Use Case Podcast: Storytelling about PRO Unlimited with Kevin Akeroyd

Music:   Welcome to RecruitingDaily’s Use Case Podcast, a show dedicated to the storytelling that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better. As we speak with the brightest minds in recruitment and HR tech, that’s what we do. Here’s your host, William Tincup.

William Tincup:   Ladies and gentlemen, it’s William Tincup, and you are listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today, we have Kevin on from PRO Unlimited. We’re going to be learning about the business case or use case or cost benefit analysis for why his prospects become customers and why his customer stay customers. So we can’t wait to learn about PRO Unlimited. So Kevin, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself and introduce PRO Unlimited?

Kevin Akeroyd:   I sure will. My name is Kevin Akeroyd. I am the CEO of PRO Unlimited. I’ve been with the company for about 20 months and the industry for about 20 months as well. And we’ll get into it a little bit more, but PRO Unlimited essentially is a technology, data, and services provider for companies that want to get a lot more cost-efficient and streamlined in how they go about bringing on non-full-time employee talent or what we call contingent. So we’re the contingent workforce folks.

William Tincup:   [inaudible 00:   01:   23]. And so people that say gig economy, this is not news to folks that have been in contingent for a long time.

Kevin Akeroyd:   That’s right. What’s interesting, and I didn’t realize this when I joined the company, I had known the contingent, I had known about blue collar and shift work for a long, long time. Staffing up the retail stores, the hotel chains during holiday seasons, or staffing up the warehouses, or all kinds of temp projects. So I’d known about blue collar for a long time. That was contingent.

And then more recently, gig, Uber, DoorDash, Airbnb. Gig is certainly contingent. What I didn’t really have an appreciation for, was even two years ago, when I joined, over a third of all white collar professional specialty skill was contingent. So your ITs and your engineer and your marketing and your finance and your operations, and most people now, whoever you read, whether it’s the consultants or the government or the industry associations, that that number is at about 50% now, too, so.

Contingent is what it’s always been for decades, which is blue collar work and gig. Contingent is also half of all white collar specialty skills around the world, which obviously makes it a much bigger and much more strategic part of the future of work and workforce planning, now than it ever has been.

William Tincup:   What’s been the impact of COVID in terms of how people, how practitioners view their portfolio of talent?

Kevin Akeroyd:   COVID didn’t create this, but COVID certainly accelerated it, though. This move from full-time employees in my physical offices, recognizing that that wasn’t going to cut it anymore, that I had to actually embrace a global talent market. And that huge chunks of the talent pool, the younger digital natives. I have three kids that are all in their 20s. And the way these recent digital natives think about career planning is very different. They want the flexibility, and they want to hop around.

So whether it’s the digital natives, whether it’s that second parent, that has their MBA and 20 years of experience, but they can’t do a full-time job anymore. One of them has to do contingent, and one of them can do the FTE job. Whether it’s the baby boomers and all that incredible skilled work, that’s now aging out that is willing to do part-time. We had our project worker, who is no longer willing to be FTE. You think about and now, you think about all those things were happening already so that the future of the workforce was already shifting to remote global contingent, instead of in my physical brick and mortar office, full-time.

Did COVID then just put gas on the fire and accelerate what was already happening and make it, by necessity, rather than just proactiveness? It took what was strategic and proactive and turned it into brass knuckles, bare necessity for survival, and it is never coming back. And now you see the hangover with things like the great resignation and all that good stuff. So a few anecdotes there, I don’t want to get too long-winded, but COVID didn’t create any of this. COVID accelerated the you know what out of it. The hangover from COVID, with things like the resignation, have made it here and permanent to stay.

William Tincup:   I 100% agree. And again, for leaders that are listening that want to put air back in the bottle, that’s just not going to… That’s not an option.

Kevin Akeroyd:   We’re never going back.

William Tincup:   Uh-uh (negative).

Kevin Akeroyd:   Yeah.

William Tincup:   No.

Kevin Akeroyd:   We’re never going back. And quite frankly, the workers don’t want to go back.

William Tincup:   No.

