Hey everybody, this is Bob Goodwin, and welcome to another episode of Career Club Live. Thank you so much for taking a few moments out of your day to join us. Today's episode is sponsored by our newest offering, which is called Next Placement, which is our innovation in the out placement category, where we're bringing a more people-centric, empathetic approach to helping people who are caught up in transition situations. If you'd like to learn more, you can do that at Careerclub. I'm really pleased to have today's guest on. He is a managing partner at one of the largest executive search firms in the world and we have a lot of listeners who are HR professionals, hr executives, and our guest today is Brad Warga who, as I said, is partner with Hydric and Struggles, where he leads both their technology and CHRO practice. So with that, brad, welcome.
Speaker 2:Thanks, bob, it's great to be here.
Speaker 1:It's so great to have you. Where do we find you today?
Speaker 2:I am in San Francisco and it looks actually sunny at the moment, so we'll take it. You know, summer in San Francisco, it's quite foggy and cold.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that'll change on a moment's notice. I'm sure you'll have a different weather pattern in a minute but, like I said, just in that little bit of a brief introduction, I'm really glad to have you on. We do have a lot of people that follow us on LinkedIn and listen to the podcast and watch on YouTube and who are HR professionals. I was just at the SHRM conference a couple of weeks ago and we massively expanded our audience from there. I was really hoping to have you come on, because you have a very unique view of what's going on in the HR space, particularly from a senior leadership perspective, that I'm very much looking forward to unpacking with you.
Speaker 2:That's great. Now, as you said, I'm a partner at Hydric and Struggles. I've been here for six years. I actually don't lead the global technology practice. I just want to make that clear. I do focus on HR officers and get to work with such a variety of clients. It's one of the best parts of the job the diversity of working with late stage venture backed hyper growth companies all the way up to the Fortune 100. The last thing I'd say is, before joining Hydric, I actually worked in HR my whole career. I developed a lot of empathy for the function, although I can't even imagine what it's like to have gone through so much chaos and crisis over the last three to four years.
Speaker 1:Well, you've seen that as a lead in, as is our want to do, we do like to ask just a few icebreaker questions that can help people get to know you a little bit. You mentioned you're in San Francisco. Where were you born and raised?
Speaker 2:I actually grew up in Cocoa Beach, Florida. My dad worked at Kennedy Space Center, worked for NASA his whole career. So I dream of Jeannie kind of life growing up and skateboarding. It's amazing I actually graduated from high school, let alone college, so it was great. My family part of my family is still there and it's fun to go back and visit.
Speaker 1:Now speaking of college. We have a little connection there. Do you mind telling folks where you went to school?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I went to Rawlins College in Winter Park and wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I knew I wasn't great with numbers, so finance and accounting were out and I thought I might end up in sales or in some aspect of business. And business it was, and from there joined. My first job was with a consulting firm and, having grown up in Florida, I had an adventurous spirit and couldn't wait to travel and nothing better than consulting to put you on the road.
Speaker 1:That is a true statement. And super briefly, on Rawlins our daughter went to Rawlins and so go TARS. Not everybody knows about Rawlins College but it is a very unique, really neat little campus just outside of Orlando, as you say, in Winter Park.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the Florida connection continues. My middle daughter is headed to University of Miami in Florida.
Speaker 1:So there you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's going to take me back a couple times a year, which I'm not complaining about.
Speaker 1:Now, just very quickly outside of work. What do we find Brad doing?
Speaker 2:I'm an avid surfer On purpose exposed my kids to surfing at a young age and took them to a bunch of exotic surf spots, and now they love it as much as I do. My youngest daughter is a competitive surfer. That's what I spend my time doing trying to stay in shape, to keep up with them out in the water.
Speaker 1:So when are you guys going to Portugal, to the place that has 100 foot waves?
Speaker 2:No, that's not happening. I can't even. I'm too scared to surf Ocean Beach here in San Francisco. Where it's a, it gets pretty gnarly.
