Time to Hire

Ep 33 The Future of Workforce Intelligence: Raleen Gagnon on Building Predictive Hiring Strategies

• Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association (RPOA)

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Raleen Gagnon joins Lamees Abourahma to discuss how global workforce intelligence transforms talent acquisition strategy, why traditional outsourcing assumptions no longer work, and how predictive data gives companies a competitive edge in today's rapidly changing market. Learn how Raleen solved the frustrating challenge of using 30+ different tools by building TalentEdge—a unified platform that consolidates global workforce data and provides 3-6 month market forecasting.

What talent acquisition leaders will discover:

  • Why India and the Philippines don't always make the right outsourcing destinations anymore
  • How to use workforce intelligence to maximize margins and speed up hiring
  • The hidden costs of employment that go far beyond salary in global markets
  • How predictive analytics inform your workforce planning and budgeting decisions
  • Why startups and mid-size companies now need global workforce strategies, not just enterprises
  • Real-world applications: from margin optimization to sales pipeline development

This conversation you won't want to miss.

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September 28–30 | LondonHouse Chicago

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About the guest: 

 Raleen Gagnon, CEO of TalentEdgeAI

Contact the RPO Association at info@rpoassociation.org

Follow Raleen Gagnon on LinkedIn

Follow Lamees Abourahma on LinkedIn

Follow the RPOA on LinkedIn

Go here for more information about TalentEdgeAI

Go here for more information about the RPOA

Whether you're a seasoned talent acquisition professional or just starting in the field, "Time to Hire" provides an invaluable platform to expand your knowledge, learn from industry leaders, and stay up-to-date with the rapidly changing world of recruitment.


Hello and welcome to the Time to Hire from the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association.

I'm Lamees Abourahma, and today I'm sitting down with Raleen Gagnon, the powerhouse CEO behind TalentEdge. If you've ever wondered how companies make sense of the complex global talent landscape, this is the episode for you.

Raleen is a global market intelligence expert who's cracked the code on understanding talent supply and demand, and the true cost of employment across different markets. We'll dive into her journey, explore how TalentEdge is revolutionizing labor market data, and uncover some game-changing insights for anyone serious about workforce strategy.

I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation. 

Lamees Abourahma 

Good morning, Raleen. I am here with Raleen Gagnon. We're just going to have a conversation to learn about Raleen and what she is currently doing. Hi Louise, I'm happy to be here. Awesome. So you've had a long career in this position. I am curious to hear about that. So take us through your story. How did you get into the industry and to where you are now?

Raleen Gagnon 

So glad you didn't put an actual number. We'll just leave it at "long."

Honestly, I've always been in the staffing or talent acquisition space. When I was in college, I worked my way through school doing research at an executive search firm. When I graduated, I ended up working in talent acquisition. It wasn't necessarily a career path I had planned or was drawn to, and then it just sort of evolved over time.

I spent some time in management consulting, and then I went to Monster and got really embedded in global staffing. And once you start looking at global staffing, it's kind of game-changing, because when you just focus on one market or one sector, it's very easy to get comfortable in your patterns and repeat things. And so opening up to global meant all the different labor legislation, all the economic impact, and that really was what got my passion in line with what my career goals were.

And then I found my dream job at ManpowerGroup and did global market intelligence, and from there it was just, you know, your network posts, your conversations with clients change. Suddenly you're not just a vendor with data, you're a strategic advisor, and you're helping them to make big organizational decisions that impact their workforce strategy and, frankly, their global footprint.

So that has really been where I've been focused for the majority of my career—in that global market data that drives workforce strategy.

Lamees Abourahma 2:07

So you just said something interesting. I would love to hear, and maybe some of the audience aren't clear on what that means. For those of us not familiar, what does global market intelligence mean? What does global market intelligence entail? Tell me more.

Raleen Gagnon 2:23

Well, because I'm in the staffing space, and I'm approaching global market intelligence from a workforce perspective, it means looking at everything that's going on globally with workforce, in particular local markets or regional markets, or on a global scale.

So, looking at the supply and demand of talent in conjunction with migration or economic stability, looking at the risk of being in one country versus another, understanding what the cost implications are—not just hourly pay or the annual salary, but the true cost of employment in a given market.

You know, in the United States, it's easy to just think about our common statutory burdens. And in other locations, the employer investment in its people is significantly different because they're more involved in providing household expenses or economic stability in other ways.

