Fractional Work and the Rise of Global Talent with David Barnette

In this episode of Strategic Shift, Christy Honeycutt speaks with David Barnette, Co-Founder and President of Avant Executive Search, about the rise of fractional work and global talent. David shares how companies are rethinking traditional full-time roles, when fractional leadership makes sense, and how borderless work is expanding access to talent and opportunity around the world. 

 
Timestamps: 

00:50 Meet David Barnette 
02:13 Career Journey Highlights 
04:48 Why Private Equity Appeals 
06:17 Who Thrives in PE 
08:08 Coaching for PE Success 
10:43 Fractional Work Rising 
13:10 Fractional vs Full Time Planning 
17:13 Hybrid Remote Expectations 
19:36 Trust and Performance Management 
26:54 Borderless Work and Global Talent 

Connect with David Barnette:
Avant Executive Search & Talent Advisory 

LinkedIn 

Connect with Christy Honeycutt: 

LinkedIn 

 
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Is your organization prepared for the Future of Work? Learn more: https://www.pepelwerk.com/build-my-future-workforce/ 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And I can see someone falsifying that they're interested in a full-time job. If in their brain they really want to do fractional, what I've seen a little bit is fractional two to three companies or four companies or whatever it is that they can sustain because it feels like, well, if I lose this one, I at least have these three because we're in a really weird point in time where people are job hugging and they're not really sure what they're doing. So I almost wonder what your point of view or thoughts are around those individuals that are taking two, three, and four fractional roles. People work is proud to present Strategic Shift, a podcast dedicated to exploring the future of work. Thank you for joining us as we hear stories of bold decisions and workforce innovations. I'm Christy Honeycutt, and I'm your host. I'm honored to present David Burnett, the co-founder and president of Avant Executive Search. Avant is a retained executive search firm reimagining how great leaders are found. They remove the outdated layers of traditional search and leverage modern research technology. They deliver what matters the most. David leads the firm's day-to-day operations prior to joining Avant, he led the technology sector for Cornberry and completed a successful 20-year career in sales and product leadership. Roles at ATT and Clearwire. Join us as we get a sneak peek into the market from David's perspective around what it takes to thrive in a private equity environment, how to think about fractional work and if you're suited for it, and the benefits of borderless work and how it is expanding talent pools globally. Let's jump in. David, thank you so much for joining us. Where are you joining us from today?

SPEAKER_02 1:50

So I am at our main office here in Atlanta, Georgia, just out of Midtown.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Awesome. I know that my intro does not do you justice. I would love for you, if you would, if you don't mind, to introduce yourself and your company to the audience.

SPEAKER_02 2:05

Oh no, thank you. So well, great being here. Obviously, it's always fun to talk to one of my favorite former colleagues from Park Berry. Thank you for having me. And yeah, so look, I um I David Barnett spent um, gosh, 15, a little over 15 years in the wireless telecom industry, grew up inside of Bell South, which became ATT, and then went to work for one of the biggest until we work, it was the biggest funded startup in U.S. history, ClearWire, first 4G company. Uh and went through a lot, yeah, seen things from the big established old slow-moving companies to the fast, you know, moving, high-pressure startup environment. Uh, did consulting for about, you know, built up a lot of brand equity and partnerships and the go-to-market strategy over that career. So I was able to do that for about four years. Really interesting stuff. And Corn Ferry had uh gotten to know me back in uh you know 2010 or so, and I kept a relationship there, and then we had a long, sort of long dialogue that led me to to Cornferry to to lead the technology sector for North America for the professional search uh group. And uh yeah, uh where we met. And then that was a great experience, obviously. And really, I think one of the things that that that I found I was passionate about the search side of this was just getting to be connected to so many people on an ongoing basis and learning about new companies and challenges for so many different companies versus just one that you worked for, you know, in a in a different type of career. Yeah, great experience for two and a half years and then went out to Boutique, met in New York, and met Sonny Parates who uh we just hit it off and partnered well together. So we decided, you know, it's COVID year, why not go start our own firm? So we started our own firm. Executive search and talent advisory back in 2020. We've ground it to about 10 people, between 10 to 12 people the last year or two. Um, we've placed made placements in 11 countries around the world. We've made over 200 placements, executive placements since we were founded in 2020, added a few new partners this past year, and really we focused pretty heavily. So we've done a lot of work or specialty work around global relocation. Is one one thing that we've excelled at. And then a lot of work sector-wise, we're pretty broad with the new partners we brought in. We cover a lot. We're very PE exposed because one of our core sectors was apparel and retail, and therefore we've intersected a lot there. Everything from technology, industrial, consumer, we touch it. So we're just excited that the growth has been good. The client roster continues to build and that's just identified a ride.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Thank you so much for sharing that. It's nice to see you come up from the ranks as a colleague to a co-founder and president of an executive search firm. So very proud of you and the work you're doing. And David, I know all the organizations that you talk to that you guys are seeing, and you mentioned it. There's the private equity, right? So can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the market right now, about what's attractive about private equity?

