Joe Fuller: Human capital management was changing before Covid-19. Automation, the gig economy, demographics, and other forces were remaking the field. The pandemic has fast-forwarded that process. Post-Covid, new digital tools will help employers and job seekers navigate the “great rehiring,” the push for greater diversity, and the need to address the skills gap. Augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and other technologies will increasingly drive hiring and personnel management. How will AI transform HR, combat bias, and help employers tap talent in underrepresented groups? How will Covid-19 and the evolution of remote work affect the uptake of those technologies?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School Professor and Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. My guest today is Irina Novoselsky, the CEO of CareerBuilder, an end-to-end human capital services company. We’ll discuss how employers can improve their talent management and hiring practices amid uncertainty, why skills matter more than experience, and how technology is changing human resource management more generally. Irina, welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Irina Novoselsky: Happy to be here, Joe.

Fuller: Maybe we could start just by talking about what CareerBuilder does.

Novoselsky: We have been around for 25 years. It is one of the largest global job sites that exists, and we are one of the fastest-growing and most diverse. That means companies come to us, and they advertise their job postings with us. And what we do is, we match candidates for them. So the candidates get our services for free. And one of the attractions for our clients is that we have various different channels to attract candidates to help with this matching. And the technology behind the matching is very similar to how you think about Netflix movie matching or match.com. We really look at all of these different skill sets and inputs in order to make sure that we connect employees and potential employees with the right job.

Fuller: So, Irina, you’re both offering a portal for people to look for work and also for employers to post work. You’re a market maker. Are you providing consultative services to either or both sides of that marketplace?

Novoselsky: One of the things that makes CareerBuilder so unique is we’re actually in a dual-sided marketplace. We work with the majority of Fortune 1000 companies, we have thousands and thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, and so we get to see what jobs they’re posting, what industries are growing, what job titles, who’s looking for what in what geographies at what salaries. And then, on the other side of the dual marketplace, we are seeing what candidates are looking for and what they’re clicking on and the types of jobs they’re looking for, geography, and salary, et cetera. And because we have that view of the supply and demand, we’re able to give a lot of insights to clients on, for example, we have lots of clients that come to us and say, “We need x number of this type of job.” And we’re able to very quickly tell them, “There’s not that many people in this area that even do this.” So how do we think outside the box and use some of our technology to do, again, skills-based matching? And then, on the candidate side, we do some really creative things that, when a candidate puts in the role they’re looking for, we’ve really invested so much in our technology that they can now type in the skill set that they have, and we can suggest the roles that match for their skill set. And even more, we can take it to the next level; we actually can help them career map. I’ll give you an example from each side and how one informs the other. One of the biggest problems that we saw on the employer side is, they only had certain number of roles and got so many qualified applicants. What do you do with all of the number-two players that were just close enough? One of the tools that we built was a talent network that basically created a hub to store all of these candidates so we could continuously reengage upon our client’s behest, so next time they had a role that was similar, our recommendation engine was able to say, “Joe, you applied to something really similar. Company A now has an opening. Why don’t we connect you?” And the same thing on the candidate side. One of the things that we saw is that our candidates were basically clicking on a job—or not—based on the job description. It was the number-one most impactful thing that a company could do. And so we really started to take that information and inform both sides of what a job description should look like, what words to use. We started educating both sides of the marketplace of, “Here’s some gender-neutral words, here’s race neutral, demo[graphy] neutral.” And so it’s really been a great feedback loop that our clients and our candidates get to benefit from.

Fuller: Irina, we’ve been talking quite a lot about how Covid is going to affect the future of work. What have you observed in terms of how it has affected work up until this point in time?

Novoselsky: One is, what’s happening from a race perspective. And one of the things that we’re seeing is the Black community is overly impacted by Covid. And we saw that really with peak unemployment, where the Black community was almost three times that of unemployment of the white community. When we’re looking at it from a gender perspective, we’re seeing that women are three times more likely to be impacted by the strains of Covid. And that means reducing hours at work, leaving the workforce in general, impacting their pay, and really having, just from a family perspective, the bigger weight is carried by the woman. What we’re also seeing from a geographic perspective is Covid in some ways is equalizing the footing of competing for talent among large and small companies. Historically, if you think about it, there were definitely several cities that were known as hubs for certain kinds of talent. And now, with Covid and the remote workforce, one of the things that we’re seeing is the evening out of that. And so small and medium-sized companies are now aggressively able to go after this talent without having to be in one of those five to 10 key cities. And then, lastly, one of the things we’re seeing is what employees are looking for from their employer. And one of the number-one things is the ability to work from home. Forty percent of employees are saying that they would not consider a job that didn’t allow them that capability. And the interesting thing of that is that a lot of industries don’t have the ability to offer that. So the war for talent is going to really evolve over the next several years as we move out of Covid.