Speaker 1:Well, you can take the kid out of Florida, but you can't take the Florida out of the kids, so not surprised that you're surfing. Let's jump into our topic, because you know the the role of CHRO has evolved a lot in the past. I know you can pick the time period, but but in a fairly compressed period of time when you're working with your CEO clients who are looking to hire a new CHRO, they've retained the firm to help them do that. What are the things that you're hearing are sort of the key things, that they're looking for one and then, if this isn't too big of a question, maybe just contrast that of how that's changed over the past. You know, 10 years.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, bob. I think you know it's just a, it's a cliche statement, but you know it's. It's been something that's been going on since I started my career 20 years ago, with HR really wanting to be that partner with the CEO and the rest of the executive team, and I can tell you for some, the last three to four years it's just been exhilarating and their roles have been elevated as well as the whole function. I think they've taken on more than ever before you see CHROs taking on the health and safety aspects of their employees, internal communications, internal IT, real estate, and so for many it's the crisis one after another that we've been dealing with have really elevated the role. For others, it's maybe a little too much attention, you know it's. I think they would say it's time to shine the spotlight somewhere else that some of the best leaders have just been exhausted, emotionally exhausted, and have questioned whether they want to stay in operating roles through so many difficult, you know, and turbulent times. I think burnout has definitely been, you know, very real recently. But, to directly answer your question, I think the skill sets they have changed. One thing that hasn't changed I mean those HR leaders are strong business acumen that speak the language of business. Like and have the ability to influence the C-suite have always done well, so there's a certain level of gravitas and confidence that has always been required.
Speaker 2:I think what's changed is now that we're in a state of constant change, with one crisis after another.
Speaker 2:The playbooks from the past they're just not as relevant.
Speaker 2:I think you have unprecedented issues that are facing businesses and there aren't any proven answers, and so what CEOs are asking us for is first principle thinkers and that's probably an overused term, but what they're referring to is someone with intellectual curiosity, someone who's a creative problem solver, someone who is a design thinker, has agility, has the ability to develop a, you know, bespoke solution that's right for that culture and that company, and then can influence and deliver that through a crisis.
Speaker 2:So I think that is probably the most requested skills, and HR leaders are dealing with pandemic social justice, employee entitlement, activist investors, you know, return to office and just so many, so many different things that don't have, don't have an answer. There's no right or wrong. In fact, I wrote a LinkedIn piece recently and I described the role of HR as the second loneliest job in the business, next to the CEO, and that was meant as a compliment, because you don't have a lot of places to turn inside your company for advice when you're in the role of a chief people officer, and so you know most of the CPO's that do well have become that trusted, confidant to the CEO and also typically have a very strong network of peers you know outside their company.
Speaker 1:So trying to not ask a just like a painfully obvious question but was the pandemic really like kind of what just completely changed the dynamics for how these HR leaders are viewed within their companies, just because of the emergency? The crisis created the need for them to step up?
Speaker 2:I definitely think it did. I mean, I don't think it was HR alone, I think, but it definitely created an opportunity to bring the executive team together in a war room environment to try to figure out first, how do we care for our employees and make sure that they're healthy and safe. And depending on the type of business you were in, you know that was that was a really intense period If you were in manufacturing or you know businesses where, where you had employees standing next to each other and it was amazing to see how seamless for a lot of companies it was for for employees to go remote and go home and and still be productive. So you know, I do think that was a period when I remember joining CHROs on calls every week, talking about hey, what are you doing and how are you enabling this, and it was. It was amazing to see the brainstorming and the creativity that was coming out of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my last corporate job was at a company in Chicago called Numerator, which actually I think is in the same location as your corporate headquarters there at Sears Tower, and I just super high marks. As you say, there was no playbook for that and the way that they figured it out and, you know, over, communicated in a positive way and just really tried to keep people calm, know that they care, gave people a ton of latitude to kind of do what they needed to do, and completely uncharted territory, you know, was very laudable.
