Transformation: The New Role of Recruitment Process Outsourcing with Alex Ridder

The RPO landscape faces a reckoning: according to Nelson Hall, 60% of buyers now view providers as largely interchangeable—a figure underscoring industry-wide commoditization. As Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) leaders struggle to differentiate amidst shrinking margins and rapid AI transformation, this crisis demands urgent adaptation. Only forward-thinking providers who evolve beyond transactional models can unlock lasting client value and seize tomorrow’s opportunity in an era where business outcomes, not just hires, define success.

Amidst this competitive tension, how can RPOs transform from cost-focused vendors to strategic business partners—or even indispensable catalysts? In this episode of the Time to Hire podcast, host Lamees Abourahma welcomes Alex Ridder, Global Head of Client Partnerships at LHH, to reveal how RPOs can drive real transformation, enhance workforce agility, and shape the future of work. Recorded live at the trusted RPOA annual gathering, this episode delivers expert insights for the entire RPO community.

LHH is a sponsor of the 2025 RPOA Annual Conference and a Gold Member of the RPO Association.

Learn about and find more content from the 2025 RPOA Annual Conference here. 

About the Podcast

Time to Hire is produced by the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association (RPOA), the leading authority on recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) foresight and innovation, and the trusted convener for the global RPO community. Through conversations with industry leaders, the podcast explores the trends, insights, and innovations shaping the future of talent acquisition.

Learn more about RPOA and join the community at: https://www.rpoassociation.org.

Follow the host, Lamees Abourahma, on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Lamees Abourahma 0:09

Recruiting solutions are moving from filling seats to shaping the workforce of the future. As our guests put it, are we content to be recruiting providers, or will we step up as true catalysts for transformation? Welcome to Time to Hire, the podcast from the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association, where we explore stories and strategies shaping the future of talent acquisition. I'm your host, Lamees Aburahma. In this episode, you'll hear insights from Alex Ruder, Global Head of Client Partnerships at LHH, recorded live at our 2025 RPOA Annual Conference in Chicago. Alex challenges us to rethink the role of recruitment process outsourcing, not just as a cost-saving solution, but as a strategic partner driving real business and people outcomes in an era of disruption, AI, and shifting expectations. If you're ready to discover how visionary leadership can turn uncertainty into opportunity, you're in the right place. Let's listen to Alex's conversation.

Alex Ridder 1:33

Good afternoon, everybody. I know we've been sitting for a while, been in this room for a while, so feel free to be a critical friend, interrupt me, uh talk to me, uh, ask questions because this should be an open forum for discussion. Um a little bit about me, uh the other than being a baseball fan. I I am an American. I'm from Colorado. Yes, I ski. Yes, I own a brewery, uh, yes, I snowboard, and now I live in Zurich, Switzerland with my family. I've been there for seven years. Uh I originally came into the industry in a very circuitous route, um, probably like many of you guys, not uh HR professional, but in fact I was working in finance. I was a revenue recognition analyst for a public company doing pricing exercises in China. And a friend called me up and said, Hey, I've got a problem. Would you help? And I said, Absolutely. So that's a little bit about me. Um, and I thought what I'd do in this conversation is talk about my first experience in RPO. And this was way back in 2012. Uh, Kim, thank you very much for this opportunity you didn't know you gave me. But uh ended up joining Pontoon um at that point. Pontoon was the RPO provider for the Adeco group. And I was in an airport and I knew nothing about what I was doing, but I was told to set up a delivery center in Manila. And the idea was pretty simple. We were gonna go out to Manila and I was gonna set up an office, and I was gonna provide offshore sourcing. It was gonna be 24-7, always on sourcing. We were gonna drive huge cost savings for our clients. It was gonna be an incredible experience where we are all of a sudden gonna change the world of RPO. And I'll not regal you with some of the details, but I had many challenges in setting up this office, including getting computers off of the boats and the docks without giving a bribing payment. Um and I've forwarded from that time, and we had a successful venture, and we still have that Manila Center operating today. And at the time, I remember sitting there and I was flying back, and I was so excited because I was like, this is the future. I have solved RPO for the next 20 to 30 years. We've got always on sourcing, we've delivered savings, we've got lower cost, we centralized compliance. This this was the future. We had done it. RPO was done, and I was ready on for like the next thing. And and honestly, um if you think back 20 years ago, what we did is is now baseline. If you're not doing some of these things right now, like sorry, you're well behind. And every client is assuming that you have always onsourcing. Every single client assumes that you have compliance control. And if you go ask them about technology, they don't say what technology you have or what technology you have in your stack. They say how are you using AI today? It's fundamentally shifted forward. And the reality is that Everest even described this exact same way. So in 2010, their lines were uh, let's see, as the early 2010s, the era of offshore hub, centralized delivery, and transaction-based measures. And now we fast forward today, and buyers expect innovation, talent insights, tech integration, and workforce transformation. It's fundamentally shifted from a transactional basis to the future. And I would say that what counted as value back then is actually hygiene today. Because my talk is meant to be a little bit of an inspiration for action, to take us forward, to take the RPO industry to the next step. And if we believe, and LHH team believe I'm talking to many of you guys and hearing about AI from many of you guys, I would agree, I think you'd all agree that if we don't find a way to move beyond some of these basics, we risk becoming irrelevant as an organization, as an operation. So this is what we thought we were building, and this is not my slide deck, so we'll see what happens. But um, moving on one more slide, let me just quickly ask an honest question for the group here. And and I won't take pictures, we don't have a Slido or anything famous, but when clients of yours think about RPO, whether you call it RPO or not, and I really appreciated uh Terry's comment on don't call it RPO, do you guys think that they see you as transactional?

