Jamie Getgood, Chief People Officer at TeamRecruit and Staffing Venture Capital, on Cultivating a People-Focused Business

David Folwell: Hello everyone and thank you for joining us for another episode of The Staffing Show. I am super excited to be joined today with Jamie Getgood from TeamRecruit and Staffing Venture Capital. Jamie, so excited to have you here today. Why don’t you start and kick things off by giving a little intro and background on yourself.

Jamie Getgood: Absolutely. Look, I think first of all I have to get this off my chest. My last name really is Getgood. A lot of people wonder whether I’ve changed my name or a different….

Folwell: I thought it was made up.

Getgood: It’s not. It’s not. It’s legit and when I talk about my background, I am going to talk briefly about General Motors. The unions in particular would call me Getbad, Getlost, Getstuffed, and some other variants. So there’s various titles I used to have. But from a background point of view, 20-plus years in HR, moved through the ranks into some senior positions over the years. Through that career I had some really unique opportunities to do some landmark industrialization decisions across Australia in particular.

I got involved in greenfield site set ups. I set up businesses from scratch, and not just startups. I mean, large organizations, manufacturing facilities. I was grateful that I then got involved in the M&A space and got involved in a few mergers and acquisitions. This is all with automotive manufacturing organizations and then got headhunted by Holden. Now Holden was owned by General Motors. So I worked with them and took on the director’s role there, and the successful part of the General Motors experience was we were not performing as a business when I joined. We were a bottom quarter, our business in the General Motors world, and we turned it into the number-one car plant in the world for quality in the space of about 18 months to two years, just by fixing culture and leadership.

Despite that, the economic factors in Australia weren’t good for automotive and a decision came down to close automotive manufacturing in Australia. And that wasn’t just General Motors, that was Ford and Toyota as well. And that then led me running the closure of the automotive industry for Australia and not just the General Motors. So I got involved in a whole heap of task force and helped that happen. I won some awards for that which was nice, but I think more importantly, we made a real difference in people’s lives by giving them opportunities after the closure. That then led to me running my consulting business for about three and a half years before my amazing wife was a co-founder of a business called Staffing Venture Capital and then TeamRecruit, and they lured me as their chief people officer and that’s my current role. I am now chief people officer for TeamRecruit and we are a staffing recruitment firm, RPO, executive search firm that supports not just the U.S., although that’s probably our primary market, but companies around the world.

Folwell: Awesome. And if you could tell me a little bit about TeamRecruit, kind of the company’s size in terms of the employees and also what your growth trajectory looks like.

Getgood: Well, look it’s interesting, this story, because if I was to have this same conversation 12 months ago, there was about four employees. And in the last 12 months we’ve grown to…I think we’re well over 200 employees now. 200 recruiters. We’re now in eight countries. We’ve grown significantly and we prominently support the healthcare and tech space, and those two areas have been really successful. And I think we bring, I guess, some uniqueness in the way we manage our global workforce to support all of our clients. And I think that’s been a bit of a secret sauce for us where we can support organizations when they’re sleeping, so there’s some unique things that we do.

Folwell: Yeah. And with that, are you able to dig into that? That unique things always piques my interests and I hope for our audience as well. Are you able to tell some of the unique things in terms of how you approach RPO?

Getgood: Look, from an RPO point of view, we want to make sure that we are adding value and not just an RPO. It’s interesting, my role. I’m a chief people officer and you would think that I have no interaction with clients, but it’s actually quite the opposite. We want to have interaction with clients. So actually I have a proportion of my time that is to invest into our clients and add value. With my experience in HR and various breadths of challenges, not all good, mind you. In the HR space, I can really talk to CHROs and a lot of HR leaders and our clients and go, “Well, what are your pain points?” And it doesn’t have to be around the RPO. It doesn’t have to be around recruitment. It can be change management. It could be employee engagement. It could be how do you restructure an organization and downsize? So we want to add value to our clients and I think that’s been a real success point.

Folwell: And so sounds like you’re going in almost as a consulting arm of, “Hey, let me help you solve these challenges if RPO makes sense for you, if staffing is where you need help.” But we also have…I mean, your experience, you have a very unique experience just in the fact that you have worked with shutting down a division of GM, which had to be pretty impactful and a lot of lessons learned. When it comes to the actual RPO I’ve also heard that there’s a lot of movement towards RPO services in healthcare and IT specifically. And it sounds like you are catching that wave a little bit.

