Government and Business Leaders on the Economic "Havoc" in the Philippines

Some of us, including me, have started thinking that 20-30 minutes may be the right length of most webinars. Well, I'm finishing up listening to a more-than two-hour webinar here right now and I haven't been bored for a second (partly due to some lively and aggressive questioning from a well-known news anchor). The event involves business and government representatives, including the Secretary of Labor of the Philippines Silvestre H. Bello III, and Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles, hosted by Karen Davila of ABSCBN news. The event was planned by Viventis and included multiple Eightfold representatives.

The pandemic “continues to wreck havoc on both our local and global economy,” Bello said at the outset. 

The economic disruption offers a chance to do better, he added, to transform the economy, and continue a “digital transformation.”

Regarding that transformation, Ashish Mediratta, a former talent leader at Tata Communications now with Eightfold, says that the number of resumes flowing in to companies is making AI necessary now. It can help companies take hundreds of applicants, automatically know who has what skills, rank the applicants by who has the skills needed to do the job, and give managers and HR maybe 10-20 to start focusing on.

Mediratta also says that AI is more necessary now than ever to anonymize candidates. It allows companies to look at their candidate funnel without knowing gender and ethnicity, and be able to make the statement that its hiring process is bias-free. “And that’s a huge statement to make,” he says.

Joey Concepcion, presidential adviser for entrepreneurship, says the IMF’s recent statements on the world’s precarious situation are “scary.” “Fear is all over,” he says, causing people not to spend money. The nation’s economic shutdown was among the world’s longest, is opening up, and is already shifting; Concepcion gives the example of people cooking at home and then selling their food.

Secretary Nograles, like Concepcion, was questioned by Davila about the state of affairs: the length of the country's shutdown, the difficulty restaurants are having operating at partial capacity, and how hard it is to get to work with limited public transportation.

Kamal Ahluwalia, president at Eightfold (which launched a mechanism to match laid off/furloughed employees with those hiring), agrees that in the short run, “job displacement is going to be very, very high. Jobs will be very different.” 

But, he says, companies that use advanced AI to hone in on skills and not industry or past job title, and hire for potential, will be able to find people in industries other than their own. “All the hiring infrastructure (currently) goes into asking people to do the same thing over and over again,” he says. The reality, he says, is people leave for new challenges, and companies should hire people who have the right skills, but may have been doing a slightly different job previously, perhaps even in another industry. 

Similarly, Ahluwalia says, “start with employees first.” In other words, there are people in companies’ own workforces, perhaps even some slated for a layoff, who have the very skills companies are hiring for now. By using AI to get their arms around employee skills, companies can move people internally in parts of the company that are growing.

Mediratta closed with advice for both employers and employees. For employees, he says, "work harder, and do not be choosy about what comes your way." And for employers, he says, "retain as many employees as you can, provide challenges, and help employees upskill and learn new skills." To both parties, Mediratta says, "stay safe, stay healthy, friends."