Understanding SOW: The workforce model reshaping recruitment

What exactly is Statement of Work and why are more recruitment firms paying attention to it?

In this episode of Recruitment Down Under, Brian Huggett, Managing Director of APSCo Outsource joins APSCo Australia's MD, Lesley Horsburgh to unpack the complexity, opportunity and future of SOW, MSPs and workforce solutions.

From workforce governance and risk through to AI, outsourcing and evolving client needs, this conversation explores how recruitment businesses can position themselves beyond traditional hiring models.

Want more info about evolving service models?

APSCo has developed a Service Delivery Model Glossary of Terms that our members can use and share with their clients and the wider community to help define key acronyms and outline the main features of the different outsourcing models.

To learn more about APSCo Australia, head to au.apsco.org 

Transcript

Welcome And Brian’s Background

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Brian, welcome to Recruitment Down under Apsco Australia's podcast. How are you? Nice to see you.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Yeah, thank you very much for having me. I'm very well, thank you. Just got back from two weeks in Vietnam. So uh feeling even better and over the jump mode.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Fantastic, nice and refreshed. That's good. Now, today we are here to talk about a statement of work. But before we do, I was hoping that you might introduce yourself and give our listeners a little bit of context, context around who you are and your background, if you could.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Yeah, of course, of course. So, Brian Hugger, I've been like yourself in the profession all my all my life, Leslie. I started off in a recruitment firm back in 2000, showing my age, doing tax accounting recruitment. So very niche straight away. And then I joined my biggest client back in 2005, which was PwC, before then moving into the very interesting world of banking. So I've worked for investment banks, custodian banks, retail banks, before before joining EBSCO outsource as the MD for UK. And effectively, in my life, I've managed RPO programs, I've built in house talent acquisition teams, I've managed managed service provider programs, I've looked after the governance around the contingent workforce, and I've had a lot of exposure to the dark arts of statement of work, shall we say. So, yeah, very happy to talk about that. And I've spoken to a lot of people across a lot of different industries as well. So I'm happy to kind of give a kind of a global lens and global insight. And that'll just be based around my own kind of personal and professional kind of interactions across lots of different industries and what I'm seeing. But it's quite a complex topic. So I appreciate my experience is not much everybody's, but I'm very happy to give my own my own opinions.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Yeah, yeah. Well, you never know. We might have to do two podcasts or two episodes. Um, we'll see how we go for time. And yeah, if it's if it's as complex as you say, then um maybe we can have part one and part two. But I think the logical starting point is to really understand or or hear from you how you define a statement of work engagement.

What A Statement Of Work Really Is

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Yeah, I think it's this is where it starts getting complex, right? Because it it's essentially what I view as a procurement term statement of work. And whenever an organization is buying, you know, a service of any description, they tend to have a statement of work. But that doesn't necessarily mean there's boots on the ground. So uh, as in you've got people as part of that service. So when you have a managed service provider program, there's a statement of work attached to that managed service provider program often, which you know stipulates the terms of which you're engaged and the requirements and the service level agreements and everything. So the whole term statement of work is confusing from the outset because people use it every day in different role types and in a different kind of meaning. I think you have to look at it in terms of the total workforce. And when we're thinking about the external workforce in particular, I think statement of work often is meant to define where you have workers working under projects with uh a defined outcome, you're buying a service, and that could be anything. It could be you want a data center being run, you want a project being run with defined deliverables and uh target dates and everything. And that statement of work is there to, you know, put together the framework for that agreement. I think what that means in reality, though, is when we have workers as part of a managed service program, often they are time and materials. They are, I need someone to help on this project, I've got someone off sick, I need to grow the team temporarily, we need people in our call center, whatever that may be. Um, and they do timesheets, it could be daily, weekly, what have you, and and they're paid like that. And then you've got the statement of work, which kind of sits outside that often. It can sit within that. And this is where it gets complex because I think where people are seeing the opportunity at the moment is there's great governance as part of those managed service programs. You've got really good background screening, you've got really good eye on tax, you've got really good eye and visibility on things like cost, expense management, uh, adherence to company policies, all of that good stuff. And it helps organizations protect themselves against risk. What you find in reality across organizations, though, is what's sat there as a managed service provider program is only the scratch beneath the service of the wider external workforce. And statement of work really could mean everything that you just don't have visibility on as much all of the supply chain that's providing people into the organization. So that's kind of a very loose and probably broad way of me trying to describe statement of work first thing in the morning, probably in need of another coffee, but I'm happy to elaborate.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

You did very well. Okay. All right. So I think what I hear and and my understanding is is is far, far uh more basic than your background. But you know, from what I hear and what I understand and the bits that I pick up here in Australia, is often there's a perception that statement of work is a way to deliver a fixed price, but essentially could be still contractors being paid a day rate or whatever it might be. So it's still workers delivering that work.

