Every year, over 800 tech and staffing leaders gather in Dallas for the SIA gig e-conference. We sat down with seven of them. Here are their stories. Well, I'm honored today. I'm with Brad Hill, president of the digital marketplace SkillGigs, and we're here at SIA. So Brad, thank you so much for taking the time. Awesome. Thanks, Paul. Pleasure to be here. So just give me a little bit about your background and how you got one here at SIA and into the gig space. Awesome. I'd love to. So two and a half decades in what I would consider the staffing outsourcing industry, over that timeframe, I worked for two very, very large global providers in that space for the bulk of my career. And what's interesting about that from the late 90s up until I kind of concluded the big corporate conglomerate world of IT staffing, IT outsourcing, I gained a very important perspective on understanding that business model, how to grow that business model, the inherent value that the business model has on connecting employers and talent. But I also started to learn how inefficient it was, how biased it was. Some of the areas that were designed in that business structure that really created a massive gap between a buyer and employer with a job and talent that has skills for that job. And, you know, having, you know, built parts of that business over those years with those companies, predominantly some forms of their their outsourcing capability, their additional services capability, their managed their MSP businesses. I joined SkillGigs because I do think there's really this evolution that's happening. I think that we've seen it kind of occur in the last couple of years as we've seen this kind of move to direct connection. And right, and one of the things that we do at SkillGigs, and we think about it, SkillGigs is a core element is like inverting the power equation from those who have it to those who deserve it. And quite frankly, I think- So tell me a little more, that's actually really interesting. Tell me a little bit more about that. Who has it and who deserves it? So I'm going to call quietly now, but I believe who's had it for a long time has been that intermediary agency model, right? So it's sales and recruiting that is basically kind of been responsible for connecting the two individuals, right? And the infrastructure design between sales that is basically, you know, taking that requirement from a job, distributing it to recruiters, recruiters going to find that talent, it's laborious, it's long, it can be inefficient, there's value in it. But at the same time, we live in a world where we want to accelerate that connection. And when I think about that term, like inverting that power equation from those that have it to those who deserve it, we want to create a platform that connects meaningfully between talent with skills and employers that have the need for those skills directly. So this is definitely a staffing platform as a service direct sourcing type platform engagement with a unique component which connects them. And now we're empowering the talent to control what's most important to them, which is their pay rate. We're empowering the buyers to control what's very important. And it's an investment in hourly rate for that particular talent. When you were in sort of big staffing, you know, that big corporate staffing, what was the inefficiency? Like where did it break down? Because I, you know, having worked in big tech and hired people, I felt it. Because I knew that if I wanted to bring someone on an independent contractor to help do a project, it took three or four weeks. And I couldn't never understand it. And even when they tried to explain it to me, I didn't understand it. So to be able to talk to somebody who was on the inside, where did you see the inefficiency? And then we'll go talk what you're solving. Yeah, yeah. Some of the problems we're trying to solve. So I think it starts with the pace, like the ability to recruit that talent on demand for an employer is moving as fast as they're capable of securing that talent, right? And then as a buyer in that type of relationship, it really determines on where you stack rank as a historical buyer, right? So staffing agencies tend to be able to channel access to talent based on driving margin and by driving relationships. And so there's an inherent bias there that occurs from that standpoint. But when we talk about some of the inefficiencies, just think of the elements that are occurring in that kind of workflow, right? There requires a meeting to secure that particular requirement. It's now the most way most operating offices operate. It now has to be prioritized. So it goes through a daily prioritization in that office in order to secure the right recruiters and the right focus from that recruiter to go and secure that talent. And of course, from that perspective, you're going into the massive channels, whatever omni channels that the recruiting organization is leveraging to secure those resources. And so to your point, on average, it can be four to six weeks before a buyer is seeing available talent, right? And so that buyer also has to understand, well, where am I in the importance of the stack ranking of my relationship with other buyers that are in that particular in-market service? The other component is, you know, for most part, the brick and mortar model was very geographically present into the brick and mortar structure. So even though big tech or big staffing tech organizations have lots of offices, they pretty much operate very independently. So your ability to source or be able to