Tim Reitsma: Before we get into it, introduce yourself and share a little bit about what you're up to. 

Jess Von Bank: I always think we should release green room tapes, like the chips that happen in the green room are so good. Always like it never fails. I'm like, I want the green room tape.

I'm Jess. and I've been in the space for my entire career, almost my entire career. My very first job out of college was selling commercial risk and liability insurance, which literally I have to stifle a giggle every time I say that, because if anybody knows me at all, that seems so counterintuitive.

But I loved calling on business owners and talking about them. Their community, their business, their like that, was my jam. Turns out risk and liability insurance policies were not my jam. It was the people component. I tell that story because one of my office maids at the time could see what I just described.

He said, Have you ever thought about executive recruitment? And I'm like, what? What is that word you just said? He said, headhunting, recruiting. I'm like, I don't even know what your, what language are we speaking right now? I did not know that the job of a recruiter existed. I didn't know that it was more formally called talent acquisition.

I had zero idea. It was part of. HR inside of a business. As far as I knew, HR people cut my paycheck; hopefully it was right. And if I had any complaints, they were the ones I called. That was my understanding of HR in my early twenties. I spoke to this colleague of mine, who obviously knew somebody who did that job and thought I would be a natural at it.

I had that conversation. I switched to becoming a full-desk executive placement recruiter inside a boutique firm. I went from that to RPO to in-house recruitment at United Health Group and fell in love with tech. The rest is history. I've been in tech on the vendor side, consulting, and tech advisory.

I'm at Mercer now. Literally, the rest was history because once I found this space, I saw so much opportunity to do right by people. Work is a huge part of our lives. It's how we contribute value, how we connect purpose and mission to like contribution we can make in the world.

We don't do a very good job of creating very elegant experiences, connecting people in purpose and their passion to like work they might do and how they can deliver that value. So, everything I saw in the space was, like, not quite good enough for me, and I will spend my entire career trying to make it better.

Tim Reitsma: It's such an important conversation, often, and I've dabbled a little bit in the recruiting space, and I worked in an organization, and they said, Okay, you've got only a couple minutes with each candidate to see if they're good to go the next round. I'm going; how do I build rapport in three minutes?

When we rethink, we're giving people an inside look into our culture, how we behave, how we interact, and what we think of them. If all I can give you is three to five minutes of my time, what is that saying for that next round or throughout that whole recruiting process?

Jess Von Bank: One thing that was true then and remains true now is that everything you just said—that whole, that really quick—First, I found you. Congratulations to everybody involved for the fact that we've found each other to have a conversation and then how quickly you need to assess, build rapport, start a relationship, and make a decision about each other.

The entire process—that journey I just described—is literally designed to screen people out. Not necessarily to screen them in. We look for disqualifiers. We compare like a list of crazy requirements against previously earned and achieved and verifiable credentials and work experience. That's not a very inclusive approach.

Unfortunately, the entire process, whether it's fully automated or not, and I know we'll probably get to that, whether or not it's fully automated, or if it's still like a high-touch human, high-touch digital experience, we still haven't fixed that design flaw, which is how do we attract as many candidates as possible and then screen 99.999?

How do we screen all but one of them out and never recycle or repurpose any single one of them? We hire one, and we forget we ever met the rest. That doesn't sound very operationally efficient nor inclusive, and I still have... That is my biggest bone to pick with talent acquisition.

Tim Reitsma: We're going to have a fun conversation here, as someone who's been on that end in the last few years, looking for something and being so disheartened in that process of going through an entire interview process and getting to the end and saying, Oh, but you don't have a degree. No, but I've got 20 years of relevant experience.

Sorry. You don't have that degree. It's hard and fast in our organization. We need to adjust. We need to rethink this process. I think that's the big thing; we're six minutes in. Let's dive into it. 

Let's figure it out. How can, through that lens of the future of work? Somebody is listening to this. Maybe you are a talent acquisition person. You're on the recruiting team, or maybe you're in HR and you're doing it all; how do we figure this out? How do we create a system where, sure, we're getting 100, 200, 300 resumes? We have to find one. What do we do with the rest?

Do we take technology? Do we put them in a database? What do we do? How do we make this an inclusive process? 

Jess Von Bank: Even if nothing was changing. If literally nothing was changing around us. That's a great question. The good news is there's a lot of things changing around us that are going to force different behaviors.

