Redefining Career Growth: How Excellus BCBS Is Using Skills To Transform Internal Mobility

When Excellus BlueCross BlueShield emerged from the pandemic amid the "great resignation," they faced more than just external hiring challenges — they needed to reimagine how they developed and retained talent. Their journey with AI would transform not just how they hired, but how they approached career development entirely.

"As a company, we started to look at, 'What does this mean to us? What do we need to change? What do we need to evolve towards?'" reflected Tim Lippincott, Vice President of People Strategy at Excellus during his presentation at Phenom AI Day. 

Post-pandemic, the immediate challenge was substantial: a mandate from senior leadership to hire close to 1,500 people over three years. But as they met this challenge through an AI-powered career site and recruitment tools to improve their candidate, recruiter, and manger experiences, a new opportunity emerged — retaining and developing this newly acquired talent.

Want the full story? Watch Lippincott's complete presentation, or read on for key takeaways

Building an Internal Talent Marketplace

"[Employees] are looking for something more than just the position they were hired into," Lippincott explained. "We want people to find many jobs. We just want those changes to happen inside of these four walls."

The solution centered on an innovative approach to skills-based talent management. While skills-based approaches were trending, Excellus needed to make it their own. "We heard about it. We saw about it. We went to a lot of conferences where skills were all the rage," Lippincott recalled. "Career growth, career development, and opportunity is part of our value proposition,” he continued. “It was important to our employees, so we made it important to us to have a strategy to meet that expectation.”

 They just needed the right tech to make it happen.

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Transforming Talent Profiles Through AI

Through Phenom’s Talent Marketplace, Excellus created comprehensive talent profiles for their entire workforce. "We now have a sense of the skills that our employees are bringing, whether they've been here 25 years or whether they've been here for five days," Lippincott noted. "We know what they can do. And that has enabled us to really turn on this concept of internal sourcing."

This transformation meant taking their external recruitment success and turning it inward. "From a recruitment standpoint, we're taking what we did externally and now leveraging our recruiters to look at talent inside of our organization. And we're doing that through skills," he explained.

The initiative at Excellus has already yielded significant results. By taking a methodical approach to implementing their skills-based strategy, they've achieved several key milestones.

Results and Impact:

• Successfully implemented AI-driven talent profiles across the organization

• Launched a new mentorship platform

• Developed a comprehensive skills validation process

• Created transparent career development pathways

• Achieved strong leader buy-in for the new approach

"We're going through a skills validation process, making sure that as we say certain jobs require certain skills, we can back that up," Lippincott shared. "Because we know that employees are looking for the next step, the second step after that, the third step after that."

Looking Ahead

For Excellus, who is already seeing a tremendous leader response from the team's work, this represents more than a technology implementation. It's a fundamental shift in how they approach actionable career development. "AI is putting us in a position to say, 'Here's who I am as an employee today. Here are the jobs that are out there across this organization,' so we can transparently communicate all the opportunities that this wonderful company has to offer," Lippincott explained. And

The long-term vision is clear: "What we're anticipating is [employees] are going to see us as a long-term option," he shared. "That value proposition going well beyond total rewards is centered on our culture — a culture that is founded in development. What better way to get there than launching skills to provide opportunities for our internal employees to find out what a great place this is to work — not just this year, but in the next 5 to 10 years?"

Learn more about the skills-based hiring tools Excellus and other top companies are using