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Key Providers for 2021: PRO Unlimited

Solution Providers by Christopher J. Dwyer on 11/18/2021

The Background:

“Evolution” and “disruption” are not often mentioned in the same discussion. However, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and its wide-sweeping ramifications on the business arena, the two are now interchangeable dimensions that are actively transforming the way work is addressed and done. The world of contingent workforce management has changed forever, with progressive attributes placing equal emphasis on the talent and innovation components of how the modern-day worker is engaged and sourced.

As the Future of Work continues to leave its indelible fingerprints on the wide world of talent and work, both HR and procurement executives will require a unified technological approach that can seamlessly connect the most critical pieces of workforce management.

Enter PRO Unlimited.

Why They Were Selected:

Future of Work Exchange research finds that 84% of businesses aimed to “reimagine” workforce management heading into 2021, given that they spent the better part of a year facing the worst public health crisis of their collective lifetimes that caused undue disruption to traditional processes and strategies related to the growing and evolving non-employee workforce. While that statistic continues to prove itself out in an ever-changing business arena, what also stands out is that (also according to FOWX research) nearly 70% of enterprises are also focused on better managing the many technological gaps in the ultimate coverage of the total workforce.

PRO Unlimited has been one of the most aggressive and disruptive workforce management solutions in the market over the past year, owed to a “platform” vision that would see it become a dynamic nexus for agile workforce innovation. In just a short amount of time, the solution expanded the depth of its data ocean (acquisition of PeopleTicker), expanded its commitment to DE&I (exclusive partnership with EightfoldAI), announced a direct sourcing solution and added progressive functionality to it within months (the new Direct Sourcing PRO offering combined with the acquisition of WillHire), and expanded its total managed service provider reach with the acquisition of Workforce Logiq (also named a “Key Provider for 2021” here on the Exchange).

In Their Own Words:

Servicing hundreds of the world’s most recognizable brands, PRO Unlimited offers modern workforce management and a partner ecosystem supported by data, software, intelligence, and services to meet your flexible workforce needs. PRO’s Integrated Workforce Management Platform can adapt quickly to regional or industry economic shifts, and provides the speed, scale, flexibility, transparency, and expertise to serve as the holistic platform for the modern workforce. Headquartered in San Francisco, PRO has helped global brands and organizations achieve operational and financial success for more than 30 years.

The Outlook:

PRO Unlimited, quite simply, is a solution that is tailored for the Future of Work. Consider the pieces of its end-to-end offering:

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) are built into the fabric of its core platform and especially its direct sourcing module (Direct Source PRO) through its exclusive partnership with Eightfold AI.
The acquisition of Workforce Logiq wasn’t just an expansion play, but rather a way to tap into the solution’s unique, intelligence-led offerings, particularly ENGAGE Talent, which has the potential to revolutionize talent engagement combined with the power of the PRO platform.
Direct Source PRO, in a short period of time, became one of the industry’s strongest direct sourcing offerings. The addition of WillHire’s deep functionality will only aid in pushing this facet of the PRO solution to new heights.
The recent partnership with Glider AI (also a FOWX “Key Provider”!) will further enable a range of digital recruitment and candidate assessment capabilities that are designed to assist PRO clients with the necessary, on-demand intelligence to enhance predictive talent modeling, improve the quality of talent channels, and optimize direct sourcing strategies.

Simply put: 2022 will be a massive year for PRO Unlimited and the delivery of its innovative vision. The company is consistently unveiling pieces of a larger puzzle that are ultimately designed to facilitate a new era of optimization within the realms of workforce intelligence, DE&I, direct sourcing, talent acquisition, and agile workforce management.

Leadership Must Change if Businesses Want to Thrive in 2022

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 10/27/2021

Many business leaders across the world were dealt an unfair hand when the COVID-19 pandemic hit nearly 18 months ago. Faced with a massive loss of revenue, customer trust, and enterprise sales, executives were also forced to lay off or furlough chunks of staff during the worst public health crisis of our lifetime. When uncertainty and the unprecedented impact of a pandemic hits your business, your staff, and your personal life, as well, there’s not much room to positively maneuver around it all.

