Artificial intelligence has the potential to change the way we create job descriptions and manage talent. gradar, an innovative AI platform, takes center stage as it dynamically adapts job responsibilities based on user responses to evaluation questions. The conversation explores the critical link between well-crafted job descriptions and motivating work environments, emphasizing the impact on employee satisfaction, performance, and retention. From navigating the complexities of job evolution to streamlining the integration of competencies with the Team Management Profile, this conversation with founder Philipp Schuch sheds light on how gradar is not just a tool but a catalyst for creating work that people genuinely love. Join in as we discuss the changing landscape of the workforce, the need for transparent and authentic conversations around job expectations, and the evolving role of technology in enhancing the human experience at work. Whether you’re an HR professional, a business leader, or someone passionate about the intersection of technology and human resources, this podcast provides valuable insights into leveraging AI to redefine job descriptions and reshape the future of work.

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Philipp Schuch – Job Descriptions, Competencies, And Technical Skills: How Generative AI Is Transforming The Gradar Solution

We are so excited to have you and you’re going to find our topic very intriguing, particularly if you’re a business owner, an HR leader, or a financial leader, as well as if you’re an employee. It’s very fascinating what’s happening. In this episode, our topic is job descriptions, competencies, and technical skills. I’m also happy to say that we’re going to be talking about how generative AI is transforming the gradar solution. We have been talking about AI like crazy because our world is changing from a global perspective.

Let’s get everything started. We have been doing this for many years. We will talk about what we are about. I started with Sam right before COVID hit. We started doing HR forums and then it became the show. I’m so excited to say that we are all about engaging, energizing, and elevating your employees and company. It’s very cool. This is a great resource. We highly recommend that you share this. If you do know of a company that is looking for the most progressive and innovative people strategies, this is the place to come. You would go to CompTeam.net.

Let’s go ahead and talk about our hosts. Joining us is Sumit Singla. Sumit is from India. I understand you have had a lot of work working in gradar as well as doing people strategy work. What’s the big company you worked for? It was Deloitte. That is on top. At any rate, Sumit has been working with us. I’m also happy he is helping us with our technology.

I would also like to introduce Howard. Howard is near the New York area. Howard is an expert in Excel and he knows his numbers. He’s a compensation guru. If you need some expertise, Sumit and Howard together are a powerful team. My name is Char Miller. They call me Char from HR. I’m a people strategist. Every time Sam hosts this, he calls me the serial entrepreneur, and that is true. I left corporate in 2016. I do HR consulting and HR contracting, as well as time management strategies. We are into investments and real estate, particularly focused on helping people who are struggling with taxes and also the elderly. I do need to update my bio but that’s one of my most recent ventures.

Also on the show here is Mr. Sam Reeve. He’s traveling across Europe. He is fantastic. He’s the CEO of CompTeam. He has built quite an amazing group, a combination of compensation and talent management strategy, and that is a perfect combination. That is your host. Moving to our guest expert speaker, I would like to introduce Philipp Schuch. He is the Founder and CEO of gradar.

This is an amazing company. I understand this company is an expert in AI, helping with job descriptions, as well as assisting companies with many aspects of job evaluation. I will not go into the details because I would like Philipp to describe gradar. What is your role? How does your company help organizations improve their compensations and job descriptions? Philipp, could you go ahead and describe that?

I’m based in a city called Düsseldorf. That’s in the Western part of Germany. I’m a quarter Dutch because we live very close to the Dutch border. I started gradar years ago. The goal of gradar was to build a cloud-based solution that anybody can use when it comes to job evaluation, compensation analysis, compensation structuring, and all the things that go in line with job architecture, design, and management. When I say anyone can use it, I mean independent consultants as well as companies that don’t need the support of consultants because they have a large team of compensation professionals, for example.

When I look at our clients, it’s a great mix of very different companies and organizations across the globe. We started this with an international DNA. When you start something out of Europe, you’ve got to be international if you don’t want to focus on just one market because there are 30 languages across Europe. You have to be international from the beginning. Gradar is a cloud-based software. It covers end-to-end job architecture, development, and management. You can bring all of the job-related information under one roof and connect it to your HRIS to synchronize employee data to feedback, be it competencies, job descriptions, or whatever you need in your HRIS.