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Yeah, that's a great question, Chrissy. So I think first of all, everybody is aware. I think most people that you'll see in the LinkedIn universe and the director and up crowd, everybody's aware that private equity has continued to grow. Private wealth is continued, private capital has continued to flow into companies, you know, year after year. Um point where I think it was last year, was it, or maybe earlier this year, the number of P uh owned companies surpassed the number of publicly listed companies. So it's people see that, right? And they're like, okay, well, I I I want to go over there and work too. I mean, and I think that's you know, obviously the equity, the compensation and the ability to earn on performance, you know, on an exit is attractive to everybody, to most everybody. And so I think those are seeing the writing on the wall in terms of the expansion of PE. And then also the sort of okay, if I get in here and drive a good exit, then there's a big cottage gold at the end of the round effort.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

So I know there's pros and cons, obviously. There might be more risk takers that are interested in private equity, but what are you seeing from candidate behaviors in the interest of joining a private equity firm? And then as an individual, what are some pros and cons that they should consider if that's the route that they want to go?

SPEAKER_02 6:17

I I think just be careful that you have a you know, I think it's easy to gloss over and think, gosh, it sounds cool, right? A lot of people think, hey, I know they did, or you know, they don't really and and look, you gotta understand it is going to be it is going to be somewhat different. It again, it yeah, I've seen this play out so many different ways, and there's different types of functions that tend to like it better. I'll give you a great example. So in the apparel and um space, and this goes from mass market apparel to luxury, but yeah, finance, the CFOs, they're fine, CEOs, they're fine, CTOs, that sort of stuff, and those orbs, they're all fine with it typically. Marketing and design hate it. They're like, you're gonna take my stuff and basically license it out into stuff that we think keepens the brand. They're running for the exits as soon as they see, you know, the design and marketing talent are often running for the exits, right, when they see it coming because they see sort of things that are out of alignment with their vision form or what the brand is. And so it's just yeah, it varies, right? And so I think the key thing that people need to understand though the pace is going to be different, you're gonna be very much more metric focused on a faster cadence, right? It's gonna be very hands-on governance, you're gonna have a lot of intensity that maybe that you didn't have in the previous environment, right? I think the closest thing to it would be if you came up and wanted a brand that was maybe um seed or VC backed at some point that never went public and things like that. Maybe if you had a very active VC that was thriving, you had a lot of visibility into the guts of every KPI, that might translate a little bit, but big publics are going to be a really different road. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Well, and I if you think about that environment, they drive like rapid value creation. So, what guidance do you have to your candidates and the individuals that you work with to help them sustain their energy and focus while going into a position with a private equity company?

