The HR Community Podcast
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Civitas Talent is excited to bring you a series of podcasts dedicated to the HR community. This is a space where you can learn best-practice solutions from HR community leaders, with host Shane O'Neill.
Whether you’re a CEO, HR executive or operating across the wider HR sector - this podcast is for you!
The HR Community Podcast
How AI Is Reshaping HR, with Melissa Bowden, HRD APACJ at Workday
The future of HR is unfolding before our eyes, and it's being shaped by data, skills, and artificial intelligence. In this enlightening conversation, Melissa Bowden, Senior Director for People and Purpose at Workday APAC and Japan, takes us deep into the transformation happening at the intersection of human resources and technology.
Melissa shares Workday's pioneering journey toward becoming a skills-based organization, revealing how they've leveraged machine learning since 2018 to create tangible benefits for both employees and the business. The results speak for themselves: 42% higher internal mobility rates for employees participating in skills development "gigs" and an 11% increase in career growth sentiment across the organization.
What makes this conversation particularly valuable is the practical application of cutting-edge tools. Workday's employee listening platform delivers weekly pulse checks that provide granular, real-time insights—enabling HR leaders to make immediate adjustments rather than waiting for annual survey results. Meanwhile, their AI-powered recruitment tools are transforming how talent acquisition teams operate, with interview scheduling time reduced from three days to just seven hours.
But perhaps most fascinating is Melissa's perspective on the emerging reality of managing both human and digital workforces simultaneously. As AI agents take on increasingly complex role-based functions, HR leaders must develop new frameworks for oversight, governance, and integration. Despite these technological advances, Melissa emphasizes that AI's purpose isn't to replace humans but to "amplify the human experience" by freeing people to focus on higher-value work.
Whether you're a CHRO planning your organization's AI strategy, an HR professional wondering how your role might evolve, or a business leader seeking to understand the future of work, this episode provides a compelling glimpse into what's possible when human insight meets technological innovation. The revolution is here—are you ready to embrace it?
Get in touch with Civitas Talent!
Enjoying this episode of The HR Community Podcast? Stay tuned for quick insights and updates during this episode, including upcoming HR events, workshops, and resources for 2025, proudly brought to you by Civitas Talent. Your journey to building better teams and thriving in HR starts here. Visit www.civitastalent.com or connect with us on LinkedIn for more. Let’s get back to the conversation!
Welcome to the HR Community Podcast. My name is Shane O'Neill, founder of Sila Tass Talent, the HR and HSE recruitment community. Each episode we will host HR leaders and discuss their journey and discover best practice HR solutions across the HR industry. Whether you're a CEO, hr executive or operating across the wider HR space, this podcast is for you. Please like and subscribe, and don't forget to comment and share your views. Enjoy the episode. Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the HR Community podcast. This morning I am joined by Melissa Bowden. Melissa is the Senior Director for People and Purpose for Workday across APAC and Japan. Welcome, mel.
Speaker 2:Hey, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1:That's good. That's good. Mel and I for everyone that's listening have been speaking quite a bit about this episode over the last couple of months and we have been fleshing out some really meaty topics. Workday don't need much of an introduction, and I would say that anyone who's attended some of our HR events Mel, you don't need much of an introduction either. Mel, you don't need much of an introduction either. Tell us a little bit about who you are, mel. Tell us a little bit about your role, a little bit about Workday. For those who don't know who Workday are, maybe they're living under a rock somewhere. But yeah, tell us a bit more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, no problem at all. So, hi everyone, I'm Melissa Bowden. You know, first and foremost, my main role is mum to a son and a 12-year-old son, so that's always really fun. But certainly my role here is to lead the P&P function across APAC in Japan and ultimately, what I'm required to do is really look at our talent strategy and think about how we scale and grow our region across APAC in Japan. So it really needs to align with some of the key focus areas that we have, both from a go-to-market perspective, both from a location perspective and, of course, how we scale and grow even with markets like Japan and even India.
