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Jenny Leman on Core Values, Culture-First Hiring, and Empowering Great Managers
10 Plays12 days ago
In this episode of MustardHub Voices: Behind the Build, Curtis chats with Jenny Leman, President and EOS Integrator at CareerPlug, about building values-driven workplaces that actually work. Jenny walks us through her journey from healthcare to SaaS leadership, explains why hiring without knowing your "why" is a major red flag, and makes a bold claim: 90% of performance issues are rooted in core value misalignment. From hiring and onboarding to retention and AI’s role in recruiting, Jenny shares actionable insights for business owners ready to stop whack-a-moling their way through people problems—and start building real momentum through empowered managers and culture-first systems.
About Jenny:
Jenny has a background in the health industry, but she pivoted to SMB/franchise business operations, and now SaaS operations have stolen her heart. She credits her journey with CareerPlug with allowing her to follow all of her loves and talents. She balances being a mom to 4 kids, leading CareerPlug as President and EOS Integrator, and sitting on a non-profit board that is focused on making tech safer for youth. In her spare time, you can find Jenny cheering her kids on at their activities and experimenting with AI as a curious enthusiast.
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Transcript
Introduction to Fireside Chat & Guest
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello again, everyone. Welcome to today's Fireside Chat, Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. Here, we talk with people building, backing, and running better workplaces. I'm your host, Curtis Forbes.
00:00:20
Speaker
My guest today is Jenny Lehman.
Jenny Lehman's Professional Journey
00:00:23
Speaker
Jenny has a background in the health industry, but she pivoted to SMB franchise business operations, and now SaaS operations have stolen her heart.
00:00:34
Speaker
She credits her journey with Career Plug with allowing her to follow all of her loves and talents. She balances being a mom to four kids, leading Career Plug as president and EOS integrator, and sitting on a nonprofit board that is focused on making tech safer for youth.
00:00:53
Speaker
In her spare time, you can find Jenny cheering her kids on at their activities and experimenting with AI as a curious enthusiast. as we all are. Welcome,
Nonprofit Work & Tech Safety
00:01:04
Speaker
Jenny. I'm really happy to have you here.
00:01:06
Speaker
Thanks. Good to see you, Curtis. So you are a fellow Texan, also here in in Austin. Hook them horns. All day long.
00:01:18
Speaker
um Before we dive in, I'd really love to hear a little bit about the nonprofit organization that you work with, Making Safer Tech for Youth. Tell me a little bit about that. What is the organization? how long have you been working with them?
00:01:32
Speaker
So I have four contexts. I have four preteens slash teens that are all in that age where I became very passionate and interested about online safety for youth in a very quick period of time because it came became very relevant in our family lives.
00:01:49
Speaker
ah This organization is run by um a founder who's actually been a very strong advocate for child tech safety, both tech-wise, but also with legislation.
00:02:02
Speaker
So Chris McKenna started Protect Young Eyes to help with curriculum um and all all sorts of, I guess, enablement to empower a young person to make better digital choices, but also advocates obviously for you know safe things on with legislation.
00:02:22
Speaker
I had been watching him for a while. I became very interested in the technology side of this and um reached out to him and said, aye you're doing great things. How can I help?
Career Evolution: Health to SaaS
00:02:33
Speaker
And he basically said, I need an integrator. and So he had a really incredible vision for sort of a ah whole project he's going to spend the next five years on and needed somebody to come in and help him hone his vision and then take steps to move it forward. And I was like, that would be exciting for me.
00:02:51
Speaker
I would be able to contribute to something that means a lot to me, but also that I can bring value in. So that's my involvement with Protect Young Eyes. I love it. What's the name of it again?
00:03:03
Speaker
Protect young eyes. Protect young eyes. um I love that. i have I have four also. um two my two My two oldest are in their 20s, so it went through that phase, and it can be terrifying.
00:03:19
Speaker
sentence to say the least. but um So health to SMB Franchise Ops, to SaaS Ops, to leadership is, ah I mean, it's quite the journey. I'd love to hear a little bit about your career path. How did you get started in the health industry? And then what led you to the helm of Career Plug?
00:03:39
Speaker
Health started in college. I actually got a full ride to the University of Texas for percussion. Percussions. Didn't pay a dime my first year of college. My dad was a percussionist.
00:03:50
Speaker
Wow. Okay. So we share that music background. share music background. did know that. And I was following directly in his footsteps. He was a percussion performance major at UT. So I was kind of like this legacy, you new grad who was coming in. I got all the scholarships and got through my first year and got diagnosed with Crohn's disease.