unknown 5:50

Some do.

Speaker 1 5:51

Some do, right? What about valuable? They see you as valuable? Okay, I see a couple. What about strategic?

unknown 5:56

A few.

The Provider Mindset: From Efficiency to Limitations

Transition to Partner Mindset & Stakeholder Expectations

Measuring the Candidate Experience

The Catalyst Model & Future-Ready Transformation

RPO’s Opportunity: Provider, Partner, or Catalyst?

Speaker 1 5:57

A few, a few. But I think we're all aiming for the target of being strategic. I I would imagine that if we were to put our guess on where we want to be, we want to be strategic partners. We don't want to be transactional partners. Valuable is nice, but it's not the uh it's not where we want to get to. And so we really have to think about what we want to do, and and a lot of what my conversation today is gonna be about is figuring out how do we become those strategic partners. So the the metaphor that the team came up with, and my marketing team is much smarter than I am, decided that you have to think about the three different places that we could be as providers or as RPO, the provider, the partner, or the catalyst. And what I hope to do is kind of bring about the idea that today we are at this crossroads. And we have an opportunity to decide the pathway that we want to go. And we've traveled a ridiculous distance since 2012, and I'm not just talking about from Manila, but I'm talking about the technologies we brought, the services we provide, how we communicate about our services. And what I'm hoping to do is explore each one of these paths independently over the next 30 minutes, uh, 45, depending on how many questions and challenges you guys give me, which I hope is a lot, and and see what once what weren't well is perhaps not good enough, but perhaps where we could go uh is a powerful way forward. So let me first talk about what we call the the provider mindset. And I I asked my team to put together this image because it's two people sitting across the table from each other. And a lot of times that was literally how our deals were won with clients is tell me about your problem, tell me what you have, and then I will respond and I'll give you something back. It was a very transactional relationship, and it was designed to solve a real-world problem. They had cost pressures that we were supporting, procurement needed predictable savings, and HR needed consistency and compliance. And sometimes they'd ask for scalability. They'd say, Hey, can you do 15, 20% scale? Oh yeah, no problems, we got that. And uh the provider model promised us efficiency and governance and scale. And the design was pretty simple, right? We would bring in a technology stack that included an ATS, ooh, and we had a CRM. Super cool stuff at the time, right? And uh this this you know technology created follow the sun methodology. You guys talk about that follow the sun methodologies? Like that was my favorite. Um, and and uh it was really useful. So these solutions were commercialized at a transactional level and it and it worked. It gave procurement leaders visibilities and HR leaders assurance. Sometimes it gave us um a finger to point, and processes were streamlined, and and this was truly breakthrough. So, really, the provider mindset was driven by this idea that we have efficiency, compliance, and speed, faster and cheaper processes, governance, audit readiness, scale, global delivery capacity. And these strengths reassured procurement leaders, hey, they're happy, they got their control, they got their cost savings, and HR teams who needed hiring capacity they could rely on. It's worth remembering, and Terry pointed out, that during the 2010s, our PO industry grew by double digits almost every single year. In fact, it capped out uh in 2019 at $6 billion, according to SIA. And the only challenge here, right, with this continued growth throughout those 10 years, is I wonder if those very strengths that made the provider successful actually sowed the seeds to their limits. Did these things, efficiency, compliance, and speed, that focus on them, actually set the standard for what the limits were? Because what ended up happening is that success started to be measured by the transaction, by that output, not by the outcome that you're looking to drive. So what ended up happening, in my opinion, is that we started measuring only how many CVs were processed, how many roles were filled, how many costs per hire, what was our cost per hire. And we stopped thinking about what was the outcome we were trying to do for the business. And that limited ability what we have, and it also consolidated what we were all trying to do. So it ended up becoming a bit of a race to the bottom, if I'm being really honest, about hey, what is the goal? Differentiation amongst us became very difficult because they were only concentrating on those three things. And so I asked, is the very model that delivered savings also creating vulnerability? Were providers becoming more efficient and therefore interchangeable? And obviously, Nelson Hall, that's kind of what they said in 2024. 