Flex or Break: Building the Agile Workforce Your Business Actually Needs

[00:00:01] You're listening to the HR Mixtape, a podcast for leaders who want to understand people, strengthen culture, and navigate change with clarity. Today's conversation starts now. Joining me today is James Terry, Head of U.S. Revenue at Indeed Flex. James helps companies build more agile workforces through flexible staffing solutions, especially in fast-moving industries.

[00:00:33] James, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast with me. Thanks so much for having me, Sherry. I'm excited. So am I. And this topic, I think, is so important right now. As we think about everything that I'm seeing out there from AI and recruiting and talent acquisition, all the kind of conversations we're having about staffing, this conversation really is about how do we think about it maybe a little bit differently.

[00:00:55] So, you know, I'm curious what your thoughts are on how we think about staffing not being an HR problem, but really becoming a business survival issue right now. You know, it's funny you ask that question because as you working in the HR field and myself, like, fundamentally, like, HR is at its core a business problem.

[00:01:19] And I think that's actually, in my opinion, one of the things that is really exciting about the changes that I'm seeing right now is that people are starting to wake up to how strategic of a partner HR can be. Where I find it is that, you know, if you think about, like, any type of staffing, like, if you don't have the people, whether that's the doctors, the lawyers, the people working in the warehouse and the call center, the people serving the tables, if you don't have those people, fundamentally, the business doesn't function.

[00:01:44] Usually in most industries, the highest cost you have, the highest output cost you have is your labor. It's one of your most valuable, important assets. And, you know, when you think about the best companies in the world that have done the most, the reason is because they've just done a really good job at hiring the right people, retaining the right people and driving effective productivity.

[00:02:06] And so, you know, one of the things that we're really noticing right now is that HR leaders are, you know, with AI, because HR has historically been like very much a ledger and a pen and a paper and a lot of clicking boxes. And HR is now being able, because you can start to automate a lot of these tasks through HR, we're noticing that HR business professionals, especially the ones that are like really forward thinking, are starting to think about how can we actually be a more strategic business partner?

[00:02:33] How can we be a profit center as opposed to a cost center? How can we help drive business impact? Because ultimately, if I can have a lower turnover rate then or faster time to fill, then what that means is if I've got a warehouse or a factory, that means higher throughput. That means more profitability. That means more packages per hour or whatever it might be for that particular business. And a lot of HR leaders are starting to wake up to the fact that, wow, I can actually be a really key and fundamental part of the way that these businesses are being run. It's so true.

[00:03:03] I just had a conversation with another guest about that exact concept around, you know, HR really knowing the business and being a true business leader with HR skills, not an HR leader with business skills, right? It's a little bit of a different perspective there. And when it comes to staffing, it really lends itself to us being able to hire for the business, not hire for a role or for that FTE or that headcount.

[00:03:31] But I'm curious, what have you seen as companies are trying to implement things that increase their productivity, become more strategic, but not add a bunch of extra time into their hiring process? Because right now, you know, what we're seeing is that talent acquisition professionals are getting inundated with applications in a completely different way than they have before.

[00:03:54] And so while they're trying to use some of these tools to be more productive, some of these tools that candidates are using to be more productive have put a big strain on the system in totality. It's a really interesting and fundamental change that's happening right now in so much as, you know, as you had mentioned, not only do you have the preponderance of AI happening.

[00:04:17] And so candidates can now apply for, you know, you see it online like 400 jobs a day or something crazy like that have really customized cover letters and resumes that are tailored to the position they're applying for through a lot of the times AI. But in addition to that, you know, we're in an interesting point right now where really in the first time since COVID, you have more job seekers than you have jobs, right?

[00:04:44] Up until just about a few months ago, you had more jobs available than you really had job seekers. And so not only do you have more people that are applying, more people generally applying because they're out of work and looking for jobs and fewer jobs out there, but you also have the ability for more people to apply for more roles. And so one of the really important things that we find is that it's, you know, it's not about just the volume of applicants.