Kevin Akeroyd:   The workers are happy staying this way. And quite frankly, the companies are too. There’s a lot of nimbleness and flexibility and that activity, and they’re not going to get caught with a bunch of things that they’re stuck with. This is one of those really nice things where the buyer and the seller, to use that analogy, or in this case, the employer and the worker, both of them are completely on the same page about the fact that they like it. And neither one of them wants to go back.

William Tincup:   That’s right. And talent’s going to win that. If talent wants to work that way, they’re going to work that way. I think the biggest struggle, one of the biggest struggles I see leaders have is, how to redefine culture, because we’ve gotten ourselves into a rut of thinking of culture, corporate culture as the office. If we take away the office and everyone’s in different places, then what is our culture?

Kevin Akeroyd:   And talk about practical use case, practical how-to… This is one of the most important areas right here is exactly right. My backyard, here in the Bay Area, tech companies, they’ve got the beautiful seven-star restaurants right in the lobby. That’s great for culture and acquiring and keeping talent, but that’s a full-time brick and mortar thing.

William Tincup:   Yep.

Kevin Akeroyd:   That the awesome two-decker buses going up the freeways with great coffee and Wi-Fi to keep the road rage down. That’s great. The daycare facilities, the meditation, the stock that goes up every year, all the things that made this company. And this is just an example, an incredible employee brand and having exceptionally good culture and great talent, retention, every single one of those was full-time in the office. They don’t matter at all to a contingent, global remote.

William Tincup:   That’s right.

Kevin Akeroyd:   Of course, none of those applies. So how I’ve gone about employee experience for FTE’s has to translate into worker experience for contingent. How I think about my employer brand has to change. How I think about what good worker experience looks like. And how I even think about the benefits and what it is that I stand for. All of that stuff wraps itself up into a new brand, new culture, new approach, a new way to go after this. Over half of the world, that’s going to be this contingent workforce. And that’s a real thing that employers are having to grapple with. And again, it’s something they’re going to have to get good at, into perpetuity if they want to continue to win the war for talent.

William Tincup:   And before we thought about employees and full-time employees, and we had a different experience for them. It’s like isn’t necessarily a different class of citizenship or anything like that, but we did have a different experience for those that were gifted.

Kevin Akeroyd:   That’s right.

William Tincup:   And now I think you’re broadening out people’s aperture in terms of thinking about talent and all the different forms of talent that it comes in-

Kevin Akeroyd:   That’s right.

William Tincup:   … and think about their experience, whatever it is.

Kevin Akeroyd:   Yep. And simple little things, but that full-time employee happy hour that happened every Thursday, which was just really bonding and a big part of the culture, but it was only for people that had the badge and could get into the bar. That’s kind of opened up stuff to digital, virtual remote and include the part-timers too, the contingent folks.

I mean, little tiny stuff like that, all the way up to big stuff, like who gets to go to meetings? Who gets access to content? And who has what security and everything? So from the small stuff, all the way to the big stuff, we’ve got to think about how we include the contingent half of work in all the stuff that we did really well from a cultural standpoint. So non-trivial set of things for us employers out there trying to compete in the talent marketplace for us to really consider and do well.

William Tincup:   Well, and this is what you’re helping your clients go through. And so, when you explain PRO Unlimited at first, I think you layered tech and services. If true, walk us through that. What’s the technology piece of the company? What’s the services layer?

Kevin Akeroyd:   I’m going to start with the data layer and to be really brass tacks. It’s interesting, again, so if I’m going to use a couple of analogies. There’s a very, very, very robust data industry out there of companies that will help you as an employer, figure out what I should pay for that role in that location, for that experience set. You’ve got Aon. You’ve got Radford. You’ve got Mercer. You’ve got ADP DataCloud. You’ve got Payfactor, Payscale. You’ve got Salary.com.

There’s a $3 billion industry a year, simply selling salary data to companies to help say, “Hey, this is what you should pay.” All of that has always been predicated on full-time employees. So PRO has rolled out, “Well, what’s the equivalent to that for over 100,000 contingent job descriptions and 20,000 skills?” How do you actually introduce the actual compensation data and the hiring intelligence data to say, “Well, if I do need to bring on 500 marketing contractors in Amsterdam versus 90 IT contractors in North Carolina versus 200 engineering contractors in Seattle or India, or the Philippines? We have needed to bring the compensation and hiring intelligence data for the entire 50% of the world that is the contingent and part-time.”

