Storytelling about Flux with Nick Ionita
Welcome to the Use Case Podcast, episode 116. This week we have storytelling about Flux with Nick Ionita. During this episode, Nick and I talk about how practitioners make the business case or the use case for purchasing Flux.
Nick is an expert in all things tech and internal mobility. His passion to keep people performing and growing while propelling businesses and careers forward really comes through during the podcast.
Give the show a listen and please let me know what you think.
Thanks, William
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William: 00:24
Ladies and gentlemen. This is William Tincup and you are listening to the Use Case podcast. Today, we have Nick from Flux and we’re going to be learning all about his firm and what they do and how they do it. So Nick, would you do us a favor and introduce both yourself and Flux?
Nick: 00:41
Sure. Thanks a million for having me on the show. I’m a big fan, as I mentioned earlier. So just one of those long-time listener, first-time caller moments. I’m Nick Ionita. I’m an engineer, turned product manager, turned startup CEO, turned entrepreneur. I’m currently the co-founder and CEO of Flux. And Flux is a resourcing platform that connects individual career development to work needs within your company. So I think it is more commonly referred to as a talent marketplace, but I think that term can be a little limiting given all that’s involved for employees, we act like a personalized crew GPS, helping uncover next steps of their company, as well as development opportunities to upskill and close gaps in the form of things like flex time projects, rotations, and assignments, and informal mentorships. This is usually a very disconnected experience across external job boards, learning systems programs on company internets, where the company’s made the investment, but the load is really on the employee to figure it out.
Nick: 01:36
And I think for many it’s just easier to leave in advance than to stay. We knit all that together and deliver it in an experience that really treats the employee like the customer.
Nick: 01:45
And for management, we provide the answer to who is here, who can do this, anytime at work need, full-time or part-time arises. And we provide tools to do this in a fair and consistent way where every employee is considered for every opportunity, of course, respecting company policies and eligibility criteria and things like that. So on the back of all of this builds a massive talent data set around what a workforce can do, wants to do and has done, which can feed more strategic workforce planning exercises and we work with some amazing partners from high-birth companies like Stripe to global enterprises like Uber and my background is in enterprise software so I always like to think of things in those terms.
Nick: 02:24
So if recruiting is sales to get employees into your company, I like to think of us as customer success to keep them happy, growing and contributing to the business in the most meaningful ways possible and kind of origin story with this… Flux really came out of a really personal experience in need myself and my two co-founders had. We were early employees at a startup that became a high growth company and then later through acquisition became part of Comcast and so it was this crazy ride from 20 people to over a thousand and then ultimately a part of a huge global fortune 50 company where our own journeys were going from the first individual contributors in our functions to execs leading those teams, which are really large at the time. And I’m sure some folks have experienced this, but when you’re small as an employee, as a manager, you have a line of sight to everything and everyone wears lots of hats.
Nick: 03:18
And I think great company cultures can connect the work the company needs done with the career development of their employees. And this can lead people on paths they may not have seen themselves taking. Either because they didn’t know about it in many cases or in many more cases, they were afraid to raise their hand for it. And I think the three of us and many others really benefited from that and as a result, people stayed, they had career defining experiences. I was there for seven years. Those guys were there for nine or 10 and you did the same and it was this really beautiful thing and it set this bar for us around what building something great and lasting meant. And then we became part of this massive company where I was hiring for product managers all the time, constantly feeling like I was behind.
Nick: 04:04
I’m sure that’s what a lot of people listening feel like these days but we had all the resources in the world, but somehow I was using LinkedIn to figure out who existed internally that was outside my line of sight and in any kind of product roadmap exercise, I’d always present two plans. One was the one I knew we could do, given engineering and more importantly, recruiting throughput and the other, which was really what we needed to do to hit plan and they were never the same and it felt crazy not to know who was here, who could do something, or in many cases be developed to a sense it was far enough out and the default just was always external recruiting and I think as a manager, people can relate to this. One of the most frustrating conversations you can ever have is with someone taking a job elsewhere. You’ve got that awkward one-on-one and they didn’t know there was a role available internally.
