Talent Attraction and Development
Talent Attraction and Development
Overview
Companies that thrive in a fierce talent market are those that engage the right people, invest in their development and enable them to adapt to change. Having a talented, diverse global workforce in place and empowering them with the resources, tools and skills they need for growth and success helps increase productivity, connection and the insights that fuel our success.
This material topic includes how we attract and retain a diverse, high-performing workforce and foster an inclusive, agile and tech-fluent culture. It covers our work to encourage career progression and facilitate an environment of open feedback.
Focus Areas
Increasing the pool of diverse candidates through supportive, equitable hiring processes.
Cultivating the next generation of leaders by offering early-career and ongoing leadership development opportunities.
Accelerating the futurereadiness of our workforce through learning, innovation and real-world application.
Supporting performance and career growth through coaching and dynamic feedback.
2023 Highlights
Maintained high employee engagement, with an 87% favorability score.
Enhanced our diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) recruitment strategy and partnerships, including a fellowship program for students of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Reached 9,000+ employees through career coaching-related events and 400+ through leadership development programs.
Supported employee education through $5.1 million in career-advancing tuition reimbursement.
“Ensuring we have the right voices in the room, the right skill set and ability to execute quickly. This is how we come together as one team to accelerate progress for our customers and our community.”
Kate Brown
SVP Global Head of Engagement
Our Approach
To attract and cultivate a high-performing, diverse global workforce, S&P Global employs recruiting partnerships and early-career opportunities, and provides our people with coaching and development opportunities to fulfill their career aspirations. And we encourage regular and open career planning conversations and feedback.
Our Board views effective human capital management as critical to the company’s ability to execute its strategy. As a result, the Board and the Compensation and Leadership Development Committee oversee and regularly engage with our CEO, Chief Purpose Officer (CPO), and Chief Corporate Responsibility & Diversity Officer on people topics, including talent attraction and development.
At the management level, our CPO is responsible for leading the development and execution of our People strategy. This includes promoting an inclusive and performancedriven workplace culture with equitable opportunity for all; managing initiatives to attract, develop, engage and retain the high-quality talent needed to deliver on current and future business needs; and overseeing the company’s compensation, benefits and wellbeing programs.
5,345
new external employee hires*
1,304
(19.6%)
internal hires
630K+
training courses completed by employees**
849
(2.5%)
number and percentage of total employees represented by an independent trade union or covered by collective bargaining agreements†
* All of S&P Global excluding CRISIL and Taiwan Ratings Corp. ** Includes all classroom, where available, and online completed passed or certified training courses.
† All S&P Global excluding CARFAX, CRISIL, Taiwan Ratings Corp. and OSTTRA.
See data for the years 2021-2023 in the Learning and Development table in the Appendix.
Exploring the Purpose and Values That Drive Our Mission
To connect with the purpose and values that help us realize our vision for Powering Global Markets, S&P Global hosted “Accelerate Progress Live: Lead with Purpose” in December 2023. Hosted by our President & CEO and Chief Purpose Officer, the enterprise-wide event encouraged colleagues to explore the People First and Customer Centric ways in which our business accelerates progress.
Engaging Diverse Talent Through Career Expos
S&P Global works with a number of partners to engage diverse talent, including the National Black MBA Association (NBMBAA). Through participation in the NBMBAA’s Annual Conference and Exhibition, we identified numerous highly qualified candidates and, in 2023, hired 17 people.
In addition, we participated in the Prospanica Conference and Career Expo and the Out & Equal Workplace Summit in the US, UK Black Business Week, Perspektywy Women in Tech Summit in Poland, India’s RISE by Pride Circle, Women in Tech Romania and HerKey (formerly JobsForHer) in India, among other events.
Diverse Hiring
At S&P Global, we are committed to being an inclusive employer of choice. We aim to increase the pool of diverse candidates at all levels through supportive, equitable hiring processes.
In 2023, we enhanced our strategy for DEI recruitment partnerships, expanding our global reach to include all regions across diversity populations. Each regional partnership has both a recruiting and branding component to maximize name recognition, engagement with local talent and our hire rate. Our DEI team added a recruitment lead to coordinate and further align efforts across the organization.
Key partnerships in 2023 included:
- The National Black MBA Association’s Annual Conference and Exhibition, through which we recruited 17 new colleagues.
- The Prospanica Conference and Career Expo, the Out & Equal Workplace Summit and UK Black Business Week.
- Perspektywy Women in Tech Summit in Poland, India’s RISE by Pride Circle, Women in Tech Romania and HerKey (formerly JobsForHer) in India.
