Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #291

Reclaiming organizational capacity, succession planning, examples of talent investment practices, verifiable credentials wallets for communicating the totality of workers' skills, and HR tech.

Author

Brian Heger
April 06, 2025

SPONSORED BY

Welcome to this issue of Talent Edge Weekly!

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PRESENTED BY Draup

Job roles are evolving fast—but job descriptions (JDs) aren’t keeping up.

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THIS WEEK'S CONTENT

Below are links and descriptions of the topics covered in this issue. If you're interested in my deep dive, you can read the full newsletter.

📉 Also, check out my job cuts tracker & Chief HR Officer move of the week.

Let’s dive in! ⬇️

THIS WEEK'S EDGE 

WORKFORCE CAPACITY

Addresses how organizations can unlock workforce capacity by eliminating low-value work and ineffective work practices.

One objective of workforce planning is ensuring an organization has the workforce capacity to execute its critical goals and priorities. While adding headcount is one way to increase capacity, a frequently overlooked alternative is improving how work gets done. Excessive meetings, low-value tasks, and outdated processes are just a few examples of work practices that quietly erode capacity. This new Deloitte Insights article highlights this challenge, noting that 41% of workers spend time on tasks that don’t add value—often prioritizing “visible” work over valuable work. This aligns with Mercer’s 2024 Global Talent Trends report, which identified “too much busy work” as the top factor draining productivity. From my perspective, while a single unproductive meeting or inefficient process may seem minor, these issues compound over time and drain resources. For example, AT&T saved 3.6 million hours and over $230 million in three years by eliminating inefficient work practices and processes. Chances are, there are untapped opportunities within your team and organization to unlock capacity. To begin, ask: Which tasks should we stop because they add little value to our priorities? And how are our current ways of working—such as excessive decision-making meetings—hindering workforce capacity? Increasing capacity doesn’t always require more people—it often starts by being more intentional about how work gets done. As a bonus, here is my one-page worksheet to identify opportunities to improve ways of working.

SUCCESSION PLANNING

Shares five example questions illustrating how organizations can use a continuum of responses to align on key aspects of succession planning.

Succession planning (SP) remains a priority for organizations looking to enhance and redesign their SP practices for greater impact. However, before redesigning SP, aligning stakeholders on key aspects of the organization’s SP philosophy is important. In my cheat sheet of 11 example SP questions, I emphasized the need for clarity on core SP issues. My new one-page slide builds on five of these questions by showing how responses often fall along a continuum to support more focused discussion and alignment. For each, I include three points on the continuum to guide conversation. For example: “What is our philosophy on informing someone they’ve been identified as a successor?” Responses range from limited transparency (successors not explicitly informed of their status), to partial disclosure (general development focus communicated without specific role promises), to full transparency (targeted roles disclosed). This slide is an excerpt from a broader slide deck developed within my new Talent Edge Circle community. The larger slide deck covers additional talent practices, from performance management to internal mobility. If you’re interested in joining this exclusive community for internal HR practitioners, we’re opening just another 10 additional spots on April 23, so get on the waitlist now! If you are already a member of Talent Edge Circle, you can log in here.

TALENT MANAGEMENT

Highlights how leading companies are investing in frontline workers through innovative talent practices that drive measurable outcomes.

Staying informed about how organizations implement talent and workplace practices is essential for improving our own approaches and learning from their success. A recent McKinsey article highlights the critical role of investing in frontline workers to drive productivity and business performance. The research identifies 56 companies outperforming their peers in labor productivity and total shareholder return (TSR), showcasing innovative talent strategies. For example, Chipotle deployed its Autocado robot to automate avocado peeling, reducing manual labor and allowing employees to focus on quality and customer experience. Disney Parks and Resorts equipped supervisors with mobile tools to engage directly with frontline workers and solve problems in real time, enhancing guest experience and employee engagement. Land O’Lakes redesigned its 12-hour shifts into shorter, flexible roles, doubling applicant interest and improving rural retention. Unilever introduced financial incentives tied to production and morale targets, resulting in a 50% drop in absenteeism, a 10% rise in productivity, and a 20% increase in revenue. These examples show how strategic talent investments can transform workforce management and deliver measurable outcomes. As a bonus, I’m resharing my one-pager featuring five organizations implementing talent practices—from AI in HR to internal talent marketplaces. What talent practices are you currently investing in, and do you know the results they’re driving for your organization?

SKILLS & TALENT ACQUISITION

Shares how verifiable credentials wallets help workers communicate the totality of their skills and abilities and translate their achievements into future opportunities.

The 47-page report explores the transformative potential of digital wallets that store verifiable credentials in reshaping education, workforce development, and hiring. These wallets empower individuals to manage their professional identities, communicate skills more comprehensively, and access new career opportunities. By enabling job seekers to present a fuller, verified picture of their abilities, verifiable credentials wallets help employers identify candidates based on relevant skills—not just traditional qualifications. These wallets store digital records of skills and achievements, ensuring they are interoperable, portable, and verifiable, and support lifelong learning by allowing users to collect credentials from multiple sources and receive career pathway recommendations. As these tools become critical infrastructure for a skills-based talent marketplace, employers can begin reviewing their processes and technologies—such as job descriptions, applicant tracking systems, and skill-taxonomy alignment—to request, receive, and interpret verifiable skills data. This shift has implications for how organizations attract, evaluate, and grow talent.

