Overview

With thousands of customers, hundreds of partners, a multi-billion dollar market cap, and two of the largest HR conferences in the world, Workday is one of the global leaders in HR tech.

But Workday is more than an enterprise software provider. It is also a large enterprise with roughly 20,000 employees who need the very solutions that drive its business.

Among them is Josh Tarr, Director of Skills-Based Organization, and the People and Purpose team (HR). For the past few years, they have led the company’s effort to “drink their own champagne” and apply Workday’s technology as they transform into a skills-based organization.

That journey took a new turn in January 2024, when Workday became a TechWolf customer. Earlier this year, the collaboration expanded to help drive Workday’s goal of empowering organizations with skills at the core.

Josh has been central to shaping this work. Today, he joins TechWolf’s Customer Community Lead, Julius Schelstraete, to share what the partnership means for Workday, how it is transforming their approach to skills, and what opportunities lie ahead.

Speed & scale, TechWolf x Workday at a glance

Julius: To start off, Josh, can you recap:  what have TechWolf & Workday done together so far?

Josh: We started our partnership with TechWolf with an initial use case to improve our hiring process. Our internal research showed that our interview teams were evaluating candidates on too many skills, so we wanted to understand which skills were most important to all of our jobs.

By combining Workday's Skills Cloud data with TechWolf's dynamic market data, we were able to identify 10-12 critical skills for 100% of our jobs and use them as the foundation of our skills-based hiring process.

The result?  It's been almost a year since we implemented skills-based hiring and we're seeing a 15% decrease in time to hire, an 8% increase in offer acceptance and a 3% increase in candidate NPS.

Julius: What has Workday gotten out of the partnership so far?

Josh: This partnership has accelerated our skills transformation.

First, it's augmented the data we have about the skills that are critical for the jobs at Workday. This has been really important for getting our leaders on board with the shift to a skills-based organization.

Second, we’ve worked with speed. Traditionally, identifying the skills in your workforce was a lengthy and costly process. With TechWolf, we achieved 85% workforce coverage in just three months, saving significant time and resources.

Finally, TechWolf has been more than just a vendor; they've been a strategic partner, helping us accelerate our own skills transformation journey so that we can help Workday customers do the same.

Julius: The collaboration started with talent acquisition. What else is happening and what’s next? 

Josh: In addition to our success with skills-based hiring, we’ve integrated the use of skills data across the talent lifecycle, including upskilling, performance check-ins and matching workmates to career opportunities. We’ve seen great results across internal mobility, how our workmates feel about their career growth, and an impact on retention. 

Our next focus is to provide our workmates with even better career recommendations and our leaders with a deeper picture of the skills that exist across their teams. This means we need skills data for our workmates that's even more detailed and more up-to-date than it is today.

So in October, we're launching the Skill Assistant, an Extend application we co-built with TechWolf, that uses AI to recommend skills to workers that they demonstrate but have not yet put on their profile. This will enrich our workmates' profiles with high-quality skills data and provide our executives with the most recent skills data about their teams. 

The pilot of the Skill Assistant yielded an 89% acceptance rate and added an average of 20 high-quality skills to worker profiles. We're excited to roll this out to all workmates soon!

Julius: When it comes to skills and AI, another big theme is proficiency. How will the partnership address that?

Josh: When it comes to skills,  organizations don't just need to know what skills they have, but it's also helpful to know how well they perform those skills. 

We’ve implemented assessment in two ways:

First, we’re directly assessing skills using the Assess Skills functionality in Workday. We launched Assess Skills to 5k workmates in our Customer Experience and Sales teams as part of last quarter’s performance check-in, seeing an 83% completion rate by workmates and people leaders.

Second, we’re testing an AI-recommended proficiency in collaboration with TechWolf. In our first test, users reported that the AI-recommended skill proficiency was "spot on" 77% of the time.

Julius: Lastly, Josh, as we look ahead, is there any particular aspect of the overall collaboration that you’re personally excited about?

Josh: Skills transformation is foundational to the question all business leaders are asking right now: ‘How will work and roles be redesigned with AI?’. We've learned so much over the past several years with our skills work, that I feel we're extremely well-positioned to evolve the work to meet this moment, and help our workmates and leaders not just answer that question, but successfully move into the AI era. By doing this work ourselves, we're better enabled to help customers succeed too.

Find out more at Workday Rising!

Keen to learn more about the partnership?

Both Josh & his team and the TechWolf team will be at Workday Rising in San Francisco 15th -18th of September!

Check out our conference schedule, where you can:

• Register for our rooftop event
• Attend product breakfast
• Schedule in-person meetings with the team
• Find our booth number & scheduled product demos

See you in Frisco!

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