EP91: Walmart U.S. Tech - How to Leverage AI in Succession Planning

All-In Recruitment is a podcast by Manatal focusing on all things related to the recruitment industry’s missions and trends. Join us in our weekly conversations with leaders in the recruitment space and learn their best practices to transform the way you hire.

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This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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Lydia: Welcome to the All-In Recruitment podcast by Manatal, where we explore best practices, learnings, and trends with leaders in the recruitment space. If you like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for our weekly episodes. I'm your host, Lydia, and this week, we have Arkesh Mishra of Walmart. Welcome to the show, Arkesh.

Arkesh: Hi, Lydia, glad to be on the show.

Moving From Engineering to the People Space

Lydia: So Arkesh, what's kept you in the people space? Walk us through your journey so far. You spent five years at Walmart, I understand.

Arkesh: Yes. So, I did my undergrad in engineering. However, after a few years of being an engineer, I wanted to be an expert in other spaces. So, I ended up doing a master's degree in Human Resource management. I had a very diversified experience when it comes to HR.

I started my career with Gallup by understanding data and diving into a lot of data trends, building hypotheses, and validating them. Then I moved into Aon, where I spent a lot of time helping organizations build their organization, designing and building the right competency and skill models, and so on. After that, I moved into Walmart now.

As for what’s kept me in HR and what’s been the pull for me when I look at HR, I started off in theory, and I did a role around strategy and programs in this mentor role here at Walmart, in the Head of People. So, if I look at HR, I feel HR is one of those functions where it brings together the best of many worlds. There is the ability to design programs and solve problems at scale, and I love the problem-solving part of it, where we are able to create solutions that impact people. They then get to know how to make people’s lives better. Being able to help make someone’s life better, solve problems, and create solutions. That’s one bit of it.

The second bit of it is you get to interact with a lot of people across a variety of interactions you would have, and the ability to talk to talent across so many different functions and the ability to know so many people. I think that’s been a huge pull for me.

The third bit is that there’s a lot of information out there in terms of what an ideal leader should look like, what an ideal manager should look like, how people should behave, and so on. Being in HR allows us to not just observe, but be able to influence that, and that is a very interesting part of my job. We’re getting deeper into human psychology, being able to understand how we can influence the outcomes. How do we get people to drive certain behaviors? And so, I think that these are the three things that have kept me in HR.

Lydia: It's interesting that you've come from engineering into the people space, a very technical, into a very human sort of elements. What are the transferable skills or sort of way of thinking that you've taken from engineering into the people space?

Arkesh: Talked about problem-solving, I believe being an engineer helps me leverage that muscle of problem-solving a lot. When you look at a lot of tech problem-solving, it starts off with, what are the symptoms, and then, you start clicking down, and then you get to a root cause analysis.

So, I have a very similar approach to problem-solving and design thinking as well. I do borrow a lot of concepts from my engineering experience, as well as what engineers even do, currently. For example, how do we arrive at the root cause analysis of a situation? Or how do you use design thinking to build a solution when you’re building a solution?

And can we use concepts like user acceptance testing, to do a better pilot, see whether its solution works, tweak a couple of iterations or sprints, and then execute it out? So, I feel being an engineer has helped me with that aspect of problem-solving, solution design, and being able to operationalize. So, those are transferable skills that I have been able to cross-leverage.

Lydia: So, in this role, you are now Head of People at Walmart U.S. Tech. What are some key areas that you prioritize in this room?

Arkesh: So, the top three priorities I would say are, first; we constantly try to evolve our ability to understand what the talent and the skill landscape looks like. How do we make sure that we have the right talent for the right roles? We are constantly involved in upskilling, R&D, and so on. So, that's a big priority for us now, with the increasing presence of AI and our understanding. How does it get embedded into our ways of working with skills? The needs to be updated, and so on, in a way that our associates need to be upscaled.

The second priority is making sure that when you look at the pace of tech and retail, both of these spaces are fairly fast-evolving, and they're also spaces where change is constant, it's an adage, but I've lived it for many years now. So, I would say being able to build the right organizational design, being able to have the right leadership team, and being able to build the succession pipelines well.

