Talent's Big Reckoning w/ Quincy Valencia

Quincy Valencia rolls back into HR’s Most Dangerous Podcast and immediately chooses violence: AI isn’t fixing hiring, nope, it’s just speeding up the mess and exposing every busted org chart, silo, and “collaboration” fairy tale we’ve been pretending works.

Chad and Cheese poke the bear on everything:• Companies buying shiny AI but not adopting it• Recruiters moving faster… toward the same mediocre outcomes. Automation quietly nuking leadership pipelines• “Total talent” strategies that have been “coming soon” for a decade• And dashboards so pretty they hide the fact nothing’s actually better

Quincy’s prediction? 2026 = The Big Reckoning.Execs spent the money. Now they want results. And when better talent doesn’t show up, someone’s getting thrown out of the org chart.

It’s robots interviewing robots, C-players replacing pipelines, and enterprise leaders realizing tech can’t save a broken talent strategy.

Pour the bourbon. This one hits nerves.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Joel Cheesman (00:31.569)

It's the show that's like rain on your wedding day. Hey kids, it's the chat and cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheesman joined as always. Chad Sowash is riding shotgun as we welcome Quincy Valencia, VP of talent transformation at Korn Ferry to the show Quincy welcome again to HR's most dangerous podcast.

Quincy Valencia (00:48.791)

That's right. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. There's nowhere else I would rather be that I can think of in my neighborhood on this day.

Joel Cheesman (00:56.625)

Your giddiness is palpable from your voice. Quincy, how many times have you been on the show, Quincy? Whether live or in recording? A bunch. So believe it or not, some of our listeners may not know who you are. Let's get the Twitter bio on what makes Quincy tick.

Chad Sowash (00:59.554)

Yeah. She seems whelmed.

Quincy Valencia (01:04.063)

I'm wrong. A lot. But it's been a long time. I don't know, a bunch. A lot. Yeah.

Quincy Valencia (01:19.691)

I enjoy long walks on the beach, so I moved to it. Joel and Chad said that I invite volatility, which as we all know on this show, is why they need me here for a ratings boost apparently today. But I've been in and around this industry for about 110, maybe 111 years. Everybody remember that Chad's older than me still. And I like talking to people that...

Joel Cheesman (01:22.585)

Yeah, you do.

Quincy Valencia (01:45.855)

irritate me and so here I am with Chad and cheese I couldn't be happier this is the best way to start my week now I'm excited to be here 20 plus years

Chad Sowash (01:50.702)

So why we've been friends for 20 plus years, that's why.

Joel Cheesman (01:53.137)

Then you're older, you're younger than both of us then. When's your birthday? yeah, definitely, definitely. Just a young pup. And you're getting the good Botox, apparently. So you're gonna look younger than us for a long time.

Quincy Valencia (01:57.195)

November.

Chad Sowash (01:58.284)

Yep. Yeah, not by much. She's still she's she's a she's an exer that come on.

Quincy Valencia (02:01.069)

This is why I'm spry.

Quincy Valencia (02:05.612)

Yeah.

Quincy Valencia (02:08.993)

Thank you. Money well spent. You should try it. Chad did. Don't knock it, man. All right, let's get into this thing. I'm stoked. Thank you. Yeah, yep, yep, you too.

Chad Sowash (02:10.894)

you

Joel Cheesman (02:12.185)

You look as smooth as Chad. Man, I need to get with it. at this. Well, welcome back, Quincy. It's good to see you. Happy New Year, by the way.

Chad Sowash (02:17.902)

Yeah, she looks she looks a lot better. She looks a lot better.

Chad Sowash (02:26.926)

We're here today to talk about the big reckoning kids and if anybody forgot, we're gonna go ahead and also in case you missed it, we're gonna talk about Quincy's big reckoning that she predicts to happen in 2026. So instead of us just talking through, let's just go ahead and roll the prediction real quick, geez.