So there's a lot to consider, and knowing where you need to dive deeper in one market versus another is key.

Lamees Abourahma 3:15

Would you say this is more prevalent for enterprise employers, bigger global organizations that hire globally, or would market intelligence still be important for smaller organizations?

Raleen Gagnon 3:35

It used to be enterprise focused because only larger companies were doing multinational operations, unless they were in distribution, for example.

But then technology changed, and way before COVID, we had a lot of remote deployment—offshore was a thing far before the pandemic.

That said, when the pandemic hit, a lot of organizations had to, even though they were small or mid-size, find new ways to drive economies of scale, find new ways to tap into talent. And so suddenly I was doing consulting projects with much smaller organizations, just because they had one part of their business that they had made a decision to nearshore or offshore.

And it's not just a matter of saying, "I think I'll go to Latin America," or "I think I'll go to India." Today, there's so much more in play, because India might not be the best place for all the talent you're seeking. In Latin America, there are a lot of different countries that you can consider, and the quality of talent, the cost of talent, the risk of doing business there—it changes from one border to the next, and in some cases even from one city to the next within a country.

So I think it's now everyone's opportunity to look at the global landscape when it comes to workforce strategy, and I see it a lot with startups today, because there's so many more of them too, in the last few years.

And as a startup, you can't necessarily afford all the development talent to be onshore, and India again, isn't necessarily always the right place to go. So when do you go to Central and Eastern Europe? When do you go to Colombia? When do you go to Vietnam? These are questions that everyone has to ask themselves.

Lamees Abourahma 

I can feel the passion here—the passion, your passion for data and market intelligence. Tell me about your decision regarding your career, because you've made a big decision recently. So tell me about that.

Raleen Gagnon 

I think this particular passion and the direction it took me was born of frustration, because when I was responsible for—when I was dealing with so many different organizations and industries, you have to imagine there were common threads in all of those conversations. Each organization is different in that we had to look at different data and different elements in the market to answer the questions that they were asking us, and there was no one place to go—so no one tool, there was no one subscription, no one website.

It was 17 different tools, and at one point, it was over 30 different places that we had to go to get all of the information that we needed to make a data-driven decision that didn't have gaps in it.

And everyone can attest to this from the various platforms that they're on. If you go to one vendor versus another vendor, they define the data elements differently. There are different rules and assumptions in place in any calculations that they make, and so you have to synthesize that information with a manual process. Yes, AI is fantastic, but it's not an easy thing for an individual to say to any platform, "Hey, make this all match."

And so my frustration led me to say, "What if we were to pull all this information into one place? What are the real core elements of those common threads that I saw in all of those different global workforce strategy conversations?" That's when it really started to evolve into what TalentEdge has become today.

It's not enough just to know what is the current snapshot of the market. You need to know how it got there and how much it's changed in the last quarter, in the last six months, or last year. You need to know where it's going next, because if there's just been an election and labor legislation is about to go into place, how is that going to impact the cost of doing business there versus somewhere else? How is that going to impact your data strategy if you need to have servers on premise in that country? And knowing those things can change whether or not you want to invest or double down in one market versus another.

And understanding how the labor and the labor legislation go together is only half of the puzzle—you need that employer insight. What industries are driving the demand? Who are your competitors in that market? Everyone knows the example of how Amazon could change prices during COVID when they doubled the cost of manufacturing talent because of their warehouse cost strategy. But they're not the only example. They were just the one that was in the headlines. That's happening all over the world.

So that's why I say your go-to market for call centers in the Philippines and in Kuala Lumpur for IT outsourcing in India—those are not always the right answers for every set of skills and for every organization today.

So TalentEdge is really designed to pull together as much information as possible and then use AI on the back end to make sure that based on the query, it's being visualized properly in a way that's going to be impactful for the user to help them drive those decisions. Could there be someone looking for something that's not there? Of course, but I feel like we've really tackled the key elements when it comes to global because having consistent data in every market is something that no one else was able to provide previously.