00:04:10
Speaker
as freshman in college. So became very interested in the health side because of the role that nutrition and food played in me stabilizing my body. I broke my dad's heart, changed majors, and finished with my Bachelor of Science in Nutrition, and then started directly in hospitals and healthcare.
00:04:32
Speaker
So it came because of my own health journey and I just got very passionate about it. Let go of one love for another interest. And yeah it was a very interesting first few years in the medical world.
00:04:45
Speaker
i will say that I didn't have a ton of direct clinical experience because I got put right into probably one year, two years in, I got put right into a situation I think very much influences my career path so far. So I'm trying to pull all the threads through.
00:05:01
Speaker
which was I worked for the state of Texas Department of Aging and Disability, which if a medical facility accepts Medicaid and Medicare funds, they're held to federal standards of care, which means the state of Texas can come in and audit or survey a healthcare facility at any hour of the day, any day of the week, and levy major fines to providers or healthcare organizations that are not upholding the federal standards of care.
00:05:29
Speaker
So within two years of graduating college, I went from a hospital to looking at CEOs of giant healthcare companies in a boardroom and handing them one to $5 million dollar fines as a 22 or 23 year old.
00:05:47
Speaker
So I think that gave me some rapid fire experience in dealing with executives and learning how to show up in a room. felt very unqualified.
00:06:01
Speaker
um Yeah, i i wow. I definitely would say so. And so then what brought you what brought you to Career Plug from there? From there, i stayed with the healthcare care journey and got dabbled into management a little bit when I broke broke off from working at the state.
00:06:17
Speaker
And about 10 years into my career, i had twins. ah And so becoming a mom, I took ah probably six months off. And when I was ready to come back after six months, I decided my brain just wasn't into the nutrition anymore. My heart my passion had moved on.
00:06:34
Speaker
And I had become very interested in business operations overall and ended up looking for basically a very flexible part-time role as a brand new mom of six-month-old twins.
Role at Career Plug & EOS Framework
00:06:46
Speaker
And... met a franchisee who had four locations of her franchise and asked me to come in and operate all four from a basically a floating operational manager level and make them perform as one.
00:07:00
Speaker
Like operationally, process, everything should look and feel the same, like same heartbeat basically across all four locations. And i've fell in love with business ops at that point.
00:07:12
Speaker
that's That's awesome. so At Career Plug, you're not just president, you're also an EOS integrator. So tell us a little bit about EOS. What is it?
00:07:23
Speaker
What does an EOS integrator do? um Let's start there. EOS is a great framework, an entrepreneurial operating system.
00:07:35
Speaker
It's a great framework for a business that has a really strong vision from a visionary that needs to be honed in order to grow and scale. I would say, you know, I see it work well between two or three million ah and 20, 25 million. That's a really good sweet spot in between about 15 employees to now career plugs at 105 employees. And we're starting to feel that We're a little too big for some of the small processes of EOS, but it has been transformational in how it's helped us um operate, become really in tune with the vision, and deploy the vision across 11 teams and 100 people.
00:08:20
Speaker
I don't know that we would have been able to do it without the EOS framework. So the integrator sits next to the visionary, I'm not a visionary. Don't ever ask me to to found a company, but I'll support a visionary all day long.
00:08:33
Speaker
And basically, hears the vision, understands it, clarifies it, and then knows how to turn that around and transform the way the company is actually making it come to fruition. And EOS is great because it's um it's a proven playbook and process to how to make that happen. So as integrator, I didn't have to come up with all the The plumbing and the bones, I just had to deploy what they teach really well.
Career Plug's Growth and Solutions
00:09:00
Speaker
So usually there's an implementer that is basically a franchisee of EOS that you hire to coach your executive team to adopt it.
00:09:11
Speaker
So we had one of those for two years. She was incredible. She taught me a lot of really valuable stuff. And then we graduate from being handheld essentially to maintaining and operating EOS without that help.
00:09:24
Speaker
I love that. So I've previously spoken with with one of your colleagues, Chris, Chris Igo.
00:09:31
Speaker
While some of your audience may have heard a little bit this before, love for you to tell us a little bit about Career Plug. What is Career Plug? What does Career Plug do? This my favorite topic right now, especially because who we are and what we're doing is changing.
00:09:46
Speaker
yeah I'll tell you more about why that's an important statement today. CareerPlug began as a hiring software, essentially to help very small business owners hire the right people.
