Episode Summary

This one is different. Recorded at Workday Rising in San Francisco, TechWolf CEO Andreas De Neve takes the host chair to sit down with Josh Tarr, Director of the Skill-Based Organization at Workday, and trace the journey the two companies have been on together. Josh is candid about the start: he knew skills data mattered, but underestimated how much. When his team looked, fewer than 20% of Workday's job profiles had skills attached. What follows is a clear-eyed account of fixing that for 20,000 employees, from pinning down the 10 to 12 critical skills per job to co-building the Skills Suggestion app that keeps profiles current automatically. He shares the numbers, the mistakes he would undo, and how the whole conversation shifted from hiring and mobility to AI-driven workforce planning. Short, specific, and useful for anyone running a skills program in the real world.

Embed

Key Takeaways

• Skills data decays fast. At Workday, 90% of profiles had skills but 75% had not been touched in six months, which makes them close to useless for hiring or planning.
• Pin down the few skills that matter per job. Workday identified the top 10 to 12 critical skills for every role and built hiring around them.
• Two things Josh would do differently from day one: develop a real data strategy, and find out what business leaders want before you start.
• The brief shifted from optimizing hiring, learning and mobility to AI-driven workforce planning and role redesign, with people kept at the center.
• Pick the partner that fits your outcomes. Workday's RFP screened for skills data quality, deep Workday knowledge, and values alignment.

Actionable Insights

• Stop asking employees to maintain their own profiles. The Skills Suggestion app, co-built with TechWolf, infers the skills a person demonstrates but never listed and sends a simple yes or no. The yeses flow straight onto the profile; Josh reports a 91% acceptance rate, with over 12% of the organization adopting in a matter of weeks.
• Build hiring around the critical few skills, then measure the business result. At Workday, sellers hired through skills-based hiring close their first deal 14% faster.
• Write the data strategy before the rollout. Josh's main regret is going in underdeveloped on what the data strategy needed to be.
• Anchor every skills decision in a business question, whether that is faster deals, better-staffed customer engagements, or fewer people leaving to grow. Define the outcome leaders want before you optimize the talent process.

About the Speakers

Josh Tarr is Director of the Skill-Based Organization at Workday, where he leads the company's internal skills transformation for roughly 20,000 employees. An early operator of skills-based hiring and AI-assisted profile management at scale, he is one of the most forward-thinking customers in TechWolf's base.

Andreas De Neve is co-founder and CEO of TechWolf. He steps in as guest host for this episode, recorded on-site at Workday Rising.

‍