[00:05:09] It's about the quality of applicants and what can you do to be able to utilize tools, technology, certain systems to be able to drive. You know, it's not about technology making a decision for you. It's about technology helping to filter out candidates so that you can be left with the top candidates. You know, whereas previously a recruiter's job a lot of the times was looking at resumes and scheduling interviews and so on and so forth.

[00:05:35] Like, you know, now because you have so much more top of funnel traffic that's coming in, one of the great things that Indeed is doing and Indeed Flex, which is the part of Indeed that I work on, which is kind of the contingent labor arm, is, you know, picture a world, you know, for a hiring manager or sorry, for a recruiter where they can post a job. They can use AI to be able to help them really be specific about what types of qualities they're looking for in a candidate. They can post it out there.

[00:06:02] The system can then go and scrape and find all the applicants that are aligned from a skill set standpoint to that job. Put them through an initial screening, an AI interview screening, essentially a chat screening with an AI agent. It can ask second and third level questions and can be relatively tailored to the type of candidate and the type of role they're posting. It ranks the candidates for you on a scale of one to 100 of, hey, of the 300 people that we interviewed, these are the top 30.

[00:06:28] You can go back and click through and look at some of the specific questions that were answered and what they were if you want to. Or you can say, hey, I just want to press the easy button. And it'll take the top 10 candidates and automatically schedule them for interviews. Like, think about now all the time that I have back, the previous I was reviewing resumes. And by the way, I had implicit bias. I probably was, you know, the people that right after lunch or before I had my coffee in the morning, I wasn't being as thoughtful about those resumes I was reviewing.

[00:06:54] And now you've got a system that's being much more consistent about the way that it's screening candidates and driving better quality through having more candidates. But how can we whittle those candidates down to really the best ones that are going to be the best fit for the business? I can't tell you how many hours I've spent over the, you know, 20 plus years of my HR career doing that exact thing, just reading resumes. Everything from, you know, doing it digitally to back in the day when you would print them out and you'd have them out in front of you and you were trying to, you know, figure out the skills that were kind of coming to life.

[00:07:24] So these tools have definitely helped us. Have you gotten any feedback from candidates about this process? And I guess pros or cons. And what really made me think about this is my husband recently went through an application process for an adjunct professorship. And part of that process was a digital virtual interview where he recorded himself answering questions like a Zoom to himself.

[00:07:50] And from his perspective, he was like, at this level, that seems really weird to do that. Somebody doesn't want to call me. But from the TA perspective, right, if you can use a tool like that and help vet candidates and the ones that are willing to do the work, right, there's this balance. And I'm curious what you're seeing from the candidate pool out there. It is you hit the nail on the head. It is a balance because you don't like fundamentally like think about it.

[00:08:18] Like one of the big differentiators within a business is what's my employer value proposition? How do people feel loved and cared for and that we're not just a number and that we're appreciated in an organization? If your first interaction might be something that feels at the top level like very impersonal, it can be. It can be. There can be apprehension in it. I do think that, you know, from the standpoint from the standpoint of like hiring almost any role, right, especially more skilled roles,

[00:08:46] like you need to have a human interview in that process from the start. But I also think that like it's fair to say, hey, look, like, you know, the world has changed. Like we are getting a lot more applicants and we want to make sure we are making a more thoughtful decision because potentially, potentially your husband could very well have placed the application and never gotten the opportunity to even record himself and just gotten a rejection letter.

[00:09:12] At the very least, now he has the opportunity to be able to state his case, even though it might be to a system that's going to record it. But like now you have the opportunity to to explain yourself and explain who you are and what differentiates you. And so I think that it's a little bit of a context change in that, you know, it's like, trust me, we've all applied for jobs. There have been plenty of jobs you've applied for. You haven't received anything until maybe three months later. And it's all of a sudden a rejection letter. Now you have the opportunity to at least at least state your case.

[00:09:40] But one of the really interesting things that we've done is we do a lot of research on this. Like personally, I was always apprehensive. Well, it must be really impersonal for people to, you know, to have to to interview in this type of manner. But we interview a lot of the candidates. And what we find is that, number one, candidates really like this type of interview setup is as far as the first screening in a lot of cases is concerned because they can do it at their time.

