Full Interview Transcript, Julie Fletcher

Welcome to a special Talent Acquisition Channel podcast on TotalPicture Radio from Riviera Advisors 10th Anniversary Celebration in beautiful Long Beach, California.

Riviera Advisors is a premiere global human resources consulting firm that helps organizations worldwide improve their internal recruiting and staffing capabilities. Visit rivieraadvisors.com/podcast to access all of our interviews with HR and talent acquisition leaders recorded at the 10th anniversary celebration as well as many thought leaders in HR and recruiting, recorded at IACPR, SHRM, ERE and other high profile conferences and events.

This is Peter Clayton reporting. Joining me today is Julie Fletcher, Senior Vice President of Human Resources and in that role provides leadership for attracting and supporting talent for the AMN Healthcare Corporate staff. Julie joined AMN Healthcare in 2008 after having served as the Chief Human Resources Officer for H&R Block’s Option One Mortgage Company in Irvine, California.

Peter: Julie, welcome to TotalPicture Radio. Can you tell us about your background and why you chose a career in HR?

Julie: Peter, I’m one of those real fortunate people who kind of figured out very early in my life that I thought pursuing a career in human resources would fit what I thought would be an interesting professional career. When I was actually back in high school, taking some really preliminary business courses and getting early introduction into psychology and people management, kind of my realization is that those two things come in together was pretty powerful that kind of understood what business was about in that obviously businesses had to have great strategy and a direction, and then so much about that people were the ones who are actually going to make that happen. So I got very lucky that even right out of high school I went in to college studying HR. I’ve been at that field for a little over 20 years.

Peter: That’s great. So tell us about AMN.

Julie: AMN is the largest Healthcare staffing firm in the United States. We staff nurses, doctors, allied healthcare professionals into temporary and permanent roles across the US. We have international business as well, but the vast majority of our business is focused within the US. We really meet the staffing needs of hospitals, healthcare systems where they can’t staff those positions themselves, we help them do that. We have everything from travel assignments, which are longer assignments, and we also help our clients with per diem, and we also have a home health business… so kind of run the whole gamut of healthcare staffing.

Peter: And what’s your focus, Julie?

Julie: My role is the Senior Vice President of Human Resources and I’m really responsible for the internal aspects of taking care of our talent. We are an organization that believes very strongly in our people and we are not an organization that makes widgets. I spend a lot of time really assessing one of the talent requirements of our organization and what am I doing to work with my team on attracting and developing great talent for our organization for the future. We’ve had a challenging couple of years with the recession and yet we really never took our eye off of continuing to focus on our talent in good times and bad.

So that is my role is to really partner with the executive team to make sure we attract the best of the best. We keep them, we develop them so hopefully they build their careers here and stay with us, and then hopefully that great talent work is the one that impacts our business bottom line.

Peter: As with many great organizations, Julie, AMN had to cut staff during the recent recession. You told me about the follow up interviews you conducted with supervisors and managers after the layoffs that I found to be really unusual. Can you share some of that strategy with us?

Julie: Sure, absolutely Peter. When I got to AMN about 2½ years ago, had some great philosophical conversations with our CEO, Susan Salka, about what she really wanted to do with the talent function or HR within the company, and she really asked me to create with my team an integrated approach to talent management. So we have a model. We built competencies, we put in systems, processes and really with the whole spirit that we’re creating kind of one language and one common approach to taking care of our talent.

Early in 2009, we were getting ready to launch our first round of succession planning work and we do a top down bottoms up approach to talent and so we meet with leaders and say, “Gosh, how’s your team doing…who do you think are your successors…why are they successors…where are their strengths… where are their development opportunities…” and then we literally feed that all into a system. We use the Corporate Leadership Counsel’s approach to talent management.

The second phase of that, which I think is very powerful, is our bottoms up approach We actually interview our head of learning and talent development and her team interview those potential successors and leaders in our organization, and we talk to them about where is your engagement level and do you really want to move into your leaders job one day, do you know what that entails and do you understand that sometimes they’ll hire you, you go into an organization, you have personal sacrifice to move forward in your career and have you thought about that. So we kind of ask them all those questions that they might not naturally say or think about to their leaders when they talk about the fact that they want to move up and do you know what that means. We marry those two pieces of data – one from the leader and the one from subordinate – and literally put that into a database.

