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Transcript

Is hiring faster making you slower? · Sized Up

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Dan Wiseman.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a learning experience designer, and I spend my time thinking about how people actually learn in organizations and the learning interventions we can design to help maximize their performance.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Sean Campbell.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: I work for scaling companies on the technologies and systems behind their people strategy.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Sized Up, a podcast for the people building fast-growing companies.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the employee experience that has to grow with them.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, Sean, welcome.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: What we're going to be talking about on this first episode, what's of value to our listeners?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, centralized things on an opening question.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Is hiring faster making you slower?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll talk through some information that we've gathered from a benchmarking report that we've just recently released.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: So there's some information that I think is incredibly insightful as well as maybe surprising.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it's around the scale-up enablement gap and what we've recognized from those responses and information we've gathered.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a great read, and I'd highly recommend it to anybody who's listened to this podcast.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fast one, it's only 15 pages.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: And going through that kind of prompted us to ask the question, okay.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Is hiring faster actually making your scale-up slower?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of where we wanted to start today.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we we've both been through that report and we found four key findings that really caught our eye.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll spend the rest of this podcast kind of going through what those findings are and unpacking them and what they mean for scale-ups.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: The first thing that I was thinking about is so you see a lot in relation to like enablement, right?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Enablement can be categorized in a few different things depending on what your role is at the company and who is enabling who.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: But ultimately, the first lesson is enablement pains hit sooner than most people would think.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the first kind of takeaway, and I think topic that we can dive into a little bit.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: So what was the stat behind this?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that it hits enablement pain hits sooner than you think.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: So within the report, 97% say enablement challenges hit performance before a thousand employees, but 43% say it actually starts between 100 and 300, which that's a huge difference, right?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: One to three hundred, oh, does it start for a thousand?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's very ambiguous.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you think this is surprising?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Or like is this people not aware of this?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Is this kind of a challenge to the consensus with scale-ups?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think there are people that if you know, you know.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like when they've seen struggles and problems in the past, but for like some scale-ups or startups that aren't familiar with this, I think it's like they think it's, oh, it's like that's a big problem, that's a big company issue.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like we're not there yet.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: You have a lot of like, oh, we don't need that yet because we're not at that stage or level.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's starting to be a little bit more recognized, but I think it's still very pervasive that there's an assumption that enablement really only is needed in a more scalable, consistent, centralized manner when you get larger and as you get larger.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it only gets harder when you're in the thousands, where it's like, oh, you start to see cracks way before that.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Is this a bit like uh is kind of an unspoken secret?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's not something that's often said out loud.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: I like this that people think it's a big company problem.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's not.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder why it's not actually a big company problem.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: To me, what this suggests is that enablement's really hard and onboarding is hard.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: So at the startup phase, enablement is done really in person, right?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: You've got managers looking over what people are doing and kind of showing them the ropes.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's essentially like an apprenticeship model, which is really effective at getting people up to speed, but it is pants for scaling.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that means that actually it's not something that you start to see the cracks in at a thousand, it's something you see the cracks in really early doors, like a hundred to three hundred.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if it's even earlier than that, to be honest with you, because you can't get managers, you know, doing that apprenticeship model for 100 people.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't work then either.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Do you agree with that, or is there anything you would challenge?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: I agree with it.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Where I agree with it is it's probably starting to be recognized or pushed aside in earlier stages where it's like, look at we're doing so well.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like we're growing headcount, our revenues increasing, our we're having happy customers, right?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like all of these things that show good signals, but there are other probably smaller things that are like we're starting to lose the message.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: And they might have like company kickoffs or revenue kickoffs or team meetings or all hands that kind of focus on those and the mission and values and things of that nature that a company does, and people are excited.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: But again, once scale starts to happen, to your point, is like the mentorship or apprenticeship model starts to be a little overwhelming because sometimes, even in the beginning, they're still trying to find their managers that are good, like the managers that are good at these things.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then those managers are if they have a really well-developed culture, like the managers are then kind of going, like, hey, what's working for you?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: What's not working for you?
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: What's like what are you, how's your team doing?
