FLEX Experiences - a new AI-powered talent market place to develop your career the way YOU want it

Last week we released a small press release about our partnership with Gloat to scale up our internal talent market place. Quite frankly I was a bit surprised and overwhelmed by the enormous interest it generated. But then again, was I?  

It is a reality, that for many of us hierarchy, fixed roles and job descriptions define our work. This means that in almost every company around the world right now, a lot of people’s talents are being overlooked. If Maud has a passion for coding and creating her own computer games on the weekends, but spends her weeks doing the company accounts, chances are no one would think to invite her to an employee user-experience meeting. Outside of work, Karl from HR might have raised thousands of euros via a social media campaign for a charity, but he’s unlikely to be considered when the marketing team decides to launch a pure digital brand activation campaign 

We wanted to fix that.

I could write about WHY we wanted to make changes – rapid increase of agility and shifting ways of working, acceleration of augmenting technology in the workplace, the necessity of lifelong learning, and the huge importance of finding a sense of purpose in our daily life and in the work place – but I don’t think I need to persuade you that helping people to reach their full potential is simply a good thing.

Instead, let’s look at HOW we are trying to change things.

Working with the Unilever Foundry, we have joined forces with Tel Aviv and New York-based start-up Gloat to create “FLEX Experiences”. FLEX Experiences is a talent marketplace that matches Unilever employees with new projects and experiences. The platform is powered by AI and - based on skills, experience and development areas - connects our people with opportunities to build skills or work on different projects. This happens across all the different departments and all geographies within the business. So, team leads get access to the Unilever-wide talent and skills pool, teams become more agile and empowered, and employees get to build and define the career that they want. 

Take for example Blanka, Brand Manager for Breyers ice cream in Hungary. Hungary's ice cream market had suddenly grown very competitive. So, the category's plan to launch low-calorie brand, Breyer's, needed to be done in a super-fast way! They also didn't want to simply copy other countries' launch models – they wanted to collect and build on insights from Hungarian consumers, too. Through the FLEX platform, they found Lili Kovács in the sales team who was interested in marketing and gave her the perfect FLEX opportunity! It was a win-win: she had the chance to work with marketing and better understand the category, while Blanka got amazing support to deliver the launch. And it was an even bigger win-win at the end of the day: Lili has since then made a move into marketing as an Assistant Brand Manager in Personal Care. Her FLEX Experience allowed her to discover her passion for marketing, at the same time gave her marketing experience to show that she could launch a brand successfully.

Or Trixi, who works in our Global Mobility team and takes care of Unilever people that are being put on assignments and have to move with their families to other countries. Her purpose is to be an ‘experience maker’, and through Flex Experiences she has lived out her purpose beyond her day job by participating in Flex Experiences projects. She has helped organise the Unilever Future Leaders’ League finals for students around the world and created that ‘magical experience’ for them, and she has also helped the Learning and T&O (Talent & Organisation) teams rollout a leadership programme in another Flex Experiences project she participated in.   

In partnering with Gloat we have been truly entrepreneurial in our approach. From the start we did not want to create a solution we thought was the right answer to the problem we were trying to solve. Instead we wanted to start small, with a “minimal viable product”. We tested it to a small group of 1500 people. Together with them we fine-tuned the ‘mvp’ to a releasable product our employees believed in. 

We then took a crucial decision - if we in HR were to believe in this disruptive way of developing careers, we need to start with ourselves. Every new feature and every change is being tested to our 1750+ HR population first, before we release it to the business. Through constant learning and feedback loops we are creating an employee experience with, and for our employees.

We are now at a stage where we are scaling up to over 30,000 employees in over 90 countries. Soon to be further expanded to 50,000+ employees.

We strongly believe that if people thrive, business will thrive. Not only is FLEX Experiences helping Unilever to unlock thousands of hours per month, what’s much better, is our people like it – it currently has an employee endorsement rating of 95%. We are augmenting technology to become more human as a company – we help each employee discover their Purpose, we have ‘always on’ development conversations with them, and FLEX Experiences then provides full transparency and matches them with the right career development opportunities. It is truly empowering our people to look for opportunities that fit their purpose and follow their interest and energy. It is democratising careers, liberating, and indeed, unleashes talent potential. 

Together with Gloat, we are actively collaborating with companies that want to join us on this journey. (see also: www.innermobility.com) We are keen to make the project an adventure of open innovation in HR. The more different companies join us, the bigger impact we can create. Let us know if you are interested. 

Jeroen Wels

#uniquelyunilever