Speaker 1:Great, fantastic. I'm sure that anyone listening is going to be really excited and interested to hear what you have to say, particularly around some of that strategy. But before we do, Mel, let's sort of take it back a little bit. I've been fortunate enough to have time with you over the last couple of months to learn a bit more about you and your journey. But for those that are listening, tell us a little bit about Mel's story. So when did you get into HR and what did that sort of journey look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, many moons ago I don't want to describe my age, but certainly many moons ago I, similar to some may have started in the recruitment world and I worked in the agency world and kicked it off with Hayes, and that was a great experience, such a great launching pad for many more of the work that I was able to do.
Speaker 2:So I stayed in the talent agency or talent acquisition side for some time before moving in-house, and then I really got the opportunity to move into HR in-house when I went to Adobe and I was part of the talent acquisition team there for a period of four years. I then had a wonderful opportunity, through scale and growth, to go to Intuit here in the region and for those of you that may know, intuit is QuickBooks and then, following that, I've had the opportunity to join Workday five years ago. So this was pre COVID. Right as COVID started, we went into lockdown. So I've been fortunate to work with the organisation and certainly seen some significant growth, from the headcount numbers that we had across the region to the headcount numbers that we have today and the ones that we have planned for in the next couple of years.
Speaker 1:Fantastic Lockdown, what a time. And also, when you talk about that, it also makes me think about some of the organisations and industries that you've worked in so very much. That kind of large scale, hyper growth, progressive tech. Tell us a little bit about that journey like from a HR perspective. Obviously your business often lean to you for that. Hyper growth, talents, the engagement, the performance. How does all that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think one of the things that we do know, particularly in our roles, is and particularly with the markets, you know there is absolutely an acceleration of change and you know, just here, locally, we're seeing it's interesting we've got an election coming up and the amount of information and discussion around workplace legislation and then the back. You know, the changes of one party to another are quite dramatic and then they flip. So you know we have so many factors and then you've got the trade war going on at the moment, so there's so many macro factors that are constantly impacting our organisations and, of course, sentiment and business performance, and so that obviously increases. And then we also have increased expectations around flex well-being. What's our purpose? And so these are some of the critical things that we're thinking about.
Speaker 2:You know, as I think about our time at Workday and where it kicked this work off in becoming a skills-based organization and really defining our skills-based approach, and it probably started from memory around 2018, 2019. And really one of the key advantages that we found with this is it's really helped provide us with a lot of real-time insights and it's been largely driven based on the machine learning and AI that we already have been built in our Workday platform. So if I think about a couple of things as an example, you know I remember joining and I had to fill in my profile, the skills that I had. Well, what this did, was it actually then fed into our Workday skills cloud? Why is that important? Because then it helped me navigate through my career hub how I can think about my career, where do I want to go, what skills do I need to develop, what learning? You know programs were then fed to me. How was I able to get involved in a gig to help develop my skills, et cetera, et cetera. So there's been a lot that we've done at Workday very early on in our commitment to take a skills-based approach. But then how has our system and technology been able to support it?
Speaker 2:And then the last thing which I think is really important that you mentioned is very much around our culture. You know, in any organization, whether you're scaling or whatever it might be, whatever challenges you may be going through, getting real insights into what's happening with your talent is really important. You know we're fortunate We've got a product called Peacon. Peacon, for those of you that may not know, is our employee listening tool, and what it does do is it gives us real live data insights. So every Wednesday yesterday I received a question.
Speaker 2:You know, a survey basically gives me about six to seven questions and the questions vary over a 12-week period to really ask how am I going? And it can range from everything from engagement, well-being, you know, benefits. It can look at our value system, it can look at how are we managing change, are we agile as an organization, et cetera, and so really these questions are being asked across our entire population globally every Wednesday, our entire population globally every Wednesday. These insights are critical because they've really helped play a path in how we think about policy design, benefit design. When we roll something out, we certainly hear through PECOM whether it's hitting the mark or not. Then we may need to fine tune it. So it's real-time data versus waiting for that once a quarter, once a year sentiment. We're getting it real time and we can interact anonymously with our workmates around what they're saying, feedback, you know suggestions, et cetera. So this has really helped us play into the vastly changing environment, how it's playing into our workmates and how can we adapt and be agile at the same time.
