Episode 5 - Consulting the Expert on Hiring - Amy Bingham

What is happening in a virtual world with staffing companies and how are they pivoting to keep up with the ever-changing times. What's next and how do they stay on the cutting edge?

Amy Bingham, President of Bingham Consulting Professionals 

 

Leighann Lovely  0:15  
Let's talk HR is a place for HR professionals, business owners, and employees to come together and share experiences, to talk about what's working and what's not. How we can improve best practices so that companies can better attract, train and retain all generations of workers. We all know that there has been a huge shift in what people want. Generations are coming together, more than ever, on what's important. Mental health has been brought to the forefront of everyone's mind. Let's humanize these conversations. Let's talk about how the economy has been impacted and what needs to happen to find a balance. I'm your host Leighann lovely. So let's get this conversation started. And remember, if you enjoyed this episode, follow us, like us, and share us 

Leighann Lovely  1:04  
I'm very excited to welcome my guest today, Amy Bingham. With a career spanning over 25 years in the staffing industry, including 15 years consulting to staffing firms of all sizes and sectors. Amy Bingham works with owners and executives to increase sales effectiveness, positioning them for success to build value in their company's strategic planning, standardizing processes in alignment with their latest best practices of high growth firms, training, sales and recruitment teams, and coaching staffing leaders are key competencies of Bingham Consulting. It is Amy's broad exposure to best practices of high-performance staffing firms that her clients value most. Early in her career working for a global firm provided the foundation for achieving excellence as one of seven elite performers today continual research on emerging industry trends and process enhancements equipped Amy to help her consulting clients differentiate and stay ahead of the competition. Passionate about supporting and success of staffing leaders, Amy launched the Millennial Mentors program for staffing leaders in 2018. By working one on one and in group settings with high potential managers and executives. Amy transfers her knowledge to equip them to effectively lead staffing teams to drive optimal business results and migrate the risk of costly turnover. Amy is an active member of the American Staffing Association and sits on the women in leadership counselor. She is a highly rated past presenter at the AASA staffing world and many other national state and regional conferences. In addition to her responsibilities, Amy is a leadership coach to MBA students at Rollins Crummer Graduate School of Business where she enjoys setting future leaders up for success in the corporate world. 

Leighann Lovely  3:03  
Amy, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk with me today. I'm very excited to have this conversation.

Amy Bingham  3:12  
Thanks, Leighann. I'm happy to be here.

Leighann Lovely  3:15  
So why don't you start off by telling me a little bit about yourself.

Amy Bingham  3:21  
Okay, so I have had a long career in the staffing industry. I started my run at a national firm way back when over 25 years ago and have been consulting to primarily small to midsize firms for the last 15 years.

Leighann Lovely  3:36  
Excellent. So you've had quite a run in really in the staffing industry. So you've been in it for years.

Amy Bingham  3:45  
Absolutely, My practice focuses on advisory services. I do a lot of leadership coaching. It's something that's sorely needed in the industry. So I'm having a lot of fun with that. But you know, your typical strategic planning, I do some training. It's just been great to have the variety of working with a lot of different firms and learning new perspectives.

Leighann Lovely  4:09  
Great. So what's your, and you kind of touched on this a little bit, but what are the types of staffing companies that you typically work with?

Amy Bingham  4:20  
Yeah, so there is a type there are what some 39,000 staffing offices in the US. There's a lot of people that help but that what we call the Mom and Pop sector needs a lot of help. These are typically recruiters or salespeople that work for bigger firms and decided they wanted to do something entrepreneurial. You know this is the, I'm just going to have a shingle outside of a door and start recruiting. And so their business grows to maybe it's even a million, two million or five million and beyond and they start to realize I need some structure. I need some help with this. Now I have a business. It's not just me and the pilot team. So I work across all sectors staffing, light industrial ministry, active health care, engineering, I've got legal, I've got clients all over the board. But primarily, I work with some startups, but usually firms under 5 million and then all the way up to we'll see my largest client is right around 100 million, but the sweet spot is probably 10 to 25 million. So you know, that $10 million for that wants to get to 25. And the 25 want to get to 50 and beyond. And that's what I like to do. I'm a sales effectiveness consultant. So totally front office girl. I'm all about let's get revenue in the door and gross profit.