Nick: 04:54
And at that point it’s usually too late and so I started working with my co-founder Max, who was running a huge customer success organization on moving folks from there into product roles and it became a wild success. I was facing the challenge of staffing a growing team with a highly competitive role in highly competitive markets like San Francisco, New York, and he had an extremely talented team who all couldn’t be promoted to managers. There were only so many spots and so what resulted was this amazing chain of succession and retention every time we needed another product role. So that senior head would become two to three promotions and the external hire would then be pushed down because we were still growing, but it was pushed down into a support role that was much easier and faster and cheaper to get, so it could be really strategic with growing people where recruiting was named and how that was done.
Nick: 05:41
And all this simply involved was looking beyond title and at what people were actually capable of and what the job required. My favorite story from this was a woman who was a classically trained architect like designing buildings, wanted to get into tech and found herself in support. She was a rockstar, worked her way into more technical and customer-facing roles there and then came over to my team and product and she just had this level of perspective and empathy from servicing customers that the average PMMI team didn’t and at this point, she’s still there. I believe leading a massive portion of a product group that is way bigger than the one I left. So when we finally got back together, we knew we were going to start a company and this was really the problem or opportunity we faced as operators we kept coming back to. It was, how do you take that story and make it possible for everyone? So we built the tool we wish we had and here we are.
William: 06:34
What I love about Flux to start with is you’re solving a problem that I think is, once we get through COVID, is the number one problem facing all companies is going to be retention of top talent and it’s not… I’m not buying in so much to the hype of the great resignation and, all of that stuff. But I am thinking more about how folks… Like the word commute, you hear the word commute and the hair on my neck stands up, right? Like, “Okay, I’ll never take a job with a commute.” Commute is like, “To what? My living room? Yeah, okay, that’ll be the commute that I’ll take.”
William: 07:12
But kidding aside, this is a way for companies to then really treat a real problem of how do you retain your top talent? If you don’t retain your top talent, someone will retain them and someone will go after them and that’s to be expected, right? So a couple of things to unpack.
Nick: 07:34
Yeah.
William: 07:35
One thing is, as you mentioned, career development, the way I understand that you’re talking about it is it’s a joint responsibility, right? It’s not just on the individual and it’s not just on the company. It’s co-owned between the two.
Nick: 07:51
Yes. Yeah. I think that’s a great way of thinking about it. I think a lot of companies and in HR and management teams today face this kind of issue where, one, I don’t think all the tools are there to allow employees to explore and be self-directed and then the overhead on creating the structures and the paths and all the formality, the formal nature of the exercise that existed really leaves a lot of gaps or almost keeps people paralyzed from being able to do it really, really well.
Nick: 08:24
And so I like to think of this as one, you need to give people a compass and shine a light on the places they can go and I think in self-interest with employees, they’ll be self-directed and they’ll explore and then for HR and management, I think a lot of this is like kind of taking those ladders and those structures you built and turning them into jungle gyms, right? Everybody kind of knows how to move up, but how do we make sure people can move across things and connect and how do we create things that haven’t happened? And I think the employees can help drive that if they know how to unlock it. And I see us kind of really reducing a lot of the friction that’s existed on both sides.
William: 09:01
On some level it’s what I can do skills, which is stuff you can obviously test for, right? We can make sure that someone really knows Java, okay. We’ve got ways to figure that out. Desires. Now that’s, that’s trickier because it’s something that they might… That they know and there might be a universe of things that they don’t know even exist. So the desires, we can capture the stuff that they know. There are some stuff out there that maybe we have to figure out kind of, okay. It’s almost like the Netflix model or either names on model. ‘If you like this, you might also like that’. So we can maybe, maybe unpack some of those things that they can’t see or have never seen before and their experiences when there’s a way to really zone in on what they’ve actually done, as opposed to what they say they’ve done, but to really kind of vet that out, there’s also not always some fact checking and reference checking and testing in there, but we can get to that. What else do we need to get to do great career development for the individual?
