HR Transformation Success: How Debbie Fulton CPO at DiverShified

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HR Transformation Success: How Debbie Fulton CPO at DiverShified

26:20

 

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**Cindy Lu:**
Hi Everyone, this is Cindy Lu and I'm joined today with Debbie Fulton, Chief People Officer at Diversified. And today we're going to continue our conversations around HR transformation. And with Debbie, we're going to do something a little bit different and go a deeper dive into one aspect of their HR transformation, which is on the talent acquisition side.

When Debbie told me that they had a great experience with the RPO, I'm like, "Okay, I got to hear this story" because I have actually never heard of that. It's typically horror stories around integrating and rolling out RPOs, which is recruitment process outsourcing companies. And Debbie will go into more of what that means in a minute. Maybe a quick analogy. But first, Debbie, tell us a little bit about yourself and Diversified and yeah, maybe even something about you that people don't know.

**Debbie Fulton:**
All right. Thank you for having me today. HR transformation, because I've been living quite a bit of transformation in the last year of my life with my role at Diversified. I have been an HR leader for about 25 years and have worked in several industries including manufacturing, distribution, pharmaceutical, and professional services, just to name a few. And I've been very fortunate to be involved with building some very people-centric programs and having an opportunity to influence the creation of a culture where associates are feeling valued, supported, and empowered to grow.

So that's right in line with my own values. So I've predicated towards companies that exemplify those same things. And then in 2023, I had an opportunity to join Diversified as their Chief People Officer. So for those of you who are not familiar with Diversified, we actually do some pretty cool things. We are a global technology solutions company, and we design, build, and manage digital environments. It's for industries such as media and broadcasting, corporate office space, and other workplace environments. So what we offer is the creation of an immersive experience, which you can determine that is probably a fairly interesting concept for many people today trying to get remote workers back. They want a little bit more interest in what we're doing. So we use advanced audiovisual systems and digital signage, etc., to build these environments, and we do it full product lifecycle from strategy to design to integration to ongoing support and services.

**Cindy Lu:**
Give us a little bit more about the size of the organization just for some context for the audience.

**Debbie Fulton:**
Sure. Our revenue is about 1.1 billion. We are global. We have 2,400 associates worldwide, and we have been in for about 30 years. And the growth for the most part is attributable to acquisitions.

**Cindy Lu:**
Okay. That seems to be a common story that I hear a lot from our Mastermind members. Huge growth from acquisitions, which creates its own set of challenges when you're trying to stand up HR or put a transformation in place. Tell me a little bit about those challenges you might have seen.

**Debbie Fulton:**
Sure. With the growth requisition, we really were looking at acquiring smaller domestic and international A.V. companies. So companies that came with their own culture, their own people, their own way of doing it, more of a small company mentality, really. And what the current leadership didn't do at the time was integrate all of their acquisitions. So because of this lack of integration in systems, people, and processes, the company did start experiencing some pretty challenging financial situations and decided to onboard a new CEO in 2022. And they brought on Eric Hutto.

Now, Eric is a visionary, and he brought with him a vision of one Diversified. His goal was to build a very cohesive team and a collaborative culture with a clear strategy and path forward to growth and sustainability. So knowing this, he knew he had several pieces he needed to put together in order to make this happen. And one of those pieces was the HR function.

**Cindy Lu:**
Okay. Before we jump into the HR function, I just want to circle back real quick. What's something that people might not know about you? Did you find it on the internet?

**Debbie Fulton:**
I'm a huge sci-fi fan and fantasy fiction fan. So I love Game of Thrones.

**Cindy Lu:**
Yeah, I know it has like a cult following. I'm not sure if I'm quite close to the status, but I will admit to watching the series at least three times.

**Cindy Lu:**
Okay. If you also like the Game of Thrones, type in the chat, "Winter." Winter is coming. Just type in "Winter." Yeah. Just for those of you who are joining us for the first time, we actually can't see who's on with us until you type something in the chat. So just trying to see who might be with us this afternoon. All right. Let's jump into sort of all the areas within HR that need to transform and how you came to this decision that talent acquisition is where you might start.

**Debbie Fulton:**
Okay. So as I mentioned, Eric had a big plan in front of him, and part of that was to build an HR team and define its role in the company so that we were set up to deliver a service that was strategic, impactful, and scalable. And that is about the time I joined the team, right, in 2023. Eric began in 2022. So in mapping out our journey, we really needed to take a look at things from both the compliance and a strategic HR management lens.

