Solving the Right Problem: How Victor Gaines Built a Data-Driven TA Function at Wellstar Health

Victor Gaines: You've seen talent tech do some really unique things. Reduce turnover, drive recruiting efficiency, keep clinical hiring moving during a, uh, global crisis. Right. And it was just a really interesting way to kind of zoom back and say, wow, like, technology did that.

Ryan Dull: Hello and welcome to the Talent Acquisition Leaders Podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Dull. Um, and on this show we interview today's industry leaders in talent acquisition to discuss challenges, best practices, and what the future holds. If you are working in TAL acquisition and have always wanted to sit down with your peers at other companies to exchange ideas and learn, well, this show is the next best thing. Join us each week as we bring you a new expert interview and extract their expertise. This episode is brought to you by SageMark HR. Transform your recruiting practices with leading edge technology. Selecting the right recruiting solutions to enable your strategy is one of the biggest challenges leaders face today. You know, technology will help, but searching all the options to find out what will work best for your specific needs can be both overwhelming and time consuming. At SageMark HR, we make selecting the right recruiting technology easy. Our proven process has helped companies such as 3M, um, Comcast, Stryker, Walgreens and many more reach out to us at SageMark HR for a free consultation to learn how we can help you improve results with less stress and confidently change from reacting to leading.

Ryan Dull: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Talent Acquisition Leaders Podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Dull, and today I have a fun conversation with my friend Victor Gaines. Victor is the AVP of TA at WellStar Health Systems. Victor and I have known each other for a long time and he is a second time guest. So thank you, Victor, for joining me on the show.

Victor Gaines: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Ryan Dull: Great. Let's start out like we usually do. Uh, I know you've been on before, but let's just kind of give a high level overview of all the great positions that you've held in your illustrious career as a TA executive. So maybe run down a few of those where you've been, uh, leading up to your current role.

Victor Gaines: Yeah. Awesome. So, you know, as you said, I'm, um, with wellstar, currently APP of ta. So wellstar is a large health system in Georgia. We hire about 14,000 people per year. But, you know, I've been in TA for a long time and I've been leading great teams for nearly 20 years of that time and have operated in executive roles, mostly in TA for more than a decade. You know, like, within those positions, I think my core expertise has been in ta, helping companies hire at scale. But, you know, across these different companies. Most of this has been in healthcare, you know, with companies like Cigna and McKesson. But I've also led TA and other companies. So fintech at Fiserv. I, uh, led TA at Comcast and Talent Management at Comcast as well. Along with De and I, I led TA as an SVP for Aveanna for a couple of years through the pandemic. I was at Papa John's as VP of TA and then promoted, uh, to also take on HR operations. So a number of different companies sort of along the way. But also the interesting thing is, at least from my perspective, is that I've been able to help govern across borders, many borders around the world, as part of global HR leadership teams that I sat on during those same times. And I guess the last thing I'll share is in terms of education, you'll see a theme. I studied psychology as an undergrad at the University of Kentucky. Uh, I got a master's in organizational psych from St. Joseph's University. And I think this early experience that I had that I didn't get at right. Early in healthcare, I was in behavioral health. So I had this, like, academic piece in behavioral health and I had the actual real world experience. And I think that's just really shaped how I think about problems, how I think about people, how I think about groups of people in the workplace and how we work together in those different environments to solve really creative business problems. So that's a little bit of, you know, that background, what I've done, where I've done it.

Ryan Dull: That's great. No, uh, I would say you're one of the best, uh, TA leaders I've ever worked with and partnered with and really appreciate you sharing that detail about your background. Let's talk a little bit about maybe share some of the initiatives that you're most proud of over the last few years. You can pick any number of those or any one that you want to particularly go into. But maybe some details about that.