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: And they're they're really working more hand in hand, but as they continue to scale with distance, remote work, things of that nature, like then you start to see these small cracks start to occur.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: It seems to be a lot of reactivity rather than proactivity, which reveals something about the way people think about enablement, which is like, oh, it's maybe it's a nice to have, right?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: We have other priorities.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: The reason why people are reactive is because, okay, now this has become something we need to prioritize.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: But we prioritize, for example, hiring or something else before enablement because it just we only have limited resources for putting our efforts in and enablement isn't one of them.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: That kind of raises a question for me, which is okay, does this finding tell scale-ups to do something different?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because they could just say, yeah, okay, enablement problems hit harder sooner, but I've got different priorities.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll probably just wait again until it gets to the a thousand people mark and we'll deal with it then.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's almost like you see something say something, right?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like the more data points of people knowing, like, hey, we don't know where to go for this, or we, you know, we're starting to see some issues here, or inconsistent messaging, or different things of that nature.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's where there should be a recognition of it.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: If someone's listening to this right now and thinking, are we in this situation?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think you could say, hey, what can we do, or what are the standard operating procedures here to put in guardrails and make sure that there's a consistency across the board that everyone knows the general basics of where to go, who to talk to, and things of that nature.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then when it comes down to maybe like more role-specific information, again, having someplace that's like a wiki or a place to at least get a snapshot of information outside of like actually diving into the topic details and learning.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: What about yourself?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: The approaches we take need to be considered as the company grows, then our enablement strategy grows.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe grow isn't the right word here, but I mean matures.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you talk about like initially it's just kind of all in someone's head, then it starts to move into a wiki, and then it starts to go perhaps into an LMS and becomes personalized to the individual.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: But that that kind of thinking needs to be baked in from the start.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: That 43% is comes from leaders in scale-ups right now.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: So they're recognizing it that it happens earlier than they thought it would, which means you need to think about it earlier than you thought you would.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Let me introduce to you then my the second finding that I found interesting, which is that growth is outpacing enablement.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: 93% of leaders were saying that growth outpaces enablement.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: What that means is that basically they say employees aren't fully equipped to do their jobs as company scales.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: I chose that because yes, that that reveals again the prioritization in companies or in scale-ups, that hiring is more important than enablement.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that's not surprising because it's one of the things that defines you, defines your growth, is your headcount.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: So, of course, like that's where the emphasis is going is on hiring.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: But I guess this is kind of thing I'm railing against here is that these things aren't separate.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: They should go hand in hand.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: In your mind, when we say, oh, growth is outpacing enablement, or from your experience, what does that look like in scale-ups?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's very common because there's excitement to it, right?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's excitement and growth.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's excitement in, you know, look, we're growing our headgown, we're hiring, all these different things because from the outside looking in, it looks like an exciting thing.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Look how successful this company is.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: They're growing.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Look how successful they are because they have all these different positions open.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: No one looks at uh the the well, look at the nuanced complex onboarding this uh this scale up has.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're going places.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: You never hear that.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: You never hear about a company talking about that.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, look if you if you looked at any job description, they're never like, hey, our onboarding process is amazing.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: You never see that in a job description.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: You never think somebody's like, wow, I joined this company for their onboarding and training.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Once we get to these certain numbers, there's like a there's a playbook out there somewhere that, or like something that you know is passed through as tribal knowledge from scale-ups, like maybe your Y combinators and things of that nature.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, oh, once you get to this head count, that's when you do this, right?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: So like now you're at 100, now you hire the sales individual based on your sales team, or you're at 250, now you get a human resources person, right?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Now you should have someone managing that process.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, it's that same point as like the position that enablement and onboarding, the respect that it kind of holds within companies.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that that's probably just a problem for like L and D, HI in general, they're not the they're not seen as the the prestige.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Oh god, I really hope I'm not uh setting our audience to say this, but I think this outs as coming from someone who comes from that place and I love and I love the the area, the industry that I work in, but I I think it's not perceived as being the prestigious departments in the in companies.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: The impact of this, right, though, is kind of the point to make here.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: When you're getting lots of people, but they aren't actually able to do their jobs as the company scales, that's actually a bad thing, right?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're hiring them to do a job, but it's taking them a long time to actually do the job.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of presents us with a problem.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And we've talked about this before, kind of, oh well, what are you doing?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Are you hiring for expertise because then the onboarding is perhaps a shorter experience because they're already there?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Or are you hiring actually for a bit more potential when the onboarding requirements are higher?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what the answer is to that, by the way.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just throwing it out there.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's nuance depending on their company, right?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: People show up and go through a process of onboarding.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: And right, we found 87% aren't fully equipped, or most leaders don't believe that their team is fully ready for that job as they scale, depending on how long that onboarding process is with new systems, different workloads, AI changing things, how they do things.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: But what is interesting about it is people don't feel fully equipped.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't they feel fully equipped?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Is it that they don't feel fully equipped because they don't understand the product?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: They don't understand the process, they don't understand this.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what's changed as things change to where people aren't feeling that equipment, where they're kind of missing those gaps?
