"Thoughts Are a Prerequisite for Thought Leadership"

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Neal Bruce

Welcome to an Inside Recruiting channel podcast on Total Picture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting.

Joining us here in San Diego at ERE Expo is Neal Bruce, SVP of Product Management at First Advantage — a leading risk mitigation and business solutions provider, with tens of thousands of clients globally. First Advantage offers a dynamic array of innovative, information-driven solutions, infused with insight and enhanced by leading-edge technologies.

On his Linkedin page, Neal describes himself as "Visionary type guy that likes to take on impossible projects. I especially like large scale change management/cultural adaptation projects." Neal’s favorite phrase, "Thoughts are a prerequisite for Thought Leadership."

Neal Bruce joined the First Advantage’s Employer Services division as the Senior Vice President of Product in April of 2008. In this role, Neal is focusing on Product Strategy and Innovation.

First Advantage Employer Services provides a comprehensive suite of employer solutions specifically designed to reduce the time and cost associated with recruiting, hiring management, screening and ongoing retention processes.

Binging and Purging:

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NEW! Full Interview Transcript.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to an inside recruiting channel podcast on Total Picture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting. Joining us here in San Diego at ERE Expo is Neal Bruce, senior vice president of product management at First Advantage, a leading risk mitigation and business solutions provider with tens of thousands of clients globally. First Advantage offers a dynamic array of innovative information-driven solutions infused with insight and enhanced by leading edge technologies. On his LinkedIn page, Neal describes himself as “a visionary type guy that like to take on impossible projects; I especially like large scale change management cultural adaptation projects.” Neal’s favorite phrase “thoughts are prerequisite for thought leadership.”

Neal, welcome to Total Picture Radio.

Neal: Thank you, Peter, great to be here.

Peter: So tell me a little bit about what First Advantage is and what you bring into the HR and recruiting space.

Neal: First Advantage is a publicly traded company, it is about an $800 million company, about $200 million of the $800 million is in the HR space. I oversee product, product strategy for that 200 million in the HR space.

First Advantage grew up as a bunch of acquisitions with about 35 different companies. I got the call about a year ago to join and look at how can we unify the strategy around all these different parts that we’ve bought and make sure that we’re maximizing value for the customers.

Peter: So you came out of Monster and came into First Advantage, different culture, different kind of an organization. Tell me a little bit about what your career transition was like.

Neal: I spent five years at Monster, had a great time there, had been in product and alliance and innovation roles, and I was ready to take on a head of product strategy role. I got the call by First Advantage to take a look at the opportunity and lots of differences in approach.

One of the things that I like about First Advantage is it’s got a very distributive leadership team. I’m out of the Boston office, my boss is out of Indianapolis, our corporate headquarters are in San Diego here locally. So for me, not needing to move was a big thing for me and my family, but also the distribution allows us to say it’s okay to hire talent wherever they are because we have offices in so many places. We’ve got a big facility in St. Pete, Florida, and so we’ve been able to hire some people that weren’t required to work out of corporate, so to speak. Whereas when I was at Monster, there was heavy penetration of leadership in the Boston area, and if you weren’t there, you were easily out of the loop. So that’s one cultural difference.

I also think that Monster is primarily a media company; we are more of a data company. I think that data and analytics are sorely needed in the HR space. HR people are kind of defenseless when they run up against a CFO, trying to justify themselves and justify their business goals. So we think we’ve got an opportunity to really make some changes in the value proposition for data analytics.

Peter: You got a call from this company, First Advantage, we’ve bought 35 companies. A lot of times that doesn’t go over very well. I was around Citibank when there was the merger between Travelers and Citibank and the culture clashes we’re just horrendous. How have all of these 35 different entities been absorbed into the mother ship, and what are you able to do to be able to take advantage of the synergies that exists, if they do?

