Jan Jedlinski: Thank you so much, everyone. It's one minute after, uh, 2:00 PM. So, there is still more people joining, but I'll just give a quick introduction to the world Staffing Summit Sessions. And then I'll hand over to Maurice who is the host for today, and we'll be talking about innovation and digital transformation in the staffing industry.

My name is Jan. I am the co-founder of Gustav. We are hosting the World Staffing Sessions every week. Those are educational webinars specifically for staffing professionals. We want to give everybody actionable outcomes that they can actually use in their business the next day. So I'm really excited to host many people throughout the next weeks until the end of the year, every Wednesday either at 12 or 2 PM Eastern and today I'm super excited to have Maurice fuller here.

He's the founder of staffing Tech. I met him a couple of years ago at his first conference, which was fantastic. And since then we have always been in touch I'm the I've been following Maurice's work. He's uh, you know, really fantastic when it comes to, when it comes to digital transformation in the staffing business he knows all of the tools and all of the processes.

So whoever is interested in learning about staffing. Tech and staffing, SaaS products, you know, reach out to Maurice and whoever's interested in learning essentially around how transformation will help your staffing business succeeds you know, your, the rights on, in the right spot here in that, on that session.

And yeah, please also follow Maurice's work at, uh, his websites and I'll hand over to Maurice and I'll be back after Maurice session to talk a little bit about our new product candidate.ly, which is a candidate presentation, tool for staffing and recruiting companies. If you're interested, you can also go to the poll section and, uh, show some interest for, uh, learning more.

But with that said, I will hand over to maurice and enjoy the session and see you guys soon.

Maurice Fuller: All right. Thank you so much, Jan. I appreciate the introduction and by the way, candidately, I've, I've had the privilege of seeing a demo of that, and it's a very exciting new product. It's going to bring significant value to the staffing industry.

And I, I highly recommend that you stick around to to see that if you, if you don't have a chance on this session to see it, then definitely uh, link up with Jan and, and, and take a look at this. The product is great and the roadmap is, is even more exciting. So, all right. I, I really appreciate the opportunity to to speak with you today.

I want to talk about digital transformation, and in particular, I really want to talk about the acceleration of change within our industry and how things are actually moving forward at a much faster pace than, than most of us realize. So a little bit about myself. I've been in this industry for big chunk of my career.

26 years now, I started as a recruiter, but most of my time has been spent in technology, leading technology initiatives and in executive roles. Most of my time was spent in the IT staffing segment. Although the last few years, I've, I've branched out into serving customers that are in many different segments, including Healthcare Commercial, Professional, I'm the founder of the staffing tech conference.

And I track about 400 staffing technology companies and their solutions. I also, uh, run a site called stack manage which is a software discovery platform to help you find solutions for your staffing business. It's very easy to use this product. You can search for different types of technologies and solutions.

And we have it categorized in a bunch of different ways. So you can quickly hone in on, on the range of solutions that are out there and get a sense of what kind of companies are involved in, in supporting our industry. So definitely check that out. And we're also available to support you. So if you want to jump on a call with me I'm happy to do so.

Just schedule time through this tool, put some time on my calendar. I'm happy to talk to you about your technology stack and how you can augment that stack with new technologies or help you with selections that you, you might be thinking about.

All right. So, let's talk about digital transformation.

It's really one of the most significant things that's happening right now. Uh, it's similar to the industrial revolution that we went through at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, where work was massively transformed through machines that were built. But the way to think about digital transformation is that we're just really at the very, very early stages of, of digital transformation.

And every industry is being affected by digital transformation. No industry is, is essentially left on, touched by the impact of digital transformation. At the same time, we're also at the very beginning of a massive economic explosion. This year we're going to see in the United States, a 6% increase in GDP.

That's one of the biggest figures that we've seen in a long time. We might be at the cusp of the very beginnings of one of the largest economic expansions in decades, possibly going back as far back as the pandemic in 1918, 1919, there seems to be a trend that when, when when a country has come out of pandemics, there's sort of an explosion of economic activity, partly due to people being willing to take more risks.

So this is what economic expansion looks like, and it's going to really in our industry, it's going to really squeeze us because it's gonna, it's good for our business because we're going to grow to fill orders, but it's going to make it very challenging to find people as it already is. So want to think about the rate at which things change in our industry.

And I want you to think about the phone that you owned back in 2011 to sort of get a sense for how quickly technology evolves. So with that phone in mind that you own 10 years ago in 2011, picture that phone for me, it was this phone here. I owned an iPhone 4, which I absolutely loved. It was, uh, such a huge step forward over the phone I had before.

And I was able to surf the web pretty cleanly. I could do text messaging. I could, um, send emails. It was such a refreshing step forward from where I had been, I loved this phone, but when I think about what, what that phone is, and it only had maybe a thousand apps, it's really primitive. It's a toy compared to what I have today, which is an iPhone 12 running iOS 14.5, this phone on the right.

Runs a hundred times faster. The graphics are at least several hundred fold faster. The communication speed 5g versus 3G is probably a hundred times faster. There's a million plus apps that are available on this phone. It's a significant step forward over where we've been. And we rely on our phones.

We depend very, very heavily. We live with our phones all day long. It's an integral part of our life, but with the acceleration of technology when you think about. Just where we've been the last 10 years and we project forward, you know, that iPhone 20,20 or 22, what is that going to look like? Who knows?

It's certainly not a consolidation of everything that we see today. It's going to be another major breakthrough. Apple alone is investing hundreds of billions of dollars into into the U S in this decade. And then you have hundreds of billions that are invested all around the planet to support the development of this platform.