Speaker 1:And you know, I think that for all the companies, because this is the case everywhere, you know it's like, wow, this HR person is like, this executive is a lot more than I think maybe we were sort of entrusting him or her with previously and they really can step up and deliver when you're working. You know you talked about, you know, natural curiosity, creative problem solver, some of those types of design thinking skills. What's the balance between those kinds of attributes and just hard skills, slash, proven track record or what looks like you know, relevant experience?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question. I think you know a lot of the CEOs and founders that I work with are in the technology world, and those individuals are, in many cases, coming from an engineering and a product background themselves, and so they're very analytical and data driven and I think you know their safe space is with data, and so HR has historically struggled in that area, whether it was lack of investment in technology. I always compare, you know, the state of HR technology with the state of marketing. Technology and marketing went through the same transition back in 2006 when it became a more analytical function. I think HR still has a long way to go when it comes to that, as well as being able to attract more analytical resources to the HR team.
Speaker 2:You know we continue to see, even when technology is available, if it's candidate relationship management, we're asking recruiters who are salespeople to be a demand generation marketer, which is not their skill set.
Speaker 2:So I think one of the things that is changing rapidly is HR leaders, if they're not comfortable with analytics, are surrounding themselves with either a chief of staff or someone that has a quantitative background to compliment their experience. You know the soft skills around empathy and balancing the business strategy with what's right for employees is still critically important. I just think there's an operational excellence element that is emerging where you know you and it's when I look back. You know Salesforce, uber, facebook they all invested heavily in this area from the very beginning and were able to have engineers and data scientists working in HR, but that was very unique at the time that they were doing that and it continues to be very difficult. But you can imagine if you're able to have more of a predictive analytics capability around some of these decisions whether it's return to office or compensation programs when many people's valuations are down right now, or launching new benefit programs, forecasting your growth and your workforce plans I mean it starts to become really critically important to mix the soft and the hard skills.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I've never heard about it really kind of draw the analogy with marketing. You know back 15 years ago or you know so and how that has exactly what you said how that's become very data-driven and now how we're seeing the same thing happen. And then pretty fundamental, rudimentary even.
Speaker 1:I don't mean to be dismissive but even some of what's you know. I'm here. People talk about analytics or just some basic KPIs, just some pretty fundamental measures that you would think that they would be have always been paying attention to, but not necessarily, I guess. In the regard of technology, what are the key? Either technologies or use cases for technology that you're seeing really kind of come to the fore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean certainly everyone's excited about AI. It's, you know. We're pretty just sitting here in San Francisco. There's about 40 startups outside my window in Hayes Valley, so it's just been amazing to see how quickly that is taking hold in business, whether it's, you know, playing around chat or a BBT and Bard and some of the solutions out there, or what's happening with the ability to search your own private dataset internally. I mean, there's some startups that we're talking to that could just be game changers when it comes to productivity. You know, I oftentimes can't remember if I put a document in my box folder or it's in my email, or I got it on my hard drive or it's somewhere in Salesforce. Some of these tools are just gonna you're gonna be able to ask it a generative chat, gbt like question and get the answer based on whether it's your private data or fusing that with public data, which I just I couldn't be more excited about. I think it's gonna be. It's gonna be huge, I would say, in terms of technology and just in a broader view of automation.
Speaker 2:There's been quite a bit of progress on employee self-service, manager self-service If you think about making your own benefit, elections or performance reviews or time in attendance a lot of the repetitive, repetitious task that HR used to provide white glove service on, now it can be done by an employer or a manager. I still think there's lots of opportunities in in across HR. I mean, if you think about recruiting, if you think about the role of compensation design, like these jobs are just still so incredibly hard In that on the recruiting side there's just so much, it's so much of a manual process still in terms of sourcing, you know, going onto LinkedIn, sorting through profiles, trying to figure out who's good, there's just an overwhelming amount of data and you know, I think that just that process hopefully at some point can become more automated, at least on the top of the funnel, to allow recruiters to do what they do best, which is sell, evaluate and negotiate deals, I think with HR business partners. It's similar, I mean it's. You know, you want to be ingrained in the business and many times you're consumed with a lot of repetitious, low level tasks and that's taking away from your ability to be strategic.
Speaker 2:And one of the changes we're starting to see as, over time, most companies are either sort of on their way towards centralization or decentralization.