SPEAKER_02 8:19

Yeah, and I have another great question. So I would break it up into a I would break it up the candidate pool in a I could break it into several sites. I'll keep it the two right here just to make it simple. Um, so you've got the battle-tested operating folks that you know they've they've done it before. They I'd say that once they've got two under their belt, you know, they're they're kind of a no commodity, and that people know that they can, they're smart, they can yeah, make decisions quickly, they hold people accountable, all that good stuff. I think they know it, they know it, they get it. I don't worry about that group nearly as much as once they've had two, three types of these experiences. These are the season pros, right? But where private equity's got to get comfortable with the grottoes and portfolio companies over the last decade, and you know, we're we're getting we're getting into buying spree again right now, too. They're gonna have they're having to reach out and and look at more. I mean, they they're all kind of competing for the same pool of those battle-tested folks, right? Well, that's not enough. That's not merely enough right now. When you get into VP, and now there's been this focus too, like, hey, we spent all this time vetting the C-suite, but where the reper meets the remnant usually is director VP. So now we need to do a little bit more diligence at these levels, and that's where a lot of the transfer there have to look at, okay, well, we do need people that came out of, we're gonna have to take people that came out of Publix or VC or some other places that weren't historically where we've wanted to fish, right? And so those are the folks that I worry about a little bit more because you just don't know. There's every assessment company will tell you that they've got the perfect assessment tool to determine whether those people are gonna make it or not. I don't know if that's true or I think that's a good idea. I'm not downplaying the need for that, but I think the big thing, if you're just talking about sort of conversationally and coaching people, is really okay, you really need to think about how you like to operate and really is that aligned to this environment? And if it's not, I think there's some people that can transition themselves to it and get used to it and find that they like it. But I think that's a lot of really know thyself and reflect on kind of what has made me successful in the past. And is this an environment that my ego is going to tolerate and that you know I'm gonna be able to thrive in.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

I think that's such great advice. And it is, we're moving into a world of the future work is changing. It's been changing, it will always change, but I'm seeing more fractional work take a rise. I'm just curious what your thoughts are around that and if you're seeing that as well.

SPEAKER_02 10:52

Oh, yeah, we we're definitely seeing that, Chrissy. So, one little story I'll give you on that. We actually had to end our SWs and MSAs, and I want to say we did it in 2023, where we were seeing two sides of this. So, companies, I won't name the company here, but it's private equity and retailer. They wanted an SVP level on in packaging, basically. And then they started thinking, they got six weeks into the search, and they're like, this could probably be done in about six to nine months, revamping packaging, and we'll be good on it for we're gonna be good on that for a couple years. Do we really want to what's this SVP level going to do on a week-to-week basis after the mission accomplished on the packaging, right? So they transitioned that, and then we saw and almost immediately we saw it happen with another client, similar thing with supply chain transformation. So there's a lot of transformation work that people were thinking about hey, we need a new leader to come in, and then the client started thinking, uh, maybe this isn't a full-time thing. Maybe it's more of a consulting or fractional thing. And so we can technically have a way, we're a container model, right? So we take a retainer up front, but part of what we make is an unsuccessful place. And we didn't have letter of the law away for us to get paid in the contract if it pivoted the fractional. Well, and so we're like, okay, this is a problem because we're giving them the talent to go do this project, but we're not collecting. So we had to amend the SOWs to say, okay, if it's fine if you pivoted the fractional, but we have to have a mechanism to get compensated for the work to find you that fractional. So we were seeing it enough to do that, put it that way. Um, so it's definitely a thing. We've seen a lot of on the other side of that, Christy. What's interesting is we have to be careful too when we're introducing candidates. We've seen this, and I don't recommend as a candidate that you do this. I don't think it's a good faith move that's going to position you very well. But we've seen people come in and interest in the full-time role. And then if the client likes them and they get farther enough along in the process and they get comfortable, like, hey, I got an idea. Why don't I do this for you on a fractional basis? You know, and they start pitching themselves in fractional, they'll they'll use the search process or even applying for jobs, right, to get it to fill their funnel on fractional opportunities. And so you see it on both interest. And I think the key thing for me on this one, Chrissy, is is good, just I hate to say this, but just good old basic uh workforce planning one-on-one stuff. Like, okay, what is the long-term value of this for all? Where does it sit in the organization? Have we really thought through this? Is this something that you know, is this something that could be done? If it can be done in six months, 12 months, and then there's really you can't think of much else to do in the job description, sure, make it fractional. But if it's something where you need to you need somebody full-time leading a uh a business unit or any kind of group where their soft skills are really gonna matter in terms of the performance of that group, then yeah, that's probably full-time because fractional is hard to make that connection between there's always gonna be that sort of thought that they're kind of like a mercenary to the people that are in their charge. And I think it's just an optics psychological thing that you got to consider when you're deciding fractional versus FTE.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

So I love that you said that because you're speaking a lot about behaviors, right? And I can see someone falsifying that they're interested in a full-time job if in their brain they really want to do fractional. What I've seen a little bit is fractional two to three companies or four companies or whatever it is that they can sustain, because it feels like, well, if I lose this one, I at least have these three, because we're in a really weird point in time where people are job hugging and they're not really sure what they're doing. So I almost wonder what your point of view or thoughts are around those individuals that are taking two, three, and four fractional roles. Are you seeing that as well?

