Building a Talent Acquisition Team with Jim Riney & Ryan Southern

The core building blocks that we're kind of saying is that every role has to have a functional responsibility set that the role's tied to. Right? So this is like, what do they do on a day in and day out basis? Can they solution design, can they project manage, can they do some of these things from a task standpoint? And largely those responsibilities is kind of what we're earmarking against. How do we rate performance beyond just KFIs? But it's also how do we start to interview for tangible experience that matches up with that right to say, does this person coming in actually have the capability that's needed to drive these responsibilities of their role?

So hello and welcome to the show. I'm Johnny Campbell, CEO and co founder of Social Talent. And this week on the podcast we're speaking with Jim Riney and Ryan Southern from Fries and Nichols about the concept of skills first hiring and a skills first approach to tal. Jim and Ryan, you're both very welcome to the podcast. Maybe starting with you, Jim, could you give the audience a little introduction to yourself, explain where you are, where you're from, what you do, and maybe a little about the organization you're working in today.

Sure. Thanks Johnny, Appreciate the time. So my name is Jim Ryney. I'm the talent acquisition manager here at Fries and Nichols. I sit in our headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, which is just 30 miles west of where Brian is over there in Dallas. And my career summed up in less than 60 seconds. Started at a recruiting agency, recruiting engineers for clients in the Dallas, Fort Worth area. Went to work for one of those 3,000 person National Engineering firm, which eventually was acquired by a giant global 50,000 person engineering firm. Weaved my way through different operational systems, process oriented positions there and eventually came to Fries and Nichols to build and lead the first talent acquisition team here about three or four years ago.

And Ryan, over to you as well. You know, you're obviously the more handsome, more impressive, dashing of the two here. And from what I gather, you know, Jim just, you know, tries to keep up. But seriously, tell me what you do and you're a little less in the less time in the organization, Is that right, Brian?

That's right. Yeah. I let Jim carry my pints around after work. That's basically how this works, Johnny. So yeah, so I've been here for about 16, 17 months now. My career a little bit different. Like most people in the talent space, I knew this was exactly what I wanted to do my whole life.

Right.

Only joking. So I started in sales in the pharmaceutical space carried a bag. Eventually kind of moved into division management and regional management. And somewhere along the line, the head of sales enablement left. And I kind of raised my head and said, I think I could do this. Give me a shot. And they said, all right, we'll give you a shot. And two days later, we were purchased by Reckitt, Ben Keyser. So I kind of assumed I was out of a role, but spit almost a decade at Reckitt. So starting out as sales enablement leader in North America, they moved me to hr, which at the time I thought was kittens and rainbows. Johnny, there's no metrics at HR coming from sales. Right. But I left there as their head of global leadership development, covering kind of all of Western Europe and the Americas. Spent a couple of years at Korn Ferry as the head of global talent. And then I've been here at Freezing Nichols for the last 17 months trying to clean up Jim's mess.

That's right.

I think there's no problems with kittens and rainbows, but there's a lot of cats to herd in the HR world. That's the difficult part. Stray cats. Wildcats. Very much so. So for. For those of us who aren't familiar, maybe starting with you, Jim, tell us who Freeze and Nickels are, what they do, how long the business has been there, and maybe for additional context, you wouldn't mind sharing what was the TA approach before you joined?

Sure, yeah. So I tell people we're an old company, but a young team. So this year we're celebrating our 130th anniversary. It wasn't until year 127 they decided they needed a talent acquisition team. So for context, Freeze and Nichols, we're a national civil engineering firm. We do the design and consulting related to civil infrastructure, water, transportation projects, and we're about 1300 people. We span from Virginia on up to Colorado. Been expanding our footprint and also growing new practices. So they decided that, hey, we're going to grow, and, you know, we need to enable that growth by bringing on a talent acquisition team. Just before you know it, really, the order came with our lead of hr, Jeanette, then me, then Ryan. Well, when Jeanette arrived about five or six years ago, my favorite story as far as the context of the hiring environment at the time, I think it was one of her first days here, and she heard there. There was a recruiter here, what I would call an HR recruiter, more somebody that processes hires, if you will. Just. That's what she was asked to do at the time. And so hiring manager came in, dropped a resume on her desk and said, hey, we just hired this person, we're going to pay her $120,000 and she starts on Monday. And our leader, you know, overheard and then the hiring manager was out. Our leader came and she was like, what just happened? And is that the way things work around here? And essentially the answer was yes. So that's how hiring was done. So that gives you a little bit of context to some of the challenges that we faced walking into the environment and helping people to understand what is talent acquisition, what value do we have and, and how can we do this better? So it's been a fun challenge, but definitely change management has been a huge piece of this.

