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Traditionally, hiring has been anchored around getting the right talent into the organization. However, in these highly disrupted times, is this still the right way of operating? In our fast-changing world of work, looking at the skills needed to do the work offers organizations the flexibility to expand internal and external pools and consider outsourcing, offshoring, gig work, process improvement, and AI-driven automation as alternative ways of getting work the done.
So how does this work in practice and what are the implications for the future of recruiting?
My guest this week is Bruce Morton, Head of Strategy for Allegis Global Solutions. Bruce is a deep thinker about technology and the future of work and has some valuable insights into how some of the organizations Allegis works with are thinking differently about talent. Allegis has also implemented a large-scale automation program in its own business, which Bruce believes will facilitate a much more human-centric approach to recruiting.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Reversing dehumanization in recruiting
• The evolving distribution of work
• Starting with the work rather than starting with the talent
• Using AI to identify skills at scale
• Assumed skills, self-reported skills, and certified skills.
• Outsourcing, offshoring, gig work and automation
• Developing automation strategies
• Augmenting rather than replacing people
• Process re-engineering
• Partnering or building
• Matching based on anticipating candidate needs
• What does the future of work look like
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Matt: Support for this podcast comes from SmartRecruiters. SmartRecruiters is your all-in-one platform for faster, smarter hiring, making recruiting easy and effortless. SmartRecruiters are making some big changes, revamping their user experience, adding AI features and refreshing the UI. I know from experience that they truly are a company that really values the recruiter and the practitioner.
They understand the intricacies of the recruiting business. And this has always been reflected in their functionality and customer support. So, it’s exciting to hear that they’re making a bunch of updates. If you’re ready to be part of the future of talent acquisition, head over to smartrecruiters.com, and find out what they’re up to. Trust me, your team and your future hires will thank you.
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Matt: Hi, there. Welcome to Episode 634 of Recruiting Future, with me, Matt Alder.
Traditionally, hiring has been anchored around getting the right talent into the organization. However, is this still the right way of operating? In our fast-changing world of work, looking at the skills needed to do the work offers organizations the flexibility to expand internal and external pools and consider outsourcing, offshoring, gig work, process improvement and AI-driven automation as alternative ways of getting work the done.
So, how does this work in practice and what are the implications for the future of recruiting?
My guest this week is Bruce Morton, Head of Strategy for Allegis Global Solutions. Bruce is a deep thinker about technology and the future of work and has some valuable insights into how some of the organizations Allegis works with are thinking differently about talent. Allegis has also implemented a large-scale automation program in its own business, something that Bruce believes will facilitate a much more human-centric approach to recruiting.
Hi, Bruce. And welcome to the podcast.
Bruce: Hey, Matt. Great to be here.
Matt: An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Bruce: Yeah, thanks. Yeah, my name is Bruce Morton. I’m Global Head of Strategy for Allegis Global Solutions, a managed services and advisory and transformation organization and all things workforce. Originally from Birmingham in the UK, so might spot that accent if you listen really hard. But now living in Tampa. Been in the US for 15 years now. Yeah, and that’s me in a nutshell.
Matt: Fantastic stuff. Now, I’m sure you won’t mind me saying that you’ve been in this industry a long time. So, obviously, there’s been a huge amount of change, and technology and things going on in the last 25 years, how would you give us an overview about what’s changed in the industry during the time that you’ve been working in it, and what’s still the same?
Bruce: Yeah, what if I go back [laughs] all the way to 1980 when I got into the industry, the only recruitment really organizations understood was if they’re receptionist phoned in sick and they needed a temp today [chuckles] that was about it.
So, in the early days, when I was doing sales recruitment, it was an education of what an agency actually does. So, I think that it’s now organizations obviously realize the industry, and so we don’t have to explain anymore.
But I think that over the years there have been so many cycles when new technology or new ability to promote a vacancy or so on, the doom and gloom. So, that’s it. That’s going to kill the staffing industry.
