All right, we can get started then.
Yeah, let’s go ahead. Let’s get started. So, for everybody out there, welcome to the Direct Sourcing Forum Winter Webinar. This is our 16th quarterly webinar.
I know we registered 154 attendees today, and they’re going to be coming in from about 10 different countries. It looks like people are filing in a little bit slow, but as they come in, I do want to extend a special welcome to our guests from the Arab Emirates, Angola, Canada, Chile, India, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Many thanks for joining us today.
On today’s agenda, we look forward to discussing curation in a little bit of detail. And we want to do this for buyers who have been curious, maybe wondering if they should run a direct sourcing program in-house. So, we look forward to unpacking that a little bit and hopefully helping people make those decisions.
We are very fortunate today to welcome a panel of the industry’s leading curation providers who collectively have rolled out, I’m going to say, among you guys, more than 75 programs in the industry. I think that’s a very fair number.
And before we introduce the panelists, some of you may have noticed that we are missing AMS today. Unfortunately, Mark won’t be able to join us due to a last-minute schedule conflict, but we do look forward to welcoming him again on a future webinar.
We will be recording today, and audience members will be able to chat with our panel as well as myself. So, feel free to ask questions, and we’ll try to take them in order.
And then finally, we do plan to launch a short poll about halfway through the webinar today. It’s only three questions, so, for the folks out there in the audience, if you don’t mind, go ahead and answer those questions for us. We would really appreciate it.
Now let’s go ahead and meet our panel. Let’s start with Jessica.
Thank you so much, Brian. Thrilled to be here today. My name is Jessica Malachowski. I’ve got a unique background that includes roughly about 25 years of experience exclusively in the TA, talent acquisition space. About half of that is on the agency executive firm side, the other half leading global TA for small to large Fortune 500 companies.
Here I’m the VP of Direct Sourcing, and I get to blend the leading practices of all of that and advise our many clients here at Atrium. Atrium is a global WBENC– certified, women-owned talent acquisition, talent solution and extended workforce management leader. We’ll be celebrating 30 years next year in 2025. So, thrilled to be here. Thank you.
Many thanks, Jessica. Brian?
Brian Spour:
Hey everybody. My name is Brian Spour. I am with Tundra Technical Solutions. We are a staffing and curation provider. We operate globally. We’ve launched programs across multiple continents, including some of the biggest in the industry.
My background is I actually came from the technology side of direct sourcing. I spent nearly a decade designing and launching programs specific to the modern definition of direct sourcing. I know the term has floated around for a long time, so I’m looking forward to talking about this topic. It’s one that I’ve chatted directly with clients on over the course of multiple years, but excited to dive in.
Thanks for joining us, Brian. Tim?
Hi everybody. Good morning. Thanks, Brian, for having me today. My name is Tim Rhodes. I’m the Head of US Sales for Raise. This coming January is my 20th year in the industry and with this firm and had an opportunity to see a bunch of different variations of staffing and how it’s approached from this side.
But direct sourcing has been a big part of my role since about 2019. 2020 is when we first really started putting that practice into place. And I’m just really passionate about it. I love the concept of engagement and curation and just doing better for our industry. I think we’re kind of reaching that pivotal point where change is good and necessary, and I think this is one of the mediums to help get that done. And looking forward to talking through all this stuff today.
Thanks for joining us, Tim. Great intro.
And my name is Brian McGuire. I lead sales at TalentBelt. I’ve been in the industry since Microsoft released Windows 95. I started as an IT recruiter in Silicon Valley, and like Tim, about four or five years ago, I became very passionate about direct sourcing. It seemed to me at the time and to my business partners that technology had finally arrived to automate a lot of the things that we had been doing manually for two decades. My organization helps businesses plan and roll out and optimize best in class direct sourcing programs.
With that said, let’s go ahead and take our first question today. To begin with, let’s take a cut at defining curation. How would you define curation? What exactly does a curation provider do?
I will take the first jump here with this question, and I think it’s one that we’ve found ourselves sort of answering over and over and over again for the past three, four years because it feels like there’s just confusion about what it actually is, what it means for a business, and I think there’s a lot of different iterations and variations of it.
But the context we would provide it, and we would advise our customers of and partners of is, curation really is the selection, organization, and presenting talent that’s aligned with your corporate or your organizational needs and culture. Those individuals or those resources, workers, whatever label you want to put on it, are pulled from a focused and maintained and engaged talent community or talent pool that’s hosted on one sort of variation of technology or another. As a definition, it’s really taking care of something for somebody else. Selecting, finding and taking care of something, presenting it in a way for other people to view it.
So, what does a curator do? Well, they grow and nurture a talent community. And this can be done through multiple sourcing channels, but primarily candidates are already accessible to the organization. So, the people, those who have applied to you in the past, may have worked there in the past, have come second place or in through the interview process, who have engaged through another third-party organization; there are all sorts of different types of channels that people can come through.
The curator would then engage, assess, validate, make sure they are who they say they are, can they do what they say they’re going to do, and then present them back to the organization in a way that matches the responsibilities of what roles are there, the needs of the organization. And you prioritize that engagement experience, the enrollment of that individual in a talent community and ultimately placing them within an opportunity that’s right for them and for the organization that can come from a contingent opportunity. It can be through a statement of work. It could be even in direct hire in some cases. We’re getting into a lot more conversations where we use our talent community for regular hiring.