We’ve experienced many Future of Work “accelerants” over the past year-and-a-half that have enabled new discussions on the best ways for enterprises to get work done. Yes, of course, remote and hybrid work have dominated those conversations, however, there’s so much more to the story that has a direct impact on how leaders, well, lead.

Future of Work Exchange research points to several expected shifts in business leadership over the next several months and into 2022:

83% of enterprises expect business leadership to prioritize an inclusive workplace environment. Diversity is just one (very big) piece of the arena known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Business leaders now seemingly understand that inclusion, which extends to how they structure a welcoming and open workplace environment, is the only path forward for both talent acquisition and talent retention. Potential candidates should feel at-ease knowing that they could potentially join an organization that welcomes their background, differences, disabilities, etc., while existing workers are more likely to stay if they know their workplace is safe, welcoming, and prioritizes openness and communication. Inclusion is just as critical for new talent as it is for current talent.
80% of companies anticipate more empathy-led leadership. Empathy is a routine, featured topic here at the Future of Work Exchange, and for good reason: empathy, quite literally, is the only way forward. Empathetic leadership is what is sorely needed for executives to earn required trust from their staff and for workers to feel “connected” to the greater organization and to also feel supported in their current roles. Empathy-led leadership involves organizational leaders asking questions, actively collaborating, and prioritizing communication with their workforce. In 2022, this will make or break the average enterprise, especially as conversations around worker burnout continue to dominate headlines.
77% of organizations believe business leaders will structure workforce management on flexibility. While we just highlighted how the Future of Work is more than “just flexibility,” the agile nature of today’s forward-thinking organizations provides a robust template from which today’s leaders can leverage to effectively plan for the year ahead. Yes, remote and hybrid work plays a valuable role in the greater concept of flexibility, however, it traverses much deeper than whether or not workers are physically in the office or at their kitchen table. Flexible work models, such as shorter work weeks, adjusted hours, or agile task-sharing, also play critical roles in how business leaders rethink the many ways to get work done.
72% of businesses expect business leadership will focus on understanding personal perspectives of workers. This attribute could be the most crucial of all, given where we are in the greater timeline of a public health crisis. When the pandemic hit, no one fully knew what to expect; what followed was tragedy, horror, and unease. From a business leadership perspective, it created a truly emotional toll on the workforce, forcing executives to enact cognitive empathy to fully understand what it was like to juggle a lack of daycare, remote learning for children, sick or dying relatives and family members, and general uncertainty regarding job security. If leaders truly understand “where” workers are mentally and emotionally, it allows them to be more flexible in their management style and how they support that talent. In the months and years ahead, this higher level of understanding will go a long in helping business leaders build a trusting workforce that feel like their leaders want to fully support them during uncertain times.

The Great Resignation, The Great Reassessment, The Big Quit…Let’s Just Call It What It Is: A Talent Revolution

Business Leadership Talent by Christopher J. Dwyer on 10/25/2021

My dear friend and fellow agile workforce pundit Jon Younger ends his frequent Forbes articles with a phrase that is essentially perfect for what is happening in today’s labor market: Viva la revolution!

Call it The Great Resignation. Call it The Great Reassessment, or even “The Big Quit.” No matter what name is tied to what’s occurring in this frenetic, volatile talent economy, it just means one thing: there’s a revolution of talent happening right now.

Yes, major pieces of the “worker-led” transformation of talent and labor are owed to a market that has been accelerated since Day One of the pandemic, as many talented professionals (and the businesses they work(ed) for) experienced the biggest disruption of their their corporate lives. Remote work became a norm, flexibility was a baseline, and empathy became a foundation for how leaders treated their teams.

However, there are other attributes that are a long time coming, such as equitable treatment, fair and living wages, and inclusive workplace cultures that promote safety and openness. There’s more discussion around worker burnout than ever before. And, critically, there’s a clear element of diversity that permeates through the job market, as well.

Looking at all of these elements converging, one would wonder, “Why would we ever go back?”