Getgood: Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think COVID has really impacted healthcare in particular. And I don’t think anyone is not aware that some of these hospitals, in particular in large healthcare organizations, are paying so much money on trying to bring in talent. And when you start digging deeper and you see how many millions are being spent in that space, it’s obvious that we need to do something different. So we’re trying to be really creative with our RPO and, again, partner with our clients to help them see that you don’t have to necessarily…and the staffing world doesn’t always like me saying this. We don’t want you spending the millions of dollars. We want to partner with you to get us out the door. All right? Because at the end of the day, you’re a better organization when you are doing that on the staffing front because you’re taking care of your own people. And we feel like we’ve actually done a solid job in supporting our clients.

Folwell: That is interesting and an interesting take. So you’re actually going in and saying, “Hey, we’re not only going to help you solve this problem right now, we’re also going to help make sure that you don’t always have to have us as your RPO partner by….”

Getgood: Absolutely.

Folwell: So you’re actually helping train their staff, then, in terms of recruiting their team as well?

Getgood: In a lot of cases, yes. And there’s one particular client, which I won’t mention their name for obvious reasons, but they were in a bit of a position where they were in a world of pain. They had a couple of thousand jobs, their entire acquisition team had suffered from burnout and stress, and that created a whole gap in their resources. And their systems were not good. So we didn’t just go, “All right, we’re going to do recruitment for you,” we actually came in and suggested, “Well, actually, if you could help do this, this, and this, this is actually going to fix your TA component.” Or, “Your HR systems aren’t talking to each other.” Or, “On the hiring manager front, how about you do this process and engage him here?” So we try to invest in the organizations and go, “If we can help you fix the TA side and reduce our costs, we’re actually doing the right thing by you.”

Folwell: So it sounds almost like highly strategic RPO and not just filling positions. You’re not putting butts in seats, you’re like, “All right. We’re a true partnership, and let’s solve the organization’s problems.”

Getgood: I mean, that’s the ideal scenario. We still have some clients that go, “We know what we’re doing. Just give us some amazing people.”

Folwell: Yeah, just give us…yeah. One of the things you mentioned, and we’ll talk about that, was burnout, which I know is a highly topical thing for probably everybody listening to this today. I think a lot of companies are experiencing that, a lot of employees are experiencing that. Still all of us kind of adjusting and shifting to a new working environment with the remote, work from home opportunities that we have. Tell me a little bit about how you’ve addressed burnout, either for your team or for organizations you’ve worked with.

Getgood: Yeah. So maybe I can talk about a personal experience. So I hadn’t planned on talking about General Motors too much. When we went through the closure of manufacturing, we didn’t just give people three or six month’s notice, we gave them four years. And then we built a world-class transition program to help them through that. I mean, we were talking around 100,000 people across Australia impacted. Not just a small project. We were really constant in how we helped people and I took the lead and got to a point where I was working…I’ll call it 16-hour days. I invested everything in helping everyone else and even my own team and had them on these great plans and health and wellbeing opportunities and did everything you possibly could think of. And then I got towards the end going, “I can’t do this.” And I had a bit of a mini breakdown myself. And I got to a point where I realized I wasn’t doing little things on my journey to support me and I wasn’t talking to the right people and I wasn’t opening up, I wasn’t taking care of my health. I wasn’t eating correctly, I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t….

And some of these we all know is common sense, but we weren’t doing that. But most importantly, I didn’t invest in the right people in my life. And I think that was one of the things that pulled me out of my own personal situation. I had a couple of key people in my life and one happened to be the pastor of my church, who actually came on the journey, lifted me up when I needed it, smacked me when I needed it, but really allowed me to believe in myself. And having that experience personally, I’ve helped numerous people since then on their journey. And if I then look within our own organization, we’ve invested heavily on health and wellbeing programs, we’ve got a couple of organizations that support our people with personal counseling and not just counseling, we want one-on-one support where they can get psychologists and psychotherapists or just someone to talk to. So then you throw in nutritional work that we’re doing and just because we got a remote workforce doesn’t mean we can’t do a lot of cool activities. So really investing on that people side because if we put our people first, they’re actually going to blossom.

Folwell: I completely agree with that. So now, how many hours are you working a day now?

Getgood: Here’s the beautiful thing. I’ve learned my lesson. I still have a tendency to be always looking at my phone, but I structure my day a lot more than I used to. I have an incredible wife, an incredible CEO, actually. Eric, who spoke to me yesterday, going, “Jamie, I think you’re doing a bit much. Pull back your hours a little bit.” But that’s the culture we have within our business. We’re open to sharing how we feel about each other and supporting each other. And that sometimes means telling us what not to do.