Back in 21, it was a different labor market to today. Perhaps we recorded this at the end of 24, some area the same, I guess unemployment is low, it was very low then, but the labor market was experiencing what we now look back at as the busiest amount of hiring we've ever seen. Hiring volumes went way up in every sector, every role, they're about double in the US what they are today according to latest standards. So there's twice as many people moving around the market. Attrition was super high. Most organizations in the 20s, even the 30s in some organizations. And you were hiring difficult, skilled talent as well, Jim. And including in that was building a recruiting team in an environment where it's hard, you know, hard to find every town, but particularly hard to find recruiting talent at the right price because you could find recruiters if you pay them several hundred thousand euros or dollars, but that's probably out of the question. So tell me about the decisions you made around building out your team and putting in what we all might call a more formal talent acquisition structure.

Sure. So, yeah, starting, you know, building my first team, leading my first team and doing that during the great resignation or the great reshuffle where, you know, you can find enough recruiters. That was, that was my first big challenge. And so I had to figure out, okay, we got to do something different here, you know, looking for experienced recruiters with that perfect resume that, or at least what I had perceived to be the perfect resume, it's not going to work. So we decided we were going to grow our own recruiters, if you will, turn them into the recruiters that we were hoping to have. And so that's where I'd read a lot about, heard a lot about skills based hiring and didn't really know how to go about it. So roughly I started Just by thinking about, okay, what skills are going to make a successful recruiter in this organization, obviously varies by organization and really giving some thought to what those are and then beginning to use that in the selection process, you know, creating behavioral questions in order to select for those and measure candidates and select those people in putting in a talent acquisition learning program eventually to powered by social talent to help grow those recruiters and develop them and give them experiences that are going to help them grow and develop as recruiters as well. So that was really kind of my first step forward when it came to skills based hiring. And I, I was really intrigued by the concept. I, you know, wanted it, wanted to do it at scale, wanted to do it more, but I think I lacked a lot of the, the experience, the knowledge, the, you know, the vernacular even to, to be able to, to do that on a larger scale. And that's really why the story then moves on to, you know, when we brought Ryan in and what he helps offer as well.

But going back to Jim, when you were thinking about these recruiters and doing the skills first approach, first of all, what were the kind of core skills, the main skills that you realized or identified for your organization you need to hire for? And then where did you end up finding them? Was it any particular roles or industries or profiles? Were there commonalities? And then maybe you wouldn't mind also sharing with me beyond obviously the learning path path, how did you, how did you give folks who had skills the knowledge and experience that perhaps skills on their own don't give you to do the role?

Sure. So one skill in particular that I figured out pretty quickly, we were going to need to see a recruiter and I still like the perfect term to describe it, but I called it the ability to push back. So again, we have an organization that's been doing just fine for 127 years hiring people. And here we are brought into the equation and we are, you know, we're taking on that process. We're, we're helping to shape how we hire people. And that was a disruption to the way things have been done. You know, people are used to doing it on their own. So I needed to find people that were willing to push back, you know, in a respectful and professional way of hey, we're going to, it's really, I guess it came down to change management, you know, needing somebody to be able to have those difficult conversations with hiring managers to, to help them, convince them to do something differently than they had been doing before. As far as where we found Those people, you know, in the, in. In the past, we've had. We. In. In one case, we had our talent acquisition coordinator who was looking to do more. She had the skills to. To. To do what we were asking her to do. We had to help. Bring. Help her see that. So that was In. In one case, we did that. We've also had success finding people who do have background, you know, people that. That similar to. To my experience that you cut your teeth in a very competitive environment in recruiting at an agency, particularly at a time where they're struggling just as much as we are to find talent. And I found that a lot of people are looking for something with more stability, with more opportunity for growth. You asked about how. How do we provide that opportunity? I think as a team, you know, I know Ryan's experienced this as well. Our. We've really pushed people into having those difficult conversations, those difficult situations. If we have a hiring manager who, you know, they're at a stadium, recruiter and hiring manager are having difficulty, we coach them through that. But I don't step in, you know, and oftentimes people will come straight to me and say, hey, can, you know, we've got this challenge, you know, can you help us solve it? And I'll say, you know, no, let's. Let's bring the recruiter in, or I'll let me talk to the recruiter and help them, arm them for that. That situation, doing role plays and giving them real experience. And then for me, the. What's fun to see is see them come out of that successful, and then they have a little more confidence, they're building their skills. And I often tell them, you know, I can tell that look on their face when they're, you know, dreading having a conversation. And then they have it, you know, I tell them, this is what growth looks like. This is development. You say you want development, you want growth. It's not always, you know, going to come, you know, through online learning. It's going to come through experience.