Curators really do things differently than traditional staffing in that it is super proactive. There’s deep partnership and understanding of the value of the organization, the culture, why people work there, what the traits of ideal sort of hires are, how they fit with specific hiring managers and really put the focus again on the health and the experience overall as opposed to just, “Hey, we have a resource, we have a demand, let’s race to the marketplace, scrape the same places that everybody else is looking for and throw somebody at the wall and see if they kind of fit there”.
So, I think, there’s a lot of different ways to define it, but that’s how we really approach it in the marketplace.
I like what you said about taking care of something for somebody else. It’s funny. I’ve got a daughter who works in a museum, and they use the word curate liberally. And I don’t like to think that we curate human beings, but I like the idea of taking care of something for somebody else. And I like that you extended it beyond just the workers themselves, but also to the relationship with the customer.
Did the other panelists have anything they want to add, or do you guys think Tim did a pretty good job unpacking that at the onset of our discussion here? Anything to add to that?
Good. Okay, let’s move on to our next question.
This is an interesting question. What job titles and functions should buyers expect to see on a curation team? So, if you’re a buyer and you’re thinking about doing this yourself, I know I’ve had people ask me, “How do I do this”?
This question I think goes right to the heart of that matter. Who wants to take a cut at that?
I’d love to take a cut at that one.
Let’s start with the functions, right? You talked about the functions and the role, and I want to start with the functions first because I think that’s what informs the roles that are required for success in a program like this. Just on the tails of what Tim was mentioning earlier, the direct sourcing curation team typically focuses in a couple of areas, ensuring that the recruitment and the engagement of the contingent talent is ready.
That includes talent pooling as one of the functions. That’s organizing the potential candidates really into specific groups. These groups are based on job-related parameters: skills, experience, expertise, vocation, job function. By segmenting and organizing, if you will, your talent pools in this way, you’re able to really target communications, and quickly respond to job requisitions and identify the suitable candidates.
The second function, if you will, is recruitment marketing. This is where really, we’re aiming to build and maintain engagement with the candidates. It’s creating and distributing content that attracts, retains the talent within that branded community and really engages with them.
There’s also of course, candidate engagement, which is the ongoing interaction with the candidates. Keeping them engaged, making sure that they are on the ready until a suitable opportunity arises, and then just giving them regular updates, personalized communication, something that’s a little bit of a WIIFM, I like to say. “What’s in it for me”? Keeping them engaged with the community, leveraging the technology, using direct sourcing platforms of course to streamline and the process overall.
And then branding management – Making sure that you’re leveraging the brand and showcasing the company culture and values and really the opportunities to these potential candidates.
So those are the functions of the team, and then behind that, who makes the magic happen? It takes a village.
There’s a lot of different types of individuals that are part of these teams and the roles and responsibilities. There’s curators and engagement specialists. They’re identifying and engaging with the potential candidates and maintaining the talent pool.
There are talent acquisition specialists, recruitment experts. Those individuals are sourcing and recruiting the candidates from the talent pool, and they’re working really closely with the hiring managers to make sure that they understand the job requirements to make the matches successful.
There’s of course also the recruitment marketing specialist or some sort of employer branding specialist. That person will help with making sure that the brand is really promoted to attract the top talent and that you’re highlighting again the culture, the benefits to working in the employment value for those individuals to be part of that community.
You also need some sort of data analyst, recruitment operations personnel. That person goes beyond a traditional coordinator type of role, but that person will analyze recruitment data. They’re going to look to track the effectiveness of it and providing insights and recommendations. Making sure that the pool, I like to say, is mirroring and matching whatever the organizational needs are, that there’s some correlation there.
And then of course you need technology, some sort of technology specialist that knows a technology platform and really can utilize that for direct sourcing, ensuring that everything is integrated well, that it’s effectively integrated with your HR systems, user friendly and the candidate side and the hiring manager side.
I think those six roles, though, I think that about outlines the majority of the types of roles you would typically see. It of course can be custom built based on whatever the organization goals are from a programmatic standpoint as well as what that employer brand is like out in the marketplace.
And so, just making sure that you’re leveraging and focusing on those roles to reflect whatever the needs of the program are.
Who typically manages workflow? Do you have somebody dedicated to that just to make sure that you’re seeing things proceed at a reasonable pace through a program?
Yeah, definitely. I mean you can have somebody that is overseeing the program, some sort of program manager, program ambassador type of individual that is working closely to make sure that the integration is happening on a good point with the corporation itself. But yeah, that’s an important piece and the integration and the partnership.
So I think it’s also important, and maybe this is on the tails of what you’re mentioning, Brian, but the corporation or the company that the client that’s utilizing the talent pool needs to be heavily engaged and truly in lock tight partnership with the curation partner and with the curation team to make sure that things are moving smoothly. It’s not just separate operating on its own. There’s a constant interaction and relationship that happens between the two.
So that’s typically a program manager that manages that relationship with the customer. Okay.
