2023: State of the Staffing Industry

2023: State of the Staffing Industry



Transcript of Panel Cast:

0:06  Thank you for joining us for the first podcast of the year for staffing and sync.

0:11  We're having a live panel discussion featuring some leading experts in the staffing industry.

0:16  My name is Tom Erb.

0:18  I'm excited to be the host for this year.

0:21  This is the second year of Staffing in Sync, but it's my first time being the host.

0:25  So I'm excited and we've got a great panel.

0:26  I, I can't wait.

0:27  We were already talking for 10 minutes.

0:29  And we said, jeez, we gotta save some of this stuff.

0:32  So I'd like to introduce our panelists just at a, at a high level and then I'll have each of them talk about themselves a little bit more.

0:38  We have Threase Baker who is President and Owner of ABBTECH as well as the current board chair for ASA.

0:45  We have Lesa Francis who is President of LJF Consulting.

0:48  She's also a former CEO and President of Supplemental Health Care and Staffmark and also a former board chair for ASA.

0:55  And we have Ron Hetrick who is the Vice President of Staffing Strategy and Senior Labor Economist of Lightcast is also the author of the Demographic Drought.

1:03  So thank you all for joining.

1:05  I'm excited to talk about the industry.

1:08  Our topic for today is going to be about what's going on with the industry, what's going to be going on with the industry.

1:17  And I think we all have some unique perspectives to be able to talk about this.

1:21  So I wanna start off and just have you guys give a little bit more background about yourself, Lesa, if you want to go ahead and start off.

1:27  Sure, I'd be glad to.

1:29  So thanks everybody for participating in this.

1:32  And I hate to even say how many years I've been in the business.

1:35  So when I start counting it up for a lot of years, I just say over 30/35, but it's getting close to 40 now.

1:41  So it's hard to believe to be in an industry that long.

1:45  And so I, I did, you know, big chunks of time with different companies.

1:49  I started with ADIA who later became Adecco after they bought Echo.

1:53  Then I was with Spherion who  later became a part of Randstad.

1:56  And then as Tom mentioned, I was the CEO of Staffmark and Supplemental Health Care and whether brilliant or not, I happened to decide that I was gonna semi-retired in March of 2020.

2:08  So like two weeks after we announced that I was gonna not run companies full time, but kind of move on to what I'm loving what I'm doing right now, and the pandemic hit.

2:18  So, you know, I know all of you guys have had, you know, an interesting couple of years running companies since then.

2:24  But I now, one of the things I always wanted to do when I retired from running companies full time was to participate on boards of directors and be advisors and some of my mentors as I was growing up, had moved into that phase.

2:37  And so I'm just, I'm having a great time right now.

2:41  doing, you know, I'm on five different boards, all of them somewhat related to staffing and then I'm advising a couple of CEOS that are running, you know, multibillion dollar firms and just hopefully being a help to them as they kind of try to solve problems.

2:57  So, I never would have thought that this can kind of be the best time in life.

3:01  I didn't know that, but now I do so look ahead and look forward.

3:05  Thanks, Lesa.

3:08  Hi, I'm Threase Baker.

3:09  I am President of Professional Resources and I have been in the industry 30 plus years.

3:16  I always tell people I started when I was five and I've enjoyed it.

3:21  I've done Executive search, retain search.

3:23  I've been a corporate recruiter.

3:24  I have pretty much done every aspect of HR but I really love the staffing aspect of it.

3:29  I mean, there's no better job than to give somebody a job.

3:32  And I am also the chair of the American Staffing Association.

3:37  So I'm pretty, pretty proud of that.

3:38  ABBTECH, we're an IT staffing firm located in the DC area.

3:42  We do national staffing.

3:45  We are family owned and operated.

3:46  I think there are seven of us that support the business.

3:49  So that's a bit of a challenge on its own.

3:51  But love the industry.

3:53  Happy to be here.

3:54  Thank you so much for having me.

3:56  Thanks, Threase… Ron Hetrick, background.

4:00  So I actually came into the staffing industry instead of saying how many years I'll tell you when I actually came in on April Fool's Day of the year 2000.

4:08  I had spent eight years prior to that at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

4:11  Eventually, I was the supervisor of the payroll employment survey.

4:14  So every month they come out with the unemployment rate and how many jobs we added.

4:17  And I was supervising that jobs we added side, which we are talking about a little bit of that today.

4:23  I did that for about 20 years.

4:24  I was at Allegis and I got to do a number of different functions including kind of spinning up a lot of the market analytics side.

4:31  At one point overseeing data science, just spent a lot of time really passionate kind of breaking down markets trying to figure out the economics behind staffing.

4:41  And then I came to Emsi, then Emsi / Burning Glass and now Lightcast back in 2020 during the fun times that we all kind of went through and I've been here ever since and I'm just really glad to be here.

4:53  All right, thanks Ron.

4:54  So, a little bit of my background, I'm Tom Erb.

4:57  I am President and Founder of Talent Resources.

5:01  We are a consulting and training company for the staffing and recruiting industry.

5:05  I've been doing that for 13 years.

5:07  I was with Olsten for six years.

5:10  They got bought by Adecco.

5:12  I was then with Spherion for 10 years, they got bought by Randstad.

5:18  I had nothing to do with either of those.

5:20  It was just a timing thing.

5:21  But but I actually, I'm, I'm thrilled to have this group because, you know, I, I know all three of you, Lesa and I worked at Spherion many years ago, Theresa and I have known each other for many years.

5:34  In fact, we were introduced by John Walters from Essential StaffCARE, which is one of our one of the podcast sponsors.

5:42  And then, and I, I haven't known for as long we actually met in person.

5:46  What about two months ago? We spoke at a conference together, but I've been singing Ron's praises for three years now, ever since Demographic Drought came out, it's, it's, it's part of my discussion and, and, and I always steer people towards it.

6:00  I say that I should get commission for referring them.

6:03  But then Ron said, well, we don't actually make anything from Demographic Drought.

6:06  That's free, free to download is actually getting your commission.

6:10  I am getting my percentage of the commission.

6:12  So, yeah.

6:13  So anyways, I'm, I'm excited to have all of you on here and I'm excited about our conversation.

6:18  We want to just kind of keep this, you know, lively and informative and, and I, I guess we'll start off just with, you know, let's talk about the 800 pound gorilla in the room, you know, are we, are we in a recession?

6:31  Are we, are we going into a recession?

6:33  Are we in a downturn?

6:34  You know, I work with staffing and recruiting firms all day long and that's the question I get all the time and, and, you know, I have some thoughts on that, but I'll let you guys talk first.

6:44  So, you know, anybody, you'd like to kind of jump in and see what you give us your perspective.

6:48  That'd be great.

6:51  Let me just first off, I just want to kick off with something here.

6:53  And that is historically speaking, when we talk about a recession and what's a recession and people talk about, well, there's consecutive quarters of negative GDP but really a key element that if you look at the definition is as accompanied by a spike in unemployment.

7:08  And, you know, if you look back to last year, we actually had two consecutive quarters of negative GDP.

7:13  But at the time really, there wasn't anybody really talking about recessions.

7:17  We were talking about technically speaking or not.

7:19  and here we are now and we're sitting here, you know, months and months into rate increases by the Fed.