That is excellent. I am very impressed. You’re the CEO of gradar. It’s an honor to have you as our expert contributor. It’s also exciting that we have Howard and Sumit on because they have expertise as well in this topic. I also understand they have partnered with you. Philipp, you’ve been working with CompTeam for a while. That’s my understanding. How is that partnership between CompTeam and your work?

We don’t see each other a lot but Sam visited me. I put some sausages on the barbecue. I had a very German welcome for him. That was pretty fun. The partnership started years ago. Sam was our first implementation partner for gradar in the United States and has delivered dozens of projects since in a variety of organizations, both NGOs as well as for-profit organizations, municipalities, and pharmaceutical organizations. He and the team helped a diverse group of organizations in introducing job evaluation and other aspects of job architecture.

If we were to go to CompTeam.net, I assume you probably have similar companies that you have partnered with.

I’m not going to build yet another consultancy because our focus is on HR technology. We want to help as many consultants and organizations out there as possible. We grow through our network of partners like Sam, Howard, Sumit, and all of the others.

As your bio indicated and our topic, we will be talking about job descriptions, AR integration into those items, and the fact that technology is making all of those task-oriented HR challenges more efficient. One of the things that I always say is that job descriptions need to be analyzed at least on an annual basis. Unfortunately, many companies have job descriptions that are decades old. It’s too bad because jobs and technology are changing very quickly. Is that your opinion, Philipp?

 

I can see some cultural differences there. I’m not quite sure to align my observations with any special culture but I can see that there are some job descriptions that will be very long and task-oriented. On those 10 to 12 pages, you might find every single task that someone is supposed to deliver. That’s very cumbersome and hard to maintain. What we have seen in other organizations is that they have a short job description with a focus on the core duties and the processes that someone is responsible for.

This task orientation then goes into the actual process description so that you don’t have to discuss a new job description every time a single aspect of the process changes. Char, you mentioned something like 4,000 job descriptions for a group of 13,000 employees. That’s too much. There’s a lot of room to consolidate the number of job descriptions once you start introducing a more process-based approach. In other organizations, the reality is they don’t have anything.

Howard, what do you think?

It’s interesting because when I first started, I was in an organization, which I won’t name. My job was to sit down with incumbents in their roles, interview them, and write job descriptions. It was a 2 to 3-page job description but it was so time-consuming. The time you finished a department, it was almost like you had to start all over again because things had changed. The approach that you’re talking about with a short core description sounds much more flexible and adaptive to what companies need.

When we started designing the gradar system and the gradar algorithm for job evaluation, we figured, “Let’s incorporate a compensable factor like processes or responsibility for processes because, in every modern organization, processes play a very big role. Most organizations, especially those with knowledge workers, are process-driven. Why not take this into consideration too?” We did. That’s where we come from. We say, “Have this short description. Have proper process management in place, and then you’re golden.” You can combine the best of both worlds.

For people who aren’t familiar with gradar, it seems like a fairly laborious process. What does gradar do? How can you describe to people the functionality of gradar that simplifies the process?

It’s only been a while since those large language models have been available. You can pretty easily enter a prompt like, “Write me a job description for a compensation benefits manager,” into ChatGPT. The system will produce something that will make a lot of sense but the reality is when you look into an organization, there are career paths. It starts with a junior analyst, and then you have the analyst, the senior analyst, a manager, a senior manager, an expert, and a senior expert. That depends on the job-tightening structure in an organization.

What we do with gradar is job evaluation. We will know about those five steps in the career ladder. We can then take this information from our job evaluation exercise in combination with something that we call a global job family to characterize the job. We will send this through an API. We are experimenting with different LLMs. We will send it there and get back a job description that is aligned with the requirements of the job as defined by the job evaluation exercise. That’s what’s new and what makes it very unique.

At least here in my experience in the United States, I’ve had to do hundreds of orientations, particularly in healthcare. In other companies I’ve worked with, there’s a major labor shortage. It’s even worse as we know. It was interesting when I did the orientation, which is not the funnest thing to do every week. At one point, I had over 100 employees sitting in the orientation group. I stopped and asked the employees, “How many of you have looked at your job description?” Two people in the room raised their hands.

I find it fascinating that we hired many hundreds of people but the manager and the hiring leaders never shared the job description. That’s unfortunate because the number one thing about talent management strategy is you need to know what job you’re being hired for. Secondly, from a performance management standpoint, how do you perform well if you don’t know your job? What do you think, Philipp?

