and I've been fortunate over the two decades to collaborate with technical leaders, product leaders in learning and HR organizations and even in healthcare space as well. So, given the focus of today's conversations on skilling and learning, I'm really looking forward to, you know, sharing some of my experience and insights. That seems like everything is under disruption right now.

Speaker 4: 3:02

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show.

Bill Banham: 3:18

I know that one of your key interests is AI, and we can't go an episode of the HR Chat Show without talking about how AI is disrupting things, for example, and I'm sure we'll be getting to that later on. Today. Let's talk about skills. For the time being, though. In your view, are skills a currency that measures workforce efficiency? Is it the best currency to do that? If so, why is that?

Shrikant Pattathil: 3:46

We are positioned in the HR and learning space, so everything we view from the lens of you know how we can transform the way people work and learn, and today we feel that we are entering an era of hyper-personalization and hyper-automation, if you will. So, given that I think, irrespective of what job or role you're performing in the organization, the level of proficiency or the precision that is needed to perform, you know, is kind of getting evaluated very closely, and that's where you know organization are measuring as far as how they can beat competition. Therefore, I feel you know skills and mapping them to the actual work is becoming central, and whether it from an overall talent and workforce perspective, be it things like hiring, learning, internal mobility, workforce planning I think it's probably touching all these aspects and therefore, from our perspective, I think skills is going to be the new currency when it comes to measuring workforce efficiency in the future workforce efficiency in the future.

Bill Banham: 5:05

Okay, very good. Let's break it down a bit, though, by focusing on what a lot of leaders ultimately care about, which is the RRI. Where do you see the greatest source of return on investment when it comes to companies implementing skills-first strategies? So, is that talent acquisition? Is that internal mobility? Will the best returns come from the upskilling? Something else?

Shrikant Pattathil: 5:29

all of the above tell us more it's all of the above, of course, and, like you said, roi is kind of uh, you know, top of the mind for for all the leaders, so so so if you have to start with, I feel you know, for most of the organization, depending on their size, all of these benefits, or some of them, might be good or bad, but talent acquisition probably is going to be, you know, a game changer for everybody.

Shrikant Pattathil: 6:00

So already in the reports, the organizations which are using skill-based workflows or skill-based hiring approaches, platforms and so forth, they are reporting like a 25 percent, you know, better ROI in terms of their at least speed to hire, because they are able to map people and get them on board quickly. The second most important area could be the whole upskilling, because everybody has a talent workforce today and they know for sure that for tomorrow they are not ready in terms of the automation and what's coming up. So definitely there is this whole, you know, and budget, specifically, if you look at upskilling in many organizations they have increased by some number, so probably close to 90%. So I think upskilling is another area as well where the skills first transformation approach is going to have, you know, a good bang for the buck for organization.

Bill Banham: 7:11

So so I would say hand acquisition and upskilling, and then others okay, I was just making some uh, quick notes there as you're giving me that answer. Um, let's focus on upskilling, sort of do a follow-up there in terms of the upskilling piece. So you've got lots of people being upskilled, trying to remain relevant because of AI is increasingly taking over different duties. How feasible is that? What proportion of employees can be upskilled versus the fast-paced takeover of AI of lots of roles? Inevitably, I guess what I'm saying is some roles will be lost, right, because AI is taking over certain things.

Shrikant Pattathil: 7:53

Yeah, there's no, I would say. You know, again, it depends the percentages will depend from organization to organization, but I feel at least 70% to 80% of their workforce can be upskilled and there would be about 20% 25% in terms of organization, but I feel at least 70 to 80% of their workforce can be upskilled and there would be about 20, 25% in terms of because those jobs also don't exist. So you probably there's no point skilling somebody for a job which doesn't exist anymore. So so obviously they will have to do it for the new jobs and for some of them there will be some sort of a reduction or change in strategy, which is inevitable, I think.

Bill Banham: 8:29

Can you spell out for our listeners who are less familiar what are the building blocks of a skills-first talent intelligence platform?

Shrikant Pattathil: 8:37

Now, what we have kind of outlined based on our experience is about five or six different components that are part of a talent intelligence platform. However, if you're already having a talent platform or an HR platform, you may already have some of these things in some shape or form. So it's all about you know how do you connect skills with it. But just to the six most important things that we think are necessary. Which constitutes a skills first talent intelligence platform is, of course, the skills graph, which comes in. Intelligence platform is, of course, the skills graph, which comes in as, like the heart of the skilling platform. It has to be AI-driven there has to be like dynamic ontology, it has to be able to map, and you know, the entire organization's various skills, you know based on role, jobs and so forth. So, and it has to be continuously evolving. So this whole skill graph creation, as well as management and, you know, maintenance of it or, you know, extensions of it, is going to be very critical from a platform perspective. The second most important part is what I would say, the existing role and job management piece, so that also and fairly many organizations have that, but maybe they have to go granular at the skill level and have that built in. The other two important pieces are one is the skill gap analyzer, because, based on the new jobs and the new roles that you're defining, where are the job, where the skills that are that are missing and essentially again here and they add AI based engine, will probably make make a lot of sense.

