The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 123: The Future of Work: Insights on resource management and talent acquisition.
In this episode, our host James Mackey, and guest Waleed Mahmood, VP, Resource Management and Talent Acquisition at Digitas Health discuss the dynamic world of resource management and talent acquisition with a focus on the ever-evolving workplace landscape.
From resource management in the tech industry to internal mobility and career development, they shed light on the challenges and opportunities organizations face in today's competitive market. Learn how resource management can act as a catalyst for employee growth and retention while optimizing costs.
0:37 Waleed Mahmood's background
1:24 Resource Management
10:56 Career development and internal mobility in talent acquisition
17:43 Remote vs. in-office work for success
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Our host James Mackey
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Hello everyone. Welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, james Bakke. Thank you for joining us Today. We are joined by Wally Mahmoud. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Very well, thank you. Thank you for having me, james.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for joining us. And before we jump into the topics we have outlined, let's start with a brief introduction. Could you tell us about yourself?
Speaker 2:Sure, I am the vice president of resource management and talent acquisition at Digitas Health. Digitas Health is an advertising and marketing agency under the Publisus Group. That's our holding company. We're around 800 employees plus our holding group, Publisus is around 100,000. I've been in the space for a long time short on the town space, worked at various other consulting firms, been now at DH for almost six years.
Speaker 1:Great, great, and I know you're also in my market as well. I'm in Northern Virginia, you're out in Leesburg, right yeah?
Speaker 2:the DMV.
Speaker 1:All right, good stuff. Hey, look, let's get into it. So the first topic we have is talking about resource management. I want to start high level. Tell us a little bit about what that means for organizations and, as someone leading resource management, what is your top focus essentially for your organization?
Speaker 2:Totally. And, james, I'd love to hear what I want to say sounds familiar to you, if you have also come across this function or function of this type in your experience. So I'd love to hear, in the end, what your experience has been. But resource management people in art craft, the quick thing we say is the art and science of making sure the right people are in the right roles at the right time. To be effective in this, really, resource management needs to be focused on having a good pulse on the supply and demand of the workforce. So that requires you to be plugged in with the business and understand where is the business today as far as what types of people do they need and where will the business be in the future? What types of people will we need to maintain our competitive edge? And the other side of this is also understanding who are the people that we have within the company or agency or firm that we can deploy to these needs and who are the people that we have a desire to attract to meet these needs that we have.
Speaker 2:So we said, right in the nexus of, I would say in the middle of HR operations and finance, and I've seen resource management home to under different functions and different companies. At Digitas Health, aka DH, we're under our HR function. Other companies have even seen them under finance, because they do have financial responsibility when you place people. Also, we're in a business, profit business and our goal is also to ensure we are gaining a margin or a profit. So that's the responsibility at least within our world has, and past functions. Sometimes it's not a responsibility, but yeah, james, we'd love to hear. Have you come across this function in your experience?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have, I think. For me, primarily working within the tech industry, it's an area that I don't think a lot of companies have figured out, and I think maybe it's even. I think it's really challenging across the board in any industry. I think tech really struggles with it too, because there's a very cyclical with market conditions where we'll go through a year or two or substantial growth and then we'll have a massive market correction, particularly since COVID. Right, like we saw a massive ramp up in the huge bull market and then in COVID we saw a kind of a collapse of that. And then 2021, market money flooded the markets.
Speaker 1:Right, capital was really cheap and then, going into the past 12 months, the markets and monies a lot more expensive, interest rates are higher, and so we're seeing a lot of hiring, a lot of layoffs, a lot of hiring, a lot of layoffs. I think, too, there's a lot of tech companies out there that don't necessarily have this figured out and they almost find it easier to just go through a lot of layoffs and then rehire for new positions we're not seeing. So when I think of resource management, I think about it more so from internal mobility and making sure the right people in the right jobs. It sounds like it's more than that, though, so I guess maybe I'm familiar with it, but I certainly I don't know. It seems a little bit more comprehensive than my initial view, which is just like moving people internally, essentially.
Speaker 2:Totally. I think that's the most basic sort of function is we have open roles or needs and making sure we fill those needs either with internal people or we attract them externally. But the real art and I think the real value, is everything in between, which is understanding where do our people want to be, what do they want to be doing, and offering them opportunities. And I think you gave a great example of COVID, because certain types of roles became less and certain types of roles have increased. So there are opportunities to retool and reskill some of the existing workforce to take on some of these new roles that might be evolving. Bob's role might be going away because market conditions or the need of the client has gone away, but Bob's got 75% skills to slide into a new role. And I think that's where that's.