I hope for better behaviors, but that's up to us. That's literally up to us, but it will force different behaviors. And the things that are changing around us are, let's call it intelligent automation. I know we're going to talk AI and Gen AI. Now, agents are becoming part of our lexicon as we talk about how work has changed workforce experience, candidate experience, and process automation, like literally just business process automation.

There's almost nothing that technology isn't changing, and what that will do is that it will change every single role, every single job that exists, will be touched in some way by technology. That's true if you're a recruiter or if you work anywhere in talent acquisition as a function. That's also true of all of the jobs you're recruiting for, by the way.

This entire conversation gets pretty interesting because I actually think talent acquisition has already been, and certainly, now is definitely too narrow. When I first heard about the job of a recruiter, I'm like, Wait a minute, I get to talk to people and evaluate whether they would be the right fit for this job or for the company.

It felt like matchmaking. It felt like professional matchmaking between talent and the company's needs. Technology is doing professional matchmaking for us now, and it's doing it much better than we can do. And I say better because it can process data sets faster. What are data sets? Your ATS, resume databases, LinkedIn, Indeed, your skills ontologies, your job profiles.

We have the benefit of technology and tools that can do some of that kind of sussing out and matchmaking for us. We still need people, by the way, to make sure that the data sets are lining up well and that we're getting accurate recommended decisions. Humans are the beneficiaries, hopefully, of the decisions we're making.

When you're impacting humans with decisions, you have to be particularly careful, obviously, being aware of bias and making sound decisions and screening people in more than you're screening people out looking for, adjacent skills and capabilities. All of those things, like all of those things that recruiters try to do or wish they could do a better job of in terms of assessing and nurturing relationships.

Guess what? Technology. Technology is going to try to do those things for us, and so back to your original question, the good news and the bad news is that the traditional role of the recruiter is gone; it no longer exists, and so I'd love for us to start thinking about talent acquisition as a talent strategy instead of recruiters just doing the traditional coordination and interviewing and assessing and making recommendations to a single hiring manager for a single job.

I'd love us to think about more strategic talent stewardship. Do we have the right systems, tools, and journeys in place to properly assess the right fit of talent for broader business needs, not one head-to-head requisition? But more broadly, more strategically. I think this is a great opportunity for recruiters to reinvent themselves, given sort of the new world of how jobs are going to be changing, how people need to be assessed by skills, and that kind of thing.

That is a very long-winded answer, but this is not an easy problem. We're literally in the middle of disruption.

Tim Reitsma: I agree. I think there's a lot of disruption here. Maybe a recruiter is now going to go. Okay, I'm going to change my LinkedIn title to instead of recruiter, but a talent strategist, and so he's going to go. What does that mean?

I think gone are the days when I've hired numerous people throughout my career. You get a stack of filtered resumes that have come from someone out of some sort of criteria, and you get it. And now you have to then sift through this pile of resumes. 

You might get three in and go, Oh, this one looks good. But what does it even mean to say it looks good? There's so much bias in that process, and how can we leverage, or what have you seen from a technology perspective, to leverage that technology to reduce that bias and find that talent that actually matches the criteria of the role?

Jess Von Bank: You commented earlier. I can't remember if it was in the green room or part of our recording. We both have kids, and my oldest just applied to her first job, and she was so excited. I helped her; of course, it was very curious. What does this even look like?

It's a quick service restaurant, but like a bougie burrito place, so not like a McDonald's. I was curious: what does this tiny little bougie-boutique chain have in place for their job seeker experience? I can never get out of my experience-based mindset.

It was pretty good. It was actually pretty good. For a 15-year-old who is clearly a high school student seeking her first job, did they have in place too many pre-screening barriers that she couldn't even like really get through, or was it open to somebody who didn't have a traditional resume, or were they requiring like an old-fashioned cover letter, that kind of thing?

I was definitely paying attention. It wasn't a bad experience, and I helped her through it, and she was seeing and experiencing all of this for the first time. I was paying attention to her in terms of what seemed weird or didn't make sense to her, like even where to find the link to apply. It's called careers.

She's not looking for a career. She is looking for a part-time job so she can buy her own makeup. Do careers resonate with her? Okay fine. So she finds the link she gets through the process. She has no idea what talent brew is. Don't show me the name of your ATS. No candidate needs to know or care about stuff like that. This should be your brand. So I'm paying attention to all of this.

Long story short, we finally get her application submitted, and she looks at me with big eyes and excitement and says, What happens now? And I said, honey, probably nothing, maybe nothing, maybe something. And she goes, what something?

