Paul Phillips

▶0:00HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. I'm excited to welcome Paul to the Built by People podcast. Paul, thank you so much for joining us today. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:52GuestSure, absolutely fine. Lovely to meet you and a pleasure to be on the podcast. As shared, Paul Phillips. I'm the proud Global Head of Talent Acquisition, Onboarding, and Business HR at Avanade. Avanade is a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft focused on providing professional services in the Microsoft space. However, although I've been at Avanade now for 11+ years and had the opportunity to sit across a multitude of different HR leadership roles, including Head of Reward as well as Head of Strategy and Operations at Avanade, Prior to Avanade, I was also the head of strategy and operations at CGI. And then prior to that, I actually was a consultant. So I was in the professional services space. So really been in the kind of, I'd say, corporate HR roles now for about 14 years and spent the first 10 years of my life in professional consulting. The last half of that was in the HR transformation space, which was my natural journey into corporate HR.

▶1:58HostPaul, can you share the specific challenge you faced that led to creating the Create pillar and the academy at your company and how that initiative has transformed your approach to talent acquisition?

▶2:11GuestSure. It's quite a great question. So typically when we think about HR, HR typically is considered as 3 key pillars, which is attract, develop, and retain. However, what we were experiencing at Avanade, certainly in the tech space, is that the market is just so fast-paced in terms of talent needs and what our clients want on an ongoing basis. And if you kind of put this into the macro backdrop that we're all experiencing around the shortage of skills, I'm sure some of these stats are not new, but, you know, the World Economic Forum jobs report from 2025 made it abundantly clear how important reskilling is and that 50% of our current employees are probably going to have to reskill by 2030. In addition to that, 63% of organizations feel that skills gap is the biggest barrier to continued success. So with that in mind, and that's always exaggerated in the tech capacity, we needed to do something different. We couldn't just go out and hire the types of talent that we always needed and wanted on a global basis. And so we decided to actually start creating our own talent pipeline. And we did this through introducing the Avanade Academy. And the benefit of this wasn't just actually just in terms of attracting new talent into the tech space. It also gave us an opportunity to double down on our diversity goals as well. And welcoming kind of non-traditional talent into the Avanade family. How it worked was that we'd actually bring talent in and invest in them for the first 12 weeks through a detailed onboarding. In addition to that, we looked at both technical and professional skill development and then gave everybody the opportunity to do some work shadowing on some real-world projects before kind of going into, you know, live mode, so to speak. It was an incredibly empowering program. It's something we continue to invest in now. We've hired over thousands and thousands of people through the Avanade Academy today, and it's had some really significant impacts in the diversity space. If I just, you know, just share in Brazil, increased our female hiring from 18% to 30% the first year that we introduced the Avanade Academy. However, what we've seen since then is actually Brazil's diversity hiring has been in the late '30s, early '40s, and it really opened up the mindset to the business in terms of attracting different types of talent into the traditional roles that we've kind of kept for others in the past. So it really did drive a mindset shift. It's something we're incredibly proud of. In addition to that, it really helped cement a stronger bond as well between talent acquisition and learning and was actually a key contributor to being able to showcase how learning investments can really drive business needs. It's kind of an intangible, intangible that we all struggle with on an ongoing basis within HR. But this was somewhere where we were able to show a clear correlation between the investment we made and the impact that it had.

▶5:32HostHow did you implement AI tools like HiveScore? What resistance did you encounter when you tried to do that? And could you talk about some measurable impacts that you've seen on revenue growth and time to stream metrics?