Joel Cheesman (02:46.417)

And by the way, Jeff, for those that listened to the show knew that I had a little, I was challenged to keep up with this one. So I've downed about eight coffees to make sure that I can stay awake. So here we go, gang. Thanks.

Quincy Valencia (02:56.885)

I can dumb it down for you, Joel.

Chad Sowash (05:35.054)

Boom, conflict, reckoning, collaboration at this point is literally just a ruse, kid. I mean, that's all there is to it. It is.

Joel Cheesman (05:38.257)

I'm scared.

Quincy Valencia (05:44.205)

It's like a group project. Everybody's involved, but nobody actually does anything or gets anything done. Sounds great on paper, but it doesn't really work.

Chad Sowash (05:52.12)

thing I loved about it, and I think where you threw Cheeseman into a tailspin, is you started from the macro on the AI side, and then you bled down to, wait a minute, we still have problems, but this is literally just gonna make our problems even worse. And those problems being that we have a fractured organization in many cases where we have talent acquisition, have talent management, we have even HR floating up around there.

And there are so many gray areas where there is a quote unquote collaboration where nobody does anything and things slip through the holes or the cracks or whatever the hell you want to call it. So as you dig into that, are you seeing that AI is exposing it more or is this just a problem that has been happening? it's it's companies are pretty much about to implode from a structural standpoint because of it's just been around for so long.

Quincy Valencia (06:33.324)

Yeah.

Quincy Valencia (06:43.477)

It's all of that. It's you know, AI is working as it was originally intended to as people are putting all this money into the AI of today. what were people but you and I both had conversations 15 years ago with leaders going, hey, you got any AI stuff? And they were talking about, you know, machine learning or RPA or something. So this is not a new conversation. It's just the technology is different. But what the new breed of AI is doing is actually being bought and it's being installed.

It's not really being adopted, but even where it is, it's making things faster. It's speeding processes up, but it's accelerating bad process and it's exposing structure and organizational structure that's not built to really support the business for the long term. So now we've got this recruiting because that's usually where it's put in that's going faster and faster and faster. But then they're getting rid of people and the rest of the structure can't really support it. And it's going to implode on itself exactly like you said.

Joel Cheesman (07:40.465)

So Quincy, I'm sort of the George Costanza of predictions. I like comedy that doesn't make me think too much. thank you for clarifying kind of what you're talking about. So basically, if I...

Quincy Valencia (07:44.929)

Get out.

you

Quincy Valencia (07:53.675)

That was too long, the way. Y'all should have made me shorten that. I get very excited and animated about these things.

Chad Sowash (07:59.662)

Whatever you should have seen her message to me. was like, that's kind of long. She's like, it's great. Deal with it.

Joel Cheesman (07:59.729)

Clearly you get very animated about everything, Quincy.

Quincy Valencia (08:02.249)

So.

Quincy Valencia (08:06.957)

Kinda... Kinda did.

Joel Cheesman (08:08.527)

Martin Scorsese-esque quality as well. So essentially you're saying we've cut costs, we plugged in AI to make everything better and it has made things quicker, more efficient, but we're not getting good people. Is that a quick way of saying what you've said?

Quincy Valencia (08:25.857)

That's exactly it is. The outcomes aren't the same or aren't any better. They're not. The outcomes are the same. They're not what people really want, which is better talent in the right place at the right time.

Joel Cheesman (08:37.283)

and the solution.

Quincy Valencia (08:40.353)

There's silos in talent. You can't have one siloed TA organization that is optimized and then move that into one siloed HR organization that doesn't know what they're doing and then a single siloed talent management or internal mobility and then single siloed learning and development. Those things need to complement each other. again, don't want, managers don't want collaboration. They want functions that work and they want a talent that's delivered. And the only way you can do that is if you start

knocking down those walls and bleeding them together and there's no reason not to.

Chad Sowash (09:13.72)

Well, it seems like we've been having this discussion, obviously, for a while over a decade where talent acquisition, talent management. mean, Joel and I literally we were we were in rooms last fall talking to heads of T.A. and heads of people. And I would ask them, you know, who who is moving toward a total talent organization? And then there were hands that would be were raising up. said, who who made it there?