Avoiding Bias in AI-Assisted Recruiting
To support our compliance with New York City’s anti-bias law, which generally prohibits the use of automated employment decision tools in screening candidates and which took effect in 2023, we created a task force to assess our recruiting vendors and discontinue work with any that use artificial intelligence (AI) in recruiting. The task force, which resulted in our terminating our contract with at least one vendor, is part of S&P Global’s comprehensive framework and practices to support our commitment to using AI ethically. (See Responsible Use of AI in Products and Marketing to learn more.)
Early Career Talent
The diverse perspectives that our people bring to S&P Global give us a vital competitive edge. Our Early Careers Programs remain a strong source of talent, allowing us to cultivate the next generation of leaders through internships and other opportunities.
In 2023, interns throughout our four global regions made valuable contributions to the business. We continue to strive to diversify our intern talent pool, partnering with leading organizations that increase our visibility to attract candidates:
- Worked with the 10,000 Interns Foundation in the UK to offer paid internships to more than 20 individuals through the 10,000 Black Interns and 10,000 Able Interns programs.
- Partnered with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to support our hiring of diverse talent. Additionally, by lending these HBCUs our philanthropy and market intelligence for educational and research purposes, we help develop the next generation of leaders across all backgrounds.
- Developed students and young professionals in the New York Tri-state area through the Year Up program to help bridge the gap for young adults from marginalized backgrounds.
- Through our Reach People Resource Group, we continued our partnership with the Commodity Insights division to host students with disabilities as interns. Throughout the internship, we worked with VISIONS: Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a New York City-based social service organization, to support accessibility and a positive learning experience.
Global Career Coaching
S&P Global is proud to offer Global Career Coaching to all of our people. Through this industry-leading program, certified coaches offer confidential, individualized and open-ended support to help our people identify and fulfill their career aspirations. Since its launch in 2020, 3,228 unique individuals have engaged in career coaching, including 1,159 who participated in 2023.
We supported Global Career Coaching with dozens of programs and resources in 2023, including:
- 65+ career coaching-related events reaching 9,000+ participants.
- S&P Global’s International Coaching Week, attracting 4,000+ attendees.
- Elevate Program Coaching for 50 graduates of the Elevate leadership development program.
- 150+ engagements focused on executive, transition/ leadership and communications coaching.10
See data for the years 2021-2023 in the Global Career Coaching table in the Appendix.
10 Provided through our preferred vendors
“Having access to an internal career coach at S&P Global motivated me to leave my comfort zone and helped me see that nothing is impossible in this company if you are willing to take a risk.”
Susana Guillen Martin
Associate Director – CARM, S&P Global Ratings, Global Career Coaching participant
Leadership Development and Support
Leaders of all backgrounds are the future of our organization. In 2023, S&P Global continued to foster this important pipeline by helping our people develop as leaders and providing essential learning, innovation and application opportunities in emergent technologies.
Support for People Leaders
S&P Global’s development programs support leaders in navigating their teams through times of continuous change and enabling them to thrive. Our tailored development experiences are anchored in our People First culture, purpose and strategy.
In 2023, S&P Global continued to develop Edge, our enterprise-wide learning offering, in several ways:
- Built on our Create (People Leader Effectiveness Program) with segmentation based on leadership level and enhancements to the New People Leader Experience.
- Provided people leaders with bite-sized learning on power skills.
- Introduced the BigThink+ platform to provide learning modules, including some featuring influential speakers, to support S&P Global’s performance management system.
- Built on our Highly Effective Teams program, with a total of 880 leaders participating in 30 live workshops and 62 custom team workshops.
- Designed and relaunched our signature development programs, Elevate and Propel, to enable leaders to execute on the S&P Global Strategic Pillars.
In-House Consultancy Supports Change Leadership
To continue to accelerate progress in a fast-changing environment, S&P Global launched Delta Change Leadership (aka Change Advisory) in 2023. This internal consultancy supports People Leaders in enhancing their change leadership skills.
EssentialTECH and EssentialINNOVATION
Our EssentialTECH and EssentialINNOVATION teams bring opportunities for all colleagues to build the skills, capabilities and mindsets to address the business and career development needs of today and tomorrow. Along with our core learning areas – Agile, Automation, DevOps, Cloud, Data Science, Cyber Security and Innovation – we leaned into learning opportunities in the metaverse and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in 2023.
To continue to create space for colleagues to find innovative solutions to real business needs, we enabled various initiatives:
- Supported 91% of our colleagues through EssentialTECH learning programs.
- Engaged 62% of our people in 100+ activities via the S&P Global Innovation Platform.
- Hosted the third annual, cross-enterprise SPARK Summit, with the theme of “Ignite. Inspire. Impact. Fueling what’s next with data, technology and innovation.”
