The Talent Life-Cycle

Episode Transcript

SB S1 E22 – Jennifer Seith

Kelly: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Welcome to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. I am your host Kelly Ryan Bailey. Each week, I chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful, how they develop those skills and their innovative approaches to improving skills based, hiring and learning around the world.

My guest today is Jennifer Seith. Jennifer is the senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Ronstadt US. She leads Ronstadt’s talent strategy and innovation team, where she is responsible for creating technological solutions to innovate the company’s talent acquisition straps.

She plays an integral role in driving candidate acquisition and engagement, employment, branding, and recruitment technology systems for Ronstadt. As a respected thought leader, jennifer brings [00:01:00] over 20 years of industry experience creating technological solutions that solve talent acquisition challenges at a global.

She resides in Atlanta, Georgia, and holds a masters in business administration from Brown University, as well as a master’s in business administration with a focus on entrepreneurship from the IE Business School in Madrid. Jen, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jennifer: Thank you for having me, Kelly. It’s good to be here.

Kelly: Such a pleasure. The interesting thing about this, and I can’t even remember if I told you this, Jen, that I actually started out and became passionate about skills, because I worked for a subsidiary of Ronstadt in New York City.

Jennifer: It all comes full circle. Doesn’t it?

Kelly: It always does. I got to see that inside of you of like, what was happening with hiring managers and what was going on with the hiring process. And back then it was, 15 ish years ago, the group it was called Sapphire Technology if you remember that one. We were [00:02:00] really focused on IT. We were doing skill-based hiring, even though that wasn’t what was really happening. It was just a manual process back in the day. So you guys have always been really on the forefront.

Jennifer: Well, it’s like so many things, you do it by rote or by gut and instinct, and then all of a sudden there’s an academic name attached to it. Product is now a thing.

Kelly: So true. Well, Jen, I gave a couple of highlights of what you’ve accomplished, which is amazing, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about what has led you here to Ronstadt, a little bit more about your journey.

Jennifer: Oh, my goodness. Well, that could take six months. It always scares me a little bit when you hear your bio talked about, and they’re like 20 plus years of experience and I’m like, I’m not that old.

Kelly: I like to just say experienced.

Jennifer: Wise is the other word. So it’s exciting. I’ve been at Ronstadt for about three years and I’ve been in the HR technology space for over 20. [00:03:00] Started out at an applicant tracking system that became People Fluent.

And my job at People Fluent and then into CareerBuilder was really learning the HR technology systems and how recruiters utilize them. So, very much to your point about how you did skills-based hiring, if you think about a recruitment process and what the technologies can offer you on, how do you conduct a search? Or how the technology actually matches people to jobs?

All of that was being talked about 20 years ago as the ETSS and the job boards started becoming the thing. So I go back to those days, spent many years, 14 plus at CareerBuilder. Learned a ton. Launched an industry changing, I believe, construct called Talent Network.

Which is conceptually the idea that a talent can just drop off their basic information and be matched to jobs always on. And basically engaging them to come back, which actually had a lot to do with [00:04:00] skills behind the scenes. We just didn’t talk about it.

 When you think about matching algorithm skills are a critical component of that. So I came to Ronstadt about three years ago. Super exciting role. Really looking across all of our lines of business and all of the different places that we try to find talent and how to acquire and attract retain, redeploy them and really started digging into the technologies we were using and started trying to narrow it down.

The exciting thing for me about coming to Ronstadt outside of things like the job boards, if you will, is that you can see the full life cycle of the talent. So you acquire them, but then you get to hire them and then you get to redeploy them. And so being able to leverage technology in that scenario full life cycle was really what drew me in.

Kelly: And I think that’s the interesting part about all of this, to be honest, like knowing what we were dealing with 15 years ago and hearing your description from a technology perspective, that was really like the in-between piece that we needed to be able to scale this, especially for [00:05:00] large staffing firms or for large employers, because there’s just no way to manually go through that process.

Like we had to enable all of that technology to be able to help us and assist us.

Jennifer: Well, you do. And I mean, any anyone that is watching this or any of our friends who have ever done recruiting know the old Boolean search string.