60% of buyers describing providers as largely interchangeable, and Alex is very clumsy. Um let's let's fast forward a bit to today. And and I use I use this image, right? Or ask the marketing team to put this image in there because it's a you know Ferris wheel at a fair. Well, I'll tell you what, when I go to a fair, I expect a Ferris wheel. Now I've never ridden a Ferris wheel since I was five years old, but if I'm going to a fair, it better have a Ferris wheel. And it's the same thing with an RPO. Like when we do an RPO, it better have cost efficiency, it better have always on sourcing, it better have scalability. But that is not why I'm going to an RPO provider. So there's an aspect of where we're at where we need to be thinking about how do we continue to move on and figure out how does our stack and our tech stack and our mentality and how we're using AI drive more outcomes for the businesses that we're supporting. And so I think we're there and we're getting very close to this next level of being partners, but the reality is SIA reported in 2023 that the RPO market contracted by 5%. And we saw that when Terry's numbers went down. And actually, the early results from SIA 2024, I'm not sure if you guys saw this, but actually we saw a report recently that said it contracted this year by another 14% globally. So you have this decline occurring. It's not just because of hiring, it's because of this consolidation. And efficiency and compliance are no longer enough to win. Like these capabilities are essentially the cost of entry. They're your Ferris wheel. So we have to continue evolving a bit. So I'm back at the airport. And actually, it was pretty cool. I used AI to get a picture of me and then put it on to a screen of an airport. So you know it's not just recruitment, but we can do images too. Um so what does this leave us, right? Efficiency is cutting costs. We did a great job, but it doesn't actually create retention. And compliance is absolutely preventing risk. And despite the conversation earlier, I would argue compliance is not is uh preventing risk, but not necessarily fueling innovation. It's kind of stagnating it, and there's lots of questions, and everyone gets nervous. And scale is filling jobs, but it's not guaranteeing a better quality candidate. So the provider model certainly did its job. What we did over the 2010s to now has been fantastic. But I would propose that it's perhaps yesterday's challenges. It can't help CHROs transform their workforce. It cannot help people adapt to a changing world of work, and the world of work is changing dramatically. So is that process we designed before gonna work for today's environment? I'm not sure. So again, I'm back at the airport and about to get on my flight, and I'm thinking about all the pressure our clients are under. And let's like be really honest like our clients are under a ridiculous amount of pressure. I mean, they're getting hit by all corners from how do we go grow faster without hiring, how do we integrate AI? I mean, I was talking to some people who work um in the life sciences division of a company, and they were asking for AI. And I said, Well, we can help you a little bit, but tell me more about your challenge. And he goes, Well, all of our AI budget is going to our RD services, to our frontline workforce and our business. So I have no AI budget to test things in my budget. It's like oh, that makes sense. Like they're struggling because they're being told to do things, they have no money to do it, and it's a real problem. And so I I kind of go back to this group and I think there's probably a space that we've actually started moving forward, and we've started moving away from the provider mindset into the partner mindset. So if I think about who the partners are, and this is again who we want to be for our clients as partners, is we want to be on the same side of the table. No longer are we sitting across the table from each other and transacting, we're actually on the same side, and we're saying, huh, that's a really interesting problem you have. Let's let's figure it out together. How do how do we work together to solve these problems? Wow, that audio changed. Um and and from that perspective, this is the the evolution that we've been going through. More trust, more flexibility, and this partnership more meant more operational excellence. So RPO wasn't just about filling roles cheaply and compliantly anymore, but it's become really about delivering with consistency. It's about adapting to demand. And it's about plugging into the client's tech stack in a way that actually drives change innovation for their people, not for the transaction. So we can start to think about what is the output or the outcome we want, not the output we deliver. And for TA leaders, partners have become much more around getting increased scalability, that their challenges year over year are much greater than they were before. A raise of hands, how many have seen like the RFPs they receive asking for more than 25% scalability recently? What about like more than like 30%? I've seen two recently that asked for 50% scalability year over year without any price changes. Like that was unheard of 10 years ago. And this is now again starting to become table stakes, but it reshapes the problem because most of our clients have no idea how many hires they're gonna do next month, much less next year. And we are the ones that they're gonna come to and ask to help solve that problem. And that's that partner mindset where you're saying, hey, I already know tomorrow you have no idea what you're gonna hire next month. So let me work with you today to figure out how we're gonna scale for that potential challenge tomorrow. So let's unpack a little bit about who our current buyers are today. Uh and you guys are opinion, did I get these stakeholders right? Are these your three major stakeholders in the RPO environment? Yeah. Operations? Okay, yeah, actually, that's true. And and maybe legal and technology now, as we're seeing with the AI conversation today. Well, procurement has has changed. Procurement used to be cost savings. That's all they wanted. But that's not as true anymore, right? They're saying, I need to know what your tech adoption strategy will be for my company. Can you support the change management that we require in order to get the business value we're expecting? It's like, oh my gosh, that was a lot of language right there. Like, are you sure? But yeah, that's what procurement is asking for. And then talent acquisition leaders, as I said, not only are they challenged with the lack of forecasting capability, but they're being asked to do more with less, right? LinkedIn licenses, like how many companies have come to you and asked, hey, can you help me reduce the cost of LinkedIn? And you go, well, actually, you get it cheaper than we do. Like, seriously, like, nope, like