00:09:58
Speaker
Our founder has and incredible vision. It's evolved beautifully over time. The original partnership for CareerPlug was State Farm. So he helped State Farm provide CareerPlug as the recommended vendor for all agents to use to hire. So we actually allowed State Farm to customize their hiring process, all of their their lingo, their scorecards, their assessments.
00:10:26
Speaker
that was such a success and he was profitable from day one that we realized that there's a model here with a parent-child hierarchy where we go to market and we we help small businesses in that frame, that but structure ah deploy this, right? and And use this across all of their network.
00:10:47
Speaker
So it turned from State Farm into something we promote to franchising. And today is now evolved, literally today, into becoming hiring and employee retention software.
00:10:59
Speaker
We're going beyond the first moment of you made your right hire to how are you going to keep this person? Yeah. and and And knowing that the role of the manager in that organization is critical.
00:11:13
Speaker
Culture lives and dies. I think through the manager role. ah And I think the employee experience yeah is just dramatically centered in the hands of that manager. So we're very interested in influencing that.
00:11:29
Speaker
I think that's awesome. I mean, moving from, I think what a lot of people might see is a very transactional relationship with your customers to more of an ongoing partnership with them, right? Through the entire life cycle of their employment practices.
00:11:45
Speaker
um Makes a ton of sense. So, Tell me or tell us a little bit more about the the clients that you helped. Understood it started with State Farm and you've kind of expanded this to franchise networks.
00:11:58
Speaker
Why did they choose Career Plug?
00:12:02
Speaker
We decided that there was this essentially gap. Franchising is really ah playbook. Right.
00:12:13
Speaker
It's you buy a business out of a box in some aspects where the franchisor gives you everything but one playbook, which is hiring and employee retention. And because of joint employer laws, many franchisors really want to stay at at least a healthy, if not very healthy distance from anything related to joint employer.
00:12:31
Speaker
So that was our opportunity. We are the missing chapter of their playbook that really helps them with this slightly risky in a legal way topic of how to operate their business, how to hire and how to engage with their employees. We're not HR consulting. We are not compliance. Right. And we do not replace an employment attorney.
00:12:54
Speaker
in their world of experts to keep around, but we wanna be expert partners in that way. It's really hard to run a business, you're doing 13 things and wearing that many hats every single day. So to keep up with the changing landscapes of what applicants expect, what the job boards expect, what is attractive even to job seekers so is it's too much.
Hiring and Retention Strategies
00:13:16
Speaker
yeah So we wanna play that role and we wanna bring our value through the structure of a partnership where we are presented essentially as the preferred vendor through the franchisor or the membership corporate office to their member base as this is the vetted and best solution in the market for employees ah hiring and employee retention.
00:13:41
Speaker
I love that. I mean, I, and I've seen it firsthand, uh, you know, joint employer, vicarious liability are the chief concerns, I think for the corporate office when it comes to, HR and and people problems, I think in general and having, um, a ah software system that can, you know, help navigate that somewhat for the the franchisees without crossing those boundaries is um like you said, I mean, it was an it's an enormous gap to fill, right? And so tell me about some of the people problems that that you know you're obsessed with solving for these organizations when it comes to hiring and retaining the right talent. You know you listed just a ah few of them.
00:14:28
Speaker
I wanna hear a little bit more detail on some of these things. You wanna dive in the hire side or the retention side first? I mean, we got all the time in the world. Let's do both.
00:14:41
Speaker
All right, we'll start at the top of the funnel because really what I see is I see it hiring being a funnel and then i see employee retention being like an inverted funnel right under it. um What's important is to first really understand your core values. I don't want any small business owner to go out there and begin hiring without being really clear on who they are.
00:15:01
Speaker
Not just what what problem are they trying to solve in their their industry, but who are they as a business owner? Why did they get into that business or that industry? And what drives them to honestly deal with all the troubles and all the frustrating parts of becoming a small business owner? yeah What dream did they have, right?
00:15:23
Speaker
So if if a business owner can get really clear on that, and ah honestly, I have an interest in productizing, right? that for our clients, then we can say, okay, now it's time to go team up and staff.
00:15:38
Speaker
And one of the most important things, and you know the the workforce is very fluid and different generations are coming up into the workforce and have very different expectations and desires for the role that their employer should play in their life.
00:15:55
Speaker
So it's about reading the landscape, being clear on who you are as a business and your big and deploying that through hiring and employee retention. That really should be the foundation of it.