Kelly: I was totally just thinking that.

Jennifer: How long can they possibly be? But at the end of the day, that Boolean search string goes back to, you’re looking for skills. You are looking for certain components of talent that that search can actually provide for you. So now of course we have the academic rigor around AI and machine learning and neural networks, all of those things. But back then, it was doing the same thing just on a little different level.

Kelly: Yeah, definitely.

So tell me too, because the transgression of your career is really interesting to me. Just because like the work that you mentioned with Career Builder and that particular tool, and now bringing that to [00:06:00] Ronstadt, like I’d love to actually just keep on the personal side for one moment and maybe talk a little bit about, you know enough about skills to be able to say, like, what really the skills that have helped you along your career?

Jennifer: That’s a phenomenal question. And it’s so funny. Someone yesterday asked me to sort of give an all about me description. And when you have to put your entire life on a slide, you really have to think about what actually is important. Following the boy, didn’t make it on this slide.

But when I think about it, it’s soft skills. And people are talking about that so much more now again, that academic conversation. But it’s the soft skills. I would not have been able to learn technology. I was not a technologist. There’s nothing in my being that knows how a fax machine works.

But I learned technology because I had relationship building skills with people in technology. And when you learn how to communicate, and when you learn how to build relationships, [00:07:00] keep relationships, speak to different types of people in different types of roles, the soft skills make all the difference in the world.

So none of the academics in my life, even though I love them, critical thinking skills from your liberal arts degrees are obviously critical. Technology skills. I studied furniture. I studied art history. I studied English literature, but those things taught me how to think. And they taught me how more than anything to build relationships as I go.

Kelly: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I love to hear these answers. It’s a similar thread that I’m hearing throughout this podcast series is that it always ends up going back to soft skills. And it is very curious because typical, like what I would say formal education, does give you a wonderful foundation. But I wonder if too, like what you described, even though that gives you a wonderful foundation, do you agree that you feel like you have to be out there in the [00:08:00] world actually using them for those to really kind of grasp for you and make sense?

Jennifer: You absolutely do. And I have a young son and I was talking to someone in this skills industry, if you will, a couple of weeks ago. And we both said that it would be incredibly beneficial for our children and to work in the restaurant industry, the hospitality industry, or the grocery stores. Their first jobs in high school and our minds, should be going to work in a restaurant.

You’ve got to learn how to serve people. You’ve got to learn customer service, you’ve got to learn basically negotiation strategy. All of those things you learn on the job when you’re young. And those are the types of industries that can prepare you.

Kelly: I completely agree. And the interesting thing now too, is that we are seeing this huge amount of unemployment, especially geared towards those industries.

And I’m sure that you are going to agree with what I’m about to say, which is that these people that have these fantastic foundational skills [00:09:00] make for wonderful employees across the board. And it is so surprising to me, why it is so hard. Because maybe they don’t have the right degree. Right. When we bring this all back down to what their unique gifts are, that they aren’t immediately seen as potential wonderful employees.

It’s still mind blowing to me because to me, I look and I see like, wow, they have every foundational skill that you need. Maybe there’s a little bit of like technical up-skilling, but for certain roles, but they’d make a fantastic sales person. Like the list goes on.

Jennifer: Well, and I don’t want to just blame technology, but there is definitely a role that technology plays in that.

And there’s definitely a role that our, when you think about recruiting the process and the dependency that we have on the technology plays in that. Because when people like that, when you, for example, we have customers right now who are looking for hundreds upon thousands of call center representatives.

I mean, everyone’s [00:10:00] shopping from home. Call center representatives, customer service, the hospitality talent are the perfect types of talent for those roles. Technology screens them out automatically because they don’t see that they have that experience. And so you have, I believe, a responsibility to make that change.

But you literally have to go back to old school recruiting tactics.

That’s what’s happening right now. And it’s not that we don’t think chatbots and everything else are the best thing going, they are. But in a time like this, it’s a combination you have to use.