▶5:48GuestSure. AI, every kind of conference I go to, AI is always top of the agenda. And obviously, we're a technology company, so It's expected that we seek to leverage AI in terms of how we deliver talent acquisition solutions and other HR people solutions across the organization. As a TA lead, I'm probably not alone in the fact that, you know, certainly in the tech sector, we saw a huge uplift in terms of demand coming out of the pandemic. In addition to that, we're also having to manage our budgets acutely on an ongoing basis. And so for me, in the first instance, AI was a way in which I could decouple productivity and people for the first time at Avanade. And so we actually implemented initially a HiredScore, which is now a part of the Workday suite. And HiredScore kind of helps with our matching and fetching of talent within the talent acquisition process. You talked about adoption. Adoption's not easy. People are scared of change. Again, that's not a new story. And people are also even more scared when they see AI as potentially replacing the work that they do. How did we encourage adoption? We tried to make it as fun as we could. We'd introduce games with prizes and incentives for kind of not just completing your training, but showcasing how you brought that training to life in a real-world setting. We also had, and naturally you'll have this, people that just really lean into the AI, a way in which they can really enhance their productivity. And so we created kind of success stories around those individuals and encouraged those individuals to come and run sessions to showcase kind of how they used AI to drive some productivity gains in their day. And so they could spend more time doing the things that they love, which is not always on our laptop at work. We use that to kind of encourage adoption as well. In terms of some of the benefits that we saw from a business perspective is that we saw about a 30% reduction in our time to screen, which therefore reduced our time to hire by 7 days. For a consulting professional services company, there's a clear correlation between our revenue and people. And so if you take that and then when you build that out on a broader global scale, because I'm responsible for GlobalTA, if we hire 5,000 chargeable talents in a single year and I'm able to get those talents productive 7 days sooner than they would have been otherwise, if we just use just a simple number, because for math perspective of $1,000 of revenue a day per chargeable individual, that means that I was able to generate $35 million of additional revenue through reducing our time to hire by 7 days. It was the easiest business case to get signed off by the CFO for sure.

▶8:48HostPaul, could you walk us through a specific example of how the Avanade Academy has helped bring in non-traditional tech talent and what unexpected benefits this has brought to the organization's culture?

▶9:02GuestSure. I kind of touched on Japan in the first, in the first question when we talked about the Create pillar. And I'll probably lean in on Japan again because I would say I'm not sure what others think. And if I'm alone here, then that's fine. But Japan is probably the hardest country to hire talent in, largely because attrition is just naturally so low. People just tend to kind of be more kind of career oriented with their chosen company that they work for. In addition to that, you typically have to have quite a large name, big brand attraction in terms of from a Japanese culture, in terms of that's where talent tends to sway towards. And so when you couple that with our desire to kind of increase and drive towards parity in terms of our organization from a gender perspective, and then when you look at the total size of the Japanese female talent market in tech, it only stands at 15%. And so if we wanted to drive our population up in terms of female talent, and we wanted to attract people with the right skill set to do different types of roles that we've typically hired for before, we had to do something different. And so what we did was we sought out, we created what we call a Power Platform Learning Academy, which is a Microsoft skill set that we were looking to kind of grow aggressively. We actually had a a full 100% female intake for this academy. So we hired 51 females into this role. This increased our hiring across our academy space to 2% females in Japan in that fiscal year. And so when you think about the fact that the marketplace is 15%, that's 150% uplift on what typically what the market has to offer. So this was seen as significant success. And this was in a year as well where we aggressively grew our Japan hiring. For years we hired around 120 to 150 people a year in Japan. This was the year where we hired over 500. So we kind of quadrupled our hiring this year and this was a huge significant contributor to that success. But in addition to just numbers, it really kind of helped shift some of the internal mindsets around who is qualified for tech roles. And it's really encouraged leaders to think more broad about more inclusive profiles on an ongoing basis. And it's also created a more kind of inclusive and supportive learning environment, boosting collaboration and mentorship. And those belonging to the cohort really had kind of action learning groups that they can lean into on an ongoing basis. And coupled with that, and not necessarily in Japan, but we did do this in some of our other regions. Was we'd actually used to blend our learning cohorts. So it wouldn't just be new hires that we'd put into our Avanade Academy. We'd also bring in some of our current talent into the Avanade Academy that we wanted to reskill as well. And we saw that blended approach as being really powerful, not only in terms of everybody learning new skills that are more, I would say, marketable in the current climate, but also for those new inbound talent that hadn't experienced Avanade before. They're able to get some of that lesson, those learnings from the kind of internals that were part of their cohort as well. So, kind of had a win-win impact as a result of that.

▶12:31HostWell, what specific strategies have you found most effective in using AI to improve candidate experience rather than just focusing on cost cutting? And how have these contributed to your Candy Awards recognition? And if you could elaborate on what the Candy Awards recognition is, that'd be awesome to have that context.

