Talent Beyond Acquisition | Johnny Campbell & Christoph Niebel

It is Wednesday, 14th of October. Welcome to the Shortlist. I'm your host, Johnny Campbell, CEO and co founder of Social Talent. Welcome back to our show. This show today I'm really excited about as it's a topic I in fact first spoke about three, four years ago on a Disrupt HR stage in New York City. I guess it's probably serendipitous that our guest joining us today is also currently based in New York City. To continue that conversation in an environment in the world of talent where I think it's become even more present. And that is the kind of emergence of this bigger conversation around talent acquisition and going beyond talent acquisition to a much bigger talent conversation. Before we get into that though, just want to quickly remind those of you listening and viewing that you can catch all of the Shortlist shows that we've broadcast in the past. You can link to our podcast if you're not on the podcast and you can get an agenda of what's coming up on our future shows by going to socialtalent.com the shortlist if you're listening live today, we'd really encourage your comments, your questions as well. So please do jump on the questions on either YouTube or LinkedIn and we'd love to hear what you want to think for our guests today or get your comments for our guests today as well. Our guest today is Christoph Niebo. Christoph has joined Pontoon Solutions as the president of the organization quite recently. Pontoon, part of the Adeco Group, is a company that Kristof had previously worked for with Lee Hecht Harrison, which many of you may know, either the Leehack Heck brand or the Pontoon and certainly the Adepo brand. If you're in any way working in the talent space, you're bound to know them. And he has a fascinating background and I think a really, really interesting and unique perspective on this bigger, bigger picture of talent. It's unique and I think brilliant to have somebody join such a powerhouse of an organization as Pontoon Solutions with such an interesting background and opinion to give us his background and explain why a man with a German accent with a hint of Australian is currently living in New York. Kristof, you might introduce yourself to our audience.

Johnny, thanks for having me. I quite enjoyed that. Where do I start after this? Let me tell you what gets me out of bed in the morning. That's probably a good place to start. You know, my purpose is to help, you know, businesses and people uncover, light up and ignite potential. And you just mentioned current and my last Employer under the Deco Group, Pontoon and lhh. And I've been incredibly lucky that both of those, you know, allow me to bring my personal kind of why into the realm of work, you know, basically much every day. And this has been now for, you know, 12 years or something with LHH where I was an executive committee member and now for the last six weeks as the president of Pontoon, as you said, I've operated in a few different places, currently live in and beforehand 12 years in Australia and then I'm German born, so operate across the world. And interesting enough, the clients I sit in front of today, which are typically C level HR and talent leaders, are very much the same that I said across over the 10 years across the world. And they have a very similar challenge and they typically tell us that it's incredibly hard to change the makeup and skill sets of their people at the speed at which they need to drive their business strategy, at which the markets are being disrupted or they need to capitalize on opportunity. And then, you know, this is where we thought how can we shape our business and set it up to increase that speed and to become a partner that can lead them, be lead to crows as they navigated in these markets and now in viable position at Pontoon to really be the architect of solutions with both the Deco Group ecosystem as well as our external kind of partner. It's tech and supplier partnerships. And I'm pretty passionate about being agnostic from that mothership in that way. But it brings us benefits. So what do we really do to do? All that is everything from upfront consulting and providing agility and workforce planning to managing extended and kind of contingent workforce. We manage about $12 billion as an MSP and close to half a million contractor starts each year. On the perm side, source more than 3 million candidates and place more than 100,000 a year through our RPO business and then get the ability to morph this all together in some interesting solutions beyond acquisitions, incorporating upskilling, reskilling, internal external mobility through sister companies such as GA and LHH and of course external networks and all that together. You know, in a nutshell is talent beyond acquisition. And looking forward to sharing some of those practical ideas and learning from you too, Johnny. So thanks for having me.