You and I were together at TMP a million years ago. When we launched Monster, it was like “That’s it. People can just put a job on Monster now and people can apply. They won’t need a recruitment company.” But we all know, there’s plenty of room for everybody. So, I think that the biggest difference there, of course, is an individual and a candidate’s ability to apply to many, many positions with a couple of clicks. I think that was the advent of an organization getting swamped with China drink water from a fire hose as the saying goes.
So, I think that’s when sorting, searching, matching technology really started to get into our industry. I think for a while, the industry did get a bit dehumanized. If we put a date on that, let’s say 20-ish years ago, relying too much on technology. And then, of course, we had COVID hit and that had different impacts, which I’ll come to later. I think what we’re now seeing with the advent of AI and automation, etc., is in a bizarre way, we’re actually allowing the industry to become more human again. Because if we can get all those tasks that should be done by robots, that does leave the recruiters actually time space to think, be more strategic and actually have more meaningful conversations with candidates.
So, I’m pretty bullish and excited about the way that we almost going back to the old days [chuckles] of bringing a candidate in and spending an hour with them before you’d even represent. That seems crazy now, but I do think that recruiters that get in the industry because they want to help people, because they like that human aspect of it. I think there are rosier times ahead, because we can reduce the amount of administration, etc.
Matt: Yeah. I think it’s a really interesting angle on it. Certainly, over the last few decades, there’s been various waves of technology. The way the industry reacts to them has often been the same, [laughs] the same kind of denial, then frantic adoption. But these one’s been different as well, I suppose.
Let’s talk about the pandemic a bit, because the pandemic was a big catalyst for lots of different things, but a huge amount of recruitment technology was adopted during that, and that’s continued to be the case. What do you think organizations have learned over the last few years when it comes to technology and recruiting?
Bruce: Yeah. I think that’s such a great question, what have they learned? I think that is the crux of this, right? I call it the biggest social experiment the world’s ever been through when COVID hit. In our organization, we have 15,000 employees. Every one of them was working normally within three days online and connected. We’d have never, ever got to that point if we didn’t have the need to.
So, I think that some organizations will benefit from what they’ve learned, which I’ll come on to more in a second. And some, unfortunately, will harp back to those days that don’t exist anymore. I seriously believe that it will impact organization success in the future. Leadership really, really need to embrace what we learned through that period.
To me, the number one thing that impacts our industry is organizations taking seriously the distribution of work, as I term it, in terms of we don’t have to do work like we used to. That isn’t just geographically where can we put this in the world. It’s also what type of worker can we get to do this. Is this best suited for a contractor or a freelancer, or should I bundle it up and put a price label on it and pay on the outcome? Can this be automated? Should we be even touching this, or should it just be done by AI? All of those in my mind is really doubling down on that simple question of [chuckles] how are we getting work done.
I think companies are finally, finally starting to wake up to that and say, “Wow, actually, there’s something in that. Let’s start with the work,” because historically, we’ve always started with the talent. It’s always been about, “I need to hire somebody, I need a job spec, then I’m going to match against some CVs or resumes.” That’s probably not the best way to do it now.
Matt: No, absolutely. I think that’s such a critical point, and just the most important area. It’s interesting, because I think we see a lot of publicity about the organizations that are trying to go the other way. So, the organizations that are dragging everyone back to the office, especially when they promise that they never would. [Bruce chuckles] We don’t actually hear much about the organizations who are embracing the opportunity. You seeing many of the people that you work with starting to think like this about talent and work?
Bruce: Yes, absolutely. It’s interesting. The latest trend that everybody is talking about now reading is the whole concept of skills-based organization, skills-based [unintelligible [00:09:09] To me, that is just a symptom of organizations realizing that they need to be starting with the work, and then what are the skills required to do that work. And those skills might be through a bot, by the way, as I said earlier.