access sourcing technical and sourcing resources through that network was one of the things that big staffing companies always struggled to solve. That was one of the interesting things. There was a very large staffing firm that came in, and they were pitching how they were going to get into the gig economy. And it was a great conversation. I said, well, you guys are one of the largest human capital companies on the planet. It's got to be pretty easy. You have places in France and India. And that's when I realized, no, these are actually independent shops that in some cases have their own technology stacks. There's not even common technology stacks across them, and they don't communicate. They don't communicate. And like that inefficiency. So for me to be able to talk to somebody, I say, I want somebody to accomplish this. And they're like, well, this is what we have. That was one of the big secrets because under that brand was just like a bunch of parts that didn't fit together. I feel like it was a toy story. It was just like all these different... It's surprising how common that is. Whether it's a franchise model or a corporate model, it's still structurally designed a lot of ways the way you just described. And so we're in a world to where we're comfortable with self-checkout. We're in a world to where direct access to everything we consume is the new norm. We can go down the list of what that experience is like. And I think about the evolution of way platform technology is disrupting the traditional third-party agency business model is not much different than what Uber has done or Airbnb has done by removing these inefficient, massive amounts of cost-driven middle layers of connection. We're using technology to do that. Nectonologies to accelerate curation, manage automation and workflow from the point of building your particular gig and publishing it in our marketplace to directly connecting that talent and empowering again, once again, the things that are most important because what happens often is those users in that old system, they're giving up control to the dependency of the middle layer and to a talent. And I want to talk a lot about that talent journey because our marketplace doesn't operate without an amazing experience in that talent journey itself. And so by giving the talent the ability to where I know my value, I can own my value and utilizing our system, which has a bidding component to it, to where no one's negotiating my value. The marketplace will tell me where my value lands and it will empower me to adjust my value based on how I interpret that job to be a bit for me. And that is what's driving so much adoption on the talent part of our marketplace. And we grow by 150 new digital professionals a day because they're understanding that being able to access exclusive contract positions in our marketplace by our employers to where they get direct access not to an intermediary recruiter, but to a recruiter at a corporate organization that now has the ability to hire contingently changes the entire spectrum of what they've had to give up for so many years. Now let's talk specifically on what skill gigs, the problem and the vertical that skill gigs is attacking. So you have this experience, it's all inefficient. I'm Brad, I'm going to show up and I'm going to change the way things are done. What particular problem was skill gigs looking to solve? Yeah, so I think what we were looking to solve was some of the inherent issues that we kind of just kind of bounced around like engagement rates, being able to increase the accessibility of talent and do it more efficiently and faster, which would lead to low fill ratios. Also, we wanted to solve problems with being able to remove a lot of the bloated cost structures that are between the two buyers and be able to give them a better way to connect, which is ultimately going to be able to give them a better to have a better outcome, which is we're going to make a decision to work together. So we increase the velocity of connection, increase the ability to have better fill ratios, lower the time it takes to actually access that talent. And what is your like when you talk about and there are a number of people that listen to understand some of the staffing lingo. So when you talk about fill rates, it is the ability of I put out 100 jobs and how many of those jobs you could fill. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then time to fill is the time it takes to then fill those jobs. Shift gigs went from four to six weeks to how long does it take once if I'm talent sign up on the platform, how long does it take before I am working? Yeah. So one of the things that we're noticing right now, the first step is engagement, right? So how if I'm a talent in the platform, when am I getting my first opportunity to engage an opportunity? A number one, it happens day one, the moment they sign up, because they now have access to all the jobs that are published in our marketplace. And this is what's uniquely different about us. We have a bidding functionality that allows them to engage that recruiter with their skill set, as well as a pay rate. So they can actually bid towards that job, engage that recruiter to go, here's me, here's Paul, here's what we call our 3D Resume, which is a three dimensional billboard, if you will, their skill set, that they can build an industry skill index around, as well as an industry density around. I think I'm a great fit for your position. Here's why I'm a great fit for my position. And here's my pay rate. Now the pay rate, it calculates a bill