SPEAKER_02 6:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

But there's a perception

Fixed Price Promise And Common Confusion

SPEAKER_00 6:30

that maybe the employer obligations and and kind of um compliance is a little easier to get around.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

I think that's true. I think that's true. I I think there's real advantages to using a statement of work and using a statement of work well. And that's where there's a lot of opportunities for our kind of members. Because if you're a very, very business, uh busy business leader and you've got a project and you need that project delivering, if you can give that project to a professional staffing or workforce solutions company and say you you just do what you do, you agree a price, you agree the deliverables, you agree the time frame, and that then let that provider figure out how many people they need, manage the project, they will get you the results at a fixed price. That can actually be really good. That can actually be cheaper than letting an organization, you know, hire that internally and go for all of that. It can be more nimbler. I think the reality though is organizations are complex. And when I've spoken to people across lots lots of different industries, I hear a similar story. HR often tend to own all of permanent recruitment. And you know, that's often in partnership with professional staffing companies. They may have an RPO embedded as part of that, and often do. And they offer great governance, great control. So permanent hiring, that's working really, really well. The external workforce, they often may have one or more managed service providers. So the the key people, time and materials, they're in, you know, there. Often, in my experience, HR uh often owns that. It can be procurement, but in my experience, HR often owns that. And then you get all of that great governance set in that program as well. So it's really good. The confusing element, though, is often HR doesn't have the mandate or the authority to effectively force all of the right type of engagements through that program. It's a leaky shit. And that's where the risk opens up. Because if you've got a very large organization with thousands of managers, and they're allowed to effectively bring people in however they like, they'll often find the path of least resistance.

SPEAKER_02 9:12

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:13

And that's where you can find ones and twos hidden all over the organization that very quickly add up to quite a large risk because they're sat under existing statement of works brought in. In my experience, I've been uh made aware of people that they don't even have a valid contract because it expired years ago. I've even seen managers before who thought that workers were actually permanent employees. When they weren't, they were an expired contractor who's just remained within the building. And that's how far it can kind of go when it goes wrong. It's because who owns that? It's individual managers. And then if that individual manager leaves or moves on, someone else takes it up. But the ownership is a problem, and this is one of the many kind of pillars of complexity with this whole topic, which is you know, you've got the governance, you've got the ownership, you've the sheer amount of stakeholders, the terminology. There's a whole raft of different things here. But that's where I I often kind of start is thinking about this from a where do you have labour and where do you have services? And trying to help an organization understand where do they need physical labour and temporary labour and where do they actually need a service, and try and help them to understand what type of engagement they need. Because often that that they don't understand that it's too complex. So being able to say is it an SAW or not, we need to start earlier than that.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

Yeah, okay. So on the on the flip side, from the member side, from the recruitment member or you know, the APSCO member side, delivering statement of work, if we if we look at obviously the UK market where you're based, what does that look like? Are those operators wholly and solely SOW, or are they a staffing firm that does a bit of SOW? How's it structured? What does it typically look like?