But it’s thinking about it that way, because then, once you start thinking about skills as opposed to resume, it changes the conversation. Because if somebody says, “Oh, Mary’s left. I need another Mary.” They’re like, “Well, hang on a minute. What is it that Mary was actually doing? Let’s talk about the work itself.” And then when you deconstruct that work, it’s much easier then to be more objective and say, “Actually, half of this can be automated. A third of it we don’t even use. The other part, we could actually give to somebody in Manila,” as an example.
That’s because you’re looking at the work, not the individual. But it does get very emotional, because organizations have been used to having people around them that they know, and they turn it with every day, and now there’s this slight distance. So, the key to it is understanding what are the tasks that we need to get done that it doesn’t matter if we don’t know who did it. [chuckles]
What staffing firms are doing here in North America, I’ll talk about that for a second, is similar to in the UK, but certainly more in North America is because there’s such a massive shortage of IT talent, because we’re just not producing enough people with those skills, they have the jobs to fill. So, they’re looking further afield. You’re seeing now the rise of LatAm with Mexico, and Brazil and so on. Having the ability to find that worker, get them paid compliantly and get paid locally, but invoice the client back home in the US, that’s becoming the key to success now to open up those talent pools.
Matt: We’ve mentioned AI already, but obviously, this really is the main event in terms of the way forward over the next few years. I think there’s some interesting questions about how it’s going to evolve and what its capabilities are going to be. But based on what you’re seeing now, where is it proving to be most useful in terms of recruiting and talent?
Bruce: Yeah, and I’ll answer it slightly wider lens of automation and AI, if you’re okay with that, because we’ve been on this journey to automate, let’s call them, menial tasks or repetitive tasks for four years with earnest. We finished last year. Within the year, we had automated 12 million actions that humans used to do and are now done by machine, which is just phenomenal when you think about it. It makes us feel bad that we used to get [chuckles] forced the people to do the job of robots, but anyway. So, that started us on the journey.
Now, the AI, if you like, is the action taken, so you’re looking at the processes, the workflows, what areas of that can be automated, and then how do we do that? Then the AI is completing the task in a way. We’ve taken a, I guess, a fairly bold stand as an organization that we don’t use AI to do the final match because of all the concerns around bias and everything else.
We’re called the human enterprise for a reason, because we believe we’re still in the human business and people business. But what we do use it for is I’ll give you a couple of examples to, if you think about from a skills-based perspective, how do you create a brief for the skills that you need? So, we have the ability to look at a job description and pull from that the skills required to be successful doing that piece of work. And then, the same with an individual, we consider three different levels of skill or three different types of skill rather, one is where it is assumed or inferred by if you have been a Java developer for last two years, we can infer you probably have these skills. So, that’s fair to pull those out of that individual.
The next would be self-reported, where those individuals are saying, “Hey, I also speak French fluent,” and adding that to their profile. And then the third one would be validated or certified. An example use is, if you’re a nurse, it’s okay to say, “I have a good bedside manner.” If you’re a brain surgeon, we probably want to see a certificate. [chuckles] That’s the example. So, we see that at scale is almost impossible to do as a human, and it would hold companies back going on that journey.
So, AI, it’s not really that smart in that case. It’s just able to work at scale at a million miles an hour that you couldn’t possibly– An organization with 2,000 different job descriptions in their ATS, having humans doing that would be just to take too long. So, we’re putting AI into that type of space.
Another area would be in the services world where services procurement SOW type work that we manage is to give us the ability again at scale to track the success of projects. So, when somebody is found an organization to complete a piece of work for them, they’re going to pay on the outcome, how successful was it? Did they do what they said they were going to do on time at the right quality? And that then is feeding back constantly into that supply chain, if you like, for democratization of the queen rising to the top.
Again, it’s a scale thing. So, we see it really, and we like to use technology to augment more than replace really. How do we make our people look like rockstars, because they’ve got that tech behind them.
