What does the future hold for the staffing industry? Chris Ryan is the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Avionté Staffing Software. In this episode, he joins us to explore the shifting dynamics of the job market and what these changes mean for staffing and recruitment. From wage inflation to embracing technological changes, to the pandemic’s lasting impact on supply chains, we explore the forces reshaping the industry in 2025. We discuss the centralization of recruitment, the evolving role of staffing agencies, and why maintaining a high-quality talent pool remains essential, even as technology advances. If you’re looking to navigate this changing landscape with clarity and strategic focus, this conversation offers valuable insight, so tune in now!
[0:01:14] David Folwell: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Staffing Show. Today, I’m super excited to be joined by Chris Ryan, who is the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Avionté. Today, we’re going to be talking about the future of the staffing industry. We’re in a very dynamic time in the industry. There’s a lot of change happening. We’re going to be going into gig work, W2 work, we’re talking about centralized procurement, and really just going into all the topics about what’s happening and hearing Chris’s perspective on it. Chris, super excited to have you here today. To kick things off, could you give us a little bit of your background and tell us how you got into the staffing industry?
[0:01:52] Christopher Ryan: Well, thanks, David. I’m glad to be here. I’ve been in the human capital space for probably three-plus decades. First time I ever did any work in a recruiting function was back in the early 1990s. I was actually an HR consultant, and I actually spent a lot of time doing things, like reengineering, recruiting, recruiting workflows and so on with employers. I also did work in other parts of HR, succession planning, executive selection, and so on. Then I moved over into industry in the early 2000s.
Most recently, I got very interested in staffing. I was actually working at ADP, starting around 2012, and we were doing a lot of research. I was looking at a lot of numbers, a lot of analytics related to the US workforce, where it was going. I became increasingly interested in the challenges associated with contingent work, and especially with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, what was that going to mean for temporary labor?
A lot of the customers that I worked with at ADP were very large employers who were struggling with contingent work, or with hourly workers and trying to figure out, “How do I manage a high turnover workforce? How do I manage contingent labor effectively?” It was from that that I got drawn into my current role at Avionté. It also helps that the CEO and I had worked together in prior lives. And so, he and I came together starting in 2020. I’ve been at Avionté now for about five years.
[0:03:25] David Folwell: That’s awesome. It’s a great background. I know just based off conversations you and I have had, you have some interesting perspectives on what the future of the staffing industry looks like and some of the things that are changing. What are areas of the market that maybe are changing, or have changed already that people might not be aware of? Any things that you guys are seeing?
[0:03:45] Christopher Ryan: Yeah. One of the most important things that we’re concerned about is the fundamental value proposition of staffing versus alternatives. There are a lot of different ways that you can create a contingent workforce, effective labor force. One of the questions in our mind has always been, what else is out there besides traditional staffing? It’s not just competition between staffing agencies, it’s also competition between gig work, it’s employers creating their own situations. There may be using a model where you have an RPO and employers of record in order to create alternative ways of creating a pool of contingent workers.
There are a lot of different models that are going around right now. One of our questions is where’s staffing going and what’s next? I think from our perspective, one of the most interesting developments coming out of COVID was rapid wage inflation, the cost of hourly work, day labor, working in logistics, and so on. What we’re seeing is there’s wage inflation, or wage pressure. The PPI, the Producer Price Index for staffing agencies has gone up even faster than wages. I think one of the dangers right now is that at a certain point, you have to ask, is the value proposition of staffing as robust as it needs to be versus alternatives?
From our standpoint, Avionté, we wake up every day and we’re thinking, what can we do to ensure that our customers are successful, and that they’re going to thrive in this? We’re trying to understand, where’s the market going and how do we ensure that we are positioning our customers for the future?
[0:05:23] David Folwell: With that, I mean, some of the changes in buying behaviors and also, all of the – we hear this all the time is that staffing agent owners are hearing, well, there’s alternatives, there’s other paths in terms of hiring. I know Indeed is an option, and so are all of the AI tools that people have access to. What are some of the behavioral changes that you’re seeing within the HR approach to buying staffing services?
