Max: Hello! Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today all the way from Plano, Texas, I'm delighted to welcome on the show. Tim Meehan who's VP and Global Head for Talent Acquisition Innovation Lab at Pontoon which is part of the Adecco Group. Tim, welcome to the podcast.

Tim: Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to chat with you, Max. 

Max: Thank you. Thanks, Tim. We met years ago in the real world and we were just saying how a business is now keeping us at home, which is lovely. And it's mostly lovely. How else is Pontoon Solutions affected? You know, changed its business over the last couple of years? Can you maybe start off by telling us how Pontoon Innovation had to adapt to the new normal, which is not new at all anymore?

Tim:  What do I have? Two hours, right?

Well, first on the Pontoon levels. Thanks for asking. I would say our business has been very strong even through the pandemic. We're fortunate to have a portfolio of customers in the technology area so that business remains strong for us. But you know, as we were talking a little bit earlier, Max, I think there's a couple of trends that increasingly occupy my time, my mind, my thought focus in terms of how to bring, not just Pontoon for it, but our entire industry.

Because I think we're at an inflection point, an important point in time where the way talent is acquired in our industry is changing radically. And we all understand digitization and the automation that's occurring in homeport experiences, but there are some trends that I increasingly look at and say, you know, I think there, if we're all aware of them then perhaps each of us in our own individual spaces can be thinking about how we work within the

Max: And the Talent Acquisition Lab at Pontoon is, correct me if I'm misdescribing it, is like a consultancy practice focused on helping companies crack the case of how to bring in new tech in their talent acquisition tech stack, and how to work within their existing IT architecture. So yeah. Does that sum it up?

Tim: Yeah, it does. And it's important to explain it. So for us, at Pontoon Talent Acquisition encompasses all the workforce categories.

So certainly RPO, or we call it RXO, the full-time talent acquisitions is a big part of what we do. MSP or contingent labor talent acquisition is another part of our portfolio offering that my team supports, but increasingly statement of work or service procurement. So people coming in on fixed deliverable basis, those are all different ways for companies to access a growing and very powerful talent pool.

Then my team, which is a team of technologists, product marketers and, solution designers are responsible for figuring out how to simplify it to our customers because this stuff is really hard. Steve Jobs once said simplicity is the answer, make it easy. And so that's what my team is trying to do. Make a little less confusing for our customers to understand and decide what to do. 

Max: Yeah, it's so complex for companies, especially when they have a broad variety of job types from blue-collar, white-collar, graduates and, and so on. And almost for every job category, you need a different partner on the sourcing side, on assessments, on the process and, and a strong case could be made for a company to buy 30 different technologies just for talent acquisition, right? 

I mean, you must have these kinds of, I wouldn't call them horror stories, but customers that are heavily loaded right? Or overloaded?

Tim:  Yeah. I think one of the trends I see is some of the tech companies in our space are trying to simplify it by bringing the entire tech stack to the customer.

So I look at like Phenom people or an eight folder, and I sense a little bit more ATS, but certainly the capabilities of Symphony Talent. So their pitch to our customers is I bring the stack to, you know, one buy and I can plug you into a whole architecture and ecosystem of capability. And we are seeing companies look at that.

The key issue is a lot of times the applicant tracking system is owned by eight. IT, the career site may be run by the marketing department internally developed, and then you've got HR with the room budget as well. So you've got kind of a challenging cross-functional challenge to break those, take those pieces, and have them all into one buy.

But I am seeing that trend. I call it the field of dreams, where these big tech companies are going out and they're building it and hoping companies come and we are seeing some interest in that. And certainly, as an outsourcer, we work with those vendors when that's the case.

Max: And maybe five, ten years ago, IT had a little, relatively to today, a little bit more power, and it's shifting a little bit to the marketing function.

Tim: Well, the other one is my other joke is Love Actually, where Hugh Grant says to uh... where Billy Bob Thornton says to Hugh grant, “I'll give you anything you want as long as that's not something I don't want to give you.” 

And in some ways, that's sort of the IT group. HR, go out there and look at everything you want. But only if it's within the framework of what I'm willing to let you do, which is to say data, privacy, data, security, data governance, the vendors have to pay a certain threshold. 

So IT is increasingly empowered, ITN, data privacy, certainly with the  data privacy regulations that are coming out, not without good reason. So you have to be able to operate increasingly. HR has to be able to operate both. Understanding the language and needs of an IT organization in their company, as well as the technology needs of the many vendors out there that can help them supercharge their recruiters.

Max: Okay. I thought it was going in the other way, because I thought, well, it's so easy to buy software now that nobody needs to know IT or be an engineer to be able to buy it. And you know, the cloud story of everybody can be a buyer now. But you're seeing it, the counter-trend to that movement. 

Tim: Absolutely, I am. I think about my career and my early career recruitment. My expertise we're building source two plans with which job boards, how many recruiters in which job boards in a couple of ratios. And today I'm doing data mapping, integration design, architectural reviews, and granted, this is all I do. But any program we want to do, that's what we have to do. And so, you know, I think we're going to have a… no, I think the language of HR in the future, certainly talent acquisition is increasingly require a digital mindset, a digital skillset.

But you know, if it's something like, you know, I don't want to do that, that's not my area then I would probably say, make a decision, either build the competency so your TA person listening to me right now, and you're not familiar with Talkpush and all the Talkpush’s competitors in the HR tech landscape, and you don't want to be then I would suggest you're going to struggle. And what you should either do is say, I'm going to ramp up and build the competency early or myself, or call me. Honestly, or call one of my competitors. This is what we're doing. We're building out an entire ecosystem of capability to help you through that gap.

Max: If you walked into HR on talent acquisition, because you wanted to get inside the psycho...