The third is around belonging and integral being, making sure that our associates feel they could bring their own selves to work, making sure we're creating a psychologically and physically safe environment, making sure that everyone across any sort of all groups feels welcome in the workplace, and being able to just create the kind of environment and make sure our associates feel taken care of.

Checking Out Walmart U.S. Tech Structure

Lydia: We’ll go to the succession planning part later. As you said, it's rapidly evolving, changing constantly, especially in the parallel that you drew between retail and technology. How is Walmart U.S. Tech structured?

Arkesh: So, the way we are structured is, all of our tech is part of what we call the Walmart tech organization. Within the Walmart global tech organization, we’ve got teams that support each of the various business segments.

For example, the team that I support is a Walmart U.S. Tech organization. It’s part of our global tech, but this organization supports the Walmart US retail business. Similarly, we report for some state that supports the business, and we’ve got an international tech team that supports international business.

However, we’ve also got a horizontal set that cuts across the segments, which helps us in building leverage and allows us to build economies of scale. So, for example, we’ve got teams that help us build platforms in terms of how we leverage cloud and big data. We’ve also got teams that help us run our information security system. So, those are the advanced tools.

Lydia: So, we've seen tremendous changes to not just technology, but also the nature of work in the past three to four years. That would include the amount of time you’ve probably spent at Walmart, looking into different needs.

So in terms of these disruptions that have affected the people space over recent years, what are some key takeaways that you've had from this period professionally?

Arkesh: The people space has been evolving, and I’ve seen a fair amount of evolution in the last five years. My experiences are confined to Walmart, as I was a consultant before I joined Walmart. So, I was also able to experience a lot of changes as I was delivering solutions for my clients.

If I were to look at the three trends that I’ve seen over the last five to ten years, one is the continuous relevance that skills play in today’s world.

Skills have become the currency through which we assess talent, as well as capabilities, and are able to connect back to the business strategy. What’s the strategy? How is the strategy evolving? And what does that mean from a talent perspective? I’d say, skills have continued to gain a lot of relevance and importance over time. Our ability to define the right skills across various jobs and under the various talent requirements has been super impactful.

Second, I would say, that the entire focus on belonging and well-being has become a very important priority. COVID was a great reset for everybody. It helped us look internally and see what our priorities are as humans. I think that’s allowed us to really look at priorities as people and as a result, well-being has emerged as a key priority and “belongingness” in order. It’s one of those things where our ability to make everybody feel welcome and allow everybody to bring their whole selves is important. A sense of belonging and well-being, I would say, has gained a lot of importance.

Third, which is more of an evergreen topic for me, and it’s my favorite topic, is our ability to design organizations and structure organizations in a way, both from an organization structure perspective and the way we build our organization, workforce plans, and so on, that’s continuing to evolve. It’s been a very important pillar when it comes to strategy. I’ve seen that continue to stay at a very key priority across not just Walmart, but across previous experiences that I’ve had. So, these three are the trends I will say that I’ve observed over the last decade or so.

Creating Lasting Connections to Retain Talent

Lydia: In terms of attracting the right talent, perhaps you have the right kind of scope, and you find the right skill you can match. But retaining top tech talent, as you said, in terms of planning their growth in the organization, what are some best practices that you could share?

Arkesh: A few years back, we asked ourselves, if you remember, in 2001, there was this massive boom. All sorts of talent across various functions were facing a lot of attrition. So, one of the questions we asked ourselves was, what’s the associated value proposition that makes associates want to stay at Walmart? What do we offer that’s unique and different?

We narrowed down some of the things. One of them was that we pride ourselves on being a very purpose-driven organization at Walmart. So, even if an associate joins, whether they’re joining the retail side, finance, or tech, one of the things that we want to do is create a personal connection with the associate. We want them to understand what the enterprise is trying to do.

Purposeful interactions were one important aspect for us as part of our associate value proposition.

Lydia: I'm sorry, Arkesh. Purposeful interactions? What does that look like?

