Greg Irwin 0:18

Hi, everyone, good afternoon. And thank you all for taking a little bit of time for our video chat group chat with HRchitect and Jacqueline Kuhn. My name is Greg Irwin. And I'm going to be co-host here with with Jacqueline, we've been hosting these forums for many years. And we've been in a great series together with HRchitect, because there's really it's just one of the craziest worlds around HR and trying to understand and really get a handle and staying ahead of the new the new workplace and the new workforce. So we're going to try and keep these going and keep the conversation going in that regard. We're going to talk a lot I do, I'll do fireside chat here with Jacqueline, I'll ask her a range of questions. And that should bubble up some good stuff. What we really love to do in these is to get your questions and to get your stories about what's happening with your workforce, and really how people are navigating all of that. So we have this chat window. It's, it's a miracle of technology, you put it in there, and everyone can see it. So let's use it throughout. So if you have Hey, I have a similar story or Hey, have you thought of this, or Hey, we tried that. And that makes this conversation so much richer and keeps everybody tied into it. So please try and use the chat throughout. Lastly, we're really have this sense of building a community. So across the grid, not just HRchitect, BWG, but everybody here, my guess is more people than not are open to building out their networks. So I have asked everybody to make a personal goal to try and make one new contact through the, you know, through through this, this afternoon's session. You can reach out directly or we'll be happy to help with those interests. Alright, let's get right into it. Jacqueline, it's so fun to have these conversations. Do us a favor, take the mic and give it a little introduction for yourself and for HRchitect.

Jacqueline Kuhn 2:30

Thanks, Greg. Hi, everybody, Jacqueline Kuhn, I'm the part of partner at HRchitect responsible for all of the work we do with our clients that help them figure out what technology they need, and then matchmaker for them to find the right products. My team and I this year will have before the year is out we'll have issued 32 RFPs, for RFPs for 32 separate clients spanning about 2526 vendors and total different vendors because it's all kinds of different stuff that we do. So we address every every area of HCM.

Greg Irwin 3:10

Fantastic, and I think we can jump right in. You've been traveling quite a bit. Where have you been recently?

Jacqueline Kuhn 3:19

Yeah, so last week, I was at the HRchitect conference, Mandalay in Vegas. And just the other day I was at yesterday, I was at the Ceridian World Tour, which is a their user prospect conference. I was speaking at that event on the hybrid workforce. But HRchitect we were exhibiting and that's where I do a lot of my research on who's who in the zoo.

Greg Irwin 3:48

So we're coming out of COVID I think we're all pretty curious. How is it being an an in-person conference,

Jacqueline Kuhn 3:57

it felt great. Um, the, the restrictions though, are still a bit I think, draconian. They they did require everyone be vaccinated. And on top of that, they did require masks. So there was kind of like the double duty although what I really loved is like all the food that they serve was pre-package so there was no like community fingering things. I mean, you know, they kept it as as really sanitary, from that perspective as you could be, which made you feel very safe.

Greg Irwin 4:32

What was the attendance? Like? I know I think we've all been my guess is we've all been to an HRchitect conference. Was it a 10th? The size was it did it feel busy, but yeah,

Jacqueline Kuhn 4:45

um, I would say it was less than half the size not not that not much more than that. There were 253 individual vendors exhibit So, and normally there's more like 300 vendors exhibiting there were about a dozen or so vendors that did cancel last minute. You know, we don't know why. So that there were a few fewer vendors, fewer attendees, about 1000 attendees was the official count. So 3000 people, 2000 vendors were of those vendors about 1000 attendees. Right? Even though even though the the traffic was lighter, it was quality traffic. And that's kind of why we went we made the hypotheses that in, in a COVID world, anybody who would travel to the conference has a real need. And we were spot on the people that we talked to really were looking to buy, and we're looking for information. So we got some great prospects out of it.

Greg Irwin 5:51

Fantastic. Alright, let's let's get right at those key themes. You were speaking at Ceridian, you were at HRchitect. All that that this group is seeing is feeling some pains with the new work from anywhere, and what what what are we calling it the great resignation? What, what are the big themes that that the community is talking about? Jacqueline?

