We talk a lot on this show about the future of work and its implications. However, it is critically important not to overlook the here and now. Work is already changing dramatically with huge consequences for everyone.
So what should employers be doing to make sure they are fit for purpose in these changing times?
My guest this week is Brynne Kennedy, founder of Topia and a congressional candidate for California. Brynne has recently written a book called “Flat, Fluid and Fast”, designed to help employers understand and adapt to the age of talent mobility.
In the interview, we discuss:
- What is talent mobility?
- The implications of a geographically mobile workforce
- Redesigning the contract for work
- New career paths and skills first recruiting.
- Importance of embracing flexible work
- Impact of office footprints, benefits and the structure of HR
- Tech stack best practices
Brynne always talks through examples of companies doing this well and shares her thoughts on what work will look like in 10 years.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from jobico. Jobico provides the next generation job board software and AI enabled matching technology combining both the benefits of a scalable SaaS platform and the flexibility of a custom solution. With Jobico, businesses can reach a new level of quality and professionalism in online recruiting and can take advantage of the rapidly changing market. Jobico helps leading brands in 12 markets globally to engage talent and grow revenues with job boards. To find out more, go to www.jobico.com. that’s www.jobico.com and jobico is spelled J-O B I Q O.
Matt Alder [00:01:05]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 222 of the Recruiting Future podcast. We talk a lot on this show about the future of work and its far reaching implications. However, it’s critically important not to forget the here and now work is already changing dramatically with huge implications for everyone. So what should employers be doing to make sure they’re fit for purpose in these changing times? My guest this week is Brynne Kennedy, founder of Topia and a congressional candidate for California. Brynne has recently written a book called Flat, Fluid and Fast, designed to help employers understand and adapt to our age of talent mobility. Enjoy the interview. Hi Brynne, and welcome to the podcast.
Brynne Kennedy [00:02:00]:
Thank you so much, Matt. I’m very happy to be here today.
Matt Alder [00:02:02]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Brynne Kennedy [00:02:08]:
Sure. My name is Brynne Kennedy. I was the founder of Topia, the talent mobility company. And then I wrote a book called Flat, Fluid and Fast which looks at the talent mobility revolution and how to succeed in it. And I am currently running for Congress in California to put a lot of these principles to work to extend economic opportunity across our state and into our more rural areas.
Matt Alder [00:02:37]:
Fantastic. So a lot of stuff to dig into there. Tell us a bit more about the book, why did you write it and what’s it about?
Brynne Kennedy [00:02:44]:
So I founded Topia, which is a talent mobility company, about nine years ago. And that was very much based on my experience previously working in real estate and infrastructure investing. And what I saw through my career and through Topia is that historic change is underway in the way that we work, from demographics to technology. The economy is changing dramatically and so is the way that we work. And to help more workers thrive and make more organizations agile and efficient, we must understand the changes that are occurring and redesign both our business operating Systems and our contract for work in America. A couple key stats for you, Matt. Millennials and gen Z are 60% of the workforce and they switch jobs much more frequently, and their careers are much more fluid and less linear than prior generations. Automation and artificial intelligence are creating new jobs in industries, but also threatening others. Traditional HR models are often too siloed to respond to the increasing need of our increasingly distributed and remote work. And this all means that companies and policymakers need to support a very different world of work that make it easier for individuals to utilize their skills in more ways. So the book provides a playbook for business leaders, for workers, and for policymakers to navigate this new world of work.
Matt Alder [00:04:22]:
Now, you mentioned the phrase talent mobility there. Could you tell us a little bit about the definition of that and also what’s driving this change in the workforce?
Brynne Kennedy [00:04:33]:
So amid the forces of globalization, demographic change and automation, we’re seeing a fundamental shift in the way that we work. And that shift is based around talent mobility. So talent mobility is a term that is new. And so I think it’s worth going into the detail. There’s four different components to talent mobility that I see, and the book talks about how to integrate all of them organizationally and how they are changing office footprint, career progression, benefits, administration systems, and all kinds of other things within companies. But they are geographic movement. So firstly, employees today move geographically more than ever for their work. These moves and sort of inverted commas though are not only traditional relocations as you might think. Today’s work related moves involve many different configurations, from commuting between, for example, Tahoe and San Francisco, to short term projects to frequent travel. And workers today move for an ever greater set of reasons. The second part is job movement. So underlying a lot of geographic movement is a stark increase in employees moving between jobs. A lot of the workforce today watched the promise of lifetime employment erode amid the 2008 recession. And so what we see today is people really wanting to develop their skills with time working across different jobs so that in the face of future disruptions, they have other skills that can be leveraged into other jobs within the workplace. The third part is location movement. So in addition to people in the workforce working more regularly across geographies and spending time doing different jobs in their career, work today has a growing amount of flexibility in remote or distributed work. And companies that are eager to promote business agility and support the work life, balance needs of employees and create jobs outside of major metros do need to embrace flexible work arrangements. And then the fourth type of talent Mobility is employment movement and that is the rise of greater freelance work. And I’m specifically talking about the white collar workforce here, more freelance work, where companies today increasingly have a workforce that includes both traditional full time employees and freelance workers who contribute their skills maybe on demand for a particular job, project or team. And it’s important for companies to think about talent mobility as encompassing all of these different aspects of employee movement and understanding what’s happening in the economy, what that means for the workforce and how they can become an expert in using these trends for strategic advantage, supporting their workers and driving innovation from it.