Folwell: That’s great. And how do you facilitate that with having a remote team? I know you’re, today as we’re talking, sitting in Thailand. You’re out of Australia, working in Asia. How do you facilitate all of the collaboration and communication amongst your team?

Getgood: Look, I think there has to be a real healthy balance with remote workforces. You can easily fix some of the issues by just having lots of meetings. And that sounds like a great idea because you’re not going to be seeing personal interaction. I think as the world’s getting back into normal, we’re really conscious that we need to build some face-to-face back into what we do. So we’ve already done some face-to-face interactions and meetings with our workforce. From a psychological point of view, or the physiological point of view, shaking someone’s hand actually makes a difference to the chemicals in our body and it builds trust and it builds rapport. So there’s various human elements that we try to make sure we don’t sacrifice.

It’s about simple rules like having every video call, your video must be on. Because there’s visual cues that we get. And there’s this whole world of digital body language that we need to relearn, watching people’s interaction on a Zoom call, and then potentially supporting people if you see things that are not right. And it’s easy to see someone sleeping on the end of a Zoom call or getting tired and ignoring it because it’s just what we do now. It’s remote. How do we take that to the next level?

Folwell: A great question, a great thought. I was just recently talking with somebody about how this is going to impact kids and kids’ ability to read each other’s emotions going through a stage where they spend so much time on Zoom. And for all of us, I think we’ve all shifted from so much human interaction to I don’t know how many hours…how many hours a day do you think you average on Zoom? I’d be easily six at this point.

Getgood: Yeah, you’re probably right.

Folwell: Yeah.

Getgood: Yeah. So it’s really important that we don’t just think about it as a remote worker. We go, “What can we do?” And we’ve had interactive lunches, we do games, we do all these different activities. We do charity events in our local regions and we then still pull people into areas. There are creative ways you can still create community and team and culture without being face-to-face. But we still believe face-to-face is important.

Folwell: Absolutely. And what is your tech stack in terms of communication internally with your team?

Getgood: So we use a range of tools. Probably the one that works greatest from a day-to-day is Slack. So Slack is a really cool tool for us. I mean, we have other tools like Dialpad and Zoom is obviously one of those that everyone’s using around the world at the moment. But Slack is probably one of those ones if you get the channels right, it really can be very supportive.

Folwell: Absolutely. I live on Slack. I’ve been living on Slack for about 10 years now. So, yeah.

Getgood: Yeah, it’s great.

Folwell: I pretty much don’t email my team ever, which is wild as it kind of takes it out of the equation. So we’re going to jump back over to kind of looking at trends in the healthcare and/or IT industry. And I know that you’ve seen an uptick in RPO, you’re seeing kind of this more partnership-focused approach. What other kind of key trends or things are you seeing in the market at this point?

Getgood: Look, I think if I look at the healthcare space, I mean, there’s the obvious trends that we all know that there’s a nursing shortage globally. We’re talking to companies in Japan at the moment that are going, “How do we get nurses?” Australia’s got the same issue. Singapore’s got the same issue. So the nursing shortage is a worldwide issue and there are certain countries that produce a lot of nurses but we’re actually working with some organizations on how do we get them into those countries. So that is, I guess, another feather in our cap but at the same time, it is a real problem. And what’s happening, and again, I’m preaching to the converted, it’s creating a high dollar figure across healthcare industry because we’re poaching off each other and then we’re paying staffing fees on top of all of that. And then, maybe they don’t like that company, so they’ll move on or will be travel nurses and they are very good in some instances but can cause other challenges within the organization. So the whole staffing world in the healthcare space has been really difficult.

And COVID’s not completely over yet. I guess there’s fear that if we start making major changes and start doing a permanent workforce again and COVID comes and hits us again, what does that do for us? So I think for us, healthcare organizations need a lot more workforce planning. They need to be really more strategic with their vendors and how they’re doing their staffing and their recruiting and their talent acquisition strategies. And you’ve got to look at what’s a sustainable model in five years’ time, not just in the next 12 months. And probably the thing that we see a lot of is organizations are taking a very much a short-term view and people go, “But I’m taking 12 months.” No, but that’s probably not enough. 12 months is not enough because the world could change drastically and you need to prepare for that.

Folwell:  Yeah, absolutely. And what are you, in terms of finding talent or whether it be the healthcare side or IT, what type of strategies have you implemented that maybe are unique to you or have been especially effective?