Jacqueline Kuhn 6:16

Yeah. So the really big themes are leveraging AI for everything. Everything from AI is to get basic HR IT operations questions. There's a product that I discovered, called me be bought pretty cool, literally, what do they call me? MEBE. Bot, mebebot. mebebot, and it literally is a is a bot that you plugin with your organization's information. And from anywhere you want to know, you know, what, what, what is the office hours? Am I allowed to go in? You know, can I schedule, you know, hotelling space, ask an HR question. I mean, it's really designed for like an operations, HR, it kind of questions for a quick q&a, no matter where you are. So sort of that instead of calling a help desk, or instead of walking over to someone's cube, right, how do I get my quick and easy answer from wherever I'm at. So a lot of AI, there's AI everywhere. The the the other, the other theme is really all about deep was about dei diversity and inclusion initiatives. And, and how, to some extent, with the hybrid workforce, it's easier to meet your initiatives, because as long as the job can be done from anywhere, you can really hire anyone, you're no longer constrained to the city with which your four wall building is in, as long as that job doesn't need to be in that building. What from a technology perspective, what we saw on the floor were apps from a recruiting perspective, that would pull out any bias on a resume, and just leave the basic information about skills and qualifications, right? With pulling out anything else that might have a bias. We've also, you know, there are complementary products out there that do the same thing with your HR data. So if you're looking at internal versus external candidates, or internal promotions, pulling out, pulling out bias, some of it even kind of takes it a next step to say, if, if we didn't have a diversity hire in the last x days, months years, we will not look at the decisions that were made because that data in and of itself is biassed because there were no diversity hires. So I mean, we're talking data analytics and AI really going deep into what has happened so that the decisions today are being made without any inherent bias. So there's a lot of technology around that out there. There were three, three new vendors in the startup pavilion that had some venture capital backing, doing things like that as well as other vendors, you know, that HR vendors looking to, to embed that into into their apps. So yeah, that was the big removing bias it was was one of the big, big themes across a number of vendors. Interesting.

Greg Irwin 9:50

Folks, I'm going to keep asking I want to keep going here with Jacqueline for a bit, but I would love to hear and let's put it into the chat. You know warm warm up your fingers here, drop in the initiative that you all are are thinking about. It could be anywhere across the HR tech stack. It could be. It could be Dei, it could be how to use AI. How do you? I mean, it certainly we're hearing a lot and talking a lot about recruiting. We're talking about retention, and succession planning. So everything's all fair game here. Oh, Amber. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that embers. Jacqueline, let's talk about retention. All right, but I think the great resignation is, is here. Maybe Maybe you could first put that into some context? To what extent do you see the great resignation among, you know, as a problem to be solved? Or to be invested in or to be addressed? versus something that people are just starting to understand? Or maybe it's more buzz than than reality? Yeah,

Jacqueline Kuhn 11:03

I think it's,

well, I think it's a great catchphrase for somebody to use. But what it really speaks to is culture and employee experience, right? You're only resigning, if you're unhappy with your job opportunities, the culture that has become your company, and the way they're handling their people, right? I mean, so it's, it's, it's a new way of labeling, you know, employee culture and an HR service delivery, you know, in in a more shocking way for people to kind of get in front of it. And so what has what has come up in the technology space, our employee experience apps, right? People who, you know, improving that employee experience, so your ServiceNow is and your dovetails and you know, those HR service delivery apps, coming out with better employee experiences, mostly through AI? Hmm. So that I don't feel disconnected. They work. Some new, some don't. Um, I know that it in all cases, it takes a while for it to really develop the right kind of content or the the AI to understand and build that intelligence. But when you get to that point, I think it really does work. But it is a journey. I mean, it's not like, it's not like a payroll system where you, you configure it, you test the heck out of it, you stand it up, and you get accurate paychecks. It's really about you start you started out with what you have. And as you start refining, what questions are being asked what answers what's going on, and it gets smarter and smarter as as the use increases.

Greg Irwin 13:01

Got it. So let me again, invite the group want to talk about retention? recruitment is the other order that's probably come up six times here in this chat window. Thank you for that. So I don't want to come off of retention. But I but let's so we'll come back to it. But let's cover recruitment here, Jacqueline in the same thread, because I see Amanda, Chris, I am as to basically talking about recruitment. So what are some of the initiatives doesn't have to be just tech, it could be process as well. That's helping people with their talent recruiting,

Jacqueline Kuhn 13:45

sourcing from a variety of places. It's really about getting that getting to various sources. And not just relying on on LinkedIn. I'm very, in some very interesting statistics came out of HRchitect, as far as who's on LinkedIn. You know, what does the LinkedIn population look like and it's not very diverse. It's it really not it's not diverse from an age it's not diverse from a gender it's not diverse from from from race, it's it's a pretty, pretty vanilla kind of population. And so getting out to those other sources, government job boards, the, you know, former military Alumni Associations of, of, you know, colleges and universities, it's really casting a wide net to other communities show that you have have a broader network to to work with.

Greg Irwin 14:59

I love that Really, really interesting. And I guess it makes sense, as you say, and I'm thinking, Oh, me, wow, that's because you think of millions and millions of people on LinkedIn, and it as the professional social network. But then how do you do it? How do you go? Let's say, I love that idea of you go into ex-military or government job boards? How do you manage that? That's, I mean, I'm sure that they're aggregators. But can you tell us about somebody who's had some success with diversifying their recruiting sources?