UK Market Trends And Member Opportunity

SPEAKER_01 11:24

Well, I think what we're seeing is the market, as we all know, has just been the strangest uh most pressed market that I've seen in my entire career, which is sad, and hopefully that will that will pick up if we can get some global stability in place shortly. But what what we're seeing is the staffing firms are moving into uh uh MSP and RPO solutions. Kind of mid-market clients are needing those solutions uh more more often. They need quickness, they need speed, they need the agility, they need the expertise. They may not be willing to pay for it internally or build it internally. They may not want the headcamp. Like they used to have a lot of organizations are squeezing their headcamp and that that their FTE and trying to ride the wave of AI and think about how do we become a more nimble, reduced operating cost organization moving forward. And that gives huge opportunity for our members because we can step into that void and help them and give them the expertise that they need. So, what we're seeing, you've got the large traditional kind of MSPs, you've got mid-market MSPs, and you've got new entrants into that market offering those services. And that could just be, you know, that we'll we'll look after this project of 10 people and we'll manage that for you. It's a different way of working. You're not you're not selling a candidate, you're selling a service, you're selling a project, and we'll manage all of that on your behalf. So it's a different way of working. But what we're seeing is people adapt to that, rise to the challenge and see the opportunity. I think the opportunity for all organisations is trying to put their arms around their entire workforce. In the UK, we've had so many things in terms of labour law changes, tax changes, liability shifts, which scares people quite rightly, and it should. And actually, if you've only got a handle on X percent of your external workforce, and you've got hundreds or thousands of suppliers providing all of these other people, there's a huge opportunity to give that to somebody or give that to certain parties and say, please help put proper governance around that. And that produces huge cost opportunity and it reduces risk if it's done correctly. And that's what we're seeing is people are capitalizing on that, which is really good. We could our members can really help people reduce cost and reduce governance, especially in the sea and storm of changes that they're being hit with.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

Yeah. So when you you just mentioned then about you know some of the members in the UK that are really leaning into this opportunity and and I guess for one trying to undermine their efforts, giving it a go. Do you believe that it is something that you can you can kind of do exactly that and give it give it a go and see how you go? And or is it something that it needs to be a very deliberate, dedicated strategy, division of your business, whatever it might be? I mean, where is it, where is it most likely to be successful and where is it not?

SPEAKER_01 14:47

It's a very, very good question. So I think it's easy for me to sit here outside having not done that and having never done that, uh, and kind of offer an opinion. So I do want to caveat my answer with that. But I do think it needs dedication, right? If you're going to look at this properly, you need to be thinking about what does that service look like and what does the scale look like? So some of the programs I've managed in the past are several thousand, you know, workers. So, firstly, when you're talking about that scale, you'd be leaning into HR systems integration, what does that tech stack look like? How do we integrate governance with the client system so that you know it's auditable, et cetera, et cetera? If you're talking about a dozen hires a year, you need to think more carefully about the you know, what do we need to invest in? How important is uh system integrations, which can take two years depending on the company's willing for risk appetite, or do we focus on the the cool things that matter? But I think it warrants a that that separate kind of dedication to that service because it's a huge offering. If you can get this right, you can manage that that project, that that that that supply to deliver on time, on schedule, on budget, well then that's you know worth multiple hires that you've made as an organization. And you're you're winning multiple hires with each project that you do, and then that can lead into bigger and longer-term relationships with the client to deliver that. If we think about how many consultancies you know effectively sell recruitment services, and how many BPOs and SSOs, you know, and all of these terms, but a lot of them I've seen in the past are offering what our recruitment members can offer. Uh, and and often, you know, they don't necessarily have the thorough recruitment background that our members have. So I do think there's a huge missed opportunity in in many cases, and a huge opportunity for the future in terms of leaning into what the clients are looking for. And I think that starts with a

Building A Real SOW Capability

SPEAKER_01 17:10

question. It starts with a question around, you know, understanding the client's needs. What are they looking for? What are they working on? What's their biggest pain points and how can you help them?

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Okay. So you just touched on on that um scope of firms that are doing this. How big is the market over there in the UK?

SPEAKER_01 17:32

It's a it's a really good, really good question. Uh and it's one which it's been very difficult to pin down. You know, you can ask ChatGBT, you can look at, you know, various different references, and you will get a whole list of kind of different answers in terms of what that looks like. I mean, you've got the whole kind of shared service and kind of consultancy market, which is worth billions and billions globally. It's very hard to pin an actual number down on it. I mean, I I've seen programs, MSP programs, which, you know, hundreds of millions a year, because you talk about thousands of contractors and their payroll effectively. So the market is huge, and I think it's trying to quantify where which work is most easily winnable. That and that's a that's an interesting piece, right? Are you going to win a large tech outsourced shared service with that technical know-how, et cetera, et cetera? You know, and there's certain services that people will pay a Microsoft for or uh, you know, whoever for, that you just wouldn't touch. Technically, that's under a statement of work, but are you going to compete into that? But if you lean into more project-based stuff where you know you can build a team that can lead on that and can deliver that engagement, there's a lot of opportunities that are more accessible to our members to win work for. So I think it's looking at that engagement and thinking about how and where do you kind of pitch. Answering that question in terms of quantifying it is very difficult because it's the there's no clear metrics out there which kind of define it all nice and neatly for people. I wish there was, but uh fair enough.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Yeah, I mean, I've I've been doing a bit of you know, chat cheaping and Googling, and yeah, I was certainly um, I think I left more confused than I started to be honest. So yeah, it's very interesting, and and I guess all the various definitions and like you say, you know how it's kind of

