Tyler McEvilly (00:00):

We're excited to have Ross here alongside Madeline to chat through how folks can think like a CFO and start to think about what their budget looks like in 2025 and also just how to become more proficient in making a strategic budget and making those decisions early on. I know we're probably at the tail end of budgeting season, but Ross and Madeline have a great conversation for you today about how folks can think about that more strategically next year and what are some of those business case strategies that people can bring to their CFO that will make it a more effective pitch essentially. So Ross, I'll leave an introduction to yourself and then Madeline after that.

Ross Grainger (00:50):

Hey all. Thanks for joining Ross Grainger, CFO at Paradox. Been with Paradox a little over five years. I often get to work with our prospects and clients on identifying their concerns, helping them build ROI business cases, and so I really like that part of the job, not just closing the books on my end, but getting out in front and working with our clients too.

Madeline Laurano (01:13):

Great. And I'm Madeline Laurano, I'm an analyst. I'm the founder of a company called Aptitude Research. I've been doing this work for a long time for about two decades, so we just published a very exciting report with paradox on TA budgeting. So this is exactly, it's perfect timing for us from a research perspective and I'm very excited for this conversation. Ross, we've had a few different conversations about this report, mostly after the report was published, which I wish we chatted a little bit beforehand, but in talking to you, I think it validated what we found in the research, which was really exciting for me. And then also you just had a lot of really great examples that I think were very empowering, certainly for me when I thought about this research project and then I think for anyone in an HR leadership or TA leadership role as they're thinking about budgeting. But I love what Tyler said about where we're at with budgeting. I almost feel like that's where we should start. I'd love to understand from your perspective where we're at right now at the end of the year in terms of budgeting and when should TA and HR think about budgeting?

Ross Grainger (02:26):

Yeah, I think that's a great start. We are towards the end of November, so for most calendar year end companies, we're towards the end of budgeting season. We've probably already thought about those big strategic projects that we're working on and we're either totally locked or fine tuning. There's still an opportunity for small adjustments if you've got a software tool that you want to swap out and it's not a big strategic decision, you can still make those changes today. But I typically see businesses starting pretty early in the year thinking about those big strategic things as early as June. I'd say between July and September is when most companies will really go heavy on the big rocks to move for the budget.

Madeline Laurano (03:12):

So I love that because the big budgeting happens around June pretty early in the year and the first half at the end of the first half of the year. But budgeting's ongoing, and we've talked a lot about this, so you might be looking to replace something that might feel little but can make a huge impact on your organization. You might be starting small. A lot of companies start small with a vendor and it's almost a land and expand situation where they then decide to build out more once they establish this as a partner. And all of that can happen at any time in the year. It doesn't need to just happen in June or during that big budgeting planning. It's an ongoing activity.

Ross Grainger (03:48):

Yeah, absolutely. And I think when it's outside of the normal budget cycle, your ROI story is actually required much more because if you don't have the budget for it, you don't already have earmarked spend for it. You need to make sure you can show how you're going to pay for it.

Madeline Laurano (04:04):

Yeah, exactly. You need to think about how you can pay for it. And one thing I'm hoping we can talk a lot about during this conversation now is about wasted spend too, because that was certainly a big finding in the research as well.

Ross Grainger (04:17):

Yeah, I have definite views on wasted spend.

Madeline Laurano (04:22):

Awesome. So I'm going to share the slides here. I'm just having a little bit of trouble getting them up here, but it'll just take another minute. But I wanted to share a little bit about the research project because it was certainly a special project for us. It's something and a topic I think we shy away from in talent acquisition and what we found is that this is probably the most important conversation for organizations. This is the number one thing that talent acquisition and TA leaders should be doing and thinking about. They should be thinking about budgeting and yet it's not something that we're always comfortable doing. So this was a very interesting project and the more that I kind of would dive into the research and have conversations, it's something that everyone feels very passionate about. So I think there's not a lot of confidence, but it's certainly an important conversation that we're having. I love this quote and you shared when we've had conversations before. You talk a lot about ROI, and this is such an important finding from the research too, but can you share your perspective about someone coming and asking for more budget or looking for you to validate what they've bought before and how that is impacted by this whole ROI conversation?