Neal: Great question. Unlike a lot of acquisitions where you’ve got the big mother ship acquiring the baby ships, it was really a bunch of babies coming together. So the leaders of the different parts were able to create a unified, in my opinion, a unified culture, no previous culture really existed, and so there wasn’t an us and a them, a new and an old. It was really everyone’s new, this is a new company. I’m sure there were people who along the way decided, hey, I only want to work for a small company and when my small company bought and now we’re a big company, that’s not my thing, but I think a lot of those people are gone by now. At this point, it’s a very strong leadership team for First Advantage and it’s a diverse team because of the acquisitions. When you can cherry pick great leaders of talent from many different companies as part of this acquisition strategy, it gives you a much more diversified thought view than you would if everyone was homegrown.

Peter: It must be fun, I would guess, to come into an organization like that when you really are taking out a clean sheet of paper and saying, alright, here’s all of these things that I have and how can I put these together to make a whole and make it really powerful.

Neal: Absolutely. I mean to me, that was the excitement for it. Frankly, all the acquisitions for the HR space are mostly in the pre-hire category. So there was clearly thought put into what to buy, they were good thoughts, in my opinion, in retrospect looking at what we acquired, and for a customer who’s tired of saying, I've got to cobble together five or six vendors just to get one slice of my recruiting process sorted, that’s nightmarish for customers. Also, there is often an integration fees and vendor disputes. We get to come to a customer and say, look, you buy three or four of our things, they’re already pre-integrated, there’s no integration tax that we charge you … and frankly, you got person accountable if it gets messed up.

Instead of typically what’ll happen is vendor A is a part, vendor B is the other part, the thing doesn’t work, what happens? A blames B and B blames A and in the end, the customer is like, why am I paying all this money. So I think that, even saying all of that, we have strong ETFs product line, screening, we’re one of the biggest players in the background screening business globally, tax credits, etc. there’s a lot of new stuff that we’re launching from SEO (search engine optimization) products to pipeline talent, community building products that we’re also pretty excited about.

Peter: One of the things I’ve heard here at this conference is exactly one of the terms you just mentioned, which is integration companies seem to really want to be able to integrate all of these different products that they’re using to manage HR, to manage recruiting, all in one nice piece. The other thing I’m hearing is simplify, everything is just too complicated. These ATS systems are like the old VHS players where they were so complicated to program, that you used maybe 3% of the features.

Neal: I do think – and we own two ATSs – we’re in the middle of consolidating those platforms to one. So I have sympathy for the people who live with ATSs every day; I do as well.

I think that the ATS platform is a fairly mature platform. I think most of what you need in an ATS exists, whether you use RATS or someone else’s ATS. I think that there will be modest innovation opportunity in the process of hiring that the ATS includes, but I think there’s a lot of innovation on the front end as more and more people do direct job searches from Google, that’s why search engine optimization is so important that you can be found in Google like searches. There’s a lot of innovation going on with interviewing video, engagement, hiring managers building their own video and associating it with their job posting to say, hey, this is who I am and if I sound like I’m cool and you’d want to work with me, then apply. If you think I’m a jerk, then don’t apply. So you’re seeing people apply cultural fit, higher up in the food chain, higher up in the hiring funnel, and that’s good for everyone.

Peter: Has senior management got more involved in the kinds of things that you’re doing?

Neal: They believe that the human capital, employee services parts of First Advantage are critically important for our growth. For me, that’s just great news, because when they sit and we talk about how is the market moving, that really interests them. So when they hear that people used to go to a job board to find a job and then maybe now they go to a job aggregator, and now maybe they go right to the search engine like a Google, that is going to mean money is going to shift to different ways to do sourcing. You need to know where the people are in order to find them. To be a good fisherman, you’ve got to be where the fish are. I think those kind of conversations, they get very excited about how some markets are collapsing, like the custom build models of “I want a website and I’m going to custom build it and it costs me 100 grand in six months…” is being replaced with cookie cutter Lego pieces that are super cheap and super fast to build. We’re trying to look at our own technology capability for some build and frankly, we’re partnering with companies.

There’s a small company that you may have heard of called Stand Out Jobs out of Canada, we’ve recently partnered with. They’ve built this really cool Web 2.0 career site functionality, we’ve added some services around that to launch a product called Hire Engine.

There’s another person you’re probably familiar with Yves, who was at Taleo, he’s got a company called Checkster, which is an online reference check. Why do we still pick up the phone to do reference checks? I think that us partnering with Yves company, Checkster, to offer an automated, faster, better, cheaper way to check references as part of your background check experience, is a new innovative approach.