Those that worked remotely pre-pandemic can now validate the productivity concerns of such a work model. Those businesses that experienced an increase in productivity since the pandemic began now understand that they can trust their staff to get work done away from the office. And it’s not just a remote vs. in-office issue: think of the core societal changes that occurred in tandem with the pandemic. Think of the renewed focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I). From permanent hiring to extended talent, hiring managers and other business leaders are finally acknowleding real enterprise value of diversity.

Put it all together and this is what you get: millions and millions of talented professionals that know their value, know that they can work flexibly, and know that they deserve better working conditions from various perspectives.

Since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking statistics on the number of workers who voluntarily left their positions, there was no greater month for turnover than this past August, when 4.3 million Americans left the workforce (the previous record was May 2021, only a few months prior). The fact that the entire summer experienced somewhere in the neighborhood of 17+ million resignations (over 20 million if you count April in these figures) speaks volumes about where we are collectively headed.

Just a month or so ago, discussions revolved around whether businesses or workers would blink first. New BLS data proves that workers aren’t coming back unless organizations completely revolutionize their stance on the employer-employee relationship. It’s not just about compensation, it’s the fact that workers desire true flexibility. They crave work-life balance. And, most importantly, they want their own values and purpose to align with those of the businesses they choose to support.

Workers that traditionally “job-hopped” are finding that they can do so much more easily in today’s market, while workers that were once “lifers” question their career choices during a time that forced all of us (business aside) to reevaluate our lives in the face of the worst and biggest health crisis of our collective lifetimes. When people witness a family member falling ill and succumbing to a nefarious pathogen, and, when they see the terror across the nation’s hospitals as they collapse from surge after surge, it results in an “awakening” that has a cascading effect on both personal and professional thinking.

If workers aren’t satisfied, why would they stay put? With so many (read: millions!) of open positions across the country (and world), most of which offer consistent flexibility and a more soulful candidate and worker experience, why would any talented individual, in this current global landscape, want to “waste” their valuable months and years with an organization that doesn’t offer everything that they want and need? The pandemic reprogrammed many facets of human thinking; it was only natural that the same transformational mindsets would alter how we, as people, reevaluate our choices as business professionals.

Many of us lost family members, friends, and colleagues to COVID-19. Some of us attended funerals with limited family members due to social distancing guidelines. We’ve watched the horrors of the insides of ICUs on the evening news or on social media. Even though things are better than they have been in months, the pandemic is still a part of our everyday lives (even with the modern marvels that we have in coronavirus vaccines). When these morbid aspects of life creep into how we think about what exactly it is what we want from our lives (which, of course, include our careers), it’s very normal that we’d question why we spend time working for an employer that doesn’t offer flexible hours, doesn’t offer equitable treatment and wages, and doesn’t enable remote or hybrid work models.

Workers are human, and humans will always modernize their thinking due to the world around them. What is happening right now in the labor market is certainly a convergence of many factors that would have eventually accelerated critical shifts in talent engagement…however, these transformations are, to a greater extent, the result of humans questioning their choices moving forward and ensuring that one of the biggest pieces of their lives, their careers, are satisfying the personal, professional, and emotional aspects of their lives.

This isn’t just a reaction to a pandemic and its wide-sweeping business ramifications, it’s a true revolution of talent that will forever shape the Future of Work.

The Mom Project’s $80M Series C Funding Represents Opportunity for Both Moms and the Digital Staffing Industry

Diversity and Inclusion Solution Providers Technology and Innovation by Christopher J. Dwyer on 10/13/2021

Several weeks ago here at the Future of Work Exchange, we recognized The Mom Project as one of our select “Key Providers for 2021,” an exclusive set of solutions and platforms that are disrupting the workforce technology spectrum and impacting how work is addressed and done. In that feature, we wrote:

“The Mom Project is uniquely positioned to continue its rampant growth in the market from three perspectives: 1) it is one of the most visible workforce management platforms that is actively prioritizing and truly aligning DE&I within the very fabric of its functionality, 2) it offers one of the industry’s deepest communities of gender- and ethnically-diverse skillsets and talent, and, 3) its progressive technology platform enables a spectrum of innovative talent acquisition, talent engagement, and workforce management solutions that harness the incredible power of artificial intelligence and machine learning while forming a foundation of total talent management automation.”