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I guess this perhaps does also represent a limit in the study itself, which is these are responses from leaders within companies.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And this is this is saying them saying our employees aren't as well equipped to do their jobs as we scaled, which is probably, I think, maybe a stronger measure than employees saying they aren't, because self-report is notoriously unreliable.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: The other nuance here, I think, is that perhaps this is just natural.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you had a really mature enablement and onboarding program as a scale up, it's complex and it does take time.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: And hiring someone perhaps doesn't take as long.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: It maybe it's always going to be the case that your growth is going to outpace your enablement.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps then the lesson here is not reversing that, it's just narrowing that gap between how fast people kind of feel they are ready to perform alongside how fast you're hiring people.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: What was the third one that caught your eye?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the findings is that hiring faster doesn't mean you're scaling faster.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: And what we found is that ramp time gets slower or longer just as hiring starts to speed up.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: When you were 50 to 100 people, maybe took people like one to two months to get up to speed.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now you're at 250 to 500, it takes three, four months.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: And what I'm recognizing, or what why I chose this, or what I thought was interesting about it, is that hiring and capacity are not the same.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: And when you have more headcount, that doesn't mean because you have a process in place that it's gonna equal to the same amount of results, right?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: So when you had a hiring class of or a cohort of five people versus 25 people, the result of training those five people versus those 25 people and that one cohort versus the other cohort is not gonna have the same result.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it just metastasizes.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I do have some thoughts about when it comes to like scaling your onboarding and the metrics you track around that.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: I like this a lot because it is asking for a more nuanced, maybe more grown-up understanding of what growth is beyond the kind of oh, it's just headcount.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because headcount doesn't mean productivity.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you take it more kind of an abstract view, you hire people actually to do work.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: So actually, all that matters here is like the work that needs to be done.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And if uh you're hiring people, it takes them a long time to get up to speed, like the amount of work or their productivity is reduced.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: And if we actually just cared about the productivity number, then we would think, okay, well, what influences the productivity number?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's people times by enablement.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually what matters here.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's what growth is.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: What people are able to produce, and what influences that is a skill set times by or enabled by the onboarding or the training that they're given.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of what I see in the scale-up world is trying to reduce the time it takes for people to get on board.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: If we say they're productive faster, we are more likely to have sales hit faster, better customer experiences, things of that nature.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: If we can the goal is to get that person doing what their role is in a sooner time frame.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: So essentially they can be more productive sooner, right?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of the underlying thing, right?
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, the tenure of an employee uh is going down, especially in scale-up companies, right?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: So if they're going to be leaving sooner than your traditional companies, then we want to make sure we can get as much as we can before they leave.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's kind of the business mentality, and I get that.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: What I would challenge about this is I think the goal should be to get someone ramped up faster, but only if your outcome is high, right?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you have a six-month onboarding process, but it's super thorough, and the people leave that onboarding process incredibly enabled, knowledgeable, excited, and have better outcomes based on that, then the outcome should be the focus.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's things about the process you should focus on, but the outcome should be what is there first.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like what is the actual results from someone being onboarded very well.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then what can we do to optimize the onboarding to still get that?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's what should be the goal.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Not, hey, they take six months, we need to get it down to four.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because at that time, when they cut that, when they usually cut that other two months down, things start dropping through the cracks.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I've seen historically.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now, some of that's like, hey, we do a six months onboarding, everything's in person.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, you could probably mitigate some of that with some e-learnings and things of that nature.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's processes in place that you could probably do to change that.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Where I find this metric unfortunate is that what is the outcome?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: If you six months and the outcome is still not good, then maybe you should change the process and the outcome will be better as well.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: But if the outcome is really good, then it's like, okay, how can well let's look at our process and where can we optimize or change things?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: There was another part of this report which talked about like consistency.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Did these scale-up needs and think that their onboarding was consistent?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: 97% of them said, yeah, it's consistent.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the framing of the question is wrong, right?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: This, by the way, listener, is the kind of candor that you can expect from us, uh, which is to challenge our own reports.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Your central point here is it's not about onboarding speed.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Onboarding speed is not like it's like uh a smile sheet at the end of a training that doesn't tell you anything about the effectiveness of the training.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: We want this to be faster, but that's not the key thing.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: What you want is for people to be proficient, right?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: You want them to be good at what they do in their jobs.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Interestingly, Sean, I think this is a combination of actually the other point that I wanted to highlight too, which was proficiency matters more than speed.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think these things are tied together.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Us trying to grapple with and redefine, okay, what actually counts as growth and how you get to that growth, taking the time to say it's not just about onboarding speeds.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: We need to have a more nuanced understanding about okay, what is it that we want people to be able to do in their jobs?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: And as you said, then, okay, if we've got a process that actually gets them there, how do we then refine that process to make it faster?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: We did actually have some data on this, didn't we?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: About like the time to competency, what that proficiency actually is.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: 2.4 months.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: That was the average.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that counts as onboarding time, or if it's a different metric.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's different, time to competency.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess that 2.4, that's the thing that we're trying to get down.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: If it's 2.4 time to competency when they're performing the job well, if it's possible to get that down, amazing.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: I agree with you.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: The English language is funny because they're there and there.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: Or you say color, I say color, but we spell it differently.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think one thing that we that I see a lot with organizations, hey, we want to get our onboarding down to 2.4 months.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me why.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this other company is doing it.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Is it your goal or is it their goal?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: What's the goal of your company, not that company?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, well, they're doing really well and they have these numbers.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Are they the same type of company as you?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's my friend's company.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the same company.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the same type of company.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's not, they don't focus on our ICP.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: They don't it's like, don't take someone else's goals and put them onto you when it has nothing to do with you.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: The argument for this is I think we've been pushing for this whole podcast, which we're aligned on, which is if you take enablement seriously and align it with your growth and align it with hiring at the same time, is given the same amount of thought, then you're able to achieve that level of actual growth that you want.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm a scale-up listening to this, I'm thinking, all right, if I bought the argument that enablement is something that we need to prioritize and we need to scale as we grow, what does that look like?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: What should we be doing?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: What does a scaling enablement look like?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: If I think about this from the learning design perspective, I think people actually get how this works when they're at startup phase, right?