00:16:06
Speaker
And i our founder's vision really supports that. And I'm also probably most proud of the way that we model this. ah I don't want to you know preach something as best practice to our clients, and but not be able to say that we walk the walk and talk the talk.
00:16:24
Speaker
And this is an area where I'll say that I will go toe to toe with any other business ah with how we embed our core values through every element of the employee experience.
00:16:37
Speaker
um And it's a good way for us to test it too. it's And it's easy for small but it's easy for small business owners over time to get disconnected from that. Why?
00:16:47
Speaker
Because of the million different hats that they're wearing on a day-to-day basis and the fires that they're putting out. And you know today they're CFO and also janitor and also you know admin support and also answering the phones. And sometimes they lose those things.
00:17:04
Speaker
And when they have to go hire somebody, Reconnecting themselves with that why can see being, I mean, a ah huge part of finding that right person.
00:17:16
Speaker
You can't find the right person if you don't know your why and you don't know what values you need that person to be able to honestly represent on your behalf. Right. Every employee is a billboard for your business. Right. So making sure they can embody what represents your values is table stakes before you ever start to add to your team, I think.
00:17:39
Speaker
So, and then the retention side. So really the the hiring process core values should be vetted through the entire thing. And there's a lot of best practice and there's constant learning of how to be attractive to job seekers, how to display your employer branding in culture and culture in a job listing. That's really hard to do. and there's a lot of noise out there, right?
00:18:00
Speaker
But once you successfully do that, and we, Career Plug, wants to be your experts and partners in doing that, and you get applicants, yes, you should eventually be hiring that right person based on values, based on knowing exactly what role you need them to play in organization and not having a very like vague idea of what is looks like success for them.
00:18:21
Speaker
Be really clear. um And then once you make that hire, the next challenge begins. ah So this is where I've spent the last two years with our founder really thinking through what is it like as a small business owner to feel really excited about making that hire then knowing, okay, I just created a whole new job for myself with planning for onboarding, creating everything for onboarding, and then actually showing up as an employer that you can
00:18:53
Speaker
ah have your integrity behind. you know I made a good experience for that employee. And i have reaped the fruits of doing so because this person has not only stayed with my organization and I've had to backfill them, but they've grown in their skillset and in their role within my organization and are providing you know three times the value this year that they were last year because they stayed.
00:19:16
Speaker
How much has EOS influenced this perspective of yours?
00:19:23
Speaker
Good question. I hear some of the things. It's in there for sure. i Right. So as I listened to you, some of these things I hear when we talk about, you know, finding the right people for the right seats, you know, um it's a lot in how you operate your business, how you hire and how you engage with your employees is huge in terms of your business success, your trajectory, your growth.
00:19:51
Speaker
Right. So, And to your comment earlier. six pieces of the pie that are really important with EOS. Yeah. I think sort of come through in different ways with hiring and employee retention.
00:20:05
Speaker
And well and your your comment earlier about, you know, the manager and their and their role in creating, you know, the um that type of that type of culture and that type of experience for the employees. i mean, if that's the person that you're hiring,
00:20:22
Speaker
I mean, if you haven't done the homework to make sure that that they embody those values,
Performance Management and Core Values
00:20:28
Speaker
right? ah Emotionally, cognitively, you know all those things, you can't expect then it to translate downstream.
00:20:38
Speaker
No, yeah I think in ah in many ways you need to trust, that manager is probably the most critical hire you will make because they will influence your culture more than you will. They will be involved in more of the small but really meaningful moments.
00:20:51
Speaker
as your business scales. So yeah, getting that person right is really critical. And I often think that, and you know, as an entrepreneur, what I've seen is you hire three or four, maybe five individual contributors to your business, but you eventually get to some point where you can no longer do it all.
00:21:14
Speaker
And there is this moment where if you can, make the right hire for a manager and entrust your people to another human besides yourself, such a relief can come to that business owner.
00:21:29
Speaker
And for the first time they'll experience being in that role as entrepreneur and not being the only boss in the house, but knowing they can step away for either a vacation or not have to be there 24 seven and trust that what they've taught this person and how this person embodies the values will not skip a beat.
00:21:47
Speaker
Yeah. That is invaluable for a business owner. Oh, yeah. I mean, and and and and he and just listening to that, I mean, it it definitely resonates. You know, I spent i spend years um as a small business owner.
00:21:59
Speaker
um i mean, oh well almost 20 years i had run multiple small businesses. And yeah. That's gospel. I mean, everything that you were just saying is gospel.