clients like miss that whole point. It's like, no, LinkedIn gets it. They know how to charge us. So they're being challenged because they're trying to figure out any possible way and they're trying to get the quality, speed, and retention. And LinkedIn's latest global trends says that retention has ranked as higher than volume for the first time as their client priorities for talent acquisition leaders. So talent acquisition leaders are no longer being asked to only deliver on that output. They have to get to the outcome as well. That's a massive change if you think about where we were 10 years ago. And now we have CHROs, our favorite person, and you get that CHRO meeting, and we're all like Terry and we close the deal and woo-hoo. So easy, right? No. Um, CHROs are under an enormous amount of pressure, like unbelievable, and their expectations have changed completely. Because right now, the World Economic Forum lists AI adoption, a workforce redesign, and shifting employee expectations is their top challenge. I mean, before it was like, hey, are employees happy? Oh, cool, awesome. I did my job. Well done, CHRO, moving on. But no, it's changed. It's completely changed. And the other thing is what the CHRO has to have to be successful has changed. The number one thing that CHROs say that they require is business acumen. So now they want to stand shoulder to shoulder, and they need to stand shoulder to soldier with their C-level C suite, with their other board members. They want to stand with the CEOs. And they're supposed to be that left arm. I don't know, I went to business school like 30 years ago, and they always said, Oh, eventually the CHR was going to be the left hand of the CEO. It still hasn't gotten there, but that's still the ambition. And now, during the transformations that are occurring now, they probably do have a really legitimate seat at that spot. But the one stakeholder that we actually may have forgotten about the most in all of this because we want to get paid by our clients, is perhaps the most important one is the candidate. And one thing that's been really, really cool about the past five years is that the people and the candidates and the workers have actually gotten a seat at the table in this conversation. So my hunch here is that almost everybody has started to measure candidate experience, hiring manager experience, and they're starting, and maybe I'll do a quick survey in a minute, but they're starting to look at what's the uh retention rate or what's the experience post higher for these individuals. And if I'm being really honest, when I was out in Manila 10 years ago, I did not really care about the candidate experience. That was not the challenge we were facing there. And that meant that we had a blind spot. And we've quickly pivoted very fast over the past 10 years to think about how do we support that blind spot. But it's not there yet. We're still measuring the output and not the outcome of those individuals. So my provocation is if people's outcomes are ignored, how they're successful in their workshop, then businesses are probably going to lose. And as partners, we have recognized that a poor candidate experience damages employer brand and experiences the company's success, and it creates a lack of internal mobility and lack of skills retention, uh, skills progression, and there's therefore a retention risk. And in the end, it's a missed opportunity to slow the workforce agility and the transformation that we're helping our clients with. So let me tell you a little story, a pretty funny one with a major bank in Switzerland. Um we were asked to go in and review their candidate experience. And we said, Well, why do you want us to look at that? They said, We think it's a bad one. I said, Okay, well, first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna look at all your processes. And we reviewed their processes, it was super detailed as a bank. SOPs were dot on and said, Wow, you guys have two interviews. That's really good. I was like, Yep, we've really defined that process. It's all about speed to hire, and we know we have a 43-day time to hire. 43 days in the banking industry in Europe. I was like, whoo, you guys are awesome. This is a tight ship you guys have here. I want to dig into more. So we kept looking at it, we kept looking, and then we started interviewing, doing those qualitative interviews. And unlike um uh Scotty AI, we didn't interview 300 people in a minute. We actually went and sat down with all these individuals. It was before the era of AI that could do that, but I wish I could have, because that's a really cool idea. And uh it turned out that we started recognizing that the two interview thing wasn't for real. Nobody was getting two interviews, they were getting a lot more than two interviews in the process. And I see nodding heads like because their systems weren't designed to even measure how many interviews they were doing. And so we sat down, we had all the TA leaders in the room, and we said, I know what your problem with candidate experience is, and had the CHRO in the room with me. I said, It's not great, but we figured it out. And he goes, Okay, well, well, tell me what it is. It's like, well, you have too many interviews, and you're not informing the candidates the process of the interview. And he goes, No, no, no, it's in the process, it's written down, it's in the SOPs, we're a bank, we follow the rules. I said, Okay, well, um, if everyone would just hold up their hand if they've had more than three interviews for their job today, every single person rolled their hand. I was okay, who had more than five interviews? Only one person put their arm down. Got to 10 interviews, and by then everyone had finally lowered their hand. The guys, CHR, was just like, oh my god, this is not happening to me. I was like, the bigger issue is that you've created a culture where this is acceptable and you haven't had the workforce change management to necessitate