Specifically to your question around at that specific time and we were unfortunate enough to have to lay off some of our team in 2009 and sometimes for example, a meeting would be in the morning where a leader would have to layoff two, three, four of their team members and we might pull them into a session in the afternoon on that exact same topic and say, “Gosh, we’re really sorry that in the short term you had to that but we want to know where is your head and do you want to be with us when all this recession ends because we want to be even stronger on the backside, so how are you feeling about all of that?” So people were really shocked . Like first of all, wow, you’re continuing to invest in me, you want to talk to me about that. That, in and of itself, helps with my engagement.

Again, we never took our eye off of our commitment to talent management during that time.

Peter: I think that’s really fascinating. You told me also about the C-suites involvement in employee engagement surveys. Can you share some of those experiences with us?

Julie: Sure, absolutely. AMN has been doing engagement surveys for about 7 years and we feel very passionate about follow through. For most HR leaders, I think they are all equally committed that is truly tough to do an engagement survey if you don’t get behind the results. So we’ve done our survey every year and we even did it during our tough times.

So in the summer of ’09 we did a survey and people were like…“Really, you’re going to do a survey now?” Your staff has lost sometimes friends, colleagues, more work is on their plate, all the survivor syndrome types of challenges, post layoff, and we absolutely wanted to do one at that time because we really cared very much that we wanted to know what was on their minds and obviously we had qualitative and quantitative responses.

We got all the technical data together and we also asked for a qualitative feedback to like five open-ended questions. Because we had layoffs, did you understand the rationale behind the layoffs and how did we do from a communication standpoint and how are you feeling today, and do you have your resources to get your job done. We got about 3,000 comments during that one really challenging year.

From the standpoint of your question, the CEO herself read every single one of those comments (as did I) and then the executive committee really got behind what were the enterprise results and what we were going to do with it and we ended up sharing them with our whole entire company when we do our annual company meetings. Each leader who has a cut of the survey data is required to create an action plan and turn it in so people are held accountable.

On the reward and recognition side, when we do annual recognition events, we actually hold up leaders who did a good job on their action plans and their scores moved up because we want to hold them up as the examples to others as people who take the engagement results very seriously.

Peter: Wow, that’s remarkable. That’s really an interesting story. You don’t hear that very much out there, Julie, that kind of involvement in employee engagement.

Julie: It’s very, very important during good times and during bad but we’ve really spent a lot of time, again, coming out of the challenging times we’ve had, focus on a couple of key initiatives like engagement. We also have really helped our leaders lead in tough times, like we’ve created programs from – again our learning and talent team has literally taught classes on how to lead in challenging times.

In addition to that, we rolled out a program that I actually read about as a best practice (it’s by no means mine), and we introduced something called One Small Thing, which is in tough times when organizations just can’t provide compensation and benefits like they would like to from a cost perspective, we did really talk to our leaders about, but what can you do to retain your people that is really kind of free. And the idea is we want our leaders to know their people so well that what is the one small thing you can do for that person on your team that doesn’t cost anything but wow, from an engagement standpoint, it could really be great.

An example is we have one of our finance manager is a great guy and he surfs. That’s his passion. So at the end of the day, typically he’d be in 7:30, 8:00 whatever but if there’s a couple of days when Southern California – we have outstanding surf and why not give him the freedom that if he can go out and surf one day and come in at 8:30 or 9 instead of 7 or 7:30, at the end of the day who cares. He’s going to get his job done because you’re giving him freedom and flexibility. Of course, if there’s some big meeting, he’s going to be in for about…but just to tell him we trust you and you can manage your work so if that works for you, that’s great.

And then maybe the next person is the soccer dad and if he can just make sure that on Thursdays he was off at 5 that he can coach his daughter’s team, that goes so far because there are so many companies that don’t understand the kind of high touch and knowing your people and what can keep them engaged, to me, that goes just miles.

Peter: I agree with you and you’re right, this is something that doesn’t cost you guys a dime and yet it means so much to the people who work there because they appreciate that you really take an interest in their life outside of work and try to support them.

