The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
Welcome to The Breakthrough Hiring Show! We are on a mission to help leaders make hiring a competitive advantage.
Join our host, James Mackey, and guests as they discuss various topics, with episodes ranging from high-level thought leadership to the tactical implementation of process and technology.
You will learn how to:
- Shift your team’s culture to a talent-first organization.
- Develop a step-by-step guide to hiring and empowering top talent.
- Leverage data, process, and technology to achieve hiring success.
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 168: Navigating staffing in uncertain times: Insights from Hugo Malan, President of Kelly Science, Engineering, Technology & Telecom
In today’s unpredictable economy, businesses must navigate shifting market conditions while maintaining efficiency and resilience.
Our host James Mackey and Hugo Malan, President of Kelly Science, Engineering, Technology, and Telecom, explore the power of a mixed labor strategy - a dynamic approach that blends full-time hires with temporary and project-based workers. Hugo explains how this strategy helps companies stay agile, control costs, and mitigate risks in an evolving landscape.
They also discuss the future of work, with AI-driven candidate screening and the shift from filling seats to solving business problems.
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
Our host James Mackey
Follow us:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/82436841/
#1 Rated Embedded Recruitment Firm on G2!
https://www.g2.com/products/securevision/reviews
Thanks for listening!
Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, james Mackey. We've got a very special guest today, hugo Milan. He's the president of Kelly Science, engineering, technology and Telecom. Hugo, welcome to the show. Thanks, james. Very excited to have you on the show today, and we got some really cool topics to discuss. Before we jump into it, though, I would love it and I'm sure the audience would if you could tell us a little bit about yourself. We jump into it, though. I would love it and I'm sure the audience would if you could tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:I'll give you the 30 minute snapshot. I grew up in South Africa, studied electronic engineering there and then subsequently in England as well. My first job was with a startup in London, but after that I spent a while working at Los Alamos in the US for a consulting firm in New York, an investment bank in New York, and about 15 years or so ago I ended up in the staffing industry.
Speaker 1:Okay, nice, and currently you are running a pretty significant large department of Kelly Services that I believe spun off about five years ago. Is that right? Not totally but in terms of a separate department within Kelly Services, what I mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I can give a bit of context. Kelly Services is a large public company. We've been around for 75 years. We currently have four reporting divisions, of which science, engineering, technology and telecom is one, and out of that division, of which I'm the president, we provide staffing services, permanent placement services, sow, solutions of various kinds, outsourcing services, but all under that general umbrella of things that fall into the science, engineering, technology and telecom categories.
Speaker 1:That's right, and one of your strategies right now is growth through acquisition. If I'm not mistaken, I think within the last year you acquired Motion Recruitment. Is that right?
Speaker 2:That's right. We're very excited about welcoming the Motion team into the Kelly family. Motion is a very well-established brand, particularly in the IT space, but interestingly they also had a telecom business or have a telecom business, and so it strengthened our telecom offering. They also have a strong government business that strengthens the Kelly government service offering. So it's been complementary on multiple different fronts, including into one of our other divisions. They have an RPO organization called Seven Step and that's strengthened Kelly's RPO profile and offering.
Speaker 1:So it's essentially like acquiring a portfolio of companies.
Speaker 2:It's been a remarkably complementary fit, that's awesome. It did strengthen our capabilities and our scale in a number of different dimensions simultaneously.
Speaker 1:That's great. It sounds like you've been busy.
Speaker 2:It's kept us up a little bit, but it follows from an acquisition we made a little over three years ago of Softworld, which was a strong IT organization, but they also had a significant science business and a government business, and so all these pieces we're putting together and creating a formidable offering in these four disciplines for our clients in North America.