Good. Okay. No, thanks. Great answer.
Let’s take another question here in the context of what we’re talking about today, whether you should curate your program in house or not. I like this question. What are the key things that buyers underestimate about curation?
Brian, let’s hear from you. We haven’t heard from you yet. I’m going to throw you under the bus on that one.
I’m happy to ride Jessica’s coattails straight into answering that question because I think what she just described cuts to the heart of it. Oftentimes when we talk about curation, it’s at times, boiled down to a job title. And curation truly is not a job title, a person or a couple of people that you throw at job requirements. It’s a true function. There are entire businesses set up to support curation in the small–medium sized business to enterprise–level. There are a lot of things that go into actually achieving mature curation.
One of the things I would say clients underestimate about that is the output is really easy to scrutinize. It’s easy to understand, are you filling roles? Are you getting the candidates, quality of candidates? Does the hiring experience for the hiring manager and the candidate match what you would come to expect? Because those are things that we’ve, those that have been in the industry have a pretty good baseline understanding around. But how we get to that point for a long time has been a black box with external suppliers. You send it out to the market, what you get back, you get to measure. If you flip that over and you decide to do curation in–house, you are now responsible for the quality, the management, the performance, not only of the overall program, but every individual in that daisy chain of delivering talent into your organization.
So, if you think about the amount of time it takes to manage a team of 5 to 25 people, that’s a pretty variable amount of skills required. Jessica mentioned everything from a recruiter to a data analyst, a program manager to somebody who’s a process expert. There’s a lot of things that go into it, so do you have the skills internally? Are you able to invest to pay for those skills internally if that’s the path you want to go down?
The cost and inflexibility of building your own team to match market demand if you’re in a cyclical business, I know a lot of clients have seasonality. What do you do with a team during down season? Are you willing to keep them on a bench and pay for them while they’re not fully at capacity for working? There’s a lot that goes into managing the function of curation and I think a lot of times we simplify it as have a req, find a candidate, fill a role, but the luxury of the black box of being able to send jobs out into the market is kind of opened up when you’re responsible for doing it.
And then performance management, if you have somebody who can manage those functions and keep everything on the train, on the rails, how do you performance manage those people as underperforming and over performing recruiters? Do you have a talent pipeline? Do you have somewhere in your organization for people who are exceeding expectations and want to grow in their career to grow into and move through within your organization?
So, there’s a lot of things when it comes to the human element of running a function within a business that I think we oftentimes gloss over when we focus on can we find the candidates, but in reality, it’s when you’re now doing it yourself is can you nurture and grow the talent that you now are responsible for?
Some great insights and you know, you’re making me think too. Brian, you talked about scaling a program down. What about scaling a program up? What about taking a program international? What about legal and statutory requirements of doing that? What about managing 1099 and ICs?What about statement of work management?
So, there are really a lot of areas, and forgive me for jumping in on this question here too, but I feel as passionate about the topic as you guys do. And again, in the context of what we’re discussing, should you do this in house, I want to make sure for any buyers out there that they carefully consider that there’s a lot to this.
Let’s go ahead and let’s take another question here. And I love this question. What must a program minimally have to be called direct sourcing?
We avoided defining direct sourcing at the onset, but I think we’re going to back into a definition here anyway and hopefully this will start sinking in. I know this is after 16 webinars, there’s still ambiguity about the definition, so we must not be doing our job.
Who wants to take a swing at doing this?
I will, Brian. I’m really kind of attached to this question really because in the beginning, you asked what a curator does, and we’re trying to define what curation is and how they work. And then Jessica and Brian have, I think, really laid a good foundation for what’s different about curation and sort of the structure and the roles that’s required and how you measure things. And I think that can at least set the table for the context of how to define direct sourcing at scale as well. And I think I want to add that in. The important thing is this particular type of strategy can have massive, massive impacts on your workforce management, workforce sourcing and contingent program strategy in a lot of different ways, cost savings being high on the list for most cases.
But to say we have a direct sourcing program, there’s a bunch of things that you’re going to look at, and I think one of the first ones that’s been mentioned is branding, right? Are we leveraging the brand that we have? And it includes putting up some kind of contingent roles on a third-party site to say, “Work for this company”. But it also includes using what your brand has already attracted. Again, as I mentioned earlier on, finding candidates that have already applied there, have worked there before and are interested in being associated with that particular organization.
The other part of it is that the communications to the talent community are generally in a branded format. So, as a curator, you’re sending out communications and updates and polls and surveys and trying to track and engage people, but that is done under the brand of the organization that they’re looking to work for, so that enhances the experience overall. So, that’s an important piece to it.
Other than that, in order to have that, you would definitely need some level of engagement and a marketing strategy from the stakeholders on the organizational side who own that type of thing, which again is usually somewhere in the marketing division or part of the organization.
I would say access to those internal sourcing channels like your ATS, like your VMS, referrals, alumni. We’ve gone as far as analyzing IDM data, so anybody who’s actually had an ID or access to that company before as a third party or other, can technically be invited to join a talent community, and that’s talent that is known to your organization.