7:27  And we worked our way up off of an almost all time historical low of 3.4% unemployment to 3.6% unemployment, which is historically speaking, kind of absurdly low.

7:37  And I think that this is where you kind of get into this issue of why this is all becoming very, very difficult to analyze and why a lot of economists are getting it wrong.

7:48  And that is, you're basically looking back at historical actions when the Fed raises interest rates, they cause things to happen.

7:55  And that usually slows the economy down, but we've never had a labor shortage during a run up.

8:00  So a recession takes care of overheating.

8:04  The economy cools off because it was overheating.

8:07  And so in this case, we were trying to overheat because we had put a lot of money into the economy.

8:12  People were trying to buy goods, but there wasn't anybody to make the goods.

8:16  We, we ballooned up to 12 million job openings but we never really filled them.

8:20  In fact, we're still around, you know, 11,000,000/10,000,000 million job openings, which is still historically speaking, an absurdly high number.

8:27  So I think what's happening is a lot of traditional economists are looking back on history trying to say, well, this is what's going to happen, but this isn't history anymore.

8:36  We're in, we're defining a new history right now.

8:39  So I would just say that as a general over, you know, view of what's happening right now.

8:44  But I'll leave it to the others to kind of comment about, you know, it's also kind of what you feel and what we're kind of seeing in the industry, which I know some people are out there going, hey, it feels like we're in a recession and I, we'll talk about that more as this goes on.

8:56  So I would, I would say what, it was interesting is I've been talking to friends, let's say a year and a half ago and they go, do you, what do you think?

9:03  Because always before I'd be like, hey, the industry, I'm in you guys, I can tell you six months before it's gonna happen because particularly in the commercial staffing part of the industry, you almost always see it and we were not seeing it.

9:14  I mean, pay rates were strong, bill rates were strong, demand was strong, but I would say about August last year with many of the, the companies I'm working with.

9:23  People started saying, hey, are you hearing anybody else talk about job orders declining a little bit?

9:27  Hey, are you hearing direct hire?

9:29  Slow down?

9:29  Hey, are you here and so slowly over like August to October, I think everybody that I spoke to was beginning to feel something that felt like a beginning of something.

9:41  it feels like to me it may not be a full on what I would call a recession because the ones I have worked through over my career of 40 years, pretty stiff steep cliff, you just jump, you just fall off of it.

9:53  And this seems like more of a, a downturn, at least at this point, you know, that it is feeling like it's, it's not gonna have the same dramatic impact.

10:04  because of what you said, Ron, that the demand is still so high just for talent in general.

10:09  And those are many things around the demographic.

10:11  I'm sure you'll speak more to as we go through this.

10:14  But I do think that there is a bit of a slowdown.

10:17  I'm actually even hearing over the last few weeks.

10:19  A few like me, people like being a little more optimistic.

10:22  So we'll see where, where that goes.

10:24  But I would say definitely we're in, you know, we're beginning to see a little bit of a, of a downturn.

10:30  I think we're gonna have, you know, a couple quarters that aren't gonna feel great, but I will say almost everyone I'm talking to is beginning to believe that by year end, we'll start seeing maybe some growth again in some of those sectors.

10:40  And I know some sectors have held up better, professional services has, and others.

10:44  But anyway, that's what I'm kind of seeing as a broad base of.

10:47  I think it's often interesting in staffing is you go to the events and you go to places and everybody kind of tells one piece of the story, but I'm kind of now back behind the curtains with a lot of people there.

10:56  I know the full truth.

10:58  So it's a little bit different, you know, it's not like, hey, I'm positioning this because a competitor may hear it.

11:03  So that's at least what I'm hearing in, in, you know, what, what I would would say I believe is happening.

11:08  And Lesa, I would say the same thing.

11:11  I've heard people call this a better caller recession, right?

11:15  Because of all the layoffs have been going on with, you know, Amazon and Facebook, et cetera.

11:21  But yeah, I think the government definition versus what we're feeling is kind of where we are, right?

11:27  And Ron you touched on that, what is the formal definition of recession?

11:30  And I'm like you, I feel that there is some slowing, but we are a government contractor.

11:34  So there is a lot of business out there for government contractors and we reviewed our pipeline yesterday.

11:40  So in that respect, that is not slowing, but the talent shortage is going to be the problem.

11:45  So, no problem.

11:48  Well, and maybe in some respects, the talent shortage is also helping us go into that recession too.

11:53  Is that fair to say so?

11:57  Yeah.

11:58  you know, I you know, with we, we've this, this group has been through recessions.

12:04  You, you, you would know it was a recession or, you know, I mean, usually it takes you a little time to know, but then you really know, especially in our industry and, and I, I think, when you think about it, you know, the great recession happened 14 years ago and we've had this period of growth ever since you've got two generations in the workforce that, that for the most part didn't, didn't experience a bit of a slowdown.

12:31  And so I think that that may be some of what we're seeing.

12:35  I also think that it's, it's one of those things where over the past year, what I have seen is that the phone was ringing by nontraditional staffing and recruiting prospects that the people who in the past, had always been able to fill their jobs on their own were calling in to staffing companies going, we need help with servers and with, you know, all these different kind of nontraditional position that and the, the, You know, I mean, been doing it for 28 years.

13:05  When did the phone ring before the last couple of years.

13:08  I mean, it, it just didn't ring.

13:09  Well, now the phone has stopped ringing a little bit.

13:12  I also think we're seeing in, you can probably speak to this.

13:15  It's, it seems like wage inflation has slowed.

13:19  It was for, it was insane at the beginning of last year for about six months.

13:24  And it depends on the, the market.

13:26  But, I think that is, that has changed a lot as well.

13:30  Yeah.

13:31  You know, when you look at that for sure, I, I feel that sometimes the data, sometimes data lags and picking up things that are we kind of already feeling and I think right now you're not really seeing, you know, actually still kind of get these increases in, you know, average hourly earnings and such.

13:46  But I, I mean, the vibe on the street and what, you know, what I get from talking to companies is they kind of drew a line in the sand towards the end of last year, like enough.

13:54  Like I can't, I can't go any higher and I think what a lot of people realized was, it wasn't giving them anything, you know, people were increasing pay rates and for what to watch.

14:02  Somebody come in the door and walk out again in a month.

14:04  It wasn't, it wasn't causing retention.

14:06  It wasn't getting you a better quality workforce.

14:09  It was just wage inflation.

14:11  And I think after a while employers adapt and adapting could mean several things.

14:16  It could mean turning down certain business going forward or not accepting, you know, if you're a construction company not accepting additional contracts, it could mean keeping a part of your restaurant shuttered because you're just going to go with a smaller weight staff.

14:28  and that's a way that you can kind of deal with ballooning labor costs is by just keeping your demand side more in check.

14:35  And I really feel that we saw businesses making that adjustment towards the end of last year.

14:39  You see it right now in manufacturing companies that are kind of flexing their production without flexing their workforce, they don't really need to lay off because they were kind of abusing people last year and now they're able to kind of distribute this and produce things on a more predictable pattern coming in.

14:54  So I think all those things you require.

14:56  Yeah.

14:57  Yeah, I definitely am seeing with the companies, I'm working with that wage inflation is not happening real time.

15:02  It's, it's slowed down and I think we're getting close to that.

15:04  We're gonna wrap year over year.

