Accenture CEO Julie Sweet on the Most Important Skill Job Seekers Need Today

0:00When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins.

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0:56Hi, I'm Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Business Review, and this is The New World of Work. On the show every week, we explore the future of work and all of its aspects and talk to leaders on the front lines about the challenges they're facing. So we have a great guest this week. I will introduce her in a second. You'll notice we're not in studio. We're at home. If you used to watch our predecessor show, HBR Quarantined, I'm quarantined. I tested for COVID. I'm fine, but I am at home and broadcasting from home and keeping a safe distance from everyone in the office. So anyway, I'll introduce our guest in a second, but first let's hear from our friends at Unisys.

1:35When you think about how the cloud can help your business, are you thinking big enough? We can help you drive more value from the cloud. We're Unisys, and we do cloud really well.

1:53All right, so my guest today is Julie Sweet, the CEO of Accenture. She's been in that job for three years, and last year additionally took on the role of chair. She brought a legal background to the job, having served as Accenture's general counsel, and before that as a partner at the law firm Cravath, Swain & Moore. Accenture has hundreds of thousands of employees and a lot of interesting approaches to talent development. So we're going to talk about that and other things today. So Julie, welcome to the new world of work. Great. Thanks for having me, Adi. I'm excited to be here. Great. So let's jump right in.

2:27You have something like 700 ,000 employees at Accenture. So I'd love to hear about how you're thinking about winning the war for talent. And let's start with hiring. What does it take to win the hiring wars these days? Well, that's a great question. And I think hiring is the right place to start. When we think about talent, we actually think about how do you access talent? So how do you hire it? How do you become a creator of talent so that you don't always have to hire it? And then once they're here, how do you unlock the potential of talent? And when you think about hiring, we've actually added to our workforce in the tightest labor history of market in history, at least our history, 200 ,000 people in the last 18 months.

3:17And we've done so over that time. We've had 4.6 million resumes. And so we use what's called a high tech enabled, high touch recruiting model. So we use technology to help us match the resumes with our needs. And our needs are really broad. For example, we have nurses and MDs, as well as deep security professionals, as well as cloud professionals and people who do supply chain. So it's really, really broad talent that we seek. And so we do so starting with this high tech enabled, high touch recruiting model, which is kind of the how we do it. And of course, the reason people come is all about what we offer our future employees.

4:19So I have a lot of follow-ups there, and there's a lot to unpack there. Let me just say to the audience watching this, I'm interviewing Accenture CEO Julie Sweet. If you have questions for her, type them in, and we'll try to get to some viewer questions later. So there are a few places we could go. And I guess one is the question about skills. And as you said, you have different types of jobs that require different types of skills. But I have a feeling that... When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more.

4:57Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. Both in what you're looking for or the algorithms you've created, there's some general skills or general attributes that people need these days.

5:38Can you talk about what you think those might be? you know well let's just start with uh one of the most important things that we look for actually no matter you know who you are is your ability to learn learning agility uh because we know that while we may hire you for a certain set of skills the rate of change in the need for skills is quite rapid so there's you know lots of research on this that skills that were around in the Fortune 500, for example, in 2017, that approximately 40 % are no longer relevant. And so as we think about our own business, we start with learning agility, and we ask a very simple question to all of our applicants, senior and junior.

6:27Those who are coming from school, we ask it slightly differently because they're in school. So what we'll say is, what have you learned in the last six months that was not part of school, is what we add for those who are recruiting on campus. And what we're looking for are individuals who naturally learn things. Now, the answer could be, I learned to cook. The answer could be, I learned how to change a tire. The point is, can the applicant respond to that question? It's a really simple but very effective way of understanding whether you're hiring someone who likes to learn. And actually, one of our leadership essentials for all of our leaders is to lead with excellence, confidence, and humility.