00:22:13
Speaker
So ah tell me a little bit about performance management. I mean, how often do you see kinds of of misalignment when it comes to values and culture get in the way of of clients, you know, CareerPlex customers, their organizational growth and and their progress, right?
00:22:31
Speaker
um I'd love to hear you kind of speak on on how are some of that performance management might go you know against core value demonstration you know or so forth.
00:22:44
Speaker
I don't believe the two are um separable from each other. True performance management, I believe, is a combination of demonstrating our core values or the organization's core values in the way that's intended, constant evaluation of that,
00:23:02
Speaker
and performing in their role with the measure of success that you have given them. So ah you have to do both. You have to measure both. And performance management holistically should encapsulate core values in role performance.
00:23:22
Speaker
And without those measurable outcomes. I mean, every piece plays its own critical role and without one of them, you know, the whole thing doesn't work.
00:23:32
Speaker
Agreed. Do you ever see clients try to fix a tech, an ops, a marketing, a sales problem, but it's really ah a people problem stemming from some of this inconsistent, you know, behavior, whether it's onboarding or, um you know, issues with measuring these outcomes, score values, et cetera?
00:23:53
Speaker
and to make a very bold hypothesis claim. Let's do it. I'm going to splice this and share it all over LinkedIn. Hope I'm halfway right.
00:24:05
Speaker
I'll say I have a gut intuition that 90% of performance problems are core value related. Bottom line. I think we got to frame that quote.
00:24:18
Speaker
You might be right about that. I think I am. I think you might be. So when when you're helping clients to hire and retain their top talent and solve their people problems, tell me about the patterns that you notice and how teams either succeed or or stumble ah when putting some of these recommendations into practice.
00:24:42
Speaker
Do you mean from the perspective of our clients, small business owners or career plug internally? Yeah. Well, I mean, you you can use Career Plug, I guess, as ah as some perspective, but I think in general with small business owners.
00:24:53
Speaker
It's how you operationalize core values, how they show up in a daily way, and how you discuss issues, I think, going back to EOS, the IBS framework, right? the The struggle I think that I see happen with our clients is both on
00:25:14
Speaker
capacity side because so many small business owners are dealing with a slew of competing on priorities in terms of importance and urgence. you know Do you whack-a-mole the fire, the customer who's in the lobby screaming, or do you whack-a-mole the fact that you suspect that there might be a hole in your cash transactions and money could be siphoned out in the business?
00:25:37
Speaker
like Which one do you try to go investigate first? So constant evaluation of priorities is going to always compete against dealing with, I think, some of these root issues. So that's one hard thing that I don't know how to solve about being a small business owner, just the nature of entrepreneurship and running a small business.
00:25:56
Speaker
I think that comes with it. It comes with it. ah There is no easy answer. I wish I could solve it for all of our clients. But I think what um what we also see is
00:26:10
Speaker
The importance of being willing to part with somebody if core values are not being demonstrated and if the performance isn't there at 90 days. At 90 days, you should have seen enough to know, yay or nay.
00:26:26
Speaker
In Career Plug, we've had to challenge ourselves to get much more clear on this because it's really easy to get to 90 days and know, this isn't it. This isn't it. But to have...
00:26:39
Speaker
urgency of running the business, goals that are staring you down in the face, and knowing how expensive and time consuming it is to go back to the drawing board with vacant role and the hiring process.
00:26:52
Speaker
The easy button is to say, oh we'll just get through it. We'll work on it.
00:26:58
Speaker
That is more expensive in the long run. And we've learned our lessons the hard way with that. 100%. hundred percent The right path is much harder, which is part with that person, call it ah day 90 be willing to go back and invest.
00:27:14
Speaker
Your long-term situation at that point will be much better off, but it's super painful in the short term, which is going back to like getting that higher right and taking the time to bet it.
00:27:25
Speaker
You need more than just a pulse to represent your business and in front of your customers. You need to make sure both skills and competencies and values are all locked in.
Leadership Lessons and Organizational Traits
00:27:37
Speaker
And it's hard. It is hard. I mean, it's yeah maybe easily, well, easily could be a stretch, but addressed definitely with strong leadership, right?
00:27:49
Speaker
they can They can recognize, you know, the right, the wrong, the good, the bad, the values, the not, right? The patterns, you know, um and, you know, who have that motivation, I think, to change them, right?