Yeah.

John, can I just add to that, like, briefly? I think. I think one of the things that's really interesting to think about and that maybe I didn't ask enough questions. Before I joined the history of the organization, it was very much kind of an apprenticeship model. Right. Like, you're talking about 200 to 300 people, what, as little as five or six years ago. Right, Jim? So we've really exploded in growth to where we're now nearing 1500. But largely, a lot of the hiring was based on. I really like, this person, I can put them under me. They'll learn the way that I do things and, you know, we'll kind of bring them up under the way that Fries and Nichols has always done it, going all the way back to. To like freeze in the 1800s, right? Like. And so I think one of the interesting things when I joined and kind of learned about what Jim's trying to do with the skills is we're really on a journey to try and get, you know, our senior leaders who largely have only ever worked here, and that's a really unique dynamic. But to get them to think beyond, like, hey, I really like this person, and to put them in a place where we can actually say, what are the tangible skill sets that. That are needed now at 1500 people and going forward, the 3000 people, right, that we haven't thought about in the past and really understanding that we have to take some chances on people that have skills that are going to help move things forward and then develop the skills that are actually going to provide sustainability and scalability long term. And that's a journey that we're still kind of on and figuring out as we go. But it was an interesting dynamic when I walked in the door because again, most of the time we didn't worry about skills because the feeling was we can teach them that we just need to bring them on because we enjoy being around them or they fit with our values.

So tell me, Ryan, about the talent parts of HR that did or didn't exist, you know, around the time you came in or in the years prior to you coming in. Like, what was the back. What was. What was there or not there in terms of training and development, talent progression, mobility opportunities, you know, a plan, succession planning process. Jim obviously came in to build up the hiring part of that, but what was there and not there when you came in that you. How did you prioritize what to then look at?

So the beauty in coming in was, you know, they were pretty honest about where we were as an organization, right? Like, we need somebody to come in and kind of be able to take this to the next level. Luckily, the organization really prides itself around continuous improvement. And they knew they wanted to get better, they just didn't know how. And so really when I came in, we had a fairly thriving Fries and Nichols University program, which largely org development was looked at as a training outfit and nothing really beyond that. We had done some rounds of succession planning, largely with very little pull through. And in some instances, Johnny, we didn't always even have the conversations afterwards to talk about what does development look like for these folks once they're on a plan? It's kind of like we put them on a plan, it went in a drawer, and then we carried on with our day. We have outrageously high engagement numbers at Free Nichols. Like, higher than I've ever seen in anywhere. I think they're almost north of 82% from an employee engagement standpoint. Yeah. So you have this weird dichotomy where, like, we. We didn't have a lot of things in place, but people really love being here. And so I think in the first week I started, I said, well, I've got to try and figure out, like, what is the first logical place to look at. And so I went through, you know, 4,000 some odd comments on the engagement survey. And largely like the narrative when I started was, people are leaving because they can't move up quick enough or they want more money and they're able to move and go somewhere else. And as I read through those comments, one of the things that really stood out to me was that people were leaving because they just didn't know what good look like or they didn't know what was expected of them in terms of really tangible outputs to be ready for the next role. And if you think about how we had kind of progressed as an organization, it made sense because largely you got moved up because the person in front of you got moved up and you had learned from underneath them. Right. So we kind of very quickly said, what do we do to allow for people to gain a little bit more understanding about what good looks like in a role, both from a technical standpoint, but also some of the softer skills that go into that. Um, and then we also said, how do we start to give people long term? And we're nowhere near this yet, Johnny. I just want to kind of let you know that right off the bat, but long term, move away from vertical career ladders and move towards where people can actually map out their careers based on the strengths, the skills, the experiences that they've had in the past and start to say, hey, I. I'm pretty good at all this. I'm a little bit good at this. Maybe I want to try a role over here. And I think that's kind of where we started from and the journey that we're on now.

