What if you could spot team members getting ready to leave—before they even say a word?
At Amdocs, Employment Practice Lead Victoria Myers built exactly that: an early warning system that flags flight risks—driving a 45% internal mobility rate and making internal hiring faster and smarter.
In this episode, Victoria shares how she made it happen, plus:
Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vicmyers/
Connect with us:
💻 All Episodes: TalentAllStars.com
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ziprecruiter/
💼 Dave’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davetravers/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ziprecruiter
🎵TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ziprecruiter
Enjoyed this episode? We’d be grateful for a rating or review on your favorite podcast app.
[00:00:00] Victoria Myers: What we did was take a proactive sourcing approach internally so that the talent acquisition teams can now approach those people and engage with them potentially on other new positions that have come open, as well as just offering them training opportunities to keep them engaged internally.
[00:00:18] Dave Travers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent?
Today, I'm Dave Travers, president of ZipRecruiter and on Talent All-Stars, we shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses. Our talent all-star today is Victoria Myers, a longtime talent leader at Amdocs, which creates software and systems for phone, tv, and internet providers.
If you've ever paid a phone bill, signed up for a streaming service, or contacted customer support, there's a good chance that Amdocs technology was working behind the scenes to make it happen. So what does it take talent-wise to pull that off? Let's put that question to Victoria Myers. Victoria, welcome to Talent All-Stars.
[00:01:02] Victoria Myers: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:04] Dave Travers: So happy to have you. There's so much to talk about. You have had such an interesting career journey and play such an interesting role now at Amdocs, but I want to go back in your 20-plus-year career and take me back to the moment when HR and people. Started to feel like it might not just be a job, it might be a career or a calling.
When did that moment happen for you?
[00:01:27] Victoria Myers: Probably even before I got that job, but, uh, my degrees are in speech pathology and psychology. Um, but after college my brothers, one was a COBOL developer and the other one was a sales guy. Said, Hey, let's start our own consulting company. So that's actually what we did, and we were, you know, pretty successful.
We landed work, and I learned the ropes of sales, recruiting, and operations. And uh, we did it for about a year. And then from there I went into the agency life and did a split desk of sales and recruiting. And again, I was successful. I really loved the recruiting. It just fed that need that I have internally of wanting to help people.
And so that's where I decided I'm gonna, I'm gonna continue this, I'm gonna pursue it. And I stayed in the agency world for quite a while, but knowing I wanted to try the corporate side because I didn't like that cutthroat feeling of the agency where I'm fighting against my peers, oh, that's my candidate.
How dare you talk to them. You know all of that. That can happen. I wanted to feel more like we are, we're all working together for the goal of the company. And so once I got into the corporate world, I haven't looked back.
[00:02:41] Dave Travers: That's awesome. So let's get to the corporate world in a second. But when recruiting spoke to you, 'cause you felt like you were helping people, what did that feel like?
Can you take me back to a specific moment that exemplifies where that feeling came from?
[00:02:53] Victoria Myers: You know, you have that candidate that had been looking for work for a while, and you found the candidat,e and you had this open opportunity. And their appreciation. Because maybe however they were running their searches, this, this opportunity didn't come up for them.
For me, it's the best feeling. You know, now that I'm in leadership, I don't get to do the offers anymore. But given an offer to a candidate has always been the best experience and so I, I absolutely love that, that side of the job.
[00:03:23] Dave Travers: Okay. You mentioned now that you're a leader, you don't get to do that. So when was the moment when all of a sudden you moved into the corporate world and all of a sudden you, you realized I might not be just an individual contributor that I might be a leader of teams who helps manage and direct people doing this sort of work.
[00:03:39] Victoria Myers: It was actually that first corporate opportunity. Uh, a few years in, I just kind of was taking leadership roles where if we were hiring someone new to the team, I would train them and.
Get them up to speed on the company's processes or seeing a need in working with the actual management of the team to try and implement some sort of change or something for us. So some of those things I just kind of did. And when I moved to the job right before Amdocs, I had the opportunity to actually move into a team lead position, and then from there just progressed to recruiting manager and further on.