And two things really stand out to me that I think make this hopefully very interesting conversation and I expect it will be because we've spoken before, Christophe, and I've been fascinated by your perspective because one, yes, you have that perspective of scale. You know, you mentioned some of the stats that you've been involved in hiring and managing talent on that scale is rare. Not everyone has that perspective and be able to see that big picture across a global organization. But second of all is that I think uniquely you have really kind of gone through the full talent life cycle where whereas many people in the talent acquisition space have just been involved in the attraction and hiring end of the talent lifecycle, you've also gone all the way through the end, which is where probably the LHH business sits more comfortably, which is the exit and kind of departure end, but everything in between. And I think that's the unique lens I'm hoping you can bring to this conversation. But before we get stuck into that, what I want to do is maybe start off with some really, I guess, timely and appropriate news stories that we found in the news this week. Niall, over to you. So first up, this comes from Forbes Christoph and this article talks about how shaping the employee experience through your HR technology stack is super, super important. And it's written by, I believe by a senior partner in EY in the US and this I guess is tapping into a trend that we know has been around for several years, the focus on the employee experience, which I guess is more of a category of a trend that incorporates a bunch of different elements. But this article is quite focused on the importance of tech to really drive that employee experience. Wanted to get your thoughts on this and maybe you can give us your summary or, you know, your perspective of what you got from this article.

Yeah, look, it resonates with me for a couple of reasons. Number one, now being in kind of my first CEO role and leading 2,000 people, I wake up every day thinking about the employee experience. And believe me, I think about this broader than just tech and the fondant of the employee lifecycle because I now live it. Secondly, I'd say that at Pontoon it's actually a real core value like how do we bring in experience? And the last thing but actually I'd say here is that for me tech is a tool, it serves an outcome and it really needs to be contextualized to the environment, the outcome. So I do think it has a huge impact on the employee experience. The question is, of course, does it simply have a positive one by bringing in more tech? And I firmly disagree with that. It doesn't necessarily change it for the better. I when I read this, it got me to think about how do you solve for this? How do you ensure that you do this the right way? And I come back to a mental model that I've stole from sto that I learned from Charlie Munger. You might know him as the long term partner of Warren Buffett, certainly someone about a million times smarter than I am. And he talks about this principle of inversion which basically most people will come and think about through an idea forward and they say how can we use tech to do really cool things to increase the employee experience? And he argues that maybe a better way is to, or what you all should do is think about it backwards and say, look, in how many ways could we use tech to actually worsen the employee experience, right? And ideally we avoid all those things. And that sounds really simple, but I bet you that each of our businesses has enough examples where we do these stupid things, you know, every day and actually through tech, worsen it. And I keep going back to this mental model as an example because my experience, you know, avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance. And I think this is a double edged sword of tech. Sometimes we throwing at it to improve something versus thinking, hey, can it actually make it, you know, worse? And so I, that is something that I kept thinking about when I was reading this.

Yeah, it's funny, it reminds me, you know, that concept of inversion and doing it the wrong way around. Years and years ago I remember being in a product meeting with our engineers and we were talking about we need to put AI or you know, into our product. And you know, I think, I think this, this happens with, with folks in the people space. We need tech to solve this problem. I remember saying, I was like, what problem are we solving? Like, like tell me the problem we're solving, tell me how we're going to solve it. And then if AI can make that solution better, great. You know, if tech can make that solution better, fantastic. But it really has to come from, you know, is there an actual need for this? I remember I recently spoke with a vendor who showed me their solution which again, AI powered, you know, a self serve chatbot for employees where they could deal with issues of confrontation in the workflow workplace. So you know, you have a, you have a disagreement or some sort of, sort of negative experience with another member of your team or your boss or subordinate, and you can talk to the chatbot and they'll advise you on, you know, your legal rights or give you some advice, etc. Etc. And it was like, look, this is what we could do with technology. And I was like, my instinct was like that's brilliant that we should put that in. But then I paused and said, is that what the employees want? You Know, is that what they're screaming out for? Is that the thing missing in their lives? Is that what's going to make their job better? And there is a danger of thinking kind of going, hey, there's tech that can do that, let's buy it, as opposed to going, hang on a second, what do people actually want? What's the driver? And oftentimes what people want is they want clarity, vision, they want autonomy, they want to understand what's happening. And you know, there's some, they're the basics that people want and without those, they're never going to be engaged. And you know, you can talk about having these tools, but unless you're addressing those core things, you know, and not from a technology perspective, just from a business operations perspective, you're not going to have an engaged workforce no matter how much money you spend on the tech.

Yeah.

Have you seen this go wrong?

