From Complexity to Clarity: A Smarter Talent Acquisition Model

Transcript:

Elliot Clark: Good morning, good afternoon or good evening and welcome to another HRO Today educational podcast. I am Elliot Clark, I'm the CEO of HRO Today. We publish HRO Today magazine, HRO Today EMEA and HRO Today APAC as well as host the HRO Today forums and educational events held around the world and we manage the HRO Today Association. 

I recently helped host the HRO Today Forum North America where dozens of CHRO’s and heads of talent acquisition gathered to discuss the biggest challenges in HR. One of the biggest challenges is integration of everything from technology to service offerings. The HR community is exhausted and more and more looking to vendors who can perform multiple functions. It's the one source, one force movement in full swing.

On a more micro level, I think most TA leaders and their RPO partners and contingent labor partners, agree that problems and challenges from sourcing to job classification to candidate interviewing to onboarding are increasingly complex and the solution sets require both service and technology. In addition, candidates need great experience to move from the sourcing to acceptance to onboard.

We all know this, so we have a great guest to help us discuss this topic. Amy Bush is the president of Kelly, the Global RPO and I hope I got that right. It's the combination of Sevenstep RPO and KellyOCG. They are two of the very best providers of RPO and MSP. They're now combined to be an example I suppose of that one force and to meet this growing trend for a total workforce solution.

Amy is a long-time veteran of the industry, if I can say that. She also previously was an executive at Kelly, then at AMS before joining Sevenstep and now post transaction rejoining Kelly. Amy, welcome to the podcast.

Amy Bush: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. What a great topic.

Elliot Clark: Anything you want to add to explain where the Sevenstep/Kelly RPO organization is headed? I mean, you're one of the top rated providers on the HRO Today Baker's Dozen for both RPO and MSP. But you know, I want to give you the opportunity to describe the company as you folks see it now.

Amy Bush: You know, it's really interesting. You used a word “everything”, the integration of everything and the expectation in this marketplace in the world we're living in today. And we often talk as we combined forces with Kelly and Sevenstep of we need to be “ready for everything”. That's what our clients need. And I think bringing these two powerhouses together, complementary powerhouses too, not a lot of overlap. We are joining really from unique points of view and bringing the best of both and combining to make sure that we're meeting our clients exactly where we need to be. And in that case, it's everywhere and everything. It's quite an interesting market and I think as we dig into this topic today, I can bring to light a little bit more of what's going on in the organization, but more so what bringing these two powerhouses together is going to enable for our clients and in the marketplace. We're really excited. It's quite powerful.

Elliot Clark: All right, so let's do the sequel to Everything Everywhere All at Once starring Amy Bush. So how does the current TA environment change the TA infrastructure requirements, you know, for both contingent and permanent positions and how does it impact the the need for that infrastructure to be both adaptable for size and flexible for approach and strategy? I mean, we all see that the environment from economic uncertainty to you know, we had pandemics, we had great resignations, we had great stagnations. It has been certainly a changing landscape. How's that impacting the TA environment and the infrastructure requirements? And tell me what you're seeing in in the marketplace amongst your clients.

Amy Bush: It's really interesting. I think it would be a complete understatement to start with “Things are different now, right?” And when you're looking at whether you're an HR or TA leader, whether you're sitting in C-suite and talent runs your company and you're trying to navigate that, people are just not sure how things are going to be tomorrow. And you mentioned exhausted, I would say highly alert as well. And with all the changing that's coming on a continuous basis, it's not stopping. TA still has the same expectations they've always had. They have to hire the people that are needed when they need them.

Most of what we're seeing from clients is that a lot of their perhaps technology or processes are really poured in concrete. And so when you come in and you're trying to help them in this integration of everything, it's not as simple as to just say we'll change this or change that. That's not possible. And so really having to have an infrastructure that you bring to the table into the TA space that's able to integrate and enable what your clients already have is critical. And when I say what they already have, that could be an HR infrastructure, could be TA, it could be investments that they made that they wish they hadn't in certain tools and tech. But how do you come to the table and provide those integration services to get the best out of what they have and to map that over in a strategy with what you can bring to the table?

And we're not just talking about permanent or contingent anymore. We're talking about all talent, including silver medalists, people who just were that second choice but are so critical to maybe the next role. We're talking about how your talent pooling, how you're talking to your internal talent. Are you treating your internal talent the same way that you're treating your external talent that you're trying to attract as you move them?

And so having that infrastructure ability to create talent pools of your internal talent, of mapping your silver medalists for permanent hires over to contingent openings while they wait for their permanent job so you don't lose them. Where the talent is and being able to have that visibility and being able to bring things to the table that sync up what your client already has is very critical right now. Not everyone can just start over. That's not the world we're living in.

Elliot Clark: Well, you know, begs the question about how the providers are going to respond. 

Let me before I get to that, let me ask you one question. I came up at the HRO Today Forum North America. I was talking to one of the TA leaders and they said we have different technology tools to address all these different issues. And they're from different vendors. And they finally realized that they needed to keep four or five people on staff internally in TA and HR to just keep the integrations functioning. And they went to the vendor and said you have to do this all the time for all your clients. We want you to handle our technology integration as part of your scope. Are you seeing that happen now as well with some of your clients where they say, all right, well, you've got some of your internal pools, you have our external pools. We're going to make you response with part of your statement of work or making sure that we can get integrated reporting from the various elements in our technology.