Speaker 1:Love that. I really do love that. I love that because, as you would know, in some of our recent workshops, workforce strategy has been a big topic and, for those that are listening to a lot of our events, we've had some amazing HR and talent leaders across APAC and some are quite immature in terms of their journey with data and tech and skill-based hiring and learning, and some are not, and clearly Workday are on the other scale of that, quite sort of progressed and matured, which is great to hear and see. Tell us a little bit about that workforce strategy. So, as you say, you're getting real-time data, you're getting real-time feedback, employees are heard and listened to and they feel, I guess, that they're contributing to that overall strategy as well. Do you feel like there's a good uptake in terms of engagement and performance and that ability to hear from your employees before you roll stuff out, mel, yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh look, definitely the benefit that I have with using this tool is I can really get into the verbatims and we have AI capability in there, so it can give us some real interesting AI insights, which is great. It also then enables me to understand where my hotspots are. I can segment it right down. I can get down to a manager level. All feedback is anonymous and as a manager of three staff, you get a rating, you get an engagement score, so I can get as granular as a manager with three direct reports. So that's where I can get granular.
Speaker 2:I can go by gender, tenure, job family location, supervisory, whatever it might be. So I'm really able to do that, which has played really well to us, and I think we've known that. We all know that career path is obviously critical for everyone and when I think about some of the data points for our career hub and the effectiveness of the gigs, so for us, how we define gigs is the opportunity where you spend, you know, maybe one to ten hours, say a week, on work that's helping you do some project work.
Speaker 2:That's going to develop your skills, which is really lovely and an interesting stat. What we have is that we know that we've been really able to accelerate our people's ability to have internal mobility. So for people that participated in a gig, we saw a 42% increase in internal mobility following them having learned a new skill and applying and participating in a gig. So some of this stuff really adds a lot more sustainability and retention of our talent, whilst also providing the opportunity for career growth. And what really gets me excited is, in PECON, our career growth sentiment grew by 11%. So we're able to kind of make changes here, but see over here what impact it's had. So you know, the data set that we get awarded to us based on Workday, our platform and the relevant tools that we use really helps accelerate us.
Speaker 1:That's really cool, really really cool. And then you know we talk a lot about data and you and I spoke about this recently as well. There's a lot happening in the world of work and we talk a lot about skills shortages, technology depending on how you feel about the evolution of tech at the moment, talk to me a little bit about your experience being so embedded in this transformation from an AI and tech and overall strategy perspective in your HR role. So I guess what I'm trying to say is HR are now so embedded in this transformation. Do you feel like that's really enabled you, your team Workday, to progress this to where it is now, where you're getting some really good measurable outcomes?
Speaker 2:It's really interesting when I think through this and 100% you know this is really aligned with where we need to go. You know, what's really interesting for me right now is the talk around agents, ai agents, and there's a lot of talk around agents being task orientated, whereas here at Workday we think about it being role orientated. So then when you start to think about it, you're like, okay, I'm the chief HR officer and here I am sitting around and I have a human workforce. Now I have a digital workforce, because when you think about a recruiter agent or a policy expense agent and they're doing role work for you, you have to think about how are you onboarding them? How are you ensuring that they're doing what's accurate? How do you offboard them?
Speaker 2:So there is this is where my head starts to spin as I think through this. You know, collectively, as we're driving this here at Workday, how do I then manage a digital workforce as part of it? So it's a really super interesting time for us in HR in how we're thinking about it, because we can see the benefits, what the reality is and what I'm seeing from many talks that I've been part of and summits and so on. Everyone's at varying levels of appetite of getting involved.
Speaker 1:So true you know.