But I think part of my progression was I had an. Excellent mentor. She really invested time in me. She helped me to see the difference between being a manager and a leader. And so that was something that, you know, I really took time to try to learn because I was managing a team and making sure they were meeting metrics and all of those things, but wanting to become someone that could inspire and develop them.
That's where the leadership aspect comes in.
[00:04:44] Dave Travers: Okay. So take me there, like the difference between management and leadership. So I think a lot of people. As they go into first-time management, they're like, wow, this is a little bit more difficult than I thought it was gonna be. You know? Not all of us have found the mentor that you found.
If you were to succinctly break down, be the mentor for the rest of us, how do you transition from being just a manager to being a leader?
[00:05:05] Victoria Myers: You know, I think even as a leader, you still manage, right? So there's certain aspects of leadership that is still the management side, but management is focusing on the tasks, the processes, efficiencies, making sure the work gets done.
So it's very. Task and KPI, metric focused type of, uh, work. A leader, on the other hand, inspires and empowers. So for me, leadership means being a servant leader, caring for my team as individuals, helping them grow, talking to them about what their future could hold, giving them the opportunities to become leaders, if that's where you see their path going.
Making sure they feel valued. Motivated to do their best work. And when you do that, they inherently want to do their best work. It really pulls that out of them, and also it helps to elevate them in their own careers.
[00:05:58] Dave Travers: So I think a lot of that is a checklist you can go down and make sure you do. One of the things that's hardest to do there that's not just checking a box is making them feel valued, and that is easy to talk about and easy, uh, talking point, but hard to do sometimes.
How do you get good at that if that's not something you've thought about before? Had to do before?
[00:06:19] Victoria Myers: Uh, empathy. They're humans. They're not just worker bees. These are human beings who have lives. Who all this work in order really to have a life, it's not the other way around. It shouldn't be. Um, and so, you know, it's, it is again, it's like you have to develop a relationship with the people that you really spend most of your time with.
And it can't be all transactional. And so when you do that and you really develop those relationships and you show that you care, be the human first while you're also looking at work that needs to be done. And I can tell you one of the things that I've always done is when it came to decision time, I would tell people, is it the right thing to do?
And if it's the right thing to do, then that's what we should do. And that helps also for your employees to see where you're coming from. And that you're a human too. It's so, even, even as a leader, it's okay to say, I made a wrong decision, or, you know what? I'm not the expert in this. You're the expert. I really want your advice.
So those types of things as well, really kind of help to build the trust, show that you're a human as well, and inspire them, your employees, your team, to do their best.
[00:07:29] Dave Travers: I think that is so wise because I think that the initial instinct as a young manager, a young leader. So often is, okay, now I have to look and act like I'm a leader and I have to show that I know what I'm doing and I make decisions.
But to make somebody feel comfortable even talking with you in a way that they can even give you the room to show that you care about them as a person. You've gotta show them that it's safe and normal to do that and sort of be a human being yourself, not just this indomitable leader. And that's very counterintuitive sometimes.
So I love that.
[00:08:02] Victoria Myers: Well, and it's taking ownership, right? It's being able to say, you know, I guess humble yourself to say, I made a mistake, but let's learn from it and let's move on. And so there's accountability that's involved in that. It's, uh, showing that you can pick yourself up and dust yourself off if you've been knocked down, you know, by whatever this mistake was.
And I think all of those things show your team, like you said, that I guess it's something to aspire to.
[00:08:26] Dave Travers: Not only is it something to aspire to, but. It's so much easier to manage people when they bring their mistakes to you to say, I learned from this, or This is something we fixed, or, I need help with this.
It takes a lot more work to have to do detective work and figure out if they've made a mistake 'cause they're not gonna tell you. And no better way to get them to do that than to model that behavior. So I love that. Okay, so at some point, Victoria, you went from individual contributor to talent acquisition manager.
To now very fancy titles like today, an Employment Practice Lead. Tell us what is an employment practice lead and what are, what are you taking on today in your leadership?
[00:09:00] Victoria Myers: Yeah, so Amdocs is in a transformation, HR transformation process where we're working to take all of the services that we provide to employees and operationalize them.