Hidden Suppliers, Access, And Governance Risk

SPEAKER_00 20:00

what's behind the packet, the the wrapping in in terms of the the deliverables. So how what would you say for those members that might be you know entertaining this idea of of um getting involved in statement of work? What's the biggest challenge? What are the considerations they should be thinking about?

SPEAKER_01 20:23

I think there's multiple. You probably knew I was going to say that, apologies, Leslie. But but I think don't assume the client understands what's okay. Right. So, in my experience, people get very confused with the terminology which I referred to earlier. Even under I've even had people confused around what we meant by colleague versus contractor versus so people but some of the basics of you know, that we see as the basics, don't assume everyone's got the same level of knowledge. Equally, people might just always assume, oh, that goes over there because that's this division, oh, this division that goes to that supplier, oh, this piece of work has a project to it, that goes to a consultancy. People's experiences across their own personal careers will define their engagement channels often.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

Right, yeah, that's a really good point.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

And I think that's where there's some barriers to entry, but with barriers to entry, there's opportunity as well. It's finding the doors. And I think that that's where a good starting point is talking to people, understanding what they're working on, understanding how many suppliers they're working on, educating people around governance and you know, where you're getting this wrong. I always looked at this from a who do we care about, Leslie? And I mean that in terms of the external workforce. So I've always looked at the external workforce that we care about. In terms of people with building and or system access. So, you know, the person that comes to fix the lift, you know, for Otis, the lift engineer, that they should really be on a temporary pass, you know, and then that becomes a who looks after their governance. Well, that's between procurement usually and Otis and that contract or the building contract or whatever that looks like, they should be given a temporary building pass. It's not necessarily, you know, high risk to the organization, or it shouldn't be if managed correctly. If you've got someone that needs permanent building access, though, like that could be a security guard on site every single day that's interacting with an organization's, you know, front of house clients, et cetera, et cetera, that becomes a different story. So I always start thinking about who do we care about? Who is in the external workforce that we want to be classified as the external workforce? And you got that building and system access. Then look at, you know, well, how many suppliers provide, you know, that and then breaking that down a bit. So, you know, you could find you've got facilities management is one or two or three suppliers, depending on the size of the organization. And that they could have hundreds or thousands of workers as part of that program. But you start, if you start looking at the data, and I'm quite sad, I have looked at the data of my years, was you start looking at the data, where you start seeing, oh, a dozen people there, one person there, six people here, twenty people here, fifty people here, all of that adds up. And sometimes the costs of those programs can be absolutely huge. And actually trying to understand, well, what are they offering? How how are they doing that? You know, I've spoken to people where they've worked and they've got a team that's all permanent, and they've got a team that's outsourced, and they're all in the same office, they're all in the same team, they're all doing the same job, and they're doing it indefinitely. And I said, Well, why aren't they why aren't they employees? And when I've spoken to people, you know, there's a similar story here. So it requires a a bit of a lot of conversations and trying to speak to the right stakeholders to try and understand that landscape and think about what's the priorities of the client. And again, another piece of advice I've learnt the that the hard way is don't assume what's what's important for one client is the same as another. So for some, that governance and risk aspect is going to be front and center. You know, for others, it it may be cost, but don't assume that say cost is going to be a driver for everybody. Because one of the things that MSPs can come against and staffing firms can come against, is if you've got a program run by HR with all of that great governance, people sometimes can have a negative perception of that. It could be seen as slower because we're doing compliance. It could be seen as headcount, it could be reported on in annual reports and things. Whereas if you've got backdoors into the organization that managers think are nimbler and they choose to go down that down those paths, then that's another barrier to entry. So it's trying to help educate people around the risk that they may have in their departments unnecessarily. And with the rise of AI and fraud with COVID, we started seeing people work multiple jobs at the same time, you know, and that trend has continued. So there's a lot of trends that are coming up that constantly expose organizations to risk. And where those risks are, that again creates opportunity, I think, for our members.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

But I'm also imagining then, you know, you're talking really about a lot of a lot of unpicking and unraveling in terms of inside the organization and their, you know, how they've A, what they need, but also the current sort of structure of the workforce.

