The Frontlines: Coming to You from the Frontlines of Hiring!

Tim Sackett [00:00:00]:
Hey everybody. Tim Sackett. And I'm coming to you with our first episode of a podcast that my friend Madeline and I decided to start called The Frontlines, where we talk about frontline hiring, high-volume hiring — all the hiring that we basically ignored for the better part of the last 50 years. And we just expected them to show up as soon as we posted a job. Madeline, welcome. Introduce yourself to everybody — the millions of listeners that we already have on our first episode.

Madeline Laurano [00:00:40]:
Thanks, Tim. Hi, everybody. My name is Madeline Laurano. I am the founder of a company called Aptitude Research, and we do research on the HR tech market.

Tim Sackett [00:00:52]:
I'm Tim Sackett. I own and run a company called HRU Tech Resources — I'm a nepo baby, my mother started that 45 years ago, and I've taken over and run it for the last 15. But we also both write, we do research, we do all this stuff within the space of hiring and talent. I've written a couple of books. I want to start here though, Madeline — people are going to go, "Why are these two talking about frontline hiring?" What's our experience? I ran TA for Applebee's, so we hired 150,000-plus frontline workers on an annual basis. I've worked at big health systems — high volume in terms of nurses, I hired over a thousand nurses a year. And we both worked frontline jobs. So I want to start there — what's your best frontline worker story?

Madeline Laurano [00:01:50]:
I started working when I was very young, probably 11 or 12, working for a local farm. But my first real job was as a bus girl at a restaurant in our town. I worked nights and weekends, all the hours nobody else wanted — basically had to put bread on the table, do dishes, bring everyone water. You're dealing with customers that might not be happy, managing the dynamics of a very fast-paced environment. And there was so much drama, even around how tips were handled. We got nothing as bus people, but if you had a nice waiter or waitress who wanted to give you a portion of what they got, that's how it worked.

Tim Sackett [00:03:10]:
My first job was at a local hamburger place in Woodland Mall in Grand Rapids, Michigan — Mr. Fables, short for Mr. Fabulous. They made smash burgers before anyone called them smash burgers. I got the job the day after I turned 16. On my first day, they threw me on the fryers. I was with this older kid training me, and he literally dumped a five-pound bag of chicken tenders into the fryer — and ate the entire bag while training me how to make onion rings. Never offered me one. I remember laughing constantly at that job. But I also worked with people who were frontline full-time — that's how they paid rent. There's this weird dichotomy in the workforce: retirees, teenagers, and full-time workers all in the same place for completely different reasons.

Madeline Laurano [00:06:30]:
And what I found at that restaurant was a lot of families, too. Husbands and wives working there, their kids working as busboys and girls. It becomes a kind of family business even if no one owns it. And a lot of that hiring is referral-based — someone brings in people they know, and the whole dynamic shifts.

Tim Sackett [00:08:00]:
We are presented by Workday and Paradox — probably the best frontline hiring solution on the planet — and we're thankful for them for giving us the space and the time to talk about this. One of the things we want to get out there first: a lot of podcasts in our space are just interview after interview with people leaders. We'll do those, but we also want to talk to the actual people on the frontlines who are going through the nightmare we sometimes put them through. There are companies out there doing really good things — we'll talk about those too. But there are also companies still making it a nightmare for somebody to apply to a job.

Madeline Laurano [00:09:45]:
Absolutely. And if you look at the research, frontline hiring interview processes still take two to three weeks in many cases. Why is that happening? It's probably the most important conversation in our industry that we don't talk about enough — and there isn't a dedicated podcast to it. We started doing research at Aptitude on the frontline workforce right before the pandemic, around end of 2019. I talked a lot at that time to Josh Secrest, who was running talent acquisition at McDonald's — he's now at Paradox by Workday. Josh said traditional technology doesn't work for the frontline workforce. We need a completely different path. He did a full transformation, brought in Paradox, invested in other providers, and a lot of organizations have followed since.