Getgood: Look, we’re using pretty much every tool you can find under the sun because especially with certain roles…and in the tech world, there are certain roles that actually are really difficult to find. And it could be that some countries just don’t have those resources so we have to be creative, right? So we’re using all those tools. Now, social media has to have a big play. So we are playing with pretty much every social media that you can think of. And some of those don’t make sense. I mean, people go, “Why would you do Facebook and why would you do Instagram,” and so forth. But they have different avenues for different groups. People in the healthcare world might be more prone to look at an Instagram or a TikTok, whereas tech guys are probably more inclined to go to a LinkedIn or another source. So we’re trying to make sure that we’re hitting those channels as well as we can.

And then on top of that, the good old-fashioned referral system works really well. And I think it’s probably not used enough in some circles. You don’t always have to recruit a specific role. You need to find the right people that are connected to those specific roles. So there’s some good old-fashioned techniques that won’t die and will never die. So I don’t think we’re doing anything crazily different in that space. Obviously, we’re exploring AI and different tech and we’re working with some of those at the moment. But I don’t think it’s rocket science what we’re doing.

Folwell: Yeah. And I think with most agencies we talk to, it’s like, “Oh, we’re trying everything we can, we have to try all channels.” So the other thing, I think you have probably an interesting perspective on what best practices look like for staffing agencies across different countries. And I was just thinking about you’re working in Asia, you’ve worked in the U.S., you’re out of Australia. I’m sure you have done some work in Europe at some point, but if you could tell if there are any kind of maybe best practices or things that you see outside of the U.S. or even just where you’re like, “Oh, well, things are done differently here but maybe better.” Are there any kind of activities like that that you see across different staffing organizations?

Getgood: I think the U.S. is actually quite good in a lot of their processes. I would actually say parts of Asia-Pacific need to catch up with the U.S. in certain areas of the staffing and recruiting world. We’ve got great tech in the U.S. There’s some great recruiters. But it’s interesting if you compare an Indian or a Filipino recruiter now to a U.S. recruiter, five years ago you might have said that the U.S. guys are in front and it’s not like that anymore. So what I think the trend we’re finding is that the best practice scenarios is the volume of training and onboarding some of these organizations are doing. They’re really honing in on that with their current staff and their recruitment teams to make sure they can get a better outcome on the people coming in. And again, I feel like it’s an age-old thing that we should all be knowing and doing anyway. But I think the best practices are those organizations that are really investing in that space, the onboarding and training piece.

And tech plays a huge part in that. We’re building our own tech, we’ve got tech plays, we’ve got AI but at the end of the day our business is people. And if you can train them in the right behavioral skills and…so we do a lot of training on behavioral and we do psychometrics and some of that, again, it sounds obvious but how do you make a difference in someone’s life with how you speak to them? Whether it be a candidate or a client? If we could think about that when we’re having our conversations, we’re going to make a difference. How do you train people in that area?

Folwell:  Yeah. And so you mentioned the kind of behavioral training, the psychometrics. If you could go into a little more detail or do you have any examples of how…for the audience in terms of what that means and what that looks like when it comes to actually onboarding or training part of their team?

Getgood: Absolutely. And I think I can bring an example that we saw are really good in the feel of things. They were investing heavily into body language, into vocal training. They were going not just into, “here’s this group or here’s a process,” they were actually trying to get people to understand that…and I actually ran a course on this for them. So….

Folwell:  That’s awesome.

Getgood: And just a really quick example. If you’re talking to someone on the phone and you’ve got a monotone voice, I don’t care if it’s a candidate or a client, you’re going to get pretty bored very quickly because it sounds monotone and everybody’s going to be…sorry. I’ll stop because I don’t want the podcasters to get…. But why don’t we train our people in variation and in our vocal tone, right? If you, when you get excited, raise your voice and speed up slightly, it actually is really interesting. And then when you get to something meaningful, you just slow down a little bit and talk about that really meaningful point. And what you’ve just done is you’ve drawn the candidate or client in and they’re actually engaged in your conversation, rather than just listening. It’s the simple bit of training tips around the people side of things. And to be honest, we didn’t really talk about, I ran a business called The People Shift as well, which, that is what that business is all about. People-focused leadership. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in Asia-Pacific in particular is some of those companies are doing that really well. And I think that’s why they’re catching up, if not in some cases overtaking the U.S. because their training is incredible.

