Steven Cooper
Analyst · Marc Riddick with Sidoti. Your line is open
Hey, thanks Marc, this is Steve. As I've obviously been studying this heavily the last 45 days, since coming back understand where the demand is in the market, who is out there competing against us and how we might be doing in that marketplace. Let me just talk about two different areas for -- if we'll first talk about what Derrek just finished, which is full time hiring. And the demand that exists out there for all these open positions, probably over 11 million open positions in the United States alone in the -- with the bulk of those in the categories we're accrued in. So demand has never been stronger. As we mentioned a little bit, the supply is not getting tighter, it's getting slightly looser. So in that demand environment, we are operating pretty well at PeopleScout. And Derrek just mentioned the surge that our clients feel even with stable demand and supply getting slightly better, there has been this huge surge. And a lot of that is employees trying to figure out where they want to end up and what type of company they might want to end up in. That's where I think when you come back to our core business and not earlier referred to the marketplace or our clients, we're doing a great out there in the PeopleScout environment. Being a leader in RPO recruitment process outsourcing here in the United States with a pretty good start on a global basis of being in United Kingdom and being in Australia. Within the United States, North America -- we win more often than we lose, we win a lot. And I think we're the preferred provider here in the U.S. When you look at that situation on a competitive front, where we need to be stronger is the ability to work on global deals. If there is a North America loan deal we compete really well. And like I said win a lot more than that not. But on global deals, we don't. And so that's the competitive front we're looking to fill in and decide and figure out and might come up with strategies to be better on a global basis. If I shift over to our commercial staffing business, both the on-demand and the longer term commercial staffing here it's all North America based, so that's our marketplace. Again demand is strong, there was a little bit of a pause button at the end of Q2 and Q3 here, that we've discussed. But we believe it's just very, very slight. And it's not shrinking, it's just all this amazing growth that's been happening in this space has slowed slightly. And as we look at the competitive front in that category, it's very fragmented. And there is a lot of commercial staffing players out there. So we have to be careful when we talk about who the competition is and who we're referring to. I believe if we focus to strengthen our marketplace on the on-demand through the branch network, we win, because we're fast, we have local talent placed on local needs. Even if it's a national provider, the national customer, we still need to place it locally and we need to show up locally, and we need to have local speed. And with our branch network, we win in that category. You throw in the goodness of JobStack that we've been working on for 10 years, and it's had a whole lot of momentum in the last three years. With over 90% of our workers on that platform and almost 60% of our revenue going through that platform. On a digital basis, we're doing pretty well especially for a company that's founded in bricks-and-mortar, not easy to shift and move to a digital world, when your real strength is your local presence, that we've made great progress. I think fundamentally we are competing as well as anybody in that space. Now, we need to clean up our digital presence because there is new on commerce that look better than us in that space. But overall they don't look better when you add in the strength of our local network and our local branch. So we've got clean up to do in both spaces, expand globally in RPO and make the experience more sticky, which we believe is digital for probably 60% to 75% of our customers. That other 25% to 35% is going to be blocking and tackling daily in the local market, and that's where we win. And it's that 25% or 35% that become the hidden gems in our company. If we have in our salesforce out there, what I call a contact sport everyday contacting and selling -- even if it's two workers for two days, those are the clients to grow into big gyms. And so making sure we're strong in that category, is going to keep us very competitive in these -- in our commercial staffing business.