Victor Gaines: I can think of two, which. Maybe it's three. Three, let me see. I can weave these together. But, you know, I like these because they show, they show the range of, like, how we can use TA technology both, I think, at a very high level, like, what sort of scenarios can we apply TA tech to? But then also I've got this one that's sort of interesting because I've used it more than once in very different ways. And part of that is thanks to you. So you'll know this one, Ryan, because you and I partnered on this out, uh, of the gate. One of these involves using an assessment tool to reduce turnover at scale. And the other using the same tool, oddly enough, was about something very different. It was kind of like reinventing clinical hiring during the COVID pandemic, which is sort of a crazy time in our world history. But it's kind of funny that it was the same tool. So on, um, the one that we worked on this was at Comcast, we had this problem with retaining some of our high volume roles, right? We had a ton of applicants, we had a really great RPO that was partnering with us to help fill those positions. But the early turnover was astounding and it was unsustainable. And at one point we calculated it and if I'm remembering the number correctly, it was about 20, $21,000 a pop that it was costing us to lose, folks. So this was really painful. And you and I were having conversations. You introduced me to High Match. And so we started looking at this and determined that it was the right tool. We went forward. We actually implemented the full, like their kind of core assessment as it existed off the shelf. And this was a huge lift because we didn't just grab the assessment and plug it in. We did full validation. We customized that tool, fully benchmarked, but it was really built around these core criteria that really spoke to what kept our techs in place, right? What made them sticky with us. And so we analyzed so many different things. That assessment had like nine criteria. We looked at voice of the customer scores, we looked at rework states, we looked at safety metrics. I mean, so much stuff. And we, we built this predictive profile that the managers, I was going to say they trusted, they came to trust it, right? And the reason they came to trust it was because of the results. We told them that it was going to work. And the results came in and turnover dropped by about half. The involuntary turnover dropped by like 60%. It was, it was unbelievable. We saved millions of dollars. And there was, it was interesting, right, because I think the results surprised both of us as we saw this kind of unfold. And so we had like, we created this business case sort of estimating, I think we said like 10% turnover reduction. So it was like a, I mean it seemed like a reasonable number at the time. And when we saw this 50, 60%, it was just mind boggling and blew our expectations out of the water. And anyway, in that case, I think those results were so strong that High Match still has that white paper on their site today, which to me Speaks to the power of.

Ryan Dull: They probably should. Yeah, I think when we. Yeah, when you and I are building the business case There, we estimated 10%, I think, and then that was going to still generate a, uh, reasonable return on investment where it would pay itself back in less than a year. So. Very comfortable with that. Yeah. And then the results came, you know, 5, 6x that, and it paid itself back in like the first month or something. It was crazy.

Victor Gaines: Yeah, that's exactly right.

Ryan Dull: Great.