Fuller: One thing that we’ve talked about with some of our guests, and certainly we’ve observed in our project, is that a number of trends have gotten accelerated by Covid, and there’s been a sharp uptake in the demands for certain types of talent. Does your data at CareerBuilder confirm that?

Novoselsky: One of the major things that we’ve seen accelerated is this mentality and the shift toward a skill-set-based hiring. Historically, we’ve talked about how with most jobs, you are looking for someone that has done that work, that has had that experience. And what that does is, it really creates a very similar demographic and a similar profile of a person to fill that role as you’ve had before. And we’ve talked before Covid of the need to be more flexible and to really move toward skills-based hiring for multiple reasons—one, because you want to mirror and have a more diverse workforce, and two is because there’s not going to be enough people that have the skill set of the future work that’s required, and so we have to start hiring based on skill set instead of experience. I’ll give you one specific example. We saw what really happened between March—and, really, the summer—with flight attendants, because so many of them were laid off, given the pressure that the airline industries were facing. Where would an airline attendant have to go to find work if all they’re able to do is look at their jobs based on their previous experience? An airline attendant has so many transferable skills: customer service, logistics handling, they’re calm under pressure. There’s this litany of skills that they can bring to various jobs. And when you look at the technology, they have over a 95 percent match to a customer-service representative role, even though technically they haven’t had that job or haven’t had that experience. And the customer-service rep role is one of the fastest-growing and most in-demand occupations right now. And we’re seeing just the movement of these flight attendants being able to get paid more money, have more flexibility, and go into this other field that historically they wouldn’t have been considered for.

Fuller: That raises an interesting question about one of your first observations—that there’s been asymmetric impact of Covid on certain communities, communities of color—specifically African Americans—and on women. Are you observing that across job descriptions, or is that a function of the concentration of women, for example, in certain jobs like flight attendants? Is that asymmetry rooted in the distribution of races and gender across job types? Or are you seeing that asymmetric impact even within jobs that are more equally balanced or representative of the population as a whole?

Novoselsky: The answer is both. When you think about bar staff and waitress staff, 90 percent tend to be female. And so, when you look at what is happening with those frontline industries being affected, it’s not a surprise that so many more women are being displaced. However, if you think more broadly, and if you think not just in the Covid-impacted industries, one of the things that we’ve been talking about is, if you look at even the pay inequality that’s been happening, that a Black household makes 61 percent of what a white household has made, and that number hasn’t really changed in the last 30-plus years. So there are things that, given Covid and a lot of the conversations that were happening around race across the country this summer, that really are continuing to bring that to the forefront. And a lot of what’s happening across the country is helping for all of us to have these conversations and do something about it.

Fuller: Let’s turn to what you are forecasting is going to happen as we begin to come out of this. How do you anticipate things are going to play out, and what’s the “new normal” going to look like?

Novoselsky: We call it “the great rehire.” We’re going to see it in different ways, in different industries. Some will have a U shape, some will have a V shape. Some will start and stop. One of the things that we’re seeing from our clients—they are very quickly looking for a specific role, and then all of a sudden their budgets get changed, or there’s a pause, and then they need to stop. And so we do a lot of sourcing and hiring for companies as extra support for their HR team that has been really reduced over the past year. One of the things that we’ve seen pretty consistently, as far as job growth, has been within the tech industry, the insurance industry, the financials industry. Those roles have continued to grow and continued to open. And so their recovery is going to be a little different in the sense of, they didn’t have a dip, but they’re having accelerated growth. So worker demands are going to be different. And then, lastly, we talk about this concept of work from home, and that’s really a luxury. Not a lot of industries have the ability to offer that. Are candidates going to want to stay in a frontline Covid-impacted industry, or do they want to have a more office-type of job?

Fuller: One of the things that I think is a hallmark of the labor market historically is that, for a gigantic market, the information flows in very distorted, convoluted ways. It has often been inaccurate, has often been difficult to access. How do you see both AI generally and other technologies continuing to make this market more efficient and effective and fairer? And what role do you hope that CareerBuilder is going to play in that?