Ross Grainger (05:43):

Yeah, absolutely. And I want to make sure that we explain ROI first as A CFO and with an accounting background, I use a ton of acronyms. TA has a lot of acronyms as well. So ROI is return on investment and the way to think about that is what are you going to get for the dollars that you're going to put in? Pretty simple, but there's a lot of ways to go attack that and in my seat right now as the CFO, I'm not approving projects that are net add to our spend without understanding really what I'm going to get for that and I want to get into the details of what I'm going to get, not just the fluffy words.

Madeline Laurano (06:20):

Can we talk about how that's changed since the pandemic? Because it feels like during the pandemic budgets increased, there was an urgency around technology, everyone was moving to remote work environment and that was certainly where HR and talent acquisition had to play the most critical role. How did the ROI conversation shift from four years ago to where we're at now? Were companies getting budgets without showing ROI at all and how has that changed today?

Ross Grainger (06:47):

Yeah, I mean it's like a lot of things that happen in business, the pendulum swings based on what's needed at the time TA towards the end of the pandemic or in the middle of it, we saw this huge need to get people onboarded and hired at companies and so many CFOs. Were not even looking at ROI at that time. It's just like we need to do whatever it takes to get people onboarded and get people hired. And so they didn't need to show the clear connection of the spend to what they were going to get. The pendulum is swinging back the other way. Now we need to reevaluate decisions that we made in the past. We've got new information now it's three, four or five years later from some of those decisions that we made and the information available to us might be different than the information that was available when we made those decisions in the past.

Madeline Laurano (07:33):

Yeah, absolutely. And you've shared with me before, and I'd love it if you could share this again, how you think about RO. I mean we define it return on investment, but when you talk about RROI as A CFO, it's different than I think how a lot of HR leaders or TA leaders might talk about ROI when we used to talk about ROI in terms of experience, a great candidate experience is a great ROI. If someone presents that to you as A CFO, what is your reaction? Is your definition of ROI very different than how we might define it in hr.

Ross Grainger (08:08):

If somebody presents it to me as this is going to improve our candidate experience, my honest response is so what? And not that I'm mean I'm actually a nice CFO, but it's really what does that mean to us? Why do we care that candidate experience improves? I'll give you an example of one that I've seen recently of what I would like to see versus what I have seen. So somebody comes to me or I've seen this at a client and they're trying to put together their ROI story and they say we want to spend $50,000 on this new software. This new software is going to improve the efficiency of our recruiting coordinators and improved candidate experience. Sounds good, right? Sounds like, hey, we're getting something for this, but that's not quite enough for me. And so I would like to see somebody take that same example and say, Hey Ross, we're going to spend $50,000 on this new software.

(09:00):

It's going to replace this other thing that we were only spending $10,000 on, so now we're only spending net 40 more and we're going to increase the efficiency of our recruiting coordinators, saving our recruiting coordinator core over 8,000 hours a year with those 8,000 hours. That means I won't have to hire four new recruiting coordinators next year that were already in the budget. Those make more whatever they make, 35, $40,000 a year. Now you're showing the hard dollars. And then add on to, oh, and by the way, it's going to improve our candidate experience, which helps us attract better talent. It's probably going to help us reduce our advertising spend in the future. I don't have the hard numbers on that, so I'm not going to take credit for it, but I know for sure it will help us in the future.

Madeline Laurano (09:46):

Yeah, it it's translating, right? It's translating the experience into the hard dollars and it's not that difficult to do. I mean, I was at the paradox customer advisory board that was a few months ago in Scottsdale, and it was amazing because I think what you did so well was show these customer booths and their examples and you could say it was improved efficiency. Everyone had improved efficiency, but if I was a CFO and I was you walking around and seeing these booths, what would stand out to me is that FedEx saved $2 million in technology costs or that seven 11 saved 40,000 hours of recruiters time, which translated to less recruiters as you're saying, and ultimately less spend on the overall talent acquisition budget.

Ross Grainger (10:30):

Yeah, exactly. Those numbers really help and it is just that next step, TA teams often know the benefit to the company of what's going to happen, the impact on their team, and it's just taking that next step to translate it into the hard dollars so that I can get comfortable with it. Because you're not only competing with just your own budget and project, I have to look at holistically the company and understand where the total spend are. So even if your project looks pretty good on the surface, I might have something else that has a higher ROI and I need to think about overall capacity of the company and overall spend of the company.