Leighann Lovely  5:53  
Yes. And you and I actually had the opportunity to work together many years ago, which was very exciting and very beneficial. And I truly enjoyed that. So there has been,  so much that has changed over obviously the last 20 months, or how has your job changed? Because of that, and has there been a shift in the needs of some of your clients that you work with?

Amy Bingham  6:19  
Good question, Yeah. So the interesting thing is, I had made a strategic decision to travel less. So long story short, I got introduced to zoom back in 2019, early 2019. And I embraced the technology. And I said You know what, I can work effectively, I can certainly do coaching calls, I can even do training in bite-sized segments, right from my home office. So I had already made that transition, I moved my clients to a virtual environment. And when the pandemic hit, my life didn't really change that much at all, because I was already operating this way. That said, the needs of my clients obviously changed. A lot of people were trying to cope with remote work and how to manage a remote team. And I think that was very challenging for leadership to understand. If they can't see, in this industry, we're used to having people in a bullpen and have an eye on him, for the most part. And so a lot of the owners and executives had a real hard time with the fact that their staff was not under one roof where they could see them. And we're surprised to see, pleasantly surprised to see that not only did productivity not suffer it, actually. So that was a radical shift for the industry. I mean, I remember the days where absolutely no one I mean, most of my clients are no one works from home. That's just not how we operate. We're all in the office together, we collaborate. So it was forced, and they learn that, but that brought new challenges.

Leighann Lovely  8:06  
Right. Absolutely. Are you still seeing that there are companies out there that are still really struggling with moving to a remote workforce? I mean, obviously, I've come from manufacturing. A lot of the candidates or a lot of those industries rely on people to walk in the door

Amy Bingham  8:29  
They do so it's harder for a light industrial firm that relies on walk-in traffic where there's a lot of go to work immediately. No interview required types of orders, right, high volume orders, that can be a challenge. It can be done. I have clients doing it. But there was a lot of reluctance in the LI sector, particularly for that reason now not so much in professional staffing. In professional staff. It was a pretty easy transition in employee base in professional staffing really embraced that because they were already these folks in the industry, in recruiter seasons and salespeople. These are this is young millennials and Gen Z now entering the workforce, and they're all about flexibility. So they're actually less inclined, far less inclined to take a job where there is no option to work remotely. Right. and actually, I had to have a lot of conversations with clients who were still having a problem getting there. We still wanted people in the office. I said, Listen, it's a candidates market anyway. You're going to take already narrowed people down further by requiring them to come to the office five days a week. Not a good idea. So that is still evolving, but yeah, in the industrial sector, it can be challenged. There's no doubt about that.

Leighann Lovely  9:58  
Yeah, absolutely. And you kind of, answered a little bit about what my next question was, what do you see for the future of general labor staffing versus the professional staffing side? You know, how are you overcoming some of those challenges with the people that you work with? And I think you kind of answered a little bit of that.

