Q&A with Greg McKeown, Senior Director of Solutions at Wilson
During Greg's time at Wilson, he's worn many hats: Director of Recruitment, Sr. Director of Innovation & Customer Success., and presently, Sr. Director of Solutions, where he aligns talent solutions to companies needing flexible, strategic hiring.
With a background spanning client consulting, technology stacks, and market intelligence, Greg brings a multifaceted approach to his work and a unique perspective about technology's role in connecting with the greater workforce.
In this conversation, he shares ways to connect multigenerational workforces to bring meaningful impact to everyday performance, and what role technology plays in it all.
What have you seen changing with workforces since you’ve been in the recruitment world?
So, I've been in the workforce for about 15 years – and it's safe to say rapid change has happened. I've broken my working life down into three distinct phases in 5-year increments:
- Post great financial collapse
- "War for talent" era
- Hybrid, post-COVID work
After the great financial collapse, during its recovery, it was an employer’s market. This ushered in the GIG economy as we know it today. Think Uber, a time where we still had desks, emails, and phones as primary modes of communication. As the economy recovered and employment returned to its full capacity, we had about a 4-year stretch of relative calm and low unemployment.
That’s when the “war for talent” era was born. During this time we saw companies focusing more on employment branding to appeal to top talent. Think free lunches, ping pong tables, and modern offices. Employee review companies like Glassdoor became hyper relevant, and candidates began vetting companies as much as the companies were vetting them. To me, this was a period of choice for workers, and swung the pendulum back to balance between the employee and employer.
Over the last 5 years, since the COVID-19 pandemic, we collectively experienced forced acceleration with a decade’s worth of transformation crammed into a few years. Everybody transitioned from the in-office status quo to remote and flexible “work from anywhere” models out of necessity.
For Wilson, a predominately remote company (even in the early years when it was more uncommon), it wasn’t much of an adjustment, but that gave us a unique lens to consult our clients through that shift. Ultimately, the Great Resignation was disruptive in the market – which brings us to today, which seems to be a hybrid reality. New technologies and flexibility, in some form, are here to stay.
So we’ve gone from desk phones from when I started to now instant connectivity with video calls and real-time data. It’s pretty jarring when you take a moment to think about how drastically it’s changed.
What ways has your career path been impacted by working with multiple generations?
I believe that wisdom is superior to information – and oftentimes wisdom comes from different perspectives. To gather that wisdom, I've sought perspectives both from people who have been in the workforce longer than me and those just starting out.
I’ve found that collaboration is incredibly helpful to culminate a bunch of different ideas and then synthesize everything into action. We often do this in the consulting space where we look top to bottom in how we work with clients to ensure that a whole slew of different perspectives are accounted for. Consulting with this in mind makes for better results every time in my experience.
How do you help define career paths for clients in a world where nonlinear paths are becoming more common?
I believe a lot of people still think of their career paths and success in a linear manner. Meaning, for example, if I'm a TA manager today, my next promoted role will be to a Talent Acquisition Director. While there's nothing wrong with thinking that way, it very well may limit your growth potential – or at least put a ceiling on it.
I've been lucky to work in many different roles over the last 15 years, very few of which were correlated to the next “linear” step. More often than not, these new roles followed some type of interest or skill that I had at the time. When you find something in your work that you're really interested in, you inherently gravitate to it and do it with passion. That could be something that today, may be only 2% of your job duties. But because you're interested in it and have a passion for it, it can end up being your best quality work, even to the detriment to the other 98%. Pay attention to where you naturally gravitate to in your day-to-day work, as this can lay the groundwork of a new path or role you really enjoy doing.
An example of this for me was research and talent intelligence. When I led TA teams, I was always passionate around market intelligence and did a lot of work for clients, even if it wasn't the main aspect of my job. Demonstrating that over time led my leaders to recognize that I was skilled in this area. So when the opportunity presented itself and I moved into consulting, it was natural for me to take on the market intelligence as a service for clients, whereas it had just been a tiny component of my previous job as a TA leader. It created a win-win scenario, something the business needed, and something that I really enjoyed.
What are ways organizations can help enable employees – no matter their career stage – to continue upskilling and learning?
So there's two ways to really kind of look at this. One is from the company lens. At an organizational level, having resources available for development is really table stakes. The primary role organizations should play in enabling learning and development is identifying opportunities for employees to take the theoretical and make it practical. It could be a project, a stretch assignment, or just learning what another team or department does.
I believe that managers play a part in enabling this, but there has to be a culture fostered by the organization that both allows for this and even encourages it. The second way to look at this is looking in the mirror as an employee. A lot of people say they want to upskill or learn in their organization, but that goes beyond a quarterly goal or an annual review.
In my career, I’ve been lucky to work for companies that support a culture of outreach and connection to anyone in the business. While discretion and discernment are important here, many times people underestimate how willing other people inside a company are to helping to better understand something.
I love when someone I haven’t spoken to before reaches out to get a better understanding of what my team does. I’m personally happy to have those conversations because I know it will help everyone. It might give them a totally new perspective on the business by sparking ideas or showing other pathways to accelerate their own career growth. That support is vital for long-term business success.
What do you anticipate will be the biggest challenges for employers with multigenerational workforces this year and beyond, and how do you anticipate solving for them?
Technology, but not in the obvious way that you might think. It’s more so in terms of proficiency, utilizing technological innovations, and ways to harness the value of perspectives and include a host of ideas to solve challenges or problems. AI is becoming an equalizer because it’s helping reduce knowledge gaps from generations that might be decades apart.
What I think still matters a ton, though, is how you synthesize different perspectives and wisdom from both ends of the spectrum. Somebody who's just entering the workforce and somebody who's maybe in the latter part of their career. I'm sure there's a tech led way to solve for this, but in my head, employers that can truly connect the ideas that come from perspectives across different generations will create leverage in a way that AI can't necessarily provide.
Companies that isolate into silos or are restricted by the confines of departments are most likely leaving a lot on the table. Long-term effects of siloing could be less productivity, less agility, and ultimately stagnation in the status quo as the market rapidly evolves around.