Speaker 2:Leaders are so busy, focused on the client and delivering they may not be thinking about. We have some of these low hanging fruit or these efficiencies that can be garnered, and the thing that's where RM can come in. The best resource managers I see are, while they're very analytical, they're also very diplomatic and very savvy on identifying opportunities. Because if we are offering opportunities to people in the company which, by the way, some service says number one reason why people leave, if not number one, maybe top five reasons why people leave. If we're offering opportunities to the existing workforce, we're going to retain our best and brightest, our top talent, and that right there is a win because the person gets an opportunity to do something they'd like to be doing and the company gets to retain top talent. And the versatility will be useful in the future as well. They'll learn something new.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's a lot more complex than I think a lot of people have the understanding of it. I do think that one of the reasons that a lot of companies haven't really mastered this is because of all the different little pieces that have to go aligned for internal mobility. So maybe we could come up with a bit of a high level checklist right, Because it's one. There has to be the right level of skills overlap. And then two, from a career progression standpoint, it has to make sense too. If somebody's in a current role making hypothetically $100,000, even if they have skill overlap, they're not going to take another position that's at $70,000, most likely it's salary, it's skills overlap. And then, I guess, for the skill gap, from an onboarding perspective, how much time would it take for somebody to acquire the missing skill? And do we have a strong onboarding or training process in place? Is there anything else Like what are some of the other? Those are three factors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're nailing, like some of the top things. We look at, obviously, the very objective, quantifiable things like skill sets, especially in technology. If they're expecting someone to be an expert on a certain platform can't really fake it. So we have to check off on the skills things. Skills requirements, rather, level is important. We're not. I know at DH. We absolutely would never demote or reduce anyone's salary.
Speaker 2:Most companies I've worked at, all the companies I've worked at that's not a practice or protocol. Good companies don't do that. But I think there are other things as well. Does, from a team chemistry perspective, does it to new team they're moving into make sense? They're moving from small team to a large team. There might be some challenges. Right, it's better to like from a size perspective, to move to a team where you will be comfortable and can operate well. It's important, especially now with everything happening with RTO and a hybrid work, something we have to take into account. I think overall.
Speaker 2:There's another thing also which is aspirationally does this new role that we're rotating someone into help them get closer to where they want to be? If someone wants to move from a project, let's say from an architect role, over to a strictly client facing, functional role. It might not be one leap over, might be. They might get into something in the middle, spend a year and then they could pivot further into an account or a client services role. People make some radical pivots and shifts, which I think is great. But it's difficult and challenging to do that without some endorsement and sponsorship of the business. If you have that support and I think RM can provide that support I think it's a competitive edge for those companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess too. It's like here. Once you build out, you can actually map out career paths where you can let people know when they join the organization. It's okay you can either continue on this team and this is your trajectory, or you can also actually year two, you can pivot and move over to this other team. Once you've established this strategy internally, then it's actually something that's marketable on the talent acquisitions side.
Speaker 2:One other thing which, to a point, james, it can be very zigzag versus very straight line. One other point that comes to mind I think it's also important that the resource management function is as neutral and unbiased as possible. Quite often when people have these conversations and expressing that they want to change teams or move into different opportunity, they feel some level of pressure and, dare I say, fear of their leadership, of letting them down, of wanting to shift their team, even though they're performing well in the team they are. I think that's where RM can come in and be a neutral advocate.
Speaker 2:Their job resource management's North Star is a very healthy mix of the business and the people. They are not really leaning one way or the other. They need to provide some buffer for the person to confidentially be able to express this that they'd like to shift. If they don't have that outlet, eventually those people become disengaged, maybe disgruntled, and they leave. So I think it's important. You probably see this on talent acquisition as well. Like the recruiters, you're always going to write in the middle between business hiring managers and candidates. Sometimes it can get pretty hot in the kitchen.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah, I think to the extent that companies are able to offer more options to keep talent engaged is definitely ideal. It's going to increase retention, engagement A lot of the core metrics that companies are looking at and also stands out. I don't think a lot of companies have very clearly defined career paths and there isn't a lot of upward mobility. I really do see this from a talent acquisition perspective, as you were saying, to the extent that you can build this out. I also feel like it's equally as important to market that, because if you, for instance, on the careers page, can have videos of, say, somebody okay, somebody started out in sales development and then they were able to move up, they could go directly to this path. They could also pivot into talent acquisition or they could get into customer success. Maybe there's some kind of like technical account manager or work towards a marketing career path or whatever it might be. You can come in the company in this position, but then there's actually several career paths that you can take. That's a strong differentiator than to a company that's just saying you can become an SDR, then SDR2, then SDR3, then SDR4, then a team lead and then maybe an account executive. It's just a different kind of feel. I think that's ultimately going to provide a company with a competitive advantage.