HR TECH

Highlights the need for CHROs to take a strategic, capability-led approach to HR tech that earns stakeholder buy-in and drives transformation.

HR technology remains a growing area of focus for Chief HR Officers and their teams as they look to unlock its potential in delivering strategic outcomes, enhancing employee experiences, and enabling new ways of working. However, as this Gartner article highlights, only 24% of HR functions report getting full business value from their technology investments. Interestingly, this gap isn’t tied to how advanced the tools are, as half of the high-performing HR teams are using basic tech. The real differentiator is how the technology is applied. With 79% of HR leaders viewing tech primarily as a way to free up capacity, many strategies stay rooted in efficiency gains, creating a cycle where foundational investments are continually reinforced—at the expense of more transformative initiatives. To shift this dynamic, the authors recommend adopting an “augmented HR” mindset that focuses on how technology enables new, high-value contributions. A key strategy is to use technology roadmaps not just for sequencing investments, but as tools to engage stakeholders actively. By organizing roadmaps into “building blocks” tied to critical business capabilities, HR can make tech transformation more actionable and aligned. Figure 4 shows an example from Takeda and how it successfully applied this approach to foster leadership support, prioritize capabilities, and build momentum through smaller, confidence-building wins. Other ideas are discussed.

MOST POPULAR FROM LAST WEEK

HR EFFECTIVENESS

Provides a framework of six actions and questions that business and HR leaders can answer to create stakeholder value over time.

JOB CUTS AND LAYOFF TRACKER

Check out my tracker of announcements from a segment of organizations that have conducted job cuts and layoffs since the start of 2023.

Partial view of tracker on brianheger.com

A few job cuts announced this past week:

  • Chevron Corp (NYSE: CVX). The second-largest oil company in the U.S. disclosed it will lay off about 600 employees at its former headquarters in San Ramon to streamline its organizational structure, improve efficiency, and enhance long-term competitiveness.

  • Whirlpool Corp. (NYSE: WHR). The leading global home appliance manufacturer announced plans to lay off approximately 650 employees at its Amana, Iowa, manufacturing facility, effective June 1.

  • Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (NASDAQ: GT). The leading global provider of tires and mobility solutions announced it will lay off nearly 850 employees at its Danville, Virginia, plant as it refocuses the facility on mixing and aviation operations.

 Click here to access all listed announcements.

CHIEF HR OFFICER MOVE OF THE WEEK

This past week, 11 new Chief HR Officer announcements were posted on CHROs on the Go, my subscription-based platform tracking movement in and out of the CHRO role. This week’s CHRO move of the week is:

  • Caterpillar Inc. (IRVING, TEXAS) [NYSE: CAT]—the world's leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, off-highway diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines and diesel-electric locomotives—announced that Christy Pambianchi has been appointed Chief Human Resources Officer effective May 1. Pambianchi, who will be a member of Caterpillar's Executive Office, succeeds Cheryl H. Johnson, whose retirement was announced in January. Pambianchi currently serves as Chief People Officer at Intel. ​​

Christy Pambianchi

CHROs on the Go has over 4,000 archived announcements in its database, with new announcements added daily!

If you are already a subscriber to CHROs on the Go, log in here.

FROM ME ON LINKEDIN

Catch up on what you may have missed from me on LinkedIn:

✂️ ‘Read Online’  if email cuts off

THE BEST OF MARCH 2025

Did you miss the “Best of March ” issue of Talent Edge Weekly? If so, check out issue #286, which includes 16 of the most popular resources from the month.

Thank you to SuccessionHR for sponsoring the Best Of March issue of Talent Edge Weekly. Join SuccessionHR for a 30-min webinar, April 16th at 12 PM EST, where you’ll get an in-depth look of the SuccessionHR software, identify key risks in succession planning, and explore proven succession planning best practices.

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RESOURCE LINEUP

​brianheger.com provides free access to +1,500 curated articles, research reports, podcasts, and more that help practitioners drive better business results through strategic human resources and talent management.

CHROS on the Go is a subscription that provides the easiest and most convenient way to stay informed about Chief Human Resources Officer hires, promotions, and resignations in organizations of all sizes and industries.

​Talent Edge Weekly is a free weekly newsletter that brings together the best talent and strategic human resources insights from various sources. It is published every Sunday at 6 PM EST.

Talent Edge Circle. My new, exclusive, vetted, invitation-only digital community for internal HR practitioners. If you are an internal HR practitioner interested in this paid community, indicate your interest here.

Talent Edge Weekly is written by Brian Heger, a human resources practitioner. You can connect with Brian on Linkedin, X, and brianheger.com