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: They're not trying to formalize this and start applying design thinking to their onboarding and enablement.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: They're just showing people and teaching them side by side.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: When we start to stay scale it, that's when the problems start to occur and people start to abstract it.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, this is just a knowledge problem.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: I've just got to create a Google Doc.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's consistent, and it is consistent, but you're just like putting words on a page and thinking that is enough to get knowledge in people's heads.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that's missing is practice, giving people the chance to actually do the new thing and then giving them feedback on that.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: And scaling that is the challenge.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: But that's what genuinely will make the difference.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we're in a very exciting time with technology in that actually the ability to now scale a personalized practice environment is really possible.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like you're seeing that with AI-driven kind of conversation style practice environments, that's we're getting really close now to something that's so much better than what we've ever had before with e-learning as a way of creating an authentic practice environment.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: If I look to the future, we're then looking at like onboarding where it is something that is reacting based on what's happening into that employee in their experience, right?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's not time-based, like, oh, you've been here for one month now.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: So here are the things that you should have been able to do.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: But it's like able to track, oh, this person has, they've had five client meetings now, and this is the kind of the outcome of those meetings.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: We need to push this sort of training towards them now.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's the kind of future we should be looking for, where it's personalizing based on what people are doing, not based on the timelines that they're experiencing.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: What we're proposing here is essentially being proficiency first rather than just hiring first.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's being a bit more nuanced in the way that you grow.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: Is that really realistic?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Do we think people are just going to say, that's just not, we can't afford to do that.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's just this time sky thinking.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a really good question because it where I would land is, you know, you could throw a mass number at it, right?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: The higher the number, the more people at it, the more opportunities there is, things of that nature.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: And there is validity in we should just be hiring faster because we learn more, because there's more conversations that are having, more things that people can talk to one another, so on and so forth.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a balance though.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a balance between like you should be focusing on proficiency and right-sizing the desired in relation to your hires.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because what happens is you have people that come into an organization, you hire them, they aren't as proficient, they leave sooner, it's costing you more to get more people back on the onboarding ship.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: When if you were more focused on proficiency, then they come in and they are proficient, they usually stay longer.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's where I would think it's not like a it's not like an either or, it's more of like a focus and.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's probably where we'll fall on this, which is like we set that kind of question at the start, which is is hiring faster making you slower?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: But maybe it's is hiring faster and not really thinking about enablement as a priority alongside that, making you slower?
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's my pitch.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is that actually this is an opportunity.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: If we think about enablement as a priority alongside hiring, then those people become competent faster, which is a strategic advantage for you, for your company or against your competitors.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sean, we've come to the the end of this session.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've really enjoyed talking this through with you.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: We've spent the majority of our time talking about our key findings from the the enablement gap, which is a report by Confirm.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: We'll make sure to put the link to that report in the podcast notes, but you'll also be able to find that on our website, which is confirm.com.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: Is there anything that you want to leave our audience with before we say goodbye?
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: Be the change you want to be.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: Be the change you want to see.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Be the change you want to see.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's all, Lee.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a pleasure, and I look forward to doing this again in a month's time.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I look forward to seeing or hearing from people as well.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: Leave a comment of what you're looking for.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: What are you interested in?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: What are things that or topics you want to understand, things that are perplexing your business?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to understand to anybody listening out there what you find interesting or what you think is uh a topic that should be tackled.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, it was a pleasure.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: Bye.