Novoselsky: There’s no way that a human recruiter or process can look through the quantity of resumes and candidates that technology can. And one of the things that our technology is doing is, it essentially learns from these individual recruiters. So one of the things that we work with with our clients is, they literally put in a resume or a profile of the ideal candidate, and then our tech matches with 95 percent accuracy other candidates that have similar backgrounds. It would be very difficult and very time-consuming for a human to be able to do that. The second part of your question is, does that mean that all our jobs are going to be taken over by robots? And the answer is, it depends. There’s definitely this hollowing out of the middle class that was happening before Covid, and Covid is going to keep accelerating that, where the high-wage jobs are going to continue to grow, and the low-wage jobs are going to continue to grow as well. And if you’re stuck in the middle, you really have two options. One is, are you going to get a higher skill set certified in order to move up, or are you going to be left behind and pushed into the lower-skill jobs and lower-wage jobs? And that has only been exacerbated with Covid, and we’re going to continue seeing that. And part of where CareerBuilder feels that there’s an active role we can play is educating the candidate. And that starts from, the candidate can put in, again, their skills or their background, and we can help them, show them, what are the salaries of the jobs they’re looking at? Does it change by location? What if they were to get certain certifications? They would be eligible for a whole different pool of jobs and talent that they could then apply for. And then, lastly, and part of your question is, how does AI really work, and how does that impact what our clients are getting on both—the candidate side as well? And it really depends on a few things. And that’s the whole AI bias conversation. It really depends on, one, the quality of the data that’s going in. And one of the benefits that CareerBuilder has at its disposal is that we’ve been around for 25 years. So it’s a pretty lengthy data set that we’re able to look at across the whole country. And then, two, it really is important to make sure that the people that are building your tools and technology, and that are bringing their inherent biases to it, are diverse. And so, one of the things we spend a lot of time on at CareerBuilder is not only making sure that we’re providing diverse candidates to our clients, but that we internally are diverse and that we mirror the markets we serve so that our people can be bringing a broader and wider lens to what they’re doing.

Fuller: When you talk about that hollowing out of the middle class, it’s something we’ve characterized as the “barbell-ization” of the American workforce, and you can see it in other labor markets as well. How do you see the education-to-employment or education-to-advancement system working in the future? Because certainly in our research across multiple projects, what we’ve seen is, people have—particularly Americans—feel a high sense of agency about getting ready for the future. They want to do it, but they’re very unsure what to look for and, very importantly, where to source it. And they don’t know who’s a good program versus a bad program, a program that regularly places people in jobs, or a job program that employers view as highly credible versus just another credential—and maybe not a preferred credential. Do you see yourselves playing a role in trying to clean up that information morass?

Novoselsky: A desire to go and get upskilled has materially changed over the past year. Now the majority are looking to invest in their training and skill set, which is great to see. There is going to be—and it’s already started—a shift in how we get education. Only 30 percent of Americans have a stereotypical four-year degree, which means the majority are looking for education elsewhere. So one of the things we’re working with with a lot of our clients is removing that education minimum and that barrier so that you can get people that have done the job, because there’s a lot of programmers and software developers that never went to college but have been doing the job for five, 10 years. And you don’t want to take yourself out of that pool of consideration as a client. The other piece that you talked about is, the education system is shifting on where can candidates figure out where can they go get that certification. And companies are stepping up with the training and the certifications, and that really makes it easier for candidates to take out the guesswork of, is this qualified or not? And what we’re doing at CareerBuilder is really similar. When you go to careerbuilder.com and you type in the role that you want, it’ll tell you, do you have the right skill set or not. And if you don’t, we’ll actually link out to free courses and certifications that you can take. And I’ll give you an example. We saw a person in a Gap retail situation who wasn’t really qualified to go and be a salesperson at Apple. And so one of the things that we did is, we offered through our site a quick assessment and free skill quiz that this employee could take that made them basically go through an Apple one-on-one. It was a few quick minutes of tutorials that you have to go through, a few quizzes. And then all of a sudden they were able to get their base certification. And we added that to their resume, and it opens up their pool of what they’re qualified to apply for. So that’s just an example. But it’s happening across industries, and it’s only going to continue.

Fuller: Do you play a role in reskilling? And how do you view that balance between investing in growing and upskilling your own, as opposed to going out and getting job-ready skills today from new hires?