7:18And the humility we find as a leadership quality is what allows people to be natural learners and to build great teams. And so they're really connected when we think about, you know, the kinds of people and kinds of skills. Then you take a step back and we do think that digital literacy is absolutely critical. And so actually all of our 700 ,000 people, regardless of where you sit, if you're working in our mail room, we still get mail or you're on the front lines with our clients. you have to go through something we call TQ. So it's your technology quotient, where you take and have to pass assessments in 10 areas, because we really believe that basic technology skills are critical in every aspect.

8:14And that sort of links to the secondary of talent that we focus on, which is being a creator of talent.

8:23um now so so reskilling in part i guess would mean making sure that people reach that that general threshold of whatever it is digital literacy um but at times you're doing you know pretty profound reskilling and i'd love to hear you know again because you have such a large workforce what does what does reskilling look like at at accenture uh well let's take let's go back to the pandemic in March of 2020. And when the pandemic hit, there was a big shift online, as we all know. And all of a sudden, we had incredible demand, for example, for our clients to help them use digital collaboration tools, which had to be implemented and then training of people.

9:12And there was far more demand than there was literally the day before the pandemic was declared. Similarly, there was a big acceleration of the move to the cloud, of needing cloud skills. And so what reskilling for Accenture looks like is we actually have a database. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast.

9:53That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. Of all our client-facing people, we know what their skills are. We're able to use AI algorithms to identify who could be re-skilled, what family of skills are close to what we have more demand on, and then we can actually do the re-skilling.

10:34So in the first six months after the pandemic, we upskilled about 100 ,000 people with programs that ranged from sort of 8 to 15 weeks, depending on what we were upskilling them for. And we were able to do so very rapidly, which enabled us to emerge from the pandemic much faster because we could shift our people towards the new places of demand. And of course, it's part of what makes our Accenture such an attractive place to work because people feel like they're constantly being invested in. In fact, we spend about a billion dollars a year, an average of 40 hours per person of training, which is a really strong reason why we are able to recruit quarter in and quarter out.

11:22It's amazing talent. So that's pretty interesting. So normally you're the deputy head of something and you're obviously a candidate to be the head of something. But, you know, when you're talking about using AI to figure out the future possibilities, you know, they may not be so obvious or may not have been so obvious in the past. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, you know, are there specific examples of where skills in one area actually translate into preparation for something else that we might not have thought about without AI showing the way? Well, the easy examples are really examples that are around technical skills.

12:04So certain kinds of programming enable you to, you know, move more easily into other kinds of programming, certain platforms. So for example, if you're, you know, working on one kind of a cloud-based platform, moving to another cloud-based platform are easier, but there's also less obvious things. So for example, in security, You know, the skills around security are very akin to what our professionals might be doing in risk and compliance because there's some deep analytical skills. And so those are the kinds of things where you might not have first looked at people doing risk or compliance for our clients to say, oh, yeah, they could easily become a security professional.

12:51Because, of course, security was another area that was triggered high demand when the pandemic hit. And yet the algorithm will identify those who have those sort of deep analytical skills that are very useful in the security area. So those are the kinds of examples. And at the same time, it's not always the algorithms that do it, but also we actually can create skills. So, for example, every part of every business right now is being transformed by technology. But if you think about most of our clients, they don't like someone maybe doing supply chain doesn't have necessary technology skills. They have the supply chain skills.

13:31But to really be able to transform it, you need more of those technology skills. Now, we provide that for our clients. And so one of the things we have to do is to have both deep domain knowledge as well as technology skills. So we've in India, for example, this past year, we recruited about, you know, building the past six months, say 500 leaders with deep domain knowledge, like in supply chain with no technology knowledge. And then we put them through a boot camp of eight to 12 weeks, depending on the domain, so that they can be working with our clients with the right domain knowledge, but also the technology skills.

14:11And so this is the kinds of things that we're doing with our clients.

14:41Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. One like Chevron, a leader in the energy fields, they know that technology is and digital is really transforming and will need to transform every part of their enterprise. And they partnered with us to create a school for them tailored to their different departments to teach already 20 ,000 people the digital skills they need to take their deep domain knowledge of working at Chevron and these departments, couple it with the right technology knowledge so that they can lead the reinvention of their particular part of the company.