Lamees Abourahma 

If you're enjoying this podcast from the recruitment process outsourcingassociation, I'd love to invite you to join us in person at the 2025 RPOA annual conference this September in Chicago. This year's event is all about the powerful stories shaping strategic talent acquisition in uncertain times. Over a day and a half, RPO leaders, talent acquisition executives, and industry innovators will come together to learn, connect, and grow. Hope to see you there, and now let's get back to our podcast. Previously,

Lamees Abourahma 

I love that. I remember previously you said TalentEdge is a tool you would use. It was born out of frustration you had using all these tools and not having a common data definition, if you will, of how these different tools define data. But I also love that you have this predictive aspect of data as well, looking ahead, helping with forecasting, with workforce planning that can be valuable.

Raleen Gagnon 

That's why we pulled as much historical data as we did. You know, it made the database a little larger than what we wanted to start with, but having the historical data, and being able to go back years to understand the correlation between supply and demand and certain labor changes that have taken place, and how that's impacted cost, or how certain legislative changes might impact demand in a particular market—that's been key for us.

And so that's to look out; again we can't predict out 10 years, but we do look out a couple of quarters, so in the next three to six months, these two markets who look identical today may not look the same in six months.

This is a way to allow our users to make more informed decisions when it comes to their forecasting, their budgeting, and their planning.

Lamees Abourahma 

Perfect. And I think you bridged us into asking, which is, how are your current customers using TalentEdge? Help me with the application of the tool, if you will.

Raleen Gagnon 

I mean, first of all, we do have a number of small and mid-sized employers who use the platform to augment their talent acquisition or their HR strategy a lot more, because it's a really cost-effective way for them to handle small pockets of their compensation planning needs. And it's certainly more cost-effective than a robust cost study that one would traditionally use.

But our primary focus is on serving the staffing industry. So we work with staffing companies, RPOs, global payrolling firms, organizations that need to have real-time visibility into that supply and the demand and the cost, and it works in a number of ways.

So the way we've been talking about it is more from a planning standpoint and delivery, where, if you have, say, a handful of remote positions or a portion of your reqs are set to a really tight bill rate, you have the ability to use our data to identify which market to be sourcing talent out of, and more importantly, which employers in those markets will help you to maximize your margin within the bill rate, because you can actually see which employers are paying a competitive rate in those locations, who might be paying less, which can increase your chance of acceptance rates.

So that really helps, not only to increase profitability, because you can target the right individuals at the right companies—you can then source and screen them more quickly with our platform, which increases speed to revenue. So I focus on the industry that I come from and that I love, because I know the pain points, and I know we built something specifically designed to solve them.

That said, that's probably only 50 percent of the use cases for our platform, because as we worked with staffing companies and RPOs over the course of the past year or so, what they also found is if they can see demand and which employers are driving demand and what they're paying for those skills, well, isn't that a great way to drive their pipeline and their business development strategy?

"Hey, this market's growing faster than the market we have been focused on. Let's start to build out a plan to penetrate that market. These companies within our industry, or ones that weren't on our radar, they're growing at a point that we want to add them to our top target list. Hey, let's look at our existing accounts and see where else they're hiring and what else they're hiring that isn't currently in our span of control so that we can increase our share of wallet with them."

So honestly, about half the testimonials we get lean more towards how we impact their profitability versus how we impact their speed to revenue or their delivery process.

But I think part of it is because there's so many tools out there right now that have AI in the name and are tied to that recruitment delivery, and everyone's dabbling with a lot of those, but when it comes to a tool designed just for staffing that can align to sales and growth strategies, that's really an area where we are the only ones focused on that today, at least to the degree that we are globally.

Lamees Abourahma 

Yeah, I love that, and I love that application for TalentEdge and how different audiences, different markets, and even different RPOs have different use cases for the tool. And I love also the strategic usability of the tool to plan the sales pipeline, like you said, and where the future business might be based on the demand.

Raleen Gagnon 

Well, the thing is, when you have the right data, it can be used and applied in a lot of different ways. That's where my passion for bringing it all into one place comes to be. And it's not to say that a lot of the tools that I used before weren't wonderful. I'm still using some of them. I'm just on the back end doing the work that used to be manual to make them available for more comprehensive analysis than they are when they're used individually by a user.

Lamees Abourahma 

Raleen, we've established that passion and we've established your credibility for the space. TalentEdge was founded because you're relatively young as a company, I should say—we're not going to comment about our age as well, let's leave that alone. But as a platform, you are relatively young, and if you want to share, your vision for a roadmap, if you will.