00:28:01
Speaker
I see one more trip wire that I didn't mention that I'm thinking of now, which is in the very first seven days of someone's employment, small business owners and many businesses, we've done it included, miss an opportunity to set extremely clear expectations ah of that employee.
00:28:21
Speaker
What do you need from them? And ask them, what do you need from me as your employer, right? It is a mutual relationship. And defining success. and spending almost agonizing time defining success upfront with scenarios and examples, anything you can give so that that person at any point in their first week, first 90 days can think back to that conversation say, does this define success in that business owner's eyes?
00:28:55
Speaker
And if not, what what would? If you can't set expect ah clear expectations then,
00:29:03
Speaker
It's going to, the train's going to go off the tracks and it's going to be really hard to get it back on. could definitely see that going downhill quickly. And I think I can chalk that up to some of the mistakes I've made early on too.
00:29:16
Speaker
um I think sometimes having that experience experience of what happens when you don't do that, you know, you know Makes you that better yeah leader eventually. Yeah, you have to learn the hard way.
00:29:33
Speaker
um So um ah among some of these organizations that maybe you admire most, not necessarily just those that you work with, but certainly can be part of the the group here. I'd love to hear some common traces stand out when they really, really get it ah get it right when it comes to culture, retain the right people. It sounds like career plug is sort of in that bag.
00:29:51
Speaker
um Give me some common traits, maybe not necessarily just those that are able to define success. What do you see in their DNA?
00:30:01
Speaker
I love this question.
00:30:04
Speaker
I see a really clear vision, crystal clear values, and the willingness to keep trying until you get it right.
00:30:16
Speaker
Nobody's gonna right you. It might one of the most important things there is just that your constant willingness to fix what's not right. Try again? Yeah, to keep. Try again.
00:30:27
Speaker
and And constant tweaks. you know are and Our current product leader has coined the term iterate within our organization specifically for how we approach product, right?
00:30:41
Speaker
But it's become sort of like a give award because He says it so often that we're all like, yeah, I know you're going say. Exactly what we we know you're going to say. what But there's some truth to that with operating a business.
00:30:54
Speaker
And it's I see operations. And this is when when I told you my career sort of started to shift towards this. this I saw business operations as sort of this dial board of a whole bunch of
00:31:10
Speaker
movements you could make and tweaks you could do. You could either, you know, pull a dial all the way to the right, or you could slightly tweak this and slightly tweak that. And I became very interested in balancing all of these factors and the the impact it would make on a business. And I still see, I think of every business as almost like a dial board where I think of my dad's old, um,
00:31:31
Speaker
you know, the the receiver that was under the big box TV. That's what I was picturing in my head, something like that. You can tell what generation I'm from. then he had his big old speakers. And that thing, that receiver had about a million dials. And I always sat there and tried to think like, what could all of these things actually be useful for?
00:31:48
Speaker
But he would work on it and he would get his sound just right. You know, and I think back to that visual when I think about operating a business. And every business is going to have a different health status of that that profile.
00:32:02
Speaker
what parts are suffering and what parts are just hitting the mark perfectly that you should not touch.
AI in Recruitment and Small Business Challenges
00:32:11
Speaker
Knowing that is hard too. Yeah. So Career Plug is at its core, it is a technology platform. So you notice any surprising ways that companies are leveraging software to change maybe how they recruit and work?
00:32:27
Speaker
hire, ground their core values, foster culture. What do you see happening right now in the technology space and the movement there with regard to the stuff we're talking about?
00:32:40
Speaker
Technology is in a wild fast lane right now. Oh my God, you said So it's it's interesting to watch what's happening, especially on the recruiting and employee retention side.
00:32:52
Speaker
I have a love for technology overall, but this last 12 months with ah the advancement and the speed at which we're all interacting with AI is wild, but also reality, right?
00:33:09
Speaker
So this is infecting every, I say infecting as if it's a virus. It is here to stay. It has a good side and a ah ah bad side or light and dark, right? Right. But it's it's infiltrating, I think, almost in every industry.
00:33:23
Speaker
So I've taken on a role of really watching what it's doing across the board, specifically in recruiting and employee retention.
00:33:33
Speaker
And it's a really sticky place, honestly, because when you're dealing with humans, the lives of people of which have applied to your job, theyre they're trying to secure income and have a career, and you have the choice of whether or not to hand off some of that process to any degree to a large language model or be under the influence of a large language model, there's a lot to think through there and bet out.