the change that you need. And that comes out in the numbers. And he was like, What do you mean? It's like, well, your 43 days, your average time to hire, it's really good. It's wrong. And he goes, it can't be wrong, that's the average. I was like, yeah, but that's the mean. And he's like, What? I was like, well, the median. You know what the median is? He was like, What? Like the median somehow is 28 days. He's like, What? I was like, and the mode is eight days. He's like, huh? And it turned out all those recruiters had rigged the system so that they would cancel a wreck at 60 days, reopen with the one candidate and close it in eight, creating a massive average that was at 43 days. They get that their wonderful bonus and be happy about it. Candidate experience went collapsing. But it just gives an evidence that as a provider, we have a responsibility to dig an extra level and think about what's the candidate's experience in here because actually they don't know. And so I use that as a really kind of fun example of thinking about hey, how do we make sure the candidate's perspective is brought into the way that we as providers and now partners can support our clients? So real quickly, um, for the RPO providers out here, are we measuring MPS today? Net promoter score of candidate experience? A couple of them, three, all right, we got some. Uh are we measuring fairness? Do you guys have a really good way to measure skills yet? Do people ask the question and track what they think the next role will be? We have one client now where we actually can track the people multiple years and see if the people we hired were ended up being promoted into higher level positions. Because I'm really passionate about the idea that provider, to being a partner, we have to be looking at that outcome. How are we impacting the individual in the future? And the reality is our clients are thinking differently about this as well. It's not just me being passionate about this, being not so funny American living in Switzerland, but actually our clients care desperately about how we can help them. The SAA reported that over 50% of enterprise buyers said retention of workforce agility were becoming more important decision drivers. That's crazy, right? They're they I mean we're not even being asked to track that. And now they're saying that's the most important decision on how they're gonna be buying our RPO services. So let me try and reframe the question a bit. For RPO, is hire only the beginning? Is that only the beginning of what we actually can provide our clients? And I would argue that it has to be. It has to be if we want to be a partner for organizations. We cannot just measure ourselves to the point of the hire, to the butt in the seat. So I do think that uh you know, obviously, we have to maintain our compliance and what made us great providers in the first place. Time to fill, cost per hire, now hygiene. But they're not gonna help transform the business. So what I do think is that if that's no longer the end point, then it's the start of creating business resilience. And that resilience only comes when people keep moving forward forward. So my team um put in a really kind of cool slide here that I thought kind of illustrated this reality, right? Because we have all these stakeholders that are we're working with the business side, whether we operations or legal, but mainly uh CHROs, town acquisition leaders, and come and uh procurement. And then the other side we have people. So if you believe, like I do, that opportunity that our RPO has is to help these businesses balance the transform the tension, then we have to imagine that businesses are constantly trying to measure the opportunity to be agile, to be productive, and transform their business. I mean, transformation is the word of the day. I I don't think I've been in a client conversation where they haven't said, hey, we're in the middle of a transformation. Is that a common refrain you guys hear? Let me see, nodding heads. But at the same point, like we just went through a half a day of sessions today where we're hearing about the need for people to be skilled and that they need to have the opportunity to adapt to new businesses, and that we have to put in AI and compliance that allow people to be shifting into that area, and they need coaching for that change. And RPO has this really interesting balance where we get to be that really sassy lady balancing um between this and creating this kind of uh opportunity where we are we're we're measuring between the two or helping to balance it. So I I kind of started thinking of it this way where business transformation without people readiness, sorry, without people readiness is gonna fail. Right? So business transformation without people readiness fails. People readiness without business opportunity stalls. So we have to continue as RPO providers pushing both people and businesses successfully together at equilibrium in order to be successful. And this really comes about when you look at some of the data from the World Economic Forum. And they start to note that by 2030, almost four in ten of today's skills will be completely obsolete. Four in ten. Forty percent of today's skills will be obsolete in less than five years. And yet many organizations are still hiring for yesterday's roles, not tomorrow's capabilities. So that mismatch is a major challenge. And in fact, I'm guessing a lot of your companies even have this. And I'll admit it on my company we did the same thing because we were talking about, hey, which roles could we move to this new location if we create a new center, what roles could we move? And no one raised their hand to say, actually, what skills do we need in that next location first? And then we figure out what roles will be there. It's a very difficult change for people to make, both mentally, culturally, and structurally. And we are the ones that are gonna be expected to help with that. So the reality with this friction though, this