Speaker 1:I love it and I'm excited to learn more about it. As a first topic for today, I think it'd be great to give folks a lay of the land with the hiring market within the US, as well as generally discussing the economy. There's a lot of uncertainty in the market right now. In your position, I'm sure you have access to a lot of data information through Kelly's solutions to understand how essentially the market as a whole in aggregate is thinking about full-time employment versus temp placement and leveraging staffing companies essentially putting together mixed labor strategies. I would love to get your thoughts on what's going on through your customers' heads right now, when they're thinking about how volatile the economic environment is right now, and what kind of conversations are you having with them about how they should think about leveraging Kelly Services? It?
Speaker 2:certainly is an interesting time right now. On many different fronts, we've gone through some, I'd say, turbulent waters in the last 24 months. On the one hand, if we look on the positive side, there's been meaningful economic growth, both in 2024 and 2023, we saw meaningful economic growth and that's great and there's also been significant job creation. If you look at the job reports every month, as we do avidly, you'll see in some months it's been significant. In other months it's been a little disappointing, but there's been consistent job creation over the last two years. So these are good things.
Speaker 2:It's great to have both job creation and economic growth and generally that's been good for the staffing industry. If you go back, even 20 years, whenever there's been positive GDP growth, there's typically been positive staffing industry revenue growth. That's not been the case over the last two years. If you look at the numbers of the public companies are reporting in general, or if you look at institutions like the SIA and the ASA and the numbers that they publish, then those have not been great. So it's a complex economic environment to navigate and we're having a lot of discussions with our clients about how they are working through this. What has been surprising is from a staffing perspective particularly, but I think economically speaking more generally. What's been surprising is the fact that there's been significant job creation inside companies but less utilization of staffing companies to help with that, both in terms of the permanent hiring and in terms of temp labor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really interesting, and I was reading one of the articles you wrote on staffing industry analysts and I believe one of the points you made was in your article. Did I clearly articulate that? Is that right, yeah?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that we think has particularly affected the use of staffing companies for doing permanent hiring inside client companies. What we identified through some internal research and analysis inside Kelly is that there's a ratio that's really significantly correlated in fact inversely correlated with permanent placement revenue in the staffing industry, and that ratio is the number of job seekers to the number of job openings. And it makes intuitive sense If that ratio goes up in other words there's many more job seekers for the available job openings it becomes pretty easy for a company to fill these openings. They put a little ad on LinkedIn and they get lots of applicants. If that ratio shrinks, on the other hand, then when you put a little ad on LinkedIn, you might not get that many applicants and that's when you start looking to outside help.
Speaker 2:That ratio has been elevated significantly over historical levels for the last 24 months. Now you can pose the question why is that? And that's a whole interesting discussion in and of itself. But it does mean that I think at the high level you can say that the job market has become more liquid. There's more applicants out there pursuing opportunities, or it could be more applicants applying to more opportunities, and we can talk about the structural reasons for that, but in part it's things like remote work. In part it's things like pay rate transparency laws that have been passed in a number of different states that make it easier to evaluate jobs and easier to apply more broadly. But when job markets get more liquid, there's somewhat less of a need for the services of staffing companies.
Speaker 2:Now whether this will persist is a whole separate question.
Speaker 1:Right, it's just such an interesting time to be in staffing and recruiting over the past five years, which is also, I'm sure it'd be very interesting for you because you've been with Kelly now for about five years, so it's like you came in during this time of the economy going through so many different cycles and unexpected shifts, so I'm sure that's been pretty cool to experience Cool and stressful and everything in between, but at least stimulating, right.
Speaker 1:It really has your brain working, I'm sure, thinking about these different solutions. So it's exciting. But if you're like me, one of my companies Secure Visions, an RPO firm and it's definitely been some late nights, some stressful times trying to think through how to best service our customers and think through a business strategy. One of the most challenging obstacles that we've had to overcome is really evaluating data our own data, market data to drive strategy and value for customers. Because back before 2020, before COVID, we had years of data that was somewhat consistent and we could see potentially shifts over time, but then, essentially as soon as COVID happened, all of our metrics got totally skewed and the data has been a little bit harder to interpret over the past several years. So it's definitely been interesting trying to navigate that.