Shrikant Pattathil: 10:27

Third thing is you know mapping your fourth thing is you're mapping your content that you already have on your sourcing, making sure that those content the definition, the metadata has the skills information, because otherwise you will do all this systems and analysis and stuff like that, but if it's not mapped to training or the tools or the productivity systems that you have in place, you will not be able to do the just-in-time automation that is needed.

Shrikant Pattathil: 10:59

And, of course, the two other pieces that are also very important is the personalization aspect, so that whether you know it's somebody on the job assistance you're doing or recommendations based on, you know what role they are going to change to or what you know department they're going to move to. You will need that personalized approach in terms of training or giving the exact tools to make somebody effective and, of course, bringing all of them together, whether you have a talent, intelligent platform, hr platform, ats you know various things, all of them talking the same kind of language and interacting with each other. So the integration and the ecosystem part is also very important, because otherwise what happens is, you know, if it's if they work in silos, then we will probably not get the benefit.

Shrikant Pattathil: 11:56

So so yeah, these are the five or six components that we think are important towards the end.

Bill Banham: 12:02

There you spoke about personalized tools to make initiatives and programs more effective. Uh, which is a nice lead into my next question, which is I'm guessing you're going to tell me that most of the time, folks can partner with a technology provider these days, because it's 2025 and they're really good at what they do. But when can it still be appropriate to build versus partner?

Shrikant Pattathil: 12:27

Yeah, that's a very interesting question. It goes back to the ROI question as well, right? I mean in terms of you need this platform today, or three months later or six months later, so so what, what, what? What do you do? And I think the the best situation for any talent management organization is to build it, because this is, like we said, so central to the whole uh everything working seamlessly.

Shrikant Pattathil: 12:56

However, you know, not everybody has the time and budget and resources to do that. So, therefore, you know, if you can, what you can do out of the six components that we defined is you can partner with the platform, maybe for two or three platform things. You, you kind of take their uh apis and configure it and whatever is core to you maybe the personalization engine is, or maybe the skill mapping is, or you know. So you build that part. So so the rest of it, you know, you, you kind of uh partner and and eventually, when you can build it, you can build it. But that should be the approach, I think. But if you can really invest, I think this is something that you should invest, because customers will see the difference.

Bill Banham: 13:44

Okay, great. What customers? Can you share a couple of use cases with us now, if that's okay, of skills first, transformations crafted by your global HCM tech? What are a couple of brands that you're particularly proud of helping?

Shrikant Pattathil: 14:07

and most of our customers that we are working with is kind of either building this or they are piloted with first 50, 100 new customers and so forth. So especially this whole AI-based way of doing it. Of course, there was even earlier days, if you know. There was skills, ontology and all of that that was there.

Shrikant Pattathil: 14:24

But the whole AI-based approach is fairly recent. In the last two or three years, we did two One, we worked directly with an end-user organization which had like an APS, which had like LMS and HR platform and so forth, but none of these platforms provided a skill gap analyzer. So, specifically what we did for their recruitment use cases, again to say that, okay, how can you make your hiring process much more efficient? So we took all the resumes, job descriptions, the profile data and past interview data and everything and created a skills ontology that is specific to their uh recruitment sort of uh needs, and then we fed it uh through an uh analyzer, uh to their uh ats engine and other engines, while dynamically mapping skills to whatever profiles will come, and that increased their overall efficiency in terms of, you know, filtering the profiles and hiring the right kind of candidates. So so that's, that was one example.

Shrikant Pattathil: 15:39

The second example that comes to my mind right now is we we did it for for a leadership coaching platform. So so their thing was, you know, in how to make the leadership coaching much more efficient and personalized. So one of the things we did is we built the assessment, or a 360 degree sort of an assessment for the leader and then, based on all the comments that were collected, we did a skill gap analysis and the profile and the interest and so forth, and then provided targeted journeys and learning maps. So then what happened was each individual leader got their tailored curriculum rather than a standard one curriculum rather than a standard one thing that, okay, if I want to become a manager, I don't have to do all this, but it's very specific to my skills and that improved the overall uh, you know engagement plus the you know outcomes as well okay, thank you very much.

Bill Banham: 16:40

Uh, many organizations talk about skills ontologies, uh, but few use them. Well, perhaps, uh, what advice would you have for companies building or adopting a skills taxonomy?