I am always very much intrigued by organizations that will introduce a performance management process but don’t have job descriptions in place because this is the core of what is expected from the employee, be it a short one or a detailed one. That doesn’t matter at this moment but you need something when you have a meeting between the manager and the employee or when you’re looking at 360-degree feedback. You need something to hold onto. You need a reference to assess the performance of someone. Are they doing what they are expected to do? That’s the main question.

Looking at smart goals is a different exercise because this smart goal may be valid for a couple of months or a year. This is only to focus on someone within the scope of their job description or maybe to go above and beyond a new topic, for example, or into a new project but the job description is core. That’s what I mean when I talk about HR and organizations doing their homework. It’s not sexy. It’s sometimes a bit annoying. It’s hard to manage the job descriptions or it used to be but it’s a core activity and responsibility of any HR department to deliver them.

It's hard to manage the job descriptions, but it's a core responsibility of any HR department to deliver them. Click To Tweet

What do you think, Sumit?

That’s a lot of thoughts and ideas to unpack. In my part of the world, one of the reasons why job descriptions have existed is more from a compliance standpoint. As an employer, I want to give you a list of things you should have done in case things go South at some point. I gave you the job description. You didn’t read it. It’s your problem, not mine but if I have to fire you or put you on a performance improvement plan, that’s how I’m going to use that document and use it as a checklist saying, “Out of 18 things here, you’ve only done 5.”

It’s evolving that while goals are a different discussion altogether, there are companies that are also trying to add not the entire scorecard but some of the broad goals or outcomes that those responsibilities will help you in getting to. What are the top 2 or 3 outcomes that the role is expected to deliver? That’s starting to form a part of some of the job descriptions that I’m seeing and what some of my clients are asking for as well.

It is unfortunate that many companies don’t have a job description. In my experience, particularly in healthcare from a compliance standpoint, which I appreciate you bringing up, Sumit, we have to have a job description because we have patients in our hands. We have nurses, doctors, and surgeons with hearts in their hands. This can be life or death. I know this sounds a little overly dramatic but if an employee does not understand the expectations of their position and how to manage, let’s say, blood, system mistakes can happen, which can kill a patient. That may sound a little bit overly dramatic but I truly believe it’s vital.

With the company that I started several years ago, I was truly working on my job descriptions and working with CompTeam. CompTeam did help me with my compensation analytics process. It was fascinating. My employees appreciated the fact that they knew what was expected of them at work. They appreciated knowing what their compensation was and also how their compensation aligned with other positions. Philipp, why do you think it’s very important from a compensation standpoint that employers do some analytics here and do it right?

There are two things and concepts. One concept is equal pay for equal work. The job description helps to determine whether someone is delivering equal work. You would need a different method, process, or toolset to measure the performance of the incumbent but generally, if they’re doing the same job, they should be compensated comparably or fairly. That’s one approach to this. The other one is equal pay for work of equal value. It might sound a bit European but it’s arriving in the United States too.

 

You also need to look at the job description, content, responsibilities, level of problem-solving, and communication skills required to assess whether work is of equal value. This is becoming a huge concept all over Europe because the European Union is asking organizations with at least 100 employees to do that. That means applying an analytical method or point factor-based method of job evaluation to rank or weight the jobs with this method and then come up with a pay band or pay scale so that the different incumbents and roles would be paid comparably. Those two things exist.

You need job descriptions to deliver this. The same is true when you’re doing a benchmarking exercise or a classic job pricing exercise. Our comp friends need to understand what the job is all about. They need to be able to somehow assess whether it’s a P1, P2, P3, S1, S2, or S3. This is not about listening to the organization but it needs to be written down so that the bias in the matching against the survey is minimized. That’s only possible through a job description.

I have to say this as a huge advocate. In the United States, as well as globally, employees expect companies to be doing this type of analysis. I’m not saying anything about older employees. I’m saying that with colleges, our employees are learning about compensation practices and what companies should be doing to ensure that they get paid equal value for equal work. It does mean a lot about diversity.

