Innovative Approaches to Talent Supply Chain and Hiring for Large Deals with Ben Johnson | Episode 191

Greg Alexander:

Hey, everybody. This is Greg Alexander, the founder of Collective 54, and you’re listening to the ProServe podcast. This is a podcast for Collective 54 members as well as other founders and leaders of boutique professional services firms. So if you’re in IT services, management consulting, marketing, or marketing architects and engineers, pretty much anyone who markets, sells, and delivers expertise for a living, this is for you. On this show, we talk about three things: how to make more money, how to make scaling easier, and how to make an exit achievable. We do so by interviewing interesting folks who have figured out how to grow, scale, and exit their boutique professional services firms. Today, we’re going to talk about innovative approaches to the talent supply chain, specifically hiring for large deals. We’ve got a fantastic guest. His name is Ben Johnson. Ben, would you please introduce yourself, your firm, and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Ben Johnson:

Yeah, so my name is Ben Johnson. I am the CEO and founder of a firm called Particle 41. We are a software development agency, but we also do data science and cloud engineering. My background is in online advertising. Software development, data science, and cloud engineering fit really well together. About a year ago, I also added CTO advisory or fractional CTO services to our practice as an additional practice area. We love doing complex digital projects, and we’ve especially gotten into the field of application modernization, helping folks with slower or outdated technologies get up to speed with industry best practices and benefit from the latest breakthroughs in technology. In short, I love to say we fix slow in software development, whether that be slow execution or slow products, we fix slow.

Greg Alexander:

I like that. We fix slow. I like to go fast. Let’s go fast here. Let me tee up the topic for you, okay? Many boutique professional services firms, which we define as having between 10 and 250 billable employees, are past the startup stage but not at the level of Deloitte. Some of these firms are hesitant to pursue large deals without a delivery team in place or have concerns about hiring to meet demand without compromising on quality. This is the issue. Inside the collective, we talk about the talent supply chain: how you recruit raw material, develop it, and deliver a finished product to the client. Tell us a little bit about your concepts around that problem statement.

Ben Johnson:

Yeah, well, let me first say that this was hard-fought. I made a lot of mistakes in this area. A couple of years ago, we implemented scorecards and operated those scorecards manually to ensure we knew our criteria for hiring an engineer. Instead of letting people in the interview process wing it, even myself, I was winging it when trying to hire certain resources. The first thing we did a couple of years ago was implement scorecards. We put a basic workflow through Trello but realized that one person was operating that workflow. If that one person was out, it wasn’t working. When we got big deals, we’d be under pressure and might start making compromises. We needed to get out of Trello and manual workflows to maximize our visibility. We looked at our pipeline much like a CRM for sales; we needed a system for hiring. We explored the market of application tracking software. Being multinational, with offices in India, Mexico, and the US, using our HRIS software wasn’t feasible. We went to the market of pure-play application tracking software. Without turning this into a commercial, we looked into Ashby but ended up going with Greenhouse as our application tracking software. We configured it extensively. We realized our interviewers didn’t have an employee value proposition that made sense. As we started recording interviews and looking at the scorecard, we saw our team wasn’t selling why they wanted to hire this person. We did a lot of training to get our hiring managers and interviewers to take part in the process, understand the scorecard, and know the questions to ask. We ensured the hiring process and SOP were so defined that anyone could run it. Once they saw a promising candidate, they could turn the table and say why they liked working at Particle 41. We did recording tests to ensure they were genuine, giving them a few reasons to choose from. We dialed in the process and went from hiring three key employees a month to ten. Right now, we can pull in ten people a month if we close a big deal, but it would take effort from everyone to hit our target. We don’t have to hire ten people every month, but we wanted to ensure we could hit that capacity if we brought on a big deal.

Greg Alexander:

Okay, so I’ve got a bunch of follow-up questions. Thank you for walking us through that process from start to finish. It’s fantastic, and congratulations on going from where you were to where you are right now. That’s quite an improvement. I want to first talk about the pipeline management of this. I like the analogy you used, which is similar to how you have a sales pipeline. You now have a talent pipeline. I think the thing that our members struggle with, particularly in pursuing large deals, is they want to win the deal, but they’re almost afraid to because they’re like, “Gosh, if we win this deal, I have to hire 10 people right away. I don’t think I’ll be able to do that.” The challenge with that is matching supply and demand, meaning I’m pursuing this large deal. Am I going to win it or not? And then how do I match that with the demand side? So how do you do that? I mean, it’s one thing to be able to hire 10 people a month, but how quickly and tied to what deal opportunity. Do you understand what I’m asking?

Ben Johnson:

Yes. So we never stop hiring. Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re pulling the trigger and maximizing our bench and reducing our margin. It doesn’t mean that. We never stop interviewing. We keep a regular flow of interviews for our ideal candidate going so that when we finally close that deal, we call the people we already know are good. Some of them have found other jobs. Some of them we need to negotiate with again, but we keep that pipeline moving. We don’t wait until the deal closes and then start interviewing. We want to know the market. We want to know our supply, like what supply is out there. I think there’s a huge amount of learning that our team gets from talking to people who are out in the market. Like, “Hey, what are you guys doing over there? What did you just run into?” So we’ve opened up our interview process to a level of curiosity that benefits the interviewer, not just the interviewee.