Speaker 2:We're definitely starting to see a trend towards decentralization. So a new structure is evolving which is, instead of having a chief people officer who sits on top of a center of excellence that's, you know, you could say is somewhat isolated from the business that's designing programs and experiences and services for the business, there's a move towards having chief people officers that sit in the business units that have a full complement of staff. So we've seen this with some of the big tech companies in the Bay Area, where you might have four or five businesses and now you have a chief people officer that has recruiters, hr, business partners, compensation partners, talent management rolling up into that chief people officer, who may have a hard line or dotted line to the overarching CHRO of the portfolio, but the idea there is that you're getting closer to the business, you're reporting to that CEO of that particular business unit or business line, and so we'll see if that continues, but it is something that we're starting to see.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you know, kind of back to what we were talking about originally, with the seat at the table and you're really being that peer business partner instead of, as you say, being siloed off to the side working on programs and policies and procedures. It's like being integrated into the business, because it seems intuitive and how we ever got here is a little odd. But the business shuts down without people and right, I mean, we're not gonna ever chat GPT our way out of great people, and yet the way that the business organizes around people doesn't seem to be very integrated as it could be.
Speaker 1:So what you're describing makes me optimistic that, you know somebody, trends start with tech companies and then they kind of trickle downhill as they kind of prove that, hey, this works a little bit better and we've got the business results to prove it, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that you said kind of early on in terms of like this, all the stuff that the CPO has to deal with, one of them was employee activism, and I think that's really an important topic. A lot of our guests are marketers and a lot of our guests are HR executives and we started to kind of see well, how do we, you know, bring those are not just totally distinct topics, because there's like what's the brand in the marketplace and what's the brand inside the four walls, and there should not be that much dissonance between the two. So that's kind of part A. Part B is bring your whole self to work. Oh, not really Like, don't bring that part of yourself to work. Yeah, how do you talk to your clients and how are your CPO clients talking back to you in terms of what's going on with your kind of social causes and play activism, those kinds of things?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I thought a lot about this, but I think, having kind of grown up in my career in Silicon Valley, I go back to the early 2000s and I think some of the activism today has come from this somewhat unique Silicon Valley employee entitlement culture. It started in the early 2000s and this is when Google was by far, in a way, the most desired place to work. Much of that was because of the perks and the employee experience. I mean, they had amazing food, they did your laundry, and at the time that was about the amount of work that Google needed a relatively small group of people to accomplish to become the company they are today. You got it. That's a lot of programming and a lot of productivity needed to scale that company as fast as possible, and so you wanted to remove everything that was distracting in someone's life to allow them to really focus on coding, keep them caffeinated, keep them full from food, do their laundry, so they don't have to worry about that. And I think I didn't work at Google, but I would say probably worked because so many other companies that were competing for that talent started to do the same thing. And the reason I make that early tie to it is, I think this bring your entire self to work, and inclusion is a very good thing, and inclusion in buying is something that I personally champion, and Hydric does as well.
Speaker 2:I think, though, the line started to blur between bringing your whole self to work, and people started to somewhat not differentiate between their life at work and their life outside of work. You heard about companies where you'd have dinner at 7 o'clock and then there'd be drinks in the office, and you had philanthropy events that were taking place that were great for team building and bonding, and so, whatever it was, I think people started to spend a lot more time at work, and it became a big part of their brand identity, and I think, from an employee perspective, you're saying wow, they really care about me. So when I'm struggling with this political event, or I'm struggling with this with Roe versus Wade or George Floyd or any of the social justice movements, well, I want to go to my CEO, because the company cares about me. My company has the power to influence. It's got a big voice if it chooses to have a voice, and so I need them to intervene Like. This is a big issue for me personally.
Speaker 2:The challenge is, if you started to do that and your CEO comments on one thing. They end up having to comment on most things, and that can be pretty exhausting and pretty challenging and very complex. And so I think what we're hearing from HR leaders is the company is not a civic organization and it can't appeal to everyone's topics, and there's a risk of alienating your workforce if you were to do that. And so, like many of the topics today, I mean, companies are on both sides of this issue.
Speaker 2:On one side, you've got a CEO that's saying I'm not going to comment on anything, it's not directly related to the business strategy. On the other side, you have very vocal leaders saying if you don't change your state laws, we're gonna pull out of your state, and so I think many companies are someone in the middle, and what we're hearing a lot of now is in the example of this road versus wave, you can offer the benefit of healthcare in flying your employee to location, and it provides healthcare for them, which is not taking a political stance on abortion, but it's providing a benefit that can be used by anyone. And so that was a recent example from a CHRO. But I do think the pendulum is swinging a little bit back to hey, we want you to be an activist outside of work and we want you to go after causes that are important to you, but we're just not gonna offer that while you're at work.
Speaker 1:So I mentioned chief marketing officers, for example. We had the CMO for MasterCard on recently and asking the same question, and he's like if it doesn't fit with the brand, then we're probably not going to take a stand on it or even comment on it. That's one. Two is back to bring your whole self. That's the problem with diversity is you get diversity, and so it's not this monolithic and inclusion, it's diversity and inclusion. And so now, what do you do when not everybody's on the same side of the issue at your company? Well then, you're almost gonna need to start making somebody upset.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's a lot of these issues too, bob. I mean return to office is another one, right? I mean it's. I've never seen a more divided issue. Within just the clients that I know and serve. I mean you literally have equal passion on both sides. One side is saying we went remote productivity's up, we're saving money, we decreased our real estate footprint, we invested in some more collaboration tools. We do get together, but it's very purposeful and thoughtful and we can hire the best talent wherever they are, and this has been a great thing for our business. And then on the other side, you have we are bringing people back, mandated three days a week. If they moved away from the office, they need to move back, and we are gonna do this because we believe in it so much. It's the expensive option because we have to maintain our real estate footprint and provide benefits around commuting and technology, and so I mean there's no right answer. Right, it's like, depending on your company and your workforce, like either one of those could be great models to pursue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was just reading very recently about trying to get people to come back on Monday, like in using Monday as to kick off to the week day, and even that was highly, highly contentious with folks. And, as you say, there isn't a right answer. We've got a hundred plus years of one work model of we all go to the office and then that got interrupted by this nasty pandemic and we're not gonna figure it out on the fly. And again, there's probably not a single answer for every company that's gonna work for a million good reasons, and so people are just going to have to figure out what works in our company. That kind of strikes this balance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean another one we're hearing a lot about, bob is just the. You know, if you joined the company in 2021 or 2022, at the peak of this kind of talent war, you're probably now facing a valuation or stock price that's upside down. And so when we were talking about activism, I mean one of the difficult choices out there right now is if you have employees that there were at the time, there were a lot of creative compensation programs where they gave employees the choice and said would you rather take stock or cash? And whenever you give someone a choice, somebody's gonna choose wrong.
Speaker 2:Right, and at the time, choosing stock probably was made a lot of sense. But now you have all these employees who are underwater who are saying, well, I guess I'm gonna have to leave because I can't spend the next seven years trying to get back to break even on my strike price of my stock. And if you're the total rewards leader, do you go back and ask to re-up those employees? Which is kind of like defeats the purpose of equity in some way, because you're saying we want you to behave like an owner, we want you to receive the benefits of being an owner, and that's all great when the stock's going up, but when the stock's going down, it's not like your owners and investors are getting re-upped on their stock.
Speaker 1:That goes back to your entitlement. I don't even go ahead.
Speaker 2:But it's a tough one because I mean, do you lose your high potentials or do you come up with a way to kind of go back and lock them in and say, it's all right, even in the downturn we're gonna take care of you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, and again, no teasing, it is part of the entitlement thing. Like, well, come on man, like I didn't really mean like an owner, I wasn't actually gonna bet real capital on this, I just considered it as part of my compensation and now part of my comp's been taken away. You need to make me whole right Versus. No, I'm genuinely investing in this business. Realizing novel investments pay off and I'm willing to absorb losses in the same measure that I'm willing to accept again.
Speaker 2:We are seeing as creative as people were in 2021 and 2022 with compensation philosophies. We're seeing an equal level of creativity, reversing many of those back to something different.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, you also, you know, at the home of universal income and college debt forgiveness, and there's a lot of things going on where people have started to get an expectation that there is no downside, like there's always going to be a net, even PPP, during the pandemic. It's like there's always going to be a net under me, and so it is going to feel like just a straight up loss that I really wasn't signing up for.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So real quickly because you're in the Valley and a lot of tech companies, layoffs have been kind of over pronounced in your neck of the woods. What do you guys seem with that and how are people? Are people landing pretty quickly or just how would you sort of think about layoffs?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's certainly been something that you know. Every week you're hearing for the last. Really, you know, quarter and a half we've seen just a dramatic number of people let go from companies and I think talent acquisition has been hit particularly hard. You don't feel like it, as I talked to CHROs and clients. There was just, you know, there was money was free for a long time. There was this belief and this level of confidence that the free money and it was going to continue coming out of COVID and that you could grow at all costs.
Speaker 2:And you know that was actually something that we heard a lot in Silicon Valley. It was almost like a badge of success is like, hey, how fast did you scale? You know, did you go from 200 to 2000 in this period of time? And so it for what? 12 or 13 years? This growth at all costs became almost like a success metric. And I think what we saw with the macroeconomic environment is that suddenly, you know, money wasn't free, profitability mattered, operating margins mattered. We talked to one HR leader who said I couldn't tell you what our burn rate or cash burn rate was in 2021, but I can tell you right now because you do not want to have to go out and raise money in an environment where you're facing, you know, a flat or down round.
Speaker 2:We also saw, you know, similarly to the growth at all costs. You saw this well. You know we are going to chase these Moonshot R&D programs that are kind of non-core products but are part of the ecosystem in some way, and there were a lot of years when you could invest in R&D that did not need to produce or make money for years. And now you're hearing if it doesn't turn a profit in X number of months, then it's got to get cut. So I do think, I do think there's a big change and you know it's hard because we have a whole generation of young people working that have never seen this downturn.
Speaker 2:You and I saw it in 2008. We saw it in 2001. And it's really tough. And you know, I think part of what the City of San Francisco is dealing with, in addition to too much homelessness and many problems, is this is just, you know, creating more, because as severance starts to run out, there's not a lot of jobs for recruiters to get re-skilled into. I mean, you could look at sales and some others. But you know, my hope is that with generative AI, you know, we had we sort of had the internet, we had mobile, and we hope AI is going to be just as big and it's going to pull, you know, pull us out and get back to growth in 2024.
Speaker 1:But because you and I have been through a few cycles, you know, we know that nothing's forever and, like you say, you know the halcyon days of free money. Well, that went away and the trough that we're in now won't last forever. Things will turn around and be in a growth mode again. How are you seeing people companies, clients taking the long view, if at all, when they're having to let go of people, realizing that you know, either you're going to go be my client one day, you might be a supplier to me, on another day you might be a boomerang employee to me, you might be someone who's referring talent to me. Do people take the long view, or is this highly transactional? My cash burn is what it is and we just have to part company under much less than desirable conditions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, unfortunately, we've seen a lot of the same mistakes, some of which I was part of making in 2001, and how you think about reducing your team or how you treat employees on their way out. And you know, I think it is critically important in how you think about you know how you're going to orchestrate that. As an example, and we talked to a lot of HR leaders who would say you know we're going to. We looked at a lot of programs that we were going to cut. We looked at non-core products that we were going to cut. We looked, you know, it was much easier to justify like we're no longer going to be in this business or we're no longer going to expand at this location. That makes rational sense. You can tell employees and they understand. And then it's about how you treat them on the way out, like did they have a 101 meeting to learn about being affected? Or was it an email, you know, and did you leave their computer access on so they could do some clean up? Did you trust them? Or was it about data privacy and you felt like you had to shut it off? So when they clicked it on in the morning, they knew they were laid off because they didn't have access to their systems anymore Like this. These things were still happening this, this go around.