15:05  If you look at the staffing industry in general, much of the growth last year has been around wage increase and bill rate increase, not unit increase, total different scenario.

15:14  And, you know, if you really look at unit increase and that's what so many people are now measuring themselves against, you know, year over year and that kind of thing versus just that, I think we're about to wrap that one number that will be wage and bill rate and now it's gonna have to come through some kind of unit increase, hours increase to really see growth in, in the industry.

15:34  And I think that's actually great for us as consumers and the overall economy this whole, you know, the only way we're going to get inflation down is once that's wrapped, right? Once you're year over year with wage inflation, you can now start seeing something that's gonna make people feel like, OK, we're, we're now not seeing that huge increase, but companies can't necessarily operate on less profit.

15:55  Right?

15:55  So once they've got to capture all of that, so hopefully we're, we're close on that and that's good for us both, you know, just immediately here in our US economy.

16:04  But ultimately, if we can't get that under control, it makes us less competitive globally.

16:08  You know, I mean, I think that's the other thing people have to keep in mind is for us to be competitive and not start offshoring.

16:14  I mean, we're, you know, a lot of things have come on shore now they're, you know, we keep this up and it's gonna start going offshore other places.

16:20  So there's all those things to consider around the business.

16:23  But I do think that we're getting closer on, at least on the, on the wage side from what I'm seeing in almost every sector.

16:31  Well, I think it's a great point because we saw, obviously health care had the biggest, the, the COVID, rates and all that and that's come back down and, and so that artificially increased some areas and then there's other areas, you know, you got like industrial where, seasonal, we've seen, we've seen seasonal differentials bigger than ever before.

16:52  And so, you know, that will come back down a little bit.

16:54  So I do think we'll start looking at apples to apples a little more.

16:57 The one thing that, that we've seen is that,, there has not only been, not necessarily as much growth on client size but also length of assignment, length of assignment keeps shrinking.

17:11  And, you know, we've seen many of our clients where length of assignment is half of what it was before and it, there just hasn't been enough focus on that length of assignment, but it's, you know, it doesn't matter if you bring them in at whatever rate they're at, if they don't last very long.

17:25  And so, it's, you know, that's one of the areas that we're really focused on is if, if, if we don't have enough people and we're gonna talk about that more later.

17:35  but if we don't have enough people and we all agree, we don't, then we got to keep them as long as we can, they, they become more and more valuable.

17:43  And Tom, I wanted to just add it, you know, it's really impacted my organization from my staff or recruiters.

17:50  because you had these big companies like Amazon saying, hey, I'm gonna hire your recruiters.

17:54  I'm gonna pay them six figures and then the recruiters is gone and now they've been off now.

18:00  That's adjusting itself.

18:01  But I also know that in the government sector we do a lot of cleared recruiting that those ways, wages are still going to be high because you need people who have those high level clearances.

18:12  It's still going to be the challenge of, oh my gosh, I've got a clear person.

18:16  I've got three or four companies that want to hire that clear person and then to go back to what you talked about about the length of assignment that, you know, the phone is ringing because people need people, they can't do it on their own, but they want them full time.

18:31  The assignment link is shrinking in that respect.

18:34  Yeah, great.

18:35  I wanna pause just for a second and tell everybody who's listening that we want this to be interactive.

18:40  So if you have any questions you wanna ask, put it in the Q and A part and, I'll pay attention to the questions and as we, as we get them, we'll, we'll ask everybody and if you have, so I have a question that you want to ask a specific Panelist please put their, their name in there as well.

18:58  So, oh, there's already one jeez, that was quick Janet to clarify by length of assignment.

19:04 Do you mean temp worker tenure or our clients contracting for shorter assignments?

19:09 a good question.

19:11  What I'm referring to is temporary contract, length of assignment.

19:15  How many hours?

19:17  We also take a look at gross profit dollars per hour and take a look at what's the average gross profit?

19:23  And that's really helpful too is the cost of, of, recruiting continues to increase.

19:29  And I, I don't know what everybody else is seeing on the, on this panel, but, you know, we're running those kind of numbers of what cost per new start is for my clients and it's usually in the range of $250 to $400 just pure costs like directly associated.

19:45  I don't know if you guys have ever done anything like that, have any kind of different numbers or same numbers.

19:50  But if you're doing that and let's say you're doing, you know, lower level positions where you're making four or five bucks an hour, you got 70-80 hours before you even break even, right.

20:02  So, so I don't know, you have, you guys looked at anything like, like, you know, cost per new start or anything like that.

20:12  Yes, definitely.

20:13  have looked at it from, you know, cost of, you know, acquisition for kind of what the top of the funnel, each phase of the funnel and then a start.

20:21  Yeah, and try to better understand that in terms of, you know, how much do you, what's a start per indeed, what's a start to refer, referral?

20:30  What's a start through, you know, all the different mechanisms?

20:32  I think it's, you know, I think companies in general have gotten much more sophisticated about that.

20:37  Generally the last decade of trying to measure that and understand that.

20:42 So we're, yes and I agree with Lesa, we're also smarter in the respect that the return on investment for all of our applications and tools, right?

20:51  And if there's something that's not getting us the return that we need, then we eliminate it or try something different.

20:58  So we've gotten much better at that as well.

21:01  Yeah, there's an interesting study that came out just a few months ago that looked at different recruiting sources.

21:10  And one of the things they found was that their clients, it was done by this.

21:14  I'm blanking on the name of the company right now, but it was they manage their clients spend and, and do data on different recruiting sources.

21:26  And they were showing that in this particular data, job postings from 2020 to 2021 had gone up 49% and yet applications had gone down 30 some percent.

21:39  And so it was, it's, you know, obviously the ROI is changing so fast on that, that we really have to know what we're doing if we're going to even, you know, accept certain types of jobs.

21:50  Right?

21:51  And we do that monthly on all of our tools, our recruiting tools and applications, we run an ROI on that.

21:56  Well, yeah, that's great.

21:58  Another question here, does it truly matter if we are in a recession?

22:02  Good question.

22:03  If buying companies believe we're in a recession, that becomes the reality, whether the Fed says we're in a recession or we meet the definition of a recession.

22:11  If we behave as if we're in a recession, do we not cause it to occur?

22:15  Well, we actually talked right before this.

22:18  Yeah, actually, yeah, I, I do want to address this because I saw that question come in.

22:22  There's no time in any history that consumer sentiment causes a recession.

22:28  I just, that's something that does come up a lot is, well, if everybody pulls back, then you get a recession, no, what you get is a temporary slowdown as people kind of reassess the market.

22:37  And then once people start to realize, you know, you can say, well, I just, I think I'm going to cut back.

22:42  But if your orders keep coming in and you start fulfilling your orders, then the numbers are going to keep running and then as people are trying to fill their orders and they're giving you more orders because you're an input good to their product, then you have to do things.

22:53  So I want to make sure that I clarify something because I did this on LinkedIn about a week or two ago.

22:58  We still have a tremendous housing shortage.

22:59  We still, historically speaking, have some of the lowest active listings of homes in this country for sale ever.

23:06  Like, it's incredible to see how few homes are for sale and that's why home prices are still about 30% over inflated.

23:12  We have, historically speaking, the lowest number of automobiles for sale that we've ever seen.