Shrikant Pattathil: 16:54

the advice is to you know, make it a long-term sort of a vision.

Shrikant Pattathil: 16:59

Uh, what happens is, in many cases, you and that's also because you are you're not choosing the right platform to build this on.

Shrikant Pattathil: 17:10

So many of the providers, like today's digital learning providers, large companies like Skillsoft of the world, you know, degree to the world they are giving you tools in which you can build this ontology and maintain it and customize it and, you know, change that whole thing.

Shrikant Pattathil: 17:29

So some of them may be in process, but others are, are already out there. So if you do that and then do it in a very structured way, then you can sustain it, because it's not a one-time thing and in the past, what many people thought was oh, I will just download an industry specific ontology, apply it to my organization and I'm done right, I don't want to make any changes. But you have to adapt it to your own industry, own job roles, own organization, own departments and continuously manage that on an ongoing basis. Then you will see the benefit. So my thing is you know, if you go down this path, then, you know, invest in a good platform that allows you to do that, so that you can do this by focusing on the domain and creating the skill set, not worry about how it is done behind the scenes.

Bill Banham: 18:24

We are already coming towards the end of this particular conversation. Just a few more questions for you before we do wrap up. In what ways can a skills-first approach help future-proof an organization against disruption? We are living in disruptive times, such as economic shifts or tech-driven job displacement. We spoke a little while ago about, hey, how ai is impacting certain jobs and certain roles, um, but maybe you can fill in some more gaps for us yeah, I would say, in a way, in my view, we're trying to create an answer for the question.

Shrikant Pattathil: 19:02

I mean this particular problem statement, right, uh, because today the problem we have is because we don't have a good idea of the skill sets and how the transformation will need to happen, so it kind of makes it very, very hard. So if we build the talent information system which is skills-based and centrally managed around that concept system which is skills based, centrally managed around that concept, chances are that in future disruptions, you will be much better prepared to tackle them, better than your competition, because if you've done this correctly and implemented this correctly, then those disruptions will be easier to tackle and you you'll see them more as opportunities than as problems.

Bill Banham: 19:50

Okay, what I'm hearing is just prepare, get it right, and it won't be so bad. Very good.

Shrikant Pattathil: 19:58

But it's not like it's a complex task. It's not a very simple thing to get done, so it's a process.

Bill Banham: 20:08

One thing that we haven't really covered yet, though, with all these different disruptions and complexities, is, uh, the growing role of the, the gig workforce and contingent work workers. You know, that number seems to be getting bigger, certainly in certain job roles. How can a skills first model fairly and effectively incorporate non-traditional talent? Can we, can we even call them non-traditional talent anymore? I feel, like the gig economy has just been on the rise for so long. But where do they fit into all of this?

Shrikant Pattathil: 20:38

yeah, well, when it comes to gig, and even in in our organizations as well, right, we tend to kind of silo it to specific types of work and specific type of projects and the problem is because our supply chain doesn't understand, you know, how that skill is relevant to the current job and if it's still so granular.

Shrikant Pattathil: 21:02

And in most cases the gig workforce or contingent workforce is managed in a totally different system, so they are disconnected. So one is, we have to bring them in to the ecosystem and the skills-based way of doing and connecting and creating that graph across all the talent that is available, whether it's your talent, gig talent, partner talent. You know, once you have that, you will be making more informed, better decisions and you will look at all types of talent in a in a very, you know, democratic sort of a way and equal provide, be able to provide equal opportunities, which is which is good for you in terms of getting the competitive edge, as well as good for people, because they get to do what they like to do and that takes me to my final question for today, which is the same question that I always ask my guests, and that's how can we connect with you?

Bill Banham: 21:54

so is that linkedin? Do you want to share your email address? Are you all over tiktok and instagram and all those places? Um, and, of course, how can our listeners learn more about harbinger group?

Shrikant Pattathil: 22:05

firstly, about harbinger you can go to wwwharbingergroupcom. That's the best place to find the latest on Harbinger Group. You can also write to us at info at harbingergroupcom. Our team is pretty responsive from that perspective. If you have to reach me individually, you can email is the best option, freekanthabijagroupcom and, of course, linkedin is too. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can just look me up srikantpatatilhabijagroup and you will find me, and that's also another way to connect.

Bill Banham: 22:40

Excellent, and there will, of course, listeners, as always, be links in the show notes. And that just leaves me to say for today Shere Khan, thank you very much for being my guest. I've appreciated your time and enjoyed the conversation.

Shrikant Pattathil: 22:53

Thanks, Bill. Thank you for those insightful questions and, you know, thanks for having me.

Bill Banham: 23:01

And listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 23:05

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom.