Strategic Workforce Planning in the Healthcare Sector with Cody Martin

[00:00:00] Vijay Swaminathan: Sometimes I have seen that the company may not be your peer, but you may be losing talent to that company. And then suddenly, based on talent flow, you have identified a new peer, right?

[00:00:16] Cody Martin: If you have a large multifaceted company, your competitors are not always the other companies in your industry. If you have an, advanced, a large IT department or cutting edge supply chain organization like we do, your competitors might be, supply chain organizations in different industries.

Or, or tech industry competitors. So the big names there, so you really have to understand who your competitors are that differ from those that are in your industry. How do they operate? How do they attract talent?

[00:01:04] Vijay Swaminathan: Good morning, Cody, super honored to have you with our podcast. We are launching this Draup Dialogues. We are reaching out to all key industry leaders, who better to, reach out better than you. And I'm super honored to have this dialogue with you. My name is Vijay Swami, as you know, I'm CEO of Draup. Just folks, super honored to be here with Cody, who is really the Director of Talent Intelligence at Johnson & Johnson. As you know, global company with multiple locations to handle the legal and the regulatory challenges and the talent complexities. For the next 20-25 minutes, I'm absolutely delighted to get, all his thoughts and brain cells. Thank you, Cody, for agreeing to do this.

[00:01:55] Cody Martin: Thank you.

[00:01:59] Vijay Swaminathan: Great, let me kick start with, the question that's probably there in everyone's mind. So how do you view 2025, Cody? There is a lot of excitement among talent intelligence folks. One of the leaders whom I spoke to summarized this really well, right? Like say, it's like we're going to do everything this year because there's been a little bit of a pause.

From healthcare industry perspective, specifically the biopharma perspective that you deal with, how do you feel about 2025 and what are your thoughts? Maybe we'll kickstart from there.

[00:02:42] Cody Martin: Yeah, I think, even more than ever, leaders need the ability and the readiness to be able to adapt and change to changing environments.

From an intelligence perspective, we need to be in a position to present them the right information at the right time, and for them to be able to make the right

talent decisions, put the right people in the right places with the right compensation, with the right pipelining of talent, we need to be ready to support them so that they can be ready when these changes occur.

So it's not changes for changes sake, it's strategic changes that are coming faster than ever before, probably due to additional information that people have but it's that readiness. I think if there's anything else it's really looking at the foundation behind our data that we provide. It's not just the cool insights but it's also how accurate and quality is the information both our internal information and the external information.

So I think it's readiness and agility, and I think it's some of those foundational elements that feed some of the more advanced, things we like to do with data.

[00:04:00] Vijay Swaminathan: Got it, got it. Perhaps a follow on question. In one of the conversations that we have had in the earlier times, you made one interesting comment.

Like you are not just a biopharma company. You are a tech company, you are a manufacturing company and probably a few more classifications that I'm missing out here, right? But you will, you're benchmarking against multiple different types of companies competing for talent against. So the- in that, with that future focus, how are you getting ready, Cody, in this, what I consider to be the most exciting time for talent intelligence professionals.

I wanted to get your thoughts on how should we get ready for this phase? Because everybody has this challenge.

[00:04:57] Cody Martin: Yeah, I think, number one, it's, partnering with expert- external experts to understand who are your competitors to really think about that. Your competitors, as you mentioned, if you have a large multifaceted company, your competitors are not always, the other companies in your industry.

If you have an advanced, a large IT department or a cutting edge supply chain organization like we do, your competitors might be, supply chain organizations in different industries or, or tech industry competitors, so the big names there. So you really have to understand who your competitors are that differ from those that are in your industry.

How do they operate? How do they attract talent? And then secondarily, I think you need to, understand what are those KPIs? What are those metrics that really matter and can affect both talent and the, investment that you put in talent and

how you manage both, the talent side of things and the cost side of things as well.

[00:06:08] Vijay Swaminathan: Got it, got it. That is well said. If I can piggyback on that question, right? Like you probably know what question I'm going to ask next in the sense. What are the metrics that are on top of your mind now? One, one thing I'm hearing is, all the metrics that workforce planning that they've been tracking or become even more important.

But one thing I'm also hearing is, a few interesting different metrics. but I would like to get your perspective and then, see how my notes match with yours.

[00:06:46] Cody Martin: Yeah, I would encourage any other, organization getting into the talent intelligence space to start at the basics. Is to start at very simple supply and demand. Demand being- let's start with supply. Supply being the number of talent with a certain skill in a certain organization that a competitor has at this moment, right?

Well that's the status quo. That's where they are today. But something that's ignored from time to time and I think should be brought more to the forefront, is the demand side of things, trends and demand. And what is demand? That is who your competitors are hiring for What skills are they hiring for? And by the nature of it being demand

it's, future focused. It's almost predictive. It's predictive of where your industry or your competitors are going next versus where they are today. So I think that those are two of the most basic fundamental elements that you would start off with. If you have a supply and demand trend line. You're off to running to answering, let's say, 50% of the questions that you could get.

Now, on top of that, if I was going to add a third, it might be talent flow. And when I say talent flow, it's the, type of jobs or skills that are moving from one company to another and trying to figure out why that is and how you can capitalize on those opportunities.

[00:08:12] Vijay Swaminathan: That's a beautiful comment.

The third one, right? Connecting back to your earlier comment. Sometimes I have seen that, the company may not be your peer, but you may be losing talent to that company. And then suddenly, based on talent flow, you have identified a new peer, right? The fact that component that you mentioned came to my mind when you mentioned talent flow.

Cody, I think one, one other thing that I've been fascinated in the way you work is like your team, it's just a mix of skills that is doing all this work. Like you have a blend of business and IT and in general technology and analytical skills. How do you- A, how did you do it in a complex company like J&J and also how should we, how should practitioners think about it?

Your advice would be extremely helpful in that regard.

[00:09:15] Cody Martin: Yeah, I think in this space, but in any other part of let's say people analytics or talent management, one of the big trends I'm seeing, you talked about 2025 is, I don't think that a small organization can innovate success.

A small team within a large company can innovate successfully on its own. I really believe that it's cross functional collaboration that will breed innovation and drive it. And there's actually studies that talk about, that the more that companies, operate cross functionally, the more innovative they typically are.

So we are not just interested in the talent implications of some of the, workforce decisions we make, but we're also interested in the financial implications of those and the balance between the talent and the financial implications for the most optimal outcome. So we, we not only keep partners close to us that are innovating in different spaces,

but we keep enabling partners close about our roadmaps and where we're looking to bring them in and help us with work, if that's our IT partners or our procurement partners. And then the last piece, which I think will come up maybe in later questions is we can keep our compliance partners really close to us and they're multifaceted compliance partners, but we believe, and I'll end on this,

is that our competitive advantage, is not only innovation, our competitive advantage is compliant innovation. As if some other organization innovates faster than us, but they're not compliant, they're gonna hit roadblocks. And what we think we're doing is innovating in a regulated and compliant way that will keep that innovation going and unencumbered

as we move forward.

[00:11:12] Vijay Swaminathan: Great. well said, Cody. In fact, I'm going to, as a follow up question, right? So we all have to talk about this. So AI and the pace at which, AI models are disrupting the world. And in your industry,

especially, and I've seen this little bit. I was doing some modeling work prior to this meeting.

One of the interesting thing I saw in biopharma and as well as banks is their number one AI skill requirement is actually AI governance, right? More than the actually AI talent. Actual AI talent is also there, but the importance that governance and the compliance gets is absolutely, stunning, right?

So there's this huge demand on, focus on AI governance, ethics, compliance, and so on. And for you, you are more an innovator, agile thinker. Is this actually a struggle for you? And I know you want to be compliant innovation. But it is also going to, or does it slow you down in your thinking?

Like you're like- knowing you, you're thinking, let's put all this data and build this model. But how do you manage that, which is absolutely crucial now, the whole world is looking at this.

[00:12:43] Cody Martin: Yeah, I think in a couple of ways. From an organizational perspective, we try to get the right people in the room, both, technical folks and legal folks in the room and create councils that kind of review, large cases where, gen AI or AI are being used.

And then we try to, at scale move projects or different ideas through those review processes. And what they're really focused on is how to help that innovation be successful, but in a compliant and a risk mitigated way. So I feel like that these, these, governances enhance and not hinder our ability to be compliant. But also the added advantage? You start to interact with other very smart people that have been doing other projects.

So the compliance also brings different innovators together, and it's another touch point where you can enhance your work.

[00:13:39] Vijay Swaminathan: So you are able to centralize some AI efforts through that process? That's a very good idea.

[00:13:46] Cody Martin: And then a lot of, just philosophy around and guidelines around, look- First, spend a lot of time trying to figure out if your underlying data is correct before you start, getting into the world of more fancy, analytical approaches.

Two, focus a lot on using AI to, automate, processes. Processing manual processes and then once you get to informing decisions, and I say, I underline the word informing decisions because you really want to make sure you have

guardrails around a human in the loop. Understanding how the analytics is working and a human, making the decision where the data and the insights really just informing that decision.

It's definitely never making a decision, especially when it comes to people.

[00:14:36] Vijay Swaminathan: Got it. One interesting thing that, I was at a conference in London a couple of weeks back. And there was a lot of discussion Cody on now, because of the way we consume data now, like through the ChatGPTs of the world, it has become

even more important to be very precise in our storytelling with broader business. You may have a lot of fancy analysis, but the practitioner was saying, put that in the appendix, just keep the story strong in the front. What has been your experience? Because with more data and execs are hungry for data, but at the same time, there is also

a need for simplicity and keep the message simple in terms of insights and stories. I know I have observed you do that really well, like any complex chart, you just put it on the supporting deck, just focus on the business outcome, right? Even though it sounds simple, many practitioners are struggling in that.

So what would be, what should they do? What is your experience been, especially to do it in a large company like yours? How have you done that?

[00:15:54] Cody Martin: Yeah, two things I would, I would call out, actually three things. One, start with the business's question. Go to the business through your HR leadership and, determine what are the specific questions they're trying to answer. And then use and go to the data, the underlying data or the user interface, Answer that specific question and come back and tell them the answer.

They're less interested in how you got there. as long as you can show that the data is quality, then you tell them the answer to their question and that's really the story they're trying to get to. So keep it targeted to the business question. Second thing I would say is, for larger audiences, and you're trying to help them tell the story, map out the story around possible insights.

So when we talk about supply and demand, supply is either going up, down, or staying the same. Demand, up, down, staying the same. You could sit down and map out what insight would it be telling me about a competitor if their supply was going up? What would the insight be if it was going down? What would the insight be if it was staying flat?

What actions could I take based on that and what guardrails from a talent management perspective or a legal perspective would I tell a leader if they were making some decision? So you can wrap some of that story before you get the insight. The last thing I'd say is just this idea of qualitative insights.

We focus a lot in intelligence on quantitative insights, how many of this, what percentage? But there is a whole new world of qualitative insights, whether it be drawn from podcasts, articles, people have written, news, articles, things like that, talking about companies. And you can really harness a lot of story from those qualitative insights and marry the quantitative and the qualitative together.

That's your holistic story.

[00:17:50] Vijay Swaminathan: Got it. There's a lot of insights into that. I may have to sit and unpack a little bit of that. But because you mentioned podcasts, is there anything specific you regularly follow, Cody, for, your learning? Any podcasts, any books that you recommend for 2025 and beyond?

[00:18:11] Cody Martin: Oh well- Specifically, I like to listen to podcasts about businesses and how businesses are operating.

There's a couple I can't come to mind right now, but one of the things I try to do, one of my dreams is to look at a business insight, something that's going on with a business. There's really great books called like "Good to Great" that tell stories about different businesses. And, what I like to do is look at changes in business and try to figure out what are the talent implications of those business changes.

So a business launches a new product, what are the talent implications? If we can marry up talent insights with business insights, that's really a future. A book recommendation that I love. It just shapes the way I think about things is, "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. It really points out how, if we're not careful, we have the ability of humans to, increase our ability to think analytically versus making assumptions.

So I always encourage people to check out that book.

[00:19:17] Vijay Swaminathan: Sounds like a good product idea, Cody. It sounds fascinating. One other thing I'm going to, a little bit, dial back to your earlier comment. You mentioned that, it's fascinating to me. You mentioned that, we should also focus on demand and understanding that part, a little better.

And in as much as, logical and easy it sounds is actually a very complex journey for workforce planners to understand demand. Is there anything you can double click a bit on that? Largely, I've seen things like business leader interviews. But I haven't seen many workforce planners take external data and do the demand modeling themselves.

Any thoughts there? How we should approach it?

[00:20:17] Cody Martin: Yeah, it definitely, let's say, first things first, demand data is based on job descriptions. And that, by the way, and that's not people. So you have a lot more leeway in terms of how you work with that data than you would with supply data, which is just profiles of human beings.

So I think in the demand side, A, it's a large amount of text. It's a large amount of information in these job descriptions. So with the advantage of large language models to kind of truncate down that large amount of text into a corpus and then to be able to prompt using gen AI to prompt questions about that corpus of information, all these job descriptions from a certain company, you can say- ask gen AI things like

what are the increasing skills that we see in these? Or where is this company moving next based on the types of job descriptions that they're looking for? So if you were to know that a competitor was starting to hire a lot of a certain type of job that might key you into- it's gonna be really difficult for us to hire the same amount of people in the same amount of place. We need to differentiate our hiring strategy because we're gonna have a lot of competition in this space.

But if we move to this location, we would, it would be easier and we might have a different, approach to it. So I think that looking at job descriptions and the content of them and what skills are applied in them or illuminated, can really help you understand where you're going to have competition or where you could even source talent from.

[00:21:55] Vijay Swaminathan: Got it. That's a great, insight to me and I'm sure to all the community here. Is that where you see, from an AI impacting strategic workforce planning standpoint, is that the variable you think where AI will be very useful?

[00:22:16] Cody Martin: Yeah. Absolutely. It's the most, it's the most amount of text and it's the and it's, it's untapped.

I don't know many people who are spending lots of time trying to wrangle job descriptions.

[00:22:31] Vijay Swaminathan: Got it, got it. No, it's very helpful. Last question, Cody, and then, I'll let you go. I know you're super busy. When you look at 2025, 2026 and so on. With the global, geopolitical sensitivities that are emerging,

what sort of variables you would- you think is important from that? Global political climate or geopolitical scenarios? How are you bringing that in? Because that seems to be in many locations, selection decisions and the minds of many people.

[00:23:18] Cody Martin: What I'll say to that question is that, there's a maturity curve in your understanding of external intelligence.

And as I mentioned, start with supply and demand and really get understanding of that. And then you're going to want to look at, maybe geographic factors, where talent is located. At a certain level of the maturity curve. You're going to start to want to understand macroeconomic factors and governments, how the government decisions impact talent and, even like military and trends and things like that.

So you're going to want to understand at a certain level of the maturity curve, much more than the supply and demand. And I think those geopolitical factors will come into play. But start with supply and demand and work your way towards, maybe these factors that do have an impact, but the percent of the variants that they account for might be smaller, but still, if you can harness them or understand them, you can make better decisions.

[00:24:28] Vijay Swaminathan: Got it, got it. To wrap up, I'm just gonna ask a few quick rapid fire questions and then get your ideas on there. If you don't have an answer, you can just say no comments. Skills or roles?

[00:24:48] Cody Martin: Skills and with fast follow with experiences.

[00:24:52] Vijay Swaminathan: Got it. Quality of talent or quantity to scale?

[00:25:01] Cody Martin: Quality of talent.

[00:25:04] Vijay Swaminathan: GPT4 or DeepSeek?

[00:25:08] Cody Martin: Oh, I think that there's many more, the plethora of talent is coming forth with new innovations every day. So tomorrow- if I answered that question today, the answer would be different tomorrow. So let's see.

[00:25:24] Vijay Swaminathan: Awesome. Thanks, Cody, this has been super fun, to do this with you.

I will conclude here. Audience, you, as you could see, a lot of practical tips are embedded in this. I am, fascinated by the demand specific conversations we had and, in a very concise way Cody also pointed that AI for workforce planning is really to understand that demand data a lot better, a lot easier.

I also loved your views on how to prepare for a business meeting. And that's not the time to show off your graphs, really focus on the insights. I also loved your overall approach on compliance driven innovation. I think that's absolutely the, the area that many people do not understand.

They kind of understand it after it becomes a problem. So thank you for guiding us through that. There's probably another ten more interesting points if we listened to this again. Thank you for your contribution and we are delighted to have you here, Cody.

[00:26:34] Cody Martin: Thank you so much for the time today,

really appreciate you.

[00:26:36] Vijay Swaminathan: Thank you.