Nick: 10:16
Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great question. I think you’ve framed it well. I think one of the issues, honestly, that’s existed has been being able to look at a holistic data set of what a person or the work is comprised of. I think skills are easier to quantify and it’s what we naturally gravitate to and skills and experiences, what somebody has done and how that translates is important. That’s a big part of the equation, but I think also… I work in Silicon valley. I think it’s very easy to think about an engineering role where those things are very well understood. I think if you take roles like sales or customer success, or some of these other functions, wherever people talk about soft skills or ways of working, I know the best people…
Nick: 11:01
The best salespeople I know aren’t good at Salesforce. They don’t want to spend any time in that system, right? There’re other things that make them great at this and so really what we strive to do is understand those pieces. So we spend a lot of time kind of doing these little microsurveys within the system to really understand work preference. What do you like to do? How do you like to think, work and interact with other people? And this is kind of out of context of a job you’re trying to get. And with that, you can start giving people the tools to understand how to connect some of these dots better as we overlay them with work. So maybe, there’s a number of jobs where particularly you could probably learn the skills as you step into them.
Nick: 11:42
They may not be a prerequisite, but there’s huge gender differences in people’s willingness to raise their hands. If they don’t check the boxes on the skills required to whatever’s put on a resume. So I think one of the pieces here is trying to get to that full data, set both around capability and not just skills and experiences and presenting that in a way that makes things feel more accessible. And then I think the other piece here particularly is bringing in data, particularly… We’ve got a huge data set around mobility, what people have done, where they have gone from there and making sure we’re adapting that to the organizations we work with because obviously the nature of work today, jobs are constantly changing. There’s a lot of things that just haven’t happened in an organization yet.
Nick: 12:24
And if we only look at the historical things that have happened, then we’re just prescribing the same things. We see a lot of customers of ours and prospective customers that we talked to where understanding how to help a whole population of employees crack out of groups like support, manufacturing, retail that are just totally disconnected from the rest of the company. Employees need line of sight to all those things. They need to understand the different currencies that can translate to them. And then ideally, they also need to have connection with people who have made those moves. So one of the things we’ll do is also in all of this experience, you can connect with people who have made a similar move and this doesn’t need to be structured mentorship. It can be a coffee or a catch-up.
Nick: 13:09
And I think talking to someone who’s actually walked the same path versus landing there in a more traditional way is going to yield very different advice and very different perspective on how to get there. And I think employees need all of those things to do that well. And I think if you can put it together in a package that does that, then it really feels like, what can I be here versus this is the path I’m walking and if I don’t like it, then I don’t know what I need to do next.
William: 13:33
Right. Yeah. And sometimes, in a very hierarchical situation, PR firms or advertising agencies are like this, there’s intern coordinator manager to re… I mean VP, SVP, EVP, principal, it’s just very easy to navigate this structure of, “Okay, I do this job, then that job, then this job.” But when it’s more complex and work today is obviously more complex even in situations where there is a great hierarchical structure, it doesn’t always make sense. Like I need to take a step down or take an international promotion to then do something else to then get to that place. Like, the dots weren’t… I couldn’t see them. I didn’t understand how they made sense. So, I want to get your take on, again, career development being co-owned, what’s the organization’s responsibility in terms of… Especially now, when you think of work from home and remote and hybrid, how do they communicate to the individual to employees and really dare I say, even candidates coming in the front door, how they’re going to build their own destiny?
Nick: 14:52
Yeah. It’s a great question. I think this is, this is a great way of thinking about how to frame it. I think, again, part of this is, is putting it on the employee, but presenting in a way that the way when we launched with with a customer, usually what gets communicated out to the employee base is, this is where you’ll go to explore your next step here and there’s some power in that language because it’s… First of all, signaling that we want you to stay, we want you to have your career defining experience here, and your next step may not always be up, but we are giving you the tools so that the next step exists somewhere and that should be easier to find than somewhere else.