Speaker 1:I think there's also a real argument to be made from a cost perspective to be able to provide this internal mobility. When you really look at the entire cost per hire of everything it takes to acquire another person in the organization, you think about this sheer amount of time and resources it takes to source thousands of applicants, to then have a ton of recruiter screening calls, to then have all of the hiring manager interviews that didn't have all the down funnel interviews and the hours and hours that it takes. You might end up spending between potentially 75 hours per hire. Think about all the salaries that go into that.
Speaker 1:If we can get resource management and of course it's evolving, but there's from a cost perspective as well it makes sense to think about okay, how can we, if we can basically improve employee lifetime value for revenue parallel and pose a customer lifetime value think of employee lifetime value can we accelerate ramp? Can we increase tenure? These are just. I feel like resource management should be a probably in often cases like more of a priority. I think larger organizations often more likely to get it right. I think tech companies are more likely to get it wrong, even if they're bigger.
Speaker 2:honestly, I haven't seen it. It's a good point. I haven't seen and it might be my lack of awareness here I haven't really seen this role in strictly core tech companies. I do see it in professional services. I just want to make the differentiation. Like professional service meaning consulting firms who might be providing tech as a service, but when it comes to product companies or just even service companies, platform companies. Sorry, I haven't seen the function but it might be my lack of awareness. However, to your point, I think it is definitely a business advantage. Just consulting firms I've worked at a few, but some of them will carry what they call as a bench. They call them bench resources or people who are sitting on the bench.
Speaker 2:Resource management wants to maintain an optimum bench. What do I mean by that? You want to maintain a number of people who are available to deploy immediately, because you and I know when business happens, it happens very quickly and the clients want you there yesterday. You want to have a healthy bench where you have folks who can they're cooling off for maybe a busy project. They have a cool down period on the bench, but then they're ready to go as soon as the next piece of work comes to the door. However, like I said, rm is managing a healthy bench. You also don't want a huge bench because that's just straight cost. There's a major element of predictive analytics understanding what does the future pipeline look like and how much of a bench would be in our advantage to maintain, knowing what type of work is in the pipeline.
Speaker 2:If there's a lot of work, you want to maintain a good bench. If there's minimal work, you want to keep that bench very tight. Because it's cost, of course, again consulting firms at least in my experience, even on the advertising side, I've seen. If you're on the bench again, this is where RM comes in. You get deployed to internal projects. You might help with internal website. Our ATS system needs a revamp. A bunch of projects you can work on. Your time is being valuable by the end. Obviously, if you're a billable resource, we would want you deployed to a billable client in the end.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. Yeah, this is very helpful. I think that the size of the bench is actually something that I hadn't really thought about. I think it's not just for billable roles too, but even, let's say, for a product at company. You want to understand how much candidate pipeline you're going to need, factoring in attrition, people growing into institutional roles, growth objectives of the organization and part of your headcount planning. Factor in okay, how many folks could we move from one role to another role? How much open headcount does that actually create for the other business segment that is going to need backfills from folks that have moved over? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I wanted to also talk to you a little bit about talent acquisition. You mentioned earlier in our conversation RTO a return to office and there's and the impact that has on talent acquisition, giving competitive pressures and whatnot. So I'm curious to get your thoughts on this and what you're seeing out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'd love to hear from you on this particular topic as well, because the more I can learn and absorb the better. So first off disclaimer, I don't know if anyone is doing it perfectly okay, and I would even put us in that boat that I don't think we're doing it perfectly. Not that we claim to be doing it perfectly. We're trying, but it is a really vague space as far as what is the right move. At Publisys, the holding company at where I work at and did it toss in particular, we, just as of this week, have asked folks to come in at least three days a week. Of course there are exceptions that can be made, but overall the expectation for folks in one of our geographies is to come in three days a week. So my thoughts from a talent acquisition perspective is number one. I would think almost all of our candidates do not wanna come in five days a week. There are those rare exceptions you come across. People like eager and I think there may be more of a personality type even that don't wanna come in five days a week. But almost all candidates are either have a desire for remote or hybrid, with minimal days to come in, and it applies like a weird type of pressure back on the team and the company to meet those needs Cause I think there's still a gap between what the market wants and what the companies at least the top companies are providing. I think there will be.
