“What took us months now takes minutes.” | Cotality CHRO Kendra Angier on building a skills engine, engaging the C-suite, and her 12-24mo strategy
Episode Summary
Cotality runs the data behind a huge slice of the property economy, and CHRO Kendra Angier is rebuilding its workforce to match. In this episode she walks through the messy reality of getting there: a nine-month attempt to hand-build a skills taxonomy that she finally killed, the outside-in search that followed, and the decision to put dynamic, integrated skills data at the center of the strategy. She's candid about what worked and what didn't, from bringing her CFO, COO and CTO into the buying decision to promoting an internal leader to own the program end to end. Along the way she explains why she plans in 12-to-24-month windows, why she caps core skills per role at 20-25, and how validation that used to take days now takes minutes. It's a practical session for any leader trying to move a skills strategy from slideware to something employees actually use.
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Key Takeaways
- Building a skills taxonomy by hand is a dead end. Nine months in, Cotality scrapped it for a dynamic, integrated approach.
- Skills strategy fails without the business. Bring the CFO, COO and CTO into the buying decision, not just the rollout.
- Plan for 12-24 months, not ten years. A static long-range plan is obsolete before it ships.
- Foundations come first. Job architecture and clean talent data are non-negotiable before skills.
- Upskill before the change hits, not after. Roughly 15% of Cotality roles are set to change.
Actionable Insights
- Translate skills into the language of margin and growth, not HR. As Kendra puts it: take the HR out of your language.
- Assign a single owner. Cotality created a senior principal of skills and workforce intelligence reporting straight to the CHRO.
- Validate skills where people already work. Push prompts into Teams and Slack instead of forcing everyone into Workday.
- Cap core skills per role at roughly 20-25, and resist over-granular taxonomies that nobody can maintain.
About the Speaker
Kendra Angier is Chief Human Resources Officer at Cotality (formerly CoreLogic), the property data and analytics company serving real estate, mortgage, tax and insurance. She leads workforce transformation across the organization, combining job architecture, people analytics, Workday and TechWolf into a skills-based operating model.
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