friction between the reality that business transformation without people readiness fails and people readiness without business opportunities stalls, is that it's a boardroom risk, right? Because if they don't have the skills available, four out of ten skills are gonna be obsolete, then boards are gonna be fail. Like the companies are not gonna work because 60% of the skills they have in the organization are gonna be uh only 50% of what they're hiring for. So what we did is we kind of started thinking about what's a successful balance? What do people really want today? Right? So, what does good look like when you connect people outcomes with business outcomes? You get fairer access for people to create wider, more diverse talent pools in business. Okay, skills signaling, where you start to signal what types of jobs are gonna be available and what skills you might need, gives people clarity and the business greater workforce agility. And this is a big piece of what the USCADI AI I was looking at, is really trying to do is kind of give people an idea of what skills are gonna be available for them to need or what they need to train on to be jobs in the future. Guided pathways. I know some companies are really working on how do they have guided pathways based upon the skill sets that individuals have to make them successful. And what's really cool about that is if you are designing your HR process and your recruitment process for the individual, you're gonna create a situation of strong advocacy for your organization, right? Because people are gonna feel happier to work there. And then you're gonna have a culture that is consistently improving. So you're gonna have this virtuous cycle that's occurring because you have people that like there, they know where they're going, they know how they were hired. And therefore, you're gonna have jobs easier to fill by proxy. So this wonderful virtuous cycle that's there. And and the reality is this is um, you know, this is not gonna be easy. This is gonna be a journey that we're gonna have to work on, but we're pretty passionate of the idea that you have to have all four stakeholders in mind if you're gonna be a partner for our clients. And that means supporting them with their workforce transformation journey as well. And so the question becomes, and I'm thinking now about my uh my next airplane ride, is is that is that the end? Is that really what the provider is gonna be? Or I should say the partner, right? We're on the same side of the table, we're looking at the screen, we've pointed out that people need more clarity and the skills they need, companies need to have people ready for the transformation, we need more scale, and we need to maintain the hygiene we have of efficiency, scalability, um, and cost control. And we said, you know what, I think that there's an opportunity to be a little bit more. And we said, I wonder if what really CHROs and teams are in ABAS for is catalysts. Is there an opportunity for not also to be actually actively looking at the screen together, but to actually be helping them design the future? Catalysts are disruptors, they're change agents, they're accelerants. They're gonna be the ones supporting with these AI journeys that I honestly am not very eloquently able to talk about. If a provider was about efficiency and a partner about operational trust, the catalyst. The catalyst is a bit of partner plus. It's where business transformation and people resilience come together. It means enabling organizations to move faster on AI, redesign their jobs, and strengthen the culture. At the same time, it means helping people build their employability, mobility, and confidence for the future. This is a fundamental shift from being useful to being meaningful. And it's where RPO becomes not just a service, but a strategic advantage. So I'm not sure the catalyst path is gonna be for everybody, if I'm being really honest. But I think it's an opportunity for all of us to consider what is the potential of RPO within organizations. And so two weeks ago, I was at a as a pretty cool event um in London. Just uh the speaker was Jacinda Ardern. Do you guys know who Jacenda is? I see a New Zealander here, so you better know who she is. So she was the prime minister of New Zealand during the COVID crisis, and it was one of the most inspiring conversations I ever had. And as much as I'd love to tell me, tell you guys about what she said, uh, I just can't do it in her words, but more importantly for me in this conversation is I talk to all sorts of CHROs. I talk to a lot of talent leaders. And the opportunity for us is huge because the pressure that these individuals are in right now is out of control. Like we saw the the uh Lamise, you did a fantastic job explaining the past five years in RPO, in our industry. But like let's put it from a CHRO perspective. All of a sudden COVID hits, we've got to figure out how to get our workforce out. So boom, move, change. Then you have uh get back to work, work from home, RTO, work from the office, back and forth going on. You have the challenges that come with uh the social agendas political side, it was a lot of stress amongst the CHRO of how do you communicate with different individuals about these areas. And then you have this massive growth that happens in 2022 when everyone needs as many candidates as possible, and the era of employees is uh here. And then you have this next phase where you have macro political and macroeconomic challenges happening, and now you have the rise of AI. I mean, it is unbelievable how much change has occurred in the past five years from it in the HR organizations. And I was talking to another person in the meeting there when I was we were talking about Gacenda and the impact in HR, and it was a really interesting point. So, you know what's really fascinating is that HR, over the past 20 years, has been the main partner for organizations transformation. If you wanted to move your IT offshore, you talk to HR. If