So I believe that we're likely to see twice as much change in the next decade as we've just been through, especially in the staffing industry and all of this is accelerating and it's going to have a significant impact on our industry. So, Dan Schulman, who's the CEO of PayPal recently said that in the next five to 10 years, we're going to see more change in the financial system than you've seen in the past 10 to 20 years.

Possibly more. I'm going to sh I'm going to talk about that in a little bit. We all know that the future is electric vehicles. According to Boston consulting group, half of all light vehicles sold worldwide in five years from now will be electric vehicles. Satya Nadella. The CEO of Microsoft recently said that more software applications will be developed in the next five years than in the previous 40 years.

Combined. A lot of those applications will be developed through low code and no code application development tools. So whatever number of applications that you're using right now to run your staffing business, you'll likely be running twice as many applications internally as you are today possibly more.

Satya also said that technology spend as a percentage of GDP will double from 5% to 10%. So GDP is rising a few percentage points every year. And then within that tech spending will double. So certainly the tech spending within your company, that people, hardware, software, especially will double from what it is today.

Possibly more than that, as we digitally transform, if you're in the IT staffing business, this is a great thing because your market is going to grow. Organically, to support everyone that's in that area. So these are some of the indicators to demonstrate to you that the, that the world is changing very rapidly from specially in our industry, where we have humans that are largely driving processes forward to a world where algorithms in the cloud are handling a lot of the work that we're currently doing.

This is a really good thing for our customers because they're going to get better services from us on a lower cost basis. So, whereas if you go through your organization and you look at who's there, you know, you may have a lot of recruiters and a lot of operations, people who are currently driving your business forward, largely through manual processes.

A decade from now, these roles are going to shift significantly. This person here who might be a recruiter today might be a project manager in the future. This person here who is a recruiter might be an integration specialist. This person here is a recruiter, might be a software developer. This person might be a dev ops engineer or a security specialist.

This person it was a recruiter today might be a digital marketing manager. These people who are recruiters, their roles have shifted significantly through the use of chatbots and conversational systems. They're taking more inbound calls and they might be feeding data to conversational systems that reach out to potential candidates.

So the way we recruit and the way we engage with candidates is shifting very rapidly. And you need to shift your organization accordingly to, to keep up with this. All right. I want to talk about an organization that is fairly far along in their digital transformation and specifically a bank, Bank of America.

And we engage with banks through multiple ways. We engage through our banks through the webpage to do banking transactions, to, to do payments. We engage through banks through our mobile phones. We engage through banks, through ATM systems to get cash. So most of the banking that we do today is done online.

Today you can still walk into a store a branch and you can talk to a person to deposit cash to have services performed. But most of the time you don't have to it's, but it's still there. And we still take advantage of that. You can also jump on a phone call and you can talk to people within the bank.

But largely when you think about it, For the most part, the bank is you're engaging with it through the software of the bank online or through the mobile app. And there's thousands of people at these banks who are responsible for this software on the front end. And on the, on the backend, a bank is largely a software company.

A bank is largely a technology company. When you think about it, all the software all the servers that run it, all the security it's, it's all technology. And there, there are people that are involved here. They interact with the same software that you do, but they may have different permissions than you do.

I can do different things, but it's the same basic algorithm. Likewise, this person on the phone, same software, different set of algorithms that they, they work. So, this is an example, a bank is pretty far along in their digital transformation. And traditionally a bank like Bank of America has competed with companies like US bank Corp chase, Citibank, Citi group, JP Morgan chase here in the US.

But, um, these are competitors that are well-known. They really understand how to compete with each other and they're competing for market share and whatnot, but that's not who these banks are concerned about for the future. What they're really concerned about is a whole new breed of, of players that are born in the cloud financial organizations.

In China, you have, for example, Ant group in South America, Mercado Libra, Grab in Singapore air Ali pay in China, Tencent. These are payment organizations that are building massive banking organizations and payment organizations in the cloud. These are born in the cloud financial organizations here in the US.

You have companies like PayPal, Square that are actively building digital banks in the cloud that take over almost everything that these traditional banks have provided. So they have these massive threats that they're facing. But the biggest threat that the banks are facing is the advent of digital currencies.

So all around the globe countries are and central banks are looking at issuing. Digital currencies in China, they've issued a Digital One in the United States we're looking at issuing Digital Dollars in, in Europe, they're looking at issuing Digital Euros etc. And so the bank could potentially be completely disintermediated through the advent of these digital currencies that are, are directly connected to consumers.

And the big beneficiaries of this trend are not the banks. The banks could be completely disrupted organizationally their role, the value that they provide massively diminished companies like PayPal, Square, et cetera. They become very, very prominent in this trend. So the landscape today might look a lot like this in terms of the competitive scenarios.

10 years from now, it's going to be completely different. And these banks are facing a whole new set of competitors. So no matter how far along you think that you are with your firm, with your digital transformation, there's a whole nother level of digital transformation that is happening that will completely transform the various industries that we participate in, particularly in the staffing industry.

And I want to show you some examples of where we're headed. So your competition today and in the future is going to be highly digitally transformed staffing firms that operate better, more efficient, more efficiently, more effectively deliver more value to your customers, and then born in the cloud staffing firms.

And let's look at some of those

Incredible health born in the cloud organization that connects nurses to opportunities. Full-time opportunities. It's a mobile application. So nurses are brought onto the platform they're there, their credentials are verified, and then they receive opportunities on their mobile phone, like a dating app, like a match and they can swipe left or right.

