Cornerstone Launches Cornerstone Xplor to Enable “Back to Human” Strategies for Today’s Modern Business Leaders

With a skills-forward, AI-powered, extensible learning, coaching, career exploration and talent mobility experience that unites people and business in shared success

SINGAPORE and HONG KONG – Media OutReach – 3 November 2021 – Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc., a leader in adaptive HR solutions, today announced the release of its latest innovation, Cornerstone Xplor. A core component of the company’s vision for a new system of work, Cornerstone Xplor is a holistic people growth experience that delivers a fully integrated and hyper-personalized journey of learning, skill development, growth and career mobility for every person. Powered by Cornerstone’s deep learning and talent capabilities, its innovative Cornerstone Skills Graph, fresh and auto-curated content delivery and self-learning AI, the Cornerstone Xplor experience enables modern talent leaders to meet their people where they are with a highly individualized and fully connected growth experience, at scale. 

According to a recent McKinsey report, HR leaders have found themselves on a relentless treadmill to reduce costs, optimize processes and apply new technologies to their existing HR models. But the COVID-19 pandemic—which accelerated employee demands to meet physical and mental health needs and intensified concerns about a company’s societal impact—shed light on how previous priorities have caused HR to lose its vital human element. Many CHROs are eager to shift to a “back to human” model that re-focuses on people and addresses the employee experience in a more targeted, dynamic way. 

“Companies are in a mad scramble to train, reskill, and redeploy workers around the world, yet they have to integrate dozens of systems to do this well,” said Josh Bersin, Global Industry Analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company. “Cornerstone Xplor has the potential to transform the HR Tech Market by combining the features of learning experience platforms, talent marketplace, career pathways, and advanced skills technology into one integrated system.”

Unlike traditional Learning Experience Platforms (LXP), or other similar applications designed to deliver various elements of the people growth journey in separate applications, Cornerstone Xplor is the first to bring every element of people growth into one single destination — and to do so by harnessing the power of the deep talent management capabilities, workflows, AI data and intelligence of Cornerstone’s core. Through this innovation, talent leaders can deliver a modern, engaging and individual experience to their people, while ensuring the experience leverages the investments they’ve already made and is fully aligned to their organizational goals, including:   

End-to-End Skills Alignment: With Cornerstone Xplor, people can select which skills they have, which they’d like to work on and even ones they’d like to ignore. That information is used to intelligently analyze and suggest new learning opportunities and the most relevant content, connect individuals with mentors and experts, engage them in communities of practice, and auto-generate potential career paths available within the organization. Once existing skills are identified and new skills are mastered, talent leaders can easily build and visualize skill pools, identify their experts and offer them new opportunities to grow in a way that both supports organizational transformation and removes implicit bias from those decisions.   

Scalable Self-Driven Development: Cornerstone Xplor delivers highly individualized and “self-driving” experiences for every user because it’s essentially powered by a person’s whole self: interests, preferences, behaviors, skills, work experiences and goals. With the power of AI, Cornerstone Xplor leverages people, content and skills data to auto-generate personalized learning and skill paths, deliver the most relevant, high-impact learning content in the moment of need and suggest new connections, mentors and career journeys along the way. This enables each user to direct their own development journey and enables talent leaders to deliver personalized, aligned and engaging learning experiences at scale – without all the heavy lifting.  

Talent Marketplace: Internal mobility exists at the intersection of experiences and skills, putting Cornerstone Xplor in a unique position to deliver on the promise of a modern talent marketplace. Cornerstone Xplor not only creates a skills-forward development experience for people, but enables people to match and connect those skills to potential new career paths and an auto-matched ”marketplace” of mentors, jobs, gigs and projects. This enables every person to proactively pursue a path that accelerates their own growth aspirations, while helping organizations to unlock the often-hidden expertise and skills inside their organization and reduce the need to constantly search for external talent. Long term plans for Cornerstone Xplor include allowing people to promote their skills and aspirations and enabling talent leaders to manage the search, hiring, onboarding and movement of people from role to role. 