Victor Gaines: It was unbelievable. So, you know, it was kind of the perfect storm's not the right word because it wasn't a bad thing. But like, you know, everything just sort of came together and made this work. But now if I think about that pie match and uh, like I want to thread it through another example, because then I got recruited out of there and I went to a home healthcare company called Aviana just ahead of the pandemic. Like I went over there in like October of 2019. Who knew m what was going to happen six months later in this healthcare company. But here we are. And so we had a very different problem there as we got into the pandemic. We're trying to recruit, like, we're, we're like trending, working toward this ipo. We had to hire a ton of caregivers and we had to hire so many because not all of them worked right. Like they would come in, they might work per diem, whatever the case was. But anyway, took a lot of people, a lot of activity to get to a number of caregivers who were actually providing care at any given time. So our volume had to be super high. We had this assessment, they were administering this assessment. So for those of your listeners who are in healthcare, it was sort of like a mini NCLEX exam. So they would administer this assessment to nurses. Problem was, it was pen and paper, and the nurses had to come into an office and sit in a conference room and complete it and surprise, surprise, in the middle of a global healthcare pandemic. And what little we understood about it at that time, the nurses were like, I'm not coming in and sitting in your conference room. Like, what are you talking about? So we had to get super creative. So engaged high match. And I don't even remember, Ryan, you might have worked with me on this, but engaged highmatch again. And obviously they had this unique expertise, right, because they built assessments and they had this kind of expertise around structuring questions, administering questions, evaluating questions, putting questions in order online. It's actually far more complex than you might think. Just looking at it from the outside and I don't know who else would have had it. Maybe an assessment company, maybe a survey company, whatever. They had it and they were super creative. They were like, hey, let's try it, let's see what happens. They wanted to sort of build this new, I think, service offering anyway, so we partnered with them and we digitized that skills assessment. So at, uh, the end of it, we did, we actually went and validated the content. Nobody had ever looked at the content. Right. We actually discovered along the way some unique stuff like these errors that we had in our own legacy assessment that had been tripping up these good nurses for years. We fixed all of that move that digital. Now the nurses could complete it virtually without having to come in. Okay, that's kind of part one. This was really opening the door though, in a really interesting way. If I pull this thread all the way through the needle, it opened the door to something even bigger because at the same time we were implementing two other platforms that were intended to make recruiting faster and easier. We had this machine learning based resume evaluation tool called ideal. And IDEAL would evaluate the resume. If somebody looked like a match, it would trigger the ats, which was isims, to wake up and in turn activate Paradox, which was a conversation or is a conversational AI platform. And it would send Paradox to work. And all this happened within like minutes. Right. And it would go out pre screen candidates and auto schedule them for interviews with the recruiters. So we're running this. If we got candidates through that process and they got an offer, then we would plug them back into Paradox, get them auto schedule for this orientation. Right, because everybody coming into healthcare has to do orientation. There's a lot to learn coming into that sort of environment. So on the clinical side, they had this incredible clinical leadership team. We worked with them to build digital onboarding on the back end that included stuff like VR based clinical training, like really cool stuff. And all together, like we had this, we went from this, I mean you would have thought like we had these old buildings, people would come in, sit in like classroom style chairs, interview with people, pen and paper, go home. And now we had this like end to end digital experience. And it was like going from like back to the future to 2030 in a DeLorean with wheels on fire. It was crazy, like just to see what happened. And the outcomes were incredible because from an efficiency lens, we improved by about 200%, which is almost difficult to believe except that it happened. And I don't know, I credit that Whole stringing together of these integrated platforms and the partnership with Clinical for helping us hire, like, we hired a record number of caregivers through the pandemic, and that's what got us through that. And it was powerful. Right. It's not just that we hired them. I'm going to tie this back to what the business did, but this is. We were hiring at a time when patients and families needed us most. Right. You had parents didn't want caregivers coming into their homes and possibly making their kiddos sick. Nurses were nervous about going to work. So we had to build a huge pipeline to be able to deliver on, um, this. So it was kind of interesting. So long story short is that between those two, you've seen Talent Tech do some really unique things. Reduce turnover, drive recruiting efficiency, keep clinical hiring moving during a global crisis. Right. And, and it was just a really interesting way to kind of zoom back and say, wow, like technology did that. Right? Or, or, or the concept of the technology helped us get through that. So anyway, that's, for me, that's one of those examples. And I'm sorry that, that fed through a couple of scenarios, but they were sort of all interrelated. It's part of why I, uh, love doing this work. Right. It's, uh, it's fascinating.

Ryan Dull: Yeah, that's great. No, those are great examples. Let's talk a little bit about, like, how you measure performance in talent acquisition. And you can talk about it from the context of what's important to the executives at wellstar and what you try to show them, or what's important to you as a leader and your teams. Just talk a little bit about how you measure performance and success in talent acquisition.

Victor Gaines: You know, look, when I was coming to wellstar, I had an interview. We have some really amazing HR business partners. And one of them asked me, you know, she said, how, you know, what, what metrics would you show us? What metrics would you come in showing us? And I was like, I don't know, what's your problem? And so she kind of laughed. She was like, that's a really great answer. Right? She said, because so many people are like, oh, I would show you time to fill, I would show you, you know, time to start, whatever. And I was like, but it doesn't matter if that's not important to you. So we kind of got into this thing. And so one of these kind of high level philosophies that I've developed over the years and leaned into is like, first and foremost, you have to make sure. You are measuring and solving for the right problem. Well, so you need to solve for the right problem, and then you have to tie that impact to the business outcomes. Because what's going to happen is you will have leaders who are going to come to you and say, we're not hiring fast enough, or we need more applicants in the pipeline, or actually, I don't know if I've heard anybody be this direct, and I wish they would be. We just want the noise to stop. Right? Like, don't make up things. Just tell us what you want, then we can go dig in and validate what it is that we're hearing and what's actually causing the pain. You can spend millions of dollars trying to solve the wrong problem. I've almost done that more than once right before I realized through listening, through anecdotal experience, through engaging with the field, whatever it is, data analysis, you go, oh, that's not really the problem. So once you understand the problem, your success becomes much easier. You can go figure out how do you then help solve the business problem, Whether that's reducing vacancy rates at your restaurants around the country and world, whether that's, you know, bringing in talent that has a knack for innovation so that you can start developing your next round of products, or just giving the business a reasonable level of predictability to their operations. Right. So I think it's better when you can show the business how the work that you delivered enabled their strategic plans. Right?

Ryan Dull: Yep.

