How Workday achieved a 32% faster time-to-hire with TechWolf’s AI-driven skills integration

1. About the Customer

Workday is a global leader in enterprise management software, offering finance, HR, and analytics solutions to organizations worldwide. 

With over 20,000 employees, Workday is recognized for its commitment to innovation and continuous improvement in talent processes. 

In that light, they chose TechWolf as their strategic partner in becoming a skills-based organization to keep an agile workforce in the face of disruptions across the software industry.

2. The Challenge: What Needed Fixing?

Workday is a leading enterprise software provider specializing in ERP, HR, and finance solutions. To maintain that lead, it needs to keep up with disrupting innovations in the industry and adapt its strategy accordingly.

At the same time, the organization is growing fast and wants to scale its sales workforce quickly. However, the unclarity of skills demand for open requisitions and continuously evolving jobs in a changing industry landscape has slowed these efforts.

In translating those business challenges into skills & HR challenges, the people department found the following:

• An Unclear Skills Demand for Open Requisitions: Lack of clarity on the most important skills required for jobs led to inefficiencies in hiring and workforce planning.
• Manual Mapping Efforts Too Slow: A traditional approach to skills alignment typically takes 12-18 months, delaying business growth and workforce development.
• Lack of scalable solutions: HR teams need agile, scalable solutions as roles evolve and market demands shift. Workday realized they needed a dynamic approach that could continuously update and refine their job architecture as skills evolved.

To overcome these obstacles, Workday sought an AI-driven solution to rapidly build a validated skills foundation that was easy to maintain to optimize hiring practices.

3. The TechWolf Solution: AI-Driven Skills Integration

TechWolf partnered with Workday to create a structured and scalable skills framework, ensuring seamless integration into Workday’s HR ecosystem. The solution focused on three key areas:

3.1 Job-to-Skill Mapping

TechWolf enabled Workday to create validated Job-to-Skill mappings for all roles, ensuring alignment between job profiles and required skills.

• Deliverables:
  
  • Skill profiles for all job roles in scope, leveraging both Workday-specific skill data and market insights.
  • A structured process for validating job skills, led by Workday’s internal teams with TechWolf’s best practice support.
  • Integrating the Job-to-Skill mappings into Workday’s HR platform for continuous use in hiring, workforce planning, and learning.
• Implementation Approach:
  
  • An initial wave of job skill profiles was created using TechWolf’s Job Evaluation Tool.
  • Validation workshops led by Workday stakeholders, supported by TechWolf’s Train-the-Trainer model.
  • Refinement of job skill profiles based on feedback, ensuring high-quality mappings before full deployment.
  • Finalized mappings made available within TechWolf’s Job-to-Skill Management Tool, embedded in Workday.

3.2 Skills Taxonomy Development

The development of a Workday-specific skills taxonomy established a common skills language, providing structure to critical skills data.

• Deliverables:
  
  • A data-driven Skill Taxonomy (domains, skill clusters, skills, and descriptions).
  • A Taxonomy workshop with subject matter experts to refine and validate the structure.
  • A Train-the-Trainer session to ensure Workday teams could independently maintain and evolve the taxonomy.
• Implementation Approach:
  
  • Taxonomy created using a combination of Workday’s internal skills data and TechWolf’s AI-driven market insights.
  • Best practice support for validation workshops, with Workday owning the final validation process.
  • Establishment of a governance framework to maintain and update the taxonomy over time.

3.3 Skills management & governance

Ensuring the sustainability of Workday’s skills framework required a robust governance process and integration with Workday’s HR tech stack.

• Deliverables:
  
  • Access to the TechWolf Console for managing and governing the taxonomy and Job-to-Skill mappings.
  • Defined governance processes for maintaining skills data accuracy and relevancy.
  • Role-based access control within Workday to manage taxonomy updates efficiently.
• Implementation Approach:
  
  • Workday designated internal SMEs to oversee skills governance, supported by TechWolf’s Train-the-Trainer methodology.
  • Integration of the TechWolf Console with Workday’s internal talent platforms to facilitate real-time updates.
  • Ongoing insights and best practices from TechWolf to refine governance strategies.

4. The Results

The journey from skills mapping to enterprise-wide impact is ever-evolving at Workday. However, two key milestones have already been achieved in the recent collaboration with TechWolf.

4.1. Building a strong, company-wide skills foundation

TechWolf collaborated with Workday to map 15,000 employees to 300 roles in just 3 months, focusing on defining the job skills required fo success. This demand-side clarity provided a robust framework for aligning roles and business units.

• 85% of the workforce had critical skills aligned to their jobs
• Data deliverables in under 3 months (VS 12-18 months manually).
• One, clear foundation for skills-focused decision-making

This partnership has been a game changer for us, by working with TechWolf, we identified skills for 85% of our workforce in just three months, saving us time and resources while setting a foundation for our future talent strategy. And we’re just getting started.
Josh Tarr
‍Director Skills-based Organization

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4.2. Empowering skills-first hiring practices across 20,000+ employees

The critical job skills identified through the partnership became the foundation for Workday’s enterprise-wide hiring strategy. By focusing on job-specific skills, hiring practices were streamlined and aligned with the organization’s goals, delivering measurable outcomes:

• 100% adoption of skills-based hiring: Easy access to critical skills per job role across hiring managers.
• 32% faster time-to-hire: Workday significantly reduced the time required to recruit account executives, optimizing hiring efficiency.
• Higher-quality hires: Internal hires accounted for 30% of placements, with a 51% increase in candidate net promoter scores and an 11% rise in offer acceptances.

5. What’s next?

Building on the success of this initiative, Workday is scaling its AI-powered skills intelligence strategy across its global workforce, integrating skills data deeper into key talent processes. The next phase will focus on:

Expanding skills-based hiring & talent development

• Continuing to refine skills-based hiring, following early success in reducing time-to-hire by 32% and improving offer acceptance rates.
• Extending AI-driven skills intelligence into performance management, internal mobility, and career growth, ensuring employees have better visibility into career opportunities within Workday.

Strengthening workforce planning with AI-powered skills data

• Empowering senior leaders with data-driven insights to make strategic workforce decisions.
• Leveraging AI to analyze skills from key work systems like Jira and Salesforce, providing executives with a real-time, enterprise-wide view of skills strengths and gaps.
• Enhancing workforce agility by aligning employees with business needs faster and more effectively.

Deepening the TechWolf Partnership

TechWolf has been named a Workday Innovation Partner as part of this expansion, marking a major milestone in the collaboration. TechWolf’s AI-powered skills intelligence will now be embedded across Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), helping employees seamlessly update their skills profiles right in their flow of work.

A Shared Vision for the Future

As Workday navigates the future of work, agility is key. With AI acceleration, shifting worker demographics, and widening skills gaps, Workday is positioning itself—and its customers—for long-term success.

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