Speaker 2:Some are really like, oh, I know it's coming, we're ready to do it. Others are like jumping on it because they're like, oh my God, the efficiencies, the work that perhaps we may not like as much. It's getting freed up through AI to enable me to add really meaningful, valuable insights right back to leadership and spend more time in the business when I'm in a business partner role. So it's a really interesting time for us in HR right now. I think it is super exciting. My guidance, you know.
Speaker 1:I feel like I'm running as I'm learning and getting my hands really dirty and I think that's the best way to do it just get your hands dirty and get really involved, because, unfortunately, if you don't, you'll fall behind yeah, yeah, and I've noticed that a lot of our events um as well, mel is and even just general conversations, like the conversations you and I have been having um around this, where, um, you've got on one side of the scale, people who have taken the reins, they've already started to make some impact from an AI perspective in their HR and talent functions and overall business.
Speaker 1:And then on the other side, I mean, yes, there's a little bit of fear on the other side, the unknown, but they've started to move to, I guess what I would call the next stage is exploratory. Ok, I want to go to these events, I want to learn more about it, I want to listen to the podcast with Mel and hear a little bit more about it so I can start to educate myself, and it's that kind of okay, I'm a little more reserved than the others, but I'm, I'm, I'm still progressing and I think, um, I think you're right.
Speaker 1:I think it's a really cool time, um, for HR to drive it it. What, what are you finding, is the overall feedback, I guess, from employees, um, when it comes to, um, digital agents, yeah, yeah oh look, I think the most obvious one is I will be replaced yeah you know, and I think when I think about workday's philosophy on this, is that we see ai as a way to amplify the human experience.
Speaker 2:It's not a replacement. Yes, some of the work that's being done, some of the roles 100% will actually be consumed with AI, but it's then taking that person and re-skilling. Remember, if you've got their skills, you're developing them, you're re-skilling them, they're getting gigs, mobility, etc. You're able to then help really drive a great career for them, but also add the value that they're getting gigs, mobility, et cetera. You're able to then help really drive a great career for them but also add the value that they're seeking in their roles today. So you know, we do really see it here at Workday is AI is not to replace humans, but it's certainly to amplify this human experience and the value that they're bringing back to the business. And there's loads. You know, when I think about the employee life cycle and how we're touching on it even at work day, you know I get really excited. Yes, we've got our career hub, we've got gigs, we've got our recruitment agent. We recently acquired HydeScore. For those of you that don't know, it's an AI recruitment platform and it's really interesting. And what I love about Hydeatt Score is there's two kind of key things, two key components to it. There's Spotlight and there's Fetch, which we're really we've got that in pilot stage right now which we're really excited by. But what Spotlight does is like many other applicant tracking systems. Of course they bring in you've got your whole lot of applicants and then they do a bit of an assessment and they kind of prioritise to the recruiter how you need to. You know who should be the person that you're actually looking at. But what our highest score is doing through Spotlight is it's actually reading the CV and understanding that you may not have identified analytics as a skill, but when it's read your CV it's like hang on, you're working with Excel, you're doing this, that and the other. I reckon you've got analytic skills. And this is obviously through all of the AI you know building and capability and testing and all the rest of it. It's able to then really identify skills that perhaps that CV hasn't brought to life or the individual hasn't identified and it's bringing to life to really accelerate that. So that's what Spotlight does for us.
Speaker 2:Then what Fetch does. So when we think about staff shortages and the inability to find the talent quickly that we're looking for. What Fetch does for us is it's going to actually go. So you create a requisition, you've got your 10, whatever skills that you're really looking for. It is going to go to your talent population, your community pipeline however you describe it in your organization for the past three years and it is going to go and look at all that talent and bring it to your shortlist for the recruiter to assess. Because I don't know about many of the other applicant tracking systems, but when you think about having to look at your pools and how you categorize and how you search and how do you remember, this is where Hyde Schools, ai is really being sophisticated to bring that to the forefront for the recruiter to assess and engage with the relevant candidates so we're super excited about that as part of our recruitment agent offering yeah, that's so cool.