[00:10:05] And so if I work a nine to five job and a recruiter works a nine to five job, like I have to take time out of my day to go and have this interview or this phone screen, walk out to my car or whatever it might be. Whereas now you can do it in the evening and you don't have to worry about the recruiter's availability. And so it gives you more flexibility as a job seeker. In addition to that, we find that a lot of the times actually candidates kind of like and tend to be a little bit more honest and open and not like I'm just trying to give the answer that you want.

[00:10:35] If they're just talking to, you know, a little squiggly line as opposed to talking to someone. And it's interesting psychologically that like you're kind of going to be more open and honest if you're just talking to, you know, the system. But then so we've done this research and we find that actually candidates overwhelmingly is like something over 60, 70 percent of candidates are either as happy with or more have a higher preference to do an AI or virtual screening as opposed to an in-person screening. And it's because of a lot of those things.

[00:11:04] And hey, by the way, here's the other thing, Sherry, is that as much as we all want to and as much as we all take the HR trainings and we all do the a lot of the recruitment and hiring trainings, fundamentally everyone has implicit biases. And what these types of systems do is it cuts all of that out. It really takes the content that someone is saying and allows that to be judged based on truly what the words are that are coming out of their mouth.

[00:11:31] And also, you know, a lot of recruiters have incentives like they're trying to get as many people hired as they can. And this does not coach candidates. It won't say, well, hey, like, did you actually mean this? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's what I meant, right? Like it's actually taking the information you're giving and it will ask second and third level questions, but it won't coach you on the right answers. So fundamentally, and hey, all that to be said, I know I sound like an evangelist and I very much am. But at the same time, like when we do for Indeed Flex all of our interviews, they are still all human reviewed.

[00:11:59] So we're still reviewing every single one of them because while AI has been around for a couple of years and it is evolving at such a fast pace right now, it's not there yet. Right. And so we need to make sure that we also have this really nice balance between the technological and the human side of it.

[00:12:17] And so what we found is that even though we have human recruiters that are reviewing all these interviews, what we find is we've taken our recruiter productivity from like 13, 14 interviews a day to now they're able to review 80 because they're able to go specifically to what are the most important questions and review those ones as opposed to having to go through an entire interview process.

[00:12:36] Well, and I suspect, too, for those that are looking for maybe a second job or a gig job, those types of interviews are really good, like you said, because they can do it after hours or on the weekends or, you know, there's flexibility there. I also like the idea of removing some of the game that we play when we interview. You know, I've coached people on this before as we went to more virtual interviews where, you know, a candidate might notice your background.

[00:13:04] Like, let's say you have a picture of you catching a fish in your background. Right. The candidate notices that and makes a comment about the fact that they love fishing. And now the hiring manager is like, oh, my gosh, I love fishing. Right. So now you've created this camaraderie in the interview that has nothing to do with the job description or the skills or all the things. Right. So I love that ability to pull some of that out of the conversation and really focus on the skills.

[00:13:28] And I think that that skills idea leads into my next question, because it really focuses more on what an agile workforce looks like and how you can tap into different skills. How have you seen that? How have you seen organizations really kind of take that mentality of a more flexible, agile workforce? Yeah, that's that's a really interesting question, because it's funny, a lot of like because of technological advancements in the last five, 10 years,

[00:13:57] that's actually forced a change in the type of jobs that people or the demands, let's say, of what job seekers have. And I think that's something that a lot of employers are starting to wise up to. Like, you know, think about it. I'm now able to go on my phone and order just about anything that exists in the world to be delivered to my house in two hours. Like you couldn't do that 10 years ago. You couldn't do that five years ago.

[00:14:21] And so but you have to understand that me as a consumer, I'm also a job seeker at certain points in my career. And so the demands that I have of like this, like inordinate amount of like flexibility and decision making power and control that I have, I also am starting to demand as a job seeker. Also, you know, Gen Z is starting to come into the workforce and they have certain demands as well around this type of flexibility in the types of work they're picking up and the types of labor that they have.