I would say one key part, and I think Jessica touched on this as well as Brian, is you have to agree on what you’re measuring, who’s accountable for what and what the outcomes are. So, let’s maybe start with what we are trying to achieve and work our way backwards with all of the other stuff and how we get there. I think in a lot of cases it’s not as strategic as it can be and the outcomes are somewhat based in more traditional thinking. And you want to look at, okay, how can we do things a little bit differently? What’s the innovation behind this? What’s the real strategic and long-term impact here?
Just to kind of put a wrap around this, I would say clearly defined processes for how you’re using the talent community. And what I mean by that is when do you go to your talent community and then when do you go to your regular supply base or other channels? You want to eventually have a high percentage of hires coming from the talent community, but it’s not always going to be like that. And you will need strategic suppliers, you will need other partners to help either with niche roles or even high volume in some cases or whatever it might be. But there is room for them in that space.
And then the last part, Jessica, again, you touched on this in the structure of it. Your curation team, technology provider and the Employer of Record. Again, just very clear, defined roles for each of those and then how and who they interact with in the organization and what their responsibilities and accountabilities would be. And I think if you package those together, then you can say that we have a direct sourcing solution.
Great answer. And Tim, you took it in a direction that I didn’t anticipate. You’re basically saying that it kind of needs to exist, it needs to be defined, there needs to be rules. It’s not an ad hoc, let’s solve this problem, we have a spike in hiring coming up in Q2 of next year, let’s get out ahead of it, and hey, we have a talent pool, so we’re doing direct sourcing. This has more sort of permanence than that. This is better defined than that. So excellent definition, I appreciate that.
I have another question here. So, I love this question because I’ve been listening to it for five years and we’ve never really taken this head on. So, the question is this, would you describe curation as contingent RPO? I know a lot of people do. I personally do not, but I’d like to hear what the panel has to say. Who wants to take a cut at that?
I would love to if that’s all right. I know in these types of situations and on these webinars, we don’t necessarily want to give the traditional, “it depends” type of answer. So, I’m going to be careful here.
And I like this, I’ve heard this before. “It’s debatable”. So, how is that? I’m going to use that instead of “it depends”. Tim, I think I owe you some credit for that perhaps. Direct sourcing and contingent RPO, they’re related, but there are some distinct differences between the two when you’re considering side by side.
And both approaches have some similarities. Both approaches definitely work to ensure efficient sourcing and management of the contingent talent for an organization. They both offer flexibility in hiring, allowing companies to scale up, scale down based on the needs of the organization.
They both can offer cost efficiency. “Can” was the key word there. They both can offer cost efficiency because they both essentially work towards the goal of reducing the need for long-term commitments with any external parties and really allowing a “pay as you go” sort of arrangement. Again, just making it very scalable.
So, there’s some similarities, but there are some distinct differences. And one of them that really stands out to me is just the scope of services. RPO typically involves outsourcing the entire recruitment process. This including sourcing, screening, interviewing, onboarding, and all of that managed externally by an external RPO, managing the process for all the contingent workers on behalf of the organization. And not that curation or direct sourcing can’t do pieces of that, ultimately though, the curation and direct sourcing focuses more on building and maintaining a private, custom built talent pool for specific roles within an organization.
Now, I know there’s a lot of debate and question about should it be all the roles, some of the roles, can we do. But ultimately, when you look at the core foundation of how the scope of services originally and sort of in a leading practice is designed, it’s in those areas.
Another difference is just the approach and the focus. By nature, direct sourcing is definitely more partner driven and we’ve talked about that a little bit. You’ve heard we need to come together. What are the challenges, what are the goals, what do we want to focus on? That’s very highly prioritized within a direct sourcing function and really creating and utilizing custom built tools from the curation team, input from the team. On the opposite side, RPO is really more outsourcing that function and using their tools and their methodologies where direct sourcing is more of an extension of your own internal brand doing it in that model.
Another thing would be the sources that are approached. So, we just talked about this in the prior question, but utilizing silver medalists, retirees, people that are already known to your organization. Using that as a source in direct sourcing is key and critical, right? That’s the whole idea of direct sourcing. You get direct access to the ability to find people out of that talent pool. On the RPO, it’s not that they don’t build pools or try to do that, but it really tends to focus and lean more towards finding, I’m going to use quotes, “new talent” to bring to the organization.
And so those are some key things. I think the branding is a differentiator and Tim, you know, touched on that. Really leveraging the brand is important from a direct sourcing standpoint. On the RPO, you’re maybe not leaning into that as much. The direct sourcing is really built upon that brand. That’s a leading attribute to this type of program.
Control and management, I think some would argue that the organization retains a little bit more of the control over the recruitment process when you’re using direct sourcing because of that partnership that we’ve talked about, right? Attention to redeploying talent, proactively talent pooling, really aiming to improve the quality of the hires that are coming from that pool. We’re on the contingent side, a lot of times organizations hand over that to an external provider and handing over along with that then a significant amount of control to the provider.
So those are some of the differences.
And I noticed a comment that came in from Eric Osterhout. Eric, thanks for joining us today. Eric mentioned we could describe this as more payroll on steroids, which Eric, let’s not, because that’ll open up a whole other can of worms that we’ll have to take on in a future webinar.