Nick: 15:38
I think the other piece here that’s key is, your example on the moves, particularly as people get much more… You keep climbing the ladder and there were fewer, fewer things available. The idea that everything needs to be a shift to another full-time role to gain a skill or an experience. I think we also struggle with a lot of learning, sometimes being very disconnected from the work where we see a lot of success is the idea of, look, there’re times where you may not be able to develop the skill you need in the seat, and that burden can fall on…
Nick: 16:10
This would fall on me as I head of product all the time where I need to manufacture that for this person. If I could just say, “Look, so-and-so needs a more customer facing time. And we just can’t do that on the existing roadmap.” If they could spend five hours with another team helping with something that they need, it flips from this protectionism of, don’t take my people because odds are, don’t worry about internal. External people are trying to take them all the time. But-
William: 16:38
[crosstalk 00:16:38].
Nick: 16:40
Especially now, right? I mean, look at the competition remote’s going to create for people, but really what it flips to is that person gets to go have this great experience. They get to try something new and they come back better equipped to advance and for us to have that promotion conversation. So I think what organizations need to be successful here is one I think the willingness to allow employees to explore the understanding that, again, not everything needs to be full time, like this is about maximizing your talent investment.
Nick: 17:12
There’s a number of things that don’t need to be full-time roles. Can those be things other people can try their hands in? And if you do that, I think there’s a level of self-organization that can happen, that that culture helps drive and just that self-interest employees wanting to stay and build careers just like that. That career development to me is the real employee experience that needs to exist at the end of the day. It’s not the cafeteria, it’s not the stuff we don’t care about right now because we haven’t had it. It’s where can I go? How do I get there? And do I feel empowered to do that? And I think if companies can present that to people, I think the results are the results speak for themselves.
William: 17:47
That’s also a great [inaudible 00:17:49] a story, right? It’s a great leveler that it’s not just for the… I remember when people used to talk in terms of the small percentage of the company that was really, really, really important. And they were on the succession plan is a special group of people, which was very exclusionary and content and programs were built around those high performers or high potentials or whatever you want to call them. But it was also very just on its outside is it was very exclusionary. This is leveling. It’s basically saying, you know what? The system doesn’t matter. It doesn’t care if you’re female or male or non-binary, it doesn’t matter if you’re this, that, or the other. It’s like, where do you want to go? It’s like those books that we read as kids where you could choose-
Nick: 18:40
Your own adventure.
William: 18:42
Choose your own adventure, right? I talked to a lot of hiring managers, a lot of recruiters, obviously. And they’ve been telling me for years that they get this what’s next question. It’s framed in different ways, but candidates will come in and they’ll be really hot about this position. Love this. This is great. What’s after that, what’s next. And there’s this freeze of moment, but one of the best response that a recruiter told me, he’s like, listen, with success comes options. So, here’s the job, be successful at the job. Okay. Now, after that, there’s five different ways that you’ll be… That you’ll have options at that point. And now it’s a matter of what do you want to do because you’ve created success.
Nick: 19:36
A hundred percent. Look, I think one of the things we need to undo a bit is we’ve trained people that progress is promotion, right? And that’s it. And that’s not the case. I mean, some of my biggest progress has been taking a step sideways and then taking a longer step after that. And that’s hard to see. There’s a risk for, I think right now, for employees to do those things and to feel confident in doing that. We need to both help people create the confidence to be able to do those things. But I think to also understand that a lot of this is about opportunity and progress is not always promotion. And I think where there’s a lot of surveying we do in the product to understand career visibility, confidence around visibility and navigation, which are two different things, right?