I said a phone call, probably from the store manager. And she's okay, like literally sitting by her phone. Okay. So call, like you have an open position. I just applied. I'm qualified. What it says on the So, they should call me in five minutes. I'm like, that's not how it works.

That's how it should work. And it doesn't have to be a human being responding. That's how it should work. Don't invite applications. You don't need or intend to have, and if you do, are you putting them in a talent pool, like a talent community, so you can nurture and keep them engaged with you? Are there a potential customer? Are you inviting them into the store with a coupon? Thanks for applying. that kind of thing.

Or are you literally dropping them into a black hole? I can't believe that it still exists to the extent that it does. That's just one very simple example, but that still happens everywhere.

The good news about technology is again, you could get through; you can do a lights-out hiring, meaning I never have to talk to a single human being in the entire interview process. That sounds cold, but it's much warmer and more inviting. More human and personalized experience than going through a bunch of screens that don't make much sense and then never hearing from anybody ever again.

So what if the experience was an immediate acknowledgement of my application, an immediate invitation to set up an interview with suggested time slots for when a person might be available to see me as soon as I select one of those personalized directions to get to the store at the top? Imagine a much higher-touch experience that's probably 100% digital.

Wouldn't that feel a lot better than the current experience we've designed? That's where I think you know when we reimagine the role of what people are doing today, which is very manual.

It's pushing a bunch of paper. It's screening a bunch of words on a page; wouldn't it be better to actually redesign the journeys all together that consider how people should be invited to apply, invited to experience a brand brought through a personalized experience? We redeploy all of the headcount that currently exists in talent acquisition and do a better job of that experience.

design.

Tim Reitsma: Imagine we have a process where let's say I get screened out at the end and I don't get the role, but I still go to my friends and my family. I think of an NPS. How likely would you recommend this organization? 

Imagine a candidate who didn't get the role but got through the entire process and still recommends this. Hey, you know what? I didn't get it, but I actually know someone who has those credentials that you're looking for, or that's competency or skill. 

What if we put that as the benchmark, then how do we reverse engineer that type of process? And yeah, having those digital agents, those AI tools to help create that environment. Absolutely. 

I think it's still creating that personal, that personal process, for me going through that process, and if I didn't get screened in, I always ask for any feedback, but imagine if your AI was trained to answer that and to say, Hey, look, like here's this competency or skillset or thing that just didn't come out in the resume, but maybe they have it, and maybe we're able to say, Hey, you didn't get through because of these reasons.

Jess Von Bank: Totally. Even back in the day when I was in talent acquisition. We were always hesitant. I think this is still true hesitant to provide feedback because there was risk inherent in providing feedback that was too specific and that might come back to bite us. That was a human risk. and so it was better not to say anything or to say very little than to provide too much coaching.

Like you came off a certain way, or the hiring manager didn't like this, or we really were hoping to have a little bit more of this, but that doesn't reflect in the job qualifications that you advertise. Yeah, I know. But that's how a typical feedback conversation might look with regular human beings who are just having a regular conversation.

Yes. AI will try to do that for us. There's still a lot of risk in that. And it's a risk of bias or risk of not presenting myself in a way that you interpreted correctly. You said you wanted this, or we're looking for this. I thought that's what I... that risk doesn't go away.

We've gone to video interviews. We've gone to psychometric assessments for talent. All of that risk is still inherent. If I have a learning disability and you ask me to do a video interview and you provide instructions in this sort of way, but I wasn't able to present myself in an optimal way because of the medium we chose, is that a problem or was it inclusive and accessible so that I could show up in the very best light possible for me? And does that work for other types of individuals?

People get scared about what if we screw this up with technology and we're asking all the same questions with AI, all of the things that could go wrong. Yes, good. Ask those questions. That's probably risk that needs to be understood and managed.

But I like to flip the coin too. What are all the things that could go right here? Could we create more accessibility? Could we invite more people with parallel experience sets and different ways of communicating and thinking? If we design more inclusive journeys or ways to invite and assess them for their potential in an organization, technology can help us do two things better than anything else: personalization and scale.

And that's huge from an inclusion, accessibility, and evaluation of people's perspectives. That's, huge. That could be game-changing for people. I hope people understand that.

Tim Reitsma: I think there's an opportunity to get caught up in that risk because I know there's risk in the context of talent acquisition in the context of recruiting.

As a recruiter, am I portraying the company correctly? Did I say the right things? Do we have the right qualifications? And now you put that on maybe an AI or integrated piece of technology. I've spent way too much time on LinkedIn and saying, Okay, all you need to do is just tailor your resume to find those keywords.