Amy Bush: We're actually seeing that almost 100% of the time. I hate absolute, so I'm not going to say 100% of the time, but it is extremely common. And I think that where this combination of Sevenstep and KellyOCG together comes into play. And I this is not a sales pitch. I'm just saying we're in a very unique position because we have proprietary technology that does just that. And I think the reason we're so close to that absolute 100% of people coming in is 1, There's a need. And two, we have a very unique capability to do that and bringing it into one dashboard, one force, one source and really simplifying this for our clients so they don't have to have 5 FTE’s sitting on their books in terms of running this. And also there's cost, but there's just ease of use. And when we're sitting here and we're talking about exhaustion and we're talking about being on the edge of our seats and just tense about what comes next. Anywhere you can simplify, anywhere you can make it easy, and then you can make it efficient from a cost and experience perspective, which trickles into your hiring community, it trickles into your candidate experience, and frankly, you're just getting smarter all around. We are seeing it quite often and we're excited because it just makes the process that much smoother for everyone.

Elliot Clark: Well, let's drill into that a little bit more. So given that these changing requirements for TA and you mentioned, you know, you're seeing almost 100% of the time on technology, but how do organizations like yours, how do partners like Sevenstep or KellyOCG need to respond to those needs and offer these comprehensive but highly modular and adaptable solutions to incorporate both the services and technologies? Where do you in this industry need to be over the next several years to sort of, you know, deal with all of these ups and downs and sideways, you know, changes to circumstances and customer needs? What do you see coming at, you know, in the near term for the industry?

Amy Bush: I think there's two things here that I would point out is that scalability is just table stakes at this point. You have to have the systems and the tools to scale because the fits and starts, the fluidity is just a must, but at the same time, there's complexity to it as well and that you're not quite sure what you're going to need when. So it's not really just a question of volume anymore. You might need a consulting portion in TA, you might need contingent labor over here, or you might not even know and are looking for a logic model of what actually do I need. I have a problem and can you help me? So having a provider that is fully modular in the sense that they have an enterprise talent management group that they have a way to walk through the door. And when you walk through one door of maybe, you know, came to partner with us on your contingent work, But you can turn around and walk through another door and say, oh, you're all connected, you live in the same house and you can help me without me having to go through another whole process. So that fully modular ability is critical right now I think to anyone in the in the TA space because that way we're ahead of the challenge. And it's not just about scalability, it's about the ability to be modular and customize that solution.

The other thing that we are working on right now and we're going to be bringing to market and our combined force of nature here that we keep talking about in a really positive way is that logic model that we get ahead of it. Often times we hear from our TA partners, you know, it's so fantastic. You guys have all this ability, your recruiters, they come to the recruitment strategy discussion and they have all this market data they have what's going on in perm and contingent. How many times we've hired this job in the past, the average time to fill for it, where the candidate came from? Is the candidate still here and successful? But if there are any changes that are needed to comp or anything like that, this requisition just went through all these approval layers for compensation to, you know, HR all the all the way through finance. And so we're working on the combination of our Helix platform and our contingent spot as well as our insights integrator platform with Sevayo® and we're moving that to the front. What if just when you had a need, you could type in what that need. You don't need to know exactly what category it fits in and you have a partner that no matter what it goes in can do that for you. It also will help finance, comp, etc, HRC, all the market conditions before the req is approved and feed that all the way through. That's the kind of innovation, connectivity, speed to placing talent in the seat that but I think you really need to be looking for in a partner.

So modular Elliot and innovation and keeping the client and the experience at the center of everything we're doing is pretty important right now and we're going to continue to push the boundaries with that innovation as well.

Elliot Clark: Yeah, that's a great point. You know that you think about just the little things like comp typically was hung on the requisition in the budget, you know, a year before the job opened. And being able to make sure before you start the search that you're in the right range for that geography, for that job classification per category saves a lot of time and getting real time feedback from candidates who say no, that's too much, but we never hear it's too little money. We never hear too much money, rather we always hear it's too little money. But you know, those kinds of insight opportunities really do save time, save effort, save a lot of cycles and revisiting things.

Amy Bush: Yeah, they save on that exhaustion level too, right. And the frustration level. So not only are we hoping to help with the efficiency and the cost savings, but that experience really matters. And I think to the TA and HR community right now, gosh, if you look at the last five years, have they not been through so much a pandemic holding companies together? There's a lot on the shoulders of those teams right now. So anywhere where we can make that seamless and easier, we want to participate.

Elliot Clark: That's great. We're running short of time, Amy, but I'm going to have you back because I think this goes back to, and I want to continue this as a theme of discussion through the year, this whole, you know, HR supermarket concept. I think more and more the clients want to be able to go to the Kelly Global RPO supermarket and say, oh, I'll take a Sevayo Insights, two pounds of RPO and a little bit of MSP, you know, but from the middle, right? They, they really want to be able to customize what they're buying, but they really want to go to a vendor or partner who can provide them these multiple solutions and, and cobbled together into a, into an integrated response to what their needs and strategic objectives are. And it sounds like you guys are have moved in that direction very strongly, and I'd love to get your perspective on that.

Thank you for taking part in the podcast. Some great insights today. This is Elliot Clark. I'm the CEO of HRO Today. I want to thank Amy Bush, who is President of Kelly Global RPO. That's the combination of KellyOCG and Sevenstep. And I want to thank you for your time and attention and will afford to you joining us on our next HRO Today podcast.