Jacqueline Kuhn 15:39

Yeah, I can't by name, I'm not sure I'm allowed to say by name, but a client of ours, a client of ours, uses, I want to say it's broad been as their aggregator engine, to, to push out to the various areas. And then because that's a lot, and that's a lot of work. On top of that they slap paradox, the AI called Olivia, that screens that does the initial screening, so they now can screen 1000s of applications in a fraction of the time. So they cast a wide net using, you know, third-party technology, that'll post out to 2030 boards, then they use the technology to screen people for skills, and then they have now a pool of people that is more diverse than what they had before. Oh, cool. Yeah, the other, there's another really cool thing that they're doing too is. And I think this is brilliant. They are they basically have redesigned all of their job postings to be 100% skill base, and have zero requirements for previous experience or previous job roles. And their thinking is, if I never had the opportunity to be an accountant, let's say, let's say I never had the opportunity to do that job because it never came up. But I have skills in Excel and finance and and you know, a degree in math or whatever. I have skills that you can teach me how to do the work. And so I can, I can actually qualify for jobs, as long as we're not looking at what jobs I had in the past.

Greg Irwin 17:38

Same question, does it work? And I hear it and I'm thinking, Wow,

Jacqueline Kuhn 17:43

it it is it is for this organization is

Greg Irwin 17:47

an accountant, but maybe it's an account level one. This person hasn't taken an accounting class, but they score high in Excel and, and math and whatnot. Yeah, does it doesn't work.

Jacqueline Kuhn 18:04

It does for this organization, because they're committed at all levels to training and development. Yes, yes. But that's what you have to be committed to training. Because if you're not committed to training, it's just never going to work. Well, yeah, paradox is the AI. Yes.

Greg Irwin 18:25

So we're going to come back to let's, let's broaden, let's bring a couple people in. And I'm going to thank Amanda and Amanda, I'm going to put you on the hot seat if that's okay. Thanks for asking some questions. Give a little intro here to our tour.

Amanda 18:42

Okay. Um, well, my name is Amanda, I work as a senior-level HR generalist for a tier-one automotive manufacturer out of West Michigan. And I've been an HR for probably going on 11 years or so just kind of on the call to just kind of understand where the tech is going with HR and just kind of trying to keep up with the trends

Greg Irwin 19:06

in the workforce that you are managing. First, how big is it? And what's the mix between, you know, maybe maybe it's, you know, factory floor, maybe it's white-collar, what's what's the next

Amanda 19:20

little bit of everything's, we have about 1700 people globally, and we are a manufacturer, so we do have people on the floor manufacturing automotive parts. And then we do have all the way up to white-collar with our C suite and some of our global executives.

Greg Irwin 19:39

And what's the top priority for your organization over the next year, where Where's your time and effort being spent.

Amanda 19:48

Right now, it's really being focused on how to automate and more efficiently get through our recruiting process. So we don't really have a lot going on with AI right now. So really came Trying to see what that looks like and how that could be incorporated into our recruitment strategy.

Greg Irwin 20:05

When you say, So, can you explain? And I think we all we all probably here touch some form of recruiting. So some of this may resonate. But where's the bottleneck? If you when you say automate, automate could mean, Hey, get it to the right person, it could mean, get faster responses from the interviewers, it could mean, do more to get more resumes in the inbox? What is what's the automation part that would have the greatest impact?

Amanda 20:35

For us, I think it would probably be that initial screening that an AI software could do right now that's all manual, like so myself and a few other people would have to go through the resumes coming in and decide whether or not we think that person meets the qualifications we're looking for, and then funnel that through to the next, you know, hiring manager level and working that all manually.

Greg Irwin 20:53

What happens now? what's the what's the process? What's the manual process look like?

Amanda 21:01

Um, so our ETS system pushes out the job postings to different job boards, the resume start coming in, and then we manually look through all the resumes, decide who kind of makes it through to the next round, funnel, those initial suggestions to the hiring manager, and then go through with the hiring manager who they think would be a good fit for first-round interviews, kind of get that started, and then kind of the same process, who do we want to then bring in on-site, you know, or teams or however, we need to get them in there, and then just kind of working that whole process through. And then we don't really get in into any more automation until we get to the make an offer kind of stage.

Greg Irwin 21:42

Let's say you wave to one and you solve it, meaning maybe it would use to take you, I don't know, a month to fill a position. And you could wave a wand and it would take now a week. What kind of impact would that have on the business? Meaning? Is it worth automating and putting all the time and investment to solve and improve the process?

Amanda 22:10

I think the short answer to that would be yes. Again, cost would be a major factor for what we're talking about in terms of software and what we'd be able to realistically have in the budget. But yes, I think that would be worth it just to get people in quicker, more qualified candidates try to eliminate some of that bias on the on the front end, you know, just kind of take that out of the equation entirely. And then just speed up that process.

Greg Irwin 22:38

How many? How many open wrecks? Yeah. I'm right now about 14. And Amanda, we're talking about the other side of it, which is retention. Have you seen increasing churn? Are you putting processes in place to manager or address incremental term?