I'm quite passionate about this too. I think the end of the article speaks a little bit about that. We need to have highly evolved models of sentiment analysis and stitching all our tools together. And you know what, of course we all want data to make better decisions, but I think if it's used as a crutch and saying, well, I don't have the data, I can't do the right thing today, then we just thinking again about this the wrong way around. Look, we are all employees or have been employees, we all know what a good experience looks like or not. And I think you touched on this. What do people want? They want to be excited about the mission. They want to know they can bring their strengths to work. They want to know they've been challenged. They want the teammates of their back. So we kind of know that already. I don't think anyone has to prove this out. And then if you look at why people leave the business, as you said, we spend a lot of time there at hh they typically say, you know, exit interviews, oh, money, okay, career opportunities, guess what? Their leader. I joined a business and I'm leaving my leader and there it comes back to keep things simple. How do they lead? How can we humanize, you know, this whole experience? And I think tech can be a double edged sword in this. Yes. If it brings me and allows me to get the stuff off my plate that doesn't allow me to be more human because it takes my time, it's one thing, but if it takes that human piece out, I think you're the danger. And I come back to keeping things simple. If you have good leaders who show up right every day. I think the experience can be profound even if you don't have all the tech.

It's a great good point. Reminded me of a piece of information I read a few years ago. I was talking about employees, employee engagement surveys, which very popular tech, there's lots of them out there which try to understand and take that sentiment analysis. And I had read, and apparently this does hold up across multiple, multiple vendor platforms that if you want to understand the sentiment of your employees and you survey them, if you survey them and 60% of your staff reply, you don't need to check the survey results because their engagement is going to be, guess what? 60%. If 40% reply, they're going to end up with 40% on anything you can ask them. Any survey results that actually the response rate of a survey is a proxy for employee engagement. A really strongly correlating proxy for employee engagement, which I thought was fascinating because you could spend all the money in the data analytics to understand the insights and behaviors. Whereas actually you know what? Turns out that your staff don't even want to do a survey. They aren't engaged. If everyone wants to complete the survey, guess what? They're an engaged worker.

Because at the most basic level it's about making sure people are being heard. But coming back to it, I'm not sure if you need technology for this. So that's where I think the balance comes in and that's where I'm really passionate about leadership and ensuring we can do this at a human to human level as well.

On that technology piece, I want to bring us to our second article this week. I want to discuss with you and this is from the World Economic Forum and in this article they talk about why skills, not degrees, will shape the future of work. Christoph, first of all want to try and get your opinion on why is it that you think the world of employment, the employers, the talent acquisition teams, the organizations have for so long used degrees as a standard when hiring because it is a thing we all use. We look at someone's degree, let's say professional jobs or lack of degree. What do you think it is that employers are hiring managers are doing when they look at degrees today? What are they using that degree as a proxy for?

Look, it's, it's, it's a, it's an accreditation, it's a stamp, it's a stamp of, of approval. And I think that in itself is part of the problem. I mean I've grown up in, in Germany, been educated there. I studied in the UK and then Coming moved here. I think it's crazy how you know, a commercial, you know, position of potentially yourself or your parents allow stamp of approval getting into bigger and better university. I'm not sure how that all correlates to the underlying talent of someone. I think it also helps us justify our decisions and it's a mental shortcut. Someone with a certain background are equal into having this. You could go broader than this and saying someone comes from a certain company. Right. And that's where biases come into play. You know, I think that's fine as long as it doesn't cut you out. And saying someone who doesn't have that is not good. Right. I think, I think accreditation is important. I do think we had a danger of cutting really good people out of this. So how do we think about the middle right who might not be able to make it in a top university and how do we don't set them back commercially because it comes at a cost. After reading this I kind of, you know, reminded myself that you know, employees are kind of, you know, can drive a real big change in this. You probably come across this as well. Google recently launched career certificate courses and specifically in data analysis, I think project management, UX design and they basically make that equivalent to a four year degree for the hiring process. And I mean if an employer like this does it, they can have a huge, huge impact. And I mean I can give you some examples that we even have from within the group and through our veen upskilling business ga where we build programs where we can see and prove out that people in academy programs after kind of intensive onboarding and training and then rotation programs perform over and above science grads, for example. So the problem in here is inherently that it leaves a big part of the population out and I'm maybe speaking predominantly about the US And I think that's a danger because you know, what is our competitive advantage is the ability to innovate and the diversity plays a huge role in this. So I do think governments, educational institutions and businesses need to keep rethinking this model.