So, in essence, it may not be so surprising that last week, The Mom Project secured $80M in Series C funding that will bolster the solution’s standing in the digital staffing marketplace, help it enhance its already-robust suite of functionality, and, most importantly, continue to connect talented mothers with open jobs, roles, and positions. This top-tier level of funding will augment the company’s teams and add additional headcount while boosting product development, a critical factor in an ever-evolving industry.

“We’ve demonstrated to the market that betting on moms is good business,” said Allison Robinson, CEO and Founder of The Mom Project. “We’ve seen 20x growth over the last three years and are eager to leverage this momentum and the trust and equity we’ve earned with moms and our customers and partners to continue building and expanding the reach of category-defining solutions that reshape how work evolves to meet the needs of modern families.”

FOWX analysis of this major market activity finds that the Leeds Illuminate-led funding (with participation from existing investors 7GC, Initialized Capital, OCA Ventures, Citi, High Alpha, Grotech Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank) for The Mom Project is both an opportunity for both moms and the digital staffing industry at-large:

This sizable level of funding, more than anything else, puts the focus on getting talented mothers, women, and diverse candidates back into the workforce. Just a couple of days ago, we wrote that 309,000 women left the workforce in September alone (on top of the tens of thousands of job losses across other backgrounds and races). The Future of Work Exchange fully expects The Mom Project to boost the power of its deep and diverse talent community, which was already a sizable component of its overall offering. With thousands of new and talented individuals added each day, the added investment will certainly help the platform expand its global reach, as well.
The Mom Project will be able to enhance its market-leading functionality in 2022 and beyond. AI-led neural network engine, equitable self-learning technology, functionality that takes into account DE&I and customer culture in candidate-matching and workforce planning…the Series C level of funding will allow The Mom Project to build on these innovative features as well as its unique WerkLabs solution, which harnesses the power of predictive analytics, workplace data, and talent experience intelligence to help enterprises design and develop the most inclusive and productive workplace environments.
This investment reflects the continued growth and impact of the digital staffing industry, which includes both digital staffing platforms and on-demand talent marketplaces. Ardent Partners, which has been covering the digital staffing space for nearly a decade, has found that there has been a 7x increase in the utilization of digital staffing solutions over the past six years, with more and more businesses opting to augment their greater talent acquisition strategies with on-demand talent channels that provide highly-qualified, pre-vetted, and project-aligned workers. A digital staffing outlet such as The Mom Project (which offers both workforce management functionality and a deep community of talent) securing $80 million in funding reinforces just how powerful digital staffing can be in the evolving world of talent and work. As businesses develop more flexibility into how they structure their workforce, digital staffing will become a relied-upon range of technology to enhance talent engagement.

The “Age of the Worker” Still Has Too Many Disparities

Business Leadership Diversity and Inclusion Talent by Christopher J. Dwyer on 10/11/2021

Across the world of talent and work, there are many factors in play that reflect perhaps the most volatile job market we have experienced in business history. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 brought a swift tumble to the labor pool, however, the economic recovery began relatively quickly and “only” hit a peak of 10.6% unemployment (in January 2010). Comparatively, in April 2020, during the earliest and perhaps the most confounding times of the COVID-19 pandemic, the unemployment rate hovered around 14.7% (and considered higher in some circles given the panic and confusion around that period of time).

For all of the horror, unspeakable challenges, and both personal and professional disruptions that we all have faced over the past eighteen months, the labor market’s initial plunge was only the beginning of a series of major issues for the workforce that continue to this day.

In September, U.S. businesses only added 194,000 new jobs, a figure that shocked economists and labor market analysts alike. In addition, however, the true unemployment rate hit 4.8% in September; while this figure may seem like somewhat of a positive note amidst a weak rate of added positions, it’s really just hiding the many disparities that remain across today’s total workforce. And if we really want to dig deeper into how the lowest unemployment rate of the pandemic thus far just masks massive inequalities, there’s another stat that should shake business leaders to the core:

In September alone, 309,000 women (above the age of 20) dropped out of the workforce, according to the U.S. Labor Department. 309,000.

