To drive transformation, “Burn the bridges so moving forward is the only option.”

I recently spoke to Adam Hawkins, Head of Search & Staffing at LinkedIn about the role of technology in driving the necessary changes in business, and my vision for the future of tech in the recruitment industry. You can read the full #TalentVoices interview here.

Leadership interview:  

Glen Cathey,  Head of Digital Strategy and Innovation, Randstad 

I’ve spent my career immersing myself in existing and emerging digital solutions – a skillset that has been well and truly put to the test in 2020!

The past few months have seen us coming together as a business to implement new solutions on a massive scale – virtually overnight in many cases. This has proven what I have long suspected - that when the need is great enough, the pace of digitalization can be sped right up.

As people around the world start at least thinking about heading back to the office, I spoke to LinkedIn’s Adam Hawkins to discuss digital strategy and the role of technology in driving the necessary changes in business, and share my vision for the future of tech in the recruitment industry.

Just to get started, I wondered if you could tell us a bit about your current role, and perhaps a bit about your background? 

I’ve been in the industry for a little over 20 years - it always feels strange to say that! I started as an IT recruiter and worked my way up into senior leadership roles at Kforce and Randstad. I live and work from home in the US, but I actually report into a group called The Digital Factory which is based in Diemen in the Netherlands. I was hired for my big-picture thinking, for looking around the corner and considering what we can do to get us from where we are to where we need to be from a digital strategy perspective. 

I can’t avoid the temptation to ask you - what happens at The Digital Factory? Is it an incubator?  

Yes, so there’s the element of ideation, incubation, and scaling, but there’s also the enablement element of identifying interesting and successful concepts being piloted by Randstad businesses across our 38 countries that are working well locally, then scaling them to work globally. 

What are you working on at the moment? and what are the strategic pillars you’re centered around?  

I think I have a good answer there, you’ll have to let me know what you think! At the center of it is the need for exceptional customer experiences. In our industry, it can be easy to be blinded by new and emerging technologies, and think “we need to be doing that.” Instead, we’re heavily focused on customer centricity as a way of delivering more value to our clients, candidates, and employees - and this is based on a few key foundational principles: 

1. Knowledge; using research and data to improve our understanding of our customers to ensure we know who we’re serving better than anyone.  
2. Personalization; delivering exceptional experiences unique to each customer. 
3. Relevance; providing the right content, people, products, insights, and services delivered/available at the right time. 
4. Convenience; making sure we’re connecting people to the things they want, whenever, wherever, and however they want. This is something I’m particularly passionate about; we shouldn’t be providing services to people in the way we want to, but how they want to receive them.  
5. Trust; privacy and security are essential; this is something we think about a lot when it comes to leveraging ethical AI 
6. Innovation; continually generating, collecting, testing, and scaling innovative concepts and solutions   

I agree, the question of technology is often more straightforward than the question of cultural change. We both work for large global businesses, made up of different entities and markets. I’m interested in how you tackle that change element at Randstad, because in my experience, that’s the toughest nut to crack.  

For sure, it’s the human element. “People hate change” was one of my key takeaways back in Psychology 101. You can have this great concept, but sometimes people just aren’t ready – both internally and externally. There’s definitely no silver bullet. A lot of it comes down to having a compelling vision and story to create a strong pull effect - and some of it is just pushing through that resistance. While some things change, others won’t – as far as we can tell, people will need jobs and companies will need people.  Even so, if you introduce a new platform for matching people to jobs or for companies to find talent, there will be a desire for many to continue to use the legacy platform for a time because it’s what they know. It’s wise to expect this desire and “burn the bridges” so there is no way of going back and moving forward to the new way of working is the only option.  

Do you ever get situations where resistance means innovations, platforms or processes do have to co-exist for a time? 

Certainly, especially for internal innovation. Often, users will claim that switching over to a new platform will be disruptive to their productivity, and it can be difficult when the new thing is seen as a “nice-to-have,” rather than an essential change. I advise starting small, identifying the champions, looking for success stories and using data to create a pull mechanism for new users rather than relying solely on a top-down corporate push type of initiative. 

How far is Randstad on a tech and talent journey with regards to your digital strategy? 

I think that would depend on who you ask! I would argue we can always do better. Others may think differently and be surprised at how far we’ve come. It’s all about perspective. Thinking as neutrally as possible, we’re well on our way, but my job is to create urgency around this. As soon as you slow down, you get comfortable when we should be asking, ‘What more can we do?’ Being a large staffing company, we see a lot of technology start-ups that intend to revolutionize and disrupt the industry; in that sense, we can’t become too comfortable with our business model. We have to prepare for, anticipate, and try to get ahead of change. 

Thinking about the journey probably comes down to mindset. Are people digitally-savvy? Are they adapting? Do they get it? Do you think that’s the first hurdle in the process? 