Kelly: So I feel like I have a question on both sides of this. How would the person that is looking for that type of role, get through these systems or what are the best strategies for them to do to be successful? And then also on the other side, what can we do to help with this technology? I mean, I know broadly what, but I mean [00:11:00] right now in the interim, because like this seems to be a huge problem that unfortunately leaves a lot of people suffering without work and on unemployement.

Jennifer: It does. And it’s interesting. I heard a new trend recently that I want to dispel on your platform. There’s a new trend out there that recruiters are telling talent, not to put their addresses and/or their location on their application. And that’s a really dangerous trend when you think about the fact that technology generally matches people to jobs based on their geography.

So the number one keyword search for talent, when they go to Google and type in things like jobs in Atlanta, it always has in Atlanta on it, right. Or in Phoenix or whatever that may be because everyone searches for jobs based on geo. When you don’t put your location, even if it’s just your zip code in your resume, the matching technology through what you applied, knocks you out because it’s matching you based on geography.[00:12:00]

So that’s not even a skill-based thing. That’s a very practical, make sure that your location is on there because you’ll be kicked out.

Kelly: I’m really glad you said this because I think a lot of people are doing that because they don’t want inherent bias. And I mean, there’s talk about not having your name on there anymore, but right now today, the systems as they are like, this is a beautiful future view that we all have, but you’re correct right now, the systems as they are, that’s not something you want to do as a candidate.

Jennifer: That’s correct. And I agree with the inherent bias conversation, I actually, to some extent, agree with taking your name off. However, the technology that is in place is not the technology that we’re thinking about. And the vast majority of organizations are using 10, 15, 8 year old technologies that don’t function that way. And the bias mitigation component hasn’t been built into those.

Kelly: Exactly.

Thank you for pointing that out. Cause I think that’s really important.

Jennifer: Absolutely. And I think to your other question when we [00:13:00] think about how. Hold on. Let me go back. I think I’ve lost the other question. What was the other question?

Kelly: The other question was, we were talking about first how the systems that they are today are causing these sort of hospitality folks to basically not match up to customer service jobs. And so we talked first about what the candidate can do and then also on the reverse side, what we can do from a technology perspective in the interim, because we know there’s big changes that we want to make. Just it takes awhile.

Jennifer: I appreciate that. I was getting very excited about the talent side. When we think about what we can do on our side of the fence, outside of just go in and buy a new technologies, because candidly, they’re not there yet. When we talk about the need for one global skills ontology, this is a soap box you and I share.

You need to be able to have a talent who is a customer service person, be a customer service person across all different organizations. That doesn’t exist yet. [00:14:00] And the fact of the matter is the technologies, as we know them have got to be changed. But since they’re not being changed, we do have to look at truly looking at who that person is on paper.

But also who that person could become. You have to look at, you think about a parser that looks at a resume and pulls out all the keywords. Those keywords need to be filled with the types of skills you’re looking for. And if it’s soft skills, then let’s figure out how to make sure that a recruiter is trained to read a resume, to understand the soft skills that could be there.

And I think a lot of recruiters are obviously. But when you get into high volume recruiting, those things can be missed sometimes.

Kelly: That’s a really good point. I’m actually making notes because I’m like, Ooh. So recruiters being trained. Now, this leads to so many other questions for me because I’m like, man, this is it.

I’m definitely someone who was like, let’s figure out a way immediately to start to help this. And I realized sometimes when we say these [00:15:00] things, they seem like huge sweeping statements. Like, how the heck are we going to train all these recruiters to do this? But I wonder if maybe you’ve had some thoughts around, well, are there ways to do this quickly and broadly?

So that again, when I think about the technology, so someone can do the best thing that they can do to make their resume seem more appealing to the system itself because once it gets through that system and it gets to a person, that’s sort of like step one. And then step two is making sure that that person, that recruiter knows what to look for.

How do we get to the recruiters then? How do we help them?

Jennifer: There’s two ways to do that. And I mean, Ronstadt has obviously different ball game than some corporate functions because we have so many recruiters, but I think there’s two ways to do it. There there’s an onus on the table to think about including skills in the resume, right.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong, and I love it, to have a section that says skills. And skills don’t have to be things like Excel usage [00:16:00] or Java. They need to be Java developer and things like strong communication skills, strong presentation skills. And we used to do that 20 years.