Ryan Dull: Yeah, I think that's, that's great. I love the way you talk about that. And, and I couldn't agree more. I, I always talk about it with our clients and the people that get advisory service from us is like starting out with, like, what matters to your business. And let's, let's design and measure. Design for and measure what matters not what everybody else in TA is doing, what not. But you, you read the latest article or heard the latest podcast on, it's like, what matters to you, to your business, and then let's work backwards from that as, like, what's preventing that from happening? How do we measure this to make sure it's improving and that all of that is aligned with your executives? I think way too many people in TA start like, just developing their own opinions and have never stopped to check with leadership team and match it up to the business strategy or what matters to them.

Victor Gaines: Yeah, one thing I was supporting global sales and we had a, uh, we had an HR leader who wanted all the metrics, but primarily speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed. And the global sales. I remember I was walking through an airport talking to the global sales leader one day, and she was basically like, I don't give a shit about how long it takes you to build the job. She said, I want the best sales. I don't care. Right. We were talking about probably sales positions some other country somewhere in Emea, probably. She was like, uh, it doesn't matter. I need the best person. I will make it work until somebody finds them. I'm not pushing for speed, so don't push me. She's like, don't show me the speed again. And I was like, going to talk to my boss about that.

Ryan Dull: I don't know.

Victor Gaines: Right. But there was this huge disconnect. And you saw it. In that moment, you could feel palpably, like, how frustrated she was because she felt like this metric that was irrelevant to her needs and irrelevant to her goals and irrelevant to the future of the company at that point were. It just didn't feel important to her. And so, yeah, I think other people will define these things or they'll ask you to bring sort of these dashboards or, you know, what I call, like, dashboards for decoration with a lot of numbers and colors on them. But if they're not telling you anything and they're not actionable, every business and

Ryan Dull: every group within that business is usually a little bit different in their interest level and acumen. And so, yeah, you just want whatever you're doing to resonate and help drive that business forward and not. Not show the stuff for decoration that their eyes roll on the back of the head and they don't. Or they just put it. Just glaze over it and trash it right away and don't even look at it. So, um, no, I think that's really important is measuring what matters, focusing on what matters and having those conversations takes it a long way. And it's easy to get distracted in ta. And when you start having those conversations, your internal credibility goes up really quickly, really quickly.

Victor Gaines: The downside is it can be hard to find that. Right?

Ryan Dull: It's.

Victor Gaines: It's because people aren't telling you. You have to dig for it. You've got to pull. There's somebody who used to work for me. I say work for me. They. I probably was borderline working for her. Brilliant TA leader. She and I had worked together at one company that she worked for me, uh, at another one. But she was like, she had this philosophy. She's like, I ask why five times and she would drive people bananas, but she would not stop because she was like, I have to get at what's going on. So she found these creative ways to keep digging, keep digging, keep poking, keep peeling the layers and finding out what is really happening and how can we help. And so anyway, yeah, I think it's just such a powerful approach as a TA leader. So um, yep, that's good way to

Ryan Dull: get to the root. The five whys. I've used that before. It's the Japanese manufacturing type of uh, methodology to cut out waste. And so yeah, I think ah, it's a great way to think about that and that's good to show up as an advisor too is to help them understand because their knee jerk is probably like, I need talent faster, I need better talent, I need it to cost less. Like why do you want to do that? So, or challenge like so if you needed to cost less, if like I reduced the cost by half but it takes longer, is that okay? Or if I reduce it by half and it's still faster but you don't get as good talent, is that okay? And kind of really pressure testing their answers a little bit to get to really what they mean.

Victor Gaines: That's exactly right.

Ryan Dull: Uh, let's talk about the future a little bit. So from this point forward, what are some things that you're interested in that some initiatives that you're focused on?