00:34:05
Speaker
State laws, like are are our legislative process is... dramatically behind on guiding this and the laws dealing with AI and how it, you know, in the recruiting space is a patchwork quilt that is challenging to navigate.
00:34:27
Speaker
think To say the least. There's a million thoughts I have in my head. and the employee retention side, i think it's it's so much more simplified because at that point,
00:34:39
Speaker
The relationship has been secured. Now you just need to execute a healthy relationship and make it successful. And a lot of the legal risk of AI drops off after that moment of hire. So I am so much more interested ah and less worried about investing in AI on the post-hire side.
00:35:00
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, generally speaking, I think that policy is usually behind Oh, I was.
00:35:12
Speaker
light used light and dark instead of good and bad um which i love by the way and i'm going to steal um Do you think a lot of these organizations are making the right choices when selecting the tech and the software they use in the talent acquisition, you know, and throughout the employee lifecycle? Are there things they could do differently to actually drive results?
00:35:36
Speaker
Good, better? i think we're all in rapid learning and experimentation, to be honest. I don't know if I can say yet if we're all going the right direction. the the interest small business owners have in AI in the recruiting side is a lot about um really shortening the screening or vetting period, either during apply or right after apply to decide, should i spend time, my precious time and interview this person?
00:36:06
Speaker
What's interesting about inserting AI into that to try to skip that middle step of vetting that person through a phone screen is what's most traditional, right?
00:36:19
Speaker
ah Is that you, if I was a small business owner, the first 30 seconds I spend interacting with somebody is a read of their through energy, their communication,
00:36:35
Speaker
They're like, I'm evaluating million things in the first 30 seconds of of interacting with somebody. So I don't want to hand that off to anybody. However, i can see the other side of it, which is I'm wearing 13 hats. There's only so many minutes of in a day.
00:36:52
Speaker
There's 70 applicants. I need to get 70 down to five. I need help to find the cream of the crop, the top five. And I want to go talk to the top five. And they're willing to hand off that that funnel I get that too.
00:37:07
Speaker
So I don't know all the right answers, but I know it's a constant evaluation for all of us right now on the tech side and on the, you know, the small business owner side.
Data-Driven Business Outcomes
00:37:17
Speaker
Speaking about retention though, he specifically, one of the things that I've noticed, you know, as a small business owner, when it comes to retention,
00:37:30
Speaker
I think a lot of small business owners don't necessarily even know how to separate signals from noise. And there's a lot of data that they can get. And that's not necessarily hard to get, but they don't necessarily know what they want or how to use it, right, to produce outcomes that they're looking for. And so I'm kind of curious if you ever notice a disconnect between what you see people tracking, what actually matters?
00:38:01
Speaker
I don't know that I see people tracking the right things on a regular. you know We're primarily SMB. It's probably very different in mid-market and enterprise. 100%. But i I would be willing to bet most business owners, if I say, what is your average employee tenure?
00:38:19
Speaker
They would be wildly guessing. They might have a feeling that it's somewhere in a ballpark, but they don't have any actual concrete way to measure that. What is your 90-day employee retention rate?
00:38:32
Speaker
Oh, seven out of 10, 70. They can loosely guess, but the patterns change over time. And just going back to my dials, if we change one dial, I want to know what that impact was.
00:38:47
Speaker
Yeah. And I want to be able to see, we went from 70% to 75% very quickly, and we changed one thing. Look at the difference that made. On that note, then let's assume you have a dashboard that can reveal one key people signal within, inside within you know, inside an organization.
00:39:04
Speaker
What insight do you want to surface? Let's say you have governance now over all the small businesses on CareerPlugs platform, and you get to design this dashboard with a single signal. What is that going to look like?
00:39:17
Speaker
You can pick two if you had to. It's really hard. Yeah. um
00:39:26
Speaker
I think I would pick one on like the the long the lag measure side, which is average employee tenure okay in months or years.
00:39:38
Speaker
And I would pick one on the lead measure side, which is
00:39:45
Speaker
ah pulsing of employee sentiment through various questions that's spread out over time. where I can sort of see patterns and trending, whether it's something everybody, even, you Gen Alpha can relate with, which is, you know, the scale from happy face to sad face.
00:40:08
Speaker
hundred percent 100%. And see the different emotions, you know changing over time against different questions. We've we've built the beginnings of this, and it's one of my favorite things to think about and brainstorm on.
00:40:21
Speaker
But when I use that version of a product right now for my team, I have seven direct reports. i have I know where everybody's baseline is.