23:17  We have the lowest auto inventories that we've ever seen.

23:20  So there's a lot of money.

23:21  So if you think about it like this I have a 3.6% unemployment rate.

23:25  What does that mean?

23:26  That means that pretty much everybody who wants a job has a job and they've just come through a pretty significant year of wage inflation even though regular inflation ate into that.

23:35  But people have jobs.

23:36  When you have a job, you spend money.

23:38  If you know anything about Americans we don't save.

23:41  So we're spending money.

23:43  So when we look at consumer spending, it's incredibly healthy.

23:46  In fact, if we look at even the most recent quarter, yes, it eased off of goods, which is why staffing companies are feeling it because staffing serves that good side.

23:54  Warehousing, manufacturing, logistics, distribution.

23:58  Staffing does a really poor job on the services side.

24:02  Restaurants, hotels.

24:03  That's where the money is flowing right now.

24:05  And we actually look at those numbers.

24:07  They did pretty well and consumers have a lot of money now we're not seeing, I mean, you get a couple of high profile layoffs but don't misunderstand those high profile layoffs.

24:16  IT unemployment is still extraordinarily low.

24:18  A lot of those layoffs were H one B.

24:20  So then I'm going to show up in our numbers.

24:22  If we look at our unemployment, the amount of unemployment claims is 1.684 million.

24:28  That historically speaking is the same level that we had back in 1972 despite the fact that our population has grown dramatically.

24:35  So, you know, a lot of people with jobs spending money keeps an economy going, not how you feel about it, but how you do it and then companies will react to what consumers do.

24:46  So that's why, you know, it's really hard.

24:49  I'm not in the recession camp.

24:50  I'm not calling for one.

24:52  just because I think the fundamentals of what it's gonna take to get us there, it's gonna, it's gonna have to be catastrophic and a lot of people go, oh, you mean like Silicon Valley Bank, you know, going under and like no, like a literally a completely catastrophic event in the economy.

25:06  So I think if we just keep running, rolling along, people keep spending money, you can kind of manage your way through this, I will say this because this is the most important part.

25:15  And I've been saying this since the middle of last year had we actually hired the people to fill those 12 million job openings.

25:23  Yes, you would have seen 7, 10 million layoffs, but we didn't, so you can't lay off that you didn't hire.

25:30  And that's the thing.

25:30  I always wanna make sure we drive home is the economy was trying to overheat, but it just couldn't do it in the way that it wanted to.

25:37  So it's kind of keeping us from having a recession to take care of what could have happened because it just didn't happen.

25:43  Yeah, I'd say one of the points on the, on the question on, does it matter if we're in a recession or not?

25:48  It probably doesn't in a way?

25:50  I mean, we're dealing with whatever we're dealing with.

25:52  But I would say if you think your buyer is in a recession mindset, you can probably take action to help overcome that to some extent.

26:01  And, you know, it's kind of funny to me because we're gonna talk about if we get time about, you know, what do we see in the future?

26:06  And there's many, many things that have changed in the industry because some of the basics of the business, I've laughed because it's the same as it was 30 years ago when I started.

26:13  But like to me right now, what people can do is we all know our buyers go and they look at line items and they see contract labor, get that $3 million out of here.

26:22  That's the first thing the CFO is gonna talk about and that kind of thing because they, they're not understanding the difference of the cost structure or what's really productivity out of that.

26:30  And so how can we help, you know, to go to our client and kind of use that old paper tool I had back in, you know, the eighties where you build up what your bill rate looks like versus their total cost of employee and help them understand that that's not necessarily where they're gonna save any money.

26:45  And, you know, maybe having flexibility in their workforce is more important than, than the other than having the full time employee.

26:52  So I think there's things that we can do because we know people are gonna behave like we're in one or a certain group of our buyers are going to.

26:59  So how do we overcome that in our conversations with them, our education, with them that might make their buying patterns change?

27:05  Because I've seen many companies change their strategy when we've helped them understand those dynamics.

27:11  So, yeah, you're right.

27:13  because we have that cost comparison sheet that we've used for many, many years and, and just showing that to the customer and say, take a look at this and compared to your internal full time, you know, that is not necessarily the best decision to make is to let that person go.

27:29  Yeah.

27:29  Well, and, and this is a great opportunity for us to be more consultative to our clients because as our clients are, are starting to get anxious, they're going to be looking for answers.

27:41  And so we can be that answer for them and we should be proactively reaching out to them and, and talking about this is what the situation is, this is what we're seeing.

27:51  You know, you know, the majority of people that are listening and watching this are in the staffing industry and they have better exposure to the market than their clients do.

28:03  They see a broader swath of what's going on so they can go back to them and say, let me tell you what we're seeing in the market and let me tell you how you can, can adjust to this.

28:14  You know, the other thing I would say is that the, the question about, does it truly matter?

28:20 It?

28:20  I, I think it, it's a good question because recessions to me are very individualized.

28:27  You could have your neighbor on the left that's laid off and you could have the neighbor on the right that just got promoted in the same exact economy.

28:34  It happens all the time.

28:36  You can have one of your branches that's doing great and another one that's, that's really struggling.

28:41  And I think, I think we're seeing that a lot.

28:44  and the one other thing that I would say too is that, you know, so much of this is self fulfilling.

28:49  So, Ron, you were talking about that, that, you know, consumer sentiment can't drive this, but at a, at a individual level, in individual company level, it certainly can influence them and close you down is what you do because you, so we're what we're seeing right now.

29:05  If you look at it, even though on the overall DOLs report, you're just not seeing it as much as we kind of see it in our Lightcast data is, I think right now, we're in the process of people laying off job openings.

29:14  So they're not laying off people, they're laying off job openings.

29:17  And your reason you're doing that is you're like, look ramping up when the waves coming in, it seems like a pretty bad idea.

29:23  So until you're sure what that wave is going to feel like you probably want to hold your ground.

29:28  And I think what's happening right now is there's a bit of that now, if you're in the warehouse space, what's happening to you is something I was calling for by mid year last year.

29:36  And that is when the logistics chain started to get unplugged and products actually started to move.

29:41  We knew that the logistics channel was grossly over bloated.

29:45  I mean, we look at the historical growth pattern of the warehousing and transportation industry.

29:50  It had taken a very unnatural turn and it needs to get back to its growth line.

29:54  And I think it's doing that right now.

29:56  So your orders are slowing down because there was bloat that needs to be corrected.

30:00  This is actually going to come.

30:01  If we don't forget, we have another question, I think we were going to talk about, but it comes to another point and that is, it's real easy when the fountains running full open to stick your cup under one faucet and just drink and be like, this is great.

30:15  And you didn't even look at any of the other ones.

30:17  Maybe they weren't coming out as fast as that, but you didn't even try.

30:21  And so you're so overexposed to a sector that when it slows down it's gonna hurt.

30:26  So the, the secret of that is, is diversifying into different sectors that are a little bit more immune.

30:33  I just wrote an article for Forbes on that.

30:35  If you go to my LinkedIn, it has the link for it.

30:37  But I just talk about that.

30:39  I get it.

30:40  You, everybody wants the easy money.

30:42  But when the easy money stops, you're in a lot of pain.

30:45  And that's usually because like I said, you got a little too focused.