Victor Gaines: So many things, Ryan. So many things. I would say two big things. So we're in the middle of implementing Phenom CRM, so we have it up and running right now. The big focus that I have is really driving adoption on that. And then the other thing is trying to build data fluency across our TA leadership team or enhanced data fluency maybe is what I'd say because we have some folks that are really good with it. But like with Phenom, um, we implemented it, it's an incredibly powerful tool. It's dense. Right. And you have to build the muscle for being able to use all of its capabilities. Understanding what does it do today, what's on their future roadmap, how do you leverage all the automations? And uh, it's tough like you, you have to help the team develop muscle around it because otherwise it's like putting your new driver at home behind the wheel of a Formula one race car. Like it's, it's, it's too much. Right. And so we're trying to avoid like throwing everything at the team at once and we're trying to kind of put this in phases. We're trying to really focus it on like what's most important for them right now, what's going to help them today in, uh, their jobs, to find candidates faster, to source faster, to engage and communicate faster with candidates. And then once we start building some of those muscles, then we'll get into some more advanced exercises, right? And some more, you know, we're starting to talk about automation, workflows, and. But right now, look, you know, none of these tools come cheap. And so we need to show ROI early. We need to build confidence with the team that they know how to use it and that they're using it in a way that it's intended, that they're not going to break it. And then we'll start scaling into, you know, advanced capabilities and more sophistication. And then I think this other. But it's hard. But again, it's hard, right? And, you know, I was at the Phenom, um, conference a couple of weeks ago, and, you know, Phenom is fantastic. And they're acknowledging that it's tough and they're trying to figure out ways to say, how do we make it easier for companies to get started with it? Right. Like, kind of what's your, uh, you unpack a TV and you get, like, the instructions and it's like, here's your quick reference guide, right? How do we start using some of it? Because once you start using it, you. Oh, oh, oh, right. It gets easier and easier. So anyway, that's why that one's kind of phased and taking a bit of time. And then the second one is, you know, helping our TA management team really learn. How do you tell stories with data? It's interesting. We have a tremendous amount of data at our fingertips here through workday, through other platforms that we use that are strictly data platforms. We have internal data teams. We have tons of stuff. Right. And we can pull complicated things. You've got anything from funnel conversions to, you know, pipeline velocity. You can look at any number of things, but the data doesn't do anything. If the team is kind of going, well, you know, what do I do with this? And how do I show the business why this is important and, and can I make this actionable? So we're investing in helping our leaders really become fluent in creating those narratives off of the numbers. Right. And using all this information to explain to the business why something is happening. Not just what's happening, but why is it happening and what should we do about it, right? And what does that mean if we do something about it? So we're kind of continuing this push that everybody's off and on of trying to move from being this kind of service desk resource to being a strategic partner in the business to them.

Ryan Dull: Um, yeah, I think that's important. We've always talked about recruiting and talent acquisition, and the process of hiring new people to your team can be a very emotional journey. And so how do you take the emotion out of the equation? Uh, with a lot of folks and data usually does a good job of doing that and using it to tell the right story. Story. And getting grounded in the facts versus the emotion and then partnering through to the solution is really an effective way to do that. So kudos to you for having that as a core initiative and trying to build that muscle within your team. I think that's really, really valuable.

Victor Gaines: I don't know, ta.

Ryan Dull: It's a.

Victor Gaines: It's this thing where people think it's not. It's not. I say rocket. I don't know if rocket science is easy or hard, Ryan. I've never known. But it's not rocket science, I don't guess. And so sounds hard.

Ryan Dull: I don't know.

Victor Gaines: Everybody sounds hard to me, so. But I think, like, other people assume it's even easier, and I think we have to show them. Like, look, there's a lot of information here that can help us sort of shape how we engage with you and shape what your experience is going through this process. And we can work together to make this better and faster. It doesn't have to be contentious or m. You know, but, yeah, great.

Ryan Dull: Last question I have for you is, what's some advice that you would have for others in this space? Like, most of the listeners are made up of people that are either in or interested in ta. And so this is kind of a TA nerd podcast, which I like because I'm one and so are you. So, uh, let's share some. Some advice that you might have for others.

