Kris Dunn cares deeply about the art of HR and recruiting enough so that he created the popular industry blogs Fistful of Talent and The HR Capitalist. Along with host John Hollon, a contributor to FOT, they cover topics top of mind including retention, recruiting, remote work and reskilling.
While reskilling can help organizations cope with the evolving needs of the workplace and help individuals better position themselves on the recruiting trail, as Kris shares it takes focus, discipline and can be difficult to actually find time for.
In this episode of the Talent Experience Podcast Kris opens up about getting his recruiting company through the momentous events of 2020 and explores the concept of hunkering down and how it has changed recruiting.
Here’s how the conversation went… This interview has been edited and condensed.
John Hollon: Kris, you’re a long-time HR leader and a partner in a recruiting company. Things are going well and then 2020 and the Coronavirus comes along. What have you had to do to change your game, your style, and cope with all the unprecedented issues that came our way this year? What have you had to do to help your company get through this?
Kris Dunn: You’re right, things are going really well and then 2020 hit, specifically third week of March. We had had our best year ever for nine straight years at Kinetix with really good growth, projection, and a great team. We’ve got the best team that we’ve ever had and then everything hit us. We’re a mid-size RPO firm doing work for some great clients, some of those clients went away, because in an epidemic fuelled recession the last thing you need is recruiting help.
So we’ve had to become more scrappy. We’ve done more contingency work, more single position search work. A lot of the things that we took for granted in a normal economy went away and I should add rightfully so. No criticism to our clients, they were dealing with the same stuff that any company that’s been impacted by COVID was dealing with. We’ve also tried to watch our spend and try to treat people the right way. The good news is we’re starting to see a turnaround.
John Hollon: One of the things that I’ve heard you talk about a lot is the concept of hunkering down. How do you define hunkering down? When do you hunker down? How do you know when it’s okay to put your head up and come out? You don’t want to stay hunkered down for too long but you also don’t want to come out to too soon, so how do you navigate this?
Kris Dunn: Let’s start with the definition for the uninitiated in the art of hunkering down. Although we’ve hunkered down at Kinetix this is really a candidate behavior. What we’ve seen and what I remember from the last recession in the United States, in the 08′ 09′ era, is during that recession great candidates were less likely to jump for something that looked like a lateral to even a slightly a good move from a salary or an ability to earn level.
Candidates during the expansion over the last four or five years were more than willing to make a move to their next job for 5-10 percent increase, they really didn’t discriminate a lot with the moves they made. But what happens in a recession is there’s so much fear, doubt and uncertainty that a lot of candidates who are gainfully employed understand they don’t know what they don’t know, particularly related to the health of a company that they might jump to. All of those candidates if they’re gainfully employed are hunkering down, which means that a lot of the candidate pool that employers expect when they have openings in a recession is not there and it’s harder to draw those candidates out.
John Hollon: Are companies now focusing more on retention, as opposed to hiring? Are they looking more at their own staff and saying ‘maybe the best trick here is to keep a hold of our own people and make them feel better’? Because if people feel that they are wanted, even at a time when a lot of folks are losing jobs, they are more engaged – I would think. Do you hear much of that?
Kris Dunn: I think retention is always a reference point and a priority for people. Doing all the employee relations work that leads to good retention is always a topic. One of the things I’m proud of at Kinetix and I think a lot of employers would agree and have done the same thing on their own is really good communication throughout the ongoing COVID period. One of the things that in addition to just retention happening because we’re in this pandemic based recession, a lot of companies have actually done a better job from a communication perspective in terms of what’s going on.
There’s been a feeling of more transparency than maybe you had under normal times. That, along with the fact that we are in a recession so there’s fewer places to go, you add in hunkering down and the fact that a lot of companies have done a really good job communicating during a really difficult time, it creates a kind of an aura, if you will, of retention where people are less likely to leave. I think retention is better as a result.
But also to your point, there’s some Gallup studies that show that employee engagement is in an all-time high during the Covid period. You can make the argument that good engagement scores equals greater retention. Without rambling on, I think you’ve got to wrap up all of those factors to say that we are in a better place from a retention perspective than certainly we were pre-Covid as morbid as that sounds.
John Hollon: To follow up on that, we hear a lot of talk about the need for people to become more agile, more flexible and to work to reskill themselves to cope with the evolving needs of the workplace. What do you make of that? Is that what you are seeing?
Kris Dunn: You read a lot of articles about reskilling. I think if you’re an employee, a candidate or an individual, reskilling is easier than it looks. But it requires a fair amount of focus to do it on your own and go to an online environment where you can get better at something, or add knowledge, skills and ability to your arsenal to position yourself better on the recruiting trail. I think that takes an incredible amount of discipline.