rate for our employer. So now that engagement happens immediately. So the employer receives that bid from the talent, they can accept or deny that bid. If they deny that bid, they can deny it for a reason, say, I filled the position, I'm no longer looking, maybe your skills are not a match. But engagements occurred step one, if they do say they can also offer up, Hey, your bid's too high. Well, now I'm empowering the talent to say, let me think about that, let me maybe come in and re-bid that opportunity at a lower hourly rate, which would be my hourly rate so that I can gauge that individual. So we start with engagement, and we measure engagement rate based on the way that our two users are connecting in the platform. But what we have noticed, we have a really awesome testimonial on our website from one of our recent people that use it, and talks about her journey, and talks about what she was experiencing, which is was kind of, you know, not demoralizing, but her experience was like, I was trying to find a position and I was struggling and I was starting to have self doubt, right? I started to have self doubt, like no one wants me for a job. I went into this marketplace, and within 48 hours, I have a bid from an employer, one of the largest employers in Texas wants me. And that was able to her connection point. So within two weeks, she was on her first assignment. And then granted, that's going to vary, you know, Paul, I don't want to promise every talent out there, hey, come into our marketplace, and you're gonna have two weeks to do the job. But I can promise you, you will get to engage employers, and you will get to engage employers that are owning the contract positions, they're not distributing those out to 12 different staffing companies that all have the same job, and they're all trying to find you. Well, and there's transparency, and I can see the job, I can bid on the job, like I, we're talking and we're collecting data. Yes. So the experience gets better and better and better. And the match happens. What verticals are you seeing most of jobs and what verticals are you seeing most as you guys get started? So I give a little history on skill gigs really quick. Like, we're at our logo was actually on one of the slides here yesterday. So skill gigs has been around about five years. And we soft launched into the industry with a healthcare marketplace, and a digital marketplace or what I call an IT marketplace. Today, we're probably more recognized on our growth in the healthcare space. So we have two, what I call two marketplaces today for skill gigs, healthcare and digital. A lot of where our, we're doubling down in my focus personally is on driving that digital IT growth of the marketplace as a part of our initial inception. But healthcare really took off for us. And, you know, I think there was some health care stuff going on around the past couple of years. Yeah, there's been a little bit of something that we've all had to experience, right? And so, you know, you know, I think we were in the right place at the right time to really provide an unbelievable service that we all needed to benefit from during a pandemic. And our technology plugged into some of the largest healthcare systems in Texas allowed them to hire directly travel nurses at volume and to do it quickly and easily. So you can imagine the climate we were dealing with during the pandemic, why that was so important. And in a five week hire time was literally life and death. Life and death. I couldn't agree more. And so that labeled us to really kind of create a really strong foundation on the concept of what, you know, a staffing platform as a service model would be and a direct sourcing talent marketplace would be. Because our founder had a history and I come from the digital IT world, we knew that we wanted to expand and grow our marketplace capability. So we see skill gigs eventually being multiple marketplaces of categories, right? With potential additional ones around FNA, et cetera. But we also know digital is a big part of, you know, the opportunity for growth. And, you know, for every, there's about 5000 healthcare systems in North America, there's by 5000 companies in Dallas that need IT workers, right? So, so that's why we started to really focus in and we started launching last year for digital, right? Kind of relaunching the brand a little bit. And what's also really exciting about our technology and parallel, we began to redesign this technology. So, and I'm happy to be able to announce here probably before the end of the year that we're going to be releasing a completely new platform that's going to be full native. So we're bringing new features and new functions to the technology, including rating systems and things that aren't there today, because we've seen and monitored that buyer and talent journey and listening to them. So it's, you know, technology capturing that it's, it's organic. It's not lost in someone's email. It's not lost in someone's email. Exactly. Great. Great. Great point. Great point. And so we're excited to see the evolution of where we're taking the technology. And the other element that I think is important to note about what we're kind of what's driving our purpose is we want to enable corporate recruiting to now get actively involved in contingent labor purchasing. So, you know, a little tagline that we use is don't call an agency become your own agency to our buyers. And what it's saying is that corporate recruiting has typically been courted off from contingent labor purchasing, right? But they're great recruiters and we