I imagine the growth that you outlined helps. Right, because when you're growing fast, you create more opportunities for different experiences, roles, projects, which works well in this environment. But tell me, Ryan, like, when you look at skills first. Hiring. Jim, you referenced, obviously you'd heard about it, you wanted to look at it. You experiment it with it from your perspective, building at your own team, but on a scale level. Ryan, what do you think about skills first? A skill first approach to talent, Just that wider concept. What are the basic building blocks and how does it sequence in your experience? Either be it for freeze and nickels or for any organization of a similar size or larger. Listening.

Yeah, so we're, we're kind of using three core building blocks to be able to identify what talent looks like. And I think that's talent in terms of Jim's world of attracting it from the outside, but it's also looking at talent internally.

Right.

Like we mentioned succession planning. How do we use a little bit more well rounded approach than hey, this person's been in the role for a little while, let's throw them on succession or let's throw her on succession. The, the core building blocks that we're kind of saying is that every role has to have a functional responsibility set that the roles tied to. Right. So this is like, what do they do on a day in and day out basis? Can they solution design? Can they project manage? Can they do some of these things from a task standpoint? And largely those responsibilities is kind of what we're earmarking against how do we rate performance beyond just KFIs? But it's also how do we start to interview for tangible experience that matches up with that, right. To say, does this person coming in actually have the capability that's needed to drive these responsibilities of their role? The second thing that we're kind of looking at is more of a skill set standpoint or their capability. For us, we've kind of simplified this a little bit. Johnny. Again, this is a starting point where we've never done this. So we're looking at kind of behavioral competencies in the space. Like do they have an indication that they have high eq? Did they are able to communicate on a different level than some of their colleagues? Can they build resilience? Can they have some managerial courage along the way? Those types of competency sets that we know as talent professionals are critically important, but as an organization, we just never really thought about classifying people in that way. And then I think the third bucket, that's really interesting for us because Fries and Nichols, again, part of that engagement score that I alluded to earlier is based on the value set that's super strong. I mean, leads is all over the place. You can kind of see it in the background there on Jim's thing, it's on his shoulder. Right. But the third thing that we look at from a skills based standpoint is those kind of intrinsic identity pieces that exist. Like what are they driven by, what do they value as an individual? What are the kind of traits that they naturally tend to be inclined to? And so when you kind of combine that responsibility or those functional capabilities, your competencies and then that identity piece, we're able to kind of start to stitch together a viewpoint on what an individual who's successful in a role, not necessarily just an individual who's successful, but we start to be able to identify like this role needs this, what skills, what experiences, what things does the person that we're actually talking to have that would match up to that. And it doesn't mean that if they don't have something, we wouldn't take a chance on them, but at least we're taking an educated chance based on natural tendencies, based on kind of strengths and skill sets that exist versus just saying, hey, this person's been in engineering for a while. Let's, let's add them to the, to the pile.

How complex was that in terms of, you know, how many, how many different role categories are individual roles? Did you look at profile, how many values did you list? What are the behaviors, how many did you standardize taking those three buckets? What are the numbers behind all that in terms of its complexity?

So again like we, I can't even tell you the exact number of roles we. So on the operations side of our business, which is really the production side of the firm, we have engineering one through eight and then just about every other classification of role. So architect, electrical design professionals, urban planning, bimcad, construction management, all of them have kind of eight levels of roles. So you know, we're still working through this from a structure standpoint because I would argue we probably have 1500 people or 1300 people. Jim and what about 200 roles, individual roles that exist? So we had to figure out complexity for, for sometimes.

How do we start?