Raleen Gagnon 

Well, I mean, part of our growth was working with organizations who were willing to do pilots. So obviously, despite all of the massive amounts of data we were pulling together and bringing into one place and normalizing, it wasn't all thrown into the platform all at once.

So as we worked with clients who were using it for growth and business development versus recruiting delivery, we got a lot of feedback from them. We continue to get a lot of feedback.

And for a number of our clients, we actually do consulting as a part of their license strategies. If there's something that they need out of the platform that's not there today, we put an analyst on that to work with them and deliver in an ad hoc fashion.

On the back end, we start to figure out, how do we build this into the tool to automate it and make it more available to the masses? And so right now—

Lamees Abourahma 

Give me that timeline. When are we talking about when TalentEdge—

Raleen Gagnon

So we were officially founded in the fourth quarter of 2023. Then we were fully funded and building in the first quarter of 2024, so we went live with our first pilot in June of 2024.

And then we spent the rest of last year working with clients in a variety of ways. Some would just have a couple of licenses, some would have a pilot team working on them and using our tool in comparison to how LinkedIn Recruiter was performing with another group, for example. And so that was really the largest portion of last year, was collaboratively working with clients while developing.

And so this year, we've identified new points of integration and new technologies that we want to bring into the mix.

So I'll use an example: AI sourcing and screening. We have a partnership with a number of different AI sourcing tools, which is why we are able to allow our users to source unlimited candidates, as opposed to most of the platforms today, who limit you to lots of 500 or 1,000. And so for recruiters who are doing high volume, that may not be enough in a given month, and that's where the added enhancement of unlimited comes in with TalentEdge.

But we also add the opportunity to do AI screening with an AI interviewing tool. So we have Interview AI, and we're looking at a number of opportunities to add in voice interviewing with AI.

But that's not enough, even though that's where the majority of the market is today, because we have so many clients in the clinical staffing space or in the lower skill categories of talent like retail or warehousing or industrial—those people don't have resumes, and so many of the platforms require that as part of the process, so they can then integrate with the applicant tracking system.

So there's another technology, "Just Apply," that we've purchased to integrate that allows someone like a nurse to take advantage of clicking a link anytime and then just answering a quick series of questions. And the tool builds their CV for them, so that even though they work three double shifts and they don't even know where their resume is from the last time they switched jobs, it won't inhibit their ability to actually move forward in an application process.

So it's more intuitive and responsive to where the candidates are at today. So that level of engagement with some of those areas that have been more difficult for staffing to solve for from a technology platform perspective—

Lamees Abourahma 

Awesome. And I do want to acknowledge that TalentEdge and the RPOA are industry partners. And we've enjoyed working with Raleen and love what you're doing for our industry in general.

Raleen Gagnon 

Well thank you. That's exciting because that's really what we're all about. And it's why we built the platform and why we appreciate the collaboration and the insight and feedback, not just coming back from RPOA itself, but from the members. 

Lamees Abourahma 

Absolutely. Any last words before we close this conversation, which I enjoyed greatly?

Raleen Gagnon 

No particular thoughts other than the market is changing really quickly right now. I see lots of comments, webinars about how will tariffs impact this and how will different trade implications impact workforce strategy. There is no one clear answer right now. The data is changing every day, so if you're not working with us, make sure you're working with the right partner who's going to give you that kind of visibility and help to mitigate any risks associated with all of the exciting changes that we're going through right now.

Lamees Abourahma

 And for those who would be interested in getting in touch with you or Talent Edge, what would be the best way to do that? 

Raleen Gagnon

Well, email is easy because it's Raleen@talentedgeai.com. And if not, you can find us on LinkedIn or send a note to sales@talentedgeai.com. We can do a demo. Anyone who does a demo actually gets a complimentary data packet based on what data they asked for during the sale cycle and, however we bring that information up, we share it back with anyone who joins us for those conversations. 

Lamees Abourahma

And again, I would add also that you can find TalentEdge on the iCoco marketplace where you can contact them directly through the contactless form as well. 

Thank you so much. This has been fun. 

Raleen Gagnon

Thank you for having me. I love these conversations.

Lamees Abourahma

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Time to Hire podcast from the recruitment process outsourcing association. Give us a review wherever you listen to the podcast and always stay connected, stay engaged and stay informed of what's happening in the talent and recruiting world by tuning into the RPOA, the place to go for RPO™.