My view is if it doesn’t exist, I will build it; but if it exists, I will partner and I’ll let it go, and if it grows big, then maybe we can make a different decision down the road. This strategy allows us for quick time to market, get products out into the marketplace, find out how much momentum we can build off that product, and then decide to build later.

Peter: Something else I’ve heard a lot at this conference is the phrase, “I have no money. ” That came form vendors, that came from the corporations that are here attending this event, especially in the HR and recruiting space. I mean what’s happening in the economy as we all know, look at all of the recruiters who’ve been laid off in the last six months. How are you able to bring your products into these organizations with the money challenge?

Neal: Great question. I think that there are two ways in which vendors are finding money. If you can offer a product that creates a net cut in spend like SEO (search engine optimization), can help you reduce your reliance on certain job boards so your net costs go down, that’s selling.

Second opportunity is if you look at a company that sees this downturn as an opportunity to talk to A players because two years ago, A players may not have called you back, but today, A players will call you back and they may not want to change jobs today because they’re nervous about the economy, are you really a stable company, but they’ll talk to you. Many A players are willing to join new talent communities as kind of a form of job insurance. Companies who are seeing today’s downturn as an opportunity to build talent communities to build pipelines, those are companies that are making those strategic investments.

I believe you can spend a dollar today on a talent pipeline community building process or ten dollars in two years when the economy turns around because you’re paying search fees and all these other costly ways of hiring, and a lot of people I think are doing that math and saying, I’d rather spend a dollar today than ten in two years.

Peter: You bring up something really interesting. I think the really forward thinking companies, and one of them that’s presented here is Microsoft. In speaking with Scott Pitasky, they’re not stopping their college recruiting program; they’re increasing it and they’re enhancing it. They may not be hiring as many people, but they don’t want to be three years down the road and not have that pipeline of really good engineers that they need to keep building in their organization.

Neal: Right. I think that and I’ve lived through this is my third recession in the recruiting world, and I see companies tend to go into one of two modes. One mode is gut the recruiting team, lose the momentum that you’ve built and once things come back, be behind and take five years to build back to where you were maybe five or ten years ago. That’s obviously what I think is the wrong model.

The right model is you clearly have to right size your organization but you can be making investments in things like talent communities when you can get A players to call you back in a bad economy, so that when things turn around, you are in a better position. Not every company can do that, not every company has a CEO who’s talent centric. But I would make the case that if I was still running a recruiting shop for a company, I would make the case through my CEO that invest the dollar today because otherwise, when inventories do get low and I have to hire people to build up my capability again, I’m going to be ready to take advantage of that and get that market share back. Otherwise, they’re going to be behind.

Peter: Well, I think what you’re really talking about is looking at recruiting from a very strategic position instead of the transactional position that so many companies have used over the years to dial up or dial down the number of employees they have, the FTE depending on the economy and what’s going on.

Neal: Correct, and I think that we will only see a rise in the temporary workforce. I think more and more companies are seeing that it’s cheaper and less risky to grow their temporary workforce as things peak in valley and have a smaller, full time workforce. There are some pluses and minuses to that model.

I mean frankly, I still think there’s a lot of bias between those two camps. I see full time people refer sometimes to the temp workforces, nonprofessional, which they’re just as professional, in my opinion. I’ve been a contract recruiter, I got more money when I was a contract recruiter than as an employee. So I looked at it as the dumb people take full time jobs. I think that there’s still a lot of weird kind of conflict that happens between those two.

