Data-powered talent management with Accendo’s Talent Pulse

• Allows employees to chart their own career development
• Benchmark internal talents against those outside to create development plans

ACCENDO Technologies Sdn Bhd, a behavioural science-based people-technology company announced the launch of Talent Pulse on May 14, a platform that combines talent measurement and career pathing into a single platform by combining behavioural science and people analytics.

[Correction: An earlier version gave the wrong date for the launch.]

“Reducing cost and exerting pressure on the workforce to become agile is no longer sufficient. By embracing science and technology, Accendo serves as the enabler for organisations to achieve business outcome through talent decisions,” said Accendo group chief executive officer Sharma KSK Lachu (pic).

Based on science and data it has built over the past 10 years throughout the Asean region, Accendo has designed a career-pathing journey that allows employees to chart their own career development. “Talent Pulse is designed to enhance an organisation’s talent management journey by providing an end-to-end solution that enables HR to make highly-accurate and effective decisions in a time-efficient manner to alleviate biases across the talent management lifecycle,” Sharma added.

In an effort to always stay relevant to current context and up-to-date, Accendo works with occupational psychologists to verify product claims.

In terms of price, Sharma says it depends on organisational need and can range from tens of thousand to millions. “Usually, the entry point for an organisation is RM80,000 to RM90,000. To break it down by volume, I would say cost per head is RM150.”

Currently, Axiata is one of the companies that utilises the Talent Pulse complete suite for its internal career and development platform called Talent Axiata Platform (TAP). Badrunnisa Mohd Yasin Khan, Axiata’s group chief talent officer, said that adopting an intelligent talent experience platform allows organisations to conduct valuable conversations about the pool of talent, supported by data-driven insights.

One of the struggles of the business, Badrunnisa says, is conversing with business leaders about talent due to the static nature of data on hand. Often, leaders are disappointed because their needs are not captured or predicted ahead of time.

With Axiata’s presence across seven Asian markets, the company is moving towards employing a talent factory concept as part of its digital transformation efforts.

“Axiata already has a framework or lens to evaluate the quality of talents. However, it needs the right technology to make it more efficient to assess talents across a wide geography and varied business needs, without always having to call on consultants to design the right assessment exercise,” she said.

Thanesyah Ravindran, the head of client success at Accendo, walked the audience through the capabilities of the platform. A common problem in the industry is the use of multiple tools throughout the organisation. Decision-making for these companies is “tragic”, she said, because the systems do not communicate with one another to derive insights from its data points.

Hence, Talent Pulse offers access to a marketplace that to date, has over ten different tools to help companies. “The interesting thing here is the data points all talk to one another giving you one seamless report for decision-making.”

Thanesyah also presented a case study showcasing Talent Pulse’s ability to search and benchmark candidates against key competencies required for an all new job function.

“If the system doesn’t exist, we would have drowned ourselves in excel sheets, and would need to stitch all the scattered data together to make a talent profile so we can talk about the individual in the talent reviews.”

Based on the demonstation, Talent Pulse is also able to benchmark internal talents against those in the outside market and help create development plans. While the platform focuses on profile-building, its algorithm works in the back end to capture coaching tips, behaviour to develop and learning references.

With Talent Pulse, organisations have:

• An AI-enabled chatbot to understand talent development gaps, and provide individualised learning and development content.
• Access to the qualified assessments on the marketplace from the best providers in the industry.
• Designed for a remarkable user experience, through cutting-edge interface.
• Machine Learning to predict job role fit and measure flight risks.
• Thousands of Success Profiles that cover accountability, technical, functional, leadership and expected competencies, which can be aligned to the organisations.
• The ability to compare internal and external talent from third party sources, such as LinkedIn.

Other than Axiata, many corporations currently using the assessments and different modules of Talent Pulse are from various industries such as the financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, fast-moving consumer goods and more.