Kelly: I know, right. We have always had this section.

Jennifer: We had a section. But we’re going back because what will happen is the technology will pull that out. And I think that a good place or a good way for talent to think of what are my skills? It’s hard to sit down and write out what you’re good at. Like if someone said, are you good at presentation skills?

I’d be like, sure. But I don’t want to put that on a resume. It’s important that you do. Another good way to think about it for the recruiter side of the fence, is that recruiters need to understand inherently what a role can lead to. It’s kind of like what a translation is. Bad example, but I think applicable when you think about military occupation codes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 could equal a, I dunno, I haven’t been on military codes, but something like a data analyst [00:17:00] or something like that.

What skills are implicit with the data analysts? How do you translate a military role to a civilian role? You have to do the same thing on the normal everyday side of the fence.

If you’re a customer service rep, you implicitly have these skills. If you’re a restaurant worker, you implicitly have these skills. And as long as recruiters are thinking about those implicit skills, they’ll be able to see through the words on the paper. And that goes into a little bit of the classification and technical ontology and all that sort of thing.

But until the technology can do it, we have to be the classification.

Kelly: It’s so true. This is actually just extremely helpful. I’ll give that I work with Emsi and the reason I’m making notes right now is because I am working with a partner on creating a skills based resume builder.

And this is the thing, I also work on these like futuristic ideas of a learner employment record. [00:18:00] But today, the way the technology is and this is why I’m like, you’re verifying the things that I inherently know and I’m struggling to communicate, which is like today, the way the technology works, we have to play to that.

Like, we can’t move all the way to the future because that’s not there yet.

Jennifer: Well, and it’s unfortunate that, you and I are both innovators, and there’s an unfortunate, but there’s a fortunate component of it because as you start playing to the current technology, you start seeing the gaps and then you can start identifying the gaps and trying to go for them.

They’re very, very large gaps, as you and I know. Like again, the global apology. But there are also gaps that can be closed. A strange example, but at Ronstadt, we were working through the other day when you post a job as a recruiter, what’s the job title? Now, that sounds pretty basic.

But the job title that you post externally is not only critical to SEO, it’s critical to the neural networks and the AI and [00:19:00] all the algorithms that Google and who else are using. And those job titles have implicit skills. And they also can have implicit bias. So when you start looking at something as simple as the dropdown box that a recruiter has to select a job title from, you’ve gotta be very cautious about what type of talent you’re going to acquire and that’s something that you can play to now.

Kelly: And it’s so true. And actually, this is something else that I’m working on. We’re going to have to continue this discussion later cause I can’t even let this cat out of the bag yet.

Jennifer: Are we bringing wine?

Kelly: Yeah, we’ll bring it. It’s a good one. But I laugh all the time because like my job title is just not a norm.

It’s not a job title you see all the time, maybe someday like evangelists in terms of job titles will be a little bit more common. But right now, if someone was to try to search something based on my job title, like not going to happen. Marketing ninja, all the cool things that we want to have out there, which are great. From a system perspective, it’s [00:20:00] really difficult then to make connections and to get through.

Jennifer: Well, and I’ll give you an interesting example. One of the reasons that we create a talent at work at Career Builder was to solve that exact problem. It was an example that I still love to this day.

We had a customer looking to hire 600 reminiscence care coordinators. Lovely name. And it’s a very genteel job descript title. The job description was looking for registered nurses with dementia experience.

Kelly: That has nothing to do with that title.

Jennifer: But they were looking for people to go work in reminiscence care or memory care.

What happened was the client came to us and said, we can’t find these talent. How do we do it? Well, the job title was the problem. The implicit skills that a registered nurse requires weren’t anywhere in that description. So the jobs weren’t being picked up. That’s when we started looking at how does a job title credit translate?

What are the implicit skills and what does it [00:21:00] mean to denote or translate if you will, what the talent they are versus what they can be? Or what they will be.