I also was disgruntled when I had male colleagues who made three times more than I did for the same job. Now, I feel that is getting improved. I spend a lot of time with employees. Employees are very well aware of the pay levels, P1, P2, and P3, or whatever you said that is. I don’t think that some executives give our employees credit that they know a lot about pay equity. Sumit, I would love your opinion about diversity and equal pay. What’s your thought on that? That’s a big passion of yours.

That’s a tough question to answer because there’s a huge pay gap in my part of the world and it’s growing wider. As a recruiter, when you give somebody a job description and ask them to apply to your organization, you tend to ask, “What was your last drawn salary? What are you getting paid?” The data in every possible piece of research says that women tend to negotiate less in such situations and don’t negotiate salaries as much as men do.

Therefore, the pay gap widens because, in all likelihood in your current role as a woman, you can expect to be paid less than a man because of the pay gap. They’re asking for your salary and then applying a percentage premium on that while hiring you for the next job, the gap grows wider. The points you mentioned made me curious about one thing that I would like to ask Philipp.

We are talking about the age of generative AI and the importance of having a job description and giving it to employees and the use for employers. How is gradar evolving to incorporate some of these elements? How does gradar make life easier? I’ve been fortunate enough to have test-driven some of the features but I’m sure I’m only skimming the tip of the iceberg.

This is the application. This is a job called Chief Travel Blogger. It’s in the marketing job family in an organization unit called Discovery and Planning within the tourism division. There’s the grading result. We know that this job requires something like an undergraduate degree, more than ten years of experience, problem-solving happens on a certain level, and so on.

The system takes all of the information, the grading factors, the title, and the job family, and will then generate a job description. There are different sections. There’s still the master data and then something like the general purpose of the job. From this little icon, you can tell it was generated by the AI. Here it says, “The overall purpose of this job is to create engaging and informative travel content through blog posts and social media platforms to promote the company’s travel services and increased brand awareness.” I did not write this. The AI did. It took the AI a couple of seconds to do that.

I remember when I was a junior consultant at one of the big firms. We charged $400 to $500 per job description and were able to generate 5 or 6 a day by googling stuff on the internet and then doing some copy-pasting. It has become very precise and quick. You analyze the job, evaluate the job, and hand it over to the API, and then the system will give you not only the general purpose but also the responsibilities like creating high-quality written and visual content, including photographs and videos, or staying up to date with travel industry trends. All of this is spot on.

Some of the stuff is done directly from gradar as this little icon tells. We have the technical skills such as knowledge of search engine optimization techniques to optimize block content for search engines. There are communication requirements also available. We’ve got the general purpose. This is the short version. We’ve got eight core responsibilities. We’ve got the technical skills. You can always edit this. Sumit, you’ve done this with a client of ours.

Within seconds and at very little cost, you get content that you can start to customize afterward. There’s the combination of competency matches. These are not the technical but the social skills. They’re behavior-based. Take the job description and social skills, and you’ve got the foundation for your performance management process. These are from TMA. You represent TMA too as CompTeam. It’s a pretty cool combination of soft skills, technical skills, and core responsibilities. Everything you need is in the system generated automatically.

I’ve had a lot of experience with job descriptions and they can take hours to produce one. You’re searching for the right words, adjectives, and technical terminology that you’re not necessarily familiar with. This is phenomenal.

Imagine you have someone from Spain or the Netherlands using the system. They can say they want to see it in their language. The content will automatically either be generated in that language or translated through another AI. The fun thing about AI power translations is the quality is often better than what you could get from a semi-professional translator. We had to learn the hard way. We have worked with so many translators in the past. I speak German, English, some Spanish, and French. Even I could tell that some of the translations weren’t any good. Coming through the AI, they are much better. It doesn’t cost you anything. It’s a couple of cents to get the translation in place.

The other interesting thing I found was the earlier way, which would be to Google and create a Frankenstein of a job description by picking up bits and pieces from here and there. I was toying around with gradar and seeing how the generated job description changes if I change my responses to the evaluation questions. What was interesting was Chief Travel Blogger at 15 versus at 19, the responsibilities changed a lot, which is not what would happen if we were simply googling. I thought that was a massive value addition.

What we are going to do soon is there are a couple of features to enhance the entire job description piece but one of them is that we want to be able to explicitly tell the AI to consider the career path when we send the junior analyst up to the senior manager or those five jobs into the AI to tell it, “Make it a stepped approach with the least responsibilities on the junior level and the highest responsibilities on the senior level,” but it requires some research. The results are already pretty good but they’re going to be even better once we have something like this in place.