30:48  So, Ron, I, I I'm glad you brought that up because I'm not in the construction staffing business, but if I were in construction staffing, what an opportunity we have, right?

30:58  Now.

30:59  Right.

30:59  Because there are so many high school students, even students who may not necessarily want to finish a college degree where they can go into a trade.

31:07  I mean, we've taught our kids to get a college education to be a professional.

31:11  But how excited do you get when that HVAC person shows up in 100 degree temperature to fix your AC?

31:17  Right.

31:19  And, and we devalue that on the, the, the, when they're younger, but we value it now.

31:25  I just heard a data point this morning that there's a half a million construction jobs out there.

31:32  Boy, what I, if I were in the construction staffing business, what I, I've got a whole plan in my head of what I would be doing, what an opportunity opportunity for us to, to, to make placements in that area.

31:42  But I'm not in construction staff.

31:46  I thank you for plugging my last article.

31:48  So the last article I wrote was called, Who's going to do the work?

31:50  It's about skilled trades.

31:51  If you haven't read it.

31:52  I go right from that point of you gotta pay attention.

31:56  There's a lot of skilled trades jobs that are now overtaking college jobs and we've been beating that college drum so much that I think we're starting to lose sight of the fact of there's critical jobs that are going to keep this country running that are not college.

32:09  And I, and I think anything parents can do guidance counselors can do to stop saying the same, beating the same message into everybody's kid, that you're gonna have to do this.

32:18  You can do it eventually.

32:19  I mean, my dad got a college degree in his forties.

32:21  Like there's other jobs out there and they make really good money and I think we need to need to do a better job of presenting this opportunity to apprenticeships, training.

32:30  I mean, I would be going to my clients, my construction, some clients say, listen, I can get you some high school kids.

32:34  Let's get them under a apprenticeship.

32:37  I mean, my dad was a plumber.

32:38  My daughter wants to be a plumber, be a plumber.

32:40  I mean, you know, we, we America is built on what we build, right?

32:46  So I want to answer another question here.

32:52  How can we help each other in this group to survive this unexpected market change situation?

32:57  I work for IT and healthcare pharma staffing company from New New Jersey office.

33:01  We are struggling for reliable companies who could help us grow.

33:05  May have thoughts on, on that question.

33:08  Sounds like they're, they're struggling a little bit.

33:10  They've had a bit of a downturn.

33:13  maybe find some partners.

33:15  That's one of the things we've done.

33:17  You know, we talk about you know, there's always so many pieces of a pie that's out there.

33:22  So let's share it.

33:23  So maybe find a partner who has another opportunity in a different wheelhouse than you do and partner together and chase that we're doing it.

33:30  We've got some, we have a mentor protege program we've developed.

33:34  So we've got some veteran owned businesses that we're working for so we can go after veteran owned opportunities that we can't because we're not better known.

33:41  So I think you really look at your partnership and maybe either be a protege or be a mentor.

33:48  Yeah, I think it, it's a great, it's a great point that, you know, now is a great time to be, belong to organizations that belong to your local staffing association to belong to the national ones.

34:00  Because now is the time to have that, that network internally where you've got somebody you're talking to, that you develop a relationship with and they go, I don't do what you do, but I get people who ask me all the time.

34:13  I would love to have a referral partner that I think it's a great, great point.

34:18  Other thoughts on, on kind of this.

34:21  I'm, I'm, I'm kind of reading into this that it's an unexpected market change of, we used to have a bunch of orders.

34:26  Now we're struggling for orders, which is we are hearing some of that.

34:30  Well, I, I think that, you know, I think about over the years, like the amount of time, you know, spent on including me fighting against MSPs and VMS and you know all of this and I'm gonna get not as good at orders and I'm not gonna get as good a bill rates or good margin.

34:49 And that, and that's true in many situations, but it also isn't true in every situation.

34:53  And in fact, in companies I've worked for and led when we really went down and we analyzed that.

34:58  That wasn't true.

34:59  We actually were getting better bill rates through a VMS than we were through some of our direct clients.

35:04  And so I would say, you know, it's, it's kind of just another theme on what Threase is saying, like, you know, go find partners, different people you could work with that might have access to orders.

35:13  Because if you think about this right now, people are, if, if they're beginning to get less orders, they're not gonna buy outside the system, they're gonna buy through the system and they're gonna buy through procurement.

35:21  And if anyone's gonna be laying down orders right now, you cannot buy anything outside of procurement.

35:25  It's gonna be anybody that's struggling right now financially of our buyers.

35:29  So I, I would say explore that and, and you know, yes, there's good and bad about all those, you know, however you get the, you get those orders.

35:38  But if that is one of the things, you know, like I said, I was, I was one of them that thought it for a long time.

35:44  And and I think you just, you may try to find the right partner that, that works for you and, and meets what your financial goals are.

35:52  And you know, Ron made a statement about diversifying, right?

35:56  But you can also diversify your orders.

35:59  So everybody wants that client who's gonna give you 50 job orders.

36:03  Well, that's not necessarily how it works.

36:06  It's very hard to come by.

36:07  But if you've got 50 clients with one order and then another order and then order, you know, that's the way to do it, right.

36:16  So my father-in-law has this saying that if he says it all the time, oh my God, I already said that it's a tree with many roots, survives the drought.

36:28  So I've seen people in my last company who hit a contest, you know, literally selling to every mom and pop shop in town and everybody knew this person and they were phenomenal at the relationships.

36:41  And I think, you know, with, you have sometimes you have a sweetheart deal in your market where you have one or two clients and they're sending you a ton of business and that feels really good and you can ride that, you know, train for, for quite a while, but sometimes those companies go bankrupt or sometimes anything else.

36:57  And I think it's that you can't ever stop working.

37:01  And I think when things are right now, we're in a pause and, and a lot of industries, we're in a pause and I think, I think right now everybody's looking for that.

37:08  Hey, help me find, you know, help me find business.

37:11  I'm panicking everything.

37:12  What's interesting to me is last year, you know, talking to our multiple of our clients saying, look, I've more orders than I've ever had before, but I can't fill any of them.

37:20  And now we're to a point where, how fast it turned where we were like, oh, wow.

37:25  Now I'm not, you know, I'm just like getting the order flow that I was getting.

37:27  Well, you kind of sometimes have to slow down with that.

37:30  You can't expect the same throughput.

37:32  You may have to make some pauses internally.

37:34  What I caution people is just be careful because let's say confidence starts to return, let's, let's say after a while people start to realize, hey, all of these rate increases really aren't changing anything.

37:45  And yeah, I do notice that my warehouse is starting to get empty.

37:48  Now I'm gonna have to replenish those goods.

37:50  You know, you wanna be there, you wanna be ready.

37:52  So what happens sometimes is during downturns, people get sloppy and they just start, you know, cutting everything and now you're not ready to grow when it grows.

38:00  So, you know, always take advantage of your, your downtime to, to be ready to, to be big again.

38:07  And Ron, I think another thing with that is your NPCs, your most placed candidates as an industry.

38:13  I have seen that we're very poor at this.

38:15  We get a really good candidate but we don't have a current job.

38:19  Right.

38:19  So, if you've got those, whoever asked the question, if you've got those candidates that you've already vetted, you've already screened, you know, they're great.

38:26  Go out and reverse market those candidate clients that you're currently working with and you may find a job that you didn't know was out there.