Matt: There’s quite a few things I want to follow up on, actually, because you touched on some really interesting points. To go all the way back to when you said about automation, you’ve automated, was it 12 million different kind of steps? If someone’s looking to do that in their organization, because we don’t have much conversation about strategy and process and how AI fits into all of that, how do you go about doing that? Because that’s not just about buying some technology to do it. There’s a lot of thinking and work that goes in before, isn’t there?
Bruce: Great, great question. I’ll start with the example of a good friend of mine, John Boudreau. I’m sure you know John, Matt. He wrote the book Lead the Work, probably 15 years ago now. He was in global business at the time. His whole pretext to that was that we used to have managers, and everybody who had management books and then we said, “No, you need to lead from the front, not manage from the back.” So, we became leaders, but they were only leading people. What we now need is the ability to lead the work. It isn’t a skillset that hasn’t been taught really. So, how do organizations start thinking about that?
So, in our mind, it’s like, “Okay, well, let’s start the conversation with, what is the work you’re trying to get done? What will make you look really good in the next 12 months, two years? What are those big projects you’re trying to get done? Okay, now, let’s deconstruct those into tasks and then look at, “Okay, what are the processes we’re going through right now to bring that skill into the organization?” It’s a good old-fashioned sharpie on the whiteboard, what are the different steps? When we went started doing that, not unexpected, but it was still a bit of a surprise where you look at 20 steps and six of them are like “Why do we do that?”
[laughter]
We don’t need to automate that. We just put a line through it, “Where’s the board eraser?” That exercise in itself, even if you didn’t automate it, is incredibly powerful. But you get to the point where say, “Okay, what are those tasks that can be automated and then pick them off one by one?” But as always, get some quick wins, start communicating that internally. We no longer have to go and find cases now, used cases. People are queuing up saying, “Hey, I’ve just thought of another idea. I’ve just got another one. I’ve got another one.” And it just takes off and it gets a life of its own.
We were able to do that. We partnered with UiPath now. In the early days, we partnered with an organization called Catalytic, which was all around the low code, no code, and everybody could write their own bot in a way, which made it much easier, because the other thing would have held it back is– We know that we’ve got 100 developers on a bench waiting to do this stuff. So, technology definitely helped with that, because it was just so easy to write that code itself.
Matt: You’ve anticipated my next point there when you talk about UiPath, because I was going to say, as you’ve done this automation and also the AI part of it, what I’m noticing is that a lot of large organizations are actually building this themselves with the AI tools that are available. What’s the best route for this, do you think? Is it the organization creating its own technology, or is it partnering with experts and is that shifting?
Bruce: For us, that was a relatively easy conversation, because we are very risk averse organization. We didn’t want to be building something ourselves with an off the shelf ChatGPT as an example. Because I don’t think the world is– We don’t really know yet. What you’re sharing out there with ChatGPT to educate her or him and make them better, what if your IP is going with it. If you let all of your staff say, “Hey, yeah, use all the tools you like and how about it,” mm, that’s a bit concerning.
So, by partnering, I guess It’s a safer option, because it’s tried and tested. They have the controls and the know how to make sure that our information stays within our firewall. To me, that’s one of the key criteria. If I was a startup, I’d probably just play with ChatGPT. [chuckles] What’s the worst that can happen? But when you’re a $15 billion organization [chuckles] like Allegis, you have to put some guardrails around it.
Matt: You mentioned at the very start of the conversation that you felt that AI was all about bringing the human aspect back into recruitment, that’s been missing for– It’s gone missing for quite some time. How is that working in practice? Where is AI working in the talent acquisition contingent workforce, part of this to free up people’s time to work more strategically?
Bruce: Yeah. The biggest advantage we get from it in the process itself is the matching at a very high level and having the ability to free text search within a large database. So, to be able to type into a Google type box, sow me all the software engineers that were in a 15-minutes commute of Amazon’s HQ. You need to use experts, Boolean search experts, everything else, [chuckles] and create these armies. Whereas now, getting to that point is like, “Great. Oh, okay. Amongst that group, show me the people that used to work at Meta. Boom. Okay, great.”