Kelly: And when you talk about this translation though, it’s so interesting. In our world we hear about the skills gap all the time. I would argue that it’s actually, there is a skills gap, so I’m not going to say that there’s not, I just mean, I think the communication gap is much wider.

Jennifer: I agree. A hundred percent. And it’s the translation gap. The lack of sort of employability across companies.

Kelly: Completely. We could talk about this forever, but I really want to dig in a little bit on some of the innovation work that you’re doing at Ronstadt because I am just really thrilled to hear some of these things and, and whatever you’re comfortable sharing Jen. I’ve always felt like, again, going back to my experience many, many years ago and what I’ve been working on since then,[00:22:00] staffing firms in my mind get a bad rap. Because we were doing skill that skills based hiring and learning right from the beginning.

And I think there’s a lot of experience that you all have and the ability to work with such huge numbers of employers that give you this amazing purview into the world of this.

Jennifer: Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more and I’m relatively new to the staffing industry, but I felt that from day one. Because when you realize that we’re putting a hundred thousand people to work a week, that is implicitly happening.

And we are looking at talent and putting them in the right roles to make sure that they are in a role that they can perform in and succeed. So what I’m excited about and what I realized when I first started at Ronstadt was we had a need. We needed to do some normalization and classification and all those big words.

But now that we’ve done it, we’re able to really look across our databases of talent and decide who can become someone else and be able to think about their [00:23:00] future employability. And I honestly, and Ronstadt does too as well, we believe it’s our job. I mean, we believe it is our responsibility as the employer of that talent.

So when you have that kind of volume, it’s very difficult to create a massive scale. So we are starting a little bit smaller if you will, and focusing on the talent that we believe that we can help find the next jobs based on gaining new skills, peer redeployment. So if a talent works for us, and again, it’s very different across different lines of business. So if you’re a warehouse worker, you may work for us for a couple of weeks, but if you’re a technology worker, you may work with us for a year.

When you start looking at the differences, you start figuring out how can we help those talents skill to learn new skills, to either be redeployed in a current or similar role, he hasn’t gained new skills at a higher wage, or actually find a new role, especially with the COVID. And [00:24:00] so I’ve sort of taken it on. We’re looking at it globally. I think it’s incredibly exciting, but we’ve been talking with, or working with a lot of our technology talent.

And so we’re looking at our technology talent and we’ve created as part of a partnership with Udemy, six different learning paths that they can go through.

So things like AI and machine learning, full stack development, all the certifications. This is the thing, all of the certification tracks. And we’re saying to them, if you’re within about 120 days of redeployment with us, we’re going to offer you the ability to skill and go in and take all the classes you want to towards the most in demand jobs that are available in the marketing thing.

And so when we did that, I think the thing that excited me the most was we were very targeted with one goal. We wanted it to work. We wanted to make sure that there was adoption and that we saw results versus just throwing out a program out there and saying, Hey, you can take a free [00:25:00] class. And what we’ve done is we’ve seen a 50% adoption rate, 50.

And I mean, I was over the moon. 50% adoption rate, and these talent are literally spending 5.6 hours on average taking classes. I got math right here. In six weeks, they had taken over 2,700 hours of coursework. And so what we found was we were very targeted about the people we approached.

We didn’t send an email or we didn’t target the whole world. We said these types of talent, who we know are looking for these types of jobs and need the skills to become those people, lets offer it to them and see if they take advantage of it. And so that’s really our goal is to be very targeted. See how we can help people gain new skills for the next thing in their career.

And then watch them go into the next role that they have.

Kelly: This is amazing. And so for [00:26:00] people that are not familiar with how Ronstadt or staffing firms work, I just want to break this down for a moment. So when you say your people, you mean that you’re employing consultants that are then being deployed to potential employers?

Jennifer: Yep.

Kelly: Okay. Just so that people understand that. Cause sometimes I know if you’re not familiar, it just might get confusing. And then when you say you targeted these people, you used the technologies that you have internally to understand where these people are at, what roles they were looking for, and you implicitly looked at specific skills that they needed to potentially develop, so you knew exactly audience you were going after, and that was definitely technology enabled.