I used it. What you showed me already looks a lot more evolved than that. The pace at which it’s improving is astonishing.

Since this is the People Strategy Forum, we have more of a people side of this topic. When employers are looking at retention, recruitment, and job performance, this is critical to be able to have a good quality job description. Our employees are using AI too. I’m pretty passionate about this as you can see. It is very frustrating to be in a position where my job description is not correct. It’s frustrating to be in a job where I’m not being paid appropriately.

If we want to improve our talent management strategies, this is a very integral part of a talent management process from the recruitment process, onboarding process, job performance aspect, career mobility of transferring our employees back and forth, as well as offboarding our employees. All of these things are very important. We all work with TMA. Did you notice that I’m using the language from TMA? It is all integrated. This is truly part of our talent management strategy. Philipp, what is your thought about how this connects with talent management strategy?

We need to talk about work motivation. That’s a big piece. People tend to be motivated in their work if they can work with a certain degree of autonomy. That’s an important thing. If they perceive the work they do as meaningful, especially for this one, the job description helps to translate what is expected of someone and gives them room to act. It’s also about fairness. In compensation, we talk about distributional fairness, distributional justice, or procedural justice. If you can guarantee anyone doing the same job is being paid the same, then this will also affect satisfaction, and at the end of the day, work motivation.

People tend to be motivated in their work if they can work with a certain degree of autonomy. Click To Tweet

For all of these aspects like perceived justice, autonomy, and probably even psychological safety, a job description helps because you are not acting in any vacuum and you don’t know what is expected of you but there’s something to hold onto. Starting with job evaluation as a junior consultant, this was also great because I had something to hold onto but it’s the same with any employee. They need something so they know what is expected from them.

One of the things that we advocate here at CompTeam is having frequent one-on-ones with your employees and having frequent touch bases because some of the leaders that I worked with often had a span of control that was so large. I had leaders with well over 50 or 100 employees. It was very difficult for a leader who was expected not only to attend all the management meetings they had to go to every week but also to hit the floor and then create all these one-on-ones.

I often suggested that we empower our employees to own their job description, bring their job description to the one-on-one, answer some questions prior to the one-on-one with the leader, and talk about topics such as fairness and equality, “Do you agree that your job is in alignment with the organization? How is your job working with other teams? Do you have barriers to your success?” Those one-on-ones are very critical.

I love what you said, Philipp. Having something at the table with those conversations is important. Back in the day when we had paper, most of our employees took their job description and their employee handbook and threw them in the junk drawer. That’s the truth. It was hard sometimes. I would have leaders say to me, “What am I supposed to talk about with my employees?” 1.) Build a relationship with your employees appropriately. 2.) Let’s look at the job description and talk about compensation. Let’s be honest, transparent, and authentic.

It’s the basis for recognition, feedback, and at the same time, goal setting. When I look at this, it will have an effect on the performance of the employee and their job satisfaction. It will also have a positive effect on turnover because turnover will go down if people are satisfied. It’s not all about compensation.

I’ve been talking to some youth. They’re working-age, fresh out of college, and very talented and smart. They walk into an orientation, look at the person, and say, “You lied to me in the interview about how my pay is going to work here. I didn’t realize that I had to wait six months for this pay increase. I also didn’t know that I had to be here at 3:30 in the morning and drive a delivery truck. All the expectations of what you told me in my interview weren’t true.”

This particular person I’m talking about stood up and walked out of the orientation. He was twenty years old. I’m not kidding. This happens all the time. If HR, comp, and the people strategy team can pull together these practices and do it quickly and efficiently, that is golden. Speaking of golden, Sumit, what do you think?

I will bring in a little bit of the Indian perspective here where we’ve got the largest population of people in the world. We’ve got a relatively high unemployment rate but, in the past, it has been a case where people have been more conservative saying, “There’s too much competition. I’ve got a job with great difficulty. Let me hang onto it.” Now, people are simply abandoning jobs, “If I don’t like it, I don’t turn up tomorrow, no questions asked.” Nobody has the time to try and fix a broken workplace.

It’s called ghosting.

In India and various other parts of the world as well, the incidences of people simply quitting or not even quietly quitting but loudly quitting in the first 15 to 30 days is increasing a lot.