And by the way, that floats like the stock market, that goes up and down and changes every single day. It is much more dynamic and much more fluid and changes a lot more and more frequently than the full-time employee stuff does. So, PRO is, I guess, just call them the source of data as to what market is and what hiring intelligence and talent landscaping should look like from a data standpoint. That’s number one.

Number two, is that we are a software, SaaS software provider. Again, I’m going to use the full-time employee. You think a lot about Workday, for instance, or SAP’s Human Capital Division or Oracle’s Human Capital Division, or Ceridian, or ISIMS. There’s a huge, robust software market of big, huge players that are publicly-traded in the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. They also only work for the full-time employee half. So PRO provides the software that actually works for the 50% of the contingent piece and everything that’s entailed. We could spend an hour and a half, going deep on all the software components. But basically we’re the software layer, where workflow and integration and time management and all that good stuff, we’re the system of record for the 50% that’s contingent because the big HCM software providers don’t cover it.

Then, third, there’s all kinds of services. For instance, if I’m a really large company, like a tech company or a retail company, and I just want to say, “Hey, PRO, I’ve got to put on 3,000 new technical contractors across these 1,100 job descriptions, and I’ve got to do them in these 72 job markets around the world. I’ve got to deal with compliance and regulations and statutories and approvals and payroll and all that good stuff. I don’t really want to have a core competency and hire an entirely different team inside my corporation just to manage all that for me. I would rather take advantage of PRO’s tech-enabled managed services layer. Will you please go do all that for me, so I don’t have to bring on the hiring managers and the compliance managers and the risk managers and the country managers? Just turnkey and basically take over that function for me as a managed service, so I don’t have to do it internally.”

So whether it’s the data piece, whether it’s the software piece, or whether it’s that services piece, a lot of companies would rather just hand it over to companies like PRO and PRO’s competitors. To just say, “You know what, turnkey this entire thing for me. It’s risky. It has a lot of compliance. There’s a lot of complexity. There’s a lot of moving pieces. It’s a messy workflow. Please just take care of this for me in a turnkey environment.”

And in those cases, a lot of our customers literally want the services, the software, and the data. Of course, they can take one, two, or three. They don’t have to take it all, but it’s interesting, in the market that we work in, a lot of the companies actually just want to rely on PRO or PRO’s competitors to do the whole thing.

William Tincup:   So I love the phrase, “System of record for contingent.” Like-

Kevin Akeroyd:   That’s what we are. Yeah.

William Tincup:   … love, absolutely love that. Those that have been in the market doing this for a while, they probably grew up with VMSs on some level. So you’re not that, I already know that, but.

Kevin Akeroyd:   Well, we have a VMS, right?

William Tincup:   Yeah.

Kevin Akeroyd:   VMs is part of that software layer, for sure. That’s a good workhorse application. We have a robust… We’re a top-five VMS player in the industry, alongside our friends at SAP and beeline and Workday VNDLY. But the VMS is just one piece of software-

William Tincup:   Sure.

Kevin Akeroyd:   … just like an HCM. The applicant tracking system used to be all you needed. Now, I’ve got six or seven different key software applications to make an HCM platform. Same thing over here, the VMS is going to continue to be a workhorse app for all these. But I need direct sourcing software. I need diversity inclusion software. I need SOW software. I need analytics software. I need-

William Tincup:   And it’s got to be global.

Kevin Akeroyd:   And it’s got to be global, and it’s got to be all integrated. So the VMS is an important piece of that software component, but by no means does it represent the entirety of the software component now.

William Tincup:   Currently right now, or in the future, how do you help folks with global payroll?

Kevin Akeroyd:   Boy.

William Tincup:   Do… Because-

Kevin Akeroyd:   Start with regulations.

William Tincup:   Yes. Not easy. [crosstalk 00:   14:   52].

Kevin Akeroyd:   Start with regs to keep people out of jail and off the front cover, or whatever the local newspaper is. Second, start with statutories because it may only be a pay rate. In a certain country, it may be… Like in the Nordics, though, there’s 11 statutories that you have to deal with just to hire somebody or off-board them. So next go into the statutories.