Yeah, yeah. And largely it was built because people wanted to be able to say, you can move from this to that. And that was how we looked at advancement. Right? Johnny? So the first thing that we started to do was to actually go through and identify what good looks like in those roles. So we brought in a third party consultant. We started to run focus groups with that consultant at different levels in the organization, leading self role, kind of leading teams, leading groups, leading strategy as a whole. And we started to say Listen, if you think about the role that you have, what are the identity pieces that are required to be successful? What are the skill sets or the competencies that we think most indicate that success is going to happen? And then from there, we started this siphon through a bunch of data points that we partner with kornvery on to pull out, like, experiences and accountabilities that a typical role may have. And so I think that took us about seven and a half months, Johnny, a lot of overtime to go through every role in operations. I think we finally mapped most of those roles in August. And now we are going through the process of bringing people who actually sit in those roles together from a focus group standpoint and say, do you see yourself in this profile? What do we need to add to it? How do we freeze and nicklify some of the definitions that are in there? And so I think between now and the end of the year, we've got about six functions left to go. And then the goal would be in January to start to actually roll the profiles out and allow for some of those responsibilities to relate to performance goals in 25, and then to start to also leverage some assessments to give a quantitative measure of where people's skill sets are.

So I'm interested to hear both of you think about this. But when I've talked about skills, a skills first approach at an organization level with different people, the analogy I use is kind of LEGO bricks, right? So let's say you take three categories. You listed Ryan, right? You could break it down to saying, okay, you've got four dot LEGO squares, eight dot LEGO squares, and two dot LEGO squares. And they could, you know, correspond to the values or behaviors or skills that you ought to have in jobs. And you have to define uniformity for the business. You know, if it's communication, communication can mean a red four. It's a red four brick. It's a, you know, it's a. Maybe it's a behavior or style. And, you know, communication is red. A different behavior will be a different color. And you have to agree on that across an organization because your roles are made up of a combination of bricks, a combination of four, two, and eight bricks. And, you know, you got to write down for each role, what is that? You know, what are the LEGO instructions for that particular role? And then, you know, there's a bit of flexibility, as there always is in building LEGO sets, right? You swap the odd thing in. But if you have that, you understand, you know, a common brick architecture with standardized, you know, definitions of what the colors are. And each role has a definition of how you, how you make the role compare made up of those different types of projects. Then you can begin to bring in other areas, such as how you measure that performance piece against those standard architecture, how you look at learning and gaps in learning and development and learning based on what's there, what's missing. Is that how you approach it, or you see it as well, to simplify it?

Yeah, I think so. And I mean, I think it's almost like you've worked here before. Johnny. Obviously, engineers, we love to tinker and build, but the I've.

I'm holding a LEGO character, by the way, is why I'm taking this. Ryan.

So, yeah, the LEGO analogy actually rings true because we're trying to, like, one of the things, like I said, future state, once we get all this launched, is to be able to have people actually build out their own career or kind of become their own career architect. Right. And one of the things that we started to play with is the building of different LEGO people that match different careers. That could happen. Right. So you may have the astronaut that just wants to go straight up through engineering, you may have a professor who's more interested in teaching disciplines. But I think that's ultimately what it is. And when you're able to get that core kind of architecture, the other thing that we're hoping that it'll do for us is we put a lot of people into roles because we assume that it's the next natural role for them to go into. Right. Or because Jim told me that he really wants to get promoted, and if we don't promote him, then we may lose him. So we end up putting him in a role knowing that there may be some questions about him being capable of doing the role. And then we wonder a year later why we're struggling in the role. And so I think providing that LEGO structure to say, hey, it doesn't mean we have to have all of this, but if we don't have the four reds and the two blues, it's going to be really hard for anybody to be successful. Now, the yellows, which are my skills, we can teach to some degree, but that's the goal, is that we're able to kind of say, at its core, this is the structure that needs to be in the role. If we lack this structure, then let's at least make an educated decision on do they have some other skills that can round this out? Does the team have some pieces that exist that may help that person be successful or Is it something that we need to pass and go back and cast a wider net to figure out who else can play that role?

Ryan. I was going to go back to Ryan asking about impact of this, but Jim, I thought I'd start with you as the kind of, as the alpha or beta team that maybe tried it out in terms of hiring into your recruiting team. How has this played out with your team like Ryan's talking about conceptually, what your whole organization's trying to do? Well, your team probably got a head start in this by a couple of years. So what does it look like today? How has it played out? What are the positives and what are the challenges that remain that you see from the approach you took to hiring the team and where they are today?