15:38And so it's really important to be sort of understanding, you know, what are the outcome that you need and what are the skills and can you educate and skill to get to those outcomes? And that's why when I talked about what companies need to do around talent, this idea of both accessing talent, but becoming a talent creator is also very, very important. So I'm going to go to an audience question right now because it's pertinent. And this is from Marilyn in Virginia. Her question is, do you have, his or her question, do you have specific areas where you are experiencing skill shortages? And what are they?

16:21Are they functional? Are they industry-based? And if so, how are you addressing those? Well, yeah, it's a great question that I I think everyone is asking. And what I would say is that we have a lot of what we call hot skills, so in-demand skills, and those range from deep technology skills all the way to the industry and domain skills. I would say that we don't have a gap in the sense of our ability to hire. And part of that is that we do use technology to anticipate based on our demand, even early stages, our knowledge of our skills, our knowledge of who we could reskill or not reskill to anticipate.

17:13And so while I'm sure any of my leaders would say I'm always in demand of skills, when you really look at, you know, are we able to hire for everything we are need, we can. But behind that is a pretty sophisticated way of anticipating the needs for skills. And of course, the technology to do that is really important. It's certainly important for Accenture, but it's also critical for our clients. It's driving a lot of our demand because it's hard to be able to predict and therefore make informed decisions about hiring or creating your own talent. unless you have a single source of truth around your employees.

17:57And so part of what's driving the need for new cloud-based solutions, which is a big part of our demand on the HR side, is this need to be much more sophisticated around your talent strategy, which does start with technology. And then if you want, we can later get into really the twin T's of trust and technology because they do go hand in hand as you think about the changes you need to make in your organization to use technology effectively. So, again, if you have questions for Julie Sweet, please type them into the chat and we'll try to get to them soon. Thank you for those who put in the chat that they're wishing me a speedy recovery.

18:38I appreciate that. I want to follow up on some of this. When you're talking about hiring and pipelines and skills, we're all trying to diversify our workforces. A lot of us are coming to grips with the fact that we have not successfully diversified our workforces to the extent that we would. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

19:18Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Propel Fitness Water. With Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. I like to. And I guess there's a risk that the, you know, the algorithm will exacerbate the problem rather than fix the problem. So I'd love to hear how you, you know, you must be thinking about this a lot and how you're trying to solve for diversity again as you hire and maintain a workforce of 700 ,000 people.

20:06Well, great. I think maybe to start with, before I turn to diversity, your point around the algorithms can be a problem is I would point the audience to a great body of work that I actually helped lead at the U.S. Business Roundtable on Responsible AI. and that is available on their website and talks about, and this came from cross-industry CEOs saying that it's really important that as companies, we have a roadmap to making sure that AI, which is so important from a competitiveness perspective, does get deployed responsibly. And in fact, to that end, when we were starting to deploy AI in some of the ways I've described to you, we first did a complete view and review of the different technologies that we had, how we were going to use AI, so that we made sure that it was clear, it was transparent, there were guardrails, there was testing, because you really can't re-engineer for responsible AI, you have to do it from the beginning.

21:21And so I just encourage everyone to make sure they do have the right governance and that when they start to use these things that they are building in this idea of responsible AI, you know, from the beginning and not having a problem and then trying to do it going backwards. And that's also important, not just for making sure that algorithms, you know, work well when you do things like match resumes with jobs, but for other uses as well. Now, with respect to diversity, it's a huge focus of ours. We have committed to being, by 2025, reaching gender parity. We have very specific goals around racial and ethnic diversity in the countries we're allowed to set them.

22:11We have a broad view of diversity that includes persons with disabilities, veterans, LGBTQI. And so all of those goals are treated like business priorities. So just like business priorities, they start with data and they start with making sure that we use the data to inform not just goal setting, but tracking progress. And I think that's a really important part of what you need to do to be committed. And so we look at that very carefully to make sure we have very diverse pools, for example, when we're doing hiring, because you can't get to your numbers if you haven't brought enough hiring pools.