Julie: We absolutely do. I mean the purpose of our company literally it’s written on the wall downstairs is that we support professional and personal development of all of our team members. Whether that the healthcare professional or whether that the corporate, we really believe that our purpose is to develop people personally and professionally.

Peter: In 2010, you made a significant acquisition of a company called Medfinders. Julie, I’m always fascinated by M&A stories, tell us about this acquisition.

Julie: It was actually a great acquisition and really created some additional opportunities that the organization didn’t have because AMN historically was a large travel business in the healthcare staffing space and we were not in the per diem business.

We acquired a really large contract towards the end of 2009 and into 2010 that really required us to do a lot of subcontracting with per diem healthcare staffing firms or literally figure out how to build that business or purchase a company that did that.

So when we came together with the Medfinders organization, they were more of a strong per diem organization with a small travel business. So those two things came together and really allowed us to be a true powerhouse in terms of what our clients required. Also in the home healthcare business, that was a business we were not in but we’re very interested in exploring with aging population and all the opportunities in home health. So kind of again put some more puzzle pieces in kind of the larger picture which we were very excited about.

We took a very formalized approach to this acquisition, a little different then the organization had in the past. So we partnered with a consulting firm just to really give us some best practice that we kind of jumped in with both feet. So from my world, we did a lot of work around cultural assessment with kind of a guiding principle of we want to focus on culture, communication and change because those all had to be out of the forefront of what we were doing if we’re going to get kind of the buy in and engagement of the new organization.

We did a lot of cultural interviews early on where we kind of looked at our own management in the mirror and said who is AMN, what is like to work here? What is our environment? Not so much what are our values and our purpose, because those are very clear, but we never really said, “Gosh, how do decisions get made here? Are we fast, are we slow? Are we bureaucratic? Are we kind of edgy? What are we?” And so we kind of got all those kind of things as to who AMN was up and running, and then we allowed the new organization to take a look at those and say, “Gosh, what do you think?” So this is the organization you’re being acquired by; are you similar or are you different on these types of issues so that we would know walking in what things do we need to continue to focus on.

So that was some really early culture work that we did and then we took their CEO, who is still with us in a president type of a role and mashed him with our CEO and they really spoke to the masses of leaders and talked about what their perspective was on the similarities and the cultures, and what we needed to keep an eye on.

Since then, we’ve continued to focus on the culture and communications. We do a lot of work on internal communications. Just recently we did an employee wide integration survey, which is a kind of a ‘how’s it going’ kind of survey, which was great. Are you getting communication… where are you getting it from… how we can do a better job… are you hearing from the intranet… are you hearing from the CEO, are you hearing from your leader… like where are you getting your communication messages from? And then even more recently now that we’re about four months into the acquisition literally real time, I’m interviewing with my team about 35 or 40 senior leaders in both organizations saying okay now four months in, honeymoon’s over a little bit… again, what’s working, where have the companies come together and you went, wow, that’s working. And where are the companies come together and out, that’s still hard for us to work together because we’re different people with have different backgrounds, coming from different organizations because my philosophy is don’t push those challenging areas under the rug. Keep them up and keep them alive, and talk about them because maybe we need to change something about the structure, maybe we need to get some people together in a room and figure out some process changes.

We’re really constantly focused on what can we be doing better so that these two organizations come together in a powerful collective way, we call it better together then we were as separate organizations. Because we were competitors before so that adds yet another wrinkle to it, but so far it’s going really well.

Peter: That’s great and you’re right, the cultural thing is so important and that’s an area that oftentimes get overlooked in these mergers.

Julie: Absolutely and like I said, we keep going back to teaching that culture is forefront for us, communications is forefront. I mean I see their interconnecting circles kind of culture communication and change.

Peter: We met at Riviera Advisors 10th anniversary celebration. Julie, I’d like you to just reflect on the past 10 years as an HR leader in multiple industries. What are some of the significant changes you’ve seen in HR and talent management over that time?