Amy Bingham  10:18  
You know, I did, but there is a huge push to the digitization of staffing, as you're probably aware, right? We're using artificial intelligence more, we're automating redundant tasks. I mean, on the candidate side, the closer that we can get to one-click apply, the better. Right? Now it's right for a staffing firm. And then you've got so you have to re-engineer your application flow your workforce, and then you've got abandon rates that are exceptionally high, but people are very impatient, they encountered any challenge at all applying for a job, they're just going to abandon and go somewhere else. Right? So staffing firms that have been historically high touch and not embrace technology are really struggling with this. And I'm doing a lot of work in this area with them. So you've probably heard a lot of people looking at their tech stack, right? How are they set up? From a technology perspective? What integrates with what is it smooth, it's cumbersome. But I think for light industrial staffing companies, that's a game of speed, though very often the first that first company, if there are all these multiple companies were done these job orders, the first company fills the order, that's a business. So if you are, if you have a cumbersome application process that slows you down, you're going to be more likely to be beaten by the competition that has embraced technology. But that said, there's a lot of recruiting technologies. There's a lot of help in the industry to get people through that. But it is overwhelming. I just had an email earlier today, actually from clients that is completely overwhelming. They're converting from one ATS to another and she knows that's overwhelming enough anyway. But the integrations piece is just mind-boggling. Right? So the grappling with that change.

Leighann Lovely  12:25  
I've seen so many apps popping up of you know, new apps popping up of this is an app where they can do a one-touch apply all their information is there and it's expediting these processes. It's very interesting, everything that's popping up now.

Amy Bingham  12:40  
Yes, so it's great for the candidate. But for those running and working in a staffing company, you've got to evolve, right? Your processes if you don't, like I said to use on Steam,

Leighann Lovely  12:53  
Right. Very interesting, very interesting stuff. What do you think the greatest need of some of the people that you are working with right now, a lot of your clients, what do you think that you know, or what are they engaging you for?

Amy Bingham  13:09  
So usually, I will be working with an owner that is sort of living on an island, right? That's what they describe to me. The typical call that I'll get is, hey, I built my firm, 5 million, 10 million, even 25 million. And I've figured it out along the way. But I don't know what I don't know. So I want to work with an advisor who's plugged into all the latest best practices so that I'm not, I don't feel like I'm living, you know, in a vacuum here or on an island. Right. So it's a lot of advisory work. And I have a very flexible plan where we've talked a couple of times a month, my client brings the agenda. So whatever's on his or her mind is what we're going to talk about. I have more structured plans where let's run hard and run fast. For three months, we're going to talk every week I'm going to give you work to do in between, it'll say you have a major initiative to standardize the process, right. So my scope of work may be to help them with that initiative and hold them accountable to getting that done. So I have a three-month plan. And then I have there is a great need, like I said earlier for leadership training, leadership development. As we've got baby boomers retiring, they've got to have successors to their firms. So that's the reason I built the millennial mentors program or staffing leaders. I initially built it as a one-to-one T program for usually the children of an owner. That was the intended successors get them and I worked with them for a year to get them up to speed get them ready to run the business. But it took it from one to one to one to many, I still do one on one coaching but I do far more good. Coaching, open enrollment. My next class starts on January 13. People can literally click and register and I end up in with 15 people in the class from all staff and verticals, all levels of leadership, from owners to brand new managers. And everybody learns, they learn from me, they learn from each other. So it's really a great program. I've been very excited to launch that. Yeah.

Leighann Lovely  15:26  
And I was gonna ask you about that too. Tell me a little bit more about that. So specifically, what is that you know, based on, or what is that about?

Amy Bingham  15:37  
I have, when I built millennial mentors, it was on five, the Bible nine, I call them nine disciplines of a great staffing industry leader. And so in my one on one coaching, I'm working through all nine, over the course of a year, I pulled out for the group program, the three most critical leading people, leading process and leading results. And over an 11 week period of time, on a one-hour zoom call every week, we all get on the phone, I teach them something in that discipline. I give them an assignment, they go do it. It's all experiential learning. They come back the following week, we debrief as a group, it's open mic. That's where the real learning comes in. How did you do on your assignment? What did you learn that I teach them something else, and I give them another assignment. So that goes on for 11 weeks.

Leighann Lovely  16:38  
That's awesome. Because I like the idea that it's at all levels, because somebody who's, just coming in talking with people who have been in the industry for years can learn something from them, at the same time that they're learning something from you. And people who have been in the industry for years, who sometimes get set in their ways can learn new ideas from somebody who may be coming in with fresh ideas. That's such a that's such an amazing way to, you know, bounce ideas up, you know, back and forth. I mean, it's just, it's great. And I mean, the best way to create a great environment is to train the leaders.