[0:05:45] Christopher Ryan: There are a couple of things that are happening right now and they reflect what’s going on more broadly within the economy. There are several things that came out of COVID. It’s already been five years, really. In some respects, COVID seems like ancient history, but the thing about the pandemic itself is that it accelerated certain economic trends that were already underway, and it took aging baby boomers out of the workforce. It started to create challenges with essential workers in a variety of settings. You had an acceleration of unauthorized workers and immigration going into ‘21, ‘22. You had wage inflation going on simultaneously.
The one thing that isn’t talked about, however, is the extent to which the entire distribution system, all the supply chains in the United States were transformed. Our supply chains have been moving towards online retail. They’ve been moving towards big box retail. What COVID did is it accelerated these trends. What you’re seeing is this mass centralization of distribution systems. You can see this in cold chain logistics. You look at all of that, for example, all the new processing that is taking place where they are creating large centralized facilities for processing everything from whether it’s your fruits and vegetables, distribution of – in COVID, it started with the distribution of vaccines, of course.
Since then, what we’re seeing is a huge amount of money is being put into REITs that are building these large distribution centers, which you can find in different parts of the country. For example, you go to north of Indianapolis, you’ll see these mega distribution centers that are being set up. You have Amazon setting up its own distribution. What we’re seeing is the scaling and centralization.
What’s happening now is that with this complete restructuring of distribution, along with it, there’s light manufacturing that is also being placed next to the distribution channel. All of a sudden, what you’re seeing is the need for contingent labor has shifted and it’s being centralized. Behind all of this, we now have centralized procurement. That centralized procurement, you’re also going to see greater use, contingent workforce systems, a VMS of some kind. Because what’s happening now is that people in logistics are managing and measuring productivity extremely carefully by the FTE. It doesn’t matter whether that FTE is a full-time position, or whether it’s a contingent labor that is being purchased by staffing. People are trying to centralize, understand that cost, manage that cost, and optimize that cost.
Companies are purchasing temporary labor in a much more efficient way, but they are also, through procurement, they are centralizing it and they are limiting who they work with. They’re going to pre-vet vendors. We’ve heard of staffing agencies, for example, that are suddenly, they have to do an RFP where they haven’t before. The sales cycle can now be months, instead of weeks. You can stretch out to six months, eight, nine months, 12 months. Once you get to be a certified vendor, you still find yourself competing with three or four other staffing agencies. Literally, sometimes you see requisitions being distributed on a VMS. Then it’s like a race to see who can proffer talent first to the –
What it is doing is it is forcing staffing agencies to compete in a very different way. It’s managing relationships very differently. It’s a lot more challenging for staffing agencies going forward. Now we have tariffs coming in. All of a sudden, that changes the equation even more, if you will.
[0:09:50] David Folwell: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like the HR getting centralized, becoming more strategic and moving away from the transactional approach to more solution-oriented. What are some things for our listeners that maybe they could take action on if they’re thinking about, I know one of the biggest challenges we hear all the time is, how do I get more clients? How do I get more business? What do you think the future of driving that new business is and how could they approach that differently maybe than they have historically?
[0:10:15] Christopher Ryan: I think part of it is looking at the employer’s labor cost structure and ultimately, it’s about workforce planning, workforce cost optimization. There are certain capabilities that employers are looking for from a staffing agency, or from a vendor that they haven’t gotten before around labor optimization and total labor cost management. What they are looking for is suddenly, staffing is going from being a transactional and a relationship sale with individual hiring managers to more of a strategic relationship, where you’re not just trying to place 10 people in 20 different facilities. Now, you’re trying to place 500 people in one facility and you need to optimize those costs and have a completely different relationship.
That means that staffing agencies are going to have to develop new areas of expertise. It’s a consultative sale now, and you’ve got to have a completely different conversation when you walk in to one of these large distribution centers. We’re seeing this across the board though, that as the economy shifts, procurement of contingent labor is across the board, is being centralized, and it’s being managed and optimized differently.