Speaker 1:I mean again what I'm taking out of that and me putting on my selfishly my recruitment hat here is, um, you made the point, it's bringing this forth to the recruiter to his head, so it's, it's. It's almost like the recruiter's role now has been um restructured in a way that a lot of the how do I say that? I guess the tasks that take most of the time, it's the screening it's the administration, it's the advertising.
Speaker 1:A lot of that's being managed now to save time, be more efficient. But then that's given your recruitment partner that ability to get out into the business and sit down with their teams and go hey, I know we've kind of worked a bit reactively together. When you need to hire Now let's work proactively, let's sit down, let's look at how your team should potentially look in the next 12 months, three years, five years, and I can proactively work with the tools that I have to try and set that up. I think it's really cool.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. You know and we've seen that same value that you're talking about. Another platform we're using in partnership is one with Paradox, and Paradox is fantastic for interview scheduling. It has coordinated over 37,000 interviews and it's reduced our scheduling time of getting an interview scheduled of three days down to seven hours, and so this is just driving a hell of a lot more efficiency in our system. When you've got a candidate talent shortage, there's just so many things that you can do to just move the needle in certain areas that can actually change the game for you and your industry. So that's another example of where we're using and partnering with AI platforms to help accelerate our ability to be successful.
Speaker 1:That's very good.
Speaker 1:And then you know, we talked about a couple of things there over the last few topics as well, mel, but you know again, I'm sort of picking out bits myself and and sort of reflecting on them. When you look at that recruitment cycle, it's more efficient now, like we discussed, it's a lot more strategic. It's a lot more proactive. So now we've got people to the business, um, and that's when the skills-based hiring and learning really starts to set in, because they can identify here are my skills. They don't need to be there for 10 years to be the next manager. They don't need to be specifically in sales or marketing or manufacturing or whatever businesses they join, as they can really start to look at their future in the business as well and how that looks. Which brings me on to the next topic that I thought we'd unpack, which was around machine learning. I know you're a huge advocate for this, so I mean, look again, tell us a little bit about your experience and exposure with machine learning at Workday and some of the wonderful things that you've been involved in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, I think, another thing that that excites me, you know, and this kind of lends in really nicely around our career hub, as I've mentioned earlier, and our Skills Cloud. I do want to talk, though, to you know, we've talked a lot about the hiring of talent, and then you've got the talent. So then, what do you do? And I'm always conscious, because whenever I have these talks, I always get asked the question around well, how you know, if I'm saying that I can do X, y and Z, how do we really know that I can do X, y and Z? And this is where we think about our partnership with Skills Cloud, our own product with TechWolf as an example, and TechWolf, for us, has really been able to validate the skills of that workmate's profile.
Speaker 2:And let me explain. You know, they're taking the ability of the job profile, the actual activity of work that they do. So this could be through JIRA tickets, it could be Salesforce, it could be a variety of actions that they're actually taking, and, as a result of that, this validates for us whether the individual has the skills that are relevant, or that they're basically validating the skills that they relevant, or that they're basically validating the skills that they've identified, which is super critical and really important when we're thinking about supply and demand of talent across the organization and how do we think about mobilization. So it definitely takes out that do they really have that skill? It starts to validate it and then it's starting to we're still working on this, but it's starting to give us some levels around proficiency, because how do you know how good someone is in that particular skill?
Speaker 2:So we're starting to get some validation around and also thinking about that proficiency level. So these are some of the things that really help us when we look at what you've asked for definitely.
