Tired of a broken talent experience at your small business? Brad Voorhees, Founder of ScaleTx, joins the conversation to reveal the secrets behind crafting a winning strategy. In this episode, Brad shares his insights on how to identify your company’s talent experience gaps, overcome resistance from leadership, and leverage your people’s strengths to gain a competitive advantage. Learn how to invest in your talent, not just costs, and watch your business thrive.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Brad Voorhees – Enhance The Talent Experience

Welcome to the show. We’re a show that guides leaders on how to elevate the workforce. We believe that people are at the heart of successful organizations and team member’s well-being, rewards, and career development are all essential to a happy, healthy, and highly productive work workforce. With this show, we discussed the practical and effective leadership strategies for top executives, senior professionals, and talent managers.

I would like to introduce you to our host. We have a full house here. First of all, we have Sumit Singla. He is in India. He is our Global People Strategist. He has a lot of deep background. I encourage you to look at Sumit’s LinkedIn account. He’s known as the culture guy. He’s highly impactful there. We also have Char Miller. She is a serial entrepreneur. She loves creating businesses and making an impact on the world.

She is the leader of Mountain Sea Career Strategy. She helps people find their way in their careers and live a happy life. We have my colleague Howard Nizewitz. He and I worked together for a long time in our professional careers at Barclays. We work together at CompTeam with the rest of the team here. It’s great to have Howard on the team.

We’re diving into how to enhance the talent experience with Brad Voorhees. He’s a visionary Founder of ScaleTx. Brad’s journey from the community-driven streets of Royal Oak, Michigan, a place near and dear to my heart. I was born not too far from there. He makes an impression there from Royal Oak and does a lot of community work.

I believe that you led the local SHRM chapter. It’s great to have an individual who has such a wide impact. His background spans manufacturing to technology, and he has a deep commitment to the professional community and contributions there in Detroit SHRM. His approach is both heartfelt and strategic.

ScaleTx is his brainchild, born from the desire to transform businesses through scalable talent experience solutions and align closely with those crucial company objectives. Brad will help you drive that. Join us as Brad shares his expertise in creating a talent strategy that drives compliance and performance and fosters growth and engagement. Reinforcing that investing in people is the best investment that a company can make. Welcome, Brad.

It’s good to be here. I apologize for the technical issues. I’ve got many things going on from recovering from the first flu I’ve had in several years. It’s all happening at once. This reminds me of a time when I interviewed for a job several years ago, and it was a panel interview. It was me, and I was sitting at a table with six other people. I had to remember everybody’s name. I used my notepad and wrote their names on the table where they were sitting. It helped me go through the interview for the next hour and a half. It’s good to be with you all.

Apart from an interview, we’re here to pick your brain on all the wonderful things you do to help your clients. It might be a good way to start to understand how you got into this business. What was your ambition that drove you to become a management consultant in the HR industry?

Management Consultant In HR

My story is one that you hear a lot. When I did it back in 2019, it was a different situation than what you hear a lot nowadays. I’ll explain that. In 2019, I was working for several years for a small software startup. The year prior, that startup had been acquired by a large organization. Things were changing, and that’s okay. That was to be expected from going to a 60-person startup to be acquired by a giant of 10,000 employees. It’s a global organization. By counterparts, it leads off the sales and the operations team.

Earlier in 2019, when their role had been phased out of the organization after being acquired, they started their own consulting practice. They said, “What we do is we work with other software companies.” They were niche. That’s where all their experience had been, strictly in tech. They’re like, “We can develop go-to-market strategies for our clients.”

It happens to be one of the clients that they were working with needed some talent support. I got the idea. From encouragement from them, I should start my own consulting firm. As every business owner does, I said, “I can’t do this unless I have a company name.” I didn’t want to say it was Brad Voorhees Consulting.

I talked to a lot of people, namely some marketing folks, and I came up with the name ScaleTX. I’m not from Texas. I’ve never been to Texas. When you write a letter or anytime that you, in the US Mail, for example, write Texas, it’s always both capital letters. I’m like, “If I lowercase the x, people won’t think that it has anything to do with Texas, but it hasn’t worked several years later.