Speaker 2:I couldn't agree more. I think stimulating is perhaps the most positive word you can use to describe it. But yeah, a lot of the historical I think what you could call conventional wisdom in the staffing industry really got upended to some extent during COVID. But I think everybody understood that there was going to be a tremendous contraction during COVID because of everything that was going on. And then there was the post-COVID surge, which was also somewhat similar to historical recession or post-recession surges. It's since then where it's been really puzzling, and I think it's because there were some structural changes that got accelerated through COVID and they've just persisted. So we're in maybe an enduring new normal. It doesn't mean that I'm negative about the future of the staffing industry, by the way. I just think it means that we have to evolve and create a value proposition that strongly resonates with the new needs of our clients, which is not exactly the same as it was five years ago.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, no, it's definitely. There's a massive opportunity because the reality too is a lot of staffing companies won't evolve right. They're still gonna be doing the same playbook they've been doing for 30, 40 years. They're not going to be thinking forward thinking.
Speaker 1:And what you were saying about available talent on the market and folks applying for more jobs and more readily ready to shift to new opportunities I could definitely see that impacting per emplacement. That makes sense. But what puzzles me a little bit more is on the temp side, because it does seem intuitive that, okay, if there's more market uncertainty, you're going to see a higher percentage of companies leveraging essentially more temp workers. So I've been trying to figure out, thinking about our conversation today ahead of time. I read your article and I was still trying to think through what else could be driving that type of shift and I was wondering maybe companies are hiring more 1099s directly. I don't know if that would go into your staffing metrics in terms of temp, if that number is calculated in there or what might be going on it is and that could be playing a role.
Speaker 2:It could also be that some of the technology platforms where you can source talent directly are eroding the market a little bit, but if you look at the total penetration of those sorts of platforms versus the size of the staffing market, it's still comparatively small. And one of the things that we've been analyzing inside Kelly and where I think we formed a point of view to try and explain exactly what you're referring to, which is it's uncertain times and yet people are not using temp labor.
Speaker 2:That seems like a strange reaction, you think, at uncertain times you want to create flexibility in your labor expense, a natural way to do that is to turn to a staffing company and say I'm going to hire 20% of my people through the staffing company so that I can flex that up and down more easily. We've not been seeing that. So what we found when we really looked at the data and what we believe might be driving this is we think there's a fundamental shift in how companies perceive risk. That's relatively unusual, but it's remained in place now for about two and a half years. It's unusual in that in normal times and I use that normal over a very long kind of time frame, the near-term risk is considered less significant than longer-term risk, and that makes intuitive sense. The near-term you can predict with a high degree of certainty. The medium and the long-term it gets cloudier and cloudier. So normally, if you think of risk lying along a curve, that curve kind of slopes up as you get further out in time. Now, if you think of what drives the use of temp labor, it's frequently short-term projects that you're going to do in the relatively near future, whereas people that you hire permanently to the company are people that you expect to be around for a longer or even a very long time, and permanent hiring, we think, is driven by a view on medium and long-term risk.
Speaker 2:Temp hiring, we think, is more driven by a view on near-term risk, what we've seen. There are ways to measure the view on near-term risk. The one we've been using is something called the Anxious Index, which is published by the Philadelphia Fed, where they literally survey a large group of forecasters and ask them what do you think is the risk of a recession in the next quarter or a contraction in the next quarter? So, very much measuring near-term risk. It's called the Anxiety Index, and this Anxiety Index spiked up in 2023 unexpectedly, even though the economy was growing. Companies were hiring people. This thing just shot up. It remained pretty elevated it came down in 24, but it's still elevated versus historical norms.
