Max: Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast, a show about innovation, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.

Hello everybody. And welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast with Max. Today. I’m pleased to welcome Elaine Davis, Chief Human Resources Officer at Continuum who is going to tell us about her 25 years of experience in the industry. And we’ll focus a little bit on the recent crisis we’ve been through and how it’s affected the talent acquisition team at Continuum, and her experience working with some of the largest high volume employers in the world. 

Elaine has worked with Conduit, Xerox, JSK, and has vast experience in sourcing, and the art of sourcing at scale —, which is how we started our, email exchange, Elaine. So to kick things off, welcome to the show, Elaine. Great to have you here. 

Elaine: Thank you, max. Appreciate it. 

Max: So, would you mind starting off by telling us a little bit about Continuum? (your current company). 

Elaine: Oh , yeah.  So continuum began life as a carve out from a larger company called Conduent. And, Continuum has been standing on its own,  since February, 2019.  It’s primarily the customer care business from the Conduent company. Conduent had been a carve out from  Xerox, a huge company.

And I was with Xerox at that time. And with Conduent. I left Conduent right after it actually became a standalone company itself in 2017 and took a couple of years off. Did some work in venture capital and got interested in HR…  

Yeah, well, the HR, well… I enjoyed the venture capital space.  I was sort of the firm’s expert in HR technology, the HR technology space, where there’s a lot of really interesting things happening, particularly in talent acquisition

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And then I got a call from the folks that were carving out Continuum and they asked  if I’d  come back into a more standard corporate role and  set up the HR timekeeping, payroll and communications functions for Continuum. So I said, yes. 

Max: Timekeeping, payroll and Talent Acquisition.

Elaine: And all of HR. 

And, Oh, I also run communications, which is the fun part of my job. 

Max: Great. Well, I’m happy that you got to experience basically, kind of like, can we say that you went from a bigger, to a smaller, to a smaller company? Are you, are you feeling that, you’re moving towards the more human sized organizations over the last 20 years?

Elaine: You know, the problems and the issues and the things that need to be solved for are the same, no matter what size the company is. You know. It’s all human behavior related and it’s all revenue related. So what I would say is fun about being in a smaller company and we’re about, 15 to 16 thousand people or so, about a half a billion in revenue.

It’’s fun to sort of own a big piece of that. So, I mentioned various planks in my world. Right? It’s a lot, but it’s manageable, for me. And, I get to impact a whole, a pretty big swath of daily operations in the company, and that’s fun. And some of my previous experiences with big companies, I had great jobs and was working with great people. But, boy, it’s hard to turn a big ship around. 

Max: Well, 15,000 it’s pretty massive already. That’s what you said, 15 to 16 K was this headcount and Continuum today?

Elaine: Yeah, we, we go up and down seasonally. We have some pretty big healthcare clients and there’s a portion of their year where they’re doing healthcare open enrollment.

And so we increase our head count to support them on a seasonal basis so we can get up to 18,000 depending on the client and the time of the year. 

But to me, it feels small because when I was at Xerox, it was over a hundred thousand then, at Glaxo Smith Kline. we were over a hundred thousand, so 15 to 18 seems very small to me.

Max: Okay. Well, one day I hope Talkpush can…  I don’t know if we want 15,000 employees, but if we could have 15,000 users, that’ll be a good start, you know, at least two years before we get there.  

Well for our listeners who aren’t familiar with the concept of a carve out, this is when a company’s shareholders decide they’re going to take a piece of the business and it’s going to run better on its own than it does as part of the mothership.

And you’re part of two carve-outs, but within the same group. So that’s pretty unique experience in itself. Can you share with me, what do you think is, you know, maybe the specifics are deal by deal, but what do you think is the motivation behind a carve out? Is it  a size question where you think you run better and faster at 15 K, then you run at 50?

Elaine: I really can’t pretend to understand the motivation of the carve-outs other than it’s financially driven. And I think it has more to do with stripping out underperforming assets.  So that the company left behind can, focus on it’s,  I guess I use an old nineties word, you know, core competencies,  in the Conduit,  Continuum carve-out, Customer Care business was not performing and Conduit wanted to strip it out and let it stand on its own.

It’s actually been a great business on its own and not weighed down by the larger infrastructure of a big company. You know, you’re right. I’ve been part of some interesting transactions. When I was first at Glaxo, in the United States, we did a hostile acquisition of a company called Burroughs Wellcome company, also a British pharmaceutical. That was quite a ride. And then Glaxo merged with SmithKline Beecham. That was a wild ride. Massive, pharmaceutical engines coming together to try to build research pipelines and get drugs on market, faster deal with the patent expirations, which were financially devastating for a lot of the pharmaceutical companies.

So I’ve been involved in some interesting transactions.  Almost always in an HR tech and HR technology role, sometimes in a commercial role. I’ve done Commercial Strategy and Marketing for businesses as well. So through all of it, I mean, I’ve had great opportunities to understand the levers of  profitability.

And big or small, I mean, in the end, you’re trying to solve the same problems and that’s even true in Talent Acquisition. Big or, small, you know, you have to make your way in a crowded field of employers and figure out a way to differentiate yourself, attract the best people and make their onboarding as gentle as possible,  and to get them as productive as possible. And particularly in the call center business, that is super important because after you’ve hired people, you’re training them. And that entire time that you’ve got people that you’ve hired, onboarded and you’re training them, you’re not generating any revenue off of that.

That’s an expense that a call center company has. It has to shoulder until you can get that person on the phone or on a chat or whatever, to start driving, to start building revenue. 

Max: I heard somebody told me that if the new hire, the agent, in a call center environ…