Pfizer: HR, don’t just focus on AI use cases, you also need organization-wide AI fluency
The Fortune 100 biopharma giant is early along in its AI journey, and at UNLEASH America 2024, VP of Candidate Experience Wendy Mayer discussed success to date. In this follow up exclusive interview, Mayer delves in deeper and shares her top tips for HR leaders struggling to know where to start on AI.
HR Leader Insight
Pfizer's VP of Candidate Experience (what the pharma giant called TA) Wendy Mayer was on stage at UNLEASH America 2024.
After the show, we caught up with her to dig deeper into Pfizer's AI journey.
Read on to get the inside track on ethical AI, democratizing data and Pfizer's work with HR tech vendors.
At $59 billion revenue, US-headquartered Fortune 100 pharma giant Pfizer, HR is called People Experience, and Talent Acquisition is known uniquely as Candidate Experience.
Speaking exclusively to UNLEASH following her appearance at UNLEASH America in May, Pfizer’s VP of Candidate Experience Wendy Mayer shares: “We made the change about two and half years ago from Talent Acquisition to Candidate Experience – it was a very intentional change to recognize that this is a process.
“It’s not just about bringing people into Pfizer, but very much the way in which we bring people in.”
Mayer shared during her session at UNLEASH America 2024 that Pfizer’s CEO asked every function to come up with a use case for AI that would drive real tangible value.
The HR or People Experience function settled on the hiring process and finding ways to use AI to drive efficiencies and experience (for candidates, but also recruiters and hiring managers) there.
The AI use cases at Pfizer
Mayer tells UNLEASH that the biopharma company is using AI (and particularly generative AI) to develop job descriptions – “a very common approach for many Talent Acquisition teams”, she notes.
This makes sense as job descriptions are such a critical thing to get right in the hiring process.
But AI will also help with job levelling, aka recommending a job level or grade for the position advertised in the job advert. Answering questions like “is the way we’re describing the role right and consistent?”, adds Mayer.
AI then helps to identify which candidate resumes best meet the job description.
AI also informs the questions Pfizer recruiters and hiring managers will ask at interview to best figure out the candidate’s background and experience – and then AI can summarize the interview itself to help to recruiter and hiring manager get a quick and clear overview of the candidate.
Then, once someone is hired, Pfizer’s HR team has the option to use Microsoft Copilot to get a draft organization-wide announcement of that new hire.
“It’s very quick, it saves times for the hiring manager, and it allows us to better and more consistently communicate job changes across the organization”, Mayer tells UNLEASH.
Mayer continues to explain that Pfizer’s HR and AI work is helping the employer to really ensure it is getting more proactive around internal mobility.
In the past, exploring lateral moves within the organization were largely up to the candidate – they had to spot the open role, and apply for it, but it was easy for them to miss the opportunities.
Now, with AI, the technology can match internal people to open roles based on their skills, experiences, tenure and their growth aspirations. The recruiters can then proactively reach out and make the colleague aware of the opportunity so that they can apply if interested.
Due to AI, “we can proactively source our own candidates,” notes Mayer – she told the HR leader audience at UNLEASH America that it’s important to remember that if they don’t hire and grow their people, somebody else will.
Pfizer on ethical AI and HR tech vendors
Mayer describes Pfizer’s approach to AI in HR as “conservatively innovative” – this is because the pharma giant always keeps ethical and unbiased AI top of mind.
To do the work around job descriptions, Pfizer is using its own internally built tool – it did take a look at the options on offer from vendors, but none of them currently met the pharma giant’s requirements.
That doesn’t mean HR tech vendors aren’t helping Pfizer in other ways. The pharma giant is leveraging HiredScore (now part of Workday) to help evaluate the fit of the candidate to our job description – the biopharma company is now extending this predictive AI capability to match internal candidates with open roles in a more proactive manner.