SPEAKER_02 14:46

100%. And no hate on that. More power to you. If you can do that and you make more money and find better balance and stuff like that, and at the same time, check all the boxes for the people you're doing those engagements for and and and hit your hit your targets, then fantastic. I no problem with it whatsoever. And we do see it. So I think the allure of it, and look, let's face it, you've got a lot of people out there kind of selling fractional platforms now, and there's a lot of cheerleaders on fractional uh the marketplace. And and and they're good ones at the same time. I mean, it's it's two things can be true at the same time, right? Yeah, yes, fractional can be an amazing thing, but it's not the end-all be all plug-and-play solution for every circumstance. You know, you got some people that would tell you you can solve everything with fractional, and that's just not true. You can't solve everything with fractional. And there's a lot you can't solve with fractional, but there's a lot in King, and I think the big challenge we all face is helping people navigate what is a good fractional use case and what's not.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

This episode is sponsored by People Work. People Work is reimagining how people connect to work by focusing on skills, not resumes. The platform brings together employers, educators, and job seekers to create clearer pathways from learning to real employment. Whether it's hiring, workforce development, or career mobility, peoplework helps organizations make smarter, more human workforce decisions. Explore more at peoplework.com. Now, back to the episode.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

I love that. It's so important. And I think our culture is shifting a little bit too with these fractional workspaces. If you look at um, well, if we talk about gigaged contract economy, right? Like what is it that these individuals are expecting to see out of their employers that maybe wasn't the same 10 years ago?

SPEAKER_02 16:40

You mean when they're in a fractional arrangement?

SPEAKER_00 16:42

I think that what's happening is we're seeing that modern workers are needing a little bit different culture or different engagement from leadership. And I'm curious if you're seeing that and if you're seeing any trends around the needs of the employees changing in these roles.

SPEAKER_02 16:59

Yeah, you know, that's a really deep question. And I'll try to answer it as simply as I can. Yes. The simplest answer is yes, there is that. And I think when you get into the attribution of factors and that, it's really very endemic has created this whole new world, right? And you mean it at the same time that you have a large generation coming into their into the workforce in Z and with their own very different sort of mindsets about work and woodwork balance and all that good stuff. Yes, I think uh there's the biggest one, let's the elephant in the room here is exactly that, you know, how much time they can spend at home and how much they have to be in the office. This is an age-old debate that's not gonna go away. So the biggest thing is like, what are the expectations around my work range? Can I do this? Um and that, and this is just like fractional. This is just like fractional. People have got to do a really good job of deciding when is a good use case for hybrid, when is a good use case for fully remote, and when is a good use case for an office. And there are use cases for all three. I don't think hybrid and remote are typically good solutions for great companies. They're in that critical scale phase where the all-way conversations spark ideas and you have things like that, and it can be managed productively. However, in any kind of environment where you've got a pretty established cadence, this I don't want to say you're on autopilot because you're never really on autopilot, but you have a weekly cadence that's been there for years, it's working quarter after quarter, you're getting your numbers. Yeah, you can probably do a lot of that remotely, right? And somebody new can come into that and do that remote without maybe as much FaceTime as it would have required before. So I think the biggest thing is yeah, really, and you can get into technology and tools that support more of the remote and hybrid and that kind of thing too. But at the end of the day, the crux of this really is how much time do I have to be in the office.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

It is a big one. And it's funny because I've seen it on both sides where managers are trying to figure out how can I make sure that the person that I've hired is actually doing their job, right? And they're not in the office. Um, I have a different point of view, but I'm also a type A like hard charger. I get stuff done. So my point of view is probably a little bit different. I think that it's important to instill trust, right, on both sides between the employee and the employer. And I'm curious if you've seen any good use cases or examples of how this is being done today for people that are fractional or doing gig type gap work. Are you seeing organizations lean in in a positive way to help build that culture of trust and loyalty?