I think when I looked at this, you know, I was quite, quite shocked, not surprised perhaps, but quite shocked by the differences that it highlighted about unemployment rates in this current pandemic and recession and how it correlated with the education level you have, you know, which, which highlights how much we still rely on degrees. A story you don't mind me sharing of one of my best friends I grew up with. We worked together when you know, we worked in pubs and nightclubs years and years ago and he got a job as a sales rep in an FMCG company and he never went to college, never got a university degree and so on and so forth. But he worked his way up and he got to a point where he was doing extremely well and he was asked to go on a leisure program and it's a massive big US multinational and they told me he had to go on that because to get the certain level in the organization you had to have a degree and they were willing to pay for it. So they said they'd fund him to go to night school. And he turned up the first night and spent an hour and left. Just wasn't for him. That schooling is just not really for him. And so they said, well, you can't progress. And he said, well, so be it. That's just the way it is, right? So then, you know, fast forward 10 years, he's now the managing director of their Irish organization. And you know, to me it was proof that this idea you have to have a degree and it's the only way, just isn't necessarily the only way to develop really, really great leaders or to develop anyone. And increasingly what I'm seeing certainly is that employers are stepping in in a world where, if we read correctly, the pace in which skills are changing, the need for skills is changing, the workforce is going so fast that universities can't even keep up with that. And employers are stepping in and to your point, they're looking at their role in education is really, really, really, really, really important because notwithstanding the fact that there's a lot of bias in approach and you know, not everyone can have those opportunities, it just isn't fast enough. Waiting four years for someone to come out of a science to computer science degree is crazy. I love that Google example when they said, I think for something like $50 or $100 you can pay and you do the course and if you pass, you know, they're saying we'll hire you as an equivalent for your computer science grad if you complete this online course. That's amazing that innovation where they're, they're essentially crazing the supply in the market, which is a really different way approaching talent. You said you might have some examples. I'd love to hear Christoph, of more innovative ways you've seen organizations approach talent supply issues.

One that comes immediately to mind, which I really love is it's a story about Disney and their need to have more coders and people who have the ability to work as engineers and their specifically want female Engineers and want to make sure they come from a diverse background. And they did build together with us and this is general assembly part of the group assistant company Pontoon, something called Code Rosie, Code standing for creating opportunities for diverse engineers. And they basically take non technical women within the Disney organization, allowed them to go through a three months immersive program focused on, you know, you know, coding and analytics skills and then through a year long apprenticeship which was, you know, two, six months split into six months and then really move into a tech job within the group. Not only did the program have fantastic, you know, net promoter score and people raved about it because of valued it made a business impact and guess what, it helps the Disney business and the employer brand. It's just so many wins all round. Plus they couldn't find that talent externally. We'll talk a little bit more hopefully about that later. But this whole idea about not thinking about talent as replaceable but that we can renew them I think is really, really important and powerful. And equally you could think about building these academies at the front end and hiring externally. Yet coming back to your point at the beginning, you're always looking for that 10 out of 10, you know, people who fit all the boxes. And I think I listened to a previous podcast of yours that where you shared the story that that doesn't necessarily even correlate to success of the person. Right. Hitting all those boxes. So I love that story because it hits me and also it's something that's really important. You know, again the purpose and diversity aspect of making sure that everyone has equal opportunities and that we bring out the best in people and imagine this experience and how they talk about the business now and how sticky that is versus someone maybe even brought in differently.

It's a fantastic story with Jerry Crispin joining us live, listening in saying where the degree is taken is too often a privileged bias excluding those with skills. Great to have you Jerry, on the, on the show. I 100% agree with you. It is a challenge. But I think that's where we're seeing, you know, maybe this is where technology, Kristof, comes actually into the, into play and becomes a real asset. I think organizations are much, much better able to assess for the true skills and potential that people need. And maybe they would have used a four year degree as a proxy for some of those skills or attributes. We're actually much better at testing for those things now. Technology's got better, the tests have got better and therefore if you know that somebody has the skills and knowledge, then you don't need a third level educational body to certify them that maybe you have to spend $100,000 a year to go to. You can assess that really, really quickly. And you know, you don't care who you know who has that background. You know, I tell a story a lot of a friend of mine, Dan, he used to run talent acquisition for EY and UK and Ireland. And Dan was the first in the EY group. I'm just mentioning the original firm who wrote that first article whereby he pushed for the UK and Ireland to allow individuals to be considered who passed a test that EY came up with regardless of their background, experience, age, education. They said, well, we know we have a numeracy test and we have other tests that we want to run. And of course, like most Big four firms, they had used GPA average or a certain level of degree in a certain type of university as the bar that you had to pass to get an interview at ey. He four or five years ago moved them to a situation whereby sit the test, you get an interview, don't care where you've come from, whether you've ever been in a college or school. If you can pass this test, you've proven yourself on the abilities we're looking for. Now we'll move you into an interview and the next year, the first year of this, they had an increase in diversity of something like 28% of the intake was from areas that would never got through the previous process and they were the highest rated group ever in the history of EY and UK and Ireland coming into it like evidence that if you just build a decent enough assessment process, you can scrap requirements like degrees and move on to just testing for skills. Then you go one step further, which is how do we build those skills? I think the Disney example is fantastic at how you can go build those skills. Christoph, I wonder if I can ask you another question around talent beyond acquisition. Are you seeing, particularly in the world of COVID where we're seeing such rapid shifts in industries that were booming all of a sudden dead or quiet industries that were stable all of a sudden in need of talent. Have you seen any good examples where companies or organizations have been innovative around that supply of talent to solve problems?