Speaker 1:Do you feel like, as well, there is that human nature. Do you feel like, as well, there is that human nature, human element, when it comes to, I guess, us now leveraging the technology? So I mean the word that comes to mind is trust, because I guess, as a business, you need to trust the tech. As a potential applicant or employee, you need to trust the tech, but also as humans, like as the employer and the employee, you got to trust each other, that you know the information that I'm going to embed into this system, that you're going to take that on board, and it sounds like a lot of the surveys that you've rolled out and the conversations that you've had with employees have worked out really well and, similarly, the employers sort of need to start to look at okay, will I trust the information and the data that's coming through from this employee about their skills is accurate, but we will work on any areas that they can develop it as well. I think it's a really cool cycle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is, you know, and I think trust is absolutely right, because that's where you know it comes back to that comment I made around. You know, because that's where you know it comes back to that comment I made around, you know, ai is to really help complement and augment and enhance the human experience. You know, when we think about some of these touch points in recruitment, there still needs to be some people that assess the candidates at the end of the day and make decisions on those candidates and think about the workforce pipeline, et cetera. So there's just all of those level of detail that needs to be governed. We need to check, you know. And then, when we come back to the role of the head of HR or the CPO, they've got a digital workforce. Yeah, they need to validate, make sure that the work is being done accurately, et cetera. Or there is no errors and what do we do about that, et cetera. So it is definitely a minefield. It's certainly something that you need to really embrace because it's taken off.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it really has. It really has, and I mean it's taken off. I mean, if we reflect on the last decade, or even the decade before that, you know how HR has evolved so much as well. A bit of a curveball question, but, but I mean, if you had your crystal ball, mel, what do you see over the next 10 years, 20 years, from a HR perspective? I mean, the way things are going now with technology and AI and digital agents, what's your sort of predictions?
Speaker 2:Oh my God, that's a hard one, isn't it Gosh?
Speaker 2:if you just think about the evolution of the internet, let alone ultimately think this. You know we in HR often seem to be supporting the business and look, I really foresee that this is where we're going to be shaping the business to deliver on the business strategy and outcomes. And so when you think about, you know we've got the plane in the air, we're up in the air and we're landing it, we're lockstead in actually how we landed and shape it and, with all of the 8i tools that are becoming available and will be far more sophisticated over the next 10 years, it's going to be able to give us the ability to be agile and think about and predict any risks that are going to come our way, any headwinds.
Speaker 2:We might think about what skill, any risks that are going to come our way, any headwinds. We might think about what skill gaps are coming. How do we mobilize talent? Where are we thinking about locations, because we will have, remember, a human and digital workforce, and then imagine the ability to be agile when we've got macroeconomic factors hitting us, because they will come. And so, as a workforce, as an organization, when we're thinking about the role of HR, we are in an incredible position to really shape how we land the plane and what's going to happen with the information at our fingertips. So I'm pretty excited. It sounds, you know, it sounds possible and plausible. So I think, definitely for me, this is where I see our future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow, it's such a great overview, mel, and links into everything we talked about. But, yeah, you're right, like the future, imagine how amazing that would look from a business perspective where HR can now be the drivers to hey, we've been identified from the data, from the systems, is the risk that we're predicting. Let's reskill our team to tackle it. Or here's the workforce strategy of the skills that we need to hire into the business.
Speaker 1:And you're sort of proactively getting ahead. I love that and, like you say, the risks and the macro factors as well. I mean, you know, the US have just announced a couple of curveballs, but without getting into politics, because that's not what this podcast is, it just shows that we can't predict everything. So the data and the systems and that enablement to support us, I think it's such a great, great advantage to have in HR. Mel, I am super, super happy that you jumped on the show today. There's so much that we could unpack and I'm sure there'll be a part two For everyone that's listening. I'm sure you've got your notepads ready or your digital notepads full. I certainly do. I did at the workshop we had in Sydney where Mel kindly hosted the Fireside Chat and we unpacked some of the conversations on this. So, in short, that was amazing, mel. Thank you again. Pleasure yeah.
Speaker 2:Likewise, that was great, Thank you. You know I get a bit geeky and super excited around AI and the future of it and there's still so much to be done. Like it's incredible. It's such a revolutionary phase for us and, yeah, I hope more people jump on. They're just going to have to right they're going to have to. Thanks so much for having me. It's been really great.
Speaker 1:Awesome Thank.
Speaker 2:Take care.
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