[0:11:31] David Folwell: We see that a lot in the healthcare staffing space, and some of the centralization of it and also, the VMS is an area where I don’t remember the exact numbers on it, but I know that the majority of business is going through MSP or VMS and sat in the healthcare space, and I feel like Avionté’s customer base in the light industrial side, maybe not so much. But is that uptick happening as well? What role does that VMS play in the centralization and how it’s approached?
[0:11:57] Christopher Ryan: A VMS is more of what I would describe as a symptom, rather than a cause for what’s happening. I mean, basically, what employers are saying is, if I’ve got 500 people in a plant and 200 of them are contingent, I want to be able to manage that entire labor pool and optimize my productivity. I can’t do that if I don’t control the costs of staffing. The only way you can do that, because you don’t want your temporary labor on your in-house payroll system is by having a separate contingent labor system for doing contingent labor management. It’s absolutely critical.
Now, once you do that, then you have very different ways measuring the productivity of individual staffing agencies. Who’s providing reliable talent? Who’s showing up every day? Who’s providing the best value in terms of overall performance? It puts staffing agencies under a microscope. It creates some special challenges to compete going forward. I think the message, though, is if you try and walk in and sell in that environment, you can’t be cold calling. You have to be walking in with solutions.
[0:13:05] David Folwell: I didn’t mean to cut you off there.
[0:13:07] Christopher Ryan: Go ahead.
[0:13:08] David Folwell: The evolution towards more solution-oriented, what does that mean from a practical perspective? Are there any examples of staffing firms, you don’t have to name any of them, but when you think about next steps for the people that are listening to this, how do they shift towards being more solution oriented? Is there an approach that they can take? Are there things that would be actions that they could take after listening to this?
[0:13:33] Christopher Ryan: I think there are a couple of things I would say. One is that you have to have an extraordinary niche around – You either have to understand the specific occupations that you’re placing for better than the industry itself, or you need to have an understanding of workforce planning at that level, or ideally, both.
I mean, frankly, if I were a staffing agency, I might be looking for a workforce planning expert who came out of industry. I’d be pulling in expertise that came from outside of staffing in order to actually help. That would be one approach. The other thing I would say, and this is really important, right now, when you think about what’s going on with tariffs, every major employer in the United States is looking at tariffs and they’re going through their own special math. Some of them are saying, “You know what? I’m going to eat the cost.” Others are saying, “I’m going to pass the cost on.” If you have a 10% increase on your bill of materials, you’re going to have a 2%, or a 4% increase in your pass through to the consumer. Others are going to try and switch their distribution channel. Some are going to switch countries, where they manufacture, they’ll go through a new – Whatever the change is, it has to be staffed, okay?
The problem is the moment that decision is being made, you as a staffing agency need to be in the room when the decision is happening, okay? You have to be there when the sausage is made, or you’re not going to get any. I mean, it’s a crude way of putting it. But it makes a lot of sense that if you have a customer who, if they are thinking about consolidating their warehouses and they’re moving from 20 warehouses to one warehouse, how would you as a staffing agency respond to it? How would you know about it? How would you advise your customer? You suddenly had to place 500 people in Indianapolis, instead of 20 in 10 different cities. Would your agency be able to adapt to that process and do you have people on staff who could actually work with your customer to plan that out?
The other thing that’s going on is if you pay close attention to economic trends, we started to look at who’s buying staffing today. As I look at who is purchasing staffing right now, I think we mentioned, it’s logistics centers and cold chain logistics are huge. In addition to that mechanical contractors, electrical contractors, everything associated with the data centers for artificial intelligence. You look at a mega center for artificial intelligence and you literally need dozens, if not hundreds of cooling technicians just to keep all of the servers cold and operating. That in and of itself requires a tremendous amount of expertise.
There are these huge opportunities if you’re in the right field and you have expertise with those occupations. The same thing with artificial intelligence itself, AI is it’s not going to make jobs go away. It’s going to change jobs. One of the questions we have to ask is, how do you retrain a workforce to work in an AI environment, similarly? We also know that there are going to be significant shortages in things like long-term care. How do you start to retrain populations?
