Cari Bohley

Vice President, Talent Management, Peraton

Peraton is a next-generation national security company that drives missions of consequence spanning the globe and extending to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. As the world’s leading mission capability integrator and transformative enterprise IT provider, we deliver trusted, highly differentiated solutions and technologies to protect our nation and allies.

Supernova Award Category: 
Future of Work: Human Capital Management
The Problem: 

After significant M&A and divestiture activities in the last few years, Peraton needed a solid understanding of employees’ experiences, skills, certifications, and backgrounds to make the best investments for their people. The company had employee data in its recruiting system, HR information system, and several bespoke databases. Still, it lacked a tool to unite the disparate systems and provide insights to enable career development efforts.

The Solution: 

At Peraton, it’s the people who fuel their customers’ missions, and hiring and retaining a talented workforce is paramount to the business. Peraton talent leaders recognized the need to empower employees by implementing an AI tool to help them understand their career development paths and growth opportunities; this effort results in employees’ stronger sense of belonging within Peraton.

Seeking to provide a holistic view of its workforce through a single platform that powers talent acquisition and management, Peraton leveraged employee feedback, survey data, and the talent team’s ability to articulate the cost of attrition to support the business case.

The Results: 

Peraton’s objectives included:

  • Empower recruiters to use AI to hire hard-to-find and diverse talent quickly and make informed decisions when considering the tradeoffs between hiring externally versus growing talent internally.
  • Save on costs and increase revenue by staffing projects quickly with high-caliber talent.
  • Provide employees the freedom to explore expanded, or new, career paths.
  • Improve our employees’ experience by supporting their growth opportunities.

Peraton’s talent team recommends that other leaders invest in AI for HR to unlock new data aggregation, insight, and scalability, “AI is the future of HR, and if you are not using AI right now in some way, shape, or form, you are missing the boat. We always have to do more with less; leveraging AI is the way to take some of the burden off us.”

 

Metrics: 

The AI-powered talent marketplace solution, deployed to more than 17,000 employees, yielded these results:

  • Delivered a better internal job board: With 23,320 job page visits, 18,996 job views, and 806 job applies, Peraton saw a 9.8 percent increase in applicants.
  • Boosted learning: Some 2,265 employees clicked on learning content, 1,418 employees saved a learning course, and 831 courses were viewed on Peraton’s learning management system (LMS) for a 6.4% increase.
  • Increased skills visibility: The solution identified top skills employees have, skills needed, and top power skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration and teamwork, communication, adaptability, flexibility and willingness to change, and self-motivation and initiative.
The Technology: 

Successfully using SeekOut Recruit for Talent Acquisition, Peraton increased its capabilities with SeekOut Grow’s Internal Talent solution and powerful search engine to source passive candidates and strategize recruitment marketing efforts to strengthen its pipeline. With SeekOut Grow’s Career Compass, Peraton automatically aggregates employees’ experience data from internal and external systems to provide AI recommendations on career growth and development opportunities.

Disruptive Factor: 

Peraton’s move to a scalable, faster, and higher-quality process leverages insights into employees’ skill sets, experience, and other qualifications. Moreover, the investment in SeekOut Grow helped the company bypass the need to build a skills taxonomy. “The amount of effort it takes to build and maintain taxonomy updates is wasteful because the skills and technologies have already changed as soon as the model is built. SeekOut’s AI tracks all employees’ skills and allows them to update in real-time,” Vice President of Talent Management Cari Bohley said.

Shining Moment: 

“Managers love seeing the career paths in front of their employees,” shared Cari. “They can see what skills, jobs, and learning are recommended, so they feel equipped to have career conversations with their employees.”

Moreover, Cari added, “SeekOut has the Talent Acquisition piece at the front end, coupled with the Talent Management piece as a one-two punch—that’s what resonated with our stakeholders.”

About Peraton

Peraton is a next-generation national security company. As the world’s leading mission capability integrator and transformative enterprise IT provider, we deliver trusted, highly differentiated solutions and technologies to protect our nation and allies from threats across the digital and physical domains.