Speaker 2:I do think, when the pendulum swings back, we're going to be in a war for talent. I mean unemployment's at what? Three and a half percent? I haven't looked at it this week, but one of the issues that I deal with now is my.
Speaker 2:Many of my clients said, hey, we want to go to market for a great leader this year and the timing should be in our favor because there's been so many layoffs, there's been so many negative announcements and and like we should get a bargain.
Speaker 2:And I'm like well, that's not the case. The talent pool is so thin that the irrational salaries of 2021 and 2022 are still in place, and if you want to compete for the best talent, it's still record breaking compensation that's required, and, and so I think those companies that treated people well, had empathy, had dignity or you know, really were thoughtful and helped people. There are some really creative things, inspiring things that happened with HR leader stepping up to connect people with talent communities, to connect their employees with companies that were still in growth mode, to offer endorsements or references, I mean. So there's always some good creativity that comes out of these, these down cycles, but I think, more than anything, it's how you treated people on the way out. That's going to allow you to either get get them back or preserve your brand when, when you start hiring again and as you said, I mean you and I have been through this multiple times and never seems to last very long.
Speaker 1:But people do remember how they were treated. They absolutely remember how they were treated. So, because we've covered so much as we, as we kind of look forward, and you've alluded to this, but I just want to make sure that you've got the opportunity to kind of paint the picture. As you see it, you're alluded to the fact that you know companies were looking to Google and Facebook and Amazon and whoever has the playbook, and let's just go do what they're doing, and that playbook's been torn up and the new playbook hasn't been written yet it's being written. What do you think sort of the key elements of the new playbook are going to become over the next next years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think. I think it starts with it infusing new thinking and and new talent into the HR function. So if I, as I talked to some of the best chief people officers that I know, I mean they they have hired marketers to work inside of recruiting. They've hired data scientists to work as a chief of staff. They've hired, you know, ex engineers to work in recruiting, because they understand the mentality of an engineer. And so I do think there is a need and hopefully this this will become more of a reality than it has been that you know, people in business school will start to think about HR as a great career and you'll have more engineers that choose to go into HR because they love the people side of the company.
Speaker 2:That just hasn't happened enough, and and that's one of the reasons we have such a shortage right now of of people in the profession. So I think these next couple of years it's going to be great news for number two's as they step up into number one roles. I think hopefully there's going to be more rotational programs. We're already seeing combinations of, you know, talent acquisition and talent management coming together under one person on their success. You're starting to see total rewards, leaders take on ops and analytics and get much more breath in their backgrounds and becoming CHROs, and so so I think that's going to be exciting to see new, new people entering the function and new ways to grow towards the top job. No, that's awesome. Is there anything, brad, that we haven't?
Speaker 1:talked about. That, you think, is just like really key before, before we let you go.
Speaker 2:I'm sure there is Bob, but I I can't think of anything off the top of my head. This has been fun. No, we, we covered a lot of territory, If people want to learn more about the firm or you.
Speaker 1:What's the best way to do that?
Speaker 2:So I think hydratecom and, depending on you, know what you're looking for in terms of search we have the most amazing, the most amazing, the most amazing, the most amazing partners I'm pretty biased, but the most amazing partners in the world around executive search. We also offer consulting and on-demand talent services, so please check it out and you know, we'd love to connect.
Speaker 1:Well, brad, you've got a very, very strong reputation in your field and I was really, really pleased that you said yes, you come and join us today. You're a thought leader, you're helping influence, you know some of the most influential CHRO CPOs you know in the world, and to get the benefit of your perspective on this has been awesome, so thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thanks, bob, it's great to see you.
Speaker 1:No, thank you and everyone. Thank you so much for taking a few minutes out of your day to watch and or listen. If you're watching on YouTube, please feel free to subscribe comment, let us know what you think. And same on podcasting Please feel free to subscribe rate review. All looks like help to us, so thank you so much Again. Brad. Thank you so much. Really appreciate talking to you today.
Speaker 2:All right, Take care, cheers, I know you're gonna find it. You've got all you need, so just keep going.