“Our customers are looking to Cornerstone to help them create a more human approach to their people experience. At the same time, they need to ensure their businesses are set up for transformation and for the skills and careers of tomorrow,” said Phil Saunders, CEO of Cornerstone. “Our vision for a new system of work is designed to help our customers and their people meet this evolving nature of work, together. Cornerstone Xplor is a key part of that vision. People can create their own growth experience that’s uniquely personal, and talent leaders can cultivate a workforce of connected, thriving people who are aligned in purpose and success.” 

Early Market Feedback 

Cornerstone launched the Cornerstone Xplor Early Adopter program in Summer 2021 and is working closely with customers and industry analysts to expand on features and functionality. Feedback from this program, as well as ongoing customer insights, will inform the long-term innovation strategy for the product. Early comments include:

• “Employee experience has been a big focus for most organizations for some time, but the pandemic and its resulting social, cultural and economic consequences have made it business critical,” said David Wilson, CEO, Fosway Group. “In a hybrid workplace, organizations need to find new strategies to engage and connect employees to the work they are doing, as well as how they can grow and develop. A solution like Cornerstone Xplor can help organizations create a more connected experience for every employee, as well as accelerating their opportunities to grow and develop with a shared view of success.”
• “It is critically important for individuals to navigate their own learning and development, and the organizations they work for need to create a personalized self-driven learning and growth experience that gives people the tools and inspiration to take the reins,” said Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal HCM Analyst, Brandon Hall Group. “With Cornerstone Xplor, organizations will be able to empower their people to be the master of their own destiny, resulting in a greater level of commitment and more meaningful milestones achieved for all.” 
• “At Deutsche Post DHL we want to make it easy for every employee to be in control of their career,” said Meredith Wellard, VP Group Learning Talent and Platforms at Deutsche Post DHL. “We plan to do this by ensuring the experience linked to skills development is delightful, and by creating greater transparency of current and recommended skills aligned with each person’s career goals and unique career path. We have made great progress developing this with the help of the Cornerstone Skills Graph technology over the past year, and we look forward to implementing Cornerstone Xplor to make the experience even more seamless and easy for our people. We are excited about how aligned this solution is with our business goals.”
• “We want to provide the best experience for our employees by making it simple and easy for them to gain the knowledge they need for the role they have and the roles they want at Fossil Group in the future,” James Webb, VP, Global People Development, Engagement and Communications, Fossil Group. “Cornerstone, Xplor will create a real opportunity to enable easy and relevant learning, matched with personalized career mapping, that better aligns with how our people think about their own development and their long-term career aspirations at Fossil Group.”

Additional Information 

Cornerstone Xplor is now available to all new and existing Cornerstone customers. New and existing Saba Software customers will be able to use the new product by the end of 2021.  

The company will be sharing more about Cornerstone Xplor during its annual customer and partner event, Cornerstone Convergence from Nov. 16-17, 2021. To join the complementary virtual event, register here: https://www.cornerstoneconvergence.com/

• To read more about how Cornerstone is helping organizations create future-ready people and teams, visit: https://www.cornerstoneondemand.com/resources/whitepapers/meet-the-future-ready-guide-for-talent-leaders/
• To read more about Cornerstone Xplor, visit: https://www.cornerstoneondemand.com/resources/articles/lets-power-future-ready-workforce

About Cornerstone

Cornerstone powers the future-ready workforce with adaptive HR software designed to unite people, teams, technology and business to inspire a work environment of growth, agility and success for all. With an AI-powered and skills-forward system designed for the contemporary workforce, we help organizations modernize their learning and development experience, deliver the most relevant content from anywhere, accelerate talent and career mobility and establish skills as the universal language of growth and success across their business. Cornerstone serves over 6,000 customers and 75M users and is available in 180 countries and 50 languages. https://www.cornerstoneondemand.com/

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