Sure, yeah. So I was going to say the structure, I think, is what, being an engineering company, I think the structure is actually very appealing to our hiring organization. And so I think that logically it makes sense. And so I think that the challenge for us is I want our team to, to really understand how do we, you know, how do we assess to these profiles? How do we measure, how do we, how do we identify those gaps, you know, or is having a gap okay, if so, what, what does that look like? And you know, development plans and you know, I, I, I've said that our, our remit in the beginning was just hire higher, higher. Well, now we want to hire quality. And we, you know, it's not just, you know, we love to track our numbers, but it's not just about our numbers. We want to obviously set people up for success and in their careers. So we've introduced the concept, I think that on our team we get the concept. We're now looking, as we're building out this structure that Ryan is talking about in these profiles, it's now how do we operationalize it? So we just had our annual HR retreat and we actually went through some scenarios as a whole team, matching the recruiters within HRBP with our compensation folks, with our organizational development folks, and really helping to help them seat have a different talent mindset. How does this all fit together? It's not just about the hire, but how do we set this person on a successful career track and retain that talent that's so hard to find? So I would say that our team is still in the beginning state. We get it conceptually, but now we're trying to put it into practice now that these profiles are built out. And how do we have those difficult conversations, frankly, when we find somebody that you Know, has some of those bricks, but maybe have some gaps there. You know, one of the things I find exciting is we as recruiters are now going to be advising on. There you go, Ryan, you might restart sentence. That's okay. So one of the things that I'm excited about from a talent acquisition standpoint is that we're now going to be able to identify those gaps. It having gaps doesn't mean that we're not going to hire them. It may just mean that we're walking in with a little more awareness and now advising and coaching the hiring team. Hey, this person, we think that it's going to be a good hire, but please be aware of this gap right here. And then Ryan's team can step in and say, here's how we can help address that gap. Here's how we advise you provide experiences to help address that gap. So it really starts to. Instead of four distinct, you know, HR teams that we have in this room, we're now starting to put it all together and see more of a broader talent mindset.

Johnny, I would. I would say too, like, I think future state, it gives Jim's team way more skin in the game. Right. Like, it's a.

For sure.

It's a much different place to work from a talent acquisition professional standpoint when you're seen as not just a recruiter, but you're actually seen as an expert in talent. And we're starting to see his team kind of evolve in pockets where they're making some suggestions around. You know, I know you think this person's the right person, but here's some of the gaps that we're afraid they have. And I think the next evolution is to be able to say, here's some of the gaps that they think they have. If you move forward, then how do we partner with HR to kind of illuminate those gaps, fill those gaps in from a development standpoint and kind of start the whole cycle from an entry point all the way through, as long as they're here at freeze and nickels.

So I love this. I've been talking to teams about this in terms of what does it mean for the recruiters just to take that audience for a second. It does make you much more of a talent business partner than a talent acquisition business partner, because acquiring the blocks, which is the kind of procurement side of ta, that's great, but you are still going to have to fill in the blanks in that you won't have all the blocks, and maybe you have to redesign what blocks we need Again, talking to your hiring manager and hiring team to go, hey, I know you think you want to build it this way. Can I make a suggestion that we build it a different way?

Absolutely.

Why? Because my data suggests I can do that for you faster, I can do it cheaper, I can do it better. But if I do it the way you originally came to me, it's going to be a bit more difficult. So I talk to these colleagues and we can do this together. To your point, Ryan, and to your point, Jim, it is a joined up solution. It isn't just a pure can you do your acquisition bit? Because the L and D people do their thing and it's different to the own design people. It's kind of saying, no, no, you gotta be that business partner to the hiring team to go solve my talent problems. I don't really care how you do it. I need a bunch of bricks. Figure it out for me, if I have them, you're going to develop them, you're going to hire them, I'm all ears. But I don't want to go to three different departments to solve this. I kind of want one person to come up with some solutions for me. I think that's kind of where this naturally leads an organization and leads a TA team, isn't it?

Absolutely.

And it's interesting too because the business acumen has to go through the roof. Right. And I think that's something that we sometimes overlook from an HR perspective is like we know HR or we know recruiting or we know talent development. But you really have to start to put a stake in the ground that I understand the business in a way that I can be really imperative to what comes out the other side of it. And so I think that's the evolution. Like Jim's team has done a phenomenal job of building relationships with key stakeholders. Like the next evolution is to say how do we move those relationships from just strong relationships that exist from a value standpoint and move them towards a relationship where we actually understand what the needs of the business are and can, can coach and advise to that.