Arkesh: Purposeful interaction, purposeful connection, and the ability to connect what you do as an associate to the overall mission of the organization are key. For example, we strongly believe that we help our customers save money and live better. So, what does an associate do today, how does that enable the end customer to either save time or save money, or both?

As a result, in a lot of initiatives that associates work on, we try to connect the dots between what they do and what our purposes are. That’s one aspect.

Second, a lot of initiatives or programs that we drive are driven towards this particular objective of helping our customers save money and live better. Being able to know that the work you’re doing is actually helping another person or another customer achieve both of those outcomes, does add a lot of value and meaning to someone’s life. We’ve seen that.

So, that’s something that we have seen other associates appreciate. And as relevant, external candidates appreciate a lot.

Streamlining Talent Acquisition with Generative AI

Lydia: Now, in terms of recruitment technology, the overall scope of things that you look into would probably also enable these processes to be put in place so you can speed up and streamline the hiring process.

So, in your experience, how has recruitment technology, or rather, as you mentioned earlier, the increased usage of Gen AI, how has it impacted HR over these past years?

Arkesh: That’s a really good question because Walmart has been ahead of the Gen AI growth. We’ve seen opportunities across the enterprise to remove friction, provide a more personalized interface, and deliver tools that our associates need. So, we introduced something called the me@campus app. It’s a personalized resource that allows associates to manage their career financial well-being during their learning journeys and so on.

Now, to your question regarding how this has benefited recruitment, what we’ve done is essentially streamline the process. If you look at a typical way of going about the entire recruitment process, just opening a requisition takes a certain amount of time. It was not an easy process, even though we used Workday.

So, what we’ve done is because we introduced this app, so opening requisition now is a one-step process. You just go to the app, click on which role you want to open, and then you press submit, and it opens. Everything that needs to happen on the backend, the AI, the Gen AI, takes care of all of those requirements for us. So, it’s not like I have to go and open like 20 different teams to then post a job. We save a lot of time that would have otherwise gone into the entire process.

Even to the point today, a lot of scheduling and a lot of coordination is being automated. So, I don’t need to go to my calendar to look for time to set up interviews. The AI goes to calendars and sets up time automatically, so you don’t really need to spend time scheduling and so on.

So, we’re bringing in a lot of cutting-edge AI-enabled work to make sure that where we spend time, which is probably non-value-added time, that is coming down.

Identifying Talent, Building Leaders

Lydia: You mentioned earlier that one of the priorities you’re looking into is succession planning, and I imagine talent reviews would be part of that. So, what has been the approach towards succession planning and managing the talent that has come?

Arkesh: When you look at succession planning, there are two parts to the question.

One part is identifying which roles you’d like to plan for. Secondly, how do we go about identifying the talent that could be part of the succession pipeline? We do focus on roles, particularly business-critical roles, and roles that are officer and above and group directors and above.

With regards to how we identify successors, we have a very rigorous framework through which we look at someone’s aspirations, their ability to move across roles, their ambition in terms of how they want to grow, and their ability as an associate. We look at all of these factors. Then, based on that, we try to understand if we were to look at someone today, let’s say, as a director, what’s their runway towards becoming, let’s say, a Vice President? If someone’s a senior director, can they be a vice president or a senior vice president someday?

Those associates who show green shoots of being able to go through the runway and be one of those associates who can be accelerated through that journey are the associates we take on. The process is pretty simple. The managers take these parameters and generate the respective team members. Then there’s a calibration that goes across the leadership group that addresses and understands whether the managers’ ratings are aligned or not.

So that helped us build a succession pipeline. However, one of the things that we also need to include is that we’ve spent time understanding that once we’ve identified our high potentials or ‘HiPos’, how do we make sure that they are set up for success? There are certain interventions where they need to be part of certain leadership programs or someone could benefit from an executive coach or someone could benefit from a certain program. Those are the approaches that we take to make sure that our high potentials are set up for success, and that we are actually enabling them to move forward and accelerate on their growth journeys.