But to that point, I mean a couple things came to my mind too, when Jessica was sharing her response. There’s the whole idea of VMS integration, requisition distribution, could be tiered requisition distribution, managing an Employer of Record or an Agency of Record. There’s a time and expense component to direct sourcing because it is contingent work. The laws and rules are different on the contingent side than they are typically in the RPO world. Reporting and metrics would be different, SLAs would be different. And then there’s the talent pool tech itself, which most RPO companies, not all, but most, have not worked on the major technology platforms, so there’s definitely a learning curve there.
So just, you know, I was taking notes as Jessica was talking. I’m like, yeah, that’s good. Yeah, that’s good. And “Big E” out there, thank you for the comment. I somewhat agree with you.
Let’s move to another question here since we’ll leave no stone unturned. What can a curation provider do that a managed service provider cannot do? So that’s controversial, I’ll say that up front. Who wants to take that?
Yeah, I’d love to jump in on that one, Brian.
And I’d like to split a hair before I jump into an answer on this. The concept of “can” or “can’t do”, I think I’d like to enter, insert some nuance into that. “Can’t do” implies that they’re unable to. But I think the idea, the way that I think about this is what are they set up to do? What is their core function? Why do they exist within the ecosystem of contingent?
There are really talented and smart people across the ecosystem. Brian and yourself have an MSP background. So, I don’t want people to take away that there is ineptitude across an inability to be flexible into a different space, but when I think about why we bring MSPs into contingent programs, the core function is to manage process and compliance.
And I’m a big proponent, if you’re going to be paying an expert, you should be paying an expert for their expertise. So, when we think about an MSP managing process and compliance, they’re great at that. We’re familiar generally in the industry, but what that looks like, when you insert direct sourcing into a program, you’re inserting an additional, completely different skill set as well. So, I think that needs to come with some nuanced change to workflows and processes and leverage the new expertise that you now have within that team, if you consider that all one team delivering for one client.
So, if we bust some of those former norms of an MSP runs the intake session. An MSP is great at worker classification and ensuring the appropriate procurement channel, whether it’s statement of work, whether it’s contingent or whether this actually belongs in a full-time recruitment space. The idea of properly classifying workers, that is a processing compliance topic. When you get into an intake call and it’s been determined this is a staff augmentation or a contractor that you’re looking for, you now have somebody on that intake call from direct sourcing that is talking to candidates every day.
We talk a lot in the industry about skills-based hiring. Who better to be able to vet out what the hiring manager needs or the team needs from a skills standpoint than somebody who’s talking to the market every day? So, when I think about what an MSP can or can’t do, it’s not that they can’t vet what is quality talent, but if you’ve inserted somebody who now is in the market having those interactions every single day, that topic is fresh for them. They can understand the nuance of skills and the combination of things that typically go together in the rapidly changing, especially when you look at technology rules, rapidly changing technology ecosystem, the idea of minimum wages. And if you think of even the lower dollar value roles, is somebody going to be willing to pay for parking or take public transport based on where they’re located? Like there are people who are considering this stuff every single day. So let the experts be the experts in their domain.
And when, as Tim described it, there should be very clear expectations for the different people operating within the program and the different functions within the program. And now that you have this treasure trove of skills and knowledge when it comes to direct sourcing and curation and candidate engagement, I think it’s important that we associate those to the right spots in the process.
The MSP absolutely provides value when you’re maintaining process, when you’re talking about the compliance and all the things that go into that. And then when we talk about all of those things we’ve mentioned already today, managing people, managing skills, managing the actual recruitment and candidate engagement, if you insert direct sourcing into the right moments and you have your curators having the right engagements with your hiring managers and your candidates, I think you’re going to find that if program efficiency starts to improve, you’re going to need less candidates submitted, meaning your hiring managers are going to need to vet less candidates. It’ll save them time, which is direct cost to the organization. There are a lot of benefits that you get when you really leverage the skill set, and I think one of the downfalls you see in some of the programs that we‘ve launched is where we try to really maintain traditional division of labor within the process. And I think that we would all benefit from creating a better blend of who’s responsible for what in that clear division of who is the expert in what thing.
And also, one of the common things I hear is I think we need to give hiring managers more credit. That they can understand that two people exist within a sourcing function for two separate things. I think that’s a common thing we hear thrown out in the, why keep it one person on an intake call rather than introducing the skill set of recruitment.
So, I hope that speaks to the nature of the question, whoever asked it, but I think we’re in a losing battle if we try to say, “What can MSPS not do”? Because there are a lot of smart people who can do a lot of things, but I think the better question is, “What are we set up to do”? And what are the core functions of these two different things we’ve now introduced into our program?
That’s a great and diplomatic answer. And I can’t help wondering in the back of my mind, would a program, a direct sourcing program under an MSP or something, would you almost not require tiered requisition distribution? It seems to me that if you allowed an MSP to control the flow of requisitions and if you treat direct sourcing like a supplier, you’re basically introducing competition to the existing supply base and even more so if that MSP is a supplier in a given program.