Third, go into that very dynamic labor rate, because what I pay for, let’s say a.net engineer one, or a cybersecurity CIS admin, or a product marketing contractor. You know what I should pay for a specific skill set in a specific market with a specific set of experience, could literally be one, two or three X of Delta, depending on where I’m hiring around the world for that talent. So you really need to be smart about the hiring intelligence and the rates. Start there.

Fourth is, remember that that is your touchpoint to the worker. If I’m a Fortune 50 company, it doesn’t matter where I’m headquartered. If I’m employing a worker for this contract, this is where I touch them, and payroll and benefits. And the experience is it sounds so basic, but it’s a very non-trivial Maslow Hierarchy of Needs touchpoint with those workers. And if you screw up the benefits and the payroll and the timing and all that, you leave a really bad taste in that employee’s mouth about that employer. Going forward, there could be reputational damaging and could cost you talent.

And what that worker experience expectation looks like, in each different country. Can be very different based on culture and norm and nomenclature, et cetera. And then finally, just, you got to think about governance compliance and then rolling it all back up to corporate, whether corporate is in Amsterdam or in Tokyo or in New York or Toronto or Beijing, it doesn’t matter.

I’ve got to do all of that at a local level, but I better have compliance and control and data and systems that’ll pull it back up across. Because otherwise, I won’t name the name, but we all know a big Fortune 50 company that got class action lawsuit for not having pay parity across 100 different markets. And it ended up being a really expensive lawsuit. I need to make sure I have the corporate governance and control while I have all that local good stuff at a country-by-country basis.

William Tincup:   First of all, I, 100% agree. It’s one thing I’ve said in HR, “Of all the tapestry of 1,000 different things, but the one thing you cannot mess up is payroll.”

Kevin Akeroyd:   That’s right.

William Tincup:   You just can’t. You can fail at succession planning, performance management. We can go around the wheel, you can fail at a lot of stuff, paychecks, no.

Kevin Akeroyd:   Like Maslow’s Hierarchy, we’re down here at eat, sleep, drink level. Eat, sleep, drink’s important. Right?

William Tincup:   You just can’t, sorry.

Kevin Akeroyd:   Taking care of Maslow’s basic needs are really important inside of this marketplace.

William Tincup:   And I’ve actually had HR leaders get fired because of pay issues, so I-

Kevin Akeroyd:   That’s right.

William Tincup:   … get it. It’s critical. Have you seen a movement? Here in the US, I’ve seen a movement to not necessarily, daily pay, but just tabbing out at the end of the shift or tabbing out at the end of a bid. Have you all seen that more on a global scale where people want to get paid on a different frequency than we have saw historically?

Kevin Akeroyd:   So much so that we issued a press release this morning-

William Tincup:   What?

Kevin Akeroyd:   … with a strategic relationship with the Ceridian folks that are the leader in on-demand real-time pay streaming on the full-time employee side. So now I’m… Great question. I’m very proud to announce that PRO is the first and only contingent payroll provider that is now offering on-demand daily-streaming pay to the contingent side of the house for the 50% of the workers that are contingent. We thought it was so important that we went and aligned and did technical integration and formed a strategic partnership for the leader in real-time on-demand pay in the full-time world. And we’re bringing it over into the contingent world if you’re a Pro customer now. So that’s-

William Tincup:   I love that.

Kevin Akeroyd:   … how big a deal we think it is. The trend is huge. And we literally announced our partnership to go to deliver to the contingent world today.

William Tincup:   Oh, that’s great. I love Ceridian. I love David Ossip, in particular, so.

Kevin Akeroyd:   That Dayforce Wallet has really changed the landscape of full-time employee payment.

William Tincup:   Yep.

Kevin Akeroyd:   And we basically, in this case, “Hey, David, let us just partner, and let’s bring that over into the world of contingent for the other half of the workers.”

William Tincup:   No need to build that yourself.

Kevin Akeroyd:   Big opportunity for them and big opportunity for us.