38:34  Yeah, I, I, I totally agree.

38:37  I think the, you know, the MPC, skill marketing, whatever, there's 18 different, the things that people call it, but it's where you have that marketable in demand candidate.

38:48  Not the purple squirrel that nobody needs but, and, and not the person that is applying to absolutely everything on the job boards.

38:55  But that one that, that usually is more of a passive candidate, but they're starting to kind of test the waters.

39:00  We call them semi active candidates.

39:02  They're, they're, they're the window shoppers.

39:05  That's, those are the ones that you want, be able to go out and market and, and that's, that's the lowest hanging fruit.

39:11  Yeah.

39:11  The other piece is to go back to all your clients and get them out to lunch, get them out to breakfast.

39:17  I, as, as I talk to my clients and as I go and speak and train across the country, people have stopped interacting in person.

39:26  They got out of the habit during COVID, it hasn't come back yet.

39:30  And I talked to people all the time ago.

39:31  When's the last time you took one of your clients out to lunch and they go, you know what we used to do that all the time.

39:38  They go, ok.

39:39  Well, let's start doing it again.

39:40  And if you're not doing it, somebody else might be, but if they're not doing it, then you have an opportunity and, you know, we all know being on this call, you know, just having breakfast or lunch with somebody, just having a meeting with it.

39:53  Good things happen, you start to have conversations that you don't have.

39:56  If you're just exchanging texts or emails or even on the phone, you know, do it, do it in person.

40:02  You know, I, I tell people all the time, in the 28 years I've been doing this, there was never one day where we had exactly as many candidates as we did jobs.

40:12  It was never like a perfect day.

40:13  Right.

40:14  There's always too much of one, not enough of the other and we're starting to see it shift a little bit, but some of it is also, well, I'm used to having 500 open jobs now.

40:23  I only have 200 open and I'm starting to get a little antsy, but I think that over the last 13, 14 years where we've been going towards this talent shortage and where we've had lots of jobs and we've had more opportunities a lot of the industry has gotten complacent about the sales side and Ron mentioned it earlier where we hear it all the time.

40:44  Why would I go out and sell?

40:46  I got too many jobs to fill as it is.

40:47  Well, this is why, because it can turn on you very quick.

40:51  And the other thing is too, you've got really, you, you've got a bunch of jobs, but are they any good?

40:56  Are they, are you, are you compromising on those jobs?

41:00  If there are a bunch of jobs, you can't fill a bunch of clients that aren't very attractive that, that don't do a good job of communicating with you that their pay rates aren't good.

41:08  Well, yeah, you got a bunch of jobs but it's, it's stuff you can't fill.

41:12  So, you know, best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago.

41:16  The next best time to plant a tree is today.

41:18  Get out and sell and, and, you know, that, that's, that's my biggest piece of advice to everybody.

41:24  particularly the person who asked the question is gotta sell, get out and sell, bring in new clients.

41:30, let's see here.

41:34  according to the panel, what do they think will be the primary bottleneck when it comes to the problem?

41:39  The inflated pay rates sorting itself out.

41:42  Not sure exactly.

41:43  You might want to take a stab at that.

41:45  Not sure exactly.

41:46  I have to talk about it all the time.

41:47  So I'll take a stab at it.

41:48  OK.

41:48  Good.

41:48  All right, good.

41:50  So I don't think we're in a situation where at least through 20, you're ever going to see a labor surplus again.

41:57  So, I don't think we're in a situation where you could see pay necessarily, it's not going to go back to where it was and it really probably was a little low, I think in some sense, one of the things I keep talking about is people have to understand that a lot of the pressure that was occurring that continues to occur in our economy is that we are really good at creating kind of sub $20 an hour jobs, but we really don't have a lot of people to fill those jobs.

42:19  And so what's happening is you're starting to get this ballooning effect in the middle.

42:23  So people kind of say staff accountant level, people will just, I use that as a token profession, but it kind of is a balloon there.

42:30  We're hearing companies saying that they open a job and they're getting, you know, 50 applicants in a day for something.

42:35  And then you have somebody who opens a job for a maintenance mechanic and they get one applicant over three weeks.

42:40  And I think that this is still continues to be a problem where you, if you start to get wage softening, be aware that that is usually occurring because there's a plentiful amount of people.

42:51  Not because somebody offered a lower wage because just because you offer a lower wage doesn't mean anybody good is going to take that wage keyword there being good.

43:00  we're starting to get people re entering the labor force.

43:02  You know, we are starting to get some labor force participation increases.

43:05  It's small.

43:06  Now, the concern here is how many people have been out of the labor force for two years and a lot of your clients aren't gonna want to talk to them.

43:13  So they're gonna want to talk to that person who actually stayed in the labor force has been working hard this whole time and those people that their wage has now been bit up, you know, they're now $20 an hour when they were $14, the people coming in, they'll take the $14 to $16, but the client is not gonna be happy.

43:27  So that's, you gotta understand, like, wage pressure is kind of this huge holistic term for, well, what do you want?

43:33  Do you want a really good worker for a cheap wage?

43:36  No.

43:37  But if you want a worker, yeah, you, you might be able to do something on the cheap but don't, you know, can't come crying about quality aspects with that.

43:44  Mhm.

43:45  Yep.

43:46  Do you think, it, it's just adding to that, do you think at some point, or maybe you're already seeing it, that, that wage inflation would get to a point that it would pull some of the early retirees back in, didn't happen last year.

44:01  So we look at the labor-force participation rate for people above the age of 55.

44:05  It's, it's stuck, it never moved.

44:06  So it came up flat, flat line, came up flat line.

44:10  And now we're sitting here with 2.5 years out and it's still, it's just not recovering.

44:15  I cover all of this when I speak and that the big part is the wealth accumulated in that population was pretty strong.

44:22  And even if they come back in, they're not going to engage in the way that you would want them to.

44:25  And it's funny because some of the initial articles about people engaging were people who were becoming, I remember one guy opened a Tae Kwon Do studio.

44:33  Another one's like, you know, I had to go back to doing consulting and I'm like, look, that's not, no, that's not fair.

44:38  Like what people are saying is, are you gonna come back and take my call, my call center job.

44:42  I was like, no, they're not gonna do that.

44:44  And this is when we talk about retracting that, that retired population, they're gonna do things like my dad did like work at the golf course as a ranger.

44:53  You know, it, it's better to be yelled at by a golfer driving around in a cary all day than, you know, answering the phone being yelled at by strangers.

44:58  So I think this is what we always have to understand is what would it mean to bring them back?

45:03  And then secondarily to that is that is not a solution.

45:06  Ok.

45:07  I'm gonna really pay up and maybe I can get people to unretire and how does that solve our problem?

45:12  I would much rather you look at your labor strategy, pay reasonably, provide a great job for people, automate what you can combine jobs, you know, rotate jobs, work on things that are gonna make the experience better.

45:26  So you can actually fill the jobs in the long run versus band aid fixes.

45:29  Like, well, I'm gonna balloon the pay up for a little bit, but it's still the same credit job.

45:34  Yeah, Ron, I'm one of those people that you, that you were talking about.

45:37  I retained search person that I love, called me probably a year ago and said there's this job open that you and like five other people in the country could fill any chance you would let me put your name in and I'm like, there is not a package you can put together that would interest me too.