Tim Sackett [00:11:30]:
At that time, we called it the forgotten workforce. I don't think it's the forgotten workforce anymore — I just don't think we're talking about it in the right way. Most of the proven AI use cases we see today are in frontline hiring. I just interviewed Marriott's global head of TA, Jessica Lee, and she said it went from multiple days to minutes to get someone from apply to interview. For low-skill, high-volume workers, when they decide they want a job, they want it that day. Your response has to be in minutes. The only way to really scale that is through AI.

Madeline Laurano [00:13:00]:
The alternative is you're waiting for an email that goes to someone who doesn't have an email address, and then expecting them to take public transportation — spend money that could be used for lunch — to come in at a time when a manager might not even be in the store. It's a black hole. It's not thinking about their experience at all. What Paradox did changed the game. It not only improved efficiency for employers, but the experience for a frontline worker has completely changed.

Tim Sackett [00:14:00]:
Five years ago I did a recruiting diagnostic for a large global manufacturer — and it didn't matter if you were VP of Finance or an hourly warehouse worker, you went through the exact same 15-screen application. They actually had to build a resume-style application and then upload a resume at the end. It took 27 minutes for people who worked there and knew what they were doing. And a lot of their plant managers had just gone back to asking people to walk in and ask the front desk for a paper application. I asked them: what 19- or 20-year-old is going to walk in and ask for an application? What is this, 1974?

Madeline Laurano [00:15:30]:
No. You have to give them the ability to text and apply through text. There are stats showing that 85% of all frontline workers only access the internet — and apply for jobs — through their mobile device. They don't have a laptop or a tablet. If you can't figure out how to reach people on mobile, you're dead.

Tim Sackett [00:16:30]:
About seven years ago, when Paradox first came out, someone sent me a link and said "test this out." I put both my kids in front of the phone and said, apply for a job — then compared it to a traditional application site. On the traditional site, they had no idea what to do. On Paradox's interface, I just left them alone and they both got far along in the process applying for barista positions. They've been at Starbucks for five years now managing locations. That's the story.

Tim Sackett [00:18:00]:
So — top two topics you want to cover in future episodes?

Madeline Laurano [00:18:10]:
One: I still have people telling me "we would never do AI apply because we don't want that chatbot saying anything to our applicants." I want to dig into that hesitation, because all the data shows that every company that turns this on sees time-to-fill drop by 70%, and three to five times more applicants completing the process. Is it just an education gap? And two: I want to get real people in the field and actually have them go through the process — apply, review it, and ask a million questions about what they'd change. Companies aren't really talking to candidates. They talk to current employees. But candidates are a different thing entirely.

Madeline Laurano [00:20:00]:
I also want to do a deep dive episode into BLS data, demographics, statistics — what does the frontline workforce actually look like right now? Right before the pandemic, a large percentage of hourly workers were over 50. Has that flipped? That's worth a full episode.

Tim Sackett [00:20:45]:
The other piece I'd add is gender demographics. My master's thesis looked at women in leadership in retail settings. What I found was that if a store's general manager was female, the workforce demographic skewed much more female too. And yet 70% of frontline workers in hospitality and restaurants are women, but leadership flips upside down. If you want more women in frontline worker roles, you have to build more frontline female leaders.

Madeline Laurano [00:22:00]:
The other one I'd throw in is internal mobility — and how it's completely different for frontline workers. It's not "I want to be a manager." Sometimes it's "I need a different shift. I can't work nights anymore." How does that mobility work when you can't even go to your manager and say that? The flexibility around schedules, managed through technology — that's a very different conversation than how companies think about internal mobility for knowledge workers.

Tim Sackett [00:23:00]:
100%. All right — that's what we're doing. The Frontlines. Keep checking back, we'll have multiple episodes coming. If you think of somebody or something you want us to talk about, hit us up — we're on LinkedIn, easy to find. Madeline, thank you for being part of this. And thank you to Workday and Paradox for helping us present The Frontlines. We can't wait to do more of these.