Search and Social Media: What Has Changed?
The short answer is “everything.” For those of us in the search business, we realize that our industry is changing in ways we couldn’t see or even imagine 3 or 4 years ago. For boards and hiring executives who haven’t yet incorporated their personal experiences and company positions on the use of social media into their talent development and hiring processes, you will limit your ability to attract the best talent until you do so, and worse, your best people are looking at companies who have already done so. For candidates seeking new employment, it can be a slippery slope if you’re not careful. You need to do two things: polish the story on how you’ve effectively used social media platforms to develop relationships with your customers…not your customers’ employer, but your customer – the individual and/or groups of individuals who buy and use your products or services. Secondly, you need to show how you have successfully communicated in realtime on topics of interest thru your social media network: customers, suppliers, partners, and even competitors – and be specific about what the business benefits or lessons learned were.
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Tony: I think you have to start with [an open] mindset as the prerequisite; it is pretty hard to train someone to be open minded if they are not open minded already.
Amit: If you look at Andrew’s background, Andrew was born and brought up in the United States, but you’ve traveled in how many countries?
Andrew: I have always told people, particularly during interviews, that one of the things I have really enjoyed in the 12 years of being with the company is that we are in 27 different countries. I think I have worked with people in each of the 27 countries we have operations in, whether that means having been in the country with them or just spending a significant amount of time interacting and working on opportunities with people in those countries. So, it is a very global atmosphere. Open communication with individuals around the world is part of developing business, and that means getting a lot of stamps in your passport.
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Tony: So, looking at the next level – beyond middle management, or lower middle management, looking at the senior leadership – what do you think are the key strengths that are going to be necessary for your executive leadership team and their direct subordinates to develop so that you can continue to grow your company globally? Beyond that, do you think you have those skills on board today? If not, what are you doing to do to get them?
Amit: I think it is a couple of things. For one, companies like us that are global are basically selling services on a global basis and convincing people that global sourcing is the way to go. To do this, you have to have a diverse executive team, and when I say diverse, I don’t mean just ethnic diversity but also diversity of opinions, views, and thought. Because when you work in a global environment, one thing you know is that there isn’t much homogeneity; “homogeneous” is a nonexistent term. Trying to make everything homogeneous is wrong – you need to understand the diversity of how people buy, how people interact, how people are motivated.
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Tony: We talked a little bit about [alignment of capabilities] in terms of being able to provide more total customer care, total customer cost of ownership, if you will. As you’ve done that, have you found gaps in the cultural approaches that your middle managers and senior managers take that have been more difficult to overcome? And as you’ve moved into higher-value services, how have you addressed those gaps?
Amit: That is an interesting question. If I understand correctly, you are asking me how, as we have moved into more complicated, complex, higher-end stuff, our middle management has adapted to this.
Tony: Middle management and senior management. It is one thing to bring people on at a junior level and train them, but the big issue I see in most companies’ ability to grow and be successful globally are the skill sets and attitudes at the top management and middle management levels, because these skills and attitudes actually drive the ability to be successful as a company.
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Tony: Are you moving toward even more of the secondary and tertiary locations in the countries in which you are operating? In the Philippines and India, are you moving more into more rural areas and setting up the infrastructure there to be able to support what you do, or are you looking for places where there is a tier 2 city that has the infrastructure and enables you to go in? How are you dealing with that? Is it both ways, or is it one way?
Amit: That is a good question. There it is bit of both. Actually, there is a third component to it. We are looking at locations that I would call rural, because no doubt you call them rural in India and the Philippines and in many of these countries, there is really not very much you can do there. “Secondary city” is probably a better categorization.
Rural, of course, is much more of a concept that is prevalent at the moment in the Western world: the United States, the UK, and so on. But it is a combination of both: looking at Indian locations that have the available infrastructure and labor force, and we help develop it or it is semi-developed. I will give a lot of countries credit; they have done a lot of great things. The Philippines, India, and some Latin American countries have done a great job of building the infrastructure to attract this kind of work into more remote locations. The third component is looking at other countries and locations around the world that also might have relevance.
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Tony: [What you just said about offering speciality skills] goes back also to another point, labor rates. Seven or eight years ago, when outsourcing was really just trying to take off in a big way for call center outsourcing, the labor rates, if you focus on India or parts of the Philippines, were at X per hour. Today, my expectation is that labor rates for the kind of talent outsourcing companies now employ have increased by a significant percentage. India is always touted as the largest producer of engineering and technical talent out of universities, and second only to China in terms of the number of total graduates. But there are still language and other skill gaps in both places that make it difficult to hire individuals with the talent needed for outsourcing.
As you continue to expand, and other outsourcing companies continue to expand, what are you doing to overcome the issues of labor rate increases and talent shortages? Is your going to all of these other countries partly a response to that, and part of your strategy?
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Tony: There obviously has to be a match between the skill sets of the people, [not just a match] with the cost. Clearly, the people who provide technical support for inbound calls have to have specialized skills.
Amit: Absolutely, and this comes in in the way we go to market. You have to talk about the evolution, I liked the way you put it – the evolution of companies in adapting to this global sourcing model. Five, seven, or nine years ago, for labor arbitrage our value proposition was, “Hey, Mr. Client, we can help you lower your costs and sustain those lower costs.” Now we are pitching India, the Philippines, and Nicaragua, and the conversation really is, “Listen, Mr. Client. We can help you look at it not from the perspective of cost per transaction but from the perspective of the cost for a satisfied customer.” That process of changing from cost per transaction to cost per satisfied customer allows us to find the right places to deliver the right kind of work. It also allows us to drive our economic model, thus lowering the cost of service. We can now say, “Here’s your cost per subscriber, here’s your cost per consumer, and here is your cost for a satisfied customer. Or, your price booked for a satisfied customer.”
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