Novoselsky: Many of our successful clients actually hit a lot of their fill targets by looking internally. So that internal mobility piece that you talk about is critical, and it actually uses the same match technology that you would [use if] looking externally. And that internal mobility you talk about is something that we spend a lot of time talking with our clients, because it’s so critical. How do you continue to engage your existing team? How do you make sure that you’re developing your existing team? And by the way, you know they work. They get your culture, there’s already a rapport. How do you make sure that you can extend their career with your client?

Fuller: Well, there’s certainly a lot of truth to the fact that making a decision to invest in somebody’s skills and speculate on their future is more comfortably taken if you’re relying on a personnel file for your insight about a person, rather than a resume or maybe a few interviews. I alluded earlier to the fact that Congress—we obviously have a new administration in the United States—and states are getting more and more interested in the workings of the labor market. What are the major public policy issues that you’re following and that you’re excited about or concerned about?

Novoselsky: We’re looking at all of it. And when administrations change, one of the things that is usually on the docket is labor policies, especially around the minimum wage and the impacts of that and the potential benefits of that. But one of the things that we’re really focused on beyond that is, how do we get Americans back to work? And the number-one way to do that is to help give companies real consistency on the outlook—having a clear timeline of what will happen, how will the country get vaccinated. And so the more stability and consistency that our clients see, the more they’re ready to plan for their workforce and make the right necessary steps.

Fuller: So, Irina, we’ve talked a lot about how people position themselves to get work, how companies should be looking for candidates who are going to be able to take on a job and do it successfully. How is it that you find yourself running CareerBuilder?

Novoselsky: The professional aspect of it is, I originally started in the finance field. And so the early part of my career, I was in investment banking and private equity. And they’re considered historically traditional male-dominated fields. And one of the things, though, that really I got the benefit of getting is just such a strong acumen in financials, which, whether you’re a woman or a man, it’s a skill set that’s a hard skill set that nobody can take from you, and it’s such a critical skill set in all aspects of decision-making. And so that really has informed and influenced a lot of what I’ve done with my life. But seeing how important talent is to an organization really started there. And then, on the personal side, one of the things that really got me excited about CareerBuilder and why I ended up taking this opportunity is, it is just such a unique culture and business. And we are right now in such a unique position to be disrupting how HR is done, specifically recruiting—both influencing the diversity nature of what we’re trying to do and help grab the CareerBuilder diverse candidates and connect them with our clients, but also really this movement toward skill-set focus versus experience. I immigrated here as a refugee with my parents when I was a little kid. And we came here in the ’80s, and I really got to see the difficulty of translating your experience into a skill set. My dad had a PhD in mechanical engineering. In the late ’80s, that was an area where it was going through a big recession, and it was tough to get a job. My mom was a chemist. And how do you translate something that was in a Russian language into English, and really highlight that technically they’ve not had the experience here, but clearly have had the skill set? And I saw that early in my childhood and in just the formative years of how important work is, and what an equalizer across every aspect that you can imagine by empowering people to get a job and get a career. And it really has just left such a strong impact on me, that hearing about the CareerBuilder opportunity was just such a great match to the passion I have and to my background.

Fuller: Well, that’s a great and unexpected story. Thank you for sharing it with us. So as you think about the next five years at CareerBuilder, where do you see the organization going? And how does that match up with the way you foresee the labor market evolving and the needs of the two sides of this market that you work—the needs of applicants, aspiring workers, people seeking to sustain good career paths, and the needs of employers?

Novoselsky: So from a CareerBuilder perspective, we are in pure investing mode. We’ve been actually consistently investing through Covid, both in our brand, in our traffic audience. But over the next three to five years, one of the conversations that we continuously have with successful clients—and I was just talking to a CEO of a Fortune 500 company the other day about this—that this hunt for talent is going to stay as one of the top-three most important things that a leadership team can do. And it’s not just any talent; it’s diverse talent—diverse in age, in race, in gender, in socioeconomic demographic. You want to mirror the markets you serve. One of the things that we’ve spent a lot of time investing in is bringing multiple channels of candidate acquisition to our clients. We’re one of the largest media job companies that exists. And it’s not just our job site—careerbuilder.com is a great source of talent, but we marry that with our referral tools. A lot of our companies that we work with, their referral programs are only driving 5 percent to 10 percent of their candidate flow. And so we have this really innovative gamified technology that turns the traditional referral on its head and really leverages your entire company to bring in diverse referrals into your organization so that the clients that work with us are seeing referrals in the 30 percent and 40 percent [range]. That’s just another channel. Or again, we talked about those silver medalists, that reengagement tool around talent network. The other channel that we help is, especially now, a lot of HR organizations have been either furloughed or cut in half. And all of a sudden, they’re being asked to hire at levels that are now pre-Covid levels. And so we’re seeing many of our clients reach out to us and where we can help them do hiring events or where we can be their auxiliary hiring department and help them source and screen candidates quickly. We’re pushing the industry to say, “You want to work with partners that can bring you multiple channels to get candidates,” because we need to be where the candidates are, and it no longer can be just one channel.

