Max: Alright, welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today on the show I have Kimberly Carroll, who is managing principal at IA, you're really welcome to the show.

Kimberly: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Max: My pleasure to have you. And what does the IA stand for. I know AI, but IA?

Kimberly: We were not Internal Audit. It used to be called Inflection Advisors and we shortened it to IA because nobody could spell or say it. So, Inflection Advisors.

Max: Inflexion advisors. That's good. Well, Kimberly, let's get right to it. How did you end up? So Inflection Advisors is an advisory group that helps companies, I guess, manage inflection and notable change, not only in the HR, including the TA space. And you don't become a managing principal of an advisory group, right out of school right out of the gates. You need a career to prepare yourself to get into that space. So tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up being in this very specialized field.

Kimberly: Absolutely.I have an economics degree which is not anything to do with HR, but when I started my career, I always wanted to help people. So I worked at Fidelity Investments for a little over 13 years, all in a variety of different roles. I implemented the HR payroll outsourcing business. I also worked in systems where I configured the platform itself. And then I also ran their shared services organization. And that was probably the most influential job I've ever had. Because you learn a lot about what to do and what not to do as part of running a shared services organization. I also managed a global outsourcing business. And then I met Mark, who was the founder of IA, and we had hired him to come over and do some work for us. And then once I figured out that consulting wasn't all bad. And that I really liked consulting and helping others. I moved to IA for about eight years, working with a ton of different clients from anything, from looking at their HR processes and making them better or selecting technology to help them implement their change or building vision. So we do a whole slew of different things at IA and just I love it. I love what I do, and so my career has been all around helping people.

Max: I mean I can see, for me as an entrepreneur I could see the joy of moving from managing and shared Services Center, which is all about process and repetition, get everything ironed out to being a consultant, moving from client to client and being in charge of your own schedule, which suits me very, very much. But it's not necessarily a transition for everybody. 

Kimberly: No

Max: But I guess it's for that stage of your career also where you're more about, you know, sharing experience and maybe resolving conflict people do people bring you in when there's battles within?

Kimberly: Absolutely. We not only battle with them but battles with their technology partners and stuff like that, so we do help with guiding our clients through the changes that they need to make. We're not shy consultants and we don't have a playbook. So we have processes ourselves but we are ones that we will come in and we don't say yes yes you should do this or we tell them this is what you should do. And it's a little bit different from a consulting process and one of the things about IA that's a little,is that we actually want to work ourselves out of a job. We would like to teach and leave and go to the next client because our role is to help all, as many clients as we can. But if we get stuck at a client for a long time, that keeps us from helping other clients. So for us we do.

Max: That's the model of like Accenture or the Lloyd's to create enough role or enough work for everybody for the next 20 years.

Kimberly: Yeah, we're not, we don't want to do that that's not I mean that's not what we want to do. And it's not I mean it's that's just because when I got into consulting I had that fear of getting into consulting, because I didn't like consultants. So I mean I hate to say that, but it's just one of those things for me that I feel like if I can influence a couple people or a couple clients or a couple companies to think differently to really move forward to, to not just do it because that's the way that you've been told to do it, is to start thinking for themselves and get us out of there, then, that to me is the is the important part of what we do. My first client at IA They're a fascinating client. They clean slaughterhouses, I mean so that's what they do but they're quite large. 16-17,000 employees. They had a hard time with recruiting, they had because their turnover was 150%. They did not have technology.

Max: So they were not able to retain people in their slaughterhouse jobs?

Kimberly: They were not.

Max: Do you think that if you're willing to take the job by that point you're going to keep it because I kind of made the mental leap that I took and retain them. Amazing. 

Kimberly: Now, are you really shocked? I'm not shocked. So, but what's fascinating is they were my first clients. They had no automation, no nothing. They had a lot of paper based processes, all of their applications were still paper based. So we finally got them automated on some systems and stuff like that to really get them so that they could make that turnover quite a bit. And to be able to get them to not have so much paper, but that client is still a client that they will only come back to us, they will. They've told us we will not go anywhere else. And it's not. I mean, and I'm not doing work with them all the time it's just a call for Mark says I'm the worst consultant because I give free consulting all the time because they will call me at the whim, and just ask questions and I will turn them down to say no, I'm not gonna answer your questions and so anyways I love that part of what we do is that we build relationships with our clients and their lifelong relationships and that's what we need to do, but that client was one of my special clients because of the work they do. 

Max: It sounded a little bit like you were that story where you said they had high turnover. We replaced the paperwork with systems and how is that supposed to resolve turnover issues. How would you, how do you connect the dots here?

Kimberly: How do I connect those dots, is they are able to do better with the automation that they put in place, and in the States, you have to do e-verify, to be able to support it with that automation they've been able to then detect the people that are not able to work in the United States, so that turnover even though it's still high, so they had it like 150%, their metric was to drop it, and I don't remember and I apologize, but I think they dropped it to like 120% which is a pretty significant drop for them, but they were able to with automation, be able to get those employees or those candidates in the system faster. Interviewed through the work verification process, and on the floor and be able to, and the people that they were hiring better suited or legal to work in the States. 

Max: Right, right, right. When you speed things up you have less...