Julie: From my perspective, I think that HR does have kind of a larger role than it’s ever had. I really feel like with the right organization that really wants to focus on its talent, it is the differentiator that I think makes a truly great organization. If you look at the best organizations that are out there that are held up as the example, it’s often times because they do pay an awful lot of attention to their people. So I think that’s evolved. I think that the right HR leaders are also taken quite seriously from a business standpoint because the expense of team members and the cost are so high in the way the organization thinks about that.

So I think talent decisions often require cost investments and keeping an HR leader close to the CEO and close to the business leaders to help decide where do you invest, where are the gaps, where are the opportunities. I think that’s come to a forefront in the past 10 years like it wasn’t at least in my first 10 years.

Peter: Yeah, because traditionally HR was thought of as a cost center but it seems that more and more today it’s seen very strategically as a way of really enhancing and helping an organization win out in the marketplace.

Julie: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I think if you read a lot of research and white papers that are out there, it’s like board of directors are spending a lot more time on people-related issues than I think they did 10 years ago because again, you can have the best business strategy and business plan in the world and yet if you don’t have the talent to execute it, you’re sunk.

So the fact that the boards want to look at succession planning information, they want to make sure their internal compensation pay for performance programs are rewarded in the right behavior in that you’re really kind of ensuring that your top talent has the focus that it should paying enough attention. And at the same time I think I tell people that 2009 and 2010 were really, really tough years and I feel for HR people who struggle with I can’t get that seat the table… I don’t know how to get the business to pay attention to me… for me personally it feels like 2009 and 2010 were really a chance for HR to show their value in an organization and if you still haven’t gotten there, that’s unfortunate because I think that was the time when CEOs were looking for what lever can I pull to deal with my cost crisis but to hang on to my best people, what to engage them for the future, give them the confidence that we’re still going to be here.

I think that thought partner from a people strategy, this was our time the last couple of years and I think if people saw the opportunity and seize it, that’s great. I think if they didn’t, that’s unfortunate.

Peter: To sort of expand on that Julie, what advice can you share with HR leaders about working with a firm like Riviera Advisors? How do you evaluate the need for these kinds of services and decide whom to partner with?

Julie: I think that’s a great question. Riviera Advisors I think is a great strategic organization and Jeremy Eskenazi is terrific. I’ve used him at organizations where there is a good size recruiting function, you have X amount of dollars to spend. You don’t necessarily believe your recruiting function is optimized so you can look at different…obviously there’s lots of different organizations that can help you think about that, but what I love about Jeremy’s approach is to really sit down with him and he asks great consultant types of questions like what are you trying to get, like what positions are your critical positions, how much do you have to spend, what is the business think about to spend. Do you feel like you have this great reputation in the outside that kind of challenges walks in the door or what is the most critical challenge you need to find by when and where are your gaps and what are you keeping your executive leaders up at night, so having kind of dialogue to get in to what is the spirit of really what you’re trying to accomplish by your talent acquisition function through your recruiters.

So I think what Jeremy does is, again, he’s a partner for someone like me to really…because organization by organization every place I’ve been, it’s a little bit of a different story. But what Jeremy did for me specifically at the last organization I was at was really look at the talent that I had in the recruiting talent acquisition function to figure that out, help train them to get to a better place the ones that didn’t have those stronger skill sets, really help the organization again kind of from a matrix standpoint like where do you spend your money, where is a critical area that you want to fill jobs internally, that you want to outsource, ones that you might need a sourcing partner but maybe you can still fill them inside, when do you use retain search, when do you use contingent…

So thinking about all of that into a model and then helping sell it up the organization is what Jeremy I think really does better than anybody.

Peter: We had talked about the trend in outsourcing HR and recruiting functions, I know you have some pretty strong opinions about this. Can you share those with us?

Julie: It obviously depends on organization by organization. My perspective is I think that your HR function is so much an extension of your culture. On the talent acquisition side, I think those are individuals who really have to be you’re face to the outside world. They’re selling your organization, they’re selling the employment value proposition of why people should come. feel like that’s really hard in an outsourced relationship. Not that I don’t add contract recruiters to my function from time to time and they’re actually really good. We try to screen really hard to make sure that they are fit but for the most part, I think if you give the whole thing away, it’s hard to really watch as to whether or not the quality and the connection and people are really…are they just filling reqs or are they hiring talent to stay for the long haul.