45:51  You know, because you do.

45:52  It's interesting.

45:53  I never even thought this but, you know, when you get to a certain stage in life, you're like, no, I don't, I don't want that full time responsibility of it.

45:59  I still hope I'm making meaningful, you know, impact, but it's just different.

46:05  And so I, I think you're right.

46:06  I mean, that's probably not where we should be spending our time because it isn't, it isn't going to solve the problem long term anyway.

46:11  But, and they're just gonna retire again in another year or two.

46:14  So, what did you do with that?

46:16  But there is an opportunity there, right.

46:19  And there is an opportunity, especially you mentioned, call center where you may have a call center where you have, who want to just work four hours a day because they want to keep their brain fresh and they wanna, you know, talk with people because you know, we've read everything that says is you sit on your sofa, it's like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

46:36  So if, if we can get call center jobs shared with retirees and I do know people who are doing that.

46:43  I mean, that is a really good opportunity.

46:45  So I always try to look at the opportunity side.

46:47  and it might not solve our problem, but at least in the short term, it would make that person happy, the client happy and we have a billable person in that seat.

46:57  So I love that what you did right there.

47:01  Like that's reinventing the job and that's what I want people to see because when I hear I'm just gonna increase pay until somebody is willing to come back in.

47:08  I'm like, that's not the answer.

47:09  But if you're like, I'm willing to, you know, locate this close to retirement community but I still want to talk to these people first.

47:13  Like, hey, we, we put up a sign up sheet every day and somebody could say I'm gonna sign up for those three hours because I have nothing else to do that.

47:19  Great idea.

47:20  Very cool, very flexible.

47:21  Such a, a creative plan.

47:23  But I don't, I think a lot of people are like, no, that's too, that's gonna take me too long.

47:28  I need to, I need this job filled right now.

47:30  So I'm just gonna try another dollar and then another dollar and, and at that point, we end up in this kind of same situation.

47:37  Well, and I was, I was speaking at a conference this morning about, about just the future of talent acquisition.

47:43  And it was a,, here in Columbus, Ohio.

47:47  And, you know, I asked the question about part time work.

47:52  I said, how many people have changed and, and offer part time or flexible options?

47:56  And there were probably 75 people in the room and four raised their hand; four.

48:01  And I go, you know, you, you've got to realize that you've got all of these different demographics now that are wanting part time work for all these different reasons.

48:11  You've got your, your retirees, semi retirees.

48:15  You, you got the Gen Xers that are, that are starting to retire, you know, early and, but still want to do things.

48:21  You've got other generations that are wanting two or three part time jobs, right?

48:26  I mean, Ron, I think you talked about it in your Demographic Drought.

48:30  About, about that they want multiple part time jobs.

48:33  Well, they still need to get benefits somewhere.

48:35  So, and you offer part time people benefits.

48:38  Can you give them flexibility?

48:40  There's, there's, you know, Lesa, you, you know this, well, coming from health care, health care has been doing part time, flexible work for decades, but other, other professions and other industries aren't doing that.

48:53  So I think there's a misperception that if I have two part time people doing one job, it's gonna take more of my time when in reality it doesn't, then you do have that flex work schedule and I think we need to change that perception.

49:12  Yeah, I mean, does it take more time to manage two people or to have that position empty?

49:18  Who did you hire?

49:19  You know, if you hire two good people, then it may be less work.

49:22  But if you hire one bad person that's gonna take you more, it's always going to be the funnel at the beginning.

49:30  And, you know, staffing companies have an onus in that as well.

49:34  Do your job up front screen a candidate really?

49:36  Well, that client, you know, everybody's gonna tell you, I get solicitations every day from staffing companies.

49:42  Oh, you see, you have openings.

49:43  I don't personally, but our company had some things and I'm like, like I'm not hiring but what's different, you know, where's that testimonial of man?

49:52  Everybody, we place our clients just rave about it.

49:55  And once again, this is the time if you're in a lull right now, make sure you really locked down, you know, your screening things, make sure every person you provide is just phenomenal and they're finishing their assignment successfully.

50:05  And, you know, I think there's just so many things you can do around that.

50:08  You know, it's kind of interesting because I can now kind of be that Monday morning quarterback because I'm not running the companies anymore.

50:14  But one of the things that I look at as an industry and including me again, I'm guilty of all these things I now can see is that we spend so much time and energy.

50:23  Like Tom asked that question, do you know what it costs you for every start?

50:27  Do you know what it costs you for every piece of the funnel?

50:29  We many, many companies have gotten excellent at that.

50:32  They can measure that.

50:33  They know the cost of each one of them.

50:34  They know when they're off of that.

50:36  But I think where we generally as an industry really fall short and I still think we're falling short from the companies I'm working with and that kind of thing is we don't really measure to the same degree and have the same focus and have the same conversation as many hours of conversation around.

50:53  Do we have the job Susie's job ends two weeks from now.

50:57  Do we already have Susie preplaced?

50:59  And you know, my teams we used to talk about, I'm like, how many of you guys would be not looking for another job?

51:05  If you didn't know where your paycheck was coming from in two weeks from now, you would be looking and we don't spend near the amount of time on that and, and if there was a way we could shift our time and energy to that is many people leave working for staffing firms, not because they don't love the flexibility.

51:20  The pay is fair.

51:21  There's all those things, but it is unnerving.

51:23  It's unnerving to know where you're gonna go next.

51:25  And so how do we as an industry?

51:27  Think about spending more time about that, giving people reassurance on how we're gonna make them.

51:31  And I know we've all tried to build benches where we pay people full time and that's all hard.

51:36  But is there a way that we can put in processes that give people confidence because they are just like we are, you know, you want to know where your paycheck is gonna come from and we don't spend enough time on that.

51:45  It's like, great.

51:46  We placed them now.

51:46  Who's our, where's our candidate, where's our candidate, candidate, candidate candidate instead of how do we really make these people feel like I am gonna take care of them and that they do not need to leave my company, my staffing firm to go somewhere else.

51:59  I, I think lots of time we can spend on that.

52:01  I think it's, I think one of the, one of the issues is that I, I have, I take issue with the title of recruiter because in direct hire, yes, you are recruiting and then you're moving on to the next one.

52:15  In contract staffing, the work has just begun and that somebody needs to own that relationship, whether it is that quote recruiter or whatever we want to call them.

52:26  whether they continue to have that relationship or it gets handed off to a group that really focuses on, on retention.

52:33  , but absolutely, you're right.

52:35  It's amazing.

52:36  You know, I've worked with companies that have 5%, redeployment rates like IT companies and pretty sure you could probably speak to this.

52:45  But, but, you know, 5% redeployment.

52:48  I know I'm gonna have this person for six months on there and I don't talk to him to get, see if I can place them again.

52:54  It's, it's crazy.

52:56  Pretty sure we're gonna say something that goes back to the old sales style of selling too.

53:01  Right?

53:01  If you've got some, you know, that's gonna end in six months.

53:05  What did we used to do?

53:06  You would call five months in, you still need this person because guess what, I am going to start marketing them for another opportunity.

53:14  And how many times did the client say no, no, we need them, we need to keep for another three or four months.

53:20  So that's that part.

53:21  And then those individuals are your MPCs.

53:25  Right.

53:25  Right.

