Welcome to CPO Rising’s all-new feature, the Future of Work Influencer series, which will highlight innovative voices in the evolving world of work. This exciting new series will be a go-to spot for progressive thoughts on how technology, transformational thinking, and revolutionary ideas are changing how work gets done.
For this week’s edition of the Future of Work Influencer series, we are excited to chat with Sean Ring, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Fulcrum:
Christopher J. Dwyer: Sean, thanks for taking the time to chat with us. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background (and how you ended up in this exciting industry).
Sean Ring: I ended up in the contingent workforce realm in the search to work for a great company. In 2012, I was at a point in my career where I had discovered my innate abilities in sales and business development, and also realized that I truly enjoyed building relationships and helping to solve business problems. I was finding success in those areas but found myself in a job that was largely unfulfilling and in an industry that didn’t align with my core values of integrity and transparency, so I decided that I would search for sales or business development jobs with companies whose employees had explicitly said that they enjoyed working there. I found the “Best Places to Work” list in San Diego and completely disregarded the industry that these companies were in and applied for jobs at companies who were consistently on that list year after year. This search led me to an interview for a business development representative position with Innovative Employee Solutions, a payrolling and independent contractor compliance firm, and the rest was history. I was officially an active member of the contingent workforce management community, where I would remain for the next five years.
CJD: The world of work is certainly evolving, especially considering the myriad talent options available for today’s business leaders and hiring managers. Why do you believe that digital staffing has experienced such a staggering amount of growth over the past few years?
SR: The short answer is technology. Every single industry is moving from analog to digital and the business of staffing, recruiting, and talent acquisition is no exception. Just as software and almost everything in our lives that relates to data and storage has moved to the cloud in a matter of just a few years, talent is moving to the cloud, as well. The economic benefits of the cloud are clear in that metrics around cost, speed, and quality can all be improved, and in some cases, these metrics are improved dramatically and not just incrementally. The people business has a lot of nuances and complexities, such as legislative frameworks that define (or attempt to define) employment and so this transition will take longer than most industries to fully make the shift from analog to digital, but the paradigm shift is inevitable.
CJD: You and I kicked off season three of the Contingent Workforce Weekly podcast with a discussion of this evolution of staffing and its place in the Future of Work. As businesses try to make sense out of all the changes happening today, why should the idea of the “talent cloud” be a priority?
SR: All businesses can benefit from increased flexibility. A rigid organism of any kind will break when it is stressed. A fully-optimized organization in the Future of Work is one that organizes work around specific outcomes that align with overarching business strategy. Organizations today rely far too heavily on the concept of retention as a universally positive metric. The problem with seeking to retain employees at all costs is that we aren’t actually measuring the outcomes of those employees as it pertains to our strategy and the value that they actually create. This problem stems from the fact that we aren’t organizing work around outcomes. Additionally, the exponential rise of technology has shifted the balance of power away from the status quo and incumbents who are used to dominating their industries. Look no further than the “Kodak vs. Instagram” example or “Blockbuster vs. Netflix.” The average lifespan of an S&P 500 company has plummeted in recent years, and so, organizations in all industries, of all sizes, and all geographies are constantly evolving their business models in order to stay relevant. Because companies are forced to reinvent themselves constantly, they realize that the benefits provided by the talent cloud, like: the ability to scale up and down with market demands, access to niche skills from a global talent supply chain, and new talent engagement models like crowdsourcing and digital staffing, which have incredible benefits in terms of expanded access to talent and agility (which are imperatives to competing in the dynamic business landscape of today and beyond).
CJD: I’ve described Fulcrum in past as “MSP for digital staffing.” Tell us about the heart of Fulcrum’s offerings and how the solution helps businesses win the war for talent.
SR: At our core, Fulcrum is a technology platform that aggregates and integrates numerous, high-performing talent clouds into a single point of entry. We are still in the “wild west” of the digital staffing revolution, and so, companies are faced with not only understanding the various models that exist in the marketplace, but also then tasked with paving the out “How to work with a bunch of disparate talent clouds when you can access all of them via Fulcrum?” Our software was designed to be embedded into an enterprise infrastructure and can easily integrate with systems that are already in place, like VMS, HRIS, ATS, or any system, really. Think of Fulcrum as the central nervous system that enables large enterprises the capability to deploy a talent cloud or gig workforce strategy at scale. While I think that the description of “MSP for digital staffing” helps industry insiders understand pieces of the Fulcrum value proposition like supplier aggregation, evaluation, relationship management and compliance, I also think that is a misnomer because MSPs are a service business and Fulcrum is enterprise software. There is a service component to our model, but we also partner with existing players like VMS and MSP solution providers as fulfillment partners in our overall solution execution and delivery. Fulcrum helps our clients win the war for talent by accelerating their competitive positioning in the talent marketplace by giving them access to talent that they simply do not have access today in their existing talent supply base. Compound that access to net-new talent, with the fact that the cloud offers significant cost savings, increases in quality, and can reduce cycle times by a factor of five, and your competitive advantage as an organization hits a force multiplier via the Fulcrum platform.
CJD: Where do you see artificial intelligence (AI) fitting into the realm of staffing?
SR: There is no question that AI will have far-reaching impacts in every aspect of our existence as human beings. In the staffing industry, you are already seeing AI being deployed in recruitment technology like chat bots and matching algorithms that automate mundane tasks and help us all get to what were really after, which is the right fit at the right time. AI and machine learning rely on massive sets of data in order to be effective, and so, we are just getting to the dawn of the AI age in staffing because the industry is still in a slow transition from analog to digital. I am excited to continue to see AI being applied in staffing with admirable goals like reducing bias in the hiring process, increasing the velocity with which we can source and then deploy talent, and intelligent software applications that can take a defined work outcome as an input and tell a hiring manager in real time the optimal blend of talent they need to accomplish that outcome (and also provide an access point to source from multiple channels).
CJD: Finally, how do you see businesses maximizing their sources of talent in the year ahead? No matter how much growth there has been in the digital staffing space, there are still many, many organizations that are going to leverage tried-and-true (and traditional) staffing suppliers.
SR: I don’t believe that digital staffing is a direct replacement for traditional brick-and-mortar staffing suppliers. Staff augmentation will continue to be a service that leading organizations in the Future of Work will rely upon, however, I do believe that digital innovations in this space will continue to make their way into all facets of work, which will include impacts to staff augmentation, FTEs, and professional services/big consulting spend. Businesses will maximize their sources of talent by starting with the end in mind and shifting their mindset to an outcomes-based framework. Once this happens, an organization becomes truly capable of measuring and comparing sources of talent across all categories of both employee and non-employee labor and free themselves from the construct which tells them to retain talent at all cost. A potentially bold prediction is that I also foresee companies starting to form alliances both externally and internally, by which siloes begin to break down and pivot away from the archaic mindset of talent ownership and instead start opening up their candidate databases, creating more of a fluid, sharing economy for talent where workers can have increased opportunity and access to diverse work and mobility across their own organizations and also amongst firms that have struck an alliance with theirs.
For more information on Fulcrum, please visit www.fulcrumworks.com.
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