Madeline Laurano (11:07):

Absolutely. So advice and recommendation number one is think about ROI think about it early and define it in terms of what the CFO is caring about, which is hard dollars and there's a translation that can happen easily there. So it was interesting when we started this project, I was very curious, is this an exercise that most HR leaders do anyway and they don't want to talk about it, it's just not a comfortable conversation or are we really behind in how we think about budgeting? And what we found from a research perspective is that we are a little bit behind only 38% of TA leaders feel confident when building a business case for technology. One in two TA leaders face difficulties getting budgets approved this year, which is probably very different than the pandemic. And then less than 50% of TA leaders can demonstrate that ROI that we talked about in their technology investments. Part of that is not being able to translate it to what you would care about, but I think we're also not talking about ROI early enough in the process when you see this and you kind of think about TA compared to other parts of the business and hr, are we behind and do these numbers surprise you at all?

Ross Grainger (12:20):

Not surprising on the numbers. I mean I think it matches with my lived experience and HR in general is often behind in understanding how to demonstrate ROI and particularly within TA and being able to make that conversion from the impact on the process flow and the business to those numbers. So I do think TA has probably the most room to gain in telling an efficient ROI story and really bringing together the why and the impact of what you want to do.

Madeline Laurano (12:55):

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we talked a little bit about building a business case earlier and how it's challenge, we've been talking about this forever. This is not a new conversation in HR technology, but it's challenging and it's challenging when a lot of different areas of technology feel the same or I think what often happens is a lot of HR leaders feel that they may have wasted some spend or made some poor decisions in the past, so they're a little bit hesitant to think about building that business case. How does this compare to other parts of the business? And you shared kind of an example of different parts that are a little bit better at the business case activity than an hr.

Ross Grainger (13:35):

Yeah, I think technology teams are often the best at being able to demonstrate their ROI, and it's not because the r OI is necessarily better, it's just they're in that mode and they're constantly building their business case on why they want to build something. And so they do tell that ROI story a little bit better, and I want to go back to one thing you said about wasted spend because we made decisions years ago and now it may look like that decision that we made was bad and it looks like wasted spend. And you know what that is? Okay. I am very happy when a leader comes to me and said, you know what? This thing that we're paying for, we're just not getting the value. I'm not going to hold it against you that you're bringing it to me to say you're not getting value out of this thing that you chose at some point, maybe you didn't choose it, maybe you inherited it, but still to identify wasted spend. It gives me confidence that you're going to make good decisions on how you're going to spend going forward. So don't hide those things that are bad decisions. I forgive sins of the past,

(14:37):

Especially in a changing environment. So highlight those areas where they may not be as efficient. You're not necessarily going to lose that budget. Let's repurpose it to something more effective.

Madeline Laurano (14:49):

I love that. I love that advice. I feel like it's so empowering because I think what happens, and I have this tendency myself, is you feel that if you've made a bad decision or something didn't work out, you don't necessarily want to show your cards. You don't want to say, okay, this didn't work out and we've built this business case. We went through the whole exercise of getting buy-in for this and it wasn't the right decision. That could be the fault of the vendor. Sometimes it is. That could also be the fault of just getting adoption going and having the right resources to get this up and rolling or which happens often is that the world has changed and what seemed like it was going to be valuable no longer is needed. We have generative AI now. We didn't have that a few years ago. So I think the tendency is to say, I don't want to talk about that and admit the bad decision, and I love your advice, which is saying the complete opposite is to say, let's talk about it together. We're on the same team. Every part of the business has made bad decisions around technology and will continue to make bad decisions over the next however many years. That's just how life goes and business goes. Let's talk about what the wasted spend is and take ownership of it so that we can replace what doesn't work and get approval for what will be a better decision. And it's almost that approach of ominous alone versus ominous with you together and let's work on the best decision together. And I think that's very, very empowering.

Ross Grainger (16:20):

Yes, and I think one additional point on that is measuring a project or something that didn't work against your original ROI plan, it's like, okay, what are the elements of that that didn't work? If you can show me that, it's like, Hey, this one piece is why it didn't work. We made this assumption that thing didn't come through. Here's how I'm thinking about it going forward. That's even better than just saying, oh, this thing didn't work. It's getting to the what were your inputs and what were your expectations, and then how did that measure against reality?