Jennifer: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Because that was the group of people that we saw that had the most interest in learning new skills, especially during COVID. They were working from home, like there were a lot of socioeconomic factors involved as well.

But when you look at the types of [00:27:00] talent that we had in our databases that were currently working for us, and when we say working for us, they’re employees of Ronstadt, but they’re placed at another organization. And looked at the types of jobs that we knew that they could become, or that they would want to work at next.

That was where we focussed.

Kelly: That’s amazing now. And I’m also thinking, because we talked earlier about how soft skills are so important in this. And we are just now talking about technical skills. So I have a quick question for you is, have you thought this far in advance yet that you were thinking of like what also soft skills we can bring to these people or is it going to be super focused on technical?

Jennifer: It is super focused on technical, but I’ll tell you a secret. So the vast, or I should say this, the number two most used or taken course in this group has been presentation skills for Techies.

So what we saw was, as we created the [00:28:00] learning paths, you have Python skills and all of these hard skills. But we’re seeing people, they have access to take whatever they want, and we’re seeing people take communication skills and presentation skills and classes, and Udemy’s got a great base of this, classes that actually teach very tactical technical people, how to communicate.

And those are the courses that were added to the learning path so that they could take advantage of those.

Kelly: That’s super exciting. The next question that I have thinking about all of these people out there that are on unemployment. Are you guys always looking for additional people to bring on?

Because I could assume that there would be so many people that are like, wow, I would love to be working with an organization like Ronstadt that really cares about where I’m going.

Jennifer: Absolutely. And that’s where the technical component of this was really just sort of the first step. The next step that we want to look at is, what are the next most in demand jobs that we can help people skill into?

And [00:29:00] there are some areas that don’t necessarily require a lot of skills, it’s more soft skills. But when you think about courses, there are great courses around customer service skills and negotiation and diffusing difficult situations that will help people, as our example earlier, who may have been from the hospitality industry skill into an online customer service type of role.

So our next step is going to be looking at other areas, but we also want to be very cognizant of the fact that in this current economy, yes, not everybody has time to sit there and take a course. Those are all things that you have to consider.

Kelly: That makes sense. And I realize you said when we did this, we wanted it to be effective.

So I completely understand, you want to make sure that you’re not just throwing this out there, that the audience that you’re targeting is really going to utilize this and move forward with this. I appreciate that. I can’t wait to see what, like further results will look like as you continue to embark upon this cause like you said, it’s [00:30:00] just one small piece. That’s really fascinating.

Jennifer: Well, I think pulling it through is the next piece of that. So all of this is great. The talent are loving it. They’re learning new skills. Our hope is that we’ll watch them get new jobs. The other component is, as we talk technology, understanding what skills they’ve gained. Adding it to their profile so that then we can match them to higher paying jobs in the future.

And as we think about the manufacturing and logistics group and the professionals groups, and a lot of other areas, you really have to think about what skills do they need and where do they want to go?

And we did a trial pre-COVID with our manufacturing talent. And we found that most of them were taking courses in technology skills, and that was not something we anticipated. Right. We anticipated that maybe they would take supply chain management or, and you start thinking about, okay, these are human beings.

They’re not numbers on paper. And they may want to become somebody else [00:31:00] someday. So that is an understanding that we have to go through as we go through this.

Kelly: It’s a good point because the other piece of this is like, how do you understand the wants of those employees as well? Because at that that’s like a whole other area. You can throw at them potential upskilling courses, but is that the direction they want to take?

Like, is there something that you’re working on to try to understand what they’re interested in as well?

Jennifer: I think we’ll get there to be honest with you. We have, as you can imagine, so many talent in so many areas. And we do have to get the technology in place, but I think we’ll get there.

Kelly: Yeah. This is so fascinating. So what else?

Well, that’s

Jennifer: keeping me busy right now. Our next step, in our relationship with Udemy and a lot of the other skilling vendors as we think about content providers is really being able to understand what’s next. I hate to say this, but tech is easy. It’s very easy to say [00:32:00] Python’s the new language, people need to learn Python.