Now you're using AI to rewrite your resume in a way that finds those keywords in a job description to then apply for that job and to see if so, there's risk everywhere. But I like how you reframe that. 

What's the opposite? There's risks, but there's also advantages and rewards. You've given some examples, like with agents and things like that. But what have you seen work really well in organizations right now that are embracing this in preparing for that future of work? 

Jess Von Bank: In talent acquisition, or at least in talent strategy conversations, we used to say buy, build, or borrow. Those were the three options in terms of talent. And buy was obviously competing for external talent in the open market, which is an expensive strategy. By the way, if you constantly see a new job pop up because a hiring manager got it approved for whatever reason, you're replacing someone or you're growing or whatever, a new product or service.

So a new job pops up; we must need to go recruit pretty expensively to constantly acquire talent on the open market. And then riff later in the year, like what a crazy strategy. We were not very good at recycling and repurposing talent.

Build is awesome. Build is develop your own people, figure out what they have done, like to do, they're good at, want to do, and how they want to grow and develop and advance in the organization, and put those strategies in place, but also put the infrastructure in place to allow for mobility. That's awesome.

Then borrow is obviously your contingent workforce and gig. All of those are coming along. And now the fourth B, by the way, is Bot. So, let's see, there's a job to be done. Do we buy, build, borrow, or bot? Is this an automation opportunity? Does this actually need to be a fully human FTE? or is this a full automation or an AI augmented.

Work design is how we actually construct jobs. Think about all the tasks to be done. They don't necessarily have to be FTEs and jobs in the traditional way that they used to be. Are there other ways this work can get done, both in terms of how we think of talent for that role?

But also, is this a human-machine teaming opportunity? Is this a fully automated process design consideration? That's pretty cool. Like now, we're talking about work design, not just matching talent to jobs. I think to answer your question, the biggest opportunity is to see how the future of work and all of the technology disruption will be. I think the biggest opportunity is to do better, like circulation in an organism. The talent in your organization should be like your circulatory system in an organism, like blood should be able to flow everywhere in the organism that it needs to go. That's the same with the people you hire for your organization. They should be able to flow to work and jobs and apply skills to the opportunities that most need them.

They should be able to contribute value and parts of the business that most need their energy, skills, and talent, especially if they have specialized expertise. Unfortunately, we have a lot of barriers to that today. We don't let talent move throughout the company very well. We don't even know who we have in the workforce.

We have a hard enough time producing an accurate head count, let alone, what are the talents, skills, capabilities, and interests of everybody I have in my organization? So, if I have a growing business area over here and I need a bunch of this type of skill set, we don't even know how to assess our own workforce to know who's available, who's interested, and who could be redeployed to that.

So we go outside all the time. Everything is external talent acquisition. I think we can solve a bunch of that, and I think AI will help us with that to really see and scan our own workforces for who we have, what we need, and where are the gaps? How do we fill those gaps? How do we move and redeploy people more intelligently in a timely manner so we can be more responsive to business needs?

Then if I were the head of talent acquisition in any organization, the business case justification, like the bar for opening a new rec, would be so high because I would want to know that we actually know we need that we don't have that person and we need to go out and acquire them on the open market. I think it's a responsibility thing to do.

You have people who want to contribute, who want to be developed, who want to use skills they're not using today. Your responsibility is to fully activate and fully well-deploy the workforce you have if you need to justify going out to get more, sure! but that would be what I would want to hear and understand to justify that.

Tim Reitsma: Imagine that we actually had a database with information about our employees. Imagine that. I love how you said that. Just what are their current competencies? What is their skill set? But most importantly, I think, where are they investing in themselves and training? What courses are they taking at night that you just don't know that they're taking? Because maybe they want a different job. And maybe we need to know that. What are their interests? Just because we have a role in, but we don't know what their interests are. How often do we go outside of the organization? 

Jess Von Bank: Don’t make them take it at night; by the way, make learning part of their job. For skill development, you want a dynamic, ever-improving workforce, but we don't make learning part of the job.

Tim Reitsma: I've had numerous organizations and organizations about, no, it's not my responsibility. They can go learn at night. It's no; let's integrate it. 

Jess Von Bank: That’s exciting talent strategy. Like you have to think about talent as a pipeline. If you're the HR organization, your literal product is people. Product development, product innovation—I hate to talk about people as products, but for this conversation, it's useful if you are not investing in ever evolving, ever improving products. That is so shortsighted; your job is to produce a sustainable, durable talent pipeline for the future. I don't think we want static people in that world.

