Is Getting Work Done Your Company’s Primary Focus?
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of sitting down with Lorne Epstein to record an episode of his eponymous podcast. Lorne and I dive deep into about the latest innovations in recruitment and total talent, as well as the first Twitter chat for recruiters. We recorded this in anticipation of my appearance at the upcoming Social Recruiting Strategies Conference in Philadelphia August 6th, 7th, and 8th.
I’ve posted some excerpts from the first part of our conversation below. But, trust me, there’s much more. And we say “so” a lot. So I hope you enjoy the listen.
HR and recruiting tech talk with Craig Fisher on the Lorne Epstein Show.
Welcome to another episode of the Lorne Epstein Show. I am your host Lorne Epstein. Today we have with us a special guest who you have seen and heard from at many recruiting events. Welcome Craig Fisher!
CF: Lorne, thanks for having me here.
LE: Craig leads recruitment marketing, employment branding and recruitment innovation at Allegis Global Solutions. His digital branding methods have been adopted as best practices by many companies including LinkedIn, which is pretty cool. Craig has been listed as one of HR and recruiting’s top influencers and most engaging conference speakers. And I can say he is incredibly engaging when you hear him talk.
CF: Thanks
LE: How’s it going?
CF: It’s going really well. How are you
LE: I’m very well. So, you know I don’t really like starting with a plug. But I didn’t know that you had your own conference in Texas.
CF: Correct. Yeah so it’s the largest recruiting conference in Texas, and longest-running.
LE: Since when?
CF: This is our ten-year anniversary.
LE: Wow. You know that’s funny because I helped start recruit DC and it’s our 10th year anniversary.
CF: Awesome. Yeah that did happen about the same time. So, our conference is the TalentNet Live conference. You can get details at talentnetlive.com.
LE: you know our conference is bigger.
CF Well it depends on the year. So, we always host at an employer’s headquarters. And depending on the size of the room that’s how big our conference is. So, when we were at Capital One we had close to 300 people and when we’re at Whole Foods headquarters in Austin for our spring event we can only fit about 175.
Our next event is at Toyota’s headquarters in Plano Texas on December 6th and we’ll have between three and four hundred people for a one day event with 25 speakers and all of the original TalentNet folks from year one when we hosted at PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay headquarters.
LE: I wanted to ask you about what’s been on your mind. I mean there’s a lot going on in recruiting as you know, you’ve been in the field for a while, and the space is changing. What is on your mind now – like top of mind?
CF: So, this is interesting. I’ve been working on a product at Allegis Global Solutions. We’re a big RPO company and we’ve been working on a product that ties systems together from both our RPO and MSP sides of the employment business to see all your possible talent for any type of work in one view.
LE: Explain what MSP means for the audience.
CF: So that’s a managed service provider. When you have a large organization, you might have dozens or even hundreds of staffing firms that do business with you. They all must use a system called a VMS (a vendor management system) to put their candidates in and get their jobs from. And then that is sometimes managed by a management company which is the MSP and that’s what we do for many large companies.
And we’re also the outsourced recruiting team (the RPO) for several Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies like Amex, MetLife, Staples, CVS and many more.
This product we’ve been working on aggregates the data from both a VMS and an ATS (vendor management system and the applicant tracking system), plus a CRM and all of your other data stores where you might have records of, or access to, talent resources to do different kinds of work that can now be viewed in one screen, one dashboard.
LE: So, what’s the value of that? Because I’ve never used that kind of outsourcing.
CF: So, this system overlays rather than replaces any of those systems or sources. It augments. But right now, to understand what your workforce would look like for a given piece of work over the next quarter, or even the next project, you’d have to go to ten different systems to find all the people that you have access to in your organization – plus job boards, plus LinkedIn, etc. to find what your available talent pool is. This system gives you visibility into that total talent pool all in one spot.
It’s called QuantumWork and launched Monday, June 24th, 2019. It’s very exciting. You can check it out at https://Quantum.Work.
So, you know in our space we’ve been talking about total talent for a long time. And that means all your available workers to get work done and that might be, you know, gig economy workers just doing bits and pieces, and might be contractors or might be full-time employees, or any combination of those. There’s just no way to visualize that all in one place – but now there is.
The cool thing about it is it also shows you in a graphical representation where your talents availability is on each HR system, candidate database, and everywhere else, so you can see where your money and effort should be spent. So if you’re constantly hiring this kind of worker for these kinds of projects you can plug that in against a job and the system will go find all the available people for that job – from all your available systems – and stack-rank them vs. the work you need to get done.
LE: That’s really interesting – and it shows you where all your talent is, in which system or repository, or job board?
CF: Right
LE: So, IBM did an interview with us – one of the heads of talent at IBM, and they’re doing something really cool. They look within their organization for folks to replace jobs they have open. So, they’ll find like a, you know, financial analyst and they know that a financial analyst has 80% of what it takes to be a blockchain developer, and they need a blockchain developer. So they’ll reach out to that person. Again this is completely passive. And they’ll get that person in that blockchain seat. That is incredibly powerful because if you think about it, it really democratized his work…
Hear for yourself how companies like IBM are focusing on internal mobility:
Check out the rest of our conversation about the future of how you can program your work strategy and get work done in the podcast.