And, and the app becomes smarter and smarter as it learns what the nurses are interested in. When there's a match, a nurse can be presented to a client. So in the past, you've had people manually doing this connecting nurses to opportunities. Here's a piece of technology that leverages everything in the cloud and mobile apps to do that process very efficiently.

And nurses absolutely love this. Indeed flex this is a, product, uh, indeed wants to move into the staffing industry. And so they've developed mobile technology to connect people. Who are looking for jobs to opportunities in light industrial and in hospitality opportunities, very efficient. It's very, Uber-like, it's the next generation of where we're all headed.

A company in New York city called 10 positions. Jim has been very open about how his company has been highly automated. He's doing a lot of placements, automatically autonomously through his tech platform. And he's been able to transform a very trendy traditional traditional staffing firm into one that's very advanced technologically top talent born in the cloud, IT staffing firm, which uses inbound marketing to locate clients.

And they connect these clients to talent all around the globe who work using their proprietary methodology for engaging with clients. They're growing very rapidly Work Genius is a great example of company thats deeply involved in the freelance economy, like Upwork for connecting freelance contractors to opportunities.

And this area is growing very rapidly. Allan recruitment in Ireland. This is a great example of how a small company can digitally transform itself. You don't have to be a large company in order to successfully digitally transform itself. Allan recruitment has been doing a lot of work in automations and it's completely transformed how their business operates in and they're growing like crazy as a direct result of, of the work that they've done over the last several years.

People ready, is a great example of a company that pioneered mobile applications for commercial and light industrial staffing. And they've had tremendous success with, with this application, their job stack application it's enabled them to shut down offices. It's enabled them to operate much faster than they have in the past.

Resource one is a company in Chicago. IT staffing, they've always been at the cutting edge of technology. They're constantly looking for the next thing to streamline their business. And they've been very effective at using technology and it's, and it's really helped them grow their business and operate more efficiently and more profitably and to grow faster in the niches that they serve.

They've done a great job there. And Uber, I just have to talk about Uber is sort of the ultimate staffing firm. And I think if you want to really understand where the whole industry is moving, just think about Uber and how, how it relates to staffing. So when I, when I want a ride. And I go onto my app and I request a ride.

That's the same thing as me issuing a job, order to a staffing firm. So I issued the job order for a ride and very quickly within seconds, let's say 10 seconds. That order is filled with a driver. The driver picks me up. That's the beginning of the assignment. I go on my 20 minute ride and the assignment end.

The financial transaction occurs and they move on and all of this happens automatically. There are no humans involved. I've never spoken to a human before at Uber and the drivers. Many of them have never spoken to anybody. It's all happens through algorithms, but it's very, very fast, very efficient and more and more of the staffing industry is going to reflect this model starting in the hourly space, light industrial, clerical space and moving its way through all the different areas of, of staffing.

So you need to be prepared for that kind of eventuality in the staffing industry. Every year, we issue a report on the top 10 staffing trends that are strategic for the next three years. And these are the trends that, that we've announced that are strategic for 21 through 24. And I want to go through all of them in a bit of detail to share with you how I think that these are going to affect our industry and the world that we live in.

So the first one I want to talk about is 5G. Now you might think Maurice, what does 5G have to do with staffing? Every time there's been a transition from one tech communications technology to the next, from 2G to 3G, 3G to 4G, 4G to 5G, there've been a significant changes in the applications that we've been able to run.

The original iPhone ran on the 2G network. The iPhone I was on a decade ago was on the 3G network. My last phone was on the 4G network. The 5G network. At least 10 times faster uh, less latency, it's going to open up all kinds of new possibilities for augmented reality, virtual reality. It will enable us to get closer to our stakeholders, our candidates, our clients that we work with will be able to work remotely more efficiently.

And it's a, it's a, it's definitely one of these major trends that you want to pay attention to. As, um, as we move on now, the next one, mobile first staffing. So. Pre pandemic about 40% of candidates coming to websites were on their mobile devices, post pandemic. It's closer to 65, 70% and rising very rapidly.

I am talking to staffing firms right now who are telling me that 90% of the candidates coming to their websites are on mobile devices. So what this means is every investment that you make that is outward facing where there's candidates or clients, everything should be optimized for excellent mobile first experience, because that's how they are engaging with you.

And they want a really good experience. As we become software companies. We are, we are measured in part in the usability of the software that, that we provide, right. Also the advent of these mobile workforce deployment apps. That's a key part of the future of staffing smarter AI and machine learning.

So we've seen evidence of a lot of AI in the applications that we use on a daily basis within applications like LinkedIn, many staffing technology vendors. Talk about the AI and machine learning that they're beginning to build out within the applications, but I would, as someone who spends all of their time, looking at technology and advancements in technology, I can tell you that it's only very recently that I I'm starting to see.

Technology that just sort of takes my breath away. Using AI replicating what humans are doing today and doing it through various sophisticated machine learning and AI, and this part of our industry is going to take off massively. So the reason why we haven't seen an explosion in technology as explosion of productivity previously was because what we were doing as humans was just so complex that we didn't have the technology yet, but it's here now.

And it's proving very rapidly. So I'm talking about conversational systems in particular and the, the ability for bots to engage with human beings. This is a big major area of technology advancement. I expect that most staffing firms will have at least one most likely two or three. Bots running their business in the next few years, doing different things within the organization, inbound processing, inbound responses.

Outbound, engaging on outbound basis with, with candidates a bot on our webpage for answering basic questions, bots for engaging with our employees, we're going to have bots everywhere. And that opens up a whole new set of skills that we need to develop internally to manage these bots, namely conversational designs.

How do you design effective conversations to engage with all of these different stakeholders? So internally we're going to be spending more and more time designing these conversations and making bots more efficient because it streamlines our operations enables us to engage more effectively with our stakeholders and speed up operations.