Nick: 20:22
One is I can see where I can go. Another is I believe I can get there. I have the tools and access to do that. And, we spend a lot of time. We’ve seen a lot of correlations to tenure data where simply by having access to more opportunity, and a lot of this can be part-time stuff, not just changing a job to another team. People stay a lot longer. We’ve got one customer where it’s as high as two and a half times longer tenure, if they’ve just done something outside their seat for a little bit. And I think that’s the key. And I think if you give employees those opportunities, it’s easier to have the what’s next conversation, because it’s also coming with, back to your point on it kind of being this co two-sided thing, it’s giving them the opportunity to go, you can go learn this and do this, and you come back and then we’ll have that conversation.
Nick: 21:11
Right now, when that conversation is only around, is the head open or not, is the seat open or not? And this person moved there, you just set up a lot of this disappointment, and I think incorrect expectations that just don’t need to exist.
William: 21:26
So you referenced at the beginning that sometimes people think of this as a talent marketplace, but that’s a bit limited and through this conversation, I can see where that is completely limited to think of you as just that. I could see people think of this as engagement like employee experience, learning internal mobility. There’s a lot of different HR categories. The traditional HR categories that would make sense… That you kind of fit into, or at least touch parts of. How do you suggest when practitioners are trying to build a business case for Flux? What’s the easiest way?
Nick: 22:06
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think some of this will depend on where the company is in its journey and maturity and what the HR teams, organization and mandate looks like. I think for much larger companies, this usually revolves around retention, and this is about creating ways to obviously keep people longer. But back to that point of… I think the more… You’re telling people to take charge of their career and not giving them tools. The more you can give them the tools, you’re freeing up management and HR, to be able to focus on the higher level, more strategic things and not being bogged down in the administration that comes along with running these programs traditionally. So, I think for one… On one site, to me, this is about retention. We see in a lot of mid-market high growth companies, it’s about talent maximization.
Nick: 22:56
There may be other reasons the employees are staying right? Stock options, the company hasn’t gone public, but the real business cases… How do we get the most out of this investment we’re making? Talent is the first or second largest investment any company makes along with sales marketing, yet what we’re able to get out of that and understanding of the ROI of that can be challenging. So a lot of these companies look at how do we make sure that for… We’re large enough, there should be people here who can do the things we need. How do we make sure that the best fit person is working on the most critical thing? Those are the two kind of big things we’ve seen and then, I think the other piece, just on your comment about just all the places we potentially touch and play, I really see us as stitching that together.
Nick: 23:41
I think there’s a lot of improved ROI we can create by better linking this very fragmented experience. I think each of these things on their own are done very well, but for a lot of people, particularly junior employees, early in their careers at large companies, you kind of have to know where you’re wanting to go in order to know the skills to get, the job to go find. You can’t search a job board if you don’t know what something’s called. So I see as adding a layer right? To this that enhances that overall investment that’s been made, keeps people longer and better utilizes them and then we get back to talking about careers at a company again. Not the job you came in to do, and this is the conversation we’ve had with customers of ours of just, what if you put candidates through an experience like this?
Nick: 24:29
All of a sudden now we’re talking about what a career at the company looks like and not just the job you’re coming in to do, which, you want to talk about employer brand and just how important that is. I think this is such a critical piece to do that.
William: 24:45
It’s interesting because when I talked to gen Z, I hear a lot of gig, gig, gig, gig, gig. I’m going to do this gig and that gig then this gig and I kind of talk like that. I say bits. I’m going to do this bit, that bit, this bit and so a lot of the older language of career and job and this, that, and the other. I think what’s interesting is you’re interacting with that and what you really are saying to folks is, “Listen, the company has an unlimited amount of gigs inside of it, and it’s growing. And some of those are just projects and some of them are longer term, shorter term, et cetera. Some of them are going to be up. Some of them are going to be lateral. Someone might be taking a step down and taking a larger role as in a step down, but they’re all these gigs and so you’re going to go from one gig to the next gig, to the next gig and we’re going to help you navigate that.”
William: 25:43
So, now that I understand where to budget for it, et cetera, how do they judge success of their investment? What do you want them to be? What metric or some type of analytic that you will want them to look at and say, “Here’s how you know Flux is working. And here’s how you know you got your money.”