[00:14:50] And so, you know, a lot of the times organizations need to understand that fundamentally, like people that are making, especially in those in those kind of like mid and lower wage categories, call it under $30 an hour. They have second jobs, whether you know it or not, like they have a second job, whether that is driving for rideshare, whether that is doing food delivery, whether that is like pouring beer at the local stadium on the weekends,

[00:15:15] like they're all doing that. And so the question is, how can you provide that type of flexibility to a lot of other people? Because what it does is if if and this is where HR comes into such a key point in the conversation, the operations team, they say, well, we have these shift patterns. This is how it is. And this is why? Well, because this makes the most sense for the way that we run the operation,

[00:15:41] the amount of widgets we have to produce or get out of the factory or number of calls we have to take or whatever it might be. And that's all very valid. But what happens is they've set it up to fit for the business and not to fit for the employer or sorry, the employee. And what HR has an opportunity to do is show that by having more flexibility in the way that people are interacting with their job can actually open up a whole market of untapped labor resources.

[00:16:09] So think about caretakers who have to take care of children or elderly people who I only have four or five, six hours in the afternoon. But by the way, I can't work on Wednesday because I have to take grandma to the doctor like they weren't able to work at your facility before. Now, if you have some type of flexibility, they are. Think about students. Think about retirees, like all these people that are actually really, really good workers, really good candidates, really good employees that,

[00:16:38] you know, if you've got a really rigid shift pattern of nine to five Monday through Friday and every other Saturday, like they're not able to work that. But if you're willing to be more flexible, then you can you can attract those candidates. And then and then this this is where really strong HR professionals become diamonds is what they then do is they say, hey, look, I know that this is a little bit of an adjustment, but here's the thing. If we run a pilot on this and let's say we run the pilot, we realize that, you know,

[00:17:05] when we look at this different segmentation of the job seekers that are in these flexible shift patterns, the time to hire is better. The turnover rate is lower. The productivity is better. The commitment is better. We don't have any as many HR cases or as many injuries or whatever that might be. Right. So like driving the pilot and then being able to take the business impact and equate that and say, hey, because, you know, if we lower it when we lower the turnover rate by three or four percent,

[00:17:31] do you know what that means to our overall cost as a business or how much more efficiency or productivity we have from our workforce? That is the type of conversation that the best of the best HR leaders are having. And that's how they're really starting to drive change in the businesses. And I had mentioned before becoming more of a profit center and being able to show bottom line impact to the way that the organization is functioning. You gave such a good example that I think sometimes we miss.

[00:17:55] And it's that pilot program spot like you can definitely end up in a scenario where you're having an us them conversation between operations and HR. Right. I've been there before. And we've all I think we've all coached HR leaders like, you know, find your business champion, your your bestie in the in the operation side. But I love the pilot idea because you can do low stakes. You can have a start and end day.

[00:18:20] You can look at the specific metrics that are important to your organization and really drive business results from there. The thing is, though, your organization does have to be, I think, a little bit in a good spot for innovation and for some risk. And so have you coached anybody on like, how do you have those conversations if if you're in that spot where you don't have kind of that organization's ability to like give you some space to have some risk there? Yeah, that's that's the tough one.

[00:18:46] I mean, you know, I would tell you that that typically what we find is that, you know, the you have to stick your neck out. Right. And a lot of the times when you're especially if you're trying to say, hey, like across our 32 different locations, we want to completely change a shift pattern and drive some type of flexibility like you, you fund them.

[00:19:03] You need like we've found that you need people who are like career oriented, say, hey, like I have an opportunity to make a change in the business and and and potentially be able to do something that is going to have a major impact on the overall organization. So you need people that are kind of like forward thinking that are willing to take risks that, by the way, also work within an organization where kind of risk taking is a little bit accepted and understood because, you know, at the end of the day, like I love it.