Yeah, yeah. Again, another area I'm super passionate about. I think Covid generally acts as an accelerator and certainly brought to the forefront a trend that, you know, I have experienced now sitting on the LH side for the last 10 years where as you said, we have been involved kind of the restructuring side of Business heavily. And what we've seen there over the last 10 years is that, you know, dramatically the, the reasons why companies restructured has shifted from capacity, you know, issues. We need to reduce our staff by 400 because we're moving them somewhere here or our business goes down to a skill mix issue which is turn out the right people. What also matters, a company, if they let a thousand people go, they were also hiring another 1200. And I always struck me as the ways of money being spent at the front end of the talent acquisition process so hard to find. And then even bigger the waste on the back end of the talent life cycle when you think, you know, it might be easier to restructure because you have different legislative requirements in the U.S. but in Europe, the amount of money and you know, and process step it takes to do that. And so I don't find a, you know, a good run business doesn't scream for more and better talent. So we have, we have struggled with this idea of how can we get business to think across this issue more broadly than in their, in their silos. And when Covid came, it really, really accelerated the issue because you know, it has even further, you know, shown who is growing and who is kind of going down. And it's a tragedy to see so many people, you know, falling on the, falling on the street and losing their jobs. And you've seen companies step in, I think it was Accenture and Verizon to build these talent exchanges right where that I think is very difficult if it doesn't, if it doesn't get scoped right to make it happen. So what we have been able to do, and this is what I told you is kind of an exciting place to be, that we can be an architect of this whole ecosystem is that there's so many companies that we know that have a talent surplus in the current environment, but people that actually do not want to lose and potentially want to make sure that they keep them, but from a commercial perspective are driven to actually releasing them because it will hurt their bottom line. On the other hand, there's so many companies who have a high talent demand. How can we stitch these together in a creative way? One of the pieces of work we've done in Germany actually is between Lufthansa and Amazon, where the Lufthansa catering business specifically had a kind of an oversupply surplus, about 6,000 people. People highly skills committed to the company, which under the German government funding were able to get support for a certain amount of time. But that support running out Means that the payroll of the business in time when there's less flights is severely impacted and Amazon couldn't meet the demand spikes. So what we're able to do is create this gearbox, as they would call it, to make the connection between those two businesses and facilitate the processes. Everything from kind of matching employees profiles with the demands and needs through technology and, and people by supporting this is really important, especially in Germany, supporting these individuals through the decision making process because it's voluntary engagement by the employee which would, you know, again a skill set that we have in the group. Making sure this meets data protection and works council expectations and then really ensuring that there is also legally compliant solutions part of the Adeco Group, you know, through a temp agency making sure that the people can move and have a double sided contract and offering upskilling, reskilling. At the end of their temporary assignment they come back which means it's a win for Lufthansa. They get these people for a certain amount of time off their books. It reduces the pressure they have commercially, it allows them to get them back and hopefully, you know, the world goes back to normal. Wait for Amazon, great talent in the short term and they don't have to lay them off because if they hire perm, you have to lay them off and bid for the employees because someone is, guess what? We can't guarantee you a career for life, but I can guarantee you that I look after your lifetime career. And that mindset shift is a really important one. And so Amazon is one example. We call it the employment bridge. We have, you know, diving into many constantly automotive firms who have already been disrupted. Right. You know, in terms of combustion to E cars. Right. And in terms of the supply chains. And so I see some really, you know, Covid has been the mother of all trigger events. You know, when everything's going well, no one wants to really challenge the status quo. Now companies are ready for it. So what I have seen that these ideas have existed beforehand but where CFO said it said beforehand, wait, I'm going to spend the billion dollars on restructuring? Because that actually helps. It's crazy, but helps my stock price potentially. You know, people are now saying what if you reinvest that money differently and don't look at, you know, and look at, you know, spending that into the employee of cycle to get a much better outcome and these and I have a, I'm very passionate about this, that that kind of wall that still exists. If we can break that, we can unlock so much in kind of in the for Talent which goes beyond acquisition. So I know this was a lot, but this is a, this is a, an area. I think we have so many opportunities together.