Nick: 26:05
Yeah, absolutely. So, great question. So I think the obvious one here is retention and attrition. I put this from simply retaining one or two people, depending on the size of your organization. You need to always got this study that they ran for like 15 years that showed cost of replacement for like a knowledge worker is one and a half to two X, right? I think this is usually what people cite. Simply retaining a couple people an extra year effectively pays for itself. The thing with that though is these are longstanding metrics. That’s important. That is like the yard stick we should be looking at things by, but I think there are other things we can look at that are more near term, that proves some efficacy around this. So, one that I mentioned is we do a lot of polling around understanding career visibility, navigation, confidence in those things.
Nick: 26:52
And checking at various points in time or when a piece of a gig is finished or things like that to understand is that moving in a positive direction because it’s highly correlated with people staying longer and we can start getting a directional read on that long-term in a retention or attrition benefit. I think the other piece that’s important here is obviously access and in how we think about that. And back to your DEI point, this is critical, particularly as we think about, what does a hybrid work environment look like when you’ve got groups of people, could be 1%, it could be 50% of the company that are just not seen in an office all the time. How are you inclusive if those people are not considered and the in-person dynamics come into play. And I think-
William: 27:37
Sorry to interrupt, Nick, but that’s a real worry of mine is that we build, almost say it like the way I think it, but second class citizens and that we have office employees and we have remote employees and we started looking at those that get promoted in a classical sense of promoted, those that were in the office get promoted faster, or those that are in the office get on the succession plan and all of a sudden we’ve created this dichotomy between those that work in the office, quote unquote, and those that work from home or work however they work and now we’ve created not just two different experiences, but two different real realities for employees. That’s a real fear for me and probably most HR people.
Nick: 28:30
Yeah. I mean, look, it’s a valid one. And I think anyone who’s been at a larger company that’s been multi office, even pre pandemic, it was kind of what office you were in, right? Was the whole HQ satellite office dynamic, right? So, this whole kind of FaceTime culture, I think right now we’ve all been on the same playing field for the most part, but this is going to change, right?
William: 28:54
Everybody’s on a zoom call. Great leveler of…
Nick: 29:01
And think about, if you were kind of a rank and file employee right now, it’s hard, right? The Zoom fatigue is real, but your line of… Again, to me, this is all about line of sight and visibility and access and if I’m only aware of what I can see and what I can see is the people I interact with on Zoom, that is an incredibly limiting experience for someone as they start thinking about what’s next for them if it’s not promotion for whatever reason.
Nick: 29:32
We spend a lot of time looking at obviously, how are we boosting internal consideration? One thing, obviously the benefit of software and AI and these things these days is we can consider everyone for everything. We ping people in Slack. We always hand answers back to the hiring managers and in many ways, this gives people kind of at least a fair and consistent process as a start to make sure that internal people are being considered because they just should. That feels crazy to me. But, I think if we look at other things around this, right? Again, if those people aren’t there and they’re not seen, and then how are they presented, right?
Nick: 30:07
This comes back to that dataset, not just using skills and experiences. One of our customers we’ve run, basically, a blind test. We looked at this rotation program they ran pre Flux and it was happening in Google Docs and whatever they were running it on and then they ran it on us and simply by presenting in kind of the sourcing stage, just identity blind candidates, candidate 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, we boosted female acceptance rates by 20% just by doing that in that step. So I think when we look at what makes this successful, again, I think people have these goals around DEI and one of the big challenges is how do we take some of these policies and all that intention and turn it into something, I hate to use the word systematize, but we put it into something that works and is consistent so that we’re building a baseline now that is ensuring something is happening and we’re having people focused on the right things and so that’s another place we see a lot of success and we tend to measure because those outcomes are profound.