As we look at all of these shifts, if you’re a staffing agency, you also need to be anticipating where is contingent labor needed in the future, versus where it was in the past. All of the traditional things that we had in manufacturing, they’re going to change. Everything that we knew about logistics is going to change. Probability that you’re going to be working through a centralized contingent workforce solution is very high. And so, figuring out how to work within that framework and make it work effectively makes a great deal of sense.
[0:17:24] David Folwell: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of change, like a shifting landscape in terms of how to operate. Then we talked about the value chain and the value that staffing firms provide. I think historically, a big part of that was it was cheap, low-cost labor, on demand labor, you get it fast. It seems like that the approach is changing. What are some of the other areas within the actual value chain of the day-to-day from a staffing firm? How do you see that evolving over the next few years?
[0:17:52] Christopher Ryan: A couple of things I would say. One is that labor shortages aren’t going away. Although, everyone is right now a little more concerned about revenue, going forward, having a high-quality talent pool on demand is going to be absolutely critical. Historically, recruiters have focused on top of the funnel search. Going forward, I think certain aspects of top of the funnel search can be handled by AI, or will be handled by AI to some extent. The ability of a recruiter to pull 50 names off of 500, or 1,000 names off of – scraped them from LinkedIn, or Indeed may be less important than your ability to actually redeploy your existing talent. That is a completely different set of muscles, if you will. Redeployment actually requires you to be tracking and thinking about your database of talent in a very different way than it is today.
I think there’s a real case here to be made for, how do I optimize the gross profits generated per talent? What’s the lifetime value of talent that I’ve hired at my organization? To me, that is the single most important metric that we could be managing against going forward. If you have 10,000 people in your talent database and you can show that each one of those individuals can produce, say, $20,000 in gross profit over a lifetime for your agency, now that would be doing very well. That’s high-end. It might be more $4,000 or $5,000 if you’re looking at high turnover logistics.
The point there is that that’s where you’re going to get the biggest bang for your buck. With immigration policy that is underway today, the fact that we are seeing work authorizations being revoked for large populations, it actually makes a lot of sense for staffing agencies to get really good at analyzing and managing their existing talent database like it’s the crown jewels. Because going forward, it is. Quite frankly, if you’ve got high-quality, reliable people, you should be demanding a premium from the employers who use them, or want – they want somebody to show up in 24 hours to do a job and to do it reliably, that’s incredibly valuable. You’re not talking about $30 or $50 an hour. You’re talking about an assembly line that if it shuts down, it’s half a million to a million dollars a day. When you start thinking about it in that way and providing that level of service, you’re no longer a commodity. Now, you are a critical resource for the employer.
[0:20:37] David Folwell: I couldn’t agree more with what you just said on that. I’ve seen the shift from the triangle of services, where it’s like they even compete on price, speed, or quality. It’s been on price and speed, and now there’s a shift towards qualities where it’s at. If you can get people to stay on contract longer, to work longer, you’re going to be delivering more value to your customer, you’re going to be creating more value for your agency. It does seem like there’s a pretty significant and strategic shift in the industry right now, where people are looking at, how do I get more people placed and who cares how long they work? It’s, how do I get the right people placed? You’ve talked about the partnering, the solutioning, it seems that the customers are, they’re looking to you and saying, “Well, do you have access to quality that I can – that’s something that I don’t have?” Because everybody has access to Indeed. So, what is it that you have that’s unique? What role, going forward, do you see technology and automation playing in the future landscape?
[0:21:32] Christopher Ryan: From our standpoint, I mean, first of all, technology is vital. If you’re not leveraging technology going forward, you’re not going to survive in this business. Technology is an amplifier. It should act as an extension of your best recruiters. From our standpoint, if you have good recruiters today, and now you are able to quadruple their productivity through appropriate use of AI, maybe you automate parts of top of the funnel search. I mean, why do we have recruiters trying to figure out which of 2,000 applications are actually real and which ones are being generated by AI bot? That’s just silly, for example. Or, why are we having people spending all of this time tracking down talented, simply to fill out their I9?