I agree. And I think there's more and more companies every day waking up to this reality and looking even internally at the way that they organize their talent teams and looking at those silos that traditionally existed between talent acquisition, talent development, turn, mobility, diversity, inclusion, and saying, hang on a second, we need a more joined up approach. We need to, to your point, move beyond just the acquisition approach where you go to the talent acquisition leader and you say we need to hire 200,000 people next year. Instead you go, we need 200,000 people to have slightly different skills in different places next year. Maybe we're going to hire some external people, maybe we can retrain, maybe we can do some graduate work, maybe we can move people around, maybe we can borrow some staff, maybe we can lend out some staff. It's kind of going. The business doesn't actually want you to hire. The business just wants the people with the skills to be in place. And of course, to your point, you, if the CFO is coming in, she's looking at this, she's like, hang on a second. Acquisition is really expensive. You know, can we look at a different way of doing this? And I think, you know, you made a point to me recently. You're sharing a story, Christoph, and I'll begin it, maybe you can finish it because I'll do it badly. When you were talking to one of your existing customers in Pontoon and this was a company in the healthcare sector and you know, the conversation isn't about we need to hire X. The conversation was the output that they need to give to market and that's the problem you're solving. Maybe you can maybe share that for them.

It's purely, look, we need to, you know, as a pharma company, if you think the situation we're in, especially you know, the flu season come up, we don't, we need to deliver flu, we need to deliver vaccines. And quite frankly, from a business perspective, we don't care how. We need the time to do so different channels to make this happen. And so we need to. And I think this is also the barrier to widen the companies doing this. We don't talking about the business outcome. This brings us back all the way to the tech discussion, right? When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And that's what it looks like. If you have very strong siloed talent functions, right? An employee relations team that works with Finance, we'll think about how do I spend the money most efficiently on restructuring and the talent acquisition teams. How do I think most efficiently on bringing these people in? Yes, they want to maximize their own function, but I think if we can, you know, we all talk about this if we, if we as providers in internal time functions, find ways to truly influence the business, being consultative, help them build a business case, you know, and this is where I'm biased, of course, and one of the reasons why I think it does happen and find a partner who can actually make these things happen with you, because otherwise this can be very disjointed. Who has the ability around this life cycle. Yeah, you can put something down that a CFO says, you know what, I'm buying into this because I can see a business impact and a business leader, the same thing. And I think if we start talking that language, we can remove some of those barriers. Because right now, and this is the positive about COVID again, the status quo is dead. People are open to new things, and we need to jump into that. We've all talked about the seat at the table. We better take it now.

Yeah, I think, you know, when you look at whether you're on a. On a vendor side or whether you're a provider or whether you're internal talent acquisition, I think, you know, now is the time to look and say, what problem am I actually solving for here? And, you know, disregard the okay, I used to always do it this way. My way of solving was to find talent. Okay, great, that's fantastic. But maybe that's not the way to do it going forward. And to your point, like, if you. I'm a big fan of podcasts, as I know you are as well, Christoph. And a lot of the business podcasts I listen to lately are all pointing back to 2008 and how much innovation came out of 08. The Great Recession, you know, it gave us brand new businesses, brand new sectors that are doing really well today. The pioneer businesses we admire today, they nearly all came out of that 08 period. Because that's what happens when you have a time like this, a rare time, where the market gets slammed so hard with something so unique that new solutions are possible. People stop and go. We can think of new ways of doing it. It's okay to take risk. Maybe your business is so slammed that you go, let's take a risk and do something else. I know some of the staffing agencies out there that I talk to, they've taken a real hit. Q2, Q3 and if you're ever going to rethink your business, now is the time to do it. But also talent acquisition teams that were told no hiring for three or six months. If you're going to rethink how you do it. And we've had some guests on the show the last few months, Christoph, talking about how talent acquisition teams have been asked to take over internal mobility in a new way. And in part I was kind of like, do they not do that already? Like, surely, surely that's what they do. And it turns out they don't. Most of them don't look after that. So even those small wins where it's still hiring, but it's just internal hiring, you're starting to see a more joined up approach. I guess for you, Christoph, you know, this is hopefully a great opportunity for you to really think about, you know, the, as you mentioned, the wider group and the way that the group maybe has leveraged technology, products, different business offerings to really have a more joined up approach. You know, if you're thinking about the actual leaders within business, within talent teams, what would your advice be in terms of, you know, from what you've seen, that works? If you're a talent acquisition leader or former talent acquisition leader who maybe is either fighting to have a wider remit or, or has just been given a wider remit, what advice or insight could you provide to someone?