William Tincup:   Yeah. Well, again, it helps both folks. When we talked about data at the beginning, I have, of course, started thinking about optimization, and I thought about comp and understanding the pay rates because you brought up the dot.net developer one, what is that? And one place versus another. Pay equities is an issue that all companies are trying to unpack. And so we don’t want to create inequities in our contingent folks, either. So how do they optimize? How do the PRO customers, how do they optimize around understanding what’s available talent-wise?

Kevin Akeroyd:   That is why-

William Tincup:   And also, what to pay?

Kevin Akeroyd:   … that data layer is just so important. And this is not a PRO advertorial by any means, this is not us advertising the company, but somebody had to pull together over a billion and a half contingent worker profiles and track what they make every single time a hiring. Every single time Sally gets hired, what’s her skill set? What’s her background? What’s her resume? And what do companies pay Sally for this kind of work, for this kind of contract with her kind of pedigree and in 160 markets around the world?

So between the assets of first-party data with all our clients for decades, acquisitions we’ve made, like the PeopleTicker acquisition, which is the largest crowdsourcing real-time contingent labor rate data play in 160 markets outside the United States, and strategic partnerships with third-party data aggregators, we’ve put together this real-time, one and a half billion dollar, one and a half billion contingent worker, 100,000 job descriptions, 20,000 skill sets, dynamic, real-time updating. And we track it, and we trend it, and we benchmark it so that at any given time, we can say, “Hey, we’ve seen what that CIS Admin 1 makes in London, 62 times in the last 72 hours, across 21 financial services companies and 16 tech companies and four biopharma companies and six retail companies and two consulting companies.”

We have got the real-time data across billions of workers and hundreds of countries across hundreds of thousands of skilled job titles that updates itself because we track what’s actually happening in real-time in the real world. We’re not some survey. We bring that to bear so that we can say, “Hey, in the last week, this is what 92 companies by skill set, by country, by job description, by, by, by, have actually paid.” So, it’s, again, I liken it to the stock market. It’s a real-time rate tool system. And it does a lot more than that. But again at Maslow of Hierarchy of Needs, it tells you what the market is paying for that skill set, for that responsibility, for that qualification, for that title, in this industry, in that market, in the last 72 hours. And it’s invaluable intelligence for companies making rate and hiring decisions on the [inaudible 00:   22:   43].

William Tincup:   Well, it gives you a puncher’s chance of actually landing that talent.

Kevin Akeroyd:   That’s right. That’s right.

William Tincup:   If you don’t have that insight, you’re flying blind to mix a bunch of metaphors.

Kevin Akeroyd:   Otherwise, you can radically overpay.

William Tincup:   That’s right.

Kevin Akeroyd:   Right?

William Tincup:   Or-

Kevin Akeroyd:   You can radically underpay and be unable to-

William Tincup:   And offend somebody-

Kevin Akeroyd:   … actually bring the talent in, which is even worse.

William Tincup:   Yeah.

Kevin Akeroyd:   So you need to do both. And even things like, “Hey, if you go here, here’s what the rates are. Your competitors are this company and this company, so maybe the hiring is going to be a little easier. If you go here, the rates are going to be this, and the competitive people are this company and this company. That might be a little bit harder.” So even helping people with where are you competing with talent, never mind what you’re going to pay, but likelihood to be able to hit the goal.

Who I’m competing with? There’s a lot of intelligence. Maslow of Hierarchy of Needs is what I should pay for the right person in the right market at the right time. That’s table stakes, and it’s mission critical. But you can get a lot more intelligence on top of that too. But right now, we’re training the industry to at least use that core data set to make real-time intelligent decisions every single time they hire a contractor-

William Tincup:   I love that.

Kevin Akeroyd:   … or freelancer or project worker.

William Tincup:   So favorite buy-in questions, when you talk to… Your sales teams talking to a prospect, just things that you love to hear from somebody, questions and maybe even topics that they’d like to discuss, but you just know that, “Okay, they get it. They’re already on the path.”

Kevin Akeroyd:   I love to say this. I love to simplify things. And these industries, you go from phase one, which is evangelism, which is even trying to go teach a large company they have a problem. To education, it’s like, “Oh, God, I’ve got a huge problem. How do I go get educated about what I do about it?” And then phase three is large-scale adoption because people have realized, “I’ve got a problem,” gotten educated and made a selection around enabling technology or data services.