Yes, in a way, but internally it’s going to vary where you are and who you’re working with. We have opcos that are very far down the digital path and some earlier on the journey.  There is of course a natural variation in the level of comfort and experience people have with digital solutions, and that can be a challenge when we look to drive broad change across tens of thousands of employees. Externally, there is less of a challenge when we move to more of a consumer-grade digital experience.   

Many recruitment companies are saying they’ve accelerated their digital transformation strategies in response. That means different things to different people. What is your take on what’s changed based on the past three months? 

When the lockdowns were instituted, I was surprised and impressed at how our previous investments in cloud technologies allowed us to switch our business from in-person to digital interactions almost immediately. Of course, that’s why these investments were made, but it’s incredible to witness theory become reality when it really matters. While I’ve personally lost the element of international travel in my role, practically nothing else changed as I’ve been working from home for three and a half years. However, for our branch consultants, they’ve had to do a complete one-eighty from working in an office to working from home. Like many, I certainly miss seeing people in person, but I’m also an introvert; I’m excited for people to see that for many people, it’s not necessary to go into the office to do your job and be productive. In terms of acceleration, you could say COVID-19 prompted us to step up many of the things we were already doing.   

Twelve weeks ago, there was a candidate shortage. Now there’s a job availability shortage, so we’ve seen our tools and products being used differently. Are you seeing functional changes? 

It’s interesting… do you have to meet someone in person before you hire them? 16 weeks ago, some would say absolutely. Now, they’re realizing virtual interviews and onboarding are perhaps no less effective - I hope there will be more people seeing this not as a step backward, but as a step forward.   

Yes, it’s fair to say we are likely to see a tech adoption on a massive scale. What is your view on the future of the industry in the short, medium, and long term? 

In the short term, there is and will be quite a bit of energy and focus on digitizing specific elements of the recruiting and staffing process through the use of data-driven insights, AI and automation. This will evolve over the mid and long term into a more holistic approach whereby staffing can be delivered end-to-end on the entire spectrum from self-service/no-touch to full-service/high-touch, with the ability to seamlessly switch between them. Completely online staffing has been hyped for a while, and while I want to be open-minded, I believe if it was ever going to be wildly successful, it would already be much, much bigger than it is right now. There’s a place for it, absolutely, but from a platform perspective, I haven’t seen anyone achieve ignition - producing a self-sustaining platform at a significant scale that doesn’t require heavy sales and marketing. Certainly, there's a reason for that. I do wonder whether now is the perfect time for people to self-serve from a staffing perspective - we shall see. It’s somewhat of a contradiction in terms but I’m an optimistic skeptic about this. I also tend to be contrarian – if everyone else absolutely believes something is the future/next big thing, I’m going to critically question it, looking for what people might be missing. Ultimately, we want to help people regardless of how they want to find work or find talent. It’s about enabling your customers with flexibility, choice, and control along a spectrum rather than binary and unnecessarily mutually exclusive options (digital vs. analog). The financial and real estate industries provide us with some insight here - you can perform online banking/investing on your own, chat or speak with someone, or go into a branch; you can research apartments and homes online yourself, but you can also leverage expert guidance from an agent.    

It’s true, I’m not sure online staffing will ever fully take over, the human element around motivation, aspiration, and potential is so important. However, as it’s accelerated due to the virtual world we’re operating in, will people start seeing this as a viable option?  

Given the COVID-19 pandemic, more people and companies will likely be looking to online staffing, but I wouldn’t like to make a conclusive call on it – everyone has an opinion, but no one has a crystal ball. I see online staffing and self-service platforms continuing to grow, but I don’t think there will be a sudden spike or trigger moment where it’s going to explode. The largest online staffing companies spend a lot of money employing people for the demand side of the platform, and you certainly have to wonder why this is necessary, and why they haven’t become self-sustaining yet.  

Just to end, part of core innovation and new growth innovation is around competitor mapping. Who is prominent on the competitive radar, and are there other areas where you think there’s momentum? 

My view is that if you’re overly concerned with competitors, you’ve already lost. It’s not always a popular opinion. When you see another company launch something, there’s probably been years of work put into it – should this really trigger a reaction? Sometimes it’s best to simply observe and see how it unfolds to learn and take appropriate action. Of course, when a competitor launches something new, there can be a hint of panic for some - a worry that we’ve missed the boat. I advise internally that yes, we want to lead and be first in certain areas but in some cases, we want to watch and learn – being a first mover isn’t always the advantage people assume, and being best in market trumps being first in the market. Ultimately, we need to relentlessly focus on serving and delighting our current and future customers – clients and candidates – rather than focusing on our competition. 

I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on innovation and growth in response to Covid-19. What are the challenges? Where are you and your business on your transformation journey? Has this accelerated or decelerated since COVID? Please respond in the comments below, or in your own #TalentVoices post.