[00:19:30] Like within within the organization that I run, like I always tell people, like, try it and fail, fail nine times. If you get one win like that was so worth it because you can then multiply off of that one. And but I'd say that a big part of what we that what we find is really important is leading with data. So if you can equip an HR professional or the HR professional has the ability to get the data, I mean, that becomes very hard to argue with.

[00:19:55] If you can show that here's our current turnover rate and here's the turnover rate by certain cohorts of workers or shift patterns or whatever it might be and say, hey, here's like we just want to try it in this one area. It becomes hard to argue with that. And so really having that data bias, I think, can be very, very important and kind of the literacy also to be able. I think you mentioned it before to be able to understand the rest of the business, like how important is it to know, like what are the just like a recruiter or an HR professional has metrics that they have to hit.

[00:20:24] What are the metrics that that operations leader needs to hit? How many calls, how many resolutions, how many packages, you know, how many deliveries, how many widgets, whatever that might be. And if you can understand that and then start to equate that back to the human aspect of like the human capital that you're using to be able to deliver that result by using data, it can be it can be really, really impactful.

[00:20:43] But I'll tell you the reason I mentioned this and I double down on it is because I can't tell you how often I talk to HR professionals and like they can they can rattle off all the important things for them. Like what's my cost per hire? What's my time to hire? Right. Like what is my interview to hire rate? All that stuff. But then like once that person has like gotten their first paycheck, it's like bye bye. Like I'm not interested as much anymore. And you're like, wait, hold on a second. Like what's the ramp up time? What's the productivity rate? What's the one month, two months, six months, 12 month turnover rate?

[00:21:13] Like what are the turnover rates by different phylums or groups that you have here? And like if you can start to look at that stuff, because that's fundamentally like that's what actually the operations team cares about. And so if you if you have like really intimate knowledge into how the business is operating, that will give you the ability and equip you with the knowledge to be able to go and have those really detailed value added conversations. James, this was such a good conversation. I love that we ended on data and metrics because I could not elevate what you said any more than you did.

[00:21:42] That is such a really important skill set for our HR professionals to have and to be able to talk and speak in that way. So really appreciate your perspective and your your ideas around flexibility and using AI. And I guess I'll ask you one quick last question, you know, for our audience, what's one takeaway that you hope that they walk away from this conversation with? I'd say I'd say the biggest takeaway that I would give you is maybe two. Is it OK if I give two? Go for it.

[00:22:12] So one of them is, as I'd mentioned, like fall forward, like try things, fail at them, learn from them and then move forward. And the other one is something from a book that I've been reading recently by Brene Brown is called Dare to Lead. And I love that book because essentially it's about a little bit about like like radical honesty.

[00:22:34] And she she she she she has a concept called like the I think called the rumble or something like that, where it's like you need to be willing to put yourself into vulnerable situations, have trust with your colleagues that you all want the same thing. And sometimes like disagree and like get into it and like have those discussions. And sometimes a little bit of healthy friction can really be powerful, especially if you all have the shared agreement and knowledge.

[00:23:00] Like at the end of the day, we all want the same thing, which is the success of the business and the success of the employees that we're hiring. And so if you kind of always have that and you can help build a culture within the organization that fundamentally like we're going to disagree and we're going to have arguments. But these arguments are always for us in the North Star of like how do we drive the mission of this organization? Then you're going to get the best outcomes because that's how we all grow and that's how we all succeed. And the most successful teams have strong diversity.

[00:23:27] The most successful teams have people that are in HR, that are in finance, that are in operations, that are in all these different fields because you take those different cross functional knowledge growth areas, you put them together. And that's where one plus one equals one equals 10. So I'd say it's like be honest, have the candor, always be trying to learn new things and fall forward and be willing to have a little bit of sometimes hard conversations with people. James, such great takeaways for our audience. Thanks for sitting down and chatting with me for a few minutes.

[00:23:56] Thanks so much for having me, Sherry. Thanks for tuning in to the HR Mixtape. Like, share, review and subscribe to support the show and help more people discover these conversations. Until next time, keep the conversation going.