Amanda 22:59

Um, the higher churn we're seeing is more on the production, manufacturing floor side of things versus more white-collar type jobs. But we are trying to put things in place, especially at the exempt level in terms of stay interviews and employee engagement and real focus on retention and employee engagement as a goal for our fourth

Greg Irwin 23:22

quarter. Hey, thanks so much for sharing this with us. It's interesting to hear the some of the detailed story that thank you very much. You're welcome. Let's bring in some others. Dave, can I get you into the mix? It's good to speak with you again. What are you working on?

Dave 23:45

Yeah, Dave, and part of the team. We have about 1400 employees, mainly truck drivers servicing throughout North America. We're based in Canada, Ontario, Canada. Two main priorities. One is also the recruiting and retention side of things. Then the other as I indicated in my comment was looking at evaluating and hopefully selecting a new HCM over the next couple of years probably.

Greg Irwin 24:22

Alright, you heard Amanda's story. How does that compare to yours?

Dave 24:28

fairly similar, um, you know, retention is is I think a challenge for all of us. We were fairly fortunate. We have a fairly low turnover rate for the trucking industry. Some of our some of our colleagues experience turnover rates that are there, believe it or not, are approaching 100%. Ours sort of pre-COVID pre-pandemic was around mid-teens. Now we're inching up to high teens. So we've probably seeing an increase of about three 4%? Not huge, but still concerning. Yes. Um, so yeah, that's that's an area where we're trying to address. And then on the recruiting side, we've probably got currently, I think we're sitting around 5060, open hiring request requests for drivers and non drivers, probably about 2025.

Greg Irwin 25:29

Any ideas of new strategies to, to either bring in more resumes, or to get through resumes work more than interviews more quickly?

Dave 25:42

Not really, I'm just sort of listening and grabbing ideas. So I'm, we're very similar to Amanda in that very manual. Her, what she described is almost exactly what we're doing job boards, and then manually going through the applications and resumes as they, as they pour in.

Greg Irwin 26:01

Yeah, are very good. Let's, let's keep doing this. And I want to share about the questions as well as, hey, we tried this in to kind of help help everybody on board. And again, for those just joining in, use this as a network, meaning, you hear something interesting, you want to do some follow-up. Let's let's make this the first conversation, not the last. So we'll be happy to help try and connect people across our group. Chris, it's nice to see you again. Tell us a little bit about your story. Some of your initiatives, but the intro first place. Yeah.

Chris 26:40

Thanks. Pleasure being back. Actually, since the last time that I was on one of these I've actually moved companies. So I'm now with. So we're a little different than than where I was before, because we're kind of a startup, and we're going through growth mode right now.

Greg Irwin 27:03

I'm sorry, Jackie, I'm gonna put you on mute here for a moment. Oh, actually, I can't do that.

Chris 27:11

She just went on. Yeah. So so it's a little different. But hey, congratulations.

Greg Irwin 27:15

What is Jupiter? What is Jupiter intelligence?

Chris 27:19

So what we are is, we are a company that does risk analysis for financial institutions, insurance companies, so all around climate, so climate change, anything related to climate change, we do risk analysis, and we are tech companies that we've modeled out. If this happens, and here's the probability that this is going to happen in the next 510 1520 years. This is what the how catastrophic, it's going to be. And so that's what we we partner with those institutions on.

Greg Irwin 27:57

Cool. How many? How big is the organization? How? And again, what are you? What's your focus?

Chris 28:04

Yeah, so our organization currently stands at 60 employees. However, in the last two months, we've hired 20. Oh, and our goal is to get up to 100 employees by the end of the year. So we have a lot of open racks, a lot of it in engineering and product. So really, on the high-end side of the, the, the what, who we're targeting, so we are going and getting a lot of write out a first year, PhDs and that sort of thing. So we are targeting the universities, we are government contractors. So we do have some other requirements with those job boards, and all that sort of thing. So you know, just really, I think the hard part is, is just growing. And for us, it's the interview process and who goes through it, you know, that we want to make sure that we're maintaining it like everybody, right? You want to track, you know, qualified and top-level talent. And I think sometimes where we're running into some of those timing issues is going to be on the interview process side.

Greg Irwin 29:19

Right? Well, what are you doing to what are you doing to tackle it? Is it simple standard ATMs? Are you trying some AI tools? You? What are you done?

Chris 29:30

Yeah, so we, we do leverage our ATMs quite a bit, we use lever, we have not gotten into the AI side of it. So I think that's definitely something for us to possibly leverage. And then, the other hard part, I think, and we just came out with our whole new dei strategy. So that's a very big focus of ours. And that's kind of a hard thing for us because we are we're big on the academia side and And a lot of the internal requisitions that we get or recommendations, you know, aren't as diverse, right? So I'm not sure how we attract the talent outside of that. And I think, for us, we are kind of looking, as was mentioned before, looking anywhere, right, and so being a little bit more open to the fully remote and and being committed to that, you know, we're able to maybe become more diverse because of that. And so I think we're just starting to really, now that we've pushed our office openings and everything like that, I think we're, the leadership is kind of warming up to that, to that remote idea more and more, but I think for some, in certain key, like in on certain key teams, they're still reluctant there. So I don't know if there's any, any anyone that has any feedback on that in terms of, you know, their strategies, and how, you know, what we're seeing in the marketplace and communicating that to leaders as to, you know, hey, well, this is just kind of the new norm. That's also something that we've heard about in the recruitment process is that flexibility of work, not only location, but kind of that work-life balance, I think that's something that's important, too.