Madeline Laurano (16:51):

Yeah, I think that's such a good point and I think that's part of the whole business case. I talked to one company and they actually described that whole process of what didn't work and looking back and then looking at where they're at now as journaling, which is kind of a funny way to describe it, but it's not kind of a dear diary approach, but it's actually just taking note what didn't work? Who needs to be involved, what were the benefits, what were the costs? And I think that takes the pressure of having it be perfect out of the picture and out of the equation and lets an honest conversation come in and replace that. Because if you're just taking note and getting curious about what didn't work and what could be better for the future, that opens the door for a very honest, transparent conversation.

Tyler McEvilly (17:41):

Yeah, absolutely.

Madeline Laurano (17:43):

So speaking of wasted spend, I mean this is probably the big aha from the research. It's where we started in the report. It's 64% of team leaders fear their budgets are going to get cut this year and then one in three believe that their existing budget is being wasted and they almost feel contradictory. If I'm afraid that my budget's getting cut, I don't want to admit that what I'm spending money on now is being wasted. And what you're saying is the complete opposite of this. Flip this, if you feel that and you're fearful that your budget will get cut, let's talk about what's being wasted so you can get what you need.

Ross Grainger (18:22):

Yeah, and I actually, I was thinking about this a little bit more and word choice matters to me, and I think fear is probably the wrong word. It's like expectation because as a CFO, I am driving towards efficiency in the business, and so I don't want you to be afraid of losing budget. I want you to expect to lose budget, expect to provide better efficiency going forward. And so you found 64% of leaders, I'll say, assumed they were going to face budget cuts this year. I'm kind of interested on the other 36% of you, why do you think you have it so good? Because you need to be aware that we are driving towards efficiency and we need to look at spend all across the organization again on that wasted spend. Even if we do have to reduce budgets, let's make sure we're reducing the stuff that's not working first and then keep the things that are working.

Madeline Laurano (19:24):

And I think that's a great place to start. I mean, if you're replacing what doesn't work, you're in a place where you feel good about what you're going to build for the future.

Tyler McEvilly (19:33):

Yeah.

Madeline Laurano (19:35):

When you look at this too, and you think about the budgets being wasted or the conversation that needs to happen when this is the reality for so many organizations, we talked about budgeting starting and really that hardcore planning happening in June. When should companies be approaching you as a CFO to start talking about wasted spend or budgeting? I mean, should they be waiting till June to have these conversations when you're looking at these big ticket items or should this be ongoing?

Ross Grainger (20:05):

I prefer ongoing. It'll depend on the structure of the company on who you're actually going to talk to. Big companies, you probably have an FP and a partner. Smaller companies, you might be going directly to the C ffo, and so that may change the frequency of the communication. If you have a dedicated resource, I mean you should be contacting them weekly If you're finding something, it is better to share that type of news early rather than late. There might be an opportunity to get out of a contract early. Maybe you feel like it's wasted because the vendor isn't fulfilling their end of their end the bargain, and we can get out of that. Do you know how happy that would make me, if somebody brought information to me that says, Hey, I had planned on spending this, it's not working. There's a way out. That would be great. You're going to immediately be able to repurpose that spend right away and not wait for that budget cycle. And then guess what? It's already a line item when we go to build the budget for the next year.

Madeline Laurano (20:58):

Absolutely. And I see it happening even if an HR leader or TA leader's not able to get out of it, to be able to use you as a resource to get out of it, to come to you and say, I've identified a way I think we can get out of this. It's not working for us. We want to plan better for next year. Can you help be part of the conversations to help us get out of this contract? And I think that can be very effective when you're either negotiating with a vendor or you're looking at replacing what really is not working.

Ross Grainger (21:31):

Absolutely. I'm always happy to get on phone calls with vendors, with clients as well and just talk through what is happening and I'll be that person that needs to get on.