Quincy Valencia (09:17.772)

Yeah.

Chad Sowash (09:41.152)

and there was like maybe one hand in the room, right? So it seems like everybody's talking about it. And we've been talking about it forever. Everybody's talking about it, but it doesn't look like executions actually happening. It's the same shit over and over and over. yeah, no, we're moving to a total talent organization. It's taking you 10 years. What the hell is the holdup?

Quincy Valencia (10:00.631)

Yeah. There's so many things that are there. So first of all, you know, people are saying, that's already done. No, it's not. We've just been talking about it for a long time. And this, again, like I just said, what AI has done and the purchase of it, I'm not even going to say the adoption, has just kind of made it more critical that it happens more quickly. It's exposing the chinks in the armor, if you will, more quickly. Because again, the dashboards look nicer now and the...

Interviews are scheduled faster and that's great, but you've got the same people on the other end. So you don't have, there's not enough, you you don't even know what talent you need. You don't know where to go. Most organizations actually have talent that they need within the organization. They don't know how to identify it. but they're having to, there's no quite, have to now, everything's changing. You know, Tia used to, you'd open a rack, you'd fill the rack, you'd measure time to hire and you'd move on to the next thing. and then by the time you get people in and

they become productive. So depending on the role, could be 60 days, it could be six months or a year, the skills needed for what the business needs now has changed. So you've got to be able to identify internally what you need and be able to move people around or you're gonna be behind.

Chad Sowash (11:10.188)

Yeah. There's so many companies though that see the talent in their organization as disposable. we'll just get somebody else. We're fine with that. We're not looking to create learning and development programs because that takes money and it takes time and then we have to maintain it and so on and so forth. So that's fine. We'll just get rid of who we have now and we'll just bring in other talent. But then the cycle shifts.

Quincy Valencia (11:17.804)

They all do.

Chad Sowash (11:37.246)

and they see how much money it's costing them to burn through talent and they're like, shit, now we actually have to do something to train and then also retain the individuals that we have now. Is this just a cycle that's happening that again, we're gonna go back to disposable heroes once again, sometime in the next few years?

Quincy Valencia (11:59.275)

I hope not because the other thing that's happening at the same time is, is you, as you look at automation throughout the business and part certainly in TA, because it's kind of cool to me that really HR and TA specifically has been in a lot of organizations leading the charge for what are we going to do with this AI stuff? So, but even really throughout the business as they're looking at automating away their

early career or entry level roles, whatever those are. And that's great. Now you're saving all this money on headcount and getting these short-term gains and efficiency. And then what happens in three years when you need a middle manager? What happens in seven years when you need a leader in an organization? For most of these places, in some industries more than others, but you have automated away your pipeline. So now you have to go out, you have no management to develop because you can bring in certain skills, but you can't bring in that cultural knowledge and that

sort of native knowledge that you have when you're there. And so now they have to go out external and buy it. Well, everyone knows when you switch from one company to another, it's because they're giving you more money in a lot of cases. So they're creating their own problem and widening their gap where they have no leadership bench left, and they're making it worse for themselves. So there's so many reasons why they need to focus on bringing it all together so they have a better view of who they've got and what they actually need.

Chad Sowash (12:59.34)

Mm-hmm.

Joel Cheesman (13:14.929)

Quincy, I love In-N-Out Burger. Listeners of the show will know, but I can't always get In-N-Out because I don't live in an area that has them. So sometimes I have to just resort to a good McDonald's Quarter Pounder with cheese, and it's sort of good enough. So to the argument that, yeah, you know, maybe we're getting more C-Players, C-Plus players than we used to, but we're saving so much money on that process and head count. And, you know, the AI is going to catch up.

You know, we're hearing dooms, know, doomsayers say that, you know, two to three years will be empty handed. Well, the AI has been improving pretty rapidly. So what do you say to the organization that says, you know what, maybe some temporary pain eventually I'll get out there to California where I can get me a, you know, an animal style. Like, what do you say to those organizations that say eventually AI will catch up and be good enough to where it's maybe not today.

Quincy Valencia (13:51.948)

Yeah.

Quincy Valencia (14:09.677)

To do what? A, we'll catch up to begin tonight, get in the, what?

Joel Cheesman (14:12.017)

to hire A players, to be more human, to not have a line that says this is AI and this isn't. Are we getting to a point where the humans and the AI, you just can't tell the difference and it's caught up to the interviewing and what we've known when people do it and the nuance around hiring, are you saying AI will never catch up, will never be human?

We'll never have the nuance that an interviewer has or will it get close enough to say, you know what, the money we're saving is worth, you know, the, the, the gap in quality that we're getting.

Quincy Valencia (14:48.811)

I don't know. I'm not going to say that definitively because I can't predict the future. Well, yes, I can. Actually, I just did. No, I don't know for sure. What I know is that it will take a long time to get there because if for no other reason than legal and regulatory compliance will prohibit that in a lot of cases. And I don't see that going away at all. So even if the tech can do it, mean, already in Europe, you can't do it. So there's a lot. There's only so much that will be allowed. There's so many guardrails and they're continuing to be put into place.

Chad Sowash (15:07.83)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Quincy Valencia (15:18.735)

place and be expanded rather than pull back. That tide will probably change at some point, but what do you do? That's great, but for the next five years or 10 years, are you just going to fall behind? Are you just as an organization going to let your competitors steal your best workers? What are you going to do? What is that breaking point? Because the problem is that most organizations aren't even measuring the ROI on whatever they're putting in today. They don't even know how. They're saying, we bought this new tech and put it in. We're so cool. But what does it get you?

It's you know, it's the it's faster. What does that mean? Are we going to have is it going to be Elon Musk's let's have all the robots in the okay great is your robot going to be your CEO? I mean it could if you're replacing Elon but anybody else I'm not quite sure. But somebody good if it's going to replace somebody good I'm not sure that it could today.

Chad Sowash (15:50.473)

The brawn brushes.

Chad Sowash (15:58.831)

He's pretty much a robot already.

Chad Sowash (16:05.422)

I think we run a risk when we run broad strokes. Will all companies do all? Of course not. I mean, we have different companies with different products. Some deliver luxury lifestyle goods, some cheap she and you know, shit or what have you, right? But one thing I think is interesting is that as Joel was talking about A players and we will go back to the college football playoffs. IU

Quincy Valencia (16:18.381)

Mm-hmm.

Quincy Valencia (16:33.229)

Thank

Chad Sowash (16:34.722)

had literally almost no four star and five star players, right? A players, B players, right? But what did they have? They had the most fifth year seniors, right? They had the most experience. Were they the most talented? No, but they were the most experienced. So again, depending on the culture of the team, of the organization that you have, I think it's important. If you think it's important for you to have nothing but four and five star players,

Quincy Valencia (16:39.659)

I think they had zero.

Chad Sowash (17:02.71)

Okay, great, but there are other organizations that are out there that are gonna have fifth year seniors and they're gonna lean heavily on that experience. So I think the whole broad brush, trying to paint a broad brush for every company out there is more dangerous and risky than anything else.

Quincy Valencia (17:20.043)

Yeah, I we've optimized hiring, but we didn't optimize talent. And that's what if you want to stick with the college football analogy, which is sad to me, you can have. I know, I'm very proud of those go. Go canes. But anyway, you know, you can, you can hire, can hire in the best people individually, but how do they meld and how do they mesh and how do you see what's happening across it? And if you look what Indiana's coach did over two years, I mean, leadership,

Chad Sowash (17:28.761)

you made it to the final, shut up.

Joel Cheesman (17:31.739)

Quincy's a grad of the U, in case our listeners didn't.