Digital marketing, digital marketing is super important. As we become technology businesses, marketing plays a more and more prominent role in our success to engage with candidates. To engage with clients. Marketing also has an overarching role in looking at the entire organization in terms of how it's delivering value to these different stakeholders.

It didn't use to be this way, but it's this field is evolving so quickly. I always advise staffing firms. They should be engaging with one of the really great digital marketing agencies that serve our industry.

Digital engagement. So this is the idea that more and more of the communications that we have with our stakeholders is made digitally take Amazon for example, I have only spoken to a human being once or twice at Amazon to deal with, with an issue. And that's after spending an incredible amount of money with, with Amazon over the last 20 years. Everything can be done through digital engagement, through push notifications, text texting, email it's all done digitally.

When you think about, you know, the hundreds of things I've purchased on Amazon. Historically, if I had purchased all that in a retail store, I would have gone into the store and talked to people. They would have given me directions on where to go advise. Yeah, four different books music, whatever. But I have made all of these purchases very successfully to a high level of satisfaction without any, uh, human involvement.

Everything was done digitally. So digital engagement, most of the way we engage with, with our stakeholders will be digital data explosion. We're going to see a massive amount of uh, increase in the data that we're using and specifically. Today, we mostly work with our ATS data, but all the marketplace partners that we connect into our ATS generate lots of data that we want to take advantage of.

We will be using whole new data sets to locate candidates, to locate job opportunities and clients that we want to work with. We will also be connecting with companies that enrich the data within our ATS is and keep it current and up-to-date. And so all of this is to demand new skills, new technologies that we manage to stay on top of our data.

Also for automation purposes, our data needs to be clean. If it, if our automation is to run correctly, we need to have clean data and we need algorithms to support that.

That brings us to the next point, which is Hyper Automation. So, more and more staffing firms are becoming an increasingly automated through different automation tools that are available, like sense.

Here Fish, you also have tools like UI path and CA catalytic and many other tools that are involved in automatic automating staffing firms. I believe the typical staffing firm by 2030, we'll have a thousand automations running bots and journeys and different programs to automate different facets of the business that are customed to that business.

Now that may seem like a lot, but I'm already talking to staffing firms today that have hundreds of bots running their business and they're well on their way to a thousand automations by mid decade. So I think it's, it's very, very easy to, to project out that the typical staffing firm will have a thousand automations.

That means if you're starting at zero today, you need to be doing about two automations per week on average to get to a thousand, you're not gonna be able to just go off to someplace and buy a thousand automation. Although some firms may have that you'll still have to, you know, do a tremendous amount of customization to make it work for for your firm and so much of your value and your, your, your brand and how you, how you engage is going to be based around these bots.

So it's a very important part of the future. I want to talk a little bit about this company called UI path, which recently went public. There are staffing firms that use a UI path in particular for connecting with VMS systems and other types of automation. They're actually, uh, Eastern European company and they've done a tremendous job of bringing automation to the, to the world around us, but they put out this graphic that I just love.

And I think it tells you a lot about our future. Hello, where U I path we make software robots, so people don't have to be bots. So much of the work that we do within staffing industry is transactional and can be automated away. And, and a decade from now, we're going to look at how we operate it as a business.

We're going to think, oh my God, it was just like, I can't believe how manual we were and how much stuff human beings said. And it's going to enable us to work at a much higher level and bring significantly more value to our clients on a lower cost basis.

There was an article that was published recently about bots, um, in the New York times, we have bots that are being deployed everywhere, not just in recruiting, not just in operations, not just to support sales, but everywhere. Including back office. There's so much opportunity to streamline the back-office.

And, and make it faster and more efficient. So pretty much every department is going to see this

Autonomous Staffing. This is a really exciting trend. This is the idea that we that we make placements without recruiters. So we basically either, uh, credential candidates or we test their skills and we add them to our system.

And once we have them set up properly, then we present them with opportunities. And the, the matching process happens automatically like with incredible health. I mentioned before we credential the nurses, once they're in the system, recruiter steps out of the way, all the matching happens automatically.

So with these mobile deployment apps that are emerging very rapidly we believe that 30% of all staffing industry placements will be performed autonomously by 2030. We're well, on our way toward that number. And, and we're starting in, in light industrial clerical, hourly. It's gonna, it's gonna expand out into every area of staffing as time goes on

Remote First Operations.

This is the idea of, of your operations being run from the cloud. Like how is it that a company like Microsoft with a, you know, well, over a hundred thousand employees can operate during the pandemic with very few people coming into the office. That's because their HQ is effectively in the cloud. So many staffing firms have shrunk their real estate footprint because they realized that they can operate just as effectively with much less real estate.

So what we want to do is make sure that our remote environment for our employees, our internal employees working from home or in the field is just as good as if they were in the office. So those are the major trends. They'll, there's more trends coming along that you'll see in, in future versions of, of our of our research, that we'll be publishing that are strategic, but these trends are driving significant progress in our industry.

So are the architecture technologically for the future will be. That our, our firm's our platform in the cloud will be highly automated with hundreds of hundreds of automations of bots. We'll be leveraging our data with, with more and more sophisticated algorithms to deliver value. We'll have a mobile app, a mobile workforce deployment app especially in your clerical light, industrial commercial areas.

Your staffing firm will run 24/7. The idea that you're only open eight to five is going away and there'll be AI everywhere to make us more efficient, more effective, and to drive down the cost of running staffing firms. So I want to talk a little bit about the various stages of digital transformation and what that means for your staffing business.

