Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Kurt Heikkinen, CEO of Montage Talent (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What levels are we talking? Are we seeing this more in technical recruitment or are we seeing this more on junior recruitment? Where is your product and is your process being applied more readily?

Kurt Heikkinen: It has evolved nicely over the last several years to be able to support the enterprise of hiring. The way we’re able to achieve that is through the configurability of our applications. Apart from on-demand video, we also offer up on-demand voice, live video, and live voice.

What we know is that the recruiting challenges are very different on a position-by-position basis. How you might want to recruit an executive or an engineer are very different from recruiting for a high-volume hourly position where maybe you’re staffing a call centre or a retail store. That’s where our solutions allow the client to apply the specific application and workflow to the specific use case.

We have clients who are using it for high-volume hourly entry level all the way up to executives. They may use different parts of our application and configure it differently but we really support the enterprise of hiring.

Sramana Mitra: I love what you’re doing. We’re huge believers in virtual everything. Our company operates on this virtual accelerator mode. We work with entrepreneurs all around the world wherever they are. We are able to do this because of videoconferencing and other technologies that we use.

We run our company as a virtual company from a team point of view. You’re confirming, enhancing, and augmenting my belief that virtual is incredibly productive and effective. What is the level of adoption? What is the level of penetration that this kind of approach has gained at this point?

Kurt Heikkinen: Excellent question. There are two major trends that are driving this adoption. One is the technological trends – the virtualization of the workforce, the fast adoption of SaaS or cloud-based applications, the proliferation of mobile devices, and the consumption of video. These are all strong technological trends driving and supporting adoption of our technology.

On the workforce side, those trends are equally as powerful. We talk a lot about the fact that within a few years, 50% of the workforce is going to be millennials. Those millennials have far different expectations not only in terms of the candidate experience but also their career. They’re looking for assignments. They’re not looking for a 30-year career.

The other workforce trend that we track very well and that we align with is we’re becoming more of a gig-driven economy or a contingent-driven workforce economy where many large organisations are developing a more holistic workforce model where there’s a balance of permanent and contingent hiring where upwards of 40% of their total workforce may be contractors for a given project. Those are the macro technology and workforce trends that are driving adoption for our solution.

Where are we in its evolution? We really believe that we’ve crossed that chasm from new concept to early mainstream adoption. We have hundreds of enterprise clients who started using our solution. They’re not entirely using it for all of their hiring but over the course of a two or three-year adoption cycle, a client like Disney adopts our solution maybe for 20% of their hiring.

As we move into years two or three, it becomes 50% to 70% of their total hiring. This is moving very quickly, especially as the challenges to compete for skilled labor and the expectation of a gig economy take over. These organisations know that they can’t continue to do it the way they’ve always done it.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Kurt Heikkinen, CEO of Montage Talent
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