Greg Irwin 31:27

Why don't we do a little poll? Thank you. It's always interesting. We're there. There's a lot of transition going on right now. of Where is your company going in terms of remote work or flex work policy? I put it into the chat. And keep it just I understand different teams, different roles. Amanda? I'm sure your factory, you know, floor workers are on site. But I'd like to see for those that have some flexibility. Is it going 100% remote? Is it bringing people back to the office? Is it in the office three days a week? What What do we have, and I'll tell you, from our perspective, we are a company that really has believed in in person. We like that idea of collaboration, community culture, and you know, kind of gang tackling stuff, we have moved to two days flex. And it worked out, but we let everybody do whatever they wanted. What we found was everybody was remote on Mondays and Fridays. And then the place was packed on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So we're now coming back to a platooning strategy, where we have teams, we know the days that they're going to be in, they're going to be in with the people that that we that at least are adjacent to them in terms of their team. So when they show up, they know that there's somebody that they have a good chance of collaborating with being there. Whereas now somebody will come in, they'll look around and they don't need to talk to anybody because the people they want to be talking with decided to be remote that day. Which is, again back to just losing the whole point of it. So we're now trying to platooning strategy or with with today's remote. Jackie, nice to speak with you. It's been a little while would you give a little intro and tell us a little bit about what's going on,

Jackie 33:29

the corporate payroll director and it's one of the largest digital media advertising companies along with w pp. IPG publicist. We have about 40 to 50 us payrolls. We're in 66 countries. And if nobody's paid attention to what's happening in the media world is we have a 50% turnover rate. We have 700, open positions, amongst all the adages

Greg Irwin 34:00

and how many, what's what's the 10,000 10,700 open racks, 10,000 employees.

Jackie 34:09

Right. So, at this point, they're doing everything in their power, HR, talent, resource managers, recruiters of trying to hire as many people as possible so I can't tell you what the strategy is the strategy is higher, higher higher, but we have like six positions. And a Mia it's just out of control, but everybody's going to immediately say, well, I'll hire 250 people one pay period, but 243 leave

Greg Irwin 34:42

what's going on with your comp. I mean, my presumption is to hire that many people with that with that risk of that kind of turnover. I assume comps going up.

Jackie 34:55

night it's a great you know, retention, sign-on bonuses, anything to People, but we're losing them. You know, it's just amazing. But that's basically what's happened. And that's because I come from Citibank. I mean, I come from, you know, organizations with, you know, hundreds of 1000s of people. But this, you know, the agency world because it just comprised of all these legal entities, I think comment on them in like WP Nova, and it's just the parent company name. So it is crazy here. Jamie, just like, yes.

Greg Irwin 35:33

No, please go ahead.

Jackie 35:35

Oh, no, I was just gonna say, you know, and as you know, like in 2017, we've, we've launched the global workday HR system across 66 countries. And we've purchased Merkel, one of the largest companies, and they run their own Merkel. So now we're migrating all of those entities over to our global

workday system from from a workday system. But this is they have IT staff such a challenge. I can strange, Katelyn, but I'm in your settings along with me.

Greg Irwin 36:08

How's workday? How's workday in terms of effectiveness? Like

Jackie 36:13

all depends, it all depends on the data you have in work time depends on the data that you have been worked out.

And depending on how clean your data is, and SAP, and it just seems to be so many different fields to do the same thing. It's crazy.

Greg Irwin 36:39

But what's your payroll underneath it?

Jackie 36:44

are we right now we're using ADP. All we went and did an entire cost and I did an entire business plan between Merkel payroll and ADP says we're on. And you can even compare the cost because the subscription to workday per headcount is almost the same as paying all of your entities in ADP, which includes, you know, not having to support the software or you know, they're totally responsible for nothing I've ever been I'm really not a big believer out, you know, ADP, city and all of that. But it's like, when you look at the cost, you can't there's no way that you can actually see we're going to go workday payroll because the cost of the subscription was all in ADP including every paycheck every minute return, all the W2s was in cost just for the subscription to Work Day, then you always have to go and get the third party provider to do all your payroll taxes, W twos cheque printing direct deposits, and or, you know, outsource the entire payroll. So no integration between Amazon ADP and Brazil's on ADP. But, you know, if you if you had a seamless process from workday to your payroll, it's really you know, it's not, it's not it's not bad. It's like, it's like, we almost have real time, data just gets automatically updated in at

Greg Irwin 38:10

our cool, very cool. Um, what's one big initiative for the next next two years? I would that you, your team, your broader HR team is?