There are a lot of things that can simply be automated and that should be automated. At the end of the day, the one thing that a recruiter can do and do uniquely is they can rapidly assess somebody’s potential fit in a specific organization. That is one of the hardest things to do. It’s one of the most human activities you could imagine is, will this person with this set of skills, with this personality, will they fit in this specific environment? Will they thrive, will they deliver a great work outcome? That’s where you want recruiters spending all their time.
Then let the recruiters instruct the AI to do the, or use AI to manage the workflows and drive all of the pieces where their judgment isn’t required. The one thing you never want to give away is the expert judgment of the recruiters. From our standpoint going forward, that’s the one piece. The other is monetizing your data. That talent database, from our perspective, is the single most important thing going forward, and figuring out the right way to manage, measure, and monetize it. If you look at the way Amazon, for example, thinks about customer lists, how much has this person bought from Amazon? What have they purchased? When was the last time they purchased? What’s the total lifetime value of that customer? You can do exactly the same math with talent. From that standpoint, technology and AI makes that easy.
[0:23:51] David Folwell: It makes it easy. Also, it does seem like the shift we’re seeing. I feel like this is how it always happens, where it happens in the consumer market, happens in the SaaS, or AI markets where people are measuring a customer lifetime value is a common metric and common concept outside of staffing. I feel like now, we’re getting into the staffing market and getting more strategic with it and thinking about how do you approach that and get more out of it.
One thing that you brought up a little bit earlier, and I know we’re talking about all these shifts that are happening. There’s obviously going to be, we’re seeing a lot of consolidation in the market. The two things that I’m just always interested in are future labor shortages, so there is demand for staffing services, or somebody to help in this front in some way. Then there’s also this major consolidation in the market that we’re seeing in a lot of verticals right now. How do you see that panning now going forward? What do you see the market looking like from a – would there be a bunch of mom-and-pop shops still? Is it going to be something that you have to roll up to bigger players, or how do you see that?
[0:24:54] Christopher Ryan: Well, one of the things that you and I had talked about was the history of some other industries, and I think travel agencies are appropriate here. There was a point years ago when there were lots of different travel agencies and a typical travel agency was getting 5%, 10% commission on travel that was being booked or placed. People said, no one will ever purchase a plane ticket online. Very famous. In the future, you have two kinds of travel agencies. You have those who are very scaled. They leverage technology and they scale to serve mass audiences. You also have specialty travel agencies. There’s a travel agency that does nothing but arrange honeymoons to Greece, for example. That’s their niche and people can find them and they have special contacts. They speak the language. They know all the local vendors and they have knowledge that nobody else has.
Going forward in staffing, you are either, we like to say, you need a moat. This is something that we’ll talk about a little at Connect in a few weeks. You’ll hear more about this. This idea of having a moat for your business. You have to have some defensible knowledge that nobody else has. That’s a lesson from travel agencies. Either that, or you’re large and you’re scaled. Either way, you have to have that defensible moat. If you’re a company that specializes in offshore oil field rigs and how you staff those, that’s a wonderful example. If you are able to provide people who have deep expertise in working in, say, municipal systems for government, where do you find IT folks who actually understand how a city runs and all the arcane bureaucracy that you have to design your technology around? That’s a very specialized kind of problem. You’re not just looking for a Python programmer, or you have to find somebody who understands the problem space. Having those kinds of expertise or that insights, I think is really important.
I guess, back to the broader point, in the long run, staffing agencies, the value prop is going to be less about here, I’ve got cheap staff for you, or you can outsource 10% of your workforce needs and save money through staffing. That isn’t going to happen in the future. In the future, I think the staffing agency is going to be a lot more like a BPO, who basically is saying, “Here is a complete plan for supporting your contingent workforce needs, and here’s how we’re going to solve it. We’re going to do it with these following systems and capabilities. For this particular area, we’re going to bring in an expert who can help you with this particular problem. We’re going to make sure that you optimize total labor costs. When there’s a emergency of some kind, we’re going to have bench strength ready to fill you in.”