- The S&P Global Patent Program offers opportunities to learn about the importance of patenting, identify patentable ideas and access assistance with the patent process. These include training sessions, diagnostic meetings with our in-house counsel, innovation initiatives, quarterly invention mining meetings and support for a program that recognizes our inventors upon filing a patent.
Learn more about how we promote our people’s futurereadiness in Fostering Innovation.
Developing Application Skills, Solving Real Business Challenges
S&P Global Innovation is a cross-divisional platform to house innovation and technology initiatives, including:
- Hackathons: Opportunities for people to collaborate and compete to solve a business challenge.
- Gig and mentorship programs: A marketplace that connects expertise to where it is needed, giving employees the opportunity to develop their capabilities and deliver real business value.
- Breaking Barriers: An annual low-code/nocode contest that encourages colleagues to become citizen developers, tackling real business challenges, with no formal programming knowledge required.
- Ideas that Inspire Innovation (i3): A contest bringing together our Market Intelligence, Sustainable1 and digital people to promote and develop their ideas, with the best ideas moving from pitch to implementation.
Neokalpana (New Imagination) Hackathon
More than 1,600 employees in S&P Global India experimented with GenAI. Prompt Engineering participants translated their solution designs into a series of prompts leveraging an internal ChatGPT web application, while Code Application participants built working applications.
Performance Management
S&P Global’s award-winning Thrive performance management system is designed to cultivate meaningful conversations year-round, personalize career opportunities and accelerate performance. We worked to embed this simpler, more flexible and continuous performance experience into our culture and processes in 2023.
The centerpiece of this effort was a five-month campaign to encourage more career conversations, mindset shifts about careers and self-reflection on individuals’ strengths, motivations and career goals. We supported this campaign through workshops and various forms of communications across the company.
S&P Global also enhanced its promotion process to better clarify this colleague-driven approach, improve data on promotions and enable People Leaders to better support their team members.
In January 2024, S&P Global launched the Thrive full-year performance story (FYPS) ahead of annual compensation planning. The FYPS allows all colleagues to reflect on the past performance year by summarizing their achievements and impact on business results based on performance notes and discussions, as well as stakeholder insights that they have actively sought. People Leaders then add their comments to the FYPS. These stories help People Leaders make salary increase, bonus and, if applicable, equity recommendations, without the use of performance ratings.
Turnover Rate
In line with industry averages, S&P Global’s turnover rate decreased in 2023, with total global turnover at 11.9% and global voluntary employee turnover at 7.2%. We continue to listen to our people, to understand and respond to their needs in our efforts to retain top talent.
See data for the years 2021-2023 in the Appendix.
VIBE Listening Platform and 2023 Survey
VIBE (Voice, Insights, Belonging and Expectation) is S&P Global’s continuous listening program. It is part of a holistic approach that includes listening channels such as annual engagement surveys, pulse surveys, monthly polls and colleague networks. These channels allow our people to share feedback on their experiences, as well as our company strategy, development, culture and other relevant items.
In 2023, overall engagement remained high, at 87% favorability. To gain additional insight on sentiments related to our collective wellbeing and People First philosophy, we also introduced a Wellbeing index. The index had strong initial results, with 82% favorability.
In the first full year following our merger with IHS Markit, the survey also tracked strong results in areas related to building a cohesive, purpose-driven culture:
- Motivated by Purpose and Values: 87% (+5 versus mid-year pulse)
- Change Leadership: 88% (+5 versus mid-year pulse)
VIBE Survey Engagement Index
I would recommend S&P Global as a great place to work (+1% over 2022) - 89%
I am proud to work for S&P Global (+1% over 2022) - 91%
My work gives me a feeling of personal accomplishment (unchanged since 2022) - 85%
I would like to be working with S&P Global one year from now (+1% over 2022) - 84%
Overall 2023 VIBE Survey Engagement Index (+1% over 2022) - 87%
Looking Ahead
In 2023, S&P Global focused on embedding Thrive’s flexible, continuous performance experience into our culture and processes, as well as making incremental improvements in our approach to promotions, the new Thrive FYPS and feedback.
In 2024, we will explore more formal development plans, as well as further improvements to our promotions process. We also plan to enhance the processes related to people improvement plans and promotions.
In addition, S&P Global will continue to incorporate a data-driven approach to decision-making for our talent attraction and development programs. 2024 plans include:
- Continuing to refine and streamline global recruitment partnerships.
- Driving Global Career Coaching awareness, participation and outcomes.
- Advancing change leadership, innovation, customer-centricity, sustainable growth and enterprise mindset as key themes of our leadership development programs.
See data tables in Appendix.