Defensible Decisions: Introducing the Talent Risk Assessor

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Scott Kelly: Hi everyone. Welcome to Defensible Decisions. I’m Scott Kelly. I’m a shareholder in Ogletree Deakins, Birmingham, Alabama and Washington, D.C. offices. I lead the firm’s workforce analytics and compliance practice group, along with being a co-chair of the pay equity practice group here at Ogletree. And before we get started, just a real quick note, this conversation is for informational purposes only, and it’s not legal advice. If you have specific questions about your organization’s situation, please reach out to legal counsel. Today I’m joined by two people I work with every day. Pete Bell, who’s a senior data manager and statistician on our data analytics team, and Chrissy Blantz, a data manager on the same team. Pete and Chrissy, welcome.

Pete Bell: Thanks, Scott. It’s great to be here.

Chrissy Blantz: I’m happy to be here too. This is going to be fun.

Scott Kelly: I hope it will be. I’m sure it will be. We spend a lot of time together, so it’s fun to connect on this podcast. Because today we’re not breaking down a new regulation, or a recent enforcement action, we’re actually going to introduce something that we’ve built here at Ogletree. It’s called the Talent Risk Assessor, and it’s a product that came out of the work our attorneys and our data analyst team have been doing together for years. We’re going to tell you why we built it, how the legal and the data sides came together to create it, and what it actually does for employers. We’re hoping in future episodes to dig deeper into each of the four areas that our tool covers, selections and hiring, separation decisions, talent progression and retention, and then we do have a component for pay equity. I guess we’ve been talking a little bit, Pete, about the talent risk assessor. It might be great if you could give our listeners a high-level picture of what it is and what it might do.

Pete Bell: Sure, sure. So, my elevator speech on it, the talent risk assessor is our intuitive comprehensive dashboard that gives a clear overview of the workforce metrics over the entire employment lifecycle of an employee. In doing that, we cover four major areas. So we’ll look at selection hiring. This is where we look at both our external and internal selections by demographic group. We take it a step further beyond just selections analyses, and we’ll take it to the stages within that hiring process to funnel down to specific dispositions that may identify particular disparities we want to investigate. We also separately look at separations, both voluntary, involuntary terminations, again, across different demographic groups to see what separation reasons may be popping up, and what policies may be leading to those issues. And then we look at the movements within your time at the company. So talent progression and any retention.

So, how are we selecting people for a promotion? Are we evaluating our performance ratings for bias or any issues there? And are we seeing differences in time for promotion? Are we promoting one demographic group faster than we’re promoting others? So, you get the picture of the start, the middle and in the end. And then I’ll highlight quickly, we do some high level pay equity analysis in there as well. I say high level, this is more a review of average pay, but it can give us hotspot areas we want to dig in deeper, which may call for a deeper dive pay equity audit analysis, which is something we can help with as well.

Chrissy Blantz: And that’s what I find great is that it starts to tell next steps, but it really helps turn all this life cycle data into something actionable, and it empowers employers to proactively identify and address those areas of potential discrimination or barriers to equal employment opportunity before it gets real costly down the road.

Scott Kelly: Well, we’ve certainly covered a lot of ground today. We really just started though. So, listeners over our next few episodes, we’re going to do a deep dive into each of those four areas that Pete described. We’re going to talk about the selections. Chrissy’s going to walk through how the tool examines every stage of the hiring funnel, from application screens through offer and hire, and how employers can use the data to assess their selection processes. Then we’ll cover separations, talent progression and retention, including the time to promotion metric that we think a lot of our listeners are going to find pretty interesting. And we’ll also end with an episode talking a little bit more about those pay equity trend analysis that Pete discussed. So, subscribe and follow Defensible Decisions on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and sign up for our client alert that we send out. It’s one I send out about every two weeks to my clients. If you’re interested in the talent risk assessor and want to see what it looks like for your organization, reach out to me, or to any of your Ogletree Deakins contacts for next steps. Pete, Chrissy, thank you all very much for being here. Thanks listeners for joining. This is the end of our time today, but we’ll see you next time on Defensible Decisions.

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