22:58Talk more about that. I mean, so, you know, I know that you have explored, you know, dropping certain requirements, degrees, you know, things like that, that once would have been, you know, just what you did. And now, you know, thinking more broadly, you know, I think you have an apprenticeship program in this area, too. I'd love to hear more specifics about, you know, how you're trying to tackle this. Well, starting in North America, although we've now done this globally with respect to skills, is we re-looked at our job requirements. And so, for example, in North America, about 48, nearly 50 % of our job openings do not require four-year degrees.

23:39And they used to all require four-year degrees. And so that immediately opens you up to a broader pool of people that you can hire from. And in fact, about 20 % of the people we actually hire for those openings do not have four-year degrees. So we've expanded the pool of people who we can go after to fill these jobs. At the same time, we've explored other ways of both expanding our access to talent, making a positive impact on our employees, I mean, on our communities, and also creating a more diverse workforce. And we've done that through the apprenticeship program. So it started actually when I became the CEO of North America in the U.S.

24:24back in 2015. I looked at, we had this amazing program called Skills to Succeed, where we were skilling people in the community, but we weren't actually hiring people at Accenture. And so we started with seven apprentices in Chicago. And And we've now since 20, and that program started actually in 2016, we've now had over 1 ,200 apprentices go through our program. We hire most of them. We have incredible retention. And 20 % of our hiring in the US, our entry-level hiring in the US will be through our apprenticeship program, which is about 50-50 men and women, about nearly 60 % or more racially or ethnically diverse, and almost all come from very challenged socioeconomic backgrounds.

25:19And these are individuals who would not have been on a path to get a job at Accenture using kind of our old way of hiring because we had to think out of the box and really look at skills and potential and then be willing to train ourselves. So that kind of comes back to that need to be a talent creator. And I would tell you, it's a huge win because these are some of our best employees, great retention, great learners. And of course, they've opened up terrific new pathways for them. I want to shift gears a little bit, and this may be to the surprise of some of our viewers, but Accenture is often mentioned as a leader in the kind of corporate applications of the metaverse.

26:11So I'd love to hear you talk about what does the metaverse do for Accenture? Well, great. So we're really excited about the metaverse. We just put our tech vision out called the metaverse continuum. So if you haven't read it, please take a look at it. We think the metaverse is as impactful as the tech vision that we did back in 2013, when we said that every business would be a digital business, which has definitely come true a decade later. And we think the metaverse is that significant in terms of what do for the next decade. And this year, we will onboard about 150 ,000 people by going through Accenture's metaverse called One Accenture Park, which we think is the largest enterprise metaverse in the world.

27:02It used a beta version of NMESH by Microsoft. And what it does is it brings together people who've joined Accenture in the metaverse to explore Accenture, to have a shared experience with other new joiners when we're still not having in-person shared experiences. And our research shows that immersive learning for short sprints, so not all day in the metaverse, this is about a 30-minute experience, is actually more impactful. It's been extraordinarily well received by our people who are onboarding, who find it both learning, but also it creates bonds of these shared experiences with other people who are going through it.

27:46So I just took my board through it just recently, and they absolutely loved it. It's super innovative. And if you're an innovative company and you're trying to show that innovation, then there's no better way than introducing your company to new joiners through some of the most cutting edge technology. So I can imagine what you're talking about, but for viewers who may think, okay, I don't get this. I really don't get what the metaverse is. Talk a little bit about what is the experience? What are people doing? What are they seeing? How are they interacting in ways that they wouldn't be just by, let's say, the conversation that we're having like this?

28:25Great. So instead of just looking at each other and having someone explain, well, here you're going to learn about TQ and here are the different things that our services do. Instead, when you join Accenture, someone will take you through building your own avatar, which you get to do yourself. You'll put on some glasses. Some people do it in 2D. Most use glasses and do it in 3D. And when you step into the metaverse, you're literally with, say, 30 other people who are also on their first or second day at Accenture. You start by talking to them. They get you familiar with how you move around. And if you've had a metaverse experience, you actually it's like going to a cocktail party where you only hear the people near you.