No, that is not a typo. 309,000 talented and hardworking women left the labor market within a 30-day span. That’s 309,000 women who are not part of a so-called “Age of the Worker.” These are women who are hitting pause on their careers due to factors way beyond their control.

Unemployment is low. The economy is thriving despite a Delta variant surge. One miraculous coronavirus vaccine has been approved and in use as a booster, with the two other major shots on their way. However, these same disparities in job growth are also occurring in other segments, such as in black men and both black and Hispanic women.

What is happening here?

The main problem is this: no matter how great the economy looks and no matter how low unemployment rates are, there is a foundational gap between 1) what we conceive the workforce to look like, and, 2) what that actual workforce looks like when broken out into gender, race, and cultural background, due to continued uncertainty in peripheral areas of the market that have a ripple effect on working mothers and people of color.

As we discussed previously here on the Future of Work Exchange, any level of uncertainty in the world of working parents is catastrophic. Any new COVID cluster in a school that eschews masks and precautions forces those parents to pause their professional lives and attend to remote learning. The continued shortage of staffing within daycare and pre-kindergarten facilities is astounding; too many working parents are having to make the difficult choice between their business personas and their roles as parents of young children.

Two years ago, if a third-grader woke up in the morning with a sore throat and runny nose, a parent could chalk it up to seasonal allergies or the common cold and send him/her off to class without a worry. Today, quarantining is disruptive and COVID testing can cause massive delays in a return to the live classroom. While some educational departments are leveraging “Test and Stay” models that enable quicker returns if children are asymptomatic, there are tens of thousands more that are not.

Those workers that are “between” pre-pandemic careers and a more settled return to the workforce are unsure of what is on the horizon. There’s no crystal ball that will tell them if the coming fall and winter seasons will spark yet another COVID surge. Millions of workers that were once toiling in more blue-collar-oriented positions are reevaluating their careers entirely, fighting as hard as they can for better pay, safer working conditions, and more flexibility in how they work before returning to work. Unfortunately, gender- and race-led disparities are caught in the middle of all of this and are suffering as a result.

So, what’s the answer here? It’s not so simple. The fact that organizations have implemented new diversity-led measures for gender diversity (82% of businesses are currently implementing these measures, according to FOWX research), cultural diversity (72%), and generational diversity (65%) speaks volumes about where businesses want to be, however, the hard truth is that they just aren’t there yet…and it’s going to take some time.

There are reasons to be both optimistic and pessimistic. COVID vaccines from Pfizer for 5-to-11-year-olds could be only weeks away, helping to curb some safety concerns regarding live and in-person learning. Not all of those 309,000 women that exited the workforce will remain out of the workforce permanently; between digital staffing outlets (such as The Mom Project) that promote on-demand and diverse talent, and the hiring managers that truly understand that a diverse and inclusive workplace culture is the best culture to build deeper talent pools, things can and certainly will change.

However, if there’s anything we’ve learned over the past eighteen months, it’s that planning for just a few months ahead causes nothing but disappointment in eventual retrospect. Businesses could stand pat in their months-long standoff with workers that are clamoring for enhanced pay, benefits, and working conditions. More COVID hotspots around the country could exacerbate the workforce inequalities that we’ve been facing since March 2020.

The question remains, though: will the “Age of the Worker” truly help those that aren’t just leaving the workforce because of culture or flexibility issues, but rather because they have no choice? The Biden Administration’s $650 billion initiative for childcare programs, universal pre-kindergarten, and the establishment of a robust paid family and medical leave program could be a boon here, although this is a measure that is months away from being approved and finalized. Many parents will choose to vaccinate their children as soon as they’re able to do so, and many will not.

Like everything else that’s occurred within the world of talent and work in this pandemic arena, there’s more ambiguity than anything else. Let’s hope it changes…soon.

Contingent Workforce Weekly, Episode 606: A Conversation With Cesar Jimenez, CEO of myBasePay

Podcast by Christopher J. Dwyer on 09/15/2021

Another all-new edition of the Contingent Workforce Weekly episode, sponsored by DZConneX, a Yoh company, features a conversation with Cesar Jimenez, CEO of myBasePay. Cesar and I discuss the impact of direct sourcing, the current state of talent and work, the future of the agile workforce, DE&I, and so much more.

