The TechWolf Podcast

Most skills programs never make it out of the spreadsheet. Cotality's CHRO spent nine months trying to hand-build a skills taxonomy before she killed it and started over. In this episode, Kendra Angier explains how she rebuilt the workforce-intelligence stack around dynamic data, pulled her COO, CTO, and CFO into the buying decision, and earned an 80% employee NPS on skills along the way. It&#...

Everyone wants a “skills-based organization.” Almost no one has built one.  At AstraZeneca, Global Director of Talent Intelligence Lara Martinez Gonzalez has spent four years connecting a tangle of recruitment systems, development platforms, and job architecture into one language for the workforce, and she’s blunt about how hard it has been.  In this episode, she argues skills is a data problem, n...

Most strategic workforce plans never make it past the CHRO's desk. The horizon is five years, the work is detailed, and the business leader you need in the room would rather talk about anything else. Felipe Hessel runs Workforce Intelligence at Sandoz, and he's worked out how to flip that dynamic, getting executives to pull SWP towards them rather than dodge it. In this conversation, he walks thro...

When your sales team closes deals 14% faster, the "skills gap" stops being an HR problem and starts being a revenue solution. In this Special Episode , TechWolf CEO Andreas joins Josh from Workday to discuss the messy, high-stakes reality of transforming a 20,000-person organization. They move past the buzzwords to discuss why 75% of skills profiles usually fail and how Workday used AI to achieve...

The world is bracing for mass unemployment, but McKinsey Global Institute researchers Sven Smit and Anu Madgavkar suggest we might actually face a labor shortage. As agents and robots move from theory to the office floor, the real friction isn't just the tech; it's our inability to learn as fast as the machines. This episode challenges the "soft skills" myth and explains why your AI strategy will...

It is rare to hear two leaders from the same organization move past the corporate script and into a "healthy debate" about the very foundation of their work. In this episode, Mike Manning (VP, HR Data & Innovation) and Preethi Gowda (Global People Insights Lead) from FM do exactly that. While Preethi advocates for the proactive power of layering skills with knowledge and ability , Mi...

Most HR leaders are obsessed with "skilling" their workforce, but they’re ignoring the tasks that actually make up the work. Josh Newman, VP of Workforce Skills at ServiceNow, argues that skills data is essentially dead weight unless it’s tied to specific business processes and AI impacts. In this episode, Josh breaks down how ServiceNow is moving beyond simple taxonomies to create a &qu...

Most organizations are pouring millions into AI tools while their actual workforce strategy remains stuck in 2010. We talk about "efficiency," but we’re failing to measure the return on investment or the impact on the people actually doing the work. In this episode, Frank and Patrick from KennedyFitch break down why the "efficiency trap" is a race to the bottom and how HR leaders must shift from m...

Most organizations are "dabbling" with AI while the technology's capability doubles every four months. Jordana Kammerud (Experienced F500 CHRO) and Mik Wornoo (Co-founder, TechWolf) argue that we’ve reached a turning point: the "Oppenheimer moment" of workforce transformation, where HR must either step up as a business strategist or watch the organization succumb to the weight of outdated role-bas...

Lisa Brockman, Talent Director at Genesys, returns to prove that skills-based transformation isn't a multi-year "maybe"—it’s a 60-day "must". After launching an AI-driven pilot to 2,000 employees in November, Genesys saw 75% of users validate their skills almost immediately. But they aren't stopping at data collection. In this episode, Lisa reveals why Genesys is making...

Most organizations spend 18 months building manual skill taxonomies only to realize the data was stale before it was even finished. Lisa Brockman (Talent Management Director at Genesys) realized that if employees don’t trust the data, they won’t use the marketplace, leaving leadership to hire externally for skills they likely already own. In this PART 1 episode with Lisa, we break down how to move...

Most companies are using AI to do the same boring work faster. They’re chasing "efficiency" while completely ignoring the fact that the work itself needs to be redesigned. Jan Duthoo (CRO, SAP SuccessFactors) joins us to explain why your business case for skills is likely too small, why L’Oreal and Safran used the exact same technology for opposite reasons, and how to stop "boiling the ocean" with...

Most organizations buy the software and hope the culture follows. Advent Health did the exact opposite. Marquita and Mary Beth spent two years building a "culture of curiosity" before flipping the switch on their technology. In this live episode from Workday Rising, they break down why skills have a five-year shelf life and how to move your workforce from "episodic learning" to...