So we've identified five stages of, of digital transformation stage number one or what we call Digital Resistors. These are staffing firms that are loathed to adopt new technology. They are, conservative, uh, technologically, they generally will adopt new technology in reaction to competition or when they're forced to do so, by the clients that they're serving.

That's level one, level two is what we call digitally aware. These are firms that embrace change. They have developed a collection of point solutions and they have islands of digital activity that they have created, through the different technologies.

Level three is what we call a digital follower. So these firms have a clear digital strategy. They have a digital vision an execution plan for how they're evolving their, their tech stack and their, their businesses internally. They have an agile, innovation process at the core of their business to drive progress. And they have digital enabling more and more of their core activities.

Level four is what we call Digital Advanced. These firms are highly automated. They have been able to lower the cost basis of their operations because of the automations and. Bots and other technologies that they've put in place, they are hyper scalable. So they scale when they get more business, they scale their technology scales, not by adding more and more people.

They there's technology scales in the cloud just by adding more servers. And and they have a customer centric, digital engagement model. They think of, they think digitally all the time about how they engage. With their various stakeholders.

And then Level five are digital disruptors companies like Incredible Health.

Some of the ones that I mentioned before truly changing the way that our industry works, they're taking businesses that may have been done manually in the past. And they're creating entirely new ways of delivering those same services. That's more efficient that delivers higher value added. So these firms have a digital first culture, their core business has been reinvented. They're highly, highly innovative. They have oftentimes born in the cloud uh, technology stacks, and they're. So coming to market with disruptive models. So if I were to look at some of the companies that I spoke to you about earlier, like Incredible Health, Indeed Flex Toptal, tell Uber, notice how these four companies are, are born in the cloud.

With modern technology stacks, they, they didn't come to our industry with legacy technology. They were able to rethink how to approach our industry with, with a completely fresh perspective. These companies have been in the staffing industry for a long time and they've evolved their tech stacks to, to become increasingly modern.

And they're they're well on their way towards moving forward in this direction. Increasingly, as they progress in their digital transformation journey journeys, but the real risk, you know, just like the banking industry is being potentially massively disrupted by PayPal and, and square. And these other players, these are kind of the equivalent.

This is a, this is a threat that we face. If you're a traditional staffing firm, are, are these, these born in the cloud technology firms that look at the industry through an entirely different lens that we do. So today, based on our research, we believe that industry looks something like this in terms of where the industry is at and, and digital transformation, where about three quarters of the industry is, are either resistors or they're aware.

And this is changing very rapidly. Our industry is changing incredibly rapidly. I see this myself with all the clients that I'm working with, how quickly their tech stacks are evolving. So we believe if we go forward, Into this 26, 28 timeframe, two thirds of the industry will be much further along on their digital transformation journey.

There'll be followers advanced. And also this is so interesting, this disruptor area, we're going to see significantly more staffing firms that are coming to market with disruptive business models. And while they may only account for a small number of the firms, they will have a major outsized influence on, on our industry.

So think Uber and Lyft, two companies just two, but massively transformed an industry that previously had hundreds and hundreds of taxi firms all around the globe serving that industry. So it's a very, very interesting time to be in the industry. And it's really exciting to see all of this progress that's being made.

So when we think about Digital transformation. When you think about digital transformation, the first thing that comes to your mind probably is technology. It's all about technology. But it's actually not. It's, that's just one of the pillars of digital transformation. There's actually two more.

Culture, The people within your organization, you need to digitally transform the people within your organization in order to move your organization forward. Technologically, there's a massive cultural aspect to this. A SaaS, a software company, culturally is very different from a staffing firm and how people think and operate.

And then your processes will completely change. You don't want to just replicate processes that you currently do through human beings. You want to rethink those processes from the ground up in terms of how you bring value to everybody. So I want to go through some of these. Considerations in a little bit of detail, no matter where you are on your digital transformation journey.

There's so many things that you want to think about in order to take your company into the future. One of the most important things is having a clear digital vision for your company and what your company is going to look like in the future digitally. And that starts at the top and it needs to be understood throughout your organization in terms of where you're headed.

And you should have models in mind that you look toward as where you want to take your, your company models. Like some of the ones that I showed you, of companies that are, are far along in their digital transformations. So you, you have something to model yourself after whether that company is in the staffing industry or not.

It can be very helpful to have a muse your investment strategy. How are you going to fund all of these investments in technology and changes in your organization? Are your shareholders on board, on these investments that you have to make? Are you budgeting properly for these investments that you need to make?

And then are you also thinking about the value that you're going to get from these investments? Are you thinking about the value that your, staffing firm may reach. From a acquisition standpoint, if you're a digital company, if you're a software company as opposed to a traditional staffing firm, this will definitely affect your valuation.

Is everybody technologically savvy, digitally within, within your organization. We're gonna talk about skills development, but you can't move your organization forward unless everyone thinks digitally in terms of how to deliver value, which brings me to the next point talent development. So this is such an important area you want to proactively develop the talent in your organization with these digital skills that you need in order to move your organization forward.

I know from my own experience running an IT department, when I wanted to pursue initiatives and, and you know, let's say implement a particular technology. Oftentimes it was stalled because people didn't feel comfortable. They didn't have the skills, but. When I had them go through the right training, then they were prepared.

They were comfortable moving forward with those initiatives. So in so many areas from chatbots, in inbound marketing data science, data management low code software development tools, you want to proactively pick those technologies and train people. So they feel comfortable. So they can implement that vision of where you want to go with your firm.