Diversified had very few programs. I think that, through the acquisition, the small companies had some of their own things that they did that worked, but we really didn't have a larger strategy. So we needed to build the foundations in order to grow from there. So we thought, where do we start? And what we did, we took a step back and we looked at talent management very holistically. And said, okay, we know we need performance management. We know we have to look at our compensation. Learning and development is important as well. But to create some momentum, we felt we had a good opportunity in talent acquisition.

Our current recruiting and onboarding methods were somewhat inefficient and costly. We had a small recruiting team who relied heavily on the use of external recruiters. And we really didn't have a sourcing strategy or data tracking or reporting mechanisms. And we felt this was really an area that we needed to show that we could really build a system to attract the best talent. And then we can start putting the pieces together on retaining our talent.

**Cindy Lu:**
So I just have to do a spoiler here. Tell us a little bit about the success, and then we're going to go deeper dive into the steps that you took. Because like I said, I've just never really heard about a success story with RPOs. It's actually talent acquisition is my first love, right? It's where I started. By the way, we've got some people popping in to say hello and winter. So welcome Kim and Kathy and Carl trying not to melt in Austin. So he wants winter to come. Hi Lacey, Lisa, Clara, Erica. So nice to see you guys. In any case, the talent acquisition function so often is like the red-headed stepchild, like the leaders, they want to talk about leadership and succession planning and all the talent management and the sexy things. TA so often is like this red-headed stepchild doesn't get the time and attention.

But gosh, if you have ever experienced amazing talent, you know that it just fixes everything else. Like I think about my leadership journey. I'm like, I didn't know anything about being a general manager, but getting the right people on board totally saved me. So Debbie, you tell me what made you guys go down that TA track? Why was it so important to start there?

**Debbie Fulton:**
As you just stated, finding that right talent and folks who can learn and grow with the company is, I believe, the key to any success you may have in an organization. It's what you do with the talent after that, that might differentiate you and cause folks to want to stay with you. But just getting that talent in place is what sets the stage for everything else. So it made sense that we look at the whole life cycle of employment and all of talent management. It just made sense to start at the beginning. We knew we had some broken pieces there, why not give that a shot? And we hadn't initially considered an RPO.

**Cindy Lu:**
What did success look like then?

**Debbie Fulton:**
So the way it was introduced to us conceptually is we were really looking for something that we could adopt that was cost-effective, scalable, and flexible. So I only had a couple of people on the talent acquisition team, and the company was hiring pretty good volumes, maybe three to 400 people a year. So they may have had a hundred positions open at any given time, many of which were specialized skill sets.

There was some really, I'll call it low-hanging fruit also on the talent acquisition side. We could get big gains by making some fairly small changes in the whole scheme of things. And someone on the HR team had experience with an RPO and said, "Hey, maybe this is a viable solution for Diversified." So as we began doing some due diligence, it was really, again, looking at what are we looking for? We want to be cost-effective. It has to be scalable. It has to be flexible based on what we're doing. And because of that volume that we had, we looked at the initial cost structure and said, "Okay, this could work for us." What are some other things that, as we're looking at a vendor, we now have decided conceptually this may be a solution. What are some of the

things that are important to us in a vendor?

So we then went through that process. Now we did have a referral, and Diversified did referred vendor, which was a really great choice for us because Seven Step has been a wonderful partner in what we've been doing. And as we began engaging with them, it became more and more clear the number of benefits that were available to us through this third-party vendor. And I will admit that I didn't realize that those services were provided or an option under an RPO. So again, we saw that we were able to immediately bring in a level of expertise and specialization and recruitment that we didn't have. We could employ some advanced sourcing techniques, and the plan was already there and built for us. And we had a team of people that was going to immediately begin using those techniques. And we have some additional market insights that we never had before. We can call Seven Step and they will immediately respond for anything we might want to know about a particular area that we're looking to grow into or a particular skill set that we may be having a challenge with.

**Cindy Lu:**
I think especially the advanced sourcing, right? So I grew up in talent acquisition, and we did many studies throughout the years, and no matter what year it was, it seemed like it was a good 80 percent of the people were considered passive candidates, right? So if all you're doing is posting and praying, then you're missing a huge population of candidates. I think the other thing is we were talking about how important the TA process is. Tell me, we're going to just fast forward and talk about the successes. So you guys broke even, right, in the first year?