Speaker 2:We think that's the reason why companies were investing in hiring people permanently internally. They weren't using agencies for that either, as we talked, but they stopped really using a lot of temp labor because they had a negative perception of near-term risk. They were afraid that there was going to be a recession soon, but their outlook on the medium and longer term were pretty good. Interest rates are going to come down. We're going to get through the election and so on. Now, here we are today, and so what does that mean for the future? I think, even though we were all expecting a degree of stability and certainty post-election, that's perhaps not exactly what we're seeing. So we still have a fairly high degree, I think, of near-term uncertainty, and that might mean that we are in for a somewhat depressed temp staffing market for a while.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting and I don't know about your business, but my RPO company post-election actually saw a rapid increase in demand very quickly in terms of our lead generation funnels, business pouring in, customers coming back and very quickly, when news of tariffs started to come out, which fueled a lot more economic uncertainty, we start to see those inbound funnels start to contract again. So it was interesting. We saw an initial optimism in the marketplace post-election and then very quickly slowing down again a month and a half later. It's pretty wild At this point.
Speaker 1:There's been so many little ups and downs that I've seen over the past couple of years. It's whatever. There's this uptick. There's been so many little ups and downs that I've seen over the past couple of years. It's whatever. There's this uptick, this swift uptick in demand. Let's just wait for three to six months and see how consistent this is going to be. We're seeing more consistent growth. Last year was certainly better than 2023. But again, every once in a while, we'll get this rapid increase that lasts like a month or two and then it settles down again.
Speaker 2:It's funny that dynamic that you describe. I've heard many people out of industry now refer to that there was a month of optimism, yeah, and everybody was talking about restarting deferred projects and ramping up hiring and so on. And then a lot of folks will say let's see what the impact is going to be of some of the steps.
Speaker 1:And so I'm wondering, like, from your perspective, just being at the enterprise level in our industry and having access to so much data through various customers in various industries, what are folks that you're speaking to, the executives you're speaking to, how are they thinking about potential impacts from tariffs, even if maybe they're not in an industry that's directly impacted? I'm wondering how much executives at larger organizations are thinking about tariffs in relation to their hiring plans.
Speaker 2:I think folks are thinking that tariffs could be very impactful. It obviously depends on where and which industry they sit in and where in the value chain in that industry. But even something as simple as steel tariffs, that's an input cost for many industries and that input cost needs to be offset somewhere, whether it's in higher prices, in the finished goods that they then sell on or simply reduce profits. But somehow that impact is going to be felt and that's going to ripple through to their suppliers as they start cutting back on what they purchase and what services they purchase, including staffing services and so on. So there's definitely a broad rippling effect that will happen across the economy, and I think we're seeing that sort of impact play out from a number of different angles, all of which are very difficult to predict at this point. On the one hand, there are steps that could end up really stimulating the economy, but there are other steps that could do the opposite.
Speaker 2:If, right now, we are seeing significant steps to reduce, for example, the labor force in the federal government, if that simultaneously affects hundreds of thousands of people, as it might, then that's a significant amount of spending in the market that's likely to contract in the near term. Many of those are highly skilled individuals, and that could ultimately provide a boon for the economy, as all these skilled workers find ways to contribute in the private sector, but it's going to be a wrenching, not least for the people involved, but also for the economy. A wrenching few months, or maybe even a few years. Difficult to predict, though, because there's so many factors mitigating in different directions, because there's so many factors mitigating in different directions. Precisely what the impact is going to be, I think, remains to be seen, because, certainly, some of the steps that are being taken are very much geared towards creating jobs inside the US, and so it really depends how these play out over time and which are the bigger impacts.