can provide them technology to bypass that external outsourcing of contingent labor purchasing, insource it and do it faster, better, cheaper, because we can remove a lot of the initial cost structures that are come along with the third party agency, because we have a thinner operating model, because the technology is doing so much of that component. And then we can also offer consumptive based discounts and rebates based on using the platform over time. So, if you take all that away, guys, we're an e-commerce business. That's how we look at it. You know, it's really interesting. I had a conversation yesterday with someone who's been in technology and pretty much been a technologist most of his career. And he said the same thing. He said, hey, these platforms, these gig economy platforms are actually just the next step of e-commerce. We're adding modules like interviewing, like compliance, and you're plugging in these technology modules on top of an existing massive, you know, e-commerce system. So it's, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a theme here, our pattern. Yeah, there's a pattern here. Second person who says it. Yeah, you can kind of weave it in. And again, it's like it goes back to we live in a world today to where it's such a low touch experience for consuming anything, right? And so we now see that buyers and sellers want to connect faster, quicker, more meaningfully. We're creating an environment that takes price ambiguity out, puts it up the front of the decision. So even big companies now are having to put salaries in job descriptions. Salaries in the state of California, it's required, more states are requiring it, right? And, you know, if you're thinking about, you know, promoting your opportunity to a talent, like our talent experience is I just got a notification on a mobile device, XYZ company has this job, it's 12 month contract, this was going to pay me. And I can now communicate immediately back. So this is not like a job board environment or a where you're kind of engaging a resume that's in there in perpetuity. And maybe they're checking and maybe not, we're connecting directly with what's very important to the talent. And then vice versa, what's also important to the buyer because what we like what we see evidence of is that when our buyers put jobs in the marketplace, their recruiters are going to typically prioritize jobs that they're focusing on based on their hiring managers, which is driving their outbound bidding activity. But what's awesome is those jobs that they're not focusing on, the talent's filling for them, because the talent's bidding those jobs there, you're seeing them every match to those jobs in the marketplace. So as a buyer side, you know, employer that's looking to bring in contingent labor, you've got a system that's working bidirectionally for you. It's always on, it's always filling for you to a degree. And you've got the power to accept, decline or engage to based on what you want from there. Right. So those are elements that, you know, part of, you know, I was talking to, I had a podcast on Monday as well along some of our topics. And one of the questions was around our marketing strategy, right? And I said, Well, listen, into a certain degree, we have a similar problem Uber had back in the day, which is Uber had to convince us to get in the car with a stranger, right, which we were told never to do as a child. Say Airbnb, go stay in someone else's house, wearing somebody's clothes, wearing someone else's clothes, right. And so all of these companies that had, were thinking about disrupting business models, not using technology to do a task faster, but a business model ran into some visceral changes that we as consumers had to think about. Now it's every day, right. So one of the things that we're having to do is educate corporate recruiting infrastructure to go, you now can have the ability to build your own contingent workforce, build elasticity in your workforce, faster, cheaper, better. Does it mean that, and again, it doesn't mean that you're going to disconnect from your third party agencies, but you are now having the ability to build against that and to be able to create a prime capability for that. And so a lot of these talent platforms are, I would say, have elements of converging the VMS world of 20 years ago, elements of converging the MSP world from, you know, this, come along with that. You mentioned some words, MSPs and VMSs, and you worked at a large staffing agency. Why aren't the staffing agency, and so about four years ago, I was here. Yeah. And there was some technology and there was the up works. But in four years, I've seen more and more of the atomized pieces of that journey be digitized, whether it's the compliance with the APIs, whether it's the interviewing and all these things have sort of become platforms of their own to make that more efficient. Why aren't staffing agencies disrupting themselves? Because that was the thing when I come and I look at this, and I talk to a lot of staffing agencies and you live there too. Why aren't you just at your same old job doing this exact same thing? That's a great question. It can be a controversial question to ask in the realm of this industry, right? It's been around for 70 years, you know, since its inception by manpower, I believe, and Kelly services, right? And I think one of the challenges is the inherent culture of those businesses being heavy, human capital driven, you know, and the relationship that has been vital in nature to connect basically between the sales and the recruiting component. And