Amy Bingham  17:20  
Yeah, it starts with leader. Absolutely. People leave bad managers. They'll even stay in a bad job. Right? If they're fiercely loyal to their manager. Yeah. So it really does start with the leaders. And you made a good point. I just got an email earlier. I'm wrapping up my q4 class right now. From I got an email from an EVP who's in the class. And she said, You know, every single week, there have been great takeaways, she said, some are good reminders. But many are new things, or new ways of doing things that I've really never thought through. This is an executive vice president of a midsize firm. Right? So I have I have that person. And then I have somebody just promoted into a recruiting manager job and now has six recruiters reporting there. So and everything in between all levels in between, right

Leighann Lovely  18:11  
That's awesome. That's amazing. It's, well, it's a lot of somebody listening who wants to check that out. I know that you are promoting it on LinkedIn. I'm sure they also find it on your website.

Amy Bingham  18:24  
website -  https://binghamcp.com/  click Services and look at leadership development. And you can download the agenda and the program overview.

Leighann Lovely  18:37  
Excellent, So here's my final question. I'm going to be asking everybody this season, this question. So I'm excited to hear you know what your answer is, if you could pinpoint a time period in your career that made a huge difference in your life or career path? When would that be and why?

Amy Bingham  18:58  
So I'm in the way back to actually pre staffing career when I was in retail management. I had a boss who was just as almost gypsy like, she came from outside the the industry, industry being retail, but she came in with a lot of fresh ideas. I remember my first one on one with me she sat down, and she said, Okay, so Amy, you're a department manager in cosmetics. How do you like it? Love it. I'm going on and on. She said, What do you want to do next? And I said, I don't know. No one's ever asked me that before. Now I'm in my early 20s at the time. She said, How about my job? Do you want my job? You want to be a group manager? And I said, I would love to be in your job. I don't have the slightest idea how to get there. She said we will get you there and I'll be darned if she didn't mentor me. And a year later, I got her job. She got promoted to store manager. So this is for Macy's store, right. So what I learned from that why that was so pivotal is I really learned. First of all, if you have a great mentor who will invest time and energy in you, you can go places. And I think we've got to start that dialogue with very junior people. To help them understand this isn't it for you, you can do a whole lot more. So then, when I was ready to leave retail behind, I did the same thing. At then Sperion all that interim services, pre Sperion was on Ranstad. Same thing started as a seven branch manager and up the track and found sought out good mentors talked about what I wanted to do next. So that but that foundation came from that one, group manager in retail.

Leighann Lovely  20:54  
That's awesome. That's amazing. And that's, really a learning experience. For every single person who's listening to this, no matter what level they're at. You cannot get to a point in your career, that you can't ask for a mentor. And you can get to a point in your career, where you can offer to mentor somebody. I mean, that should really be the true takeaway from what you just said, because we all have so much to offer to other people. And we still all have something new to learn at any point in our lives or careers. So that's amazing. And you truly, you obviously took great advantage of that, because you've now run your own consulting firm. You know, I've, like I mentioned earlier had the opportunity to learn from you take a training course from you, eventually work under you, many years ago, but it is. Yes, you are a brilliant woman. And I really, really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today.

Amy Bingham  22:03  
Oh, yeah, you're so nice. Thank you so much for inviting me, and all the best to you and your career. I see you just climbing and climbing so really excited for you.

Amy Bingham  22:15  
Thank you so much. Thank you again for listening to Let's Talk HR. I appreciate your time and support. Without you the audience this would not be possible. So don't forget that if you enjoyed this episode to follow us like us or share us. Have a wonderful day.

Show notes

Amy Bingham

LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/amybingham 

Website - https://binghamcp.com/ 

 

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