Madeline Laurano (21:43):

Awesome. So this is an example that we did in the report. This is not a real life example of a company that did this, but I think this was just we looked at a what if scenario. And a lot of organizations are feeling this right now, and it almost doesn't make sense. I think if you're in a TA leadership position or an HR leadership position to say, okay, we know that hiring may have been down this year compared to four years ago, but we know it's going up and we know based on how our business is growing and our goals for our organization, we know we will be making more hires. We already see that for next year. So the five five-year hiring curve is going up. And at the same time we know and we're fearful that our budgets are getting cut, but we do believe that budgets are going to be going down.

(22:30):

And when you look at this and you hear that dialogue, it can feel paralyzing. What situation am I in? I'm going to be working twice as hard. I'm not going to have the same amount of money and the support and the vendors and the advertising and whatever else I need to think through this. I'd love your take on this. I'll share with you an example that I heard from a company that we've done some work with where they talked in this scenario about, okay, let's identify our fixed costs that we can't change, that we need to keep forever and ever and ever. And then our variable costs. So variable costs might be advertising, we use that as an example. That might be third party recruiters, maybe that's even our po. But there are, depending on your company and your priorities going to be fixed costs and going to be variable costs. And if you look at it from that perspective, I think this feels more manageable.

Ross Grainger (23:24):

It does, yeah. You find out what your baseline is, what's your floor on, where your spend could go to the lowest and then figure out how do you layer on those things that are most efficient, again, to get up to what your budget is with those variable items. And I think this is an example, but this is the way I think all across the organization is how can I continue to, whether it's in this case hires, but I can think about top line revenue with spending less. This is just the constant mantra of the C ffo is drive to efficiency, continue to do more with less, cut out the wasted spend. And so this is not an unheard of thing even in a growing company to think that the dollars that you have available to do the same job you're doing today, you won't have as much in the future to be able to do because it's part of my fiduciary responsibility to provide value and return to my investors, to all my stakeholders that we can get more efficient.

Madeline Laurano (24:24):

First piece of advice I think is important. One is this is not unusual regardless. This is not the aftermath of the pandemic. This is not unusual. This is how budgeting happens, this is how companies grow. You are always looking at how can I not only think about ROI, but you're looking at reducing costs and in some cases reducing budget even if the work is going up, even if the number of hires are going up, you're looking for budgets to go down, and that's not unusual and we don't like TA or hr. That's just the reality of business today. So I think that's the first piece of advice. And then I love looking at that baseline as the starting point, but then going back to the wasted spend, I mean, I think you really opened my eyes to this conversation because I do think the wasted spend piece becomes, there's a fear of shame around that, and when you take that off the table and say you want to hear that, you want people to come and bring that information to you, this doesn't feel scary and it doesn't feel unusual and it doesn't feel like I have to manipulate things to get what I need.

(25:38):

It shows that you're on the same page.

Tyler McEvilly (25:40):

Yeah, absolutely.

Madeline Laurano (25:44):

So I love this. We worked on this as part of the report, but I know this is a framework that you use all the time at Paradox, and I think it's a really great way to think about building a business case, but also ROI because you're identifying the hard costs, the savings, but I think what's not talked about enough are the operational benefits of that as well, which is obviously what you're thinking about all the time. And it goes back to I think a lot of the translation conversations that we had about how do you translate those operational benefits into the hard dollars

Ross Grainger (26:19):

To my comment, I think when we first started, when I said, so what this is is how it helps me see what are we going to do, and I very much splitting the things that we can identify as hard savings and then those things that while they're operational benefits, we may not be able to tie directly to the hard savings. One of the easiest ways for me to lose trust is to have made up numbers based on something that is really an operational benefit that you can't tie to specific numbers. There's plenty of things that you can tie to specific numbers, leave it at that and then leave these other operational benefits of showing how the process is going to change. But don't tie dollars to them if it's not true. If your goal is to save hours, but it's not going to have any impact on the number of people that you're going to hire, you're not going to be able to remove that headcount. It's hard for me to say that's a true dollar savings unless you tell me what else you're going to do with that spend if you don't know what you're going to do with those additional hours, it's not a hard savings

Madeline Laurano (27:21):

And I think it comes down to quantity or quality over quantity. I think you'd rather see three or four really significant benefits that are translating to hard dollars that you can understand are going to impact. Again, not just reducing the number of hours, but also reducing maybe the number of recruiters or maybe freeing up time or freeing up tools that might not be effective. Then to just see a list of 20 to 30 benefits that really don't tie to anything other than that sounds nice or so.