Folwell: Well, what’s interesting is I think you’re probably seeing that being trained outside of the U.S. I’m not sure how many people are trained in the U.S. And that’s just as important anywhere you go, right? It’s things that you need to know that maybe aren’t intuitive to everybody. I don’t know if it was Zig Ziglar or I don’t remember what book it was, but I remember years ago when I started my career in sales, reading that as, “Stand up, smile, walk around like…” basically, if you have a smile on your face, the person on the other side of the phone will know and will feel your energy in a different way. And I think that that was exactly what you were talking about as well. It’s really cool that you guys are doing that.

So I also know that you guys have kind of looked at different metrics that you’re working with in the staffing industry in terms of how you partner with companies and you had a note here about cost-per-hire metrics. Are you guys…and I don’t need to dig into what those metrics actually look like, but how are you partnering with companies and working with them to make sure that you’re hitting their KPI’s and that you’re kind of outcome-focused?

Getgood: Yeah. So for us, we have a technical dashboard that we’ll put in place with our clients. And that’s fairly important. So there’s some live visual data. Especially if you’ve got volume. We want to make sure they can have real data on where we’re performing and where we’re not. So cost-per-hire is a metric, obviously, that we all want to know and consider. But some of the metrics that we don’t always think about is if we have candidate drop off before they even get to a submission stage, why is that? What’s the candidate experience? So how do we measure that? So we’re starting to dig deeper into some of those metrics and talk about the candidate experience and how we can do that. And I know that one large client at the moment, for example, that we’ve talked at length about the reasons behind why people don’t want to go to the next stage. We always take it from an employer perspective and go, “Why didn’t we hire this person?” Well, the candidates have a voice. If we can learn that candidate voice, and actually I think that’s a metric even though it’s not a number, if we can understand a candidate voice, we understand how we can improve our talent acquisition and improve our brand. So….

Folwell:  Couldn’t agree more. I feel like the firms that I see excelling are the ones that have a very close view of what’s going on from their talent and kind of a steady stream of feedback happening so they can optimize on an ongoing basis.

Getgood: Absolutely. And then you can do that at every stage of the cycle. So someone before submission, someone at interview stage, someone who’s got to offer and then still pull the plug. Let’s dig into that. That’s such valuable data and I don’t think we, in the past, have dug deep enough in that area.

Folwell:  Yeah, absolutely. And actually, I think sometimes the cost-per-hire and some of these other components end up ruling out maybe the more meaningful things we could have and maybe more of a shift in terms of change in the organization. That’s a great insight there. So with that, I’m kind of going to jump to the next stage of the interview, the podcast today, and ask some personal questions about you. So the first question I’ve got is do you have any advice that you wish you were going to before entering the staffing industry?

Getgood: Don’t. No, no.

Folwell:  Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Oh, this is….

Getgood: I think, for me, in fact, I got some really good advice from our CEO. And probably, I think he gave me the advice I wanted. So maybe I’m not answering the question exactly how you wanted it. But I was so focused on process when I came in and was so focused on the metrics you just talked about and my performance and so forth. And Eric just pulled us all aside, saying, “The reason we started this business was actually not to make money.” And this is his ethos. His reason is he wants to change our employees’ lives. He wants to change our candidates’ experience and change their lives. So the lesson I’ve learned is don’t just look at what we do for a job, look at how we impact people in the job. And I think that’s the lesson I wish I had learned coming into it, which I ended up learning because I have an amazing CEO.

Folwell:  That’s awesome.

Getgood: I just wish I had latched on to that a little earlier because it sort of…I mean, I’ve always felt that way, even through my General Motors experience, but I didn’t in my first few weeks. I was really focused on process and I think I had to shake it up. And I think being in a startup helped with that too. I’ve come from a corporate world and it was very structured and I had to realize that I have to be flexible and move and not always have process. It was an adjustment period.

Folwell: I had the same. I went from GE to a 20 person company. I’m on the same boat. I get it. So in the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?

Getgood: So this one I actually learned from my wife and my pastor, which was having the ability to be self-aware and adjust my own personal direction to improve others. And my burnout story was part of that. I went through a divorce at the same time as that burnout, so that didn’t help. But my wife now, she’s really invested in me to look at my strengths and how I can grow and she’s the one that sort of helped me get rid of the imposter syndrome I had at that point and realized the strengths I had. So I think for me it was that self-awareness. And that sounds like a really corny answer, probably. But I wasn’t as aware as I think I needed to be. And I think when I’ve reflected on my career in HR, I realized there’s a lot of executives out there that aren’t self-aware and probably not even understanding how they’re not wanting the other sales or taking care of their people because they don’t understand their own behaviors.

