In Conversation With | Christy Harper

Welcome everyone. My name is Amy Brookshshire, vice president of talent operations here at Wilson. Really excited to be speaking with our guest today, Christy Harper. Christy and I have worked together over the years and really excited to talk with her a little bit about our partnership journey and um some of the insights that she has around the talent acquisition space. So, welcome Christy.

 

Hi Amy. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm really looking forward to talking.

 

Love it. I'll kind of start with you first if you want to tell me a little bit about just who you are, your background, um and then we can talk a little bit about how the partnership came to be.

 

Absolutely. Thanks again. So, I've had a winding 30 plus year career. I've worked with Fortune 100 consumer package goods companies all the way to familyowned and run technology companies. We have worked  in brand and product marketing to HR and HR leadership. So today I'm now pursuing  my own passions um with Archway Advisors where you know I really just believe that businesses transform through  people. I believe that an organization is only as successful and strong as the people who power it. So I'm really  excited to kind of go down this new path.

 

Love that. Yep. And I think that's why our partnership has been so strong because it absolutely aligns with Wilson and our values and its people first, right? So you and I worked together for a large manufacturing company in the print production space. So let's talk a little bit about that journey because if I remember correctly, while you had worked with RPOs before, it was introducing RPO for the first time to that organization as well as also the first time working with Wilson. So kind of talk to me a little bit about that process and how that came to be for us.

 

Well, part of it is informed by how I grew my career. So I started in marketing. I kind of approach HR a little differently. I kind of bring that business mindset of partnership and taking a very systematic datadriven approach to choosing those partnerships.  So first we did have to make the case that an RPO was needed and we were in a situation where we had our average load was over 100 reqs a recruiter jobs weren't getting filled for you know 300 400 days which was really holding the business back. So we made the case that shortening the days to hire and days to productivity was going to pay for this RPO service. So once we made that business case, we went down a formal RFP process and we eventually came down to three finalists and Wilson was one of them. One was a very structured RPO where it was kind of like we're going to bring in all your infrastructure. You're just going to do it our way and then it will be self-driven. One was a past partner that I did work with who was exceptionally adaptable, but they didn't really come with the framework or the structure that I felt that we needed in this case. and Wilson came with a really nice blend of that structure and framework and advice, but the adaptability to work within our structures and our culture that I really valued and it was just a great basis for building an ongoing partnership to kind of blend in data-driven decision-making with some added structure that we needed, but also the adaptability to  change and modify and move forward in the way that works best for the organization.

 

As you were really making that decision um and moving forward um was there really was there an inflection point or a moment where you said, "Yeah, we're really headed in the right direction. This is where we need to go."

 

Yeah. So it was really at our first quarterly review and your team brought the kind of data that had been invisible to us at that point. So at the time we were in an applicant tracking system that just didn't provide us the clarity or visibility within our own operations. And by coming in and working with us, we were able to define benchmarks. we were able to define what our goals were that  we were going to achieve and being able to have that clarity and visibility within our own operations and how we were meeting the needs of the business was so important. I mean at that point I was meeting every Tuesday morning with the CEO. Like that's how much in a crisis we were from a hiring standpoint.  And we were able within six months to kind of ease back off of those every  week meetings with the CEO and really give the company confidence that we were making the progress that they needed to see.

 

 

And I loved how you were willing to work with us because I really focus on the measurements of what's going to get us success not the results themselves. So like you know we didn't really talk about days to fill very much but we talked a lot about things like screening to interview ratios. How many days in the most critical parts of the process is it taking for us to move a candidate from one day to another? Because if we knew that we got them move through the stages faster, we knew that we were going to hire people faster. But we really stayed focused on those things that we could control. And that's what I loved about our working together is that we just really kind of focused on the things that we could actually do because we can't control time to fill. As much as everybody loves to talk about time to fill, we can't control it. It's too complex. It's got too many inputs and we were really able to prioritize what were the most important inputs to time to fill and really stay laser focused on those.

 

Anything else as we kind of come to the end here? Is there anything as we reflect back on on what we've talked about today that we didn't cover that you wanted to add or or that you wanted to circle back on?

 

Well, all I want to say is Amy, it has always been such a pleasure working with you. I love that you never hesitated to challenge me if I had an assumption that maybe was not aligned with the data. Or that, you know, just in general that it was so easy to align with you on what our goals were and work together towards them back and forth. Being able to have that kind of give and take partnership where we could challenge each other to be better was, you know, just a great part of my time there.

 

100%. First of all, thank you. That was absolutely very kind of you to say and um I have to say just from our journey just knowing how we were just transparent and I knew exactly, hey, where are we going? Where do we need to be? And having that collaboration and always being able to say, hey, we've got a wild idea. Let's talk about it and see if this makes sense. And um so it was really great. So I really appreciate it as well.

 

All right Christy, well as you have embarked on this new journey and your your career where you know where can we find out about what's going on with you? How can people connect? What's going on with you these days?

 

Thanks so much for asking. So I have launched my new company. It's an advisory firm called Archway Advisors where we're helping companies transform by leveraging their talent, growing their talent, picking the right talent. And I'm really excited about this journey. And you can find me  on LinkedIn or you can find us at www.archchwayadvisors.ca.

 

For more on RPO, check out Wilson's whitepaper titled 7 Reasons Recruitment Outsourcing Works for You.