William: 31:12
Can we get your [inaudible 00:31:14] last question. I want to get your take, because when you mentioned attrition and retention, I tend to… I’ve been on the record of saying this so I don’t mind saying it again. I don’t believe that turnovers are necessarily bad or attrition is necessarily bad. I think it’s the regrettable turnover or the regrettable churn, if you will. So it’s the retaining your top talent. So in my mind, if a C player leaves, so what? If you could have made that C player, a B player and a B player an A player, no, that different, different story, obviously. However, if that C player was always going to be a C player and they chose to go somewhere else, okay.
William: 31:57
Now, that’s not necessarily everyone’s view of turnover, right? I get that. Some people look at turnover and they look at all turnovers as bad. I tend to parse that just a bit in so far as well, not everyone’s equal here. You’re going to have some employees you just don’t want to keep and nor should they stay and that’s for a lot of different reasons and so what’s your take on bifurcating or parsing the retention and thinking about retention in… Not just retaining all talent or attrition of everyone, but thinking of it in a little bit different way.
Nick: 32:40
Yeah. It’s a great question. I think the way I, and we think about it is like, look, I think there are always those cases where someone is just not a fit with the company. The company is not a fit for them and it’s probably better that they find something somewhere else for whatever the reasons are to that.
William: 32:57
Right.
Nick: 32:58
But I think when we think about what’s regrettable, what’s non regrettable, I do think there is this very large portion of people who maybe the job itself wasn’t the right fit, and sometimes I’m… Look, in startups, the job could have changed and back to some of the stuff we were talking about earlier, particularly when development programs and kind of this shoulder tapping and selecting of, quote unquote, top talent, some of the context matters a lot and unfortunately, a lot of these programs and things benefit a very small portion of the employees, right?
Nick: 33:30
We call it the meat of the sandwich, but the other 85% of people who aren’t management are just those people who aren’t going to cut it, they are kind of left to figure it out and, we see this a lot with hybrid companies where you’re hiring fast, you’re getting a lot of people in the seat and you get a lot of people who land, where the job’s different, maybe this wasn’t the right fit for them. They passed some bar, right?
Nick: 33:52
Values, knowledge, whatever was required to get them into the company. But the issue here is around fit and so I think the big thing is if you can take those people and unlock the right place for them to go, and I’ve seen this happen, then they find something that they’re more performant in and that might not have been the thing that they landed in at first. I think if you convert that, then that’s massive, right? Because, now you’re not having to replace those people. They’re happier and you get people on a different track and it’s not necessarily about needing to take them through a bunch of development, learning things. It’s just getting them in the right seat. That’s the right fit for them and for the company.
William: 34:30
Well, that also fits most people’s careers. You don’t know. I had the pleasure of doing a lot of internships. You don’t know you don’t like something until you do it and for me, it was… I did PR twice. Didn’t like PR. Did advertising twice. Didn’t like advertising. I had to do some things. I think a lot of people are like that. They do a bit. Here, I’m using my language. So you do it. I did a bit and then went, “Yeah, I hate this.” And I think a lot of people are like that, or especially early in their career, but it might be your entire career.
William: 35:03
Listen, I could take up all your time talking about this and I know you got other stuff going on. So Nick, thanks so much for coming on the show and really come breaking down Flux for us. And Flux is with an X by the way and so what’s the domain?
Nick: 35:21
Yeah. You’ll find this at fluxwork.co.
William: 35:24
Okay. So just so everyone, when they’re thinking about it, so Flux capacitor. So, but listen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I absolutely appreciate it and thanks for everyone for listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast and especially the use case podcast.
Nick: 35:41
Thanks for having me.
William: 35:41
All right, brother.
The Use Case Podcast
Authors
William Tincup
William is the President & Editor-at-Large of RecruitingDaily. At the intersection of HR and technology, he’s a writer, speaker, advisor, consultant, investor, storyteller & teacher. He's been writing about HR and Recruiting related issues for longer than he cares to disclose. William serves on the Board of Advisors / Board of Directors for 20+ HR technology startups. William is a graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a BA in Art History. He also earned an MA in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.
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