SPEAKER_02 26:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

That's challenging in itself because you've mentioned the word stakeholders in multiple. It's not just one conversation with one person, sit down with a client and get all the answers. That that would I imagine would take significant amount of time and meetings to unpick what it is you're actually looking at and what you're trying to then stitch back together with a solution.

SPEAKER_01 26:40

I I I I think that's completely right. Sadly, that's that's some of the complexity. No one, in a lot of organizations, no one person owns the entire, you know. If you look at tech, which is always a huge part of most organizations, they run their own, you know, PL, they run, they run their own head camp. They'll they'll deliver what they need to deliver for the organizations. And often that's a beating heart of the organization. So, you know, you need to lean into the right people into tech, but you need to lean into the right people in procurement, you need to lean into the right people in HR, you know, and it's having multiple conversations with people to understand, you know, what's on their mind, where's the agenda, and how can you play into that. But I think often people may default to suppliers that they've worked with in the past. And it's important to build those relationships and keep those conversations going on. So you can get in the in the front door, as it were, when legislative change is happening, etc. You're already as part of that conversation, so you can be included. And I think that's a challenge is spreading yourself too thinly. And how do you do that? And there's no playbook that kind of will give you the right answer for every single client because it doesn't exist. There's a bit of trial and error here, but where you've got existing relationships with clients, that's the perfect place to start, right? And I've I've seen that's where uh our members have broken into kind of MSP and RPO services for the first time, because they've built great relationships with their clients, they're trusted, and they're able to add even more value with

How SOW Engagements Go Wrong

SPEAKER_01 28:25

them.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

Yeah, yeah. So without going to the the dark side, you've you said the dark side earlier. What uh tell me about when it can go go wrong. What what does it look like when it goes wrong and why?

SPEAKER_01 28:40

Yeah, I I think it's it's challenging. It is really challenging. I think across organizations, if you're running a program and you build a program, you know, you you tend to be building a program at scale. And what we've seen over the last few years, the numbers have come down. And often with, you know, if you're talking about an MSP program, which obviously my members run, you know, you're often talking about a three to five year engagement. If you're looking at an SOW engagement, you know, that there tends to be a significant time stamp on that. So I I think the if we're talking about SOW particularly, I think the the risk here is just spreading yourself too thinly, getting the right stakeholders engaged from the outset, being at the forefront of those conversations, and then being able to deliver, you know, thinking about how you can scale up and scale down, you know, how can you be agile? How can you utilize the very best tech to support you, bringing the right people in? How are you going to manage that to the timescales? You know, what kind of project management capability do you have? Do you have a framework? Do you have anyone with that kind of agile mindset? Like what how does that play to the client's methodology? So just trying to think about what does the client need? How are we going to deliver it and being prepared, I think, for everything is key, which is challenging in itself.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

Yeah. And you just mentioned the times, the times and the numbers coming down. Is that what you said? You said the time stamp on SOW. Can you explain that a bit more?

SPEAKER_01 30:34

Yeah, so uh what I meant, so the there's two aspects that are constantly in my mind, right? So one is MSP. So the MSP numbers uh have typically trickled down, just like permanent recruitment numbers have trickled down post kind of COVID. And apart from that initial spike we saw after, with then global events unfolding, sadly that they kind of deteriorated down. So if you're running an MSP program for the first time, one of the challenges you face with pricing that in such a volatile market is being pushed into very small margins based on high volume, and then finding yourselves trapped into a contract for several years with a situation like this where where it's been quite stagnant. So that's kind of a challenge. I think with SOW, that's an opportunity because it's deliverables. You know, you can agree the price point and that the people, but you need to make sure you've got enough the right price point for the right amount of people that's going to get you the client, the delivery and the time scale that they want. So it's a challenging one because you need to price to attract, but equally it has to be realistic and scalable. So sorry, two probably separate but linked views on the numbers and things.