You’re going to pay a premium for that service. This isn’t about saving money anymore. This isn’t about avoiding health care costs anymore. It’s about fielding an effective workforce. The other thing I think we’re going to see a lot of are these large talent pools, flexible work arrangements. I think there will be staffing agencies that will excel in that particular area.
[0:28:04] David Folwell: Yeah. It sounds like the shifting towards a hyper niche, or hyper scale, and picking, if you’re going to be the scale in the low cost, you better be the biggest and have the best systems and figure out how to do it, like the booking.com, or Expedia play. Figure out the niche, specialized like crazy, understand how to be a better expert than those that are out there.
Then the one part that you also brought up is, I think the concept, and this goes back to what the, I guess, undercurrent of this conversation. You’ve talked a lot about the being a solution provider and you mentioned total labor costs. From your customer base, are you guys seeing more people walk into the room and try to be somebody who’s partnering with them and say, “Hey, we’re going to help you manage and keep your labor costs under control as a strategic partner”?
[0:28:49] Christopher Ryan: Without naming names, the short answer is yes. Obviously, some of the very large enterprise staffing agencies even have specialty arms that do workforce consulting. We see some, what I would describe as emerging mid to large players who are developing that kind of expertise. They are leveraging their relationships. They take the relationships they have, but they’re bringing new expertise to it, if that makes any sense. That really helps.
[0:29:18] David Folwell: Yeah, that makes sense. With all of this in mind, and this might be – I don’t have an answer to this. I’m not sure where you’ll go with it, but what skills or investments, if you’re running a staffing agency right now, where would you be putting your investment into from hiring your team and looking at like, what skills do you think you’re going to have and need on your team going forward?
[0:29:40] Christopher Ryan: One of the most important is somebody who can have a consultative discussion with a customer. I mean, start by having a conversation with your customers, but it has to be a different conversation. One where you’re basically saying, “What’s happening in your industry? Where are you going? What are your needs? If you’re seeing these developments, are you going to need more of this kind of skill, or this kind of labor?” Then bringing that expertise back to your customer. It really starts by rethinking your sales process a little and making it more consultative.
Consultation means more than just asking a couple of questions. They have to be smart questions, and they have to be based on an understanding of what’s going on within the industry. Maybe that means bringing your most expert recruiter into the mix of the sales process to actually help with that, where it’s almost like you’re using that deep subject matter expert who’s a recruiter to actually help with the sales process. I think that’s number one. If you don’t have the relationship, you’re shut out. That’s the first place.
The second is leveraging technology. There are certain things right now, compliance has to be entirely digitized, period. The top of the funnel is getting crushed with AI slop. Having recruiters going through that is just silly. Having access to economic data associated with the industries you serve, if you’re relying on data from the federal government right now, so is everyone else. You’re at the starting line. You need data from other sources, whether it’s a manufacturing, very specific organizations that you need to be a part of.
You also might want to be interviewing, or talking to procurement experts, who are purchasing labor for different organizations and trying to understand what it is they’re doing. The other thing I would say is anything associated with talent acquisition and talent marketing is going to be critical. Trying to understand, what is our relationship with talent going to look like going forward? With talent shortages, you’re going to have to have a compelling reason why talent wants to stay with you, rather than working with the agency down the street. It’s still the basic. You got to sell. You still have to run an efficient agency. You have to be compliant and you have to cultivate the talent. But the way you do those things has changed, and the model has changed. If you’re using old workflows, if you’re automating old thinking, it’s not going to work.