00:40:33
Speaker
I know that if you are an optimist, a pessimist, or a realist, just based on the first few weeks of you responding to our product pulse, then I watch and I see what changes ah happen. And then I can sense and respond in real time because I say, okay, Jim doesn't ever answer that question like that.
00:40:57
Speaker
Something's going on. um And I can get something that allows me to go have what we're calling manager moments. Give the manager a signal and let them go take an action and have a moment and find Jim and say, hey can we go to lunch today?
00:41:14
Speaker
i just want to check on you. And give Jim the chance to tell you that something's going on in their life. How do you support them? I care about them as a human first, right? And then figure out, or is it something that as an employer, I can tweak, I can adjust. Maybe Jim has an unmet need maybe somebody is being a jerk on the team um and it's bringing his performance down. I want to know about that, but I need to create a safe space for Jim to say that to me.
Human Interaction in Tech-Driven Workplaces
00:41:40
Speaker
But give me a signal to tell me I need to at least go check in with Jim.
00:41:45
Speaker
You know, as companies get more deliberate, I think about how they they support their people, like like this, like some of the other things that we talked about, um how do you see your own work adapting or or evolving?
00:42:01
Speaker
My personal work? Well, you know, click Career Plug obviously is going to have or want to have a stake in all of those things. So how do you see your work with Career Plug sort of evolving to meet what's ah what's going on?
00:42:17
Speaker
I want to be extremely valuable in the moment to managers who need to show up in those moments, ah empower them to know what's going on and have an idea of even how to respond and to make sure the business owners can tell, okay, my manager's got it.
00:42:36
Speaker
They're responding to these moments and it's not all on me. I wanna own that for every single small business owner.
00:42:44
Speaker
First of all i love that. You said you're not a visionary, but that's a very good vision. It's representing our current vision, so I can't claim it. But i've
00:42:55
Speaker
the more I think about this and the more I like interact with our our customers, i have put I can put myself in in their shoes. I have become more passionate about this than I ever thought I would be.
00:43:06
Speaker
you know And it's it's something that I find a lot of purpose in, and it's taken on legs that I didn't expect. Yeah. But this is honestly, I'll tell you the, going make another big claim.
00:43:20
Speaker
I think this is how the world has changed over time.
00:43:27
Speaker
Work. Everybody's going to have to work, right? Like that is a part of our lives. And hopefully you love it. Hopefully you don't hate it. Where you become a better human, hopefully, through your work experience. You will only become a better human through your work experience if you have a manager who cares about you.
00:43:44
Speaker
And who's pushing you to your potential. That's how the world has changed outside of the family life.
Final Advice and Conclusion
00:43:52
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think arguably now we're all in the business of relationships.
00:43:59
Speaker
And it's probably... you know, ah swinging that much harder in that direction as more things become, you know, automated, right.
00:44:10
Speaker
As technology takes over so much, I think as human beings, we're sort of craving that, that side of it to, to feel like we have some purpose and some connection and some belonging, yeah you know, and and purpose, et cetera.
00:44:22
Speaker
So. Every hour we're spending away from our families or, or, or away from our personal life, whether it's, you know It can look any number of ways. But if you're spending those precious hours of your one given life at work, they should be and valuable. They should be and changing you in a positive way and they should be you know contributing to good in the world.
00:44:48
Speaker
yeah So business leader comes to you. You're sitting next to him on a plane. You all are about to deplane, walk off the the jetway, and they turn around right after they get their bag and just ask you for only one piece of advice on how they can truly get it right when it comes to growing, to retaining their team.
00:45:12
Speaker
And you only have an opportunity to tell them one thing before they walk in the other direction. What is that thing?
00:45:22
Speaker
Besides don't screw it up.
00:45:27
Speaker
I would say... Every manager deserves the tools to be great and every employee deserves a great manager. Make sure that's happening.
00:45:39
Speaker
I love that. I love that. can't take credit for that one. ah But that that that that is a good one. Whoever said it. Our CEO and founder, Clint, has put those together and it's... I love it.
00:45:52
Speaker
That's what I would tell that one business owner. Well, we need to make sure we chat with Clint. um Thank you so much, Jenny. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today. them horns again. and Make sure that we, that's right. Show some love.
00:46:08
Speaker
um And thank you all for tuning in to ah to Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. Please share this fireside chat with a friend or colleague and check us out at mustardhub.com to see how we help companies become destinations for workplace happiness and turn culture into a competitive edge. Until next time, thank you.