Quincy Valencia (17:48.717)

matters, shared systems matter. So that's what I was saying when you try, well, we'll just hire in another A player, A player, A player. There's a whole lot of foundational knowledge and experience that they're going to miss if they do that. there's a place, I'm a big fan of AI, I'm a big fan of automation, I'm a big fan of efficiency, an organization should be doing that, but they should be doing it strategically. And I'm working with an organization now, a large one that whose name you would know, and

We know, I'm not going to name names. I saw your face, Chad. I don't do that. But we work with every name that you can think of. So this is one you would definitely know. And they're asking, well, I don't know. We want to go in and do a diagnostic, not just of their tech stack, because you can't look at that.

in a silo, you have to look at where their business is going first and foremost and then backtrack into, okay, well, where's the talent and what do you need and what are your systems and all the way back down to how are you sourcing in the market and everything in between. And the question is, yeah, we could do that, what's one option, but can you just recommend some other tech that we could put into our stack? And I said, no, I can't.

Because what are you trying to solve for? I don't know where your gaps are in this process, your hiring processes, but I also don't know your gaps necessarily beyond that. I need to know organizationally what you're striving for so that we can then build back into a system that's gonna support that future gain. TA and talent in general, not just TA, but talent management in general is not about having a good talent management program. It's about building.

a layer of talent within your organization or building a talent ecosystem that will support your business objectives. And anytime you talk about TA or TM or any of that, even internal mobility outside the lens of business, I think you're looking at it wrong.

Chad Sowash (19:31.503)

Well, in taking a look at like enterprise companies in being able to better understand, as you'd said, external, internal, retention, development. We've been talking about it for years. We need one organization to do that. What percentage of enterprise companies do you think have successfully moved from this fractured talent acquisition, talent management to a full encompassing talent organization?

Quincy Valencia (20:00.621)

and our experience less than 10%. Less than 10%. And they're trying to. So there are a lot of organizations that are trying to, but how many years have we been hearing it? And some are further along that path than others. But you've got political and structural barriers there. You've got hiring managers that don't understand.

Joel Cheesman (20:02.896)

You

Quincy Valencia (20:20.823)

the what's in it for you conversation and looking at internal talent and skills from other parts of the organization. You've got pressures from internal and external pressures to deliver, deliver, deliver today. And they're not taking the time to allow people the luxury of learning how what they know and then upskilling that a little bit will be applicable in another part of an organization. So then they just go out and they want to hire and they hire faster and they don't know if they're hiring best and then their wages are going higher. And so you've got all these reasons why

There are barriers to doing this. Even the best talent leaders and the best business leaders who want to do this are coming. and fragmented data. my God, the data, the inability to share data in an organization is just mind boggling to me. And that's actually a real problem. my God, yes.

Chad Sowash (20:59.31)

you

Chad Sowash (21:06.574)

would think that there's a huge market for that, for companies to come in specifically clean up data so that you have systems that definitely need to talk to each other. But yeah, it seems like that would be a hell of a business. Cheeseman, get on that.

Quincy Valencia (21:16.801)

They have to.

Joel Cheesman (21:19.919)

Yeah. Yeah, I'll get on that. Quincy, we talked about companies and we've interviewed for the show. mean, companies like Guild and Lattice and Fuel 50. While we see the organizations like a paradox that is the sort of quicker, efficient, more hiring, they're getting acquired while the internal mobility companies seem to be struggling. Like, what are they getting right? What are they getting wrong?

Companies, I think, want an easy button where they just write a check to somebody and it's done, but that doesn't seem to be happening. What's your take on what you see there?

Chad Sowash (21:52.558)

Yep.

Quincy Valencia (21:52.738)

They do.

Quincy Valencia (21:58.297)

So I've seen, by the way, I'm a big fan of Fuel 50 and others like it. I think they're great. But if they don't have the right infrastructure to work off of, they're limited as well. You still have a fundamental data issue because it's coming from so many places, especially in large global organizations that don't even have sometimes the same systems of record. mean, it makes it very difficult. You have to have a common language. That's the first thing.