You will evolve new KPIs and K P I to measure your progress. The old KPIs, when your firm was largely human driven is going to give way to a new set of KPIs for a company that's run primarily through algorithms, your processes. We talked about not just replicating processes that humans do, but rethinking them from the ground up.

You need to manage more and more processes that are being handled automatically. Your, your tech stack, your tech stack is the enabler of all this. This is what allows us to, to provide higher levels of value to our clients and to do all of this, all this work, it's so important that you pick the right technologies and you, you build the stack to support your digital transformation integrations more and more.

You'll be integrating with, with a wider range of, of uh, marketplace partners. And you'll become one part of a chain of value between the marketplace partners that you have connected into your platform and the value that you bring to your clients. So you're likely to have dozens and dozens of integrations into your platform and, you know, a provocative ideas that sometime in the future, maybe a decade from now.

The staffing firms may have their own API APIs that that they connect that they use for delivering value. Just like all of us, all of the software vendors that you work with have API APIs, you're staffing firm at some point may have an API as well,

Experience governance as you become increasingly a software company the the experience of the software.

Will be more and more important. We all know what it's like to work with software that is, is very poorly designed as hard to use. It's the same thing with your staffing firm. People are using your software. You need people trained in software usability who can look at it from a, from the point of view, like a software company would, is this good software?

Is it easy for me to work with this firm and, and, and and get the kind of value that I'm looking for automation strategy. So as we move towards a thousand bots per staffing firm, on average, how are you going to manage a thousand bots? How are you going to govern it? How are you going to um, oversee all of these bots running concurrently throughout your business?

Doing different things. Cybersecurity. So this is a big, big area, uh, that I wanted to just really highlight for all of you. We know about the colonial pipeline incident that occurred this week. Another thing I just read yesterday was about the Washington DC police and how some hackers broken their stole thousands, tens of thousands of records.

And they're gradually leaking out these, these these records and they want, they want Bitcoin ransomware. There are staffing firms that have dealt with us. You have very valuable data. You are at risk of having your data stolen and, and held high hostage. So it's imperative that you have very strong security posture and you invest in cybersecurity.

Data management is going to become more important. More and more data. You need to manage this, especially with bots, your bots want clean data, your bots won't run properly unless your data is clean. And as we add more and more data sources, we have to develop skills internally for managing all of that data.

You will increasingly generate value through algorithms on top of the data that you have within your organization. So you want to think about how can you take this data and you run algorithms on top and AI on top to create value for your clients and for your, for your stakeholders that separates yourself

DIsruptive Innovation.

You know, what can you do? Like what incredible health has done to. New ways of doing business to market using technology. This is an exciting area. Do you have an agile innovation process at the core of your business to evolve your business and then last but not least cultural transformation, how are you going to evolve your business over the next decade?

The culture of your business, to think about everything digitally as you become more and more of a technology firm, how do you change your culture and become more and more actually like the software suppliers that you're working with, your, your culture internally within your staffing from world war and more mirror, the software suppliers that are delivering solutions to you and less and less the traditional culture that you've had within your organization for how you operate.

So these are. A few of the many things that you want to think about as you digitally transform your business. So, I want to talk a little bit about what I do. And then, and then let's let's, let's, talk about this look forward to your questions. In, in the work that I do, I help companies move up to the next level of digital transformation.

So no matter where you are on this journey, I work with staffing firms to help them get to the next level and lay out a roadmap. If you're at level two I'll lay out a path for getting to level three, level three I, I worked top to bottom throughout your organization. Look at all the different technologies you're currently using and your key processes.

And I laid out a path forward to get to a level four. Typically, what I'm seeing is to get from one to two is really pretty straightforward. You can move that move pretty quickly from one to two, two to three, that's about a two year journey, three to four. Is about a two to three year journey and then four to five, depending on how aggressive you want to operate, that could be a couple, two to three years as well.

So, it takes time to evolve your tech stack. It takes time to evolve your culture and, and, and good from where you are today into the future. But you really don't have any choice. The whole industry is moving in this direction. You can't just, if you're in here, you can't stay here. You have to move forward as rapidly as you can, because the industry is transforming very quickly.

In all the years I've been involved in the staffing industry, I've never seen a time where there's so many opportunities to invest in technology and to get high ROI returns. So I want to strongly encourage you to lean into technology more than you have recognize that there's an acceleration of change, recognize that this industry is about to massively transform, recognize that we're at the cusp of a massive economic explosion of roaring twenties.

And it's, it's going to help you grow faster, operate more efficiently and take your staffing firm to the next level. If you're here in the US I'm happy to send you a one of these posters for, um, our staffing technology stack. I just go to staffingtech.com and put in your address and we'll send that out to you.

And again, the work that I do is Strategic technology assessments I operated on by providing consulting services, fractional CTO services. I have a co podcast, uh, coming out soon. And also if just looking for products, check out, stack manage, and you can quickly hone in on, on service offerings that can help you.

And that's it. So really look forward to your questions right now.

All right. I see one here. So, here's one. I'll just pick them out. How do you evaluate ROI for your entire tech stack? Raleigh, that's a complicated question. And that's actually a really interesting question. I appreciate your asking that. I think typically what I do, if, if I were to look at the ROI I usually look at ROI individually at different levels pieces. I look at the ROI of the ATS. I look at the ROI of individual marketplace partners and the incremental ROI that they're going to bring. If you asked me to do the ROI for your entire tech stack, I would look at the initial investment that you made. And I will look at the returns that you're getting, you know, through sort of a traditional financial evaluation.

But as you're incrementally adding more technology, we want to look at the gains that you'll get from more placements, the gross margin you'll capture the efficiencies that you'll gain, and then all of these should stack together to make your organization more and more financially successful. All right.