Is your workforce plan looking in the rear-view mirror, or is it predicting your next market win? Rob Etheridge, Group Head of Workforce Strategy at HSBC, argues that most organizations are drowning in "use cases" while missing the bigger picture: future competitive advantage. In this episode, Rob reveals why he rejected the "4,000 skills" taxonomy, why buying more HR tech won't solve your talent...

In this episode of the TechWolf Podcast , Julius Schelstraete sits down with Diane Gherson , former CHRO of IBM and current independent director at TechWolf. From her vantage point as one of the most influential HR leaders of the past decade, Diane shares a candid, strategic, and urgent message for HR executives navigating AI, workforce intelligence, and the shift to skills-based organizations. Di...

In this episode of the TechWolf Podcast , recorded live at Workday Rising in San Francisco, Marianne Herrmann (Principal, Skills-Based Hiring Strategy & Enablement at Workday) reveals the real numbers behind a hiring revolution. Workday didn’t “experiment” with skills-based hiring; they rebuilt hiring around it . By combining AI-driven insights from TechWolf with behavioral science and relentl...

This special edition of the TechWolf Podcast puts the spotlight on a topic that’s often misunderstood, frequently overlooked, but absolutely foundational : Job Architecture . Julius sits down with Richard Hanson - former founder of Jobbable and now leading Digital Strategy & Innovation at WTW - for a deep, candid exploration of the frameworks behind workforce transformation. Whether you’re map...

In this episode of The TechWolf Podcast , host Julius Schelstraete speaks with Mikael Wornoo , co-founder of TechWolf and the leader of its US expansion. Calling in from New York, Mikael lays out why skills data alone is no longer enough —and how task-level intelligence is the key to making workforce AI transformation actionable. From task automation to strategic workforce planning, this episode u...

In this episode of The TechWolf Podcast, Carolien Sonck, Director of Support Services at the Belgian Government, joins Julius Schelstraete in Ghent to share a remarkable transformation story. When the COVID-19 crisis exposed a fundamental blind spot in their workforce data, Carolien and her team set out to build something entirely new: a skills-based workforce intelligence system that could suppor...

In this episode, Guillaume Lavoix, Global Skills Intelligence Lead at Sanofi, shares how one of the world’s largest pharma companies is embedding skills at the heart of its transformation. Guillaume explains how Sanofi’s “Skills Power” program emerged from a shifting business strategy: moving toward R&D-driven innovation and AI-enabled drug development. He details the early steps — from buildi...

In this episode of the TechWolf Podcast, we travel to Stockholm to meet Cecilia Sandberg , Chief HR Officer, and Dorna Shafiei , VP Talent Management at Atlas Copco Group. Together, they break down the practical journey of making a 55,000-person industrial tech company skills-enabled, without introducing a new platform or compromising on cultural values. The conversation covers internal mobility,...

Why do so many companies say they’re going skills-based, but still hire like it’s 2005? In this episode of The TechWolf Podcast, Julius sits down with Harvard Business School Professor Joe Fuller to uncover the disconnect. From the real business case for skills to the hidden role of AI, Joe makes one thing clear: skills are more than an HR experiment—they’re your edge in a high-stakes transformati...

In this in-person episode of The TechWolf Podcast , we sit down with Ben Wein , Director of Workforce Skills Enablement at Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) , live from the Flanders House in New York City. Ben shares the inside story of how one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies is becoming a skills-based organization—starting with a business-critical talent shortage in cell therapy manufact...

In this episode of The TechWolf Podcast, Marc Ramos, industry learning leader with Google, Novartis, Microsoft, Cornerstone, and EdTech advisor to leading HR tech companies, joins TechWolf CTO Jeroen Van Hautte to explore the emerging frontier of task-based intelligence . Live from New York, we unpack how tasks are reshaping the future of work, why task data may be even more actionable than skills...

In this face-to-face episode of The TechWolf Podcast, Kason Morris, Global Director of the Future of Work and Skills-Based Organization Strategy at Merck, joins us in New York City to discuss why skills are not a trend—they're infrastructure.  With experience at Allstate, Salesforce, and now Merck, Kason breaks down the practical realities of skills transformation: where to start, how to prove val...