**Debbie Fulton:**
We did, and that's part of the success story. Again, I think we did have some low-hanging fruit. We had opportunities because our costs were high. But having a break-even situation just on pure cost in the first year was more than what we expected. And then we have several secondary benefits. Our RPO has helped us dive into and regenerate our employee brand, for example.

They understand our industry. We've been able to engage them with helping us respond to our social media posts on Glassdoor or Indeed. So we're able to get out there in front of things and are much more proactive rather than reactive with this partner. I think maybe most significant to me is that Seven Step has integrated themselves with our team.

They act and look and are part of our Diversified recruiting function. So it's very seamless, and they work directly with our people leaders and our hiring managers. They work directly with the candidates to ensure positive experience and efficient processing. But most importantly, they're freeing up the time for my HR leaders and my other HR folks to focus on the core business rather than being bogged down with the time-consuming process of talent acquisition.

**Cindy Lu:**
No kidding. First of all, the generalist also is expected to be a strategic business partner. That's already challenging enough, right? You're dealing with the shared services work or the ER work, and you're trying to be strategic. And then you throw recruiting in there, which basically, if people don't have, managers don't have their people, then they're screaming loud. So really hard to balance those. Plus, you never know from a staffing perspective, most organizations will staff for the valleys, not the peaks, right? As far as the talent acquisition team. So Debbie, tell us a little bit about maybe lessons learned along the way.

**Debbie Fulton:**
Sure. And before I hop in there, I did want to mention, as we're looking at RPO for us, there's when you have upside, you have to look for the downside. And our caveat is, if you're entering into this type of relationship, just ensure you don't rely too heavily on your RPO. Now we're able to leverage a lot from them, and we still have two dedicated resources in-house that helps our HRVPs and helps the recruiting team shepherd the hiring process.

But if you rely on them too heavily, you have a chance of losing control over your hiring process. And you don't want to do that. And you don't want to make it difficult to bring recruiting back in-house if you need to. So as we were looking at the linkage of technology and different systems, we wanted to make sure that we set ourselves up to bring this back in if we ever needed to. And I feel pretty confident that would be a pretty easy transition. Other than, of course, hiring an entire staff and maybe investing some additional tools. But again, just a small caveat as you're looking at it, because it is a big deal, and it is a cost to the company. So it's not just a small piece of your budget. It's going to be a larger piece of your budget.

So after we had selected our vendor, we're off to the races. We are looking at, okay, how do we approach this? And a couple of key learnings for us. The first was making sure, and this might seem obvious, but stating it is so important. We needed to make sure that our leadership really clearly understood and were bought into the goals and objectives of the program.

This was a very big change. So setting those expectations upfront was super important because implementing an RPO involves a very steep learning curve, and you have to have participation and buy-in from those people who work within your process, all of your stakeholders, all of your hiring managers. And when you're implementing this model, you may have a temporary slowdown, and you can encounter some challenges in your process. Addressing what some of those things are and being realistic and having set those expectations was really important for us and something that I think the HR team did well.

**Cindy Lu:**
Yeah, that's so important. I remember when I was in the search business. I think most leaders are you're like the Wizard of Oz, right? You're just going to go behind the curtain, and you're going to pull out the perfect candidate for me tomorrow.

**Debbie Fulton:**
And it doesn't work that way. There's this crystal clear blue pool of candidates out there somewhere, and I'm still searching for it. But in short of finding it, we're trying to build our own pool. And I think that's another advantage of an RPO. They can do things on a much larger scale than we can.

So we're looking now at a much wider candidate pool and arguably a more qualified candidate pool. You mentioned targeted hiring. We've been doing quite a bit of that this year. And Seven Step proactively sources. We have hired more than 50 associates from our competitors. And we don't plan to slow down our role in that area. We're getting some really key talent, and I truly believe that we have been able to move through it effectively and professionally because of the talent RPO Seven Step has brought to us.

**Cindy Lu:**
I'm curious from the audience. If you can put on a scale of one to five, five being the most difficult to find talent right now, even though supposedly the economy is not doing great, and one being super easy, I'm curious, what are you guys seeing in the marketplace? I know it takes, there's a little bit of a delay for them to respond, but let's keep going. The first insight is really about setting expectations with the key stakeholders.