Tyler is asking in these automation systems, we still are in the human business. What is the balance for people who want to be treated like humans and people who are, who will be naturally resistant to AI bots during the transition. Very interesting question. I can tell you one company that that is highly automated and is invested heavily in automation.

And during that journey, they lost pretty much everybody in their organization, except the people who are working on the automations. And they brought in a whole new set of people and they love working with automations. So it's quite possible. You're going to lose people along the way. They're just not comfortable working, working in an environment that's highly automated.

They want to work sort of in the traditional way and they might be resistant. So this is part of that cultural transformation that I talked about before most. Yeah. Okay. What else do we have?

I'm just sort of scrolling through your questions. Oh yeah. It's the question about humans? You know, I always think about Amazon when it comes to like the services that we provide, I think about.

The fact that I have, I love Amazon and I shop there all the time and it's as good if not a better experience than what I had before, when I went into retail stores. And I only engage with them digitally. So I think the same thing is very true. You can, you can generate a very high level of satisfaction and, and deliver significant value to all of your stakeholders and doing it entirely with digital, but just like a bank, just like we showed like Bank of America, you can still have human beings in the process that have human beings that are available working at a high value of a high value where people still want to engage with humans.

We make them available. We don't take them out entirely, especially during this transition. All right. Jerry for start-up where just a second here.

For start-up. Where do you recommend starting in this journey? It is a matter of learning what's available and getting that guide your tech stack purchasing decision. Okay. So the starting point is It's one of two areas, depending on what business segment you're in, it's either looking at your workforce deployment platform like, um, a work in or time saved or serenity, or it could be your ATS.

I mean, those two components are the two most important starting points for your business. Those are the anchors technologically, everything really builds upon that. So that decision has to be rock solid and support your digital transformation journey. And from there, it's looking at all the different options that are available and systematically thinking about, you know, where do I, where do I move first?

And as anesthesia ,Valentine at Arwen has told me that certain tools, you know, she has lots and lots of tools, but if you were to strip it right down, there's like two or three that are absolutely essential to running her business. And those are the ones that you want to identify and start with first.

Humans are a number of recruiters or tech stack, which which will you prioritize more and why for newly incorporated fresh staffing agencies? I don't, I don't know. I think you, you, if you're, if you're new to the business, I think that you, you want to be able to serve your customers, whatever that takes.

It might be humans. It might be technology depending on the, on the segment you're serving. But in any case over time, you will want to evolve that into a more highly developed tech stack in order to deliver those services. I can't advise you on which one to start with.

Does this, , uh, need to be customized? Where can you buy it off the shelf? That's a great question. I think Off the shelf, but then the require a fair amount of customization. How do you see ATS fit into the digital transformation, particularly as they are created with traditional staffing processes in mind? That's such a great question.

The ATS isn't going away anytime soon. It's the system of record for all, um, staffing firms. I do know of some solutions out there that operating without ATSs that are very, very advanced that are that support full digital transformation. But, um, I think that for now, the ATS is a very core important part of, of the future of our industry until a whole new set of, of solutions evolve that, that possibly take out the ATS in the future or the ATS evolve themselves to provide this support.

So you definitely want an ATS.

UI path and for VMS integrations, are these firms using them that have a functional solution, any idea on scope that has been tracked? I don't have a good answer for you on this. I've just been told by different people in industry that there are companies that are using tools like catalytic and UI path for building those integrations.

In the context of MSP programs and VMS systems, mobile first staffing automation for candidate and client acquisition. Is there any guide line information available? You can point me to Robert, you can go to stack vantage and check out some of the solutions that we have listed there. Uh, but certainly, tools like, uh, work in time saved, et cetera.

Those are great examples of workforce deployment platforms that are helping staffing firms in that part of the business. And it's streamlining lots of different facets of their business. It's not only that it's making recruiters. Much more productive. That's the interesting thing about these workforce deployment platforms and we're seeing significant material improvements and productivity and speed.

And in the past we've been filling orders in hours and days is workforce deployment platforms enable us to fill orders in times, measured in minutes and hours. I've spoken to a one staffing firm and they're very proud of the fact that they are the fastest that they filled an order was 30 seconds. So I mentioned Uber and the speed at which we're filling orders.

That's the way the industry is moving is faster and faster fulfillment.

What technology is overrated in your opinion? That's a really interesting question. I would say probably AI is over-hyped in our industry. And as I mentioned before, I'm just now seeing. Real AI that is astonishing and is going to lay the foundation for taking over more and more of what recruiters are typically doing,

Apart from ATS which most of the staffing companies are using what will be the next step in AI solution for the staffing industry?

Certainly, chat bots that engage very, very intelligently with with, um, candidates and with, with clients, the intelligence that is, is being built up within conversational systems. And the rate at which conversations systems are evolving is simply astonishing. It's those bots that is core to replicating more and more of what humans are doing.

So bots just handling process, but also bots that are intelligently engaging like a human talking to humans through texting and through voice. That's like the next big thing,

Assuming those are low code tools that can be easily integrated. Yeah. So there's a lot of low-code tools. You don't have to be a programmer to program here, fish automations, or sense automations.

And I would imagine a UI path and catalytic as similar, where, where mere mortals people, who've never been programmers before can build automations very rapidly. You just have to be able to think about processes you want to automate and have some technology training. But there's so many stories now about people who have built automated solutions using low-code and no-code tools that, um, you know, dozens of dozens of applications.

And they're very proud of that. They weren't trained as programmers. It's, it's really revolutionary. And I want to tell you one more thing. That's really, really fascinating to me. There are suppliers now into the staffing technology industry that have built their product. Using low code and no code development tools.