Soft skills are not easy. Basic understanding of how to move, like we said, warehouse workers into a more white collar role, or if that’s even an option is a question. The other thing that I’m beginning to be really fascinated by is the sheer lack of training and educational opportunities for, I don’t know how to describe it, but for blue collar work.

There’s no online classes in forklift driving, there’s no online classes in warehouse work. There was no online classes in electrical manufacturing or engineering. There’s a few, but not at scale. That’s where the majority of the jobs are right now.

So yes, on the job training is critical, but what can we augment that with? And is it just that we all augment with soft skills, if you will, or are there hard technical skills that we can augment that population with? And that’s something I’m interested in.

Kelly: That is really [00:33:00] fascinating. I’m going to have to think on that. There’s a few things that I’ve seen lately. Like some, some of the new, again, I tend to think more futuristic. I realized we have to think of like what we can do now, but there’s some really amazing technologies I’ve seen that would unlock the ability to create online experiences, especially for workers in that particular area.

But I have to, I’m going to have to noodle on like, I agree with you, but what are the things that we can do now to help that particular audience? Because you’re right.

Jennifer: Yeah. And the bigger question candidly is, does that particular audience want to be helped? At the end of the day, it may not be that us giving somebody a class online is going to change their life.

And that’s what we have to think about. I worked in a restaurant when I was in high school, if I had taken one online class, would it have changed my life? I’m not sure. So there’s different ways to think about it. And today’s economy and COVID and everything else that we’re in right now, it makes all of that a little bit more complicated.

Kelly: It’s very [00:34:00] true. Anyone in our audience, if they have interesting information to share along those lines, please get in contact with me. I agree like this is something that could be really interesting. So Jen, we’re coming up on the end of our time. I just want to give you one opportunity and I’ll leave it as a completely open-ended question, which is always a little difficult, but I’m sure you can handle it.

What would be your last parting words to our audience? And it could be anything from the personal side to what you’re doing at Ronstadt.

Jennifer: That is a tough one because that’s like saying, tell me about yourself.

Kelly: Exactly. It’s the age old awful interview question.

Jennifer: I’m very impressed.

I think really what we talked about earlier as critical, because as much as I love to think about the future, as well as you do, we’re in a situation right now where we all have a responsibility to help make sure that not only ourselves, but all of [00:35:00] our workers and our talent and friends and family are employable.

And if you don’t understand the current technologies that are in place, you can sort of overshoot the idea of making everything futuristic. And if we can focus on right now in this economy with the jobs that are available, helping people understand how to apply for jobs, how to get their resumes together, how to articulate the skills that they have so that they can be understood, we’ll be in a much better place for helping people migrate around to other roles.

But the same applies to recruiters as well. And like I said, it’s our responsibility as staffing agencies, just like it is any other employer to make sure that the people hiring on our behalf are understanding what implicite skills are and how they actually fit into people’s people’s daily lives.

So that, that would be sort of my parting words is, we have a responsibility, we have the tools, [00:36:00] but we also have to make sure that we’re realistic about functionality and realistic about feasibility right now, so that we can make a change in this economy right now.

Kelly: I absolutely love that. Very now and practical and something that I think will help a lot of people.

Jen, thank you so much for joining us again. This was really a pleasure. I know that we’re going to continue conversations, but if anyone does want to keep in touch with Jen, you can find her on LinkedIn at Jennifer Seith. That’s S E I T H.

Obviously Ronstadt is available@ronstadtusa.com and probably there on all the social networks. I can imagine. Great organization, honestly, I think you guys do fantastic work. If you guys are not familiar or thinking that staffing firms have a different play, you’re wrong, take a peak. I promise you.

And thank you all for listening into Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. If you guys would be so kind to submit a [00:37:00] review, offer some feedback, I would greatly appreciate it. And you can find me Kelly Ryan Bailey on all of the various social channels as well. I hope you have a wonderful day and we’ll see you next time.

Thanks Jen.

Jennifer: Thank you, Kelly.