SPEAKER_02 19:36

I've seen a lot of effort put towards that. I have seen a lot of slides at conferences about that. In reality, though, I think it's a murkier picture. I think there are some examples. And this, I hate to oversimplify this, but I'm going to here. It's funny. Some of the best examples. So, two of two former leaders of my organization in the wireless world have gone on to pretty big success. And I knew them when they were young sales managers, hard charging, very, very good. But they're young enough to be very adaptable and moldable. And the you know, COVID hit as they were ascending, right, in their careers and really hitting the senior vice president of the C-suite level. And it really does boil down to is this somebody that gets up every day with old school legal pad or whatever? Okay, these are the 20 things that need to get another day. These are the five people I need to talk about it, and I'm holding them accountable while staying on track. And it's there's all the tools in the world to communicate and to measure output and some of that sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, it really is about that discipline of not letting things go too long between touch points from a leader to make sure that things are getting. Here's the thing: people say we need this much revenue. Well, between here and this much revenue are about a hundred steps and a hundred little milestones that have to be accomplished in terms of you know, build a list, you know, uh segment that list, figure out what the strategy for going down that list is and and and hitting those prospects and things like that. And and people, you know, say, okay, well, we wanted this in four quarters, and they say here's the goal, and then they come back four quarters after without touching it very much, and they're like, Oh, we missed it. Well, because you didn't measure the incremental milestones. And so I think it it really gets back to whether there's technology, the best leader I've ever had. Honestly, I give Jim Ryder credit here. He had a very smart guy, back in the clear where it is I worked for. That I swear to God that he came in every every one on the one every week. I had the 1.53 markets, six channels, six sales channels of markets. That's 300 something channels. I've got to know what's going on from web to retail to direct, you know, all that sort of stuff. And I got to know him well enough to know that I can go on the report that week in sell the reports and say, okay, he's gonna want to know about Best Buy of Charlotte. He's gonna want to know about the web channel in New York, he's gonna want to know about and what am I doing to fix those things. And it and I think that's the kind of thing, whether you're doing it old school in a notebook or in some sort of fancy technology management platform, it's the same thing. You just have to do it. And that's where a lot of this falls down.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Well, and I love that you're talking about effective performance management because it we've all had great bosses and we've all had really crappy bosses, hopefully less few crappy bosses. But my best boss was actually at IBM. And I would come in and I knew exactly what he needed to see every week. And and they mapped it out. That was a true example of leadership, giving lower level team members at the time I was a first-time manager, but really kind of spelling it out, mapping out like what we needed to do, just like you said. Here's the goal. What are the hundred tasks to get to the goal? And are you keeping them on point? It was so beneficial. So, David, I'm curious, how do you think leaders measure value when work is distributed and invisible? How do we keep away from the micromanaging and more of measuring value? Because we talked about the boss top-down. Have you seen anything productive there?