Tune into Episode 606 of Contingent Workforce Weekly below, or subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, Stitcher, or iHeartRadio.

Key Providers for 2021: The Mom Project

Diversity and Inclusion Solution Providers Talent Technology and Innovation by Christopher J. Dwyer on 08/30/2021

[Editor’s Note: Over the next several weeks, the Future of Work Exchange will unveil its “21 for 2021” list of key solution providers that are shaping the Future of Work through innovative technology, progressive functionality, and overall impact on the evolving world of talent and work. On deck for today: The Mom Project.]

The Background:

In the world of “digital staffing,” which is a wide-encompassing industry that includes talent marketplaces, talent clouds, talent communities, on-demand staffing outlets, freelancer management systems (even though “FMS” as an acronym is seemingly defunct), as well as direct sourcing technology, it’s not often that businesses have access to an end-to-end workforce management platform that also prioritizes talent engagement with a deep community of gender- and ethnically-diverse professionals.

Future of Work Exchange research finds that 62% of businesses expect more focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives over the next year, proving that the technology spectrum within workforce management needs to evolve to meet this expected shift moving forward.

Enter The Mom Project.

Why They Were Selected:

The world for working parents has dynamically shifted…again. The Mom Project’s Greg Robinson (COO and co-founder), who appeared on the Contingent Workforce Weekly podcast earlier this year, said that he and his team fear that we will see another mass exodus of women from the workforce due to the pandemic and its wide-sweeping ramifications. The Mom Project is looking to change that through its unique ability to connect enterprises with qualified and diverse candidates in a nimble, agile, and on-demand manner. That alone warrants selection as a solution that is shaping the Future of Work, but there’s more to the story.

On top of its 500,000+ (and growing) network of diverse candidates, The Mom Project also offers progressive workforce management technology such as true total talent management functionality, an AI neural network learning engine (that incorporates customer culture and DE&I attributes) that helps users identify key DE&I trends and patterns, and automation that assists enterprises in building ready-to-engage, pre-vetted talent from both non-employee/contingent and direct hire/FTE perspectives.

The Mom Project is one of the most progressive and innovative workforce/talent solutions in today’s evolving technology landscape.

In Their Own Words:

More than one million American women will become parents this year, joining the ranks of the working parenthood — a vital segment of the workforce. Simultaneously, businesses are challenged to retain talented employees as they navigate through this period of life, and struggle to find the experienced talent they need to grow.

The Mom Project is the expert partner helping companies create stronger, more diverse workforces that are well-prepared for the Future of Work. These are the big picture problems that C-suites, boards, investors and hiring managers across the country are focused on. We’re proud to be the consultative, action-oriented partner working hand-in-hand with our customers to drive lasting change.

Our platform drives community engagement and trust, driving a premium pipeline of over 500,000 members, growing by 20,000 members a month.
Our thought leadership and hands-on collaboration with hiring managers and recruiters ensures talent doesn’t get stuck mid-way, and that mom is primed to thrive in her new role.
Giving back to our 501.3(c) nonprofit, RISE, ensures that we’re continuously preparing the candidates of the future.
Co-branding drives talent perception and pipeline, and each hire becomes a story to further elevate partners as employers of choice for working families.

Women staying engaged in the workforce on their terms is good for families. It’s good for business. It’s good for everyone. .

The Outlook:

Over the next two years, 62% of businesses expect to address DE&I objectives and initiatives with workforce management technology and similar automation, according to Future of Work Exchange research. This statistic reflects just how critical diversity, equity, and inclusion truly is within the digital staffing solutions arena and its crucial place as part of greater talent management strategies.

The Mom Project is uniquely positioned to continue its rampant growth in the market from three perspectives: 1) it is one of the most visible workforce management platforms that is actively prioritizing and truly aligning DE&I within the very fabric of its functionality, 2) it offers one of the industry’s deepest communities of gender- and ethnically-diverse skillsets and talent, and, 3) its progressive technology platform enables a spectrum of innovative talent acquisition, talent engagement, and workforce management solutions that harness the incredible power of artificial intelligence and machine learning while forming a foundation of total talent management automation.