you wanted to help change your finance organization, you talk to HR. If you wanted to change your sales organization, you talk to HR. But HR itself never actually transformed. They're constantly having to reinvent itself within its own space, and now they're under massive pressure because they have to transform. The expectations of HR transformation are at an unbelievable level, and this is all happening at the same time where they're being expected to deliver on a bigger agenda AI adoption, talent scarcity, and evolving expectations. So the World Economic Forum CHRO outlook is clear. The long-term priority is transformation. That's a long-term priority, which suggests that transformation isn't over. So I hope you guys weren't hoping that the 2025 wasn't the end. And the top three challenges AI adoption, talent scarcity, and evolving workforce of expectation. Nearly 90% of CHROs say their top business challenge is business acumen. So they're not just gonna be filling roles, but they're shaping workforces and they can adapt, scale, and thrive in this disruption. Uh so I think, and I guess what I think the catalyst position here is that we need to help deliver on that brief. We need to help deliver on that idea that they're no longer gonna be just towards a transaction, but they're gonna have to be about shaping the workforce. And that RPOs are in a shift from a vendor relationship to a board-level advantage for the right clients and the right supporters. And the catalysts still need to help people. By 2030, more than a hundred million workers worldwide will need to shift occupations because of automation and AI. I didn't say replace, I just said shift. But that's a reality. And the reality also is that workers aren't ready. Have you guys heard about the 11%? The 11% is the number of people expected to be workforce ready today. What does that mean? Was workforce of the future ready? So we've defined it quite simply. You have to be adaptable, you have to be able to change jobs and adaptable in the future. You have to be tech savvy, you have to be proactive about your own learning journey. You can't expect companies to do it for you or others to do it for you. You have to be proactive. When we surveyed individuals around the world, only 11% said they were workforce ready based on those three criteria. That's a pretty scary thing. If we're gonna be the people that help companies recruit, support their transformations, if only 11% of the people are there. If you look at CNBC, they said recently that young job seekers today say the job market is trash. It's difficult to navigate, it's with limited pathways, and even in low unemployment economies, there is no chance to find a job. As catalysts, if we are gonna measure, if we are gonna help be that balance, right, if we're gonna be partners on both the business and the people, we have got to close that gap. So I believe that the same solution that supports people is the only way to protect these businesses. And I earlier I mentioned about being useful to meaningful, and I I use this slide a lot. Actually, I talk I take it with clients. I go in front of clients and I say, Can you tell me who where are we? Are we being useful for you? Are we being reliable? Where are we in our relationship with you? Because my ambition is to be a meaningful partner for you. And I would argue that for a very long time, RPO providers have been extremely useful. That's also what kind of made us that provider mindset. When we started to become more of a partner, we've become more reliable, we've become easier. And as easier we became seamless, and the hiring manager and the candidate experience became better. As we started to become more personal, we actually were creating tailored journeys for our clients. We were giving them nudges, we started doing skill signaling for their people side. But at the top, you know, this is where we can be stronger and people can thrive. So the best way I can think about this is a conversation I had with a large pharmaceutical client the other day. And they're going through an incredible transformation. And to give you context, this transformation, not only laying off people, but they also have to grow because no business lays off people to die, they actually are laying off to transform, just to be clear. And they believe, and I actually think they're right, that in the age of AI, the role of a manager is no longer to be a knowledge source. Think about that. A manager historically is put in that position because the knowledge they have, they're experts in knowledge. But in the future, because of AI, AI has the knowledge. So the manager doesn't need to support people's knowledge. They need to support them and motivate them and encourage them, help them find pathways for skill sets they didn't know they needed. And that's meant that they believe that every manager can go from managing seven people to 30 people. So they've literally eliminated entire sections of their organization where they are managing 30 managers are now managing 30 people versus seven. Now, okay, interesting idea. That seems difficult. Entrepreneurship, a lot of change management, but think about it from an RPO perspective. Well, normally working with a hiring manager is difficult as we've heard. I mean, I've had a couple in my life. But if you imagine that historically that company has had 10, 15% turnover, well, an individual hiring manager might hire one person a year. Well, if you're now managing 34, all of a sudden that one manager has to figure out how they're going to motivate and encourage people while at the same time they've tripled the number of hiring activities they have to do. So we have got to think of a way to support that transformation at a recruitment level at the same time. And that conversation with those managers around that topic was a game-changing moment for them. Because they were talking to me about RPO, and I said, no, you have to think about it completely different. Stop thinking