And now, you’re refining your talent pool before you pick up the phone. And now, there’s so much technology and data that we can fairly accurately predict when an individual is more likely to take the call. I guess I didn’t even call these days, showing how old I am, we just picked the phone up, but you know what I mean.
Matt: The Instagram direct message or whatever–
Bruce: Yes, that’s right.
Matt: Whatever the chosen challenges.
Bruce: If you’re in this organization and you came from these two organizations previously, at two years, one and a half months, you will be at your point where you want to take the call. So, again, it’s increasing the chance of success. It’s the winnability ratio, as we call it.
Let’s get the recruiter speaking to those people, they got a higher chance of success with quickly, and we don’t want spending all day creating that long list of 10 people they’re going to speak to, how can they do that instantly at their desk? And then, the other piece of it is, again, democratization of labor market data and talent intelligence, which is the sexy name for it now, is having at the recruiters’ fingertips, how much somebody should be earning in that zip code with this much experience, and that meant that skills, etc., etc.
In the contingent world, we’re able to track that daily. It’s almost like a ticker feed of the stock market. When you start breaking down the work, this is where it gets really, really exciting. Instead of an individual saying, “Well, with five-years’ experience, we pay them this. With seven years’ experience, it’d be worth that.” So, no, no, no, what are those skills they have? I’ll use job developer in our ontology and taxonomy, there’s 14 skills that a job developer has, how much is each one of those worth today on an hourly rate?
So, if I take these three out, not only does it open my talent pool up, but look what it does to the hourly rate that I need to pay today to attract the right level of person. And that level of science and detail, I geek out about it. I wish I had that when I was a recruiter back in the day.
[laughter]
Matt: Yeah. I think it’s incredible. I’ve seen some technologies like this in action. It is just really taking all of that data that’s out there and just giving people exactly when they need it. I know you’re someone who likes to think about the future a lot and where things might be going. Based on what you’re seeing at the moment, what are the implications of this? What do you think the talent industry might look like in two- or three-years’ time?
Bruce: So, I think that at a macro level– It’s already started, but at a macro level, the world of work in terms of how that work gets done and where it gets done will be dramatically different. If you think right now, the greatest example that would be the rise of GCCs in India, where so many North American companies now are putting their frontend R&D, really high-level tech enablement and development in India. That’s just going to continue to grow apace.
If you look at the stats on that, it’s phenomenal. It’s a $46 billion industry right now. It’ll be $110 billion by the end of the decade. We’re just not producing enough people in the so-called developed world. So, the work has to find the talent. I think if you look on the end of five years, the world will woken up to the fact that we have to have an ability to send work to Africa. It was good to see Microsoft’s investment recently of $3 billion, but they’ve got two of the top 20 universities in the world. By the end of the decade, a third of the world’s working population will live in Africa. So, we better find a way of sending work there, help them get out of poverty and all the great things that comes with that.
The trend of, what we call, contingent, which is completely the wrong word to use now, but that will continue to grow. I don’t think it’s ever going to go backwards. I think organizations will be made up of a third employees, a third contractors and a third outsourced to service providers as pockets and packets of work. So, the companies will start to look very different. And then, if you take an economic view of that, what does that mean of their value? Just look at a market cap of an organization, a lot of it was around, what’s your profit per employee? Well, it’s just the wrong measure now.
Even the way the governments measure unemployment and measure the level of the workforce is completely out of date with what’s actually happening. So, bit of a soapbox moment, but I do think that the smart companies will understand that the new competitive advantage is truly understanding how to get high-quality work done in the best way and get out of these silos of the first question you ask a high manager, “Well, do you want to employee or contractor?” Had probably a long time to ask him that question.
Matt: Bruce, thank you very much for talking to me.
Bruce: It’s been a pleasure. It’s great to speak to you, Matt.
Matt: My thanks to Bruce. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. And on that site, you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
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