▶12:49GuestSure. So the Candi Awards is an independent survey that is sent out and you have to ask to be part of the Candi Awards, Candidate Engagement Awards, and they send out a survey not only to your successful candidates, but they also send out surveys to those that were unsuccessful as well. Typically, they're sending out like 30,000, 40,000 surveys from an Avanade population basis, and then they then rank those responses against peer organizations. And then if you kind of end up above the, you know, significantly above the benchmark, then you can receive a candidate engagement award. The first year we did this, I was embarrassed by our results. We were nowhere near any awards.. And it was a difficult message not only to kind of read and see, but also, and share with the teams, but also think about, you know, what do we need to do differently in order to turn this around? And one of the levers that we did pull down on was how can we leverage AI to help us improve? I mentioned HiredScore before. You know, one of the benefits of HiredScore is that it also allows us to disposition candidates and get back to people on a lot more large-scale basis. Than it did before. What does this mean? It means that you don't get lost. I think the biggest, when we looked at our survey data and the biggest contributor to our negative scores was those unsuccessful candidates that just didn't hear back or didn't hear back quick enough. It just took too much time. And I always think about this in relation to when we're having someone at our house, a contractor at our house to do some work. When they're at my house, I see them answering their phones, on their phones the whole day. And then when they're not at my house and I try to call them, when they don't answer, it infuriates me because I know they're very accessible when I see them working at my house. And it kind of goes back to that point around communication is key. And so people get disgruntled now where we live in a world where communication is much easier than it has been before. And so if people don't hear back in what's considered a timely way, then they do get frustrated. So that was one way in which kind of AI contributed to a significant uplift in our candidate engagement scores. In addition, as I said, you know, HiredScore is a matching algorithm. And so this also helps not just Avanade, but it also helps the candidates because it helps them to make sure that they're more matched to the role that we're looking to bring them into. So we actually found in the last 12 months that those candidates that scored high on the matching algorithm were 1.8 times more likely to receive an offer than those that didn't. And so not only is that good for Avanade in terms of kind of where we focus and prioritize, it's also good for the candidates and future employers themselves. And actually, rather than waiting for candidates to come to us, if candidates are a part of our candidate community, we can also use HireScore in a fetch capacity where we could actually reach out to candidates where they did match highly and had submitted their CV previously. Sometimes, you know, you'd hear from us when you hadn't even applied about an opportunity. So that's always nice to see. A second AI tool that we've also introduced, and this was more of an in-house homegrown tool, was a job posting tool. So this enabled us to kind of create consistent job postings. Job postings, no one enjoys job postings. I don't believe so. I've not met one yet. And if you're out there, you can reach out. But, you know, they typically take around 15 minutes to create a job post. They typically weren't consistent. They weren't using all the right language from a gender bias perspective or just in terms of kind of how we wanted to sell certain roles at Avanade. This job posting tool really enabled us to drive consistency. It was also in a multitude of different languages as well. And it also reduced the time to create a job posting on average from 15 minutes to 90 seconds. That means we created 13.5 extra minutes for every job post. This probably created over 1,000 hours in terms of additional time for our recruitment team. 1,000 hours doesn't really contribute to 1 FTE in a year. Okay. But what does that create? It creates an opportunity for our recruiting team to spend more time with our candidates. It's more time with our hiring managers, more time with our interviewers in terms of prepping them for the interviews. And so it's about how you sometimes utilize that that productivity gain, not just from a reduction in headcount, but how do you take that productivity gain and invest it into the human experience? And so that's also contributed to an uptick in our candidate engagement and experience scores. What does this culminate in? This culminated in the last year where we won 4 out of 4 awards for every single one of our regions. So we went from zero awards to winning 4 out of 4 and getting a full house. So it does show it is possible. It is hard work. There's no flick of the light switch and everything changes the next day. But it was certainly a great investment for our team and a journey that I'm proud of.

▶18:13HostPaul, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶18:18GuestI would say don't chase your pets. Chase your passions. I feel sometimes we get dazzled by the new shiny ball that comes into, into view, and we kind of sometimes lose sight of what's really important to our organizations on a more medium to long-term basis. And so my guidance or advice would be, you know, stick to what you truly believe in. That doesn't mean you don't interact with the shiny ball, just make sure that shiny ball's aligned to what the end goal and purposes, or rather than driving you off on a tangent that may not enable you to return to your journey that you were previously on.

▶18:59HostPaul, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶19:04GuestThank you very much. Pleasure to be here.