I feel like the contingent industry, even though it’s a 30-plus-year-old industry, the old way, the new way we’re talking about, using a tech stack, data analytics, an integrated platform, the way we’re talking about now. Now, it’s gone from 15% of my workforce to 50% of my workforce. It’s gone from two countries to 22 countries. It’s gone from a hundred million in spend to two and a half billion in spend. It’s gone from HR visibility to board of directors and CEO visibility. It’s gone from kind of risky to really risky, blah, blah, blah. People are literally saying, “Good, Lord. Now, this is as important as HCM or ERP or CRM or any of the other technology buys I’ve got to make. What’s out there? How do I evaluate? How do I buy? How do I get smart?”

And now, they’re asking the strategic questions and the holistic questions and the global questions, and they’re edifying with compliance and risk and diversity, inclusion and direct relationships, et cetera. The fact that we’re in education phase, and people are asking incredibly-educated questions instead of just being convinced there’s even a conversation to be had, is a wonderful step for everybody. Whether you’re on the customer side, the talent side, or the vendor side like us. I think that’s the first one.

And then the second one is people are realizing, “God, the last thing I want to do.” I’ll use direct sourcing as an example, “Boy, I could hire an MSP from one company, a curator from a second company, a VMS from a third company, a direct-sourcing SaaS application from a fourth company, a payroll provider from a fifth company, a data provider from a sixth company. I could go buy seven different solutions from seven different companies, and then spend the next two years in the hell of people, process, and systems integration across seven different vendors, never mind, integrating that all into my own enterprise.”

Or, “I could go look at integrated solutions, where people have put more of that system of record together that says, ‘Oh, you can do all of that.’ I can buy from one provider, and I can spend those next two years driving business outcomes and getting cost out of my organization and winning the war for talent.” Instead of two years, vendor managing, and trying to do people, processing, systems integration across seven different third parties and my own company. So when people are realizing the benefits of that system of record or integrated solution provider approach versus trying to go buy seven or eight different things for seven or eight different sub needs and that’s just in America and then five more in Europe and two more in LatAm and six more in APAC.

We love to hear when the light bulbs are above everybody’s head that they want to take, “Well, let’s get the business results and outcomes solution with a platform.” Rather than, “Let’s go sic procurement on 20 RFPs to do 20 global point solutions.” And obviously we’re biased because we are the platform provider. We are the system of record, so that’s a biased comment. But it’s not just good for us. It’s very, very good for the customer, too.

William Tincup:   Well, the tech stack.

Kevin Akeroyd:   They need to drive their business outcomes and win a war for talent. They don’t need to be doing vendor management for the next two years.

William Tincup:   I was about to say, the tech stack that you explained is Frankenstein, right?

Kevin Akeroyd:   Yeah. That’s right.

William Tincup:   So you can do it. But then the question is why? It’s going to set you back?

Kevin Akeroyd:   That’s right. So when we hear, “How do I liberate myself from Frankenstein?” We get pretty excited.

William Tincup:   Drops mic. Walks off-stage.

Kevin Akeroyd:   That’s right. That’s right. Exactly.

William Tincup:   Kevin, thank you so much. I absolutely love what PRO’s doing. I love what you’re doing. Actually, I love the approach because I’ve studied and worked with a lot of VMS players/ and just, I love the… It’s just a fresh way of thinking about contingent and just, I love it. So thank you so much for [crosstalk 00:   28:   24].

Kevin Akeroyd:   We’re excited about it, too. We really think we’re onto to something here. And obviously, the industry needs it.

William Tincup:   100%.

Kevin Akeroyd:   That’s the most important thing is-

William Tincup:   Talent.

Kevin Akeroyd:   We’re doing cool things, but the worker needs it, and the hirer needs it. When you’re doing really good things for the two constituents that really matter, which is the talent and the companies that hire them, it’s a gratifying position to be in.

William Tincup:   It is, it is. Well, well-done, my friend. Thank you again for coming on the Use Case Podcast.

Kevin Akeroyd:   You bet. Thanks a lot for having us. Take care.

William Tincup:   Absolutely. And thanks for everyone listening to the Use Case Podcast, until next time.

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