Like, that's a difficult question to answer. I'd come back to first principle. I mean, I think when we, having worked both as a functional COE leader in my career and kind of a P and L leader, I think the danger is as a functional leader, we're looking to optimize for potentially for a siloed outcome. And I think having the empathy to really understand what drives the business, who is really the customer and how can we achieve that is a key aspect of making the understanding what the outcome needs to look like and then working together broader across the spectrum might be the talent organization, but also the finance organization and others who can together get to that outcome. This idea from Silent Sinek, whether you play the finite or the infinite game, right? I think we need to think about this way because it might not just be that we need to solve this through in our own four walls, right? And I'm not only talking then bringing in other partners and vendors, but how can we think about talent across the industry and how can we share this? And I think the winners in the future are the ones who break down those silos, maybe come with a different perspective. I think coming into the more pure talent acquisition space. Now, I can tell you as a little bit of an outsider, it's full of acronyms, it's hard to understand, it is very technical and it's, you know, I see myself more as a general kind of business leader. It is, it is. It's sometimes hard to engage. And I think we need to look at ourselves here and say, how can we, you know, get our own way here and, you know, be closer to what matters? First principles are the business and long winded answer. That's kind of my view today.

I think you're right. You know, when I've talked to any leaders who've been successful or begun to be successful, it's through close collaboration in their own organizations across the different functions. I think your point is echoed by Jerry Christman's comments, who's talking about how we need to come together as a collection of vendors, employers, consultants to try and promote best practice and share that. I think that's so true. I know Jerry's been trying to do that for years and has had success in trying to do that as well through colloquium and other ways. But it's definitely something that. I think I would echo your sentiment there, Christoph, which is that it isn't something that any one of us or one part of the talent landscape can solve. It really has to be more joined up. Whether you're seeing that from intern inside your own business as a talent acquisition professional in a private company, or you're seeing it as somebody who's in the ecosystem, maybe as a vendor or partner technology provider. It is, it is kind of. How do you, how do you join those things together? Back to the tech piece. Tech is great, fantastic if it's serving a purpose to our first article, but really you have to look at what, what is the challenge of the business, what is the challenge of the employee? And I think listen to them more than anything else. That's, that's what I'm hearing from you. And I think it is a great perspective to come in, Christophe, that you aren't, I suppose, you know, way down with the baggage of, of only having worked in recruiting or talent acquisition all of your career, that you've seen many different aspects of the employee lifecycle and the business challenges organizations have. I think that's that kind of that Medici effect where you've seen how other, other people think, how different parts of the business think, how solutions can come together will hopefully serve you, serve you really well. Yeah.

And on this level, I mean, I said that let's be frank. That would have found someone with more experience running an MSP or an RPO business. Right. But this is, I think this should tell you something around. Well, so where we want to go, it's, you know, how can we be more impactful business partners? So I, you know, my, my view is that I need to co create the future of our business also together with others. And that's not just in the spectrum of who we are within the group. Johnny, you've been great at introducing me to people who I could call my competitors or core clients. And I believe in, you know, building in public and co creating because ultimately I think we can increase the pie here. You know, I believe in this infinite game more probably in the finite. You know, we all want to win, we all competitive, but there's a, there's so many problems out there to solve for us as, you know, talent and talent acquisition leaders. It's, it's quite clear that there's a ton of growth if we, if we think about this together.

