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Lauren Tunnell: Building Relationships is the Core of Being a Great TA Partner

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In the staffing industry, numbers are important, but they aren’t everything. A true partner to customer talent acquisition (TA) teams does more than fill job requisitions quickly.

But what does that look like in practice?

I recently sat down with Lauren Tunnell, Vice-President of Direct Placement at Insight Global. She shared her expertise on TA partnerships and the importance of relationship-building.

Interview has been lightly edited for length and for clarity.

What does your discovery process look like with TA clients?

At a high level, I think about talent acquisition for a company through two lenses.

One is from the business side. Organizations don’t go through hiring full-time employees unless they are investing in certain areas of the business, or unless they have an attrition problem, or whatever the case may be. The business helps me understand the why behind the talent acquisition needs.

I need to paint the big picture to my candidates, so my process really starts with uncovering the business need for hiring in general. I want to understand a lot about the customer experience and the hiring process, too.


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But the second and equally important part is becoming closely tied to the client’s talent acquisition team. Talent acquisition leaders are hired to develop the strategy for procuring full-time employees for the organization at large. So, to think that a staffing agency could come in and work outside of the preexisting talent strategy—that’s just silly. That’s what causes rifts. That’s what causes friction. That’s what causes poor candidate experience, poor customer experience.

So the secondary but equally as important discovery phase with talent acquisition is to clearly understand their talent strategy and their priorities. I ask about their KPIs, their strengths, their weaknesses. I ask if they have specific areas that really need support.

TA teams are often one of the last teams to be invested in, so they’re usually overworked. They’re usually working on a high volume of job requisitions. If they’re partnering with a staffing agency, it’s not because they’re not effective at their jobs. It’s more of a bandwidth or volume type of thing. So how can agency support be part of their overall strategy?

My philosophy is that if you create the partnership with talent acquisition, that makes it clear we have the same customer and we are working to accomplish the same thing. It’s important that we create the trust that ultimately helps us streamline the existing strategy.

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How do you handle situations where a client might have unrealistic expectations for a role? What strategies do you use to bridge the gap and find a solution that works for everyone?

The power of utilizing agency support is that we are experts in the candidate marketplace. We have 28,000 consultants on our payroll at any moment in time. We place 12,000 full-time employees on an annual basis. We bring in 36,000 full-time job reqs on an annual basis.

We hear from both candidates and from other companies what people are looking for and what they’re willing to pay people for those jobs. That is a breadth of knowledge that most internal talent acquisition teams don’t have. The power of using an agency like Insight Global is that we look at more than 50,000 reqs in any given year. And some of them are going to match your customer’s job description. I can clearly say to them, “Here’s what your competitors are paying for the same skill set, what technologies or disciplines are becoming more obsolete or more popular, what candidates are looking for in a job.”

But the success of that conversation is directly correlated to the relationship and the partnership the staffing agency has with that customer. If they view you as a vendor that is solely responsible for putting people in seats right, then they won’t listen to your counsel.

But if they view you as a partner, they will have conversations with you that allow you to be upfront about the job market.

I think the secondary piece of that is oftentimes, vendors come to those conversations with the problem statement. “Your expectations are unrealistic.” What they rarely do is come with solutions.

Instead, we can approach conversations like this: “Your salary constraints are your number one constraint. You cannot go above this number. So let me show you profiles of people that are at that number with varying skill sets and varying levels of expertise. And let’s have dialogue about how I can get you to your ultimate goal, which is hiring the best possible person for you.”

I love that just being solutions oriented is so important.

I think it’s all also about expectations. I always tell clients the perfect person for the job always exists. It’s just that perfect person might not be in the job market. They might not live in your location. They might not meet your salary requirements. They are most likely not in the job market today and may not be interested in making a move. And you’re hiring me for my talent expertise. You’re not hiring me just to fill this requirement. Yes, the byproduct is that the position will be filled. But the journey we’re going to be on as partners is that I’m going to help advise you on the best possible way for you to do that.

Why is it so important for staffing agencies to be involved in the overall talent strategy discussion, not just the hiring process?

I feel so passionately about this. There are, what, 10,000 staffing companies out there? This is an industry that has a fairly low barrier to entry, especially in the full-time hiring space. Anyone with a laptop and a LinkedIn subscription can just fill reqs, right? But without alignment on KPIs, a staffing agency isn’t a true hiring partner.

If I understand what my talent acquisition partner’s most important measurements of success are, I can hold my team accountable to meeting or exceeding the same expectations. Time to fill, number of candidates interviewed compared to number hired, whatever the case may be.

I have not met a talent acquisition leader who is not thrilled to talk to me about those things. They know that when I know their priorities, I will get my team to operate with them appropriately. That’s where the partnership starts.