I also think that typically the temp workforce doesn’t always get as good of benefits. And so as we live in a culture, in a political environment, where benefits are being scrutinized harder and harder with healthcare getting more and more costly, I think that people are going to have to make some hard choices about how they motivate people to be in a temp workforce, mainly the big staffing firms like the Kelly Services and the Spherions and the rest of them, are going to have to make a case that providing good benefits are critical to make this model of a flexible workforce viable. If they don’t keep pace, you could get in a situation where the lower quality people are willing to be the temp worker and if a big chunk of your workforce is temp and you can’t get good ones, you’re actually creating more risk, not less. So it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

Peter: In this whole area of the temp worker, I think there’s a new phenomenon that’s sort of been brought there because of the mass layoffs that have happened. A lot of baby boomers in their 50s are looking and assessing this market and realizing that the opportunities and chances for them to at least transition into the same level that they were in when they got laid off are pretty slim. And so they’re looking at these new opportunities to use Dan Pink’s free agent nation idea of saying, well, why can’t I go and do project based work at a very high level within organizations who need to bring in someone with my expertise and background but really can’t afford to hire me at my age with what’s it’s going to cost for the benefits package but really need my skill set for six months to implement this project.

So I think to your point, I think you’re going to see more and more of that kind of thing happening within organizations who are certainly, in this environment, I’m willing to go out and make that hire or send out that offer letter for a full time employee.

Neal: I totally agree. I think most companies are woefully unprepared for the concept of high level project work. For example, let’s say a company is trying to do a business case on the viability of a new product line. That’s going to be a spike in work and you’re going to need specialized expertise for a short period of time because in the end, you may decide not to go forward. So that would be a perfect scenario to bring in a project team of very senior skilled people that could come in, maybe spend three months working on that and then go away if the project doesn’t continue. That would be great and it would be super efficient use of work.

I think there’s still, at least in the States, this cultural negative association. I mean basically there was a time when if you said, I’m a consultant, that means I don’t have a job, and it was kind of a joke. So the whole view of work and the transparency and movement within work has to be redefined for us to be much more efficient.

Peter: And I think it was also along with that, efficiency it’ll also be much more humane.

Neal: I totally agree and I think that the stigmas – I haven’t used that word before yet in the interview – but I think the stigmas associated with the flexible workforce are frankly, if they don’t go away, we’re going to have problems with China, because it’s productivity that’s allowing the US to continue to maintain a manufacturing workforce. Frankly, most of our workforce’s are able to exist at a high pay structure because of efficiency and productivity. If we can’t get over these biases then we won’t maintain that productivity gap that we need in order to maintain our pricing gap. Saving money was lost. Now it was a different pot of money, and so I guess on the books, they got to hide the math, but in the end, it’s a silly way to work.

I think this view of looking at the temp workforce as a separate pot of money from the full time workforce, that’s got to get sorted but I also think that people aren’t good enough, every company struggles with this at doing the proper business planning, workforce planning to right size their companies. I mean when you’re binging, hiring too many and then purging because you’ve hired too many and you’ve got to let a ton go, that’s a sign of bad planning. I think that hopefully, business tools will get better for us to be right sizing and I think there’s interesting arguments.

I think that some jobs that have been shed in the last couple years may never come back and the whole way we look at talent, just having lots of people, there was a theory that having good people, the whole intellectual capital game, you can’t have too many good people. Well clearly there’s a problem with that theory because a lot of people are being laid off and a lot of good people being laid off. So talent as it relates to generating value, that equation we have not figured out as a country, as a world, you can tell that because we over hire and then we lay off in droves.

I’ll be interesting to see if someone comes up with a new better theory than Drucker’s theory about the knowledge worker, because the math is still not right.

Peter: It seems in this conversation and learning more about your organization that the tools and the way you’re approaching this, is you’re trying to go into an organization and really be a strategic partner and given the complexities of managing a workforce today and the things that need to be considered. To your point of bringing in contingency or short term workers to compliment the full time workforce, I mean that’s something that, as you said, in this country really hasn’t been looked at other than back office administrative work, certainly not at a high level SBP level.

Neal: Yeah, there are a few exceptions. There’ve been like contract CEO to hire, those are on the margins. I totally agree. One of the things that we believe is we have an opportunity – because we have such a broad product set across RPO and ad agency, job board spend through ATS screening assessment on boarding, we think that there is an opportunity for us to be a data player and analytics player. I don’t think there is a company in the HR space that has the metrics and analytic capabilities necessary for HR to have the credibility that they need to go toe to toe with the CFO when they’re making hard decisions on where to put my next development plant or what kind of shrinkage should we do in the workforce to maintain our competitive advantage but still right size the company. We have so many pots of data across all these different applications, we’re working to centralize that, massage the data, work on the quality of the data, put some analytics on top of that data so that people can have better planning.