Philipp, you touched upon this as well. People do want to be paid fairly for the work they’re doing but beyond that, they want to know what they do matters and how it fits into the organization. Are they going to be recognized for their contributions? Is there a growth path for them? The job description in the past has always been laborious. You’re making that very easy to produce. That’s the cornerstone for all of those activities in HR. If you don’t get that right, you can’t do any of the other things. You can’t do performance management, career architecture, or ten million other things in HR, learning, and development. It all starts with having a job description that’s accurate and flexible enough as duties change to reflect that.

Don’t fall for fashions and fads but do your homework. That’s my takeaway from this.

You’re making it a lot easier. Many organizations stall because they look at this as a horrible activity that they will never get through. They don’t know where to begin. They don’t have the employees in place to write job descriptions. What you are providing is a very strong start that they can then customize.

It’s time to think in connected ways, not to have the job description as a PDF or DOCX. Have it somewhere. Maybe even give it to the employees through your HRIS. It’s a bit hard to sign it but you can keep it updated, and then it becomes part of the job architecture. You have a direct connection toward the benchmark information, the pay bands, and the gender pay gap analysis. It all comes together. That’s what gradar stands for.

Employees expect that. Leaders need things in their hands like an app. I don’t know if you offer an app or any technology like that but an employee can look at their job description through technology very easily, not just looking up the HR department. It’s vital. Oftentimes, managers and employees are intimidated by this process because they have to do their homework and analyze this.

We have a fantastic tool called artificial intelligence to help us do this quickly and efficiently, perhaps with some tweaking because we know, at least in my humble view, that AI is pulled from many internet sources. That’s my ignorant view. The HR leader or the compensation analyst or consultant has to do their homework but it’s going to give them a jumpstart. It’s going to give them that starting platform that’s going to be more comprehensive. I also love the fact that gradar integrates other aspects such as competencies.

Most employees don’t even talk about the word competencies, and that’s fascinating to me because I need to know what my competencies are. I need to know what my talents, drives, competencies, and skillsets are. I also need to know how that applies to the job that I do. If I’m going to complain about my pay, I would like to see my job description. This is great. I love the blogger. I don’t think we had that job a decade ago. Let’s say I’m an HR leader and I need to revamp my compensation practices. How quickly would that occur with gradar?

The biggest challenge is probably to differentiate between the person and the job. We would always ask them to correct us, “Give us a list of the employees and their position titles.” We would try to consolidate those position titles into actual job titles together with HR. Once we have the job title, it becomes quite clear what the requirements are. We’re entering this in the system and going through the job grading exercise. It’s about 30 to 45 seconds until you get the job description.

The biggest challenge is to differentiate between the person and the job. Click To Tweet

The competencies are going to be there right away. It doesn’t take a lot of time. We haven’t handled compensation then because compensation strategy and philosophy, picking the right benchmark vendor, and preparing all of the employees’ salary data takes a bit more but handling the jobs, evaluating them, and getting the description is a quick win and fix.

That was a complex question. I worked with my compensation department on the 4,000 job descriptions and it would take years. I’m talking about a decade to do a compensation transformation. We’re approaching the top of the hour. If you don’t mind, I would like to talk about our sponsor real quick. I’m happy to say all of us here have used it but before I say that, I would like Sumit to have a couple of words about this. Sumit and Sam co-wrote this fantastic book, The Workforce Experience: A Framework for Creating Work People Love. Sumit, could you describe this book for me, please?

In a nutshell, it captures what we have been discussing, the coming together of technology and the human experience. That’s what excites pretty much all of us and the larger team as well. The idea is that as humans, we need to enjoy the experience of being human. It’s great to have technology at our fingertips and great innovation by folks like Philipp who are working to make our lives easier and better with the technology they give us. It has been a great project. I would love to talk more about this. What I’ll cap off by saying is tools like gradar are unlocking the workforce experience, genuinely creating work that people love, and helping us to focus on the right things.

We will have an episode about this book. I loved TMA. As a people strategist, this is one fantastic tool. When I owned my company a couple of years ago, we had about 23 employees and several contractors. I utilized this TMA method in every aspect from recruiting, onboarding, talent management, learning and development, and even offboarding. I also use the TMA to identify the talents, skills, competencies, and abilities of my staff. We promoted and transferred people because of what we learned through the TMA process and the discussions with the TMA. Philipp, I understand that you met with the CEO of the TMA.