Tim Reitsma: No, talent strategy. That's what we need to sustain and build for the future of work. It's not just that. Oh, I have a job rec. I need to go and fill, and I better go and fill it fast because I want to reduce as much cost as possible.

Maybe taking a pause. It's that saying, hurry up and slow down. Take a pause. Before we even get there, maybe just take stock of who's in your organization. What are they interested in? How are they doing? How are they performing? Where are they excelling?

And maybe there's a skill set that could be adapted to another part of the organization. That should be the foundation of your talent strategy, in my opinion. My opinion is now based off of this conversation. So I appreciate that.

Jess Von Bank: Now, you know, going back to the beginning of our conversation, why I think talent acquisition is just too narrow.

It's tactical. It's narrow. It's usually a transactional process that happens a little bit in a vacuum today. Of course, talent acquisition can be and is very strategic and aligned to business strategy, but not always, like too often. It's a knee-jerk reaction. It happens in a vacuum.

We throw away like huge pipelines of talent because we don't know what to do for the rest of the applicants, especially if they're like fully vetted silver medalists. You can't tell me you don't need silver medalists in other parts of your business. But if you're not hiring for that requisition and that's not your hiring manager, you don't even know that operating company.

I only recruit for clinical people in this division. We don't know and don't care what else to do with highly qualified talent presenting themselves to us on a regular basis. Oh, drives me nuts.

Same goes with alumni, by the way, your levers, especially your positive levers that you'd love to have back. Oh my gosh, please, create communities to keep in conversation with them and keep them connected to your brand and get referrals from them, all of the things.

These are not that hard to do, by the way. These are like tech design things. It would be so easy to do a better job of most of the things that we're doing today.

Tim Reitsma: It was popping in my mind: a marketing automation piece for sales. We always keep those leads warm with automated emails. What if we just take that idea, and I'm sure this happens in subplatforms, but I haven't seen it a lot? Are you actually implementing it on those, like you said, those silver medalists or those 10 gold medalists, but you had to only pick one?

So keeping people engaged in the process, setting them company updates—maybe you just raised a round of money, financing, and you will be hiring in the next six months. Talk about that; share that. And because I might not be the right fit for you or you might not be the right fit for that organization, but because I'm kept warm, I see all the progression, and I'm getting a sense of the culture. Our networks are vast. We might have someone who we'd recommend, and you don't need to pay me a finder's fee and things like that. It's get people excited about your organizations to stay, but also if they're in that talent pool, build it into your strategy. Oh, I love that. 

Jess Von Bank: We should take a lot more note. When I first got into recruiting, which at that time was evolving into recruitment, marketing, and employer brand, and we were taking a lot of notes from the consumer brand side of business and realizing that talent was also consumers, all of a sudden we started doing recruitment marketing, just like consumer marketing, and recruitment automation, just like marketing automation.

So I agree, we need to keep taking a lot of notes from that side of business because they get it. This is a super old stat. But I think at one time Burson was reporting over $4,000 in cost per professional hire. That's insanity. That's literal insanity for what we spend on job advertising and all of the parts of recruiting to actually get qualified candidates to the point of offer and accepted offer and hire, and then hope they don't leave.

We'll just run all of the stats out like a successful hire who stays after six months. That's an insane number. You can't tell me that most businesses would accept the cost of customer acquisition at over $4,000 per customer. Of course not.

You attract a wide pool of viable customers, and then you keep them viable, and they might not be a customer today, but they might be a customer in a week, two months, or six months.

That's how you reduce your cost of customer acquisition. We need to think the same way about talent. You attract them once, hopefully, and it might take a few touch points and all of that stuff. But once you've got them, you've got them, and then you nurture and engage with them. And they might not be a hire for this position today, but they might be somebody that you convert as a customer or eventually convert as an employee down the line.

That's how you get that cost per hire, which is a terrible metric, but it's a metric that matters. That's how you get it down. This, like this churning of people we do, is still absolutely insane to me again. Another place technology can help us.

Tim Reitsma: Oh, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things packed into this episode. And I'm sure somebody who's listening to this is going, where do I start? What do I do? I need to plan for the future. It sounds like I need some technology to redesign my whole talent strategy and my whole nurturing campaign. 

As we wrap up, Jess, somebody listening to this, what do we need to do?

Where do I start? Maybe we already covered it, but what is that one tactical thing that somebody can do today? 