Lydia: When it comes to succession planning and looking into the talent pipeline that you have is there an ideal frequency towards which you have to review this and look into it so that you know, the people that you've picked, or have seen as being high potentials would stay in the organization?

Arkesh: I personally follow two approaches toward succession planning. One is at the beginning of every financial year, which is by March of every year, we make sure that we’ve looked at our high potential across the VP, group directors, and senior directors levels. We ensure that we understand how our succession pipeline and high potential (HiPo) bench look. If we were to start building a succession pipeline from those levels, what would that look like? So, at the beginning of the year, we go through all of those calculations.

However, the other thing I strongly believe in is an always-on talent mindset. This is where the succession plan starts to come into effect. Instead of slotting people into specific roles, we create a shared awareness around a common pool from which we could consider someone for a role that may not be in their functional area. For example, my potential could be in R&D in the tech people space, but then I could be considered for a role in the retail people space. This allows us to be more dynamic and maintain an always-on talent mindset.

When a role opens up, we’re not just considering people in that narrow vertical but consulting people across the board. This allows us to constantly keep looking at, for example, these are the 10 HiPos that I have today at the officer level, or these are the 20 HiPos that I have at the group director level. Both of these approaches have worked pretty well for us.

Doing the review at the beginning of the year allows us to have the entire year to observe people. When a role opens, we’re able to consider a much larger pool of candidates rather than only a few from a particular function.

Lydia: And to keep that dynamic behind that kind of plan, you probably have to, as you said those interventions that would come in place. So, that would fall under L&D?

Arkesh: So, the leadership learning team helps us with the broader program and management. The leadership and learning team helps us with the frameworks and how we sort of go around the calibrations, and then we take that forward.

Perspective Matters in Making Decisions

Lydia: Arkesh, you obviously spent a very interesting amount of time looking into the people's needs and also looking into large organizations’ needs when it comes to talent. So, what advice would you give someone who's starting out in the people space today?

Arkesh: I would say there are three things. One of the most important skills that I believe is relevant across any function is building strong problem-solving skills. It’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day and not focus on building someone’s problem-solving skills. Building problem-solving skills is one of the first things that someone entering into any job or professional career should look at.

Second, it’s easy to mistake the people space for being a governance function versus being an advisory plus governance function. We shouldn’t be seen as the policeman out there, trying to just enforce certain policies or regulations. So, we need to balance the adequate balance between where it’s an advisory function versus where it needs to be dominant. That’s important for being able to be agile in that space. That’s very important.

The third is being able to have a diverse perspective, being able to consider multiple perspectives, rather than just considering the business perspective, the associate perspective, or a policy perspective. Being able to consider all of these perspectives and then being able to arrive at a decision is more important. Sometimes, it takes a little longer to arrive at the decision, but that decision is more thought through and it’s a decision that someone will be comfortable with. I would say that these are the three skills I recommend for someone venturing into this space.

Lydia: HR itself, in terminology, is moving from ‘Human Resources’ into a different scope, which is a different sort of branding for the role, which is now ‘people.’ Have you ever seen any changes in terms of the mindset that comes with even changing the way it’s titled?

Arkesh: I think the people function makes a lot of difference. I mean, at Walmart, by the way, we call ourselves a function. I feel it’s more human. Human Resources in our own way. It is called Human Resources but I would say, by making it the people function, we’ve made ourselves more sensitive to the fact that we’re not just managing resources like you would manage your digital resources or your hardware, software, and things like that. People come with their own self. People need to be comfortable being themselves. When making decisions, we need to balance multiple perspectives. I think these are some things that are gaining more awareness. I would say that’s something that has been a change from HR to people.

Lydia: Thank you so much, Arkesh, for your time and all these generous insights. So, for whoever's listening in who wants to pick up a conversation with you and understand more about any of the topics that we've talked about today, where can they connect?

Arkesh: They can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Lydia: Okay, great, and just look for you, ‘Arkesh Mishra.’

Arkesh: Yes.

Lydia: Excellent. We have been in conversation with Arkesh Mishra of Walmart U.S. Tech. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe to stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-In Recruitment.