Thanks. For those of you who haven't already heard it, Simon Sinek's talk, which I believe is going to be a future book on the infinite game versus the game, is fascinating. I remember watching it on YouTube a year ago, trying to board a plane and then kind of wanting the plane to slow down, not take off so I can finish the talk. It's fantastic. Both a history lesson, but also a perspective to think about when you look at this. So those who haven't seen it, cynic the infinite game, Google that, watch the YouTube video talk. It's fascinating. I think you'll very much appreciate Christophe's perspective after checking that out.

And the best part, Johnny.

Oh, it's out.

I'll send it to you.

Awesome. All right, so I've got more, more, more new reading to keep me up at night. Christoph, I appreciate that. Would you believe at time? And that time, Christoph, is the end of the show when we ask our guests to please leave us with advice for our audience, for our audience. I'd love if you can maybe think of advice that perhaps you have been given in your career or you perhaps have to offer from that broad background that you'd like to leave our audience with here today.

Yeah, and this is something very personal, but it speaks to experience as well. I started this job six weeks ago. There's about 2,000 people in Pontoon at this point. I have not met anyone in person. I have not works at Pontoon. I've met in person throughout the recruitment process. The same thing. So as a leader coming into the business, you think, and I'm not the only one who's in that situation, of course. Right. I think how do you come in, you know, how do you build a human to human relationship and create some sort of experience with these people? And so this is very tactical but I think it's a moment that matters. Like what is my first introduction. People are going to think is this guy going to be good for me or bad for me? So I made a point, it kind of happened, but I think it had, you know, would be a tip I'd share is for everyone that connected with me on LinkedIn for the organization. I made a point to reply to everyone on LinkedIn just 30 second, 45 second video. Hey Johnny, thanks for connecting with on LinkedIn. Looking forward to working with you. I just saw this about in your profile, you know, and the amount of goodwill this created, the amount of, you know, energy before I even started and how it enabled me to create a little moment that matter and quite frankly made it easy for me now to do my job was incredible. So I, I would, I would, you know, encourage people to think about how they continue to, you know, focus on those, on those moments that matter even in the world, you know, that's so virtual now because I think it, we can still humanize yourself if you now come back to tech, if you, if you use things like video and it just had a huge impact. So that's a, that's a very personal one. Hopefully that hops others too.

It's an amazing tip. Something I haven't been doing but now the technology is available on LinkedIn. I'm going to be video messaging, reply to connections to create those moments. It's a brilliant piece of advice, Christophe and thank you for sharing. Thank you for joining us. I know you've been overwhelmed in a new job, a lot to do. I'm really excited to see what happens next with Pontoon. What someone like yourself can do in the job with an already fantastic business. What's going to happen next I think is going to be, is going to be fascinating and hopefully adds value and as you say, grows that pie. So Kristof, thank you for joining us, really appreciate that. We'll catch up again soon.

Thank you so much, Jenny.

So that brings me on to what's coming up next on the shortlist. So as always, we want to try and bring you the best guests and we have one of our own next week, one of our own partners, the fantastic Jose Kadlek. Who I met, gosh, five, six years ago at a sourcing event in Europe, is going to be joining me on the show next week. Jose hails from the Czech Republic. He lives in Prague today and is extremely well known across central Eastern European as being the sourcing expert. We were delighted to kind of let you all know that he's joined the social talent platform as our resident advisor on all things sourcing and trainer on all things sourcing. But Jose also runs his own kind of training business in the Czech Republic. He runs an RPO business that supplies sourcing services to many, many big blue chip companies across the world, with several hundred recruiters and sources working for him as well, and also runs a recruiting technology company, an ATS provider. This man literally has an enormous amount of energy, so literally has his fingers in training and in service provision, in technology within our industry, and is just always out there trying to help the community, teaching us, hopefully some new advanced sourcing techniques and what's happening in the world of sourcing. Jose will join us next Wednesday, 21st October at 4pm UK Ireland time, which, don't forget, is 11am on the east coast of the United States. That's 8am if you're on the west coast or 11pm if you're in Singapore and parts of Asia. So do check that out. If you can't make that time, as always, you can go to socialtalent.com the shortlist. You can get a link to our podcast on Apple or Spotify or wherever you might be listening to this show, and you can find all the recordings from the show there or on our YouTube channel as well. Really hope you enjoyed the conversation today. I hope that Christophe's insights and unique background have given you some food for thought as to what is next for the wider world of talent acquisition beyond acquisition and that bigger sphere of talent. Hope you enjoyed the show. I'll catch you next week.