Jackie 38:21

Um, Yep, absolutely. Since we, automation, using UI path, I pretty much automated the entire payroll process through bots, which is awesome. And I'm gonna roll out and start to do it across all the countries between there between the global HR systems and their local payroll system, because there's no payroll system that's, you know, globally that handle up to four countries, and we went through that Citibank are in 200 countries, and we just have to choose a vendor that actually can handle multiple countries. So we're looking at being able to go in and use but you know, in order to build the make sure it's we have data integrity between the two systems. And basically, I think, eventually, to use that automation also within validation, all the HR data, and then I think the big goal is to, you know, Council's posture, HR Ops, and HR and payroll. They couldn't do right now because

Greg Irwin 39:28

Jackie, you just chopped up on that last

Jackie 39:30

one site would be eventually over the next two years to offshore the operations for HR apps and payroll. Interesting.

Greg Irwin 39:39

What's your so that's so interesting. You're using robotic bots, to consolidate your payrolls,

Jackie 39:49

pretty much processes I actually taught it, how to go directly into ADP, payroll and process flow. Cool.

Greg Irwin 39:56

That's really cool. Yeah,

Jackie 39:58

actually, I just taught it The tax forms, pull out the pertinent data because ADP doesn't have a self-service tax portal, don't ask me why

Greg Irwin 40:09

I'm really interesting. But whatever. Great, Jackie, it's great to speak with you. Thanks so much for joining us. You're

Jackie 40:15

welcome.

Greg Irwin 40:18

Let's go back to Jacqueline, Jacqueline Kuhn for a moment. So from using UiPath bots to automate payroll to, you know, AI, across applicant tracking systems, I'm hearing about automation, Criss jumping jobs, I mean, all of the the, the the whole reshuffling, it's hitting HR, and just like it's hitting every other division, I'm going to just turn to you because, again, you're at the conference, you're talking to two organizations here, what's resonating for you? Yeah, so

Jacqueline Kuhn 40:59

it's really

it's really about having,

in addition to having empowering your frontline leaders, to take ownership of retention, and take ownership of their employees and making sure that they're engaged, and they've got the right tools, and they know what they're supposed to do HR, it shouldn't be hrs job anyway, in my opinion, but you know, even when it was or when HR felt it was a part of their job, they can't do it anymore. It just isn't. And it's really about that people are calling it the employee experience, but it's really empowering that frontline manager and supervisor to with access to information with data with the right tools, so they can start coaching. And a couple of organizations that we talked to, are moving away. And one of the ways they're doing this is they're really moving away from that, you know, I make five goals, I have a mid-year, I have a year-end, right. And we talk about the five goals, they're really moving to. And I don't want to use an acronym, but it kind of like the OKR model. The what are the two or three things we're focusing on this quarter, everybody is focusing on what are we going to get accomplished, let's measure it, let's track it, let's follow up on it and move on. So it's really about keeping people focused on what's important and on the work they need to accomplish in the short term. So that employees who are remote or feeling disconnected, still really understand how I connect to the company, because we're all working on these few things that tie up to this one big thing. And I think that's, that's been a theme and talking to people at conference. And and I actually found a software company that to actually that do that really well. In the performance space. One is littice. Li TT ice, and the other is better works. They both have really good applications for you know, management of groups, you know, virtual collaboration, making sure that you you keep crisp and short and everybody understands why they're working on what they're working on. Because when you know when I'm over here in my home in northern Chicago and Samantha's in New Hampshire, we work for the same company, but it's kind of it's sometimes easy to forget that we're working toward the same end. Yeah, and and that empowerment of managers is like so so huge.

Greg Irwin 43:52

It's, this is the big thing really for I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but it's just it's changing what work is. And it's so i i agree 1,000% on how do you drive that sense of community and culture and we're all in the same boat, and we're all trying to achieve something more than a paycheck here. Because it's just more fulfilling. It's It's so it's so straightforward that you want to be part of something meaningful. You want to feel like your work has value, and you want to feel like you're not off on an island. And if it's tools like this that can help help with that kind of that kind of sense. I get it. We do sessions on project management tools, Monday and Asana and they've absolutely exploded. Because for that same reason. It's like it's more important. Yes, you can track a project in Excel, but it's not so easy to do it collaboratively for everybody to see where this Project is at this moment in time. So those tools become incrementally more important than actually drive a bit of your feeling of how you're doing and where you fit and where we are and what needs to get done. And it becomes being much more important than just to get charged. So we've, we've seen those in our sessions as well. Let's keep going. Kim, Kim it's nice to see you on today. Are you with us? Are you able to share share a little stuff, I'm here, great to speak with you a gift give a little intro place.