So, I think your answer, I really appreciate the diplomacy of it, but I also find myself saying you really need to have tiered distribution if you’re going to involve direct sourcing with an MSP. And I’ll leave it at that. I know I’ll get some static from that.
Let’s take a minute. I’m just going to really quickly launch our poll here if that works, and hopefully that won’t become a distraction. And then we’ll go ahead and start taking a look at our next question.
So, it seems like our discussion about MSPs and contingent RPO has opened the door to another question that’s sort of similar in nature. What can a curation provider do that in–house recruiting cannot do?
Let’s see. I’d say, Tim, we haven’t heard from you, and I see you kind of fidgeting a little bit, so I’m going to give that one to you.
I want to jump on some of Brian’s comments with the MSP “can” and “can’t do”. But I also want to appreciate just the framing there, Brian, in that it really is about context and roles and responsibilities and it’s not about who can, who should do these things, but it’s how do we all work together to make this a better experience for the buyer who’s investing in this type of solution?
And then the other part of it is the candidate. They have a terrible experience for the most part trying to find a job. Like that’s just common knowledge in a lot of ways. And I think there are many, many smart people in our industry that if we all just kind of align with that, can do some really amazing things. So yeah, I want to just kind of put that under context of yeah, it’s not “should”, “should not”, “can”, “can’t”. It’s just part of how we’ve addressed the solution to do better for everybody.
And really quick, just before jumping in, I noticed a comment in the chat from Dana Goyer about the RPO, the contingent thing. I think she just touched on one thing that’s important in that after this, there probably will still be some confusion from those in the space purchasing and looking and investigating. But I think when it comes to the RPO, calling it RPO or not, to me just have a discussion with your team, how it works, what the current state is and then talk to people in the industry that are doing it and you’ll be less confused I think very quickly after that. But it’s a good call out, and I think certainly needs to just get a quick bit of attention.
But when we look at sort of what curation does differently, I think what it really comes down to is structure and behavior. The way that a curation team at a high level would be sort of aligned to compensation is really what drives behavior. Staffing has always been compensated on making a placement. Race to get somebody in there and keep them billing as long as possible. That’s how you make money, it’s how you make commission, that type of thing in.
In a curation environment, one of the considerations should absolutely be how are you compensating your curation team and what metrics are you using to incentivize their behavior. And the behaviors that are desired are generally nurturing, connecting, identifying sort of top-level talent and then matching at the end of the day. If all of those things are done well, the placement is a natural occurrence. So, look at how your team is sort of structured and how they’re incentivized and how you’re creating those behaviors in there.
And also, do you have the right people for that? I would argue that a lot of TA sort of recruiting mindset people may not have the intrinsic sort of drivers to be in that space. They may in some organizations. I think it’s just one thing that is in consideration when you’re building out that type of team.
The other part is specialized roles. So, there’s roles to source, there’s roles to engage and curate, and there’s roles to manage the program, and those are multi-tiered. I think in traditional organizations and makeups we ask sort of one person to do a lot of different things. And when things get busy, parts of their role are sacrificed for other parts.
And you can certainly degrade the candidate experience. You can create opportunity for more mistakes and that type of thing. You have increased in attrition and fall off through the onboarding process. And if you’re specific about who stays in what lane, until what point with the candidate processing, and I use that term loosely because it’s part of a holistic sort of engagement process.
And then the final part of that in at least the structure pieces, as a curator, we’ve made the investment in the people. We have the resources and have access to more resources or less when it’s necessary. So, Brian had mentioned before about scaling, and you’d ask about scaling up and scaling down. Curators have the resources there already. I would just pose it to a buyer. Let’s say you had an acquisition or a new product launch or something where you needed hundreds and maybe even thousands of workers in a short period of time. It would be very difficult to hire a team of people to do that in this type of model and still make those deliverables, whereas a curation team has already again done the hiring. They have the people and they can, if necessary, hire quickly to bring those people in, but the structure is existing so you’re not having to retrain new resources to match, right? And match that speed. And likewise, it’s easier to move people from programs to go to other programs when necessary. That being said, there’s a level of consistency for each customer at the top end of the teams and who they’re interacting with and that type of thing.
I think in the candidate experience component to this is, notwithstanding sort of the challenges of litigation and litigious society, but the engagement and personal interactions are very clear and dedicated and from a third party you add another layer in that. So, it does control some of the risk that’s involved as well.
Great answer, a lot of detail. And just one thing I’d add too, I’m just thinking about any sort of shared services for back office. It’s not something that an in-house team is particularly thinking about or dealing with or doing. There may be lower cost delivery locations in–house, but if you are a curation provider, I have to assume you guys have all thought about, where do we want to deliver this? We have shared service centers here or there and we can tap into that for whatever we need for back office. So, I think that’s a big consideration.
Let’s take another one here. With respect to technology providers, and by that, I mean talent pool technology providers, do you guys think that they‘re well suited to managing a program? Like if I was a buyer and I was thinking I may want to do this in–house and anything that I may not be able to do, I think my tech provider can probably step up and help us with that. I’m curious to get your thoughts on that as a panel.
Jessica, I see you nodding. I’m going to give it to you.