And in order to do that. You really have to have, um, what we call global service owners or these employment practice leads who own the service, but we're also detailing the processes, the r and r. So all of the different roles and responsibilities that relate to it. And many of these are actually in our sister HR pieces of the organization, whether it be HR operations, our tier support, you know, aspect, the business unit, hr.
People relations, et cetera. So as an employment practice lead, I am reviewing certain practices that relate to employment such as standard work hours, overtime, vacation. There's a lot of different things, and we're a global company, so you have to look at what are the laws of. Every country where you have employees, when you're rolling out a practice, are we, you know, following those laws? What if an escalation occurs?
Who needs to be involved in that? So we're essentially detailing all of that, and we're also implementing operational efficiencies along the way.
[00:10:18] Dave Travers: So here's the the thing, when you are in a new role and your job is to interact with so many different stakeholders that you just described in a very complex job like you have, where you have so many different people that you're affecting their work lives or that are depending on you to get it right.
The hot topic buzzword today that I know you have experience with is AI and how does AI come into that? And I think all of us as professionals in today's environment feel responsible to have like, you know, three or four smart things to say about AI in our back pocket at all times in case somebody asks us.
So we can, we can sound, uh, like we're on our front foot about the changes that are happening. How do you think about AI, and how do you utilize changing technology in a role like yours where you're also counted on to have very low risk tolerance for these very core operational, um, needs.
[00:11:12] Victoria Myers: I think of AI as a partner at this point, whether it be actual gen ai, where I can go and ask, you know, create me a project plan for this.
You know what X, Y, Z project that we're working on, it's a starting point. It really just helps you, especially if you have that bottleneck of, in your own mind, I can't think of how to get started on this. Have a really good prompt. Of course, prompt engineering is super important in that, but, um, it's a partner.
It's a way to get things started and really helps with some of the efficiencies when it comes to those type of tasks. I also look at it as essentially it's an overall, it's an opportunity. As we're in this process of operational efficiency, we're also looking at what are the tasks that the team may be doing on a regular basis that could be automated, whether that automation is through an AI system itself, or some other technology or something.
So those are some of the ways that I personally look at it in my day-to-day life. I can tell you, you know, when it comes to, uh, what my old hat, talent acquisition, talent attraction, you're in a competitive market to find the best talent. And so what we had rolled out two years ago was a talent marketplace and talent acquisition that's AI driven.
And the efficiencies and the benefits that we saw from that system, the improvements that that occurred within talent acquisition in the candidate experience were immense. And so that was really my first introduction to it all, was through that project and those programs. And you know, we developed a.
Proactive sourcing model, proactive engagement model. And again, it improved our time to source our time to hire our, um, application completion rate. There's so many aspects to it that we saw improvements that, you know, it, it was really astounding. Now. I'm gonna tell you a little more. Um, so last year we also ran at the end of last year, we also ran a survey of 500 full-time employees that are either using gen, ai, power tools or software at least occasionally in their jobs.
We published our Gen AI in the workforce findings. Now, interesting is that we found 50% of Gen Z respondents say they would leave their current companies if they don't offer them gen AI training. So that's one of the things that we do a lot at Amdocs is we try to train and upskill our own employees to be ready for that change.
And so going back to the very beginning, when I said prompt engineering, I've probably taken four different classes on prompt engineering and every. Single one of 'em. I learned something new, and it benefits me in my day-to-day work. So, I think all of us could benefit from utilizing these tools.
[00:14:04] Dave Travers: A hundred percent.
Now, here's the big question that I think lots of people struggle with when we're thinking about applying AI to some new problem. What percentage of the time should we be thinking about how can AI make something better, and at what percentage of the time should we be worried about some unintended or undesirable consequence of utilizing it?
How do you balance those things?
[00:14:24] Victoria Myers: Focus more on how to make it better because I think that when you're looking at operational efficiencies, it's. How can I free up more of my, my team's time to be strategic or to handle those things that really require a human's touch? And some of those really require time and attention.
And if I'm still, you know, dealing with something that, that operationally in the AI system or could handle, why not? I can tell you as a company, we've done a quite a few hackathons where we've had the employees come together and, and build teams and try to solve. Problems, whether they be for our customers, but a lot of them were internal problems that again, different teams came together.