Kim 45:35

So I'm Kim and I work mostly on the IT side. But I've been working with HR for implementations of various things for 20 years plus, I've actually currently recently changed as well, back into the mortgage side of things. And we're actually looking at a complete digital transformation. There on a fairly good, you know, systems right now, but they're multiple systems. And we're looking to kind of streamline that and get that into kind of a shared services model and be able to, you know, do handoffs better, and really just, it's privately owned, so they're just really trying to rethink every certain amount of time, stay current stay on top of things. But you know, same as everyone else, looking for different roles and different people, and

Greg Irwin 46:25

I will see everyone on mute here. Oh, thank you. Okay, sorry about that camp. Ah, that's okay. And by the way, I for some reason, Neal, I don't have control of that. So if you're able to mute when that happens, please do or hand or hand the baton over? Um, Kim? How many? How many employees are you at? At his freedom mortgage?

Kim 46:53

Freedom mortgage about 12,000 5000?

Greg Irwin 46:54

And I assume it's net nationwide? Yes, there are 50 states. I mean, and I'm curious, what's your you said in in here believe in Remote Jobs remaining? How many? How many offices? And what's the remote, I mean, that's such a big organization.

Kim 47:17

Yeah, I'm still kind of getting to know the lay of the land, because I've really only been there about three weeks. But when I when I speak to my various people, they've been, you know, fairly big believers and in house and then COVID, kind of started to switch and like, they already had a model for remote their mortgage in 50 states. So they kind of already had a model for people working out of their home office or to have a smaller office and different things. And they just expanded that model. And they're like, there's no need for most of our positions, to come back into a central location of any kind. They do have some positions that they want in. And it makes sense, in mortgage, we are a servicer as well. So a lot of those positions are more difficult. If you've ever worked in that. It's very difficult to make sure you're compliant. If you can't control some of the exterior, exterior qualities of what's going on for the servicing piece, right? Those are all where we had the regulations of who can see what and when, and all of that. So it's just more difficult to control externally. So it's easier to have some of those in house just to be able to prove to the regulators that you are controlling that environment. And nobody can take a picture of something, you know, that kind of fun stuff, which I appreciate as a mortgage holder, you know.

Greg Irwin 48:34

Sure, sure. All right. So what's your big from the HR tech stack? What's your what's your area focused? initiatives?

Kim 48:46

Well, yeah, there, we are literally changing just about every app we're on right now. currently using people flow it and they're moving from people float with higher right over to greenhouse, we'll be using workday. We're actually using ServiceNow. So we're trying to going to use ServiceNow for a lot of their HR for employee relations, managing cases, onboarding is going to be a, you know, a combination of greenhouse for the HR side and the technical side ServiceNow. So, you know, really trying to change that workflow, but also broaden the capabilities. Right now, most of the HR supports in email, I think we've all been there for not still there. Let me email benefits and benefits and all of that. Really try to make it more collaborative and make that and get a nice knowledge base up and running. A lot of people just need to find it. They don't need to talk to someone, but if you don't have it centralized, they can't get to it. So it's a pretty big initiative that we're doing over the next couple of years.

Greg Irwin 49:53

Very big and what about payroll

Kim 49:57

I have not heard honestly myself. I'm still new. I haven't talked to the payroll people. Because I was listening to I drew a blank on her name, I'm sorry, but you know about not using, you know, they're using ADP payroll today, but I don't know what we'll use going forward. But if I had to hazard a guess, my past experiences that workday wasn't strong enough to handle how mortgage has to pay. Right. Right. From a compensation standpoint, yeah, we're getting ready to put in LBA, where to to help manage the all the mortgage sales folks and all of that, because you know, there aren't very complex compensation packages. So it'll be a resection built

Greg Irwin 50:42

for mortgage comp. Right. Kim? You know, it's interesting, we're talking to some smaller companies, you're on the larger side. Yeah. And ServiceNow is, I think many people are familiar with it. But it's really kind of the application. It's a workflow tool. It's a ticketing tool. And it's a process tool. How important is that, in terms of how helpful is that as you've been been at various companies? And now you see, ServiceNow? is sitting in the middle of this? Does it help us make this easier? Or is it something you just have to deal with, with What's your thoughts on service now within this tech stack,