Matt Alder [00:07:54]:
So, picking up on that last point, obviously the relationship between employers and their workforce is changing dramatically. What should employers be doing? What should they be thinking in order to really be doing this?
Brynne Kennedy [00:08:11]:
Well, the book lays all of this out. And to end Matt, the way that Flat, Fluid and Fast is written is as a nine step playbook to TR transform your organization and workforce in the face of the trends of the talent mobility revolution. And it can be used by business leaders. In fact, any business leader who wants their business or team to succeed in this new era must understand the principles of it. But it also should be used by workers and by policymakers to help to understand what careers will look like in the future. And for policymakers specifically to understand how we can support our workforce with good benefits, safety and a dignified retirement in this new world of work. So what we look at in the book is how do you do your organizational design with this new talent mobility structure? What does that mean for your office footprint and what’s the best practice for designing your office footprint and physical spaces for this new world of work? How do you design career paths? What does it mean to be a manager and how do you enable your managers? What does it mean for recruiting and matching employees with particular skills to jobs that need those skills? What does this mean for evolving your benefits? And key is ensuring those benefits support every worker, regardless of whether they’re a full time employee or a contractor. What does this mean for systems? And then in the final chapter of the book, we look at how do you do the change management around this if you’re coming from the lens of a bigger company or how do you start a new company with these principles? At its core and critically for the economic development and opportunities for society across our country, in the US and in all countries, is how do you do that outside of a major city, which the talent mobility revolution really makes possible? Makes possible starting businesses in rural areas or other places that aren’t the historic Major metros. So that’s kind of how we bring it all together. So I’d encourage everyone to pick up the book. It’s available on Amazon and on our website. Flat, fluid and fast. And there’s a lot of detail on how to go through each of those steps to succeed.
Matt Alder [00:10:45]:
Fantastic stuff. So perhaps could you give us maybe a little preview of some of the details, particularly around recruiting, because that’s something that’s going to be very important to the people who are listening. What would your advice be to companies in terms of how they should think about recruiting and indeed recruiting professionals in terms of how they should think about this new world of talent?
Brynne Kennedy [00:11:10]:
The fundamental shift that has happened is recruiting for skills rather than recruiting for titles or experience necessarily. So in the book, I talk about my grandfather’s career as a contrast to my career and many of the folks that we profile in the books careers today. In my grandfather’s era, he worked in a factory called Mead Paper Company. They produce paper. And the promise of lifetime employment was there. And the idea was that you would start in a particular department and you would start as an entry level employee. If you did your time and did well, you’d move up to the next level and the next level and the next level until perhaps becoming a manager and continuing on there. And people in my grandfather’s generation very often spent 40 years at the same company in the same department, climbing a career ladder within that department and for much of that time working for the same person. And his sort of eligibility as an employee was very much measured by his resume and what level he was in the organization and the experience that he had doing a particular activity in a particular department. What we see today, I think a big shift that’s happened in recruiting. Whether we’re talking about recruiting externally to fill jobs or recruiting from an internal talent pool to move someone to a new job, is that employers are increasingly looking and they must frankly look to skills first. So the notion of a traditional resume that puts title first is going away. The notion of a skills graph is very commonly discussed today. And you see a lot of software solutions and a lot of recruiting departments starting to say, okay, if I have a product manager job opening, what are the skills that a product manager needs? And where can I find someone with those skills and with the ability to really learn quickly and engage quickly? And that doesn’t necessarily need to mean that they were a junior product manager at another company previously. They may be coming from somewhere different in the career trajectory, but have the skills that are applicable to that role. And I think that’s the biggest trend touching recruiting. Now the book lays out what are the software solutions that make that possible? What should your technology stack look like as an organization? How are we innovating in the resume to support this? What does this mean for you if you’re a worker in building your toolkit of skills? But that’s the overarching theme that I see the talent mobility revolution really bringing to the recruiting aspect of things.
Matt Alder [00:14:10]:
And I think that picks up on another interesting point, which is the role of technology in all of this. Obviously, by the sounds of it, you’re talking about all kinds of different technologies in the book. Is there any sort of overarching advice around technology or ways of thinking about technology that’s going to really help companies here?