So I think that’s why I’m kind of a fan of keeping as much as an in-house as you can obviously with cost constraints. Kind of the same thing on the HR side, most of the organizations I’ve built I’ve been at, I’ve built small HR service centers through my team and same kind of thing. I do really feel like when you’re a team member and you’re calling the benefits person or the person in HR and want to find out, hey I have to go out and have some surgery or gosh, my spouse has just been diagnosed with something, and I think someone again who represents and emulates your culture and is understanding with that person versus a call center maybe 25 states away and doesn’t know you, doesn’t know your people, doesn’t know your leaders, doesn’t know what is your CEO like… all of that to me is all part of what it is like working at an organization.

So again, I’m a fan is if you can run it lean with great people, make it cost effective, deliver a strong ROI – I’m a fan of keeping an in-house where it make sense.

Peter: Speaking about trends, what do you envision in talent acquisition in the next several years?

Julie: Gosh, I think more than ever it’s as we come out of the recession and people are maybe not thrilled about the organization they were at during the tough times, I think those are the people that in the statistics are like 1 out of 2 people are kind of ready to make a change as soon as they feel safe that they can leave their job and go to something else and they won’t be cut from that new company.

I think there’s going to be a lot of talent looking and I think organizations once again as they look in the mirror and figure out, gosh, who’s been here through the tough times, who’s staying, what our talent needs for 3 to 5 years from now, where are our gaps, how can talent acquisition really go in….like pound the pavement and dig through the bushes and try to find out where is that talent to fill your gaps, and again at least being 3 to 5 years ahead of what you need.

I think it’s tough because there’s a lot people right now that are applying for jobs that are way over qualified and had large salaries, and are really to kind of take in anything to get in and I worry about that that those individuals they can do their best to try to convince themselves and the company that they want to be here and they’re willing to take a 40% pay cut to get a job. I understand all that and want to support talent wherever I can, but I also worry that if you have a kind of rotating front door of people coming and going to fill your talent spots, that’s a challenge as well.

So I think to answer your question about talent acquisition function, I think they need to be more strategic than ever. I think they have to understand what’s going on on the talent development side of the organization. Again, from a succession standpoint, where are the gaps, where are the areas where positions turnover frequently, what does that mean, how do you dig in to what’s the root cause for people leaving and whereby always needing to build a pinch because it seems to be an area that turns over a lot.

So I think they need to be more connected with kind of the OD talent side of the organization as much as ever and be really particular and creative in their approach to finding talent.

Peter: Julie, thank you very much for taking time to speak with us today on TotalPicture Radio. It’s really been a pleasure having this discussion with you and I look forward to seeing you at ERE.

Julie: That sounds great. Thanks so much Peter.

Peter: And you’re going to be presenting, is that correct?

Julie: I am. I’m actually telling parts of the story I just told you. I was kindly asked to speak a little bit about AMN. I just think from a unique perspective, at least in our little world of continuing to focus on talent during turbulent times, so that’s the presentation I’ll be giving.

Peter: Great. Again, Julie, thanks so much for taking time to speak with us on TotalPicture Radio.

Julie: Take care, Peter.

Peter: You too.

We’ve been speaking with Julie Fletcher, Senior Vice President of Human Resources AMN Healthcare.

We’re always interested in hearing from our listeners, please share your thoughts and opinions on our podcast today. Visit the Talent Acquisition Channel on TotalPicture Radio. That’s totalpicture.com to add your voice to this discussion. And be sure to visit rivieraadvisors.com/podcast for a complete library of thought-provoking in-depth interviews on HR and recruiting, including the complete transcripts from these discussions from Riviera Advisors 10th anniversary celebration.

To learn more about Riviera Advisors real world experience in leading and managing corporate internal recruiting and staffing functions, please call toll free 800-635-9063 or visit rivieraadvisors.com. Riviera Advisors is a member of the Asher Talent Alliance, a global alliance of talent acquisition providers working together to benefit the unique and individual needs of their clients. To learn more about Asher, visit ashertalent.com.

This is Peter Clayton reporting. Thank you for tuning in to TotalPicture Radio, the voice of career and leadership acceleration.