He was sitting at a cafe in Portugal. It was raining. There’s a wrong assumption that the sun always shines in Portugal. There’s a big storm front coming from the Atlantic to hit Europe. We have had the competencies in the system since 2018. We have dozens of clients that would use the competencies in their processes but we figured it is time to program a button, and then in the future, when you click on that button, the job profile from gradar together with the competencies will be transferred directly into the TMA solution so that you can start using it to assess your employees or give them orientation with the click of a button.

Philipp, I’m excited. We’re getting close to the top of the hour. I do want to mention also working with Andre. Andre was so kind to do one-on-ones with several of my top leaders himself. It’s pretty impressive. My employees gave me excellent feedback about that because they felt valued, particularly when talking to someone like Andre. What I love is that the two of you are partnering as CEOs of TMA and the gradar system. What I love is that we are making it easier and more accessible.

One other little sales point about the TMA is that this is an app on your phone. Hopefully, I’m not misspeaking here. It’s still on my phone. The TMA is there and they offer free tools too. We’re talking about interview questions, competencies, and even comparisons of other job descriptions for other companies. I utilized this tool. My employees gave me positive feedback, particularly my leaders. It made their jobs easier and it was at their fingertips.

When I was a talent management strategist, I was always asked how to make talent management strategies quicker, more efficient, accurate, and people-centric. This is a great solution. As we’re wrapping up, Philipp, how would an executive or your clients reach you? Do you have a website or email? How do people reach you?

There’s the gradar.com website and the option to either chat with us or sign up for a free trial. This is very unique in the marketplace. There’s the option to book a demo. The demo will not be with a salesperson but with someone who can guide you from crib to cradle from the first contact to implementation of gradar, TMA, and anything job architecture-related. I don’t believe in the classic sales approach. I want people on the team who know what they’re talking about.

I love the fact that you’re wearing a sweatshirt and that you’re a CEO. Our employees want us to be real. They’re tired of the HR and the corporate talk. Employees honestly are tired of that and leaders are also tired of it. The fact that you have a one-on-one, offer a free demo, and work with employers to be the solution around job descriptions, competencies, and the utilization of new technologies like artificial intelligence and the integration with HRIS systems is fantastic.

If they want to do a meet-and-greet with you, Philipp, that’s fantastic. We will highly encourage all of our participants. The CompTeam People Strategy Forums are on all aspects of social media. We’re talking about LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and everything. We would love for our potential clients to go out on CompTeam.net.

There’s an email here, [email protected]. I’m sure there’s Sam and a team like Howard, Sumit, and maybe me if you want more of an HR people person. That would be me. Email us if you would like to have a demo of CompTeam, TMA, as well as Philipp and gradar. We’re going to wrap up. Are there any final thoughts and words, team?

I’m very impressed. Thank you, Philipp, for your time.

You’re most welcome. Thank you.

It has been a pleasure. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Everybody, stay warm wherever you are in the world unless you’re in India where it’s warm.

It was great to say that. Thanks, Char.

Everyone, we appreciate your time.

 

Important Links

• gradar
• TMA
• The Workforce Experience: A Framework for Creating Work People Love
• LinkedIn – CompTeam
• Instagram – CompTeam
• Twitter – CompTeam
• Facebook – CompTeam
• [email protected]

 

About Philipp Schuch

Founder and CEO of gradar.com

In 2012, I presented the idea for an Open Grading System to a small audience during Berlin’s first HR BarCamp. And I never let go of the idea – even during my employment as a full-time Compensation & Benefits Manager in the fashion industry and later in a multinational IT firm.

Two years later, I invited my friend Ralf Kuklik to my basement in Düsseldorf, Germany for a business meeting. Inspired by my initial idea, we decided to develop a solution for modern job evaluation and spent more than half a year (still in the basement!) researching and drafting our system’s design. Today’s application – gradar.com – combines point-factor-based job evaluation with an integrated competency library and smart support for compensation analytics & benchmarking.

Gradar.com is developed and distributed by our independent and international HR-Tech startup with locations in Düsseldorf, Germany, Providence, USA and Warwick, UK. The American entity is managed by Zachary Weinberger who has been supporting the team’s and product’s development since its early days.