Yes, thank you so much. So, I love this question and part of it is maybe if I put on my corporate TA hat and where I spent so much time. It’s the age old; everyone thinks technology can do so much and it can, and it can be an incredible tool. And AI, my gosh, right? You can have a whole webinar just on AI and the AI technology and integrating that, it can be incredibly helpful. But at the end of the day, call me old school. I think you still need the people interaction. You still need the human interaction to bring everything to life.
Technology in and of itself definitely has the ability to enhance the success of a program and it does just that. And the direct sourcing tools that are out there today are incredible. I mean, they’ve really advanced over the years and the things that they’re able to do, focusing on the branding, the data, the analytics, the AI engagement, the ability to do searching within almost like an ATS type of function, and actually come down to a long list and then get to a short list of candidates and help make recommendations and even maybe preemptively recommend your talent pool looks a little scarce in this particular job family, and based on what I’ve seen, you might want to focus there more.
So, I think technology is an important piece of the puzzle. It can help. You can do some pretty cool things with drip campaigns and keeping candidates engaged as well, but it doesn’t do it all. You still need outside human interaction that can pull everything together and make recommendations. Use discernment, use the input, the information, everything you’ve learned along the way from partnering with this client and what’s important to them. Or from the hiring managers of the company that you’re at. What’s important to them and what, what do we really need to make things hum along? I think it’s an important piece of it, but in and of itself, I don’t think it can do it. I think it can help support a program that’s efficient and scalable and all of those things, but you really need the full story.
It sounds like it’s a question of specialization. It’s almost like, to use an analogy, there are people who build medical equipment and there are doctors who use medical equipment. Would you use the builder of the medical equipment to do surgery on you? Probably, you would not. They would know enough about the subject matter to probably be dangerous at a cocktail party, but it doesn’t mean that you want them to do the actual surgery. So, I think that, yeah, great answer.
Here’s one. We have questions starting to pour in, so we apparently have struck a chord with people. How do you determine the appropriate size and composition for a curation team? Brian, I see you nodding. Go ahead, take a swing.
Yeah, I think this one matters a lot when we think about whether you’re doing it in–house, not in-house. Regardless, if you’re thinking about direct sourcing with the holidays coming up, I’ll use a cheesy analogy. If you were hosting a dinner party, you would either need to know how many people were coming before you decide to know how much food you’re going to buy, or you need to know how much food you’re going to buy, to know how many people you can invite. You need to have some understanding of scope or goals of a program before you can even enter this conversation.
So, I see some questions from the chat around, “Can a curation provider truly manage a global program”? First, you need to understand when you say global, is that 100% of the countries or do you have regional pockets that you do 90% of your hiring that you want to target? If it’s a Europe, EMEA, North America, centralized, specifically in the United States, West Coast, you name what your actual needs are before you start to design a team. I could talk about the scoping and variables all day, but I think if you can clear that bar and understand what you’re trying to accomplish, then a lot of this becomes a math problem.
There are certain efficiency metrics that across curation providers, I’m sure there’ll be a lot of people who can speak to a pretty tight window of what you can expect from a specific recruiter to submit certain number of candidates per week. Within a given program, depending on your skill set, how many candidates submitted do you need to make one placement? There are all of these variables, depending on your skill set, depending on your geography, depending on your capacity to spend on resources that can help you understand the number of people that are going to be needed to reach those goals.
Inversely, if you say I have $10 to spend, how far can $10 get me? That’s another way to scope it. It’s a very basic example, but if you want to do this in–house and you have a finite amount of money that you can put up against it, it’s important to be really realistic about what that $10 is going to get you compared to what the cost would be to go out and have somebody do this for you externally.
So, the core of the question here is how do you scope a team? I’m going to go back to the beginning of the chat and understand if you have your goals defined, how many of the various resources do you need? The program ambassadors. Do you need a program manager? Are you going to need a data and analytics team? Do you want to include Employer of Record within the scope of direct sourcing, or do you want to use an external service for Employer of Record?
The variables that exist are something that you need to really clearly have laid out before you can make a final determination. But then once you have your variables defined, if you have somebody who’s done this before and can understand what kind of ratios can be effective, not to oversimplify it, it becomes a math problem and decision on investment.
Great answer, Brian. I appreciate that. And I can’t help thinking too, I keep adding comments to everybody’s comments here, but the importance of having program data and census data retroactively, if you’re a buyer, to be able to bring some of the variables to the table to solve that math problem, it’s critical, and I’ll just throw that out there.
Jessica, I have a question specifically, I have a text question here for you. Since you’ve sat in corporate talent acquisition, do you think direct sourcing should sit under TA?
Yes. There, I said it. I do think so from my area of expertise and my experience. But it doesn’t always have to, right? I mean, I think ultimately it is a loaded question, Eric, you’re exactly right.
It depends, again. So, I’m going to come back to that a little bit. It’s most important, we referenced this a few times. What are the goals of the program? What do you really want out of this program? If the goals are heavily focused on compliance, risk management, cost management, of course, it’s all the goals, right? We also want to have an increase in quality. We want faster time to fill. We want to leverage our employer brand. We want to make sure we’ve got quality talent pools. We want to make sure we’re aligned with our recruitment goals. We want all of those things.