about the transaction here. Start thinking about what is the outcome we're looking to achieve within your business. How are we going to make sure that new employees are coached to success? That new hiring managers are actually managing people based upon their capabilities and not based upon their resume. And that was a fundamentally great moment for them to say, okay, we have to think differently about how we recruit people, how we manage the recruitment process, because it's not the same linear one as it was before. So I'm probably running out of time. Doing okay here. I hear some laughter, so it's not too bad, I guess. Um let's make this real. If you think about a company in the new market and they need to scale fast, they need predictability and they need talent. So the first thing you gotta do is be that provider. You gotta be useful. You gotta set up that hub center, perhaps. Don't send me an Manila, please. Um we have to deliver the hires, we gotta keep the costs down, we've got to tick those boxes on compliance, but we're measuring them on transactions. How many CVs did we get through? How many jobs did we fill, not the outcomes? So it's a very functional level of engagement that these providers are providing. Now, if we're being a partner and we're going to this organization, we say, hey, we're gonna do those things and we're gonna drive more efficiency, we're gonna drive more reliability, we're gonna flex our resources as the demand rises and falls, we're now up to 40-50% scalability, we're starting to integrate into their technology, we're gonna tracking KPIs, and we've become trusted. We've become a valuable resource for them. But the limit is we've only solved today's problem. We actually haven't helped them solve that problem of that pharmaceutical of the future. We've only helped them today. We haven't pushed them to the future. And the catalyst, my argument is, is gonna reframe the future. We believe that we're not only gonna deliver that the hires are coming and we're gonna make sure we get the pace and the speed and we're gonna measure average time to fill correctly. But at the same time, we're gonna help to bridge the skills gap. We're gonna start to look at the talent pools and then signal to them what skills are coming available in the market, where they need to go. We're gonna start building those pipelines based upon skill taxonomy and skills growth. We're gonna give micro-credentialing for these candidates and these clients, uh, these individuals, and make them more employable. And these employable ability metrics will sit alongside our hiring. So we'll know, hey, this is where they're going, and we'll start to track where these people are going in the future, and then start to be more mobile within the organization. If I if I think about that RPO piece, right, and I think about a catalyst, and I'll ask an open question here that's not in my script here. How many of you guys charge less for a candidate that's been moved internally for internal mobility, right? Because we don't have to source for them, right? But aren't we, isn't that a perverse incentive in the workforce transformation? That we're actually incentivized to just post the job, pray that someone internally does it for two weeks and then externally hire them and get more money? Like that's a perverse incentive that as an RPA organization we have to be thinking about. Because actually, we're not helping the business transform if we're not helping their internal mobility expand. And this is where I really want us to be thinking as catalyst for business transformation and success. I mean, for me, and I obviously uh I'm passionate about this, and I haven't mentioned AI much, so you can see where I land on this thing. Um, that's the promised land. Uh, where every hire stops becoming the transaction. I know you know Melissa here always tells me is like, how can we make sure that every single hire that we support starts becoming people that are admired within the company? And if that becomes the vision of how we recruit and how we work with the hiring manager community and the business we work with, we're gonna be much more successful as an organization as a whole. So I take us back to uh to our fun AI image of me at an airport and the provider, partner, catalyst model. I think the provider path keeps us efficient. I think the partner path actually drives us to mean valuable. But I honestly think that only the catalyst path has the opportunity to make us indispensable. And to business and to the people. So I think this is a little bit of a responsibility that we share as an organization. It's a bit of a call to action. And if you think about it, without people, transformation fails. And without transformation, people stall. So as an organization, I would I would argue that our opportunity is that we actually have a see the table with some of the most important people of organizations in the world, they're C level, HR level, to help the future. And so I I say that we have a real, a real critical opportunity here that uh is to serve these individuals. And we can do both. I mean, we're talking to so many candidates a day. I mean, with with uh with Scotty AI, we're talking to two million people a day or two million conversations, right? Yeah, I mean that's crazy. Like that is a responsibility that I guarantee you no other company is talking to 2,000 people. So I I apparently don't have a memorable closed slide. So at its best, RPO is not just about filling jobs, it's about helping companies perform and transform better and helping people live better. So for me, that's the future worth choosing. And I guess I just ask you guys you challenge yourselves internally. Do you guys want to be providers? Do you want to be partners, or can we be catalysts to support this transformation that's occurring across all organizations? Thank you. Appreciate it.

Lamees Abourahma 46:25

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 RBOA, the place to go for RPO.