Ross Grainger (27:54):

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I'm looking at business cases across the organization. I'm looking at how are we investing the dollars, so the ones that I can evaluate more easily, they're just easy to digest and have a higher likelihood of getting approved if you are clear and concise on what those benefits are.

Madeline Laurano (28:12):

Yeah. I want to talk about the costs for a minute because I think companies are using more tools than they have before. Vendor relationships have changed quite a bit. You work for a vendor, but also you're investing in vendors all the time. Are you seeing kind of costs changing or is this kind of always been the state of how companies are working with different technology providers? Is there anything else that companies should think about or ask questions when they're evaluating providers?

Ross Grainger (28:44):

Definitely understand how the cost is going to change over time. What are the drivers of cost and what does this cost look like in two, three years on bringing on a new vendor? The other things you need to think about on the cost side is what is the cost of change to the organization, both in terms of our dollars, is there an implementation cost? Do we need to buy something outside of what the vendor is providing in order to be able to run what the vendor is providing, as well as what is the time impact on the teams that need to learn the new system? That is often why I reject projects. It's not that looking at the software showed a true ROI, it's that I don't have the capacity for the change within my organization at this time. So make sure you've got that covered in your business case as here's how it's going to get implemented. These are the teams that are impacted. Talk to those other teams too. Make sure that you don't want one of those other teams that may be impacted to put a roadblock up on your project because they weren't aware that they were going to need some time. So working with others outside of just your function if it impacts them is super helpful too.

Madeline Laurano (29:54):

That's great advice. We worked with an organization and they were looking at making some changes to their HR tech stack, but they had, this is a company that had less than 20,000 employees. They had 19 dedicated people to just integrations of their HR technology. So I think to your point, that's not something that they wanted. Obviously that's not ideal. That's not something that they thought to consider when they were investing in certain areas of technology, but they had to build that over time and it was a huge cost, a huge inconvenience, and it's frustrating on the vendor side. It's frustrating for this company as well, but thinking through all those components, so it's not just coming down to, okay, we're saving time for our recruiters, but okay, do we need 19 people focused on integrating and orchestrating 20 different systems together? No, thank you.

Ross Grainger (30:46):

Yeah. Yeah, that's not helpful for the overall budget, even if those systems integration people are now outside of the HR budget. I'm going to look at the big picture.

Madeline Laurano (30:54):

Yeah. Yep. So one of the areas that came up in the report as obviously driving a lot of ROI, it's a big topic right now and everyone's considering this is a big topic at HR Tech this year too, is automation, right? No surprise. It's when we're looking at transformation for our company, and that might be less recruiters or less resources or maybe even less solutions we have in place, we want to automate as much as possible. It's a better experience. It goes to all those or operational benefits that we saw listed before, but we found that a lot of time savings for companies that are automating the different parts of talent acquisition, and this is very significant. I mean when you see this as a CFO and you're saying, okay, if we're going to automate all these different areas of talent acquisition instead of either using recruiters to be able to do this work manually or have 20 different systems in place that require more hours, more time, more frustration aren't integrated, it doesn't work When you see this, what are your thoughts? I mean, does this get after that ROI piece that you're looking at?

Ross Grainger (32:10):

It does and it might also help where to focus when you see where the best opportunity is for automation, you're going to get the best bang for your buck. So looking at those areas with higher automation would be where I would want to start. It doesn't mean we'll forget about the rest of 'em looking at onboarding at only 62% using automation compared to screening at 82%. I may start with trying to really nail down the screening side of it because I've got the most opportunity and then continue to refine back to one of the other slides as we look at what does the future look like and squeezing budgets down the road, maybe move into those other areas where less automation is as expected.

Madeline Laurano (32:49):

Yeah, it's a great advice and it goes back to what you stated earlier. It's like if budgeting's happening in the June timeframe, but we can start to evaluate what we're doing right now. We want to start small somewhere. Maybe this is where we start and some of these areas are low risk too. If we're looking at automating the screening, we know it's going to be a significant amount of time savings. We're going to see some benefits there. It doesn't mean we're changing the whole process. It doesn't mean they're building a business case to completely transform talent acquisition, but it's a great place to start.