[0:32:04] David Folwell: Yeah. It is changing. It’s changing so rapidly. I feel like the AI component of it is it’s crazy to see. You and I talked about this and I’ve had many conversations, but I mean, at one point, I think people were hiring staffing agencies because they didn’t have the capacity to go interview 100 people, or 200 people. Now, you can do that with AI. That’s not perfect, moving it so that the –
[0:32:28] Christopher Ryan: I mean, the one thing AI can give you is you can find out if the talent is really interested. You can find out if they even have pay expectations somewhere. You can find out if they actually have any prior experience, so you don’t have to go through all the credential slop that now might appear on somebody’s resume. The one other thing that I would be looking at very carefully as a staffing agency is figuring out how to identify and select people who have ability that has not yet been tapped, because we are going to have to retrain and repurpose a lot of talent over the next decade.
The staffing agencies that succeed are going to be very closely aligned with local and community colleges, with any organization that is repurposing talent is absolutely crucial to the future of your business.
[0:33:19] David Folwell: Yeah. I saw a stat the other day. I don’t remember the number on it, but it was like, adaptability is going to be one of the most important attributes for future hires, because of the amount of change that is going to –
[0:33:28] Christopher Ryan: Adaptability is everything, and it’s hard to measure. It’s very hard to measure. Some organizations make it a lot harder to be adaptable than others as well. That’s actually, if you were to talk to our CEO, he would say that right now, leaders teaching their organizations how to be adaptable is probably one of the most important things that you could be doing as a staffing agency.
[0:33:51] David Folwell: Couldn’t agree more. This is a book from years ago, and I don’t remember the name of it, which is terrible, but they looked at Fortune 500 companies over the course of a 15-year period. They documented different competitive actions that they could take, like legal, marketing, strategic, just the different corporate business actions that they could take. They were trying to figure out what type of actions correlate with success. If I remember it correctly, it was that the ones that were most successful, there wasn’t any specific type of action that they took, it was that they took more actions. Essentially, meaning that they were willing to adapt and adjust more to meet the current demands of the market. That actually gave the longevity of the business was more about the flexibility to move through these circumstances is –
[0:34:39] David Folwell: Yeah. The challenge right now is there’s so much uncertainty, everyone is inclined to freeze. But the smart leaders are constantly experimenting. They’re constantly testing. They’re seeing what’s going to work, and then where it works, doubling down. They’re constantly bringing in new information all the time. It’s extremely important to be in that mindset. CEOs ultimately don’t get any work done. They can be the experts at aligning an organization, listening for an organization, and building adaptability into an organization. From our standpoint, leadership is a really big deal. In staffing, I would say, that’s number one right now.
[0:35:23] David Folwell: We’re going to finish up. I’ve got a couple of speed round questions.
[0:35:26] Christopher Ryan: Uh-oh.
[0:35:27] David Folwell: Before we jump into those, I did want to – I know, Avionté Connect is coming up. It’s right around the corner. Just a few weeks out. Anything that you’re excited about, any reasons why people that if they’re listening to this and they’re on the fence of going, why they should be showing up to Connect in a few weeks?
[0:35:41] Christopher Ryan: Well, aside from all the amazing partners who will be at Connect. That certainly, one reason alone is that you have 40 to 50 different technology partners in one room, and you can check everyone out and sample the wares. Beyond that, we’re testing a lot of new ideas. We’re introducing a lot of new concepts around AI. We’ll be talking about our vision for artificial intelligence going forward, which is really, it’s quite exciting to see how in the near future, AI capabilities are going to be built into the native code of the platform in such a way that we’re really going to be able to start putting AI agents to work within the core platform, without ultimately changing.
It’ll still look the same to a recruiter in some respects, but there will be all this amazing additional capability that will start to evolve. That’s certainly an important part. Then, of course, our CEO always has a lot of interesting things to say about that. Hey, we’re going to have over 35 different – if you’re an Avionté user, we will have over 35 different courses from our experts on how to maximize the value of the system.
[0:36:55] David Folwell: I’m excited to learn, hear you guys’ perspective on digging into the different types of moats and approaches to that as well. It’s always a great event. Excited to be there with you. We’re going to finish out with the speed round and then we’ll close out from there. First question I’ve got for you is what book, or books have you gifted the most, or recommended the most to others?