SPEAKER_02 23:06

Yeah, I so I think it really boils down to look, I I a big point to me and that as Christy is, and this is what this drives the whole conversation really because the rise of fractional, the AI coming into the mix, all this sort of stuff. Look, when I think we all knew. We all knew. No, I'll tell you, I I spent, you know, uh I hated sales so much my first year out of school that I went back and got a landscape architecture degree and and did that for a couple of years and led construction careers right out in the field, and then you know, build building all kind of stuff. And and that was that was there were no minutes often, right? There was there, there was no, you know, there was no slack time in that, just nut. I mean, then you transition to your corporate career, and we all knew, right? I I remember I I always used to joke, I'm like, there's no problem or no circumstance I've had to deal with in a in a quarter office that was as hard as laying out a set of plans on a truck and 15 guys, whatever minutes, 15 minutes. Your budget, you know, there's nothing there because that's not hard. And I think we all knew that a lot of white collar work was not 40 hours a week. I mean, yeah, most people could do their jobs in a good 10 to 15 hours, 20 hours of hard work a week. Now that's focused hard work, but it and the rest of us this other time. Guess what? The pandemic happens, and now we put all this surveillance in place to actually quantify that a little bit. And the pandemic kind of led us to this place where we we anecdotally kind of all thought that, but now we know it. Now we know that okay, this doesn't really take what we call full-time work to do it. So I think what's coming to play now is that you do have a lot of productivity measurement tools and they can feel, and the trick is to not make them feel invasive, right? Like I think the the trick is like, okay, let's measure output, but let's also have some grace in that and allow for what we can't change the world overnight. If somebody wants to take an hour in the middle of the day to, I don't know, be on the internet or wash clothes at home or whatever they're doing, that's fine as long as the output targets are met. I think if we're just strictly focusing on output versus time logged into the horror stories are the ones you hear where it's okay, they're measuring every minute you're at your screen. See, I think that's terrible. That's not productivity. That's just you sitting in front of it. That doesn't mean you're productive, that just means you're sitting in front of a screen, right? I think those are the kind of things that we need to get away from and say, okay, well, look, if your job is a product management, for example, you've got three products in development, you're gonna have to take a little bit of a short-term and long-term thing, say, okay, well, on a monthly basis, here's where we expect these things to advance down the roadmap. And but on a weekly basis, here's what we expect. And I don't care if you did it at two in the morning or four in the afternoon or didn't do any of it all on a Wednesday, but if it got done. And I think it's getting away from that sort of too invasive mindset of I want this person engaged every minute of the hours. I I think they should be working.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

The toxic leadership is what I like to call that. But I think it's because if you think about it, it's it's slowly or quickly killing their purpose and their drive to do good work and to bring great value when they're managed in a certain way, like that. I'm very passionate about that, by the way. I've heard of employees getting so saucy that they'll go in and create these bots that will look like they're on because it's like, oh, you want to you want to micromanage me? Let me show you something. And it goes back to hiring the right person, understanding the job, the role responsibilities, the value that you're trying to create. I could talk about this all day. One last question I had for you, David, is you know, we've talked a lot about private equity. We've talked about gig and fractional work, and we've we danced a little bit around hybrid work, which I know is a big topic and it's going to continuously change. But as we move into borderless work, that you know, it's expanding talent pools globally. How do you think this opportunity is changing for both organizations and individual workers?

SPEAKER_02 27:08

Yeah, I know that's a huge one. And I, as I mentioned at the beginning, I know, and it's your laughing or we do a lot of global relocation and expansion type work too. But look, it changed things a lot. We take advantage of. And I was lucky enough to the boutique I was at, and I'm at East Middle Eastern, and we all had team members in Pakistan. We have team members from there now because when we left, we had a few that liked them as to want to kind of come join us. And it's game changing in the sense that um I think one of the really coolest things about this, it's a bit of an aside, but I think one of the amazing things that I like the most about it is you're seeing people that wouldn't have had these opportunities globally get exposed to learning development, exposure trust, letting them have opportunities to shine that they wouldn't have had. And I gotta tell you, there's just an appreciation factor that they have that it's hard to find it in the US sometimes. And when you really invest in people globally like that, it is oh my gosh, it's very rewarding, and and you see the results in your bottom line. So I'm a big fan of it. Now, what does that mean for domestic workers? I think you know, if we can take two views on this, we can view it as threatening, and I don't like to see it that way. I like to see it as like, look, if we have people that are really good in a certain area better than we are, we can either choose to view that as a threat or we can choose to view that as a bar for us to try to get ourselves to. And having the exposure to work with them in some of these environments, now I think it's on the employer to not make people feel threatened by global borderless work and say, hey, we're not coming for all your jobs because people in Hong Kong can do this better, or Malaysia can do this better than you. I think it's like, hey, let's leverage different regions for what they're notably good for, and let's integrate them with you guys and give you guys an opportunity to learn what they're good at, but also give them an opportunity to learn what you're good at, and then we all get to a better place faster.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Together.

unknown 29:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:09

Yeah, and I think we need to not have the workforce dynamics here to we need the H1B thing. I know it's a hot button issue and all this sort of stuff, but the reality of it is if you take our population against Globe, it's we're not nearly as big as some of these people we're competing with, and we don't have the available headcount in terms of bodies, period. Not to mention, before you even get into the education levels and certain experiences, we just don't have the number of people that a lot of these places, and we're not going to create all this uh overnight, and nor should we. And so I think that's the having a bit bigger picture, more global perspective on that is probably healthy for most people.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

I love that so much. David, it has been an immense honor to spend some time with you this morning. Thank you for holding space for our audience. Is there anything that you'd like to share that maybe I missed?