If you look at those products, you would have no idea that those things are being built with low code development tools. They are astonishing in terms of what they can do. They are built very, very rapidly because these tools are very powerful. So in other words, the speed at which our vendors that are providing marketplace solutions to us the speed at which they can evolve their product is going to increase significantly in the years ahead through these modern programming technologies.

Thanks for your question, Robert,

Jan Jedlinski: Maurice, there's one more question on the Q/A section I haven't seen, but I find interesting somebody's asking what happened actually to Uber works in, in, in the context of the like deployment platforms. I think I read something around them not being active anymore last year.

Have you heard any news around that?

Maurice Fuller: Well, look when the pandemic hit, Uber lost tremendous amount of revenue. And so that leadership team had to look top to bottom throughout the organization for opportunities to cut costs. And that group was likely cut because they were not profitable and they may not have even been strategic to where Uber wants to go.

So, I believe that's what happened. They were, they were cut out as a result of the pandemic. That doesn't mean that they're not, they're not coming back. But for now, they were quite active for awhile. But if you're looking for that type of thing, look at Indeed Flex it's similar to what Uber works was doing.

Jan Jedlinski: Agree. Yep. Cool. Thanks. Thanks Maurice. Anybody else has any questions maybe if you're still around if you're interested in learning more about the topic that's Maurice's talked about or any specific SaaS tools please remember to go to stackbandage. It's a great platform where you can find all of the tools that are out there.

And I personally, recommend to speak with Maurice. I have conversations with him every now and then, and it's always fascinating to learn more about the new technologies coming out there. For us as a technology provider to the industry. So, yeah, highly appreciate Maurice your presentation today.

Yeah, a lot of engagement on the chat. So I'm excited about that. Thanks everybody. For being around I'll stick around for a couple more minutes to also talk a little bit about our new product candidate.ly, and show a quick, two minutes demo. So if somebody is interested in you stick around,

Maurice Fuller: Please stick around for this demo, if this is, this is very, very cool, and you're likely to want to use this product in your own business, this is a game changer, something that's been done traditionally in a very manual way.

It's a whole new way of engaging with your clients that I'm really excited about. So I love the innovation that you're bringing to the market Jan.

Jan Jedlinski: Thank you so much, Maurice, highly appreciated. So I'll, uh, handover and go quickly and share my screen with everybody. Give me one second.

There it is staring to go.

So the product that we are launching is called candidate.ly think about the product and candidate.ly, candidate.ly, as your new digital storefront for your staffing and recruiting business. So to say your digital branch. So basically we are helping with two things we're helping with candidate presentation. So very simply to say, if instead of putting candidate resumes into an email and sending it to your clients and following up, you will grab a public, a branded link branded in your company, colors and a logo.

Basically share it with your customer. The same, same system and same product you'll be able to use for candidates marketing and building digital talent pipelines. So essentially what will happen is we will give you an nicely branded interface that you can think of as your you know, storefront for your staffing and recruiting business branded in your company, colors and logo and hosted on your URL.

So to the customer, this looks and feels like this is your link with available candidates that the customer can tap into all four candidates that you're shortlisting for a specific opportunity or for candidates that you are presenting. So in the next iterations of the product, you'll see things like automated interview scheduling automated payments for customers on that link.

And also the ability for the customer to immediately get in touch with your sales team, chat with them, give you a thumbs up, thumbs down feedback on a candidate and much. We are super excited about this product. We've seen that this, since the pandemic specifically you know, more and more employers are tending to go to online talent platforms, the Upworks of the world to find available candidates in specific for specific roles.

So obviously most of the staffing industry will not be replaced with those types of platforms yet, but in this case, The interface and look and feel basically out of the box for your customers to interact with them digitally and fully mobile optimized. So I'm really excited about this product.

If you're interested in learning more please just let us know. You can message me directly. I'll put my email here into the chat Jan@hellogustav.com and you can also just press yes on the polls. You'll find this little poll I can you can just press the, yes. And we will then reach out to you to schedule a conversation for the next sessions, please uh, you know, please go to LinkedIn or follow the emails that we sent every Wednesday.

Now we will have a World Staffing Session with somebody new that will present a new topic in the industry. Next week we have Kelly , she she'll be talking about marketing and for staffing professionals. So Maurice already mentioned Kelly's working for one of the marketing agencies that is serving the industry would highly recommend that presentation as well.

So if you're interested feel free to also subscribe again, it's a free session. You can invite your team to join and we'll be more than happy to answer your questions. Again, if you're interested in learning more about stack advantage and get in touch with Maurice, don't forget to go to his booth or messaged him directly.

He has a lot of his, a lot of things on his plate when it comes to tech and digital transformation and staffing. I was actually at one of his conferences and I was amazed by the amount of really cool products that Maurice was able to bring together and offers knowledge for the industry.

I think he's I couldn't find anybody else in the industry that can tell you so much about staffing SaaS products and technology, and what's coming in the next years than Maurice. Thanks. It was a pleasure to have you here, Maurice. We'll be sharing the recording with everybody. So if somebody wants to pass this on to their teams to review, feel free to do so you'll receive an email most likely tomorrow afternoon and with the recording and with some links to Maurice's website and to stack vantage.

And yeah, with that, I'll leave everybody here. You can head over also to networking. So we have the networking section on the left hand side. I see that there's still 50 people in here. So if you want to network with fellow staffing, peers and people that joined the session, feel free to do so. And, uh, yeah, I'll head out to my next meeting.

Thanks Maurice for joining and see everybody soon.

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