Victor Gaines: Oh, boy. Ryan, I think this is one you and I have talked about since the day I came to work for you many years ago, probably. But it's this idea. I said, I keep telling. I tell you all the time, everybody thinks they know TA better than you. And you just have to be prepared for what that means. Right. Like, the business is going to think they know how to run their own process. They're going to think that they know where you need to go source and what you have to do. HR might want to dictate your priorities. And hiring managers think sourcing is voodoo or black magic. I have no idea. Right. But. And everybody's role by the way, is the most critical, urgent role under the sun today. Right? And if you. If you don't plant your feet firmly in the pavement on this, you're going to spend all of your time reacting to somebody else's emergencies, right? Somebody else's. The chaos they're creating for you. And so you have to be prepared for that, and you have to know where your priorities are. You have to prioritize that work and focus on it. Look, uh, politics are very real. We have to be comfortable pushing back. But you also have to. You got to say no sometimes. You have to protect your process, you got to protect your team. But you have to be careful when you do it, right? Because as soon as you TA is this kind of like fickle space, and as soon as you trigger the idea for somebody that, you know he's difficult or TA's being difficult or TA. I've heard it also as TA's defensive, you know, because we're always in the hot seat. And, uh, so the business often feels like when we're pushing back that we're being defensive, when maybe we are, maybe we are, maybe we're just trying to tell the story. But the problem is once the label is applied to you and it sticks, your clock is ticking, right? That top THC is fragile, it is political, and often you get it because of how good you are, but that's not why you keep it all the time. Right? And so I guess there's that, uh, you know, we talked about this other one, which is validating everything, right? But I just, I feel very strongly that it's so common that we have a lot of clients, right? In ta, you've got hr, you have business leaders and hiring leaders, you have candidates, you have vendors. There's a lot happening. And so people will kind of tell you what they think is happening. But again, you have to just, hey, you got to validate it. But you also have to know where the real issues often are. And I think I found in my career, 80 plus percent of the time, it's something in the business. It might be comp. It might be hiring managers not doing the right thing. It might be requirements aren't clear, could be broken processes, old tape that keeps playing about, you know, ta's no good, whatever it is, right? And you. You find power in finding the truth and then speaking truth, right? Yeah. Uh, versus just reacting to whatever you hear. And then I think the last one that I would say, you have to figure out how to provide roi. And that's in all of the things that we do. But part of this is in these business cases where we've talked about technology, we talked about PI Match, we talked about paradox, we talked about ideal, we talked about phenom, um, all of these things that we're doing. If you can't help the business understand the value of investing in the platform, that's the cost, Ryan. That's your license cost, your seat, your implementation costs. It's how much lift are you going to be asking your IT team to engage in to help you with this, then those things are going to fall apart. And so if you know how to go find the tools that you need, maybe you have a partner like Sagemark, maybe, you know, a couple of vendors you've used in the past, maybe, you know, you walked into this knowing that they had somebody already on deck. But you've got to figure out how to make it a win by finding the value in IT and not having a solution that's in chase of a problem that doesn't exist. Right. Uh, companies get wary of technology sometimes.

Ryan Dull: Yeah. I mean, that is such a critical point. It's like, I can't tell you how many times I interact with folks, and we start thinking about, like, okay, what are the priorities? What are you looking to solve? And. And it's really, you know, as they talk through it, and it's so easy in TA today, where we're bombarded by all this marketing and all these cool solutions and all this AI and it does all this amazing stuff that you start, like, I want to use that. Let me go find a problem for that. Instead of saying, like, what are my biggest priorities? What matters to the business? What, what, what will deliver the greatest ROI for my business? And identifying and defining that process problem, then finding the solution that's the right fit. And all the things that you talked about today were the right thing for your businesses at that time. Are, uh, they the right thing today? Probably not right. But there's.

Victor Gaines: But they were right then.

Ryan Dull: You know, they're right at that moment. They were the exact right solution for what your specific needs were there. And it's a really delicate dance to be able to navigate that on an annual basis in a new role and those kinds of things. So don't, uh, I think that's really, really good advice.

Victor Gaines: You know, and so I used. Made me think of this other thing that I would throw out. And it's, you know, I don't know if you and I have talked about this before, but it's that whole idea of the Sunk cost fallacy, right? We, we implement solutions. And in this TA tech space, you know, companies come and go, right? Companies get acquired by the next bigger company. To your point, the product may be right for you here, it may not be right there. You know, a lot of companies will give you discounts for longer contracts, all those kinds of things. But you also have to be comfortable saying, like, listen, IT department. You have to understand, like, the stack that we have today might change next year, might change in two years. Right. We are, we're leaning into what's coming next, what the best and most effective tools are. And it's okay if something isn't working, we might rip this part out and plug it in with something else. Right? We might rip these two things out and plug them in with one thing. Who knows? But we don't want to get down a path and just keep sinking money into something at a point when something better does come along either. Right. And we just. Yeah, I think sometimes in a TL and you'll sort of feel hamstrung by these kind of tech decisions and you have to figure out a way to kind of punch through that turbulence and open that up and say, look there. You know, let me tell you what we need and when we need it. And if I want to chuck this old PC and pick up an Apple next week, so be it. Right. Or whatever it is. And so, yeah, and hopefully you're doing