SPEAKER_00 32:02

And that, I guess, that on the SOW side, when you are working to a fixed price, I mean, the reality is things do blow out, and and so you have to build, I guess you've got cost creep or whatever you want to call it. Um how do you set those boundaries? Like what do people do to mitigate that risk? Because you could end up losing a lot of money, I'm assuming, if you don't get it right.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Yeah, it's it's a really challenging one, and I don't have all of the answers to that. I think a good procurement team will always try and you know buffer any contract with a million limiters and things and make sure all of the insurance is in place and stuff, and business insurance is wrong. There are, and some are trusted partners of ours, people that offer you know insurance in this space. So you can you can make sure all your bases are covered. But I think if you're breaking out into SOW, you break off with something that you can you can take a good bite of, you know. Don't take off something bigger than what you can chew that on the page straight away. I think you start off with something that that's scalable and and you build

AI Screening, Fake Candidates, And Trust

SPEAKER_01 33:15

up from there.

SPEAKER_00 33:16

Yeah, yeah. You talked about one of the the key changes obviously being, you know, AI and it's and it's having an impact everywhere. What would you and you've obviously seen quite a shift in, you know, you've you've been in this market a long time and you understand it well. What do you see happening next, or what do you see changing or more change of?

SPEAKER_01 33:42

I think I think everything's changing so rapidly. So I'm gonna give you uh a few examples that are just on my mind from this week alone, right? So there's an article, I'm not sure if it was in the BBC or Sky News this that this week about a candidate that had been interviewed by an AI person.

SPEAKER_02 34:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:05

You know, not very happy about it. I think that's probably the easiest way to kind of talk about it and being pre-screened out. So we've all been talking about being pre-screened out by kind of uh AI and the virtues of that. The flip side to that is when you are running an RPO, an MSP, or even you know, a staffing firm posting an advert, we all know we get hundreds and sometimes thousands of applications. You know, you look on a LinkedIn job that gets like a hundred applicants within like the first two minutes or something. It's like trying to get Rolling Stone tickets or anything like that. It goes like that, and you can't beat everything. So you've got the flip side where to do the human element of it is just not sustainable because you can't the pricing doesn't work to staff a team that big to call up everyone. Oh, thank you, Leslie, for putting in your C that stuff. Those days are gone and it's not realistic. So you you started off with kind of the AI screening people out, you've now got AI interviewing candidates, but equally we've got AI candidates being interviewed by real people. And so I was in a very interesting the LinkedIn Talent Connect event in London a few weeks ago where we saw on screen a live AI kind of interview stills, and it was guess guess the bot. And I you couldn't, you couldn't guess the bot. But the the bot was actually a fake uh candidate that was answering this. So then we started getting into equipping recruiters with the right questions to spot the bot. So one of the things that I found fascinating was asking people to raise their hand or asking them about where they live. Talk to me about some of the landmarks where you live, what's your joy about that? And you'd see the bot trip up because it it it physically couldn't raise a hand realistically. I'm just proving I'm not a bot. Uh it couldn't it couldn't do it realistically. So you've got all of that kind of piece around the rise of AI, and you've got AI kind of prevention, but you've got AI threats, and then that goes through the whole recruitment life cycle as well. It it tips into background screening, you know, CVs, the interviews themselves, with remote working. I think there's opportunity there, and I think where we have burnt a lot of calories in CV writing, candidate sourcing, candidate screening, the opportunities where AI can help you in that interview scheduling, all of that good stuff is there. The human element is still important and so important, and I like to think it always will be. I think the key thing that organizations, not necessarily our members, I'm talking about the the organizations they support and represent, how do they ensure their employee brand is, you know, positive? It it gives a great experience because that's something I think organizations often forget about, which is if you've got hundreds of thousands of applicants every single year, how do you triage those and make sure there's a human element to at least a certain proportion of that? If they're coming through an interview funnel, I always like to think there's a human element to that where you're building that brand and they have a great experience, even if they're not given a job at the end of it. And I think these are some of the questions people are having to think about. But again, that creates opportunities for our members because that's where we can support.