what I see a lot happening is these large organizations are looking at ways to automate components to lower the cost of recruiting through technology. There's a lot of great products out there that can plug into, you know, products that the staffing organizations are using to accelerate that. But to fully adopt this type of model that, you know, we're moving to market with skill gigs means you generally have to cannibalize a lot of what built you to a degree, right? And so I'm not ushering in by any way saying that those large mega companies, we all know their names, are not going to adapt, right? I mean, we look at evolution of technology. I give an example, you know, when there's a very long history of companies that did not adapt, because they just tore the sears down by my house. Exactly. It's kind of this reminder of, it's a reminder, a great analogy. And like, listen, I think there will be some that don't, right? And I think those that do will, you know, we saw this in the software world when we moved out of, you know, our companies, you know, a company's data center to the cloud, you know, there are software companies on our rounding more because they couldn't move their product to the cloud, right? And then the big players obviously did change their business model completely. You know, they deal with, you know, cloud consumption now, not licensing of their product in a data center. So I think there's going to be this evolution over the next decade or so, right? And where companies that are been historically heavy driven through the relationship cell, the relationship recruit will adapt in ways to where they will follow their customer's demand. But as we all know, if you create an environment to where your producer, meaning your talent, is choosing a new form or way of working in this decentralized world we live in of work now, particularly digital talent being the most decentralized form of work, work anywhere from, you know, on your terms and at your pace, then companies are going to have to think about how do I engage that? Do I engage that through the traditional large staffing MSP VMS world? Or do I now take back control of that, use technology to directly access that talent and to do it at my pace where I can control my costs, I can actually build a redeployable virtual bench because when you buy through the marketplace, you retain them even when they go off contract because they are part of your environment. The interesting thing from the keynote yesterday when Heather was talking, companies are going to have a choice because Gen Z is, you're a digital native. I'm a Gen Xer and kind of in this in-between space. I remember life before the internet. I'm a Gen Xer too. Like I thank you for the compliment. But when you look at Gen, their expectations, I mean, I look at my young, like they're just not going to operate that way. They're not and the buyers won't either. And you're not going to get good time. You might be able to fill, but you're not going to fill with the high quality because those people are going to go to the place where there's least friction. Yeah. I was in a breakout yesterday and the staffing platform was in the lowest quadrant of adoption for it. I'm like, I totally expect that to be there today. It's there today. And what's in the upper quadrant of staffing companies adapting to the change is all the things we talked about. Plugging in technology to streamline and automate certain functions that was handled by a recruiter or a salesperson more indirectly. So that's, I think, where the big players are today. And it's like there's plenty of products, there's a roomful of products over there that I think are going to be very interesting to them. But ultimately, there's going to be a fissure at some point. And I think you're going to see more adoption of staffing platforms as a service. They may be focused in on a, with specificity on certain skills. We're building on a broader set of those skills. And they can also bring some other things. The analogy I always that makes sense for me when I'm trying to understand change and disruption is what happened with Elon Musk who had no experience in building cars. And there was a YouTube video I watched once for a Ford engineer. And he was looking at the test and he goes, I would never have designed, he was just going part by part of the things that didn't make any sense from a car manufacturer manufacturer's perspective. And I asked the question because I used to have this debate all the time. Like, are staffing companies going to transform or is somebody just going to come in and change? And I think it's because it's human capital, it's different. I think there'll be tons of platforms that come in and change. Yeah, I think so. I think that we're right on the cusp. And I think, Barry made a comment in one of his breakouts that VMS was the disruptor 20 years ago. I think it's clear that platforms like what we're doing with skill gigs is the next 20-year disruptor. And we're early in. There's not a lot of companies out there that are doing this. And then also a lot of companies that are doing it to a degree uniquely the way we are driving engagement. Well, there's more. I can tell you five years ago, it was almost none outside of the big brand names that you know of Upwork and Fire. Now, there's more and more marketplaces. Brad, I want to thank you for your time. Again, apologize for being a little late today. Absolutely. It's been a pleasure. It's been great to meet you and I hope you enjoyed the rest of the show. Yeah, I will. Thank you, Paul. Appreciate it.