Kim 51:26

I'm, I'm a big proponent. And here's why ServiceNow is a platform. It is not its job, it does tickets, right. So what it owns is the ticket management, everything else it does, is a platform to help you manage interactions with employees and managers and everything better. And by that, I mean, you bring a central location, you can actually build that out. And that's what we're looking to do, you build out a portal page or a web page, that then behind it has single sign-on to multiple applications, and allows you that single point of contact for the employee to go into, it can replace and or interact with SharePoint. So it doesn't alleviate, necessarily the foundational technology that you might have that its job, the payroll system, the HR system, the financial systems, but allows you to bring them together as kind of that platform to make it easier to interact. And then there's some shared data that's out there, right, but you're able to still protect the things or not even bring that data in that you need. But it allows one-stop-shop, so to speak, of being able to provide that layer. And from an HR standpoint, it's one of the only companies that do that workday is trying to work into case management, but it's nowhere near obviously, ServiceNow is a little further along that development, they've been doing it for close to 10 years now. And workday has just been doing it for you know, three to four really trying to get into that market. But um, I do find it helpful. Now what I will say and will bless be honest, it's not cheap. Yeah, you know, their, their, their license structure has changed over time, their HR module is expensive, but they've kind of built-in things that make it worth it. Automated encryption, they've automatically built into their how to HR people look up their data, right, they know that they have to do a lot more validation than saying it person might have to, to make sure they got the right Michael Smith, or whatever, when they do that. So they're trying to build in that logic, they literally work with the HR people, not the IT people like me working with HR, but the HR people and say, how would you need this to work. And so, you know, they really are trying to grow it. But it's not a cheap tool. It is an investment. But it's a fairly robust tool. If if it's something that, you know, your company is looking to do in that direction.

Greg Irwin 53:49

Great. Kim, it's great to see you again, or speak with you again, very much. But let's come back to Jacqueline and Jacqueline. Let's provide some closing comments here in our remaining couple minutes. Just a reminder, again, I'll share the list of names. And then it's up to you all. And I'll encourage you please make that point to to meet that one new contact, you're across our group. And then of course, HRchitect, look, you know, we're huge fans. And the reason that we're doing this is to drive that awareness. So if there projects or questions or initiatives you've got or something a colleague is working on, like Jacqueline and her team are some of the best so please give give him a shot with your questions, comments or projects. Jacqueline, we've we've covered a lot. We didn't talk much about a lot of the different areas of of HRchitech training. We haven't talked much about, well, I could just do a laundry list but I want what I'll ask is you spent a lot of time at the Ceridian conference. Just The other day. And what are you seeing from some of the larger platforms in terms of who's doing some really innovative things to help drive? Again, it's all about employee experience, but who's doing some innovative things that make a difference?

Jacqueline Kuhn 55:19

I would have to say that I'm not sure there are doing anything really innovative, from the big players. Ceridian does have some really cool things coming out in 2022, although I can't really talk about them. Because they're, they're on a roadmaps. They're they're they're probably, they're pushing more of data-driven decision making into the hands of people right into the hands of the employee. But I think where the other all the other vendors are, are at right now is, I would say, dusting off their UX, and trying to make a better mobile experience, make a better employee wax, looking around for how to integrate secure, reliable things like AI. But yeah, the innovation is coming from people you've never heard of before. That's really where where I'm seeing the innovation, and so about,

Greg Irwin 56:29

or if it's Dave, or Kim, or somebody else who's thinking about digital transformation, and they're thinking, I want to change the experience, I want to own a better employee experience. I want faster clothes times on on on racks. I want I want a better turn right, I want to have an impact on the business. What do you recommend?

Jacqueline Kuhn 56:53

If it really, it really depends. That's a loaded question.

Greg Irwin 56:58

But it may be turning into a story. I was Dave's Dave's solution is going to be different from Camp person.

Jacqueline Kuhn 57:07

Yeah. So what I would say is, um, the, the better practice out there is to drive, drive it from a standpoint of planning, budgeting work, you know, a workforce planning standpoint, that if you're not doing workforce planning today, if you don't understand what positions you have, what jobs you have, when you need them, so that you can plan for your, your planned growth. And then when you have the unexpected, you know, turnover, whatever. But it's really about that workforce planning. And if there's anything that I'm seeing, I wouldn't say it's innovative, but new. And adding additive capabilities is all vendors are really focusing on having better tools to do that. What are the jobs that I have? How many people do I need? When do I need them? on show that I can kind of almost like the whole concept is I pre-approve position budget for the year so that when things become vacant, they can automatically be filled? I don't have more dogs,

Greg Irwin 58:16

that would be amazing. You mean Yeah, I have to go. If you had already approved at the beginning of the year as part of the budget, the fact that you're going to add a senior manager for to cover this this function, then six months later, you don't have to go to approve it. At another point, you have to say, hey, look, I really think we now need to really fill it. It's already approved. You just get Yeah, don't do it.

Jacqueline Kuhn 58:41

That's the better practice that I think people are trying to put in place and what the big vendors are beginning to invest more and more of their resources in building out. workday is probably the furthest along in that I'm in in in doing this, but Ukg de force Oracle not too far behind.

Greg Irwin 59:06

Got it. Wonderful job. Jacqueline. I always enjoy these sessions. I always come away just learning a ton. I let's wrap it up here. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you everybody, for joining and please, again, use this as a networking opportunity to expand your personal your personal networks. Jacqueline, thank you so much.

Jacqueline Kuhn 59:29

Thank you, Greg. Thank you, everybody.

Greg Irwin 59:31

Have a great day. Take care everyone. Bye.