Speaker 2:I'm getting into a little bit of predict or forecasting here, based on like very limited experience in going through RTO right now, but I do think this will be like a longer term, longer arc on when we actually see the effects of this Our people. Was it actually a good thing that we did this and people are engaged like they were, and three days a week eventually. I was painful in the beginning, but our hybrid working became fine in the end and everyone's totally okay with it, or are they? Is there gonna be continued sort of pressures from the candidate marketplace and candidates will select companies that are offering even more flexibility? It's just, it's really odd. It's becoming like the new normal, and it didn't happen over 20 years, it happened over three years and it's become the new normal. What are you experiencing in this regard?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's a debate that's going back and forth in terms of productivity and office and remote. I haven't really seen compelling evidence in either direction, because I've seen reports that will show data one way and the other. It seems like there's data out there in the back both perspectives and if somebody listening has a great and bias report to share with me, I'd love for you to reach out to me on LinkedIn and show it to me and I can reference on the show. But now, based on what I'm saying, I could see arguments that go both ways, and I honestly think that sometimes the productivity argument is not necessarily always relevant, and what I mean by that is if you're competing for a talent pool in which the best people have access to remote or hybrid versus completely in-person opportunities, you, at the end of the day, want to compete for the best people. I'd rather have somebody who's amazing at what they do, working remotely, than have somebody that maybe doesn't have quite as many options and is thus considering an office and I'm not saying that's mutually exclusive, like where you're it's one or the other. I'm just suggesting that you have to understand the types of candidates you're competing for and if the companies you're competing with are offering something similar, are they offering more flexibility? And if they are a flexibility, then what can you offer in return? Because there's something that you can offer that they can't.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of the times, people will look at big enterprise companies and see what they're doing and then basically say, okay, that's the playbook that we're seeing Google do, or Amazon do, or Meta and let's, or even like financial services, right, like.
Speaker 1:People will look at these big companies and say they're doing it, so we should too.
Speaker 1:And I think the one thing to keep in mind is, depending on where you're at as an organization, you may not have that same leverage in order to pull in talent, whether it's brand, salary, benefits, and so every company needs to.
Speaker 1:It's situational, and you really can't look at the generic kind of marketplace and just follow the herd. If not, if you want to get great results, you really have to look at your core business and understand the competitive, the type of talent you're trying to recruit and what options do they have available to them. And again, you want to. Either you got to offer the same level of flexibility, and if you're not going to offer the same level of flexibility, what competitive advantage, do you have to make sure that you can still get in the best people, whether you're working with a firm like Mine, secure Vision, that we up over 200 companies hire like who can share this data with you, or you're doing it through your own internal data or advisors. You have to be able to know this in order to for me, in order to have a return to office strategy.
Speaker 2:Totally yeah. And again I'll go back to the first thing I said. I think everyone's still trying to figure it out. But I'd underline one of the points you said, which is every company's got to figure out their own approach. I think it's following the herd is not a good idea, because some of these big brands yes, you do look at them as industry standards, but they also do have a different type of brand appeal which attracts talent to them. And what talent will also be more amenable to forego a lot more just because they get to work at a Tesla or a Google, which might not be the case at smaller or midsize agencies. People may not. Once push comes to shove, the commute becomes more difficult. They see other peers who have worked fully remote. They may not want to stick around, but all this is again hypotheticals. I'm really curious to see how. I agree. I think it's no compelling idea that either way, we're going to have to see how this turns out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the whole compelling data thing. Again, like anybody tuning in, if you have something that's highly relevant, like I'm, you know that's not sponsored by a company that has a significant skin in the game for any type of bias, like more like a scientific paper, like an academic paper that is independent and peer reviewed, and if there's something like that out there and I'm wrong, please just tell me. I just I haven't seen it. So I think you're right. It's evolving. I think the employment market in the tech space which I keep referencing because I'm primarily intact, but it's starting to rebound Candidates are going to have more options again. So we just we can't look at what strategy is going to make sense for the next three to six months. We have to be thinking further out from that, because decisions we're making today are going to impact our business over the next decade. And where do we think the employment market is going to be a decade from now? Do we really think that we're going to be overall, as a culture, as a economic system, going back more in office, or do we feel like things are going to, over time, be more bent toward remote? As technology continues to advance, collaboration, data, workflows, these types of things become easier and easier to work with, and again I think that just because the tech doesn't mean that we're all going to be living in like a box and not physically being in the same location as everyone. But I think it's safe to say that working remote is going to become more and more accessible and, hopefully, more and more productive with technology advancing. So I think that there's room for both in office and remote.