And even HR we did a couple as well. You know, whether it be dashboards that could be AI or gen, AI driven. And so I think there's a fear around AI that, uh, and I can understand that, but ultimately, when you start using it and seeing the benefits, and also keep in mind there's a bit of a difference between AI and Gen AI. So generative AI is your chat, GPT, and copilot that can actually generate communication and chats with you versus AI could be an automation that's been developed into a system. So ultimately. One, you have to trust that the developers that you're working with will do something that meets your company's standards, which our company has very tight standards, but uh, you know, you also have to at least try it out.
[00:15:51] Dave Travers: I think that is so wise in the optimistic, proactive, let's solve a problem approach rather than the defensive. What could go wrong? More pessimistic approach is so right for so many reasons. And I think one of them. That you get at there is even for a company like yours with super high standards about what the results are.
The point of comparison for any change that you make, including introducing AI into a process, should be I. The incumbent process not perfection. And what I think often happens when AI skeptic conversations happen is AI is compared to the almighty rather than the alternative. And so that becomes an impossible standard to meet and is an excuse for the status quo, which is almost never good enough.
There's always room for improvement. So I think that's so wise, Victoria. We now are gonna go to the rapid-fire section, and I like to imagine that the CEO or Chief People officer of Amdocs is, you know, making a cup of coffee next to you in the kitchen or getting into the elevator next to you. And you only have like 60 seconds.
I. They say, Hey Victoria, how are you? I was thinking just about the people team. You've played so many different roles in people-oriented roles. How should I, as an executive, measure the people team? What's your answer?
[00:17:10] Victoria Myers: I would say, and again, coming from my talent acquisition hat, um, to look at a few metrics because we've implemented these tools and we see the, the productivity increase is that time to source and time to hire.
Um, since this measures how we. Efficiently identify and secure the top talent for the company. And it's something that is always, uh, us, everyone has an eye on it. And since we've made such improvements, you wanna ensure that those improvements are maintained overall. And another is the internal mobility rate.
Um, so tracking how effectively we're upskilling and retaining that top talent that we've acquired, it is very important to keep them in within the company. And so this can show that we are attracting the right people. We're growing them for our own long-term success.
[00:17:57] Dave Travers: Okay, so let me do the follow-up rapid-fire question on that topic, which is, you know, we've had a lot of success and done some cool stuff with internal mobility.
How should we measure that internal mobility works? How do I take that from being a buzzword to something I could talk to my board about?
[00:18:12] Victoria Myers: Well, how we approached it was to look at why we're we losing our, our talent. And what we found internally was if someone had already applied to a position, then there is a higher likelihood that they're now going to leave the company if they didn't get that position they applied for.
So it's about being strategic and changing your processes and opening things up. And what we did was take a proactive sourcing approach. Internally, which we had not been something we had allowed previously, so that the talent acquisition teams can now approach those people because they've applied to something and engage with them potentially on other new positions that have come open, as well as just offering them training opportunities and other things that are available to keep them engaged internally.
So from those practices, we've seen an improvement in our internal mobility and it's now at. 45% average, I would say sometimes a little higher.
[00:19:10] Dave Travers: Very impressive. And what's so cool about that is in addition to, you know, creating a talent pipeline from your own pool of talent, is that the way you're describing it as?
What you're doing is creating a permission structure for your best people to say, Hey, I'm actually a little bit loose in the saddle. I've hit a plateau, and now there's a pro-business, pro-company way of raising my hand saying I'm interested in something else. Rather than having to walk into office, say, you know, I might start looking for other jobs in a way that could benefit the company, and that feels much more comfortable for the person to do, and then alerts you we need to, here's a really talented person.
We need to work to keep them. I love that. Victoria, it is so clear why you're a Talent All-Star. Thank you so much for taking the time with us today.
[00:19:56] Victoria Myers: Thank you. I really appreciate it.
[00:20:01] Dave Travers: That's Victoria Myers. She's the Senior Talent Leader at Amdocs. We'll put her LinkedIn profile in the notes below. And just a reminder, we put this conversation as well as all of our episodes on the official ZipRecruiter YouTube page. I'm Dave Travers. I'll see you back here with another Talent All-Star next week.