Jess Von Bank: If you're an employer, I know we say this all the time, and it's a little bit cliche but really applies to your own job. Don't start on your career site. If you have a career site, a proper ATS, and all of that, don't even start there; start where most people will find you, and that's on a job board.

See how that experience feels and be a nobody in your ATS and see if you get a call back. Again, it doesn't have to be a human call back. See if you get a closed loop. That is the lowest-hanging fruit. Think about the white glove experience you wish you could give everybody.

I promise you there are like two or three choke points. There's a couple of places in your process that are probably pretty easy to address, like acknowledging an application or properly closing out a candidate. If you don't make a hire and they're qualified, what then? If you don't have a CRM, fine.

But if you have one, Oh my gosh, use it well, please. Like you've got to put the communications and design the workflows and do all you've got to juice the CRM. It doesn't just work for you. You have to design it to do the things that you want it to do. Nurture people, provide the company updates that you mentioned, give them a coupon to your product or your store, like something to keep them warm.

This is not that hard to do. It's mostly a design effort. And if they weren't qualified again, probably think about the sort of respectful and dignified process that you'd like to give people and look for two or three things that technology can help you solve. And if you are considering headcount adjustments because you're not hiring or you see an opportunity for automation to do some of the stuff that humans are doing today, oh my gosh, those are the people.

Those are literally the people that can help you redesign the experiences and journeys that you'd like people to have. Don't cut them because you don't need them. Literally, use them to redesign the proper talent experiences and strategies your organizations should be thinking about.

Tim Reitsma: Mapping out your current process, looking for those potential pain points, maybe even being as bold as inviting some candidates in, paying them to tell you where they fell or you fell short, and redesigning a talent strategy that works.

If we've got a guest coming up on the show, his name's Luke Mahoney. He is coming up in a couple of weeks, and he's all about people's experiences. And that people experience design. Adopted from that customer experience or that product experience. 

We take that customer experience or that customer journey and adapt it to our candidate journey. You'll find holes, and you'll probably want to go. Oh, I can't tell anybody about this. 

Jess Von Bank: Small changes go such a long way. Yes. Ask people, ask the 15-year-old daughters like mine of the world, but also ask my 68-year-old mom, who's retiring next week. Ask her to go through that.

Get every end of the spectrum because it's crazy. We have five generations in the workforce. 2025 is the super age. The first year in history, we will have more people over the age of 65 than we do under the age of 18. The workforce is aging. They're staying in the workforce longer.

So don't just think about, like my 15-year-old example. You've got to get; you've got to think about everybody you're going to need. in the workforce and will be accommodating in the workforce. So yes, get all the feedback.

Tim Reitsma: Oh, that's so good. And speaking of feedback, I am sure there's people listening to this going I know I need to do something. I don't know where to start. I need some help. 

Jess, where could people find you? 

Jess Von Bank: I'm everywhere on social. I do most of my talking about work stuff on LinkedIn. I'm at Mercer. So we do a lot of transformation consulting and work design; experience design helps. Mostly we help organizations think of how to be digital.

Everything we're talking about is learning how to be digital. And that is high touch. That is personalized. That's empathy at scale. That's how we help organizations think about the opportunity of technology. It's really to be empathetic, digital, all of those things. LinkedIn is a great place to catch all of that.

I'm pretty active on Instagram as well, mostly because I have a nonprofit called Diverse Daisies, and that's where I promote the good work of our youth development organization here in Minneapolis. So, you can find me anywhere.

Tim Reitsma: Oh, I love that. And we'll definitely have your links in the show notes.

We'll collect those from you later on and make sure we put those out there because, I know I'm thinking of putting on my HR advisor hat going. Okay, I need to know more. And it's hard to cover everything in a 40-45 minute episode, but there's some real practical takeaways here.

I think the first step is thinking of talent acquisition as not just a tactical piece. Think of it as a talent strategy, and we are bringing in people into our organization, and we've got to create that amazing environment for them throughout that entire employee life cycle, starting with that recruiting piece. That's how we're going to win in the future of work. 

Jess, I appreciate you coming on, and for those who are listening, always curious to your thoughts, send us a note, let me know, and connect with me on LinkedIn. 

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Join over 40, 000 people on the newsletter, flexos.work. You'll see the subscribe button there, and we release a multitude of newsletters just to help you stay ahead in the future of work. 

Jess, thanks for coming on, and thanks everyone for tuning in. 

Jess Von Bank: Thanks, Tim.