SPEAKER_00 38:00

Yeah, yeah, it's very true. And look, you know, that that candidate or user experience has always been a challenge. I mean, it's it's not a new challenge, it's it's exacerbated, I think, now with like you say, with the application volume, but it's certainly not

Parting Advice And Listener Questions

SPEAKER_00 38:15

been a new one. So um interesting. I'm gonna ask you to give us one like listeners here, particularly in Australia, that might be looking at, you know, dipping their toe in this in the SOW pond. What what would be your your one piece of parting advice? I know you've talked a lot about, you know, the detail and and having those conversations, but what would be the one thing that you would leave people with today?

SPEAKER_01 38:45

I I think it would simply be asked ask the question. Yeah, help educate and talk to people about other things that they're working with. Because I think in the minds of a hiring manager, for want of a better expression, of which there are many we interact with, they often have preconceived ideas about when do I go to a staffing firm, when do I go to a consultancy, when do I use a BPO, etc. They're preconceived, they're not always consistent. It varies from human to human, right? So I think the first thing is to ask those questions and speak to people openly about, you know, where you're leaning into as a business, where you can offer support, the advantages of doing that. You know, I I think staffing firms can often be very nimble, they've got really deep expertise. We can really help with a lot of these. And I think often I've seen, and speaking to others, I know this exists across all industries. You can often use BPOs, SSOs, consultances, and pay, you know, a lot of money for something that actually staffing firms are equipped to deal with. So I think it's about spotting those opportunities and just having a conversation.

SPEAKER_00 40:04

Fantastic. Excellent. Brian, thank you so much. It's really interesting to hear more about your experiences and obviously some of the detail behind it. It's it's quite complex. And I think it's um, you know, we've talked about this before in our conversations around the whole kind of workforce ecosystem and how interconnected and and kind of blurry everything's becoming. And I think you know, a lot of what you've talked about today really emphasizes that that there's there's multiple solutions and and you know the the edges of what you need and what you thought you need, um, you know, are really intertwining and getting quite complex.

SPEAKER_01 40:46

So yeah, and and I'll I'll leave another parting comment if I if I may, Leslie, which don't assume organizations understand their workforce. That's another piece. Do they understand? Could you ask them to produce a report which shows here's all of the people that are working like labor, then get in direction from people, etc. And here are all of the people that are working like a service. Yeah. People often, you know, the lines are blurred, the systems aren't equipped, they're using multiple systems. It might be a procurement system for projects. Some countries might not have that procurement system, so it's on an Excel spreadsheet. You know, if that, you know, you've got you've got all of these different kinds of uh viewpoints, but don't don't underestimate that organizations struggle with this because it's so complex. And you've got to have an organization that's culturally mature enough to want to put arms around it for the betterment of the organization. And it's no wonder a lot of organizations have struggled, I think, with things like skills, because you need to understand your workforce and some of the basics of that workforce before you can then start breaking down into things like skills and mapping and basic skill map against the entire workforce, and then getting into things like operational workforce planning or strategic workforce planning. So I think organizations historically have underestimated how complex their own organizations are, but they've been leaning into some of these buzz trends, trying to figure it out. And I think there's huge opportunity there, but often it understands with just so it starts with just understanding the the makeup of the workforce, who's supplying whom, how are they supplying it, how should they be supplied? Those are the types of questions which I think can help people navigate this.

SPEAKER_00 42:44

Yeah, that that's yeah, that that's really good. And I think also breaking down that kind of legacy of understanding or lack of understanding or terminology, like you mentioned earlier, around well, you know, this is how we do it. And like they may not even understand what it is they're structuring within their own workforce. So I think you know, everybody's everybody's journey leads them to where they are now, but they've picked up all sorts of habits and understandings and perceptions along the way of what something is or doesn't do or looks like. So yeah, really interesting. Fascinating. Thank you so much once again. It was really nice to see you as always. Um, yeah, thanks to everyone for listening. If you'd like to hear more questions, or you have a question that you would like us to put to Brian, particularly about the um the UK market and the MSP. There's there's so many acronyms now. MSP, BPO, SSO.

SPEAKER_01 43:41

Yeah. Yeah, sorry. We should we'll we'll we'll do an acronym sheet as well.

SPEAKER_00 43:47

A glossary of terms, yeah. I think that might be quite a good idea. All right. Well, thanks again, uh Brian. A wonderful to speak to you. Thanks for listening, everybody.

SPEAKER_01 43:56

Thank you.