Speaker 1:That's what I've been thinking a lot about is how tariffs are going to specifically impact staffing, and of course, that's a complex question because you have the macro impact on the economy, but then you also have job creation within the United States within certain industries, which may become high growth.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. Maybe they might even contract a little bit in terms of overall revenue growth. Possibly I don't know, but then they're also increasing. They're going to have to increase headcount. So does that then mean that, of course, short-term risk would be incredibly high. So, by that method of thinking, they would still potentially steer away from temp staffing, but the reality is, in order to produce, they're going to have to ramp up staffing. So I'm almost wondering if we're going to see staffing companies that specialize in impacted industries increase, have a lot more demand as a result of these tariffs and even if these tariffs are delayed or for several more months, I think, just the threat of tariffs, even if all of them don't go through for the next potentially several years, I could still see companies in the United States upping their manufacturing within the United States just to mitigate the risks. Should, even if it's not now, trump come back and implement tariffs six months from now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no there's clearly a reshoring trend and that could, like you say, lead to increase employment levels in the US and then the staffing industry would benefit from that, but I think it's really difficult to predict. But my advice would be is to anybody trying to navigate this stay nimble and agile. It's just as important for our clients to have flexibility in their cost structure as it is for staffing companies to have a nimble and an agile approach to planning their business. But I think if staffing companies continue to focus on the strong parts of our value proposition, which is we're really good at sourcing talent, finding great matches for our clients, but we're also really good at providing that flexible labor structure that allows you to more effectively navigate turbulent times Increasingly, staffing companies and we're very focused on this are taking the next step, and that's providing more comprehensive solutions, and that can be a solution in the form of an SOW, where we commit to providing a team with a certain skill profile on an ongoing basis.
Speaker 2:It can be an SOW where we take on a piece of project work and commit to delivering, whether it's a chunk of software code or a piece of engineering design work, or a piece of radio frequency optimization work in a region for a telecom company. Those are the kinds of solutions where we see a lot of demand. In fact, if anything, there's accelerating demand in those areas, even as the demand for traditional staffing services continues to be. You're not as strong as we'd all like it to be. So I think by focusing on being a solution provider to your client and asking first, what is the business problem you're trying to solve, what's the technical problem you're trying to solve? And now let's devise a labor strategy around that, you can ultimately be in a strategic conversation with your client. That's much more meaningful than just asking do you need people?
Speaker 1:To pivot the conversation a little bit, which is, I think it's still relevant to the SOW conversation how are you thinking about incorporating technology and AI into your solutions, whether that's behind the scenes, with your internal staff to drive efficiencies, or what you're thinking about putting together solutions for your customers? What are your thoughts on leveraging AI?
Speaker 2:We're very excited about AI. We're aggressive adopters and experimenters at this point because there seems to be so many different places in the staffing value chain in particular where AI can play a meaningful role. There's interesting things to be done on the sales front in terms of identifying clients that may be in need, automatically scouring the market for buying signals, whether it's new hires, new project starts, new capital commitments, and so on. Many of these you can find from public sources, and AI is particularly good at scouring through a vast trove of information and narrowing it down to the things that's relevant for you. So we think that's a really interesting opportunity.
Speaker 2:On the recruiting side, the opportunity is at least as interesting, if not more, sourcing talent again.
Speaker 2:Scouring thousands or even millions of profiles to find just the right folks for a particular job description is a very obvious application automatically reaching out to candidates in a personalized way, gauging their interest, doing some pre-screening questions and there's some really convincing audio avatars these days and even video avatars that can do that.
Speaker 2:So that's clearly the way things are going to go, and we're excited about that for two reasons.
Speaker 2:One, it's going to drive significant jumps in productivity in how we do our business, which is going to create additional resources for us to reinvest and get even more sophisticated on these fronts.
Speaker 2:But two, I think from a recruiter perspective, it's going to change their day and some of the somewhat more routine and maybe even somewhat tedious activities are going to be taken over by AI and they'll be able to spend their time doing the things that they are distinctively good at and that only they can do, which is really understanding what are the subtle elements that drive success from the client's perspective in a particular role. The things that's not stated in the job description but that you can tease out through a thoughtful conversation with the client and, similarly, with the candidate. What are the aspirations that are not showing up in their resume or in their application but that would make them really gravitate towards a particular role and ultimately be successful in it. And those sorts of subtle human interactions the moment and I think for many years still only humans can do, and if we can spend more of our time on those and a little less of our time on the tedious activities, that's a win for everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think so, and I think that the staffing companies that are really going to thrive in the future are going to be the early adopters to AI technology, and I've made a big bet on that recently, starting an AI company that is primarily focused on servicing the staffing industry.