For example, I don’t know why in this day in age, people guess on where to post their job. I mean basically, I’ve got a job and there are thousands of job boards, and I put it on a bunch of them and I hope it works out. That’s crazy. There’s plenty of data that we can pull together to demonstrate based on value return on every dollar I spend, how to optimize my job for this location across all these media options and not just job boards, but banner ads, Facebook applications, iPhone apps. You can look at all of those pieces and say, real time, I’ve got this job in Kansas City for a product manager, have the system run a simulation based on historical data on how to maximize that spend, and then maybe also make some self corrections to make it more SEO friendly and then send it out. That’s the kind of thinking that we’re working on, that’s what we want to be able to help customers figure out.

Peter: Neal, it’s really been great to have an opportunity to speak with you. Is there anything we haven’t discussed or I haven’t asked you in this interview that you would like to share with our audience?

Neal: The one thing that is frustrating for me at First Advantage is we have over ten different product lines across all of these HR talent acquisition pieces, and I constantly hear, as I talk to people in the space, oh I had no idea you offered a recruiting process outsourcing product or an assessment product or an ATS, etc. So what I’m trying to do and I know our marketing team is doing, is helping people understand we have a broad breadth of products.

The advantage of buying several things from us is twofold; you get all those integration pieces, which is nice but (2), the more pieces you buy, the more likely we can tell you a compelling data story because we have more of your data and we can cross reference it and make it more powerful. So I think I’ll leave on that note that I think data is important. I think actionable data is very important. We’re focused on that, and if you have any people listening to this that are trying to figure out workforce analytics and data that can help run their business in the recruiting area, I’d love to try to catch up with them because we’re trying to solve that problem.

Peter: You know, I think you’re right. I think for the HR people to really have that strategic role, to be able to sit down at the table with the CFO, they have to have the data or no one is going to pay any attention to them.

Neal: It’s amazing. I mean you talk to recruiting people and they say, why did you pick this vendor? Oh, he took me out to dinner. Can you imagine if the CFO was asked by the CEO, why did we pick this CPA accounting firm to check our books? Oh, he took me out to dinner. They’d be fired in two seconds and that doesn’t happen in HR. We’ve got a change that, the standards have got to be raised, I’m tired of people talking about how HR is a problem and negative, blah, blah, blah. We can be better, and we can do that through data.

Data is the currency of business. If we can speak like CEOs speak, if we can speak with data, we’ll have credibility, we’ll have a seat at the table, that’s what we’re trying to empower the HR community with.

Peter: We’ve been speaking with Neal Bruce, senior vice president of product management with First Advantage. Be sure to visit Neal’s feature page in the inside recruiting channel of Total Picture Radio. That’s TotalPicture.com for resource links and far more information.

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First Advantage Backstory...

In June 2003, First Advantage was formed by the merger of the Screening segment of The First American Corporation and U.S. Search.com. First Advantage has evolved and grown to be one of the nation's leading single source providers of risk mitigation and business process solutions for thousands of clients. Since June of 2003, First Advantage has acquired dozens of best-in-class companies to complement their core business lines and broaden their products and services. These companies have been brought together under one brand name: First Advantage.

Neal's Backstory...

Prior to First Advantage, Neal spent nearly five years with Monster, the flagship brand of Monster Worldwide, Inc. At Monster, Neal’s roles included Product Director, VP of Alliances, and VP of Monster’s Global Innovation Group. Neal joined Monster after spending 11 years in recruiting roles moving from recruiter, to recruiting manager, to director of global staffing.

Neal has served on the Board of Directors of HRsmart. He has also served as a member of Human Capital Institute’s talent acquisition board and ASU’s Center for Services Leadership Board of Advisors. As a leader in the HR industry, Neal is a regular public speaker on the topic of human capital and has been quoted in several periodicals, including Forbes magazine, the Arizona Republic newspaper, and the Wall Street Journal’s CareerJournal.com.

Resources

First Advantage