Tx is an acronym for talent experience. I want to scale talent experiences. That’s where the name came from. I got a contract with that shared client. It happens to be that about a month later, it was my turn, and I was voluntarily told to go elsewhere by my employer, and my position was eliminated. I was like, “I am now doing this.”

That’s what I’ve been doing ever since the beginning of 2020. That’s how the company came to be. The offering and branding and my strategy have morphed and changed over the last several years. I’ve done all these different things. That is how ScaleTx was born. It was born starting off as a hobby. I was given a choice. I said, “I can continue doing this or find another full-time job.” I continued to consult.

Talent Experience

The talent experience is near and dear to our hearts. All of us have collaborated on a book that we wrote on the workforce experience and released in 2023. I would love to hear your perspective on how your organization helps people navigate that or create those places and talent experiences that attract the best people and motivate the workforce. Can you dive into that piece on what you do to help your clients?

I don’t remember the first time that I heard the term talent experience, but it’s a rather new term when you look at the history of HR. It’s several years old, and nobody has even talked about talent experience. It came because HR was fragmented in its functions. You see it even at larger companies. There’s a talent acquisition lane, onboarding lane, training and development lane, and total rewards. Nobody was saying, “How do these different lanes connect to form one experience?” That’s how talent experience was born. It was people to look at the bigger picture and say, “How do you connect all of these different lanes?”

That’s something that piqued my interest, as well as how I work with clients. To give you a little bit of a background, I don’t work with large companies. I work specifically with small businesses that don’t have any HR on staff, or if they do, it’s somebody who is maybe more junior in their career, excels at the tactical stuff of HR, could process payroll, answer benefit questions, and could put an employee handbook together and you get the gist, but they may not know what to do from a talent strategy standpoint. Companies come to me and say, “We need help on our HR side.” The owner or the office manager is wearing that hat. You have to think of 30 to 150 employees. It is the sweet spot.

When I start talking about talent experience, most don’t even know what I’m talking about. They hadn’t even heard that term. They’re thinking about HR. This is where I have to start explaining that the Tx doesn’t stand for Texas because most companies don’t even know. When I start talking about things like, “How do you continue the experience after the offer letter has been signed? What do you do now after somebody signs the offer letter? What happens between then and their first day, and they don’t have a plan?”

That’s where I work to craft a process that tells them what to do, the framework in between. I’m giving one example. The offer letter has been signed, but they don’t start for 2 or 3 weeks. What happens in between? That’s going to be a part of your talent experience. Those are the types of things that I do and talk to my clients about.

 

That’s important, especially with your customer segment. When you’re looking at those small developing companies that are going into mid-size, the executive team and leadership team often have a mindset like, “I’ve been doing this for a while. I know how to do this.” When you look under the coverage, it’s like going, “You need to put in some processes and procedures here to have that great experience and consistent and scalable approach. I imagine that’s something you walk into a lot.

Small companies are fighting for the same talent as large companies that do have fancy bells and whistles. They want those same people in a lot of cases, but if they don’t have their employee value proposition, which is a big part of helping define your talent experience, and you don’t have that defined, it’s going to be hard to compete at a level for talent that your competitors or companies that may be in your space, but 7 to 10 years ahead of you do, you want those same people. Defining these things and putting them as a package is a big part of what I help my clients with.

Small companies are fighting for the same talent as large companies. If they don't have their employee value proposition and define their talent experience, it's going to be really hard to compete. Share on X

A lot of things have changed in the past few years. We have companies that have more remote employees than ever and are often hiring people from different cultures and perhaps even outside the country in some situations. Do you see that occurring in the small businesses that you support?

I do, but the biggest driver I see to a varying level is the type of work in the industry that the client is in. My background happens to be that when I talk about my corporate background, not working for myself is primarily in tech manufacturing, which you have to be if you live here in Michigan. We’re a heavy manufacturing state here, especially in the Metro Detroit area, where I lived and was born and raised.

It happens to be that most of my background is in tech, manufacturing, and service-based industries. It’s hard to scale remote and flexible policies in a manufacturing environment compared to a tech environment. In a manufacturing environment, a large contingency of the workforce comes into a facility, clocks in, and clocks out. These are jobs that can’t be done remotely. There are always challenges with service-based and manufacturing industries and companies that want to implement a lot of these things, but they can’t at the level of a tech company. That’s always going to be in existence.

The people who are working in those environments, it’s not that they don’t want remote jobs themselves. They do want remote jobs. They do want flexibility. Talent is talent from one end to the other, as far as my opinion goes. They’re still asking for all of those things. It’s harder for a client to execute those requests.

Steps To Take

When you are thinking about the talent experience with some of your clients, what are the first steps you take to assess the environment to understand the current talent experience?

The first couple of steps in my process is comprehending what they’re doing in anything else. Like any other consultant, I have my list of questions that we talk and ask. These are things that get uncovered normally during the sales process. It switches anywhere from 2 to 3 calls to get to know you and talk about what you’re looking to accomplish, what your current issues are, and how ScaleTx can help.

Once you’ve identified where you’re at in terms of your talent experience from one step to the next, that’s when you start formulating a strategy that you can use where you can say, “These are things that we can tackle immediately.” I’ll give you an example. Most clients don’t know what they don’t know. Going back to me talking about talent experience and them hearing it for the first time when I start asking questions like, “Tell me about your performance management process.” They’re like, “Brad, we haven’t even gotten there. We’re having issues finding talent. We haven’t even been able to tackle the performance management piece.”

That’s why I don’t do project-based work. You have to enter into a contract because many clients say, “Don’t you come in for a one-day training and fix their culture?” That’s an issue. I have now identified an issue. That’s clearly an issue because you thought I could fix your culture in a one-day training of some stranger. Being able to go through that comprehension and identify where those issues are from one step to the next because I know what services I offer, I know the connection points between total rewards, employee engagement, HR tech stack, and all of these different things and how to connect those.

Clients are funny in the sense that they don’t know what they don’t know. It’s up to me to be able to identify those problems. What we normally see is that there are some things that they want to tackle right away because this is where their issues lie versus these things that we want to address in the future. It’s a great retention tool for me because you prove your value with every other consultant or advisor. They’re going to be much more open to continuing services after a contract ends. That’s where it’s nice to say, “Let’s eventually get to your HR tech stack or develop an employee engagement strategy, but let’s work on your organizational design now. That’s where you seem to have the most problems.

Organizational Design

Talking about organizational design, what are the most common problems that you see in the talent experience in small organizations?

When it comes to organizational design, we’re noticing and finding that the process is broken with what they have. I didn’t even start doing organizational design until several years ago. Talk about something that is a true passion of mine. It’s easy for companies to think about organizational design as an organizational chart. You’ve got your fancy PowerPoint chart. You’ve got a name and a title, but you’re not thinking about what that role is responsible for.

It's so easy for companies to think about organizational design as an organizational chart. Share on X

We go to their organizational design when I start identifying problems and think about where the process is broken. In a lot of cases, and this shouldn’t surprise you with the small organization, there isn’t any. The 3 to 7 responsibilities aren’t listed. You’ve got people doing the same thing but in a different way, and it’s completely inefficient. People don’t understand everything that they do on a day-to-day basis or how that’s impacting the person next to them or the person in a different department.

Organizational design is something that we work on. This relates to the talent experience because people normally have talent attraction problems, especially over the last several years. Recruiting isn’t a service that I do. When it comes to talent acquisition and some problems that I can solve, there is your job description strategy, your hiring budget, the applicant tracking system that you’re using, and what you should be looking for. I don’t read through resumes and present candidates to hiring managers. Everybody in this room or on this call knows that that’s a full-time job in itself. As a solopreneur, that’s not a scalable solution for me.

When it comes to organizational design and talent experience, you’ve had a role that you’ve backfilled multiple times. Have you ever stopped, taken a step back, and looked at how you can think differently about that role? In most cases, they haven’t because small businesses think, “My accountant quit. Let’s dust off the accountant job posting, throw it back up there, and let’s find the best candidate.” They haven’t taken a step back and said, “How does this impact everything else?” What that does is it helps you find the right person when you’re doing an organizational design exercise properly.

That’s how it ties into a talent experience because it’s a promise to the rest of your organization that you’re fluid and you don’t look at things on a one-for-one transactional basis when it comes to responsibilities. People love to know how their work impacts everybody else and what they do for their company. Talent loves to know that.