Ryan Dull: the right due diligence up front, um, where you're really assessing that risk, assessing the like one thing that that's a gap that a mistake that I see in a lot of people on there, whether they do RFPs and don't get me started on RFPs. But, um, they're doing their assessment of solutions is, you know, what is the actual business health of those solutions? What is their Runway look like? What does their roadmap look like? Where have they demonstrated results in similar organizations and how are they growing and scaling so that you can make sure that you don't have to. You're not going to automatically be put in that position to find the next thing. It doesn't always work that way because people get acquired, businesses fail, uh, things happen in the space. But there are ways to minimize your risk. And we always help clients do that and think about that. And then as you're going through, like, how can their roadmap feed your intended roadmap as well, where it's very linked up and how do they partner with your other core systems? Like, um, for you, in a workday like, you wouldn't want to look at a solution that was obviously a direct competitor at odds with workday. Now, no one will say that's the case, but you can see who those people are and who they aren't. And then you probably should think about that as a risk quotient in your decision making.

Victor Gaines: Yeah, that's absolutely right. And that's, that's what makes it so tough to do. Not only are there, I don't know, untold number of, of solutions that are out there percolating in the market at any point in time, and I don't know how any one person goes out and figures out, like, out of all of these, this is the one I need, right? It's, it's something like, I don't have people pick out cars. Um, it's like, you know, I love cars, so I know, but like, I, but I don't know, it's like I still haven't driven everything, so how do you know? So I think it's important to have a partner that can say, this sounds good, but we also need to do this other kind of due diligence to help you make sense of it, because, you know, while I kind of facetiously say, like, you know, we may have to swap tools out, it and your finance department are not looking to do repeat implementation, cost, repeat implementation, lift, repeat API integrations and all this kind of stuff. So you do need to have a sense of, are they at least here long enough that you need them? You want to make sure that they're here until you decide you don't need them, not until they decide that they can't function any longer or whatever the case may be. So, yeah, I think, you know, I think that's a big one. And so, uh, I just. All of that said, I think TA is one of these, like, you know, it's. Again, it's a precarious seat. You know, sometimes we're kind of damned if we do, we're damned if we don't. But if you can diagnose the right problems and you can lead with data and you can name roi, you start to lift your function out of that space of being the order taker and being more of an operator and being a strategic operator within the business. And I think that's the, that's where you find that real value.

Ryan Dull: Yeah, I think that's great. You also talked, the first thing you mentioned is, you know, trying to, to focus and focus the group and say no to some things. I think that's that is really important for TA leaders specifically. But generally any business leaders, the way to make transformational gains is to focus on the vital few things that really matter and be okay. Not doing everything. That sounds easy to say. It is so hard for people to do. And especially in TA, where you've got 10 business leaders who have 10 ideas on what your priorities should be, who you said, you know, think they know TA better, and that happens. And you know all these things to be able to say, I hear you, and yes, that is an issue. However, we are focused on these three things this year and this is why, and this is the results we're going to drive. And then hopefully your specific situation will prioritize itself next year and those kinds of things. But the focus element, that's the difference in those who are able to make transformational gains to those who do incremental change.

Victor Gaines: That's right. Yeah. I think it's that idea that having a meaningful strategy gives you leverage for saying yes where you need to say yes and no where you need to say no for exactly those reasons you just described. But if you don't have that strategic approach and you don't have a documented strategy that you can share and communicate, then, you know, everybody just thinks you'll do everything. And when you say no, then you go back on that you're being difficult list. Right. And so, you know, that's how you, that's how you protect yourself and you protect your team and you protect your, your, your resources and time. So, yeah, that's great.

Ryan Dull: Well, Victor, thank you so much for, for joining me today on the show.

Victor Gaines: Anytime.

Ryan Dull: Excellent job and, and I really appreciate you.

Victor Gaines: Yeah, likewise. And I appreciate you. Thanks for having me.

Ryan Dull: We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Talent Acquisition Leaders Podcast. If something we said today resonated with you, please subscribe, rate and download our podcast and share the episode with your network. Ready to transform your recruiting practices with leading edge technology, just like our other clients at 3M, um, Comcast, Stryker and Walgreens. Then reach out@sagemarkhr.com for a free consultation.