**Debbie Fulton:**
Yes. And, the second one would be making sure you're building a detailed plan and you're revisiting it often. Mapping processes. We spent about three months mapping processes, and it was well worth the time spent because not only did we, were we able to dissect what are we doing and what can we be doing better?

But Seven Step brought world-class processes to us. I look at, wow, we have a green field here. We can come in and build what we want. And we have this partner who is helping us select the pieces that we need most. So spending that time with them initially was important. Again, we had a team of people this would not have been successful without the HR team.

I can absolutely say that it took the village to raise this child. And the change management and the communication planning involved was pretty sophisticated. We are fortunate to have a change management component within Diversified as well as patience. So they were definitely able to help with that.

But really making sure we're reminding people often of what we're doing and why, understanding who our change leaders are and leveraging them, making sure we have the key messages very consistent, and then just involvement and support. And again, I'm probably not saying anything that you don't already know. But looking back and talking to the team are the things that clearly stood out to us as being important elements for success.

**Cindy Lu:**
Yeah, you'd be surprised, Debbie. I hear a lot of people talk about technology before they talk about process. And then it, I've actually made this mistake myself, right? Like the very first ATS we purchased years ago, it was, "Okay, here's what the ATS can do." And you get so excited about all these features, but it's not lined up with your process. Or maybe you don't even really know what your process is, or the organization hasn't aligned the process. And that technology and investment can be a disaster. So I've actually lived that. So hopefully we'll see. I think taking the time to put that process map in place probably made you a really good RPO partner client.

**Debbie Fulton:**
I hope so. They seem to like us.

**Cindy Lu:**
Any other insights or lessons learned?

**Debbie Fulton:**
I think those are the big ones. We're more than a year into this now, and we just had our annual review meeting. And we spent that time looking at how do we improve? Are there additional tools we want to give to our hiring managers? What was the feedback that we're receiving as we're holding our meetings with the hiring folks and just really calibrating on how, what's

the next step for us.

And I see Seven Step helping us next with our emerging leader recruitment and acquisition program. Right now, we don't do a lot of campus recruiting. We don't have an L&D function. We do know that we didn't have a very robust function, so it was difficult for us to take folks who are early in their careers and train them to do what we need them to do. They would get lost in the system. So now that we have a structured talent acquisition program, and we are building our learning and development platforms, we are now able to take a closer look at how do we develop our future skill set and prepare us for the shift in technology that we're experiencing with AI.

Other things in our industry. So how do we make sure that we are looking far ahead to our future so that we can sustain what we have done to this point?

**Cindy Lu:**
Congratulations on the success of rolling out, selecting, and rolling out an RPO. It is not an easy thing to do. I think from setting those expectations with leaders all the way to actually getting that process mapped out, all while probably continuing to do acquisitions, trying to keep HR afloat, it's not easy. I'm always so impressed with these HR transformation stories because it's, I guess it's like flying the plane while you're building it to say the least.

**Debbie Fulton:**
It really is. And the RPO, there are times that we just need specialized talents to help us. I can maybe think about an RPO as compared to you're throwing a dinner party, a gourmet dinner party, and you're not a chef. You don't know how to do it. You have an idea and you know how to use your microwave. Creating this gourmet dinner, you're going to bring in an expert. So you bring in your chef. They know the ingredients. They know the market.

You can interact with your people. They can give you the full experience versus just putting a meal on a table. And that's what Seven Step has been able to do for us. They have given us the gourmet selection of talent acquisition and helping us navigate. So when someone asked me, "Deb, are y'all having a hard time finding people and hiring them?" My response is, "Not really." We have challenges. Yes, absolutely. But overall, Seven Step is helping us reduce our time to fill rates as well as our cost to fill.

**Cindy Lu:**
That's awesome. Great story. Thanks to everyone for joining in. It's great to see everyone. Next week, we are joined again at the same time with Deborah Bosley. So we've got getting all the Debbies out of the way here. Deborah Bosley is going to talk to us about Plain Speak. So one of the things I hear often from executives who don't know HR or talent management is, "Sometimes I get lost in what you're saying to me." And so Deborah Bosley is an expert in that field, and we're going to talk a little bit about Plain Speak next week.

All right. So thanks, everyone, for joining. We'll see you next week.