(33:25):

We looked at key drivers for evaluating providers. I know you have to look at technology providers all the time. I thought this was really interesting because efficiency was number one again this year, and I think that's important. And I think for a long time we kind of thought about efficiency in HR as we should be talking about experience or we should be talking about quality as number one. To me, efficiency and everything you're looking at in terms of hard dollars impacts everything else. It impacts quality, it impacts experience, it's impacting reducing bias. That's a different conversation. We saw that really go down as kind of a priority, which was unfortunate, and I think companies are trying to kind of figure that piece out. But the efficiency piece impacts all of the other three drivers of technology.

Ross Grainger (34:14):

It definitely does. I mean, I'm a user of a lot of technology too, and my experience is the more efficient that the technology is, the more happy I am and hopefully the quality stays with it that you, you've got to have the quality along with the increase in efficiency. But you're right, it does drive the efficiency does drive the other two,

Madeline Laurano (34:37):

And I think that's a great point. It's not sacrificing one for the other. If you have an efficient process because of technology and it's enabling efficiency and that meets many different things, it doesn't necessarily mean you're prioritizing that and quality goes down or experience goes down. You can have all of these things together.

Ross Grainger (34:54):

Absolutely.

Madeline Laurano (34:57):

So this is our last slide and I'm hoping we can wrap up with this because I think these are great tips. You've given so many recommendations. I could ask you a million questions nonstop. I'm sure people are going to reach out to you after, but I'm hoping we can kind of talk through some of these quick tips because I think it's a great place to start. And I think when you look at budgeting and how important of an exercise it is and how often we don't do it and we don't do it in a strategic enough way to be able to think about, okay, let's just get started or have these open conversations. I'm hoping we can talk through some of these tips here. I think building the FO with the CFO in mind, I think you've given so many recommendations. One is have conversations early, have them frequently. You just don't want to have a conversation in June. And then I think the other piece that you really again opened my eyes to is just the transparency and what the conversations need to be. It's not like I need to come to you pretending to be something I'm not or with a shiny object that I've tried to polish as best I can. It's come with the mess and tell you that I'm working through the mess and I think I have a way, but I need your help to work through it.

Ross Grainger (36:10):

I don't mind working through it at all. I love when somebody comes with a point of view and here's what I've done and I need your help to finish. That's great. I love co building, which can also kind help get your CFO on board. If you're asking help on building the ro OI story or the business case, that's a great way to make sure you are building with your C ffo in mind.

Madeline Laurano (36:31):

It certainly makes vendors more responsive too. If you know the CFO is involved in this process, they're definitely having these open conversations. Everybody's on the same page and the same team. It builds a better vendor relationship at the end of the day because now the vendor's involved in that conversation too, and everyone's kind of working as a team.

Ross Grainger (36:50):

And I'm going to go down to number six also, right? From the company's perspective, I think those actually go really well together. One, you want to make sure it's your own materials. At Paradox, we provide a lot of great materials, but as the c FFO of my client, I wouldn't want to see only the paradox materials if we were presenting to them. I want to build it into how the way that my company views it. You can do things like if you're a public company, you can listen to earnings calls, listen to what the CEO and C ffo are talking about on those calls. What are the priorities and how does your project fit into the strategic priorities of the company? So really think about the language that matters for your company, not just the vendor. And that does help with building with your C ffo in mind,

Madeline Laurano (37:33):

And I think vendors have great resources and materials, and you can even take what vendors have and put your own spin on it with your own company information, including the tech stack that you're using, which is going to be very different than how every other company is using it. I mean, having awareness of all the tools you're using and showing that in a visual I think is a great way to start too.

Ross Grainger (37:54):

And then include the vendor's materials directly as an appendix, but it shouldn't be your main presentation.

Madeline Laurano (38:00):

Absolutely. We talked about hard savings and operational benefits. I love that conversation. I love splitting it out too because I think if we can clearly define the hard savings, that's where you're going to go first. That's what you're going to look at first. But then translating the operational benefits into what's driving value for the business. It's a great exercise.

Ross Grainger (38:20):

Absolutely.

Madeline Laurano (38:22):

Don't buy it if it doesn't save you money. I love that one.