Fuller: Irina, it’s interesting that you can capture data about the attitudes of job applicants demographically. One of the things that we hear pretty regularly is that younger workers have a different ethos about work, they have a different attitude about what they expect from the employer, maybe have a greater focus on their employer’s purpose or the way they make money, things like that. They want to be motivated by intrinsic, as well as extrinsic, rewards. Do you see that in the data, or is that just an urban myth?

Novoselsky: No, we see it in the data. Needs are really different depending on who you’re talking to. And that puts a lot more onus on HR departments and the culture of the company of how do you service all of these varying needs. And you hit it on the nail, Joe, when you said the younger demographic, really the Gen Z is, they’re digital natives. They’re looking for their HR departments to interact with them digitally. And one of the things that they really look at when they are looking to apply for a company is the values and mission of the company. One of the things that we see, Gen Z doesn’t really want to see the corporate-speak on your career site. What they want to hear is from other employees.

Fuller: Irina, one of the topics we’ve been following for many years at the Managing the Future of Work Project is the emergence of gig work and contingent labor, and specifically the growth of contingent labor in higher-skilled workers, harnessing lots of trends that will be very familiar to you, whether it’s the desire to, yes, work from home or work remotely, but also to be able to choose where you live and even how your working calendar plays out, if you’ve got young children, or you’ve got some kind of seasonal interest—the ability to really customize the work experience to meet personal needs, causing more and more talented people to access the over 300 gig marketplaces that are now available to them to find contingent work. How do you see that phenomenon?

Novoselsky: The gig economy has really been impacted by Covid, in that it was growing more before. But one of the things that’s happened—and you mentioned it—the flexibility angle. A lot more industries and full-time employment opportunities are now more flexible. And this world of a standardized 9:00 to 5:00, Monday through Friday in the office, is really not going to be a winning proposition for many clients to be offering to get top talent. And so one of the things that’s happened is that Covid has almost equalized a little bit of that footing in order to compete for that top talent, because we’re seeing that you have to have flexibility. You have to be a little bit more flexible, as we see that there are childcare needs that are impacted. Especially if you have a household where two people work, it’s really difficult managing both careers. Before, that was really in that gig world. If you wanted that flexibility, that was your only option. And now, companies are offering that to full-time employees. So that’s an interesting trend we’re seeing. The second thing that we’re seeing is, clients are definitely helping to supplement their workforce needs where necessary, but are really focused on that core full-time mentality, even if they have to offer more flexibility to get it. And then, lastly, this need for benefits is really important. And one of the things that we’re seeing, both with Millennials and Gen Z, this focus of asking about benefits. And that’s something that, in the gig economy, you’re just not able to compete with as much as full-time work.

Fuller: Irina, when you think about companies that you serve that you think are at the cutting edge—people making maximum use of the technologies and support you offer, but just generally, for lack of a better term, just get it—are there four or five shared attributes they’ve got?

Novoselsky: One of them is, they advertise where there’s diverse talent. And it starts there. It sounds so basic, but if you are working with job sites that don’t have a diverse talent pool, you will not get diverse talent. And so, one of the things we’re seeing—and we’re proud of at CareerBuilder—is just the diversity of our talent. We have over 56 percent of our candidates are female; over 13 percent are [from the] Black community; we have almost the same from the Hispanic community, which if you think about from a work population, we’re almost double in many cases of what is available from a candidate pool. So that’s one. The second thing I would say is, to build their pipeline. Even if they weren’t ready to hire in that moment, they were building and investing and getting that pipeline. And then lastly is, we’ve talked about the skill-set focus, but it is just so critical—technology and being open to looking for people that have the skill set and not the experience and using tools to get there. And that is where they’re turning to us for technology and our multichannel approach. And it’s a unique change, and it’s early on the curve, and we’re excited to be part of that disruption.

Fuller: Well, Irina Novoselsky, CEO of CareerBuilder, thank you so much for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Novoselsky: Excited to be here, and happy to have spoken to you, Joe. Thank you.

Fuller: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.