We hear that feedback constantly. It’s like, “I don’t know how my role impacts the greater good of the organization.” It’s because it hasn’t been communicated in a sense to that person or to the rest of the company how important you truly are. When you start thinking about those things, you start thinking, “That’s a plus one for a talent experience for a small company to do that they may not otherwise be thinking about.”

When we’re thinking about organizational design and the talent experience for small organizations, large organizations often think about a job-based approach. It’s like, “We need an accountant, a financial analyst, and a lawyer.” What I see in smaller businesses is they’re based around people, how well people get together, and the fact that people have diverse skills. From your perspective, do small businesses thrive better on taking a people-centric approach, understanding people’s talents, how they can best apply their skills and talents, and what they love to do to work?

It’s a competitive advantage for small businesses to take that route because they’re learning like the companies that are several years ahead of them. They’re going through the process for the first time like their competitors were. Using that more people-centric approach, say, “You have this talent here. What type of alternative skills are you not thinking about?” You hired them to do this specific job. It’s easy for an owner to say, “This is where this person’s skillset lies. It is what they do every day because they excel at it. That’s what we hired them to do.” There’s so much more.

There could be some hidden talents for you to uncover. That’s where I connect that to professional development in the career development program that I implement for a lot of clients, which is a tailored individual development program that we can put people in to help them get to a role that fulfills their organizational design rather than hiring it from the outside.

 

Talk about retention of talent. If you had your manager listen to you, and they’re hearing and picking up on the cues, saying, “I can do more. I like what I’m doing, but I feel like I’m underutilized.” If you are that person and your manager comes to you and says, “We see this role being a future role in our organization. We want to help you get there. Here’s a tailored development program that’s going to help you get there. This is the seat that you’re going to eventually fill.” How good would you feel as an employee? You would feel like $1 million.

I connected organizational design and career development as part of a talent experience that most small businesses aren’t thinking about because they haven’t had to be there yet. I’m getting a fairly high level when I start talking to business owners about this. From a 100-person manufacturing company, they’re like, “I’ve never even thought about any of this.” These are things that usually come later, but those are some of my approaches on how to do that, which directly answers your question about a people-centric approach.

Overcoming Resistance

Brad, I appreciate what you’re saying. It is a real challenge to convey what talent management strategy is because it is often perceived as a tactical HR process approach when a strategy is a combination of all of those factors, recruitment, development, and succession management. In my experience, I had a real challenge conveying what all that means and getting the buy-in from the executive team and the senior teams to embrace that, not go to a one-day seminar and think that it’s all fixed, but talent management strategy is in all of us as leaders. Every single leader has to be a talent manager in a way, but you’re not going to say, “You are a talent manager.” They look at me and say, “It’s your problem.”

In looking at your commentary, I agree. Sitting at the table of the executive team and saying, “We need to embrace this. This is how we do career mobility and help our employees instead of posting a job and filling it with a key position that’s hard to fill.” Career mobility, wise from a succession management standpoint, how do we move that person into that position long term oftentimes? I was told, “No, we’re not going to take the time to do that.” How did you overcome resistance so that leaders would embrace this concept? Did you ever get resistance to say, “No, that’s not the approach we’re taking, and that doesn’t make sense to us?” Have you ever seen that with some of the clients that you’ve worked with?

Resistance is what’s made me the professional that I am now. I do not anticipate resistance to stop. HR is always going to have that devil on the shoulder. We’re HR. There’s always going to be some people who are completely resistant to what we have to say. From my experience working for somebody else and being a corporate employee, I’ve had a lot more resistance and had to overcome challenges working for somebody else than I do compared to my role now as a consultant.

That’s because, as an advisor and a contractor to a small business, there’s a level of trust and transparency that I’ve been able to build more with my clients compared to working for a CEO at a company. In both cases, the only thing that overcomes that barrier is showing up, being dependable, and doing what you say you’re going to do. For some reason, what I have noticed is that my peers in HR think that this is a problem that only HR faces alone. I don’t think that’s the case at all.

Finance and marketing professionals have to prove their value, as HR does in the C-Suite. That’s by introducing an idea, following through with that idea, and showing what the ROI is. How could we say that HR is the only one that has to go through that process and constantly prove ourselves? If the last several years have taught us anything, it is that HR now does have a seat at the table. We’ve never been in a better spot as a profession than we are now in terms of our ability to drive value because the talent market has changed so much in the last several years due to the pandemic.

 

We know that CEOs and owners are looking at HR more than ever to solve their people’s problems. As a consultant, that’s why I like to start with easy pickings and low-hanging fruit: because I can show them, “This is what we did. Here’s the value of it. This is what we should try next.” It’s a long way of saying, “Yes, I have faced resistance. I still do. I still expect it.”

The best way to overcome those challenges is nothing that you haven’t heard before. Be dependable, throw ideas out there, do what you say you’re going to do, and if the idea works, be able to prove that value because nobody else is going to stick up for your career growth more than yourself. That is a fact. When you get support from a great manager, that is a bonus. That is having a piece of cake along with your ice cream where you weren’t expecting the piece of cake. This is great, but you have to be able to stick up for yourself more than anything else.

I appreciate that. I want to make a follow-up discussion. HR tends to be somewhat threatened by the external consultants themselves. The internal HR function has to buy in to accept consultancy. I am curious what Sumit has to say because I know he has a perspective on all of this.

One of the things I’m curious about is, at least in my part of the world, what I see, Brad, is that folks like to believe they need to grow to a certain size and scale before spending on the talent experience. How do you nudge them? How do you get them to start early and say that it’s an investment, not an expense, and second, considering a small organization is much more likely to be sensitive about the cost part of it? How do you show returns? How do you show the timing of the return, saying, “I’m not giving you a ten-year roadmap here, but you do these 3 or 4 things, and you start seeing results in a few months?” How does that journey look like?

That’s a great question because we’re going to get into my business development/LinkedIn part of the show. I talk about client scenarios without using client names every day on LinkedIn. I bring up challenges that I have direct experience in helping my clients manage. The small business community or the owner of a manufacturing company doesn’t have an active user base on LinkedIn where they’re posting themselves or commenting themselves, but they’re lurking. They’re seeing what people are talking about on the platform. Because you may not be active yourself, it doesn’t mean you’re facing the same challenges.

I talk about talent retention. I say, “This is what a client came to me for. This is what we implemented. This was the end result.” As a business owner, you see that, and you go, “I’m facing the same issues they are facing. I didn’t know about it, but I’m facing those same issues.” That’s where they come to me. From a perspective, to answer your question, how do I get people to realize some of those problems that they have?

When you see other small business owners that are in your same situation, they’re having the same issues that you are, they spent money on the talent experience or through me, and they’re getting results out of it, you are going to feel better about the decision to invest in something like this than not seeing the story or what your peers who are in your field are going through.

That’s one way in which I make people aware that you can invest in talent experience before you get to 150 employees. Just because you’re a smaller business does not mean you are having the same talent issues that larger companies do. They have them at scale, but small businesses have talent issues. In a lot of cases, they’re looking for a way to not spend $90,000 on a full-time HR director. They’re looking for alternative ways to spend less and not commit to somebody full-time rather than doing that solution. That’s where I come in.

Just because you're a smaller business does not mean you are having the same talent issues that larger companies do, they just have them at scale. Share on X

 

Impact Of AI

We live in the age of technology. We keep hearing about how AI is set to take over the world. Do you see technology or AI as an ally? Do you see that as a bit of a lazy mechanism that people sometimes deploy? Another part of the question is, what pieces of technology excite you the most from a talent experience perspective?

If I were to say it’s a lazy way for people to coast, I would be completely tearing down my own business. I don’t consider myself lazy because I use AI quite a bit from a trust-in-business development perspective, particularly on LinkedIn. I use AI every day. It is an ally. It is not a way for people to coast at their jobs because people who coast at their jobs don’t have their jobs for long. They don’t need AI to replace their jobs. They’re going to replace themselves.

If they’re lazy or coasting, especially now because we’re in an economic downturn, at least compared to several years ago, what do we see CEOs doing right now? They’re back to the office. They’re not hiring as much. We need to control performance. CEOs and owners are looking for ways to find the people who are lazy and are coasting at the job. AI is going to speed up that process for those particular people.

I am a fan of AI. I use it personally every single day from my own branding and trust. When you look at client-side work, AI has gotten into applicant tracking systems and learning management systems, which is the next major iteration of how HR uses AI in the learning and development modules. I mentioned talent acquisition and people analytics. I love seeing the rise of people analytics departments at larger organizations. You talk about the value that HR can bring to the table.

When you can predict high retirement trends or turnover trends from a certain area or pinpoint what managers are struggling with from a performance base or retention base, these are all things that cost companies money when you think about these types of problems. We’re seeing analytics departments now using data and AI to help them give insights to management to say, “Here are the issues. This is how we’re going to solve them.” You saved us X amount of dollars by making this one change or predicting this for us. It’s significant. I’m glad that SHRM, which I am a big part of at every level, is investing so much of its content, learning, and resources into HR and AI as a combo to their members because they’re seeing it, which is fantastic.

Final Words

We’re quickly coming towards the top of the hour. As we think about what we want our readers to take away from this session on the talent experience, what do you think they should be highlighting in this discussion?

It’s the connectivity of it all right. There’s a reason why I don’t work for big companies with established HR departments. I don’t want the HR department to think, “There’s a consultant trying to tell us what to do.” Most of my clients don’t have HR departments. I’m telling the ownership. For anybody who is getting started in HR or is mid-career and thinking about HR as different lanes, you can provide a lot of value by connecting all of those lanes and talking about talent experience and improving the value there.

When we start thinking about HR in a disconnected, fragmented way, you’re doing your organization and your people a disservice by not providing them something fluid from hire to retirement, to use that saying. There are many different ways that you can connect your HR lanes, from talent acquisition to onboarding to performance management, and how all of that ties to your total rewards that many companies aren’t doing. A lesson for anybody who is reading, doing the opposite, and thinking about it in a fragmented way is you can provide a lot of value to your organizations by connecting them.

 

Some of our readers may have additional questions or are saying, “I’m a small business. I want to get ahold of Brad and see how he can evolve and scale our talent experience.” What’s the best way to get ahold of you?

You can go to my website, ScaleTx.io, and click on the calendar link. The better way is to follow me on LinkedIn and direct message me or leave a comment. That’s how I interact with a lot of people who have questions and prospects. That’s the channel that I’m on every single day. You can go to my website and check me out there. You can book time with me directly using my calendar link, but the best way is to follow me on LinkedIn and message me from there.

Thank you so much, Brad. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom here.

I appreciate even being invited to come here and spend time with you. I apologize for the technical difficulties.

That shows your endurance and what a great consultant you are. You’re going to be there at the table even if you’re not feeling well. Thank you. We appreciate it.

Take care, and we’ll see everyone in the next episode on the People Strategy Forum.

 

Important Links

• Sumit Singla – LinkedIn
• Char Miller – LinkedIn
• Howard Nizewitz – LinkedIn
• ScaleTx
• LinkedIn – Brad Voorhees
• [email protected]

 

About Brad Voorhees

Brad Voorhees, founder of ScaleTx, is deeply rooted in his hometown of Royal Oak, MI, where his lifelong commitment to community and family flourishes. A proud alumnus of Oakland University, Brad not only gained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees there but also met his wife, Kimberly, through his active fraternity life, proving the lasting impact of fraternal connections.

Entering the HR field during the challenging times of the 2007 recession, Brad has since honed his skills across diverse sectors including manufacturing, tech, digital, and service industries. His journey in HR has been marked by his ability to innovate and adapt, leading him to launch ScaleTx after a corporate acquisition left his position redundant in 2019.

At ScaleTx, Brad passionately works with businesses to harness the power of their people through scalable talent experience solutions. His leadership is not confined to professional realms; he also dedicates himself as a volunteer with Detroit SHRM since 2019 and plays a pivotal role in his personal life, striving to be the “Husband and Father of the Year.”

For those looking to empower their organizations through strategic HR initiatives, Brad extends an invitation to connect via his website at scaletx.io or directly through email at [email protected]. Brad is eager to help your business grow by realizing the full potential of your team.