Max: Hello. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster, and today I'm delighted to welcome Lindsay Witcher, who is VP of Global Practice Strategy and Solutions at RiseSmart, which is part of the Randstad group and an expert on internal mobility, which is maybe the hidden engine a company needs to activate in order to really power up their hiring for graduate hiring That’s what I'm hoping for this, that with a good internal mobility engine, then that means you can train, you can grow people for many years, and then you can build a more diverse workforce, which is built from people from within coming straight out of school. So that'll be my pitch. And maybe Lindsay, if you want to poke holes in it, you're most welcome to do so and to expand our mind on how to build a good internal mobility program. So welcome to the show. 

LINDSAY: Thanks Max. I'm so excited to be here. And definitely looking forward to that topic. I don't know that I'm going to poke holes necessarily in, but I'm excited for an interesting conversation.

Max: Thank you. And to kick things off how did you end up in such a, you know narrow, I would say specialized area of mobility I'd ran stats. Walk us through your career on how you ended up in the beautiful field that were of people strategy. 

Lindsay: Yeah, sure. No happy to. So I've been here at Bronstein RiseSmart for a little over 10 years. I started when we were just RiseSmart very early days as a small Silicon Valley-based startup looking to disrupt the outplacement industry. So the industry of supporting people who are impacted by layoffs, find a new role, that was really the roots of our company.

And since that time you know, the company has really grown and expanded in terms of what we do and how we support our customers to really encompass the entire employee life cycle. So internal mobility redeployment all the way through to outplacement. And so obviously internal mobility today is such a hot topic for companies.

The war for talent is such that you can't find people on the outside. It's an important time to start looking within. And so we do a lot of that. We offer services and technology to help with that.  And looking forward to, you know, diving into that topic as far as on a personal note I got here, I started my career.

I actually got a master's degree in career development. I was really passionate about psychology and careers and HR. So that's the path my education took me and then stumbled upon you know, a number of different roles, managing businesses, managing HR and some small businesses, coaching executives, writing resumes, all sorts of interesting things. As I went through graduate school, and then ultimately came more into this space, specifically that outplacement space and now the talent mobility space. And I'm part of Randstad RiseSmart’s global leadership team. So excited to have... 

Max: Well of psychology is one of those departments that always produces great talent for the HR teams because you know, you have to have that sort of twisted mindset.

Sorry, just poking fun. But then you kind of have to have that curiosity to try to create these good environments and deal with the stresses of people. Maybe people from in talent acquisition these days I see more and more who are coming from an analytics background and maybe more, you know, left-brain thinkers.

But there's these two elements rises psychology elements and the analytics, which are both rising in demand and perhaps a in town tech position, what's becoming less, less frequency is the, you know, the more aggressive salesy kind of profile. The last two years must have been a very busy time for RiseSmart.

I'll play it. You know, if we're talking about outplacement and how is the market changing in the field of outplacement, which is. I think unknown to most people outside of that, up in the air movie with George Clooney. 

Lindsay: Ah, you thought, oh man, I have to be honest. It's very much not like that movie.  I can assure everybody. So just know that I mean, you know, we've really. Well, first of all, to answer your first question, what it's been like. I mean, obviously last year, 2020 was an incredibly difficult year for many companies, right? So many organizations were really negatively impacted by COVID their business models were turned upside down and they really struggled to find their way through the economic downturn that we experienced.

So we definitely had a lot of our customers needing to have layoffs last year, unfortunately. Which of course, you know, we much rather our customers retaining talent and move talent and train talent and do all those things. But of course, last year we saw a lot of companies needing to let people go.

But at the same time, you know, there's always that other side of it, there were a lot of organizations that we work with that were in a good position as a result of COVID they were in industries that were, you know, boom. On the flip side of that scenario. So in that case, we were able to really work hard with those customers who were having to let people go.

And those customers who were hiring to try to connect those dots and create as good of an outcome as possible for those employees who were impacted by layoffs. Because, you know, for us, we're really focused on experience. We want the individuals to have who we work with to have as good of an experience as possible, have all the support they need.

They get partnered with a coach, they get a brand new resume from a resume writer. We do a number of things to help them. And so for us, you know, we were really honored to be able to help a lot of people through a difficult time and found a lot of success, helping them find new roles in the industries that we're hiring over that time.

Max: I've never received this Rolls-Royce service, but I've actually never suffered a layoff personally you know on a personal level. But the career coach service the outplacement service, is that something that is offered at scale or it's more for, you know, leaders, senior leadership and you know what are some of the best practices in this space for maybe the more high volume space?

Lindsay: Yeah it's a good question. And I think that it's a nuanced answer because I think I remember, I don't think I know every company handles it differently. So on the one end of the spectrum, we have customers who truly are committed to equity and inclusion, and they believe that everyone should have equal access to services such as ours, as part of their exit process from the organization.

And so those organizations whether you're at the, you know, most entry-level of the company, or you're the most senior executive you're going to get outplacement services. And I do think that is the most fair and equitable approach because really we that when people have our services, not only do they handle the transition better, land into their new role much, much more quickly.

So that's good for the company, right? You save on severance, you save on unemployment insurance, depending on what country you're in and what those rules might be. But ultimately I think that we, of course, always advocate for that approach. There are companies, however, Based on budgets or past, you know, past processes or ...