Speaker 1:I think there's a few primary reasons. Right, it's like, literally, your business is hiring, so it makes sense to optimize there. Also, I think it's something where it's in order to efficiency gains are directly correlated to revenue, and so I think that for that reason it's, they're going to be early adopters. And then, thirdly, there's services companies that are a little bit lower, smaller margins than software companies, and so looking for those efficiency gains, not only from a speed to additional revenue, but also looking at margins and making those healthier and bigger for a staffing company, I think is also going to drive early adoption. And I just think it's in order to build a successful agency and to compete, like I think a lot of old school agencies are really just going to get left behind, and I think it's going to happen at Accelerated Clip, like over the next few years. Agreed, agreed.
Speaker 2:I think it is going to be kind of a shakeout in the market. We've already seen a pretty severe shakeout in the market because of the challenging economic conditions for the staffing industry. Over the last two years it's been a full-blown staffing recession and that always causes a realignment and an adjustment in the state of play. But AI, I think, is going to drive that to a next level still. So these are interesting years to be in our industry.
Speaker 1:When you think of AI in your business, I'm wondering do you see it because obviously this is my world, I'm thinking about this stuff a lot Do you see it as incorporating it for more of a revenue generating motion or value creation motion, or do you look at it from an earnings and profitability perspective to optimize your delivery?
Speaker 2:I think the impact is going to be on many different fronts. You could think of it as it's going to accelerate the productivity of your existing salespeople and recruiters. So, with the same number of people or the same cost base, you're going to do a lot more generate more revenue, make more placements, etc. That's a good thing, and that ultimately means that your bottom line is going to expand significantly as well. That assumes that there's more demand out there for you to go and capture as you grow all this productivity. If there isn't, you could say I'm going to do the same that I do today, but with fewer people that are in more interesting and meaningful roles, but in a highly accelerated productivity environment. But that, too, accelerates and expands your bottom line.
Speaker 2:The impact is as you drive productivity and you drive that up and down the value chain. It can drive the bottom line, it can drive the top line. It can drive both. Certainly, it would be our intent to drive both pretty aggressively. We want to do a lot more with the people that we have today. Is there a specific use case within AI and staffing that excites?
Speaker 1:you the most right now? Lot more with the people that we have today. Is there a specific use case within AI and staffing that excites you the most right now?
Speaker 2:It's a good question.
Speaker 2:The traditional, the holy grail of staffing automation that everybody has chased now for many years is the perfect match Having an AI ingest and part and interpret a job description and do the same with thousands or millions of profiles, and then pull these things apart into skills and experiences and perhaps refer to some sort of a taxonomy but eventually use that analysis to create the perfect match.
Speaker 2:I think what we've learned is the match only gets so good because there's always things that's not in the job description and there are always things that's not in the job description and there are always aspirations and even sometimes skills and experiences that are not fully captured on the resume.
Speaker 2:So we might be nearing a point of diminishing returns there in terms of additional investment, because so many people have run at that and they've made some pretty good matching algorithms, but nobody's made a perfect one. So I think that's an interesting use case, but I'm not sure how much more there is to do there. I think the use case to me that's intriguing is doing the first part of the interview in some sort of an automated manner, but doing it not as a tedious set of questions but as an interactive experience that's ultimately fulfilling for the candidate. Ai seemed to be pretty good at that initial superficial conversation, not the ultimately in-depth brokering that only an experienced recruiter can do, but the initial kind of survey discussion to see if there's at least a potential fit. And there may be ways to gamify that and make it a bit more amusing and entertaining. And of course you can have an AI engaged in a thousand of those simultaneously without breaking a sweat, whereas traditional recruiters don't scale quite as effectively.