Brynne Kennedy [00:14:33]:
Yes, I’m just sort of hesitating in how to articulate that. So yes, there is. What we lay out in the book is the best practice for the technology stack that can enable both internal and external recruiting and managing all of the dynamics of the talent mobility revolution. Critically, there’s no one size fits all, one technology provider bringing all of this together. So it’s important to be able to integrate the different HR technologies that enable different parts of this. There’s technologies that manage and unlock the freelance workforce and logging their skills and matching them to jobs. There’s technology, your traditional HRIs managing your internal workforce. And there’s some interesting things happening in that space to move from traditional demographic data to much more of a skills graph for the internal workforce. There’s technologies like Topia, which is the company I founded, which manages the logistics and a lot of the taxation and a lot of the compliance with respect to managing talent mobility. And then there’s recruiting technologies that help to manage the recruiting with a skills focus for an external workforce. So the important piece is to understand what those technologies are and how they work together to enable full success within the talent mobility revolution.
Matt Alder [00:15:58]:
And in your research for the book, or indeed in the sort of broader work that you, that you do, what examples have you come across of companies doing talent mobility or companies embracing talent mobility really, really well. Who should we be looking at as some great examples here?
Brynne Kennedy [00:16:18]:
You know, it’s interesting because when I started writing the book, I had this hypothesis that I’d be able to take one company and use it as a case study or a couple of companies as a case study. From going from being a traditional company to one that was fully set up for the talent mobility revolution. The reality is that really no one’s gone through that full shift, but a lot of companies have gone through pieces of it along a continuum for becoming much more agile and much more disruption proof in the talent mobility revolution. The way that I’ve written the book is for each of those steps in the playbook, we look at what did this topic historically look like within a company? What should it look like in a flat, fluid and fast company, one that’s set up to succeed in the talent mobility revolution? And then what’s an example of a couple companies that have gone through that shift? A couple case studies, and there’s a number of those. You know, there’s companies that have completely changed their office footprint and unlocked much more remote work for their employees. There’s companies that have been started like Automattic, which owns WordPress as a fully remote work environment for their employees. There are companies that have shifted to much more of a jobs based or a skills based jobs matching and recruiting. We talk about some of those in the book. There’s a lot of companies that have gone through the best practice of setting up the compliance and the systems and the operations behind that. We talk about Schneider Electric, one of the largest power companies in the world, in the book, as an example. So there’s a lot of case studies in the book. But the critical thing is that no one’s really brought it all together yet. And that’s why I wrote the book, because the vast majority of organizations haven’t even started yet. And those that have are providing some good data along the continuum. But the book is the first real definitive playbook for what your business should look like and what your career considerations should be in the face of a changing economy.
Matt Alder [00:18:29]:
Final question, what will the world of work look like in 10 years time?
Brynne Kennedy [00:18:35]:
That’s a very interesting question. I think it’s important to address it in sort of with two sides. So the book is very much focused on the creative economy or the white collar workforce as it were. The folks working at some of the largest and fastest growing companies in the world. That world of work I believe will be much more dynamic with people working across companies, across jobs within companies, working from different geographies as I mentioned, and also able to live and work where they want to. So much, much more distributed and remote work with commuting to support that, to go into an office or go into a city as needed. There will be in that segment of the workforce continual learning, continual development for workers of their skills that they can then effectively loan or use across different jobs through their career. You can think of it as sort of episodic or lots of tours of duty through a career. At the same time, I believe that we will, and this is a large part of something I’m focused on as a congressional candidate and future congresswoman. At the same time, we must accelerate our apprenticeship programs with our high schools and our community colleges and offer a path to the middle class through a lot of our trades and a lot of our unions where people can have a stable job with stable pay, move up career ladder in a particular company and earn a dignified retirement. And we have a shortage of workers in our trades and we have a great problem with inequality in the US right now where we need to solve that with apprenticeships and offering a path to the middle class for a lot larger group of people. So I think you’ll see those two different dynamics happening critically all of our workforce, regardless of where folks sit, whether they’re a full time employee in the creative economy, a freelancer across a lot of different businesses, or someone who’s a member of a unique union in one of our trades, they all should be paid a good wage with good benefits and safety and workforce protections and have the opportunity to earn a dignified retirement. And so that is really what I’m focused on is how we think about this as one workforce and we offer different paths for different people, but all with the support for our workers, the appreciation for our workers and the opportunity for them to build skills, to earn a good wage, to be supported with strong benefits, and to retire as and when they would like.
Matt Alder [00:21:24]:
Brynne, thank you very much for talking to me.
Brynne Kennedy [00:21:26]:
Thank you so much, Matt. I am very happy to be here and I encourage everyone to take a look at Flat, Fluid and Fast. Available on Amazon now.
Matt Alder [00:21:36]:
My thanks to Brynne Kennedy. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for recruiting future. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