What are some of the ways you advocate for yourself and your team to be included in these strategic conversations? It sounds like they are thrilled to have you in those conversations. But if you encounter any issues, or if you’re trying to get in those conversations initially, what do you do? What’s your process?

They are thrilled to tell me all of the rules of engagement. What they’re not always thrilled to include me in is the actual development of the strategy or changes to the strategy.

I may see efficiencies, or I may see different things that we could be doing that would make us collectively more successful. Advocating for myself or my team is really through that lens.

The number one thing that I tell people is that my goal is not to make you operate my way. I don’t work with two customers the same way. Every one of them is different. My goal is to make your process the most efficient it could be.

So, if we’re having a lot of candidates back out during the interview process, we may talk about how long it’s taking to get interviews set up or how many interview rounds. If we see a lot of candidates decline job offers and it’s all for salary reasons, we’re going to have a conversation about salary expectations.

My starting point is that I am not trying to turn your process into mine or impose my beliefs onto you. I’m trying to make your process the most efficient and effective it can be.

I’m a full-time staffing expert from an industry standpoint. The person I’m talking to is a full-time staffing expert for that company. If we can take those two lenses and bring them both into focus in the same conversation, we typically can solve a lot of problems.

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You’re just saying, hey, here’s my expertise, let’s work together to make your existing process better.

Yeah, exactly. And to say, hey, at the end of the day, when you’ve had 15 candidates back out, for whatever reason, nobody’s happy with those results.

So, let’s talk about what my team can be doing better. Let’s talk about what your team can be doing better. Let’s talk about the efficiencies on both sides.

And I think it’s important to take ownership of the fact that there are things that the agency partner can be better at doing. There are also ways for us to modify our process internally.

It’s always to solve the ultimate problem at hand. Remember, my philosophy is that you and I have the same customer which is the business. So we are collectively working to solve the business’s problems.

How do you define a “great solution” in the context of talent acquisition? How does that go beyond simply filling the open position?

When I think about excellence from a solutions standpoint, it’s about understanding the TA team’s strategy and their KPIs. Their primary responsibility is to hire people for their organization, but they’re also measured on KPIs like attrition within the first 90 days of placement or efficiencies in the hiring process.

What are the most important KPIs to them? I craft solutions to support that.

Can you provide an example?

I’ve had customers say that one of their KPIs is the number of positions that their recruiters fill compared to what agencies fill.

There are two ways of looking at that. You can say, “Oh, that means this is going to be a bad customer.”

Or you can focus on solutions by narrowing in on exact pain points, by asking questions. “What positions are the hardest for your recruiters to fill? What takes the most time? What are the easiest for them to fill? What’s the highest volume?”

This is an opportunity for a staffing partner to take on the most challenging job reqs. Then the TA team is using an agency as a strategy instead of as a competitor.

So that’s one example. I think being clear on some of those internal measurements helps bring those solutions to life.

Here’s another example. A customer is having bad attrition in the first 90 days. It’s because they’re using a smattering of different agency partners, and the team culture is messed up.

In this case, I offer the solution of using just one agency. When Insight Global is supporting a customer, we’re hiring a team. We are not hiring individual people. We can put measurements in place. Performance reviews, culture touchpoints. We can see that even though all ten people have the same job title, they’re not all the same people. They’re not all strong in the same areas. They’re not all weak in the same areas. We become more strategic in the way we hire by balancing out strengths and weaknesses. This reduces attrition, makes the team more successful, and increases collaboration because the team sees value in each other.

The way I think about guiding the conversation is to understand the customer’s problems and pain points when it comes not just to the acquisition side, but the true talent side.

Not everybody realizes everything that goes into the entire talent acquisition process, beyond just filling reqs.

Totally. Talent and acquisition. I see them as two unique words. This person is responsible for the acquiring of the individuals, but they’re also responsible for the individuals themselves. And often, vendors ignore the talent side, and they just focus on the acquisition side. But when you can bridge those two, that’s how you become a real solution provider.

Talent and acquisition. Two unique words. This person is responsible for the acquiring of the individuals, but they’re also responsible for the individuals themselves. -Lauren Tunnell, VP of Direct Placement

Is there anything else you want to share about TA partnerships?

I am very steadfast in the way that I lead my people, the expectations I have for my people, the way I interact with customers. And it’s all centered on three things: passion, curiosity, and care. I want my people to show that same passion, curiosity, and care for their clients that we show to our people and that we show to our candidates. That means coming from a place of genuine curiosity and genuine care and genuine passion for our solutions in our talent acquisition partnerships.

Success for me is that Insight Global becomes known in the marketplace as an elite partner to talent acquisition teams, because we’re already great at finding top talent, right? And we’re already great at taking care of that talent.

But if we can also be seen as a strategic partner to talent acquisition teams and help them bolster their own growth strategies, that’s success.


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You can connect with Lauren Tunnell on LinkedIn.

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