Speaker 1:I'm really happy you said that because, literally, the company I started June that's what it does and I came to that conclusion that it's going to be the most valuable use case for staffing and, honestly, I think, hiring in general. From 10 years of experience running an RPO and then honestly, on the podcast I invited on all of the CEOs of every recruiting tech company that's incorporating AI into their solution and we've been having conversations about this for a long time and so I got to learn from literally all of the CEOs building these products and then my own experience like in-house and building an agency and what I really came down to is that like high level evaluation turning like large applicant pools into qualified candidate shortlists, where that's a very compelling use case. Very compelling use case and it's a way that we're thinking about. It is essentially optimizing inbound recruiting for a more significant ROI and contribution for hiring and essentially, when somebody applies to an inbound job, june automatically reaches out to conduct all the pre-screening questions. So it's like as soon as somebody hits apply, they're getting outreach and follow-up to essentially answer what we would consider knockout questions.
Speaker 1:Right, like those questions where a recruiter is on the phone for five minutes and they know whether or not the person is a fit, and so they can avoid like going through all the resumes, all that kind of stuff. They can avoid doing all the scheduling right and they can be scheduling with folks that aren't necessarily going to be the right fit and they can just essentially evaluate a short list of people. So that's a really, I think, one of the most exciting use cases right now, and what we're doing is we are like signing folks in different industries, but our primary focus is dialing into staffing and recruiting and for people tuning in Huga and I did not discuss this before, so when he was giving like, when he was talking about this use case, that was totally random. But I'm really happy that's what you said, because it makes me feel even better and feel like we're on track to build the right solution for the market. So that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think if you guys can create a better mousetrap there, then certainly the world, the staffing, will be the path to your Peter. Pass your door.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll just have to see Any final thoughts. We're wrapping up on our time here, but if there's anything else you want to share with the audience about what you're doing or what Kelly's doing, we have a few minutes to discuss that.
Speaker 2:The final words. I think, in terms of speaking to our potential clients listening out there at Kelly, we are very focused on being able to provide a solution that solves your business problem, and we're able to operate across the full spectrum of potential solutions. So if you just need a permanent placement, we can help you with that. If you need traditional staffing, we can help you with that. But if you need a solution that encompasses a team of people that's being supervised, we can do that or deliver a project. Or if you want to outsource an entire piece of your business, and we can do that for you, onshore or offshore, with mixed bill rates, whatever is optimized. So that's really the approach that we are taking and it seems to be working quite well for us. So I'd offer that as free advice to my staffing competitors even out there. But I think if we're going to be successful as an industry going forward, we have to start thinking in terms of how we're solving the business problems of our clients and not just how we provide 10-blamer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'm really excited for you and for Kelly. I think it's been great getting to know you a little bit and I think what makes you different in your background as well, versus a lot of executives and staffing, is you're actually you have an engineering background, right Cambridge, so it's I think, when you're thinking about SOW work and creating custom solutions, you're probably you and your team are probably much better positioned in order to do that most effectively versus, I think, probably a lot of staffing execs that have more of a business ops go-to-market background.
Speaker 2:I will say it does take an investment going down this path. You need folks that are good at identifying solutions, designing solutions, pricing solutions and then running the projects. It's all well and good to sell an SOW project. The challenge is delivering an SOW project. So it does take a bit of a different skill set. It's not easy to step from just the traditional staffing world into that space, but it's very rewarding and I think that is where our future lies.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it, Hugo. Thank you so much for joining us today. I know our audience is going to love this episode, so I appreciate you coming on the show.
Speaker 2:My pleasure. Thanks for the invitation, James.
Speaker 1:All right and for everybody tuning in. Thank you so much for joining us, Take.