SPEAKER_02 30:01

I I think you'd asked about tech stacks and tablet recruiting and Yadoui and some of that sort of stuff. Yeah, I and I think it's a good segue because it's it's almost the same answer I just gave you on the low. There are a bunch of the AI tools out there that are marketing themselves as one-stop shop. And what we have found, the best tax set, and we're pretty happy with where we are with it. Now, it would look on paper, if I diagrammed it, it looks kind of messy. But but the reason for that is that what we have found is that there's a there's just there's a ton of tools, right? That in and some of them are exciting and they have all this promise. But what you find is that if the marketing has five things that this thing does, it's really only great at one of them, you know, maybe good at two or three, and it's just not at all as advertised on four and five. Um, so what we have tried to do is we've tried to say, okay, well, if this is the best at this one thing, let's figure out a way to put it into our process quo. And then we'll assign licenses based on how that process flow goes. Because we don't want to spend a bunch of money on licenses, not gonna get full use out of it. We're saying, so what is this tool good at or the best at? Where do we put it in our process, whether it's in BD or we're at point execution, wherever that sits, what is it best at? Build a flow around it and pull, and I don't think that's gonna change for a while. I think this idea of the one platform solution is crazy to me. There's so many good ones out there that do a really good job in a couple areas. Figure out how do you get the best of each, right? And yeah, I it's not too hard. I wouldn't want to take that a big shit if they probably tributed with thousands of programmers. That would be a nice, but if you're a hundred people or less, I think this is something maybe even 200. This is doable for any internal team, clients that internal team that's you know, a handful of recruiters and up to 50, even 100 to boutiques and search firms after that. I think you can take that approach of what does each one do best and figure out a way, and then constantly evaluate it, right? If it's no longer the best, then plug it and replace it with one that beat it. And I think that's I don't think that's changing. Where's this gonna be continue to be a lot of noise for the next few years on that? And you're just gonna have to continue to commit to looking at the new stuff, take the demos. I always take the demos when I have time, and take the demos and see what you think, share it with your team, get your team's feedback, and see if you want to incorporate it. But it's exciting when you do that because you really find some breakthroughs.

SPEAKER_00 32:32

I really like what you say about do the demos, understand what your problem is, do the demo, see where it connects. But the thing that I liked and respect the most about you as a leader is you said, and then send it to your team and get their feedback because, and you said it earlier, they're the ones, right? They're where the buck stops doing the execution, and it's important for them to have a say on if that will actually help them or not. That's what I've heard you say.

SPEAKER_02 32:57

Yeah, I know I don't want any part of being the person that dictated everybody use this, and then and I have in my exuberance, I've learned that the hard way, right? You get excited about this too, like, hey, we just got this thing, and you know, and then you realize, hey, my perspective was not adequate to really embed this. I should have brought more people into the process, right? And I would love to say that I was born with that that that bit of wisdom, but that was earned the hard way.

SPEAKER_00 33:23

As it is with most leadership lessons, right? You gotta live through it. David, if anyone in the audience would like to connect with you to talk about your brilliance or any of your offerings, where should they reach out?

SPEAKER_02 33:34

My brilliance. That's that's high phrase. So especially for me, I appreciate it. No, I look our website, NabontSearch.com, is a great place to get information on our services, our partners, everything that everybody that's here, what we do. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on there pretty regularly. If you live in our world, you know you're there. So you can easily find me. Uh, my company and my partner is there. And we look forward to talking to anybody that has any needs and really figuring out their talent plans, building a talent function all the way to executive search and project recruitment.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

Perfect. Again, David, thank you for holding space for myself and our audience. And guys, until next time, keep shifting. Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Christy Honeycut. Be sure to subscribe to Strategic Shift so you never miss an episode. Tune in next time as we continue to explore innovation and the future of work. Until then, keep shifting.