For Mayer, HiredScore is a noteworthy vendor partner because of its “very rigorous process from an ethical AI standpoint” – “they not only audit the data on their end, but they also audit our data to make sure that all decisions that are coming from using their platform are not creating bias”.
For the job levelling piece, Pfizer is working with Willis Towers Watson.
“They’ve been working on a solution for two years”, and now the pharma giant is piloting with them to leverage its job architecture and ensure that jobs are leveled in a way that is bias-free ad truly adds value.
Mayer’s top tips to HR leaders unsure where to start with AI are to find the right partners, those with “a very high bar in terms of ethical AI and a rigorous process” to support and scale the expertise you have in house.
These vendors have significant expertise and experience, so they can help educate HR teams about what they need to look out for around ethical AI.
From AI to people data at Pfizer
The key to doing AI well is having the right data underlying it – if you put garbage in, you’re just going to get garbage out.
Pfizer is a very data-driven organization – “people are hungry for data”, but the challenge then is having real democratization.
To achieve this in the People Experience (or HR) function, Mayer explains that Pfizer recently switched to Visier.
“The platform was easier to use, very comprehensive, and gave us the ability to provide access to data across a broader audience”, rather than just have it limited to the data and analytics team.
Mayer’s whole team has access to Visier – they now have access to real-time updates on the progress of the team, which helps with managing workloads, but also wider workforce planning across the organization.
The partnership is still in early phases of implementation, but Mayer shares that access to all of this people data is going to be integral to Pfizer achieving its ambitions around internal mobility.
The challenge now, especially as Visier is being rolled out across the entire HR or People Experience function, is making sure everyone is speaking the same language and defining everything in the same way, otherwise the insights won’t make sense across the different HR teams.
To help here, the HR team has created guidebooks or dashboards and appointed ambassadors on the team to answer any questions.
The future of AI and tech at Pfizer
In this AI work, Mayer is very clear that they’re at the beginning of the journey, and they are learning along the way. “It’s still very much a work in progress”, she states.
UNLEASH was keen to find out the top lessons learnt; there’s always an element of “randomness” with generative AI, so humans need to stay in the loop to ensure reliability and consistency.
This explains why one highlight of UNLEASH America 2024 for Mayer was Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick’s keynote – he talked a lot about the “jagged edge” of AI, and how it is good at some things, but not others, and it’s essential that HR leaders are aware of this.
In another vein, Mayer shares that although they have lots of very specific, intentional projects around AI, the biopharma company also wants the wider organization to feel more comfortable with AI in their daily work.
“If you have these use cases, you’re just focused on these high-end specific areas, but people may not be involved with those use cases, but AI is going to touch their lives in other ways.”
This means everyone is going to need to get comfortable and understand how to use AI, figure out what is right and accurate, and what isn’t, and assessing when you can use it (and when you should not).
To this end, Pfizer is rolling out Microsoft Copilot across its nearly 80,000 employee population to drive AI fluency.
“One of my tips to my team was to use it in your day-to-day; think about the work you do and start to play around with how this can help create greater productivity for you,” shares Mayer.
“Do you write a lot of emails? Well, every time you write an email, use this tool. Start to build the muscle for how you can weave it into the way that you work.”
But, for Mayer, another positive of getting employees experimenting with AI (in a safe way) is that “there could be areas of opportunities that have just not been on our radar” as a HR department. That could really help drive the roadmap, and drive productivity across the organization.
The final future focus is around skills – this is a big priority for Mayer’s Candidate Experience team.
“We’re not a tech company, but tech is core to the way in which we will be working” now and into the future.
Success here is essential so that “we can attract tech talent into our organization because they’re going to be critical for us going forward”, concludes Mayer.
Sign up to the UNLEASH Newsletter
Get the Editor’s picks of the week delivered straight to your inbox!
Chief Reporter
Allie is an award-winning business journalist and can be reached at alexandra@unleash.ai.
Contact Us
"*" indicates required fields
Partner with UNLEASH
"*" indicates required fields