Ross Grainger (38:25):

And I'll add, don't buy it if it doesn't save you money. You can also buy it if it makes you more money. So one of the things that we see with our clients is on reduced time to fill jobs, especially in the restaurant space, retail space, if you're fully staffed, you're actually going to grow your revenue. That's okay too. You can spend more money if you've got a clear case to how you're going to make more overall, it's fine to spend a little bit more money.

Madeline Laurano (38:50):

And there were a couple examples that I saw at the customer advisory board that I'll call out. One is, I think so often when candidates apply, especially in high volume positions or even at quick service restaurants, they're going to one location and everybody knows that that location, that's the popular location and that location's doing fine. They're only hiring a certain number of roles. Other locations that might only be five miles away might be struggling a little bit as restaurants or whatever they are, convenience stores and just being able to automate that, so you're showing candidates, okay, there's actually a 7 11, 5 miles down the road and you can actually apply there and there's lots of positions that grows the revenue for that seven 11. They've got more people working there, better quality people, they're able to stay openly or whatever it is. That was just one example that stood out to me with automation.

Ross Grainger (39:45):

Yeah. Yep, that's a good one.

Madeline Laurano (39:49):

Make it clear why this is a good investment.

Ross Grainger (39:55):

Yeah, just show your things. It's going to show when you're separating the hard savings and your operational benefits, but just make it clear. Don't use more words than you need to. We don't need a ton of fluff, just clear, concise, showing those things that really matter to the business. And then I'll jump into number five, making sure you're asterisk any math. Show me where you're coming from, show me the inputs that you used. It doesn't need to be part of the big presentation on the main point of the slide. Put a footnote on here's how we assumed the savings dollars based on these number of hours at these rates. Just so I know where you're coming from so I can check.

Madeline Laurano (40:33):

And I think the good place that we're all in right now is that we're all comfortable with data. We use data all the time in our personal lives. We're not where we were 10 years ago. So to be comfortable with numbers, to be comfortable with math, it's something we're doing all the time in our personal lives. It shouldn't feel as overwhelming when we're looking at it from a budgeting perspective.

Tyler McEvilly (40:54):

Absolutely. Yep. Ross, I know you've mentioned before. Awesome.

Madeline Laurano (40:57):

Well, yeah, go

Tyler McEvilly (40:59):

Ahead. If the savings look too high, then definitely red flags we'll start to pop up in your head. Definitely fitting for asterisk. Any math.

Ross Grainger (41:08):

Yeah, the numbers need to be believable sometimes even when the ROI story really is that good and supportable, I might even suggest toning it back just a little bit so that you don't get that immediately red flag from the C ffo. It should be good. It should be believable. You don't want to get discounted on the surface by saying You're going to spend $10,000 to save $40 million. That's probably going to pick up my Spidey sense, and I'll be like, I don't really know if I want to read the rest of this. It's probably not reasonable,

Madeline Laurano (41:43):

And it doesn't build good credibility when you come back in a year and say, actually, we didn't save anything. That was our baseline and that was our benchmark of what we wanted to show you, and it didn't really work.

Tyler McEvilly (41:52):

Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you both for a wonderful conversation. This was great. Yeah,

Madeline Laurano (41:59):

Thank you Tyler. Thank you, Ross. I could again ask you 50 more questions, but I know we're at time. I'm sure people will be reaching out to you too. But to get the CFO's perspective on this, I think in a way that's so empowering is I think it's an exciting time. I think people are going to see a lot of changes over the next few years and to be able to do really smart budgeting is a really great skillset for any HR talent acquisition leader right now. It

Ross Grainger (42:27):

Definitely helps set you apart.

Tyler McEvilly (42:29):

Yeah, good opportunity to level up. Appreciate you guys walking through all of this, and like Madeline said, feel free to reach out to Ross or Madeline on LinkedIn. I'm sure they both would be happy to connect and chat through this further in any way. And feel free to reach out to Paradox if you have any questions or want to learn a little bit more about the way we do things here. So appreciate you both and thanks all for joining us live and for those joining us on the on-demand version. Thank you.

Madeline Laurano (43:02):

Thank you both. Thank you everyone.

Tyler McEvilly (43:03):

Bye all.

‍