Ultimately, by having some of the ownership, maybe a hybrid approach is the best answer. Having some of the ownership under the talent acquisition space, you’re able to get that expertise. I think a lot of times, say procurement team, has a lot of knowledge and valuable information and insight about managing a program like this, but they will be heavily focused on the cost, the cost management of it, the vendor management of that piece, the compliance and the risk piece.
And so, I think in a perfect world you would want input from both.
What I’ve seen, and definitely with some of the trends are, this just was brought up actually at SIA in Houston for anyone that was there a few months ago, more and more organizations are putting their contingent workforce under talent acquisition, and they’re pulling it there because they see it as more of a holistic way to manage the talent as a whole for the organization and because of its integration and support in the overall workforce strategies, as opposed to just really focusing in on the cost.
All of the goals are important, but I think it’s really critical at the onset. What do we really want to achieve out of this? And then where should it sit? And maybe where are some of the shared ownerships and the hybrid ownership taking place?
I personally think that some of the best programs out there are ones that have strong ownership and leadership coming from talent acquisition because you just need that partnership and expertise.
Nice job. Again, very diplomatic on kind of a prickly question, so, well done.
Let’s do this. We have five minutes left. I have actually a follow up question here for Brian. It sounds like someone’s asking to elaborate on his answer for the size and composition of a team, how do you arrive at that?
Someone’s asking here, what role should the curation provider play in solution design and implementation? So how would you summarize that? I’m going to give that to Brian and then Tim, I’d like to get some closing comments from you because we haven’t heard from you. But Brian, go ahead, take a cut at that.
Probably a good thing we’re tight on time because I could go on for a full 60 minutes on this one. The concept of solution design, we’ve talked for 55 minutes so far about all the different corners of direct sourcing, there are clearly people who have done this, who understand the questions to ask, the opportunities to avoid scraped knees and programs. So, in the spirit of keeping it brief, the role of the curation provider in solution design is to be the person to know the questions to ask; to be the one there to say these are all the things that we should have set up, defined, decided on before we move into an implementation.
Once you engage a project manager, that train has left the station, that project manager’s role is to get your program delivered on time. So, they’re going to create those timelines and they’re going to move the project hopefully effectively through all of those different parts. So, if there are decisions that have not yet been made, but when you move to that project management phase, you’re going to find yourself moving through some things too quickly, so the idea of having a person or a company who’s done it before, who’s asked the questions, who’s experienced the pitfalls of early stage launching direct source programs; that role of understanding the gray areas and the shadowy corners of what all the decisions that are needed to be made, understanding the nuance of pulling in legal at the right time, understanding pulling in branding at the right time, presenting the right information so that you’re not giving a perceived additional risk from compliance standpoint, but minimizing risk, to be able to get the value out of your program.
There’s so much to it and I wish I could go on for another 60 minutes on it, but the punctuating statement I’ll say is there are people who can help you avoid challenges, and there are certain things that getting something out the door is better than getting a perfect thing out the door, and I think direct sources bar is higher than a lot of those other things because if you launch with a less-than-ideal experience, it’s way more difficult to bring those hiring managers and those candidates back into it. So, you need a high bar of quality program before you decide to go live.
Great answer. And I’m thinking back to our medical device surgeon analogy. You want a surgeon who’s done the surgery before. I would, you know, I can’t help thinking that.
Tim, I promised you closing comments. What would you say to any buyer who is thinking about curating in–house?
Thank you. And just want to express gratitude I think is the first thing because you guys all recognize that this is something that can have significant change and impact on your organization, on your roles within the organization, on the marketplace as a whole, and if we all continue to work together to raise the bar, and maybe a pun intended there, but let’s just do better together. And I think that will drastically and rapidly change how people connect with work and how people find work. And I think that there is a rallying opportunity with the collective that’s involved with this to do so.
The second sort of closing part I’ll say is that, especially for companies that are in those Fortune sort of 100 and 500 rankings, people are already applying. They already want to work with you. There are very few candidate profiles that are not accessible to you already just with your brand. Why pay a premium? Like why pay 40–plus percent to go after and have somebody just re-present that to you when it can be done at a significantly lower cost in a much higher and better experience for the person that wants to work there and for the hiring managers receiving that talent? Or a better way to put it is the person who needs work done, which we all know is yesterday by the time it gets to procurement or TA. And there’s a significant probability that they’ve already gone to an SOW partner for that and they’re going to be paying significantly more anyway.
So, I just encouraged to continue dialogue conversation. I think any one of us on this panel would be happy to have a conversation and work with you.
Tim, awesome closing comments. I really appreciate that. Sort of a good rhetorical question to leave everybody with. Why would you want to pay more, wait longer, introduce risk, and have a poorer quality experience for the hiring manager and the worker? That’s a good way to end. This is our fourth year of doing these webinars, and I would love to end with that rhetorical question to any buyers out there.
Other than that, I do want to say thanks to all of you guys. You did a great job on the panel. Many thanks to the viewers who spent part of their day with us. We want to wish everybody happy holidays this year and we hope you’ll see us or come visit us again in March for our next webinar. Other than that, I hope everybody has a fantastic day.