Yeah. And I think the, the story is going to be more about the gaps. You know, we keep coming back to the gaps. Our, our industry is very unique. It's interesting as you look around and it's a tough market out there, tough job market out there for a lot of people. But in civil engineering, it's very different. So the one third of all jobs in civil engineering go unfilled each year. You know, 51% of engineering firms are turning away Work because they don't have the talent. And so I feel that in a way, it's a blessing for us because we, we have the opportunity to help. I mean, we have no choice. We've got to figure this out. You know, how do we address that need? And it's only going to get worse. Almost every conversation I have now I'd refer to this report from Light Cast, the rising storm. And it's. They use an analogy of a hurricane and making landfall and those outer bands, you know, being the first to hit land. You know, their, their analysis is that, you know, with, with the different demographic changes that are coming, you know, retirees with baby boomers, you know, you know, lower birth rate, you know, education, the changes in education, whatnot, that what we've seen the last few years is just a kind of a warning shot. It's that outer band of the storm and that the, the bulk of the storm has yet to hit land. So we've, we see that and we've been talking about this in a lot of our leadership meetings to talk about. We've got to start thinking differently. You know, the, the, the time when everybody ticked all those boxes is no longer exists. So we, we've got to start thinking more about those gaps and how do, how do we fill those gaps? And so I think that the story of the future of talent for us, maybe for the civil engineering industry, is, is identifying the gaps and learning how do we, how do we adjust for those.

Sorry, Ryan.

I would just say one thing, Johnny, just on that, like, I think one of the other pieces and people will resonate with this because when labor is hard to come by or when talent is hard to come by, like we get stuck in trying to find these unicorns or these purple squirrels that exist with like the exact years of experience that have done all of this. And I think what we're recognizing from those trends that Jim pointed out is like, we're gonna have to take a shot on identifying people's potential and putting them in a place to maybe try and learn quickly and fail quickly versus finding the purple squirrel to fill the role exactly as we need it today. Because that just doesn't exist.

Yeah, you remind me, Ryan. My kids a couple of weeks ago asked me, four young boys, they asked me, could we make some muffins? I was like, sure, I can make muffins. I've never made muffins in my life. And I asked Chatgpt for a recipe and spouted a recipe and required. I think it's sunflower oil was one of the ingredients. I have no sunflower oil in my home. I have olive oil in my cupboard. I'm like, will olive oil do? Turns out olive oil works just fine. If I wanted to stick to I need a particular type of sunflower oil that this recipe gave me, I'd be in trouble. In fact, there was a couple of ingredients. I was like, yeah, I don't have that book. Do I have something close? I think this is what we, you know, the solution thing is saying, you know, don't just stick to the exact recipe because that's going to be really hard to procure, probably expensive, it'll slow you down. It's kind of saying, will this do or can I, can I augment it with something else? Which to your point, requires a business acumen. The business acumen being analogy of don't worry, don't swap with that, that ingredient that will not work. This one, this one could work. Or my colleagues have showed me how we could get, get what we need with this other way. Deem your point on the talent market's really valid. I heard a fantastic presentation by a really good economist, labor economist, two weeks ago talking about the likely impact of the incoming administration on this, which is a very clear and vocal policy on immigration that's almost certainly going to drive a supply shock to labor. And although that's likely to be in the unskilled markets predominantly, there's an inevitable trickle up effect on semi skilled and skilled working eventually because you take this labor pool, which is almost certainly going to happen because it's within executive power to do come January, you're going to see during the course of 25 a further lessening of the supply of talent which is going to make it even harder. And you could have a demand increase because a lot of the taxation policies proposed but are, you know, most people would agree that they're going to likely lead to more investment by corporates in the U.S. you have a demand increase likely as supply retraction almost certain for talent in 25 makes it even harder to find. So I think if you're creating as a leader an environment where you have a talent team who are problem solvers, you know you'll survive if you're just doing your job, posting stuff on a job board, doing searches on LinkedIn based on a rec, you're hired, you're passing on resume days, you're screwed next year. I don't, you know, they don't survive the business acumen to go, I got to be creative. This market's getting harder next year. But in that is an opportunity for great talent acquisition folks, talent development folks to kind of do their good work. Because I think the organizations, the likes of Fries and Nichols and to Jim, your point, all engineering companies know that the lack of talent is what holds their growth back. So I think it puts talent in the front seat, in the driving seat of organizational strategy because without it you can't survive.