I always joke as an HR leader that one of the cheapest things you can do is to offer up tuition aid as a benefit. It looks great on the PDF of the benefits you offer but it’s incredibly hard to use. Think about candidates with families, obligations, who take care of parents, just a variety of things so reskilling is easy to say but it’s hard to do on the individual level. At a company level, we do have a client or two that’s actively talking about reskilling, primarily in a healthcare world. You’ve got some adjacent type of skills that with the right amount of training, you might be able to move them a half click over to take care of a need that you once had. We see that in some very specific sectors but once you get outside of those very specific sectors, I don’t see a lot of talk about reskilling because I think people and corporations are still in survival mode.
The last thing is if you think about reskilling on an individual level, especially if you have somebody who is currently out of work, the thing they’re most focused on is providing for their family. They are on the recruiting trail and doing what candidates do, which is typically applying to 100 jobs a day and not hearing much back. That’s kind of the sad state of online applications to companies. I think our recruiters at Kinetix do a pretty good job of treating candidates with respect, but it’s really hard on people. So I like the topic of reskilling but I think it’s hard on both ends for corporations and candidates both trying to survive and everyone who is incredibly busy in a really strange time.
John Hollon: Do you see any long-term takeaways from the lockdown and pandemic? Are there any positives we can hold on to that will help us to move us and our workforces ahead in our organizations?
Kris Dunn: One big positive is I think the pandemic has really pushed the envelope and pushed us ahead, at least five if not 10 years, related to how companies view remote work and how they view a work-life blend and lifestyle for the employees they have. That’s certainly true from a white-collar perspective, I can’t speak as much to the blue-collar perspective as that is very specific and requires someone to be at a certain location at a certain time.
But when you talk about white-collar work, I think the fact that so many companies had to send employees home it ramped them up and probably jumped them forward five years in terms of trying to figure out remote work. It jumped them forward figuring out how to use digital tools. I think the big winners coming out of whenever we clear COVID are going to be the companies that maintain a lot of the flexibility that they granted their employees.
The other thing that happens is, especially in the white-collar world now, a lot of companies were locked into location when they recruited. Remote work blows that model up, not entirely, because a lot of companies are going to want to get back together from time to time, or periodically. If employees were five days in the office, they might go to two or three – even Wall Street, firms are talking about that.
As a company if you’re willing to consider remote workers, and you’ve figured some of this out, your recruiting radius has increased exponentially. Now you’re not just talking about a metro area, you’re really talking about the nation wherever you live, and potentially the world. The big winners are the ones who can maintain this and meet people where they’re at.
John Hollon: It sounds like you think that the genies out of the bottle on remote work, that we’re not going to go back to how it was prior to the pandemic, that what a lot of organizations had to do just to get by is probably going to stick?
Kris Dunn: Yeah, I think that’s true. I’m an HR generalist by trade so what I would tell you is the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. If you think about it, it’s not going to be 100% remote but it’s not going back to the way that it was. I think the best of both worlds is to have some sense of place where people can get together. Once we clear this, this COVID thing, to still have some sense of place where companies will be able to leverage physical places and provide it periodically will be an advantage over companies that went from physical place to 100% remote.
But the truth is always somewhere in the middle. You will have some companies that will try and go back to the way that they did it. A lot of those companies will be driven by cultive personality founders that want it a certain way and they’ll seek to drive it that way. Over time the best talent at those companies will say ‘you know what this kind of sucks going back to four or five days in the office, I got used to it the other way…and by the way, my kids are now in physical school, I don’t have to serve as a tutor to them, I want to go back the other way.’ Then a recruiter, hopefully one from Kinetix, is going to call those people and find a great opportunity for them. So yes, I think the genies out of the bottle.
The other thing is it’s really an employee by employee type of vibe. So if Shannon Russo, my partner and I were working at a company, she may for whatever’s happened in her life, want to go into an office three days a week, I may want to go in one or maybe a couple times a month. The best companies are going to have incredibly flexible philosophies at meeting our needs and where we are in order to recruit us away from whatever company is now providing that.
John Hollon: If there’s a good takeaway from this whole lockdown, that may be the one.
John Hollon: Last question, we believe that everyone should have a job that they love, one that they’re passionate about. So Kris, what do you love about what you do?
Kris Dunn: I love many things of what I do at Kinetix. I think probably the thing I enjoy most is I get the chance to create a lot of things, not only for the company, but for our clients. So I’m a creator. I’m a low rules type of individual. I’m low rules high challenge. I love to create and I’m really fortunate to be surrounded by some really great people who are creative in their own right but can also once I get it to a certain level, take any type of product or service that we offer for our clients and execute on it in the field so I can keep doing what I really enjoy, which is continue to create. Since I’m one of two owners at Kinetix I’ve had a big opportunity to do that. To really motivate me you have to get me through the stuff that can be a little bit of a slog, I like to focus on the unbelievable opportunities to create once all that stuff is kind of handled.