Speaker 1:I just think that we have to be thinking like really long term. I feel like too much of the policies I'm seeing around remote in office is based on like the current state of the economy or like it was based on, the pandemic and it's. I think we need to be thinking further out than that because otherwise you just start pivoting back and forth. It's just a lot of time and energy going into. Okay, you recruited these people where they were remote, now they're in office and five years from now we're going to pivot back to remote and it's like time when people could just be focusing on their job and now they're focusing on these transitions. So again, it's okay to transition. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I'm just saying it's like we need to have a longer time horizon that we're considering if this is actually worth it. Like 10 years, five years from now, we're going to be happy we made this shift. Are we still going to be competitive if we make this shift?
Speaker 2:Totally. It's great to hear someone with your background and the work that you do at SecureVision Just talk about this because I think quite often and I'm guilty of it myself is us in the talent space. Talent acquisition, I'll call out end up being a fairly reactive function that's focused on reacting to the business versus advising and offering counsel to the business. In this regard, especially professional services firms, where people is essentially you, are your people it's important you think through these things a little bit more comprehensively. But, yeah, totally, I think it's important that leaders especially enter the conversation today about what are the repercussions slash, domino effect of these decisions in three to five years versus a Hail Mary and hopefully this works. I bet their companies who have thought through that and they've made some bets and I bet some companies are just following and hoping for the best. But yeah, let's see.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just like for me as a business owner right now, and I'm in the tech market, so we've been part of the market correction that's happening For one when we start to hit a rebound. My business is pretty cyclical. A lot of these SaaS companies are somewhat cyclical when it comes to market conditions. When we're starting to grow again, I want to be able to compete for the very best people. I don't have the brand of Google right, so we do have a lot to offer, but part of what we have to offer is autonomy and not being micromanaged. Hiring senior people we have great process so they can follow step by step, what to do and they have the support they need from leadership, but we're not breathing down their neck. They can work from where they want. That's part of our core offering, and so I'm not going to constrict our talent flow when the market starts to rebound, which, again, I'm professional services too, so that's going to take me more time to put people that are potentially billing out to customers to get them ready to go. And also, I don't want my operations and leadership team thinking about pivoting back and forth on operational organizational structure when it comes to in-office versus remote, when I would rather them focus on. How do we create great experiences for our customers and our employees? Now, part of creating great experience for customers means having people in specific regions so they can visit customers, or for certain roles that require in-person collaboration. Again, that's why it matters.
Speaker 1:It's different for each business. For my business, I just want the best damn people. I don't care where they are, because for my company it's not relevant. They don't have to be in the US, they can be in Latin Europe. Just get me the best person. Most of our team is US-based, but we're not opposed to hiring people in different areas either, and we haven't had any performance issues. Our customers will tell us a lot. Hey, we worked with several agencies and this is the best experience. We're on a site called G2, which is a review site primarily for the tech industry. We lead three categories there. We have 500 reviews at a 4.8 out of 5 star rating. It hasn't impacted our productivity for our business, and so I just don't worry about it.
Speaker 1:But the other thing that maybe makes it easier for our business is there's very clear KPIs and metrics that people have to hit, so it's very obvious whether what's getting done needs to get done or not, maybe in some roles. I would hope that every role is very clear to measure, but I feel like to some extent, if it comes down to performance, it's more of a measurement issue that needs to be solved. Even if somebody's in office, we should have clear measurements. I think again from my perspective, the creativity in office culture might increase engagements, that the relationships, the team aspect, the idea of coming together, overcoming things, solving for challenges. There is, I think, real value there too. But when I'm weighing everything from my company, I just know that the feedback I get from my employees are like we love the autonomy, that's why we come here. You pay us well and you let us do our thing and we can work from where we want to. That's just part of what I can offer. That seems to get good people for me personally.
Speaker 2:Makes complete sense, totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, hey, look. Well, this was a lot of fun. I appreciate you joining me today. Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Totally. Thank you so much. Appreciate it and, james, hope to see you in person at some point.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, we got to make it happen, Definitely sometime in the next month or so.
Speaker 2:Awesome.
Speaker 1:And for everybody tuning in. Thank you so much. We will see you next time. Take care.