Folwell: I absolutely love that. That resonates very strongly with me as well and I feel…I always laugh with people. I’m like, “Oh, my entire 20s I knew everything and then 30s…every year of my 30s, I just realize how much more I don’t know.” Every year it’s just like that.

Getgood: For sure.

Folwell: The awareness is kind of a consistent, “Oh, man.” That’s great advice as well. What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? Could be an investment in money, time, energy, et cetera.

Getgood: Best investments? I think it is investing in myself. It’s interesting, when I was going… been getting really deep with you today but when I was going through that burnout phase, I got to a point of almost depression. One of the reasons I got myself to that burnout was… and that’s like a therapist I saw kept telling me, “You don’t know how to be selfish.” He was going through every bad and good scenario in my life and going, “How would you handle that?” And he actually pointed out for me that I was not taking care of me. So I never had a lot of time to actually improve myself and self-reflect. Yeah. So I think my best investment is time, I would say. Investing in myself. Realizing the value of family and people around me, the people I love. I’m still going through some challenges with my kids as a part of some the previous divorce, but if I had my time again, now that I’ve learned this lesson, I would’ve gone over and changed a number of things. But investing in yourself and investing in time makes a big difference. It doesn’t mean you’re not working hard. It doesn’t mean you’re not doing the right thing. But that actually makes a difference.

And my pastor actually said to me once, “You should be working from rest, not resting from work.” And I love that analogy because I think we sometimes get that wrong. We’re going to work, work, work, work, work, and then fall in a heap and rest. Whereas if we are rested and fit and up to full health, you’re actually going to work and all you can do and more.

Folwell: And I enjoy that as well. That’s great insights there. What are the bad recommendations you hear in your professional area of expertise?

Getgood: I think the bad recommendations would be when leaders drive people by metrics only and don’t want to understand people’s values, understand their why, understand what actually drives an individual. Sometimes people are in the wrong job and they don’t even know it. So until you actually invest time in talking to them and empowering them to dream a little, then you can’t understand that. But I think…and I saw this in the automotive industry a lot. Not just General Motors, just in automotive in general. We always…and this is a practice that wasn’t good. If you were the best widget maker, best engineer, best process guy, you’re the one that got promoted. And then we didn’t give them leadership skills to back it up.

So we wonder why we had a whole heap of micromanagers in that industry and we wonder why we had people not feeling encouraged and feeling like they’re driven to the bone and were micromanaging. It’s because it was all about metrics. So for me, help people understand their why and they’ll get the metrics because they’re brought into the values and the journey earlier on.

Folwell:  That’s interesting. That’s some Simon Sinek there.

Getgood: Yeah, absolutely.

Folwell: And actually, there is a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell where he talks specifically about how the best sales people get promoted to sales managers and then consistently fail as managers. So good insights. How has a failure or apparent failure set you up for later success?

Getgood: Well, I could take closing an automotive industry was an apparent failure.

Folwell: I thought that might come up. I thought that might be it. Yeah.

Getgood: It’s interesting because if you look at the media, we were front-page news for about two years. Four years, actually. And the media smacked us about we’re obviously a poor company, our quality is no good. But we invested so much in the development of the people outside of work. So it looked in the scheme of things that we weren’t able to build good cars. The reality is, when we turned that culture around, we were building the best cars in the world. We had a workforce out which was full of pride and when we did end up closing, it was a celebration not a wake. So I think that, for me, was on the outside a failure because we closed an industry. But we ended up with almost 90% of our workforce transitioning into new jobs outside of General Motors within 12 months.

Folwell:  That’s amazing.

Getgood: It’s an unheard of metric. So apparent failure into success.

Folwell: That’s great. And with that, that was the last question I had for you today other than just if you have any closing comments for the audience? Any last thoughts?

Getgood: Yeah, look, I think if you hadn’t noticed, I’m very people-focused in my theology. I think I’ll leave with my favorite quote, which is by Maya Angelou. “People may not remember what you say, they won’t remember what you do, but they’ll always remember how you make them feel.” And I think if we take that approach, not only within our businesses, but with our candidates and with our clients, our staffing firms are going to make a difference not just for our clients but for our current workforce. So that’s probably my pill at the end.

Folwell:  Thank you so much for joining us today, Jamie. I really enjoyed the conversation and the insights and hope you have a wonderful day.

Getgood: No worries. Thank you so much.