53:26  So you ask the question, look at the people you have on contract.

53:28  Lesa brings up an excellent, excellent point.

53:31  See where their end dates are and then start selling those candidates to new clients.

53:36  They've already proven themselves.

53:39  You can go to somebody and say, hey, listen, I got this person coming off of an assignment for six months, they're getting great reviews.

53:45  Would you have any interest in talking to them?

53:46  Right of first refusal here.

53:48  You wanna look at them if you don't?

53:50  No problem, I'll go to the next one.

53:52  I mean, it's, it's, yeah, it's very powerful to go.

53:55  Yeah, there's a, there's proof that they already have been able to do this.

53:59  I'll be happy to talk to them.

54:01  We've got about five minutes and I do want to kind of wrap up and just talk a little bit about what do you guys see it with the future of staffing?

54:10  What do you think?

54:11  The next six, we kind of talked about six months and, and beyond, but, but down further down the road, what do you think?

54:19  What do you think staffing, where, where are we going with this?

54:22  Are we all going to be just be cloud staffing companies or are we gonna?

54:25  No, no, no, no, I I even look at chat GPT.

54:30  People talk about it could do this and it could do that.

54:33  And I'm like, well, first off, let's establish one clear fact, technology accompanies a good person.

54:39  It doesn't typically replace them.

54:40  In fact, any time that it has, it's just given us kind of better jobs.

54:44  But at the end of the day, it is incredible the subtlety of humanity.

54:50  That, that when you're talking to somebody and you're interviewing them and they're sitting forward and they're looking at you and they're asking questions and you start to forget that they don't even have the experience anymore because you're so blown away by who they are, that you can't wait to hire them and you do hire them and they blow you away and then the next person comes in, their resume is loaded with everything you've ever wanted and you're interviewing them like I wouldn't work with this person if you paid me a million dollars to hire them.

55:15  So I think that's the part that the experience of trust of what does a human bring to the equation.

55:22  And I think saving companies need to constantly make sure that, that it's not about being the fastest to give a candidate.

55:29  If you gave somebody a really terrible candidate, you know, you just ruined your reputation.

55:32  It's your ability to stand somebody, put your name on them and go, man, I know a good person when I'm seeing him and this person is it.

55:39  And I know they don't have everything that you want.

55:41  But we've already done the research on that.

55:43  We placed five people like this who also didn't have the same skill set and they smoke this assignment as well.

55:49  And I'm going to, I'm willing to stand behind this person with a voucher.

55:51  Like that's what we're going to need in the future because as labor continues to be a constrained resource, I know it's hard to look at this right now and You know, March of 2023 and see this, but it's hits around us everywhere.

56:04  It's not gonna take much of a flex on that very tight rope to make this really tight again.

56:09  So be really good at the human aspects of your job.

56:12  Ron, you nailed it.

56:14  You absolutely nailed it.

56:15  My husband is a software engineer and we talk about AI all the time and we also talk about, you know, AI can't pick up the nuances like, you know, looking at least shaking her head, she's agreeing to it and all those things in the interview where you're like, yeah, you see somebody who's concerned or they don't give you the right answer.

56:30  I mean, you nailed it.

56:31  Good job.

56:33  Yeah.

56:33  And I look back at it as perspective of 40 years of all the different times that we were like, oh my gosh, they're not gonna need us anymore.

56:39  Think about when the job boards came out.

56:41  Oh, my gosh, they aren't gonna need us anymore.

56:43  They, they, even when BMS MSP, oh, my gosh, they're not gonna do that.

56:47  And now there's the platforms that you don't have the intervention as much with the, with the recruiter and that kind of thing that takes up a, a portion of the market but not the full market.

56:57  Right.

56:57  And so I think, you know, as Ron says, it always just creates different kinds of jobs, it creates different kinds of opportunity.

57:03  And so I, I have kind of found over the 40 years, I've been in the business, about 60% to 70% of the business truthfully Is the same as it was when I started in 1984.

57:14  And then the rest of it is where it changes how we deliver and how we, how we connect with people, how we make things happen.

57:20  But the human part is still important.

57:22  And so I think that it will be different and I think anybody that isn't willing to, to change, I think those that are willing to change and look at different ways and not be caught up in that will be the winners on this.

57:33  And I think that's been the case for some time, but I, I do not think that we're gonna see the industry go away.

57:39  It's continued to boom many, many, many, many years.

57:42  And I think it will continue to do that as, as long as the companies are willing to make the changes.

57:48  Yeah, I think the, the, I think the myth when people talk about, like, travel agents, they say, oh, well, we get in the way of travel agents, which there still are travel agents out there.

57:59  I think that's a bad analogy.

58:01  I think that the realtor is a better analogy.

58:04  Realtors.

58:06  the, you know, the, the realty profession is lagging has always kind of lagged behind on technology a bit, kind of like our industry has.

58:16  And yet it still continues to thrive people get to a certain point and then they go, now I gotta bring in somebody to help me finish this.

58:24  And that's where I think we're gonna be, is I think we, we've got, you know, you don't want my advice to, to people in the industry is you don't want to be known for doing things that can be automated where AI can do it, you know, things like going out and sourcing, just groups of candidates and sending out mass emails and doing, you know, anything that can be automated, that's not what you wanna be.

58:46  You, you want to have that expertise where it's, you're you're able to identify and match talent together, you're able to, to pick up on the nuances.

58:58  If anything, I think all the technology is gonna scale the best people and allow the industry to continue to grow and empathy empathy, right?

59:07  Understanding, I mean, we as humans struggle with various things throughout, you know, our, our, our life and our career and we need people who understand that, who's gonna listen to that and give us advice and, and support us.

59:20  And before we go, I did wanna say that this week ASA will be publishing the full year employment revenue data for the industry in 2022.

59:29  Last year we employed 14 million American men and women in our industry, 14 million.

59:37  So a huge industry and we're gonna continue to play an important and even greater role in the future as we move forward.

59:45  Well, fantastic.

59:46  Well, thank you all.

59:47  This has been a, a great discussion.

59:48  I knew it would be.

59:49  So we're gonna wrap up.

59:51  I just had a couple of things.

59:53  If you missed any of our past episodes or want to revisit them, you can find recordings of our discussions on popular podcast platforms like Spotify and Apple podcast.

1:00:02  Be sure to sign up for our next live panel cast discussion on Tuesday, May 9th where we're going to talk about sales and marketing.

1:00:08  So, that, that'll be a timely one as well.

1:00:10  I'm excited about that.

1:00:12  You can sign up for the next staffing in sync as well as access a video library of our past sessions on our website staffinginsync.com.

1:00:21  And I also want to let everybody know.

1:00:22  And I wanna, I wanna do a big shout out and thank you.

1:00:25  Staffing in Sync is produced and sponsored by Sync Stream Solutions.

1:00:29  They are the top provider of the affordable care act compliance for the staffing industry and Essential StaffCARE, the largest provider of health insurance and benefits for the staffing industry.

1:00:39  So thank you to my panelists.

1:00:40  It was awesome.

1:00:41  Like I knew it would be.

1:00:42  Thank you for all those that attended and have a great rest of the week.

1:00:46  We'll see you.

1:00:46  Thank you for the inclusion.

1:00:47  Thanks.

1:00:48  Thank you.