[0:37:13] Christopher Ryan: Oh, wow. I generally don’t, because I don’t think anyone else has my –
[0:37:21] David Folwell: I want to know. What book do you love? Yeah.
[0:37:24] Christopher Ryan: I’ll tell you, I do get a lot of inspiration from military history. This comes from the marketing and the strategy side of my job. John Keegan is a military historian from England. Some of his descriptions about vital conflict between business and competition have always fascinated me. Sometimes it’s the little details that determine who is going to win on the battlefield. In modern business, you really have to have that competitive mindset. You have to walk in thinking, “I’m on the field to win, or I’m not going to survive.” That is absolute. I definitely take some of that from military history. That’s one thing.
I’ve almost liked Michael Porter and classic business strategy is I think extremely important as part of this. I almost liked The Soul of a New Machine. That’s an older book now, and that dates me. Tracy Kidder. But he writes about the wars between Digital Equipment Corporation and Data General. In particular, how Data General developed a new computer and what that process looked like. Seeing a group of technologists come together to actually build something that was literally so complex that no single human being can understand how it works. This is back in the 80s. Very interesting time. Of course, neither company exists now. They’re all umbrellas under another organization. Yeah.
[0:38:54] David Folwell: Great recommendations. What habit in the last two or three years has changed your life? Have you had any new habits, or adjustments?
[0:39:02] Christopher Ryan: Oh, I wish I’d known this one was coming. I would say, probably one of the most important is a complete focus on mental alacrity. It sounds funny, and this is actually more than in the last five to 10 years, I literally test myself with puzzles every morning. It’s like, I need to know before I get on a Zoom call if I’m thinking clearly.
[0:39:26] David Folwell: That’s amazing.
[0:39:26] Christopher Ryan: If, am I sharp, or should I just ignore everything I think today and push it off somewhere else? It’s very important that you’re constantly objectively evaluating yourself. The thought that we’re complete people, I’ve been in business a long time, but the thought that I’m complete and I can’t make mistakes is obviously wrong.
[0:39:47] David Folwell: At any point, if you think that, then you’re about to be wrong.
[0:39:50] Christopher Ryan: Then you’re about to be. Yeah. Pride goes before the fall. That’s definitely the case.
[0:39:57] David Folwell: Do you have any favorite failures any times in your career, where you’ve had a challenging time, or a failure that maybe helps set you up for later success?
[0:40:06] Christopher Ryan: Wow. Probably one of the most important, I was in my early thirties. I was a consultant at the time. I was in management consulting. I was working at a very large company on a project. Like many 30-year-olds, I thought a lot of myself, it was like, “Oh, look at me. I’ve got these fancy degrees. I’m a really smart guy.” Nobody cares. But we were working on this consulting project that was going sideways in a hurry and we were risking getting fired. I was working with a client’s team and we had a good relationship. Somehow or other, the four of us were able to sit down as a team and figure something out that I couldn’t figure out on my own.
At that point, I suddenly was aware of the skills and strengths of other people that I hadn’t acknowledged before. It’s like, the more you think about yourself, the less you see the talent, or the value of other people. That was a really important lesson for me. Since that time, I’ve increasingly felt respect for the organization, respect for the intelligence of the crowd, of the hive, if you will, is sometimes you have to sit back and feed the organization and let it make the decision. It’s not about you. Taking ego out of the equation is critical in being successful.
[0:41:34] David Folwell: Absolutely. That’s a great comment. With that, any closing comments for the audience, anything else that you’d like to share before we close it up?
[0:41:41] Christopher Ryan: All I’d say is staffing is it’s an amazing place. I love the people who work in staffing. They’re so much fun. So alive. I think there are huge opportunities in staffing going forward. It’s going to be a little uncomfortable. There are going to be some changes. For the people who adapt, there are a lot of really bright opportunities in the future. I’m excited to be part of it.
[0:42:07] David Folwell: Chris, really, really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today.
[0:42:12] Christopher Ryan: Yeah. Thanks, David.