Absolutely. To me that's really exciting because we're having really, really thoughtful conversations at a very high level in the organization about talent that I've not seen before. And I think part of that is this organization, I think the way we operate. We were excited. We just won the Malcolm Baldrige Award for the second time. It's an award for national quality performance excellence by the federal government. And I think we're one of only 11, only 111 people have won. We're one of I think 10 that have won it twice. And what, what it really means is that we're an organization that really, we try to measure our performance and improve that, that continuous improvement culture that, that Ryan spoke to. So I think the way we think, we're always trying to think how can we do better, how can we, how, how can we do things differently in order to, to succeed? And so I'm really excited about the conversations that we're having at very high levels in the organization about talent and, and really helping change the way people think about talent and, and looking ahead and going, hey, we, we know there's even bigger challenges to come, but how do, how do we address that now? How can we be on the forefront so that we're not caught flat footed, you know, down the road?

And Johnny, I think it's also like obviously we're in the middle of an evolution, right? Like I'd love to be able to say here's the tangible outputs, but we're kind of building the plane as we're flying it, right? Oh, we don't really need this door. Let's toss it out of 30,000ft and find the one we do need. Right. But I think we're seeing some of the tangible impacts already play out. We made a really kind of proactive decision to say we're going to build this while we're launching it versus saying we're going to take three years, build this in isolation and, and see if it works. Right. And I, I've done something similar in the past, more on the sales side only looking at like sales capabilities, but we built it in an Isolation and then it flopped. We spent a ton of money, nobody engaged with it, nobody used it. So we're proactively talking about these things ongoing while we're building it. And like, you know I mentioned succession earlier. We've already seen people starting to talk in terms of here are the identity pieces from a succession candidate that we need to have and that's evolved into now we're taking a succession pool and actually entering them into training that's targeted at you know, four or five core skills that were identified across the board in that process. So you know, we're starting to see the language kind of carry up and then we're about to go into performance reviews, same thing. We're going to spend a lot of time in the calibration or performance reviews talking about exclusive express terms that exist in the responsibility sets for those roles so that we can start to define in our leaders minds what does good actually look like. So we're not waiting until we build this fully. We're letting them play with it, we're entering into discussions with it. We're, we're having kind of the back and forth around does it work, does it not as we're going. And ultimately I think that's what's going to allow for this to be sustainable and scalable is that everybody feels like they've got some skin in the game and we're starting to see that these conversations are more fruitful than just saying oh I really like this person or I really don't like this person or I think this person is the one to put in a role. Like now we're backing it up with some real tangible evidence and the language of talent is probably the thing that we're seeing evolve the quickest because we're giving people that definition of what good looks like and how to phrase things which has been fun.

I've loved hearing the story. I know it's an ongoing story. To your point Ryan, it's not a finished story. Jim Ryan, really appreciate you both taking the time out today, particularly today to share this story. If anyone listening wants to reach out to get some advice tips because they're thinking about beginning this journey themselves in their own organization. Whether it's to build out a talent acquisition team the way you did Jim or Ryan, to implement more skills based approach across their organization and to hear the war stories, the positives, get the templates. Where can folks reach out and find you both?

Probably at the bar, Johnny. That's where I spend most of my.

Time between these sessions. Yeah.

I'm joking, but I mean, obviously look us up on LinkedIn. Probably the best place to get started. Drop us a note.

Yeah, more than happy to have those conversations because I'd love to share the way we failed so that maybe somebody else will succeed.

Gents, thanks for coming and joining us this week and discussing that Skills first approach to building a TA team, but also across the organization. Thanks both. And thank you, the listener, for joining us this week. Hopefully that's inspired you to look at the Skills first approach you're using in your TA team or thinking about how your TA team is becoming more of a talent advisor to the organization, or whether you're doing the right thing across your organization with the Skills first approach that you haven't quite started yet but your TPO or CEO is pushing you on. We'll be back next week with another great episode. Until then, thanks for listening.