But here's where I've seen people try to apply it. So we've heard people say, we need to a skills-based organization. That means different things. I actually had somebody in an organization say to me, who's a senior HR executive, and said, we've been talking about this forever. Do we just abandon this? Because it's not working. It's not going anywhere. No, maybe don't abandon it. Maybe you call it something different and approach it differently. But anyway, here's what they do. Here's what I've seen them do. We're going to do this. We're going to prove it works. We're going to do a pilot to have skills be the thing so that we can start down the rest of the.

track of getting the organization into identifying where their talent is and what they need, right? So we're just going to start with one department though. We're going to start with marketing and do it there. like, well, now you're defeating the entire purpose because the purpose of doing this is looking outside of the core skill, the core function and seeing where these things are applicable outside of there. So now you've, it's an echo chamber. not seeing anything. So it's fear. They're afraid to do it. People don't want to give up what they know.

People don't want to, there's still cultures of, I'm not letting Chad go because he's the best person I've got in my department. That's what Joel said to me. Joel said I couldn't do this without Chad.

Chad Sowash (23:31.694)

You

Chad Sowash (23:36.142)

You

Quincy Valencia (23:38.029)

No, so there's so many, there's just, there's, then adoption, you know, people are putting in all sorts of technology everywhere and not measuring adoption. So it's not really working. They're not, and they're not getting the ROI on what they need. And then people go back and say, well, it's not working. Like the guy I was talking to said, we're just going to abandon this and start over with something else. So you're not even, there's another company I'm working with that said we they're going through a transformation prog.

process and they are like this is we've done this seven times. maybe we need to relook at it. Let's keep saying transformation. I'm not sure that means what you think it means. If it's seven times, so all sorts of things, you're not getting people it's not you're not taking enough time to see if something's working. You're not doing it. Whatever it is on a wide enough scale. You're not measuring adoption. You're not getting by. I mean, there's every reason you could think of why somebody's group project and that's back to that.

Chad Sowash (24:10.862)

You

Quincy Valencia (24:32.991)

fails and that's why it's not working in these organizations.

Chad Sowash (24:36.344)

The is Joel said earlier, I think like the easy buttons in I think you're looking at you're looking at easy wins as much as easy button. So a lot of these companies that we've actually talked to will have a fountain or a paradox or or smart recruiters or whatever it might be. But they'll they'll have just a very small part of the process that they implement. A lot of times it's an interview scheduling because everybody hates that. It sucks. Nobody wants to be a scheduler. Right. It just it's a horrible, horrible job.

So you take a look at that and you take a look at the actual man hours that you can save on it. You take a look at the actual time to interview. I mean, you've got all these different things that you can actually adjust to, but they did it in small chunks. And then they went back later, these companies did, and said, this is how AI is working for us. And this is literally just a sliver of our process. So I mean, is that?

Is that the answer really? Instead of trying to do a major overhaul, literally, you can't eat an elephant in one bite, go ahead and take it a bite at a time and then try to go ahead and have a phased in approach to AI instead of, again, a lot of these companies, these CEOs are like, we want AI, we want it now. we can't get ROI out of it. Well, shit, like you'd said, seven different times they've tried transformation. What the fuck does transformation mean to you?

Quincy Valencia (25:58.763)

Right. Yeah, I think you're right. I think that is the right approach. You can't do everything at once. I think you need to have that vision of what you want to be. And then you start working backwards and say, what can you do now? When we go in and help companies do this very thing, it's here's where you are from a maturity standpoint. Here's where you are.

And here are the things that you should prioritize and why based on where you are today and where you want to be in your business. And it looks at everything from change readiness, you know, who will take this and who won't to all the different components of talent, of a talent organization to say, if you do this, this will be a lot of effort, but it will have the biggest business impact. But you can do this right now. It will have medium business impact, but you should be able to do it in a relative short of time. And then you start biting off chunks, like you said, and then it compounds.

upon each other. So yeah, that's absolutely the right way to go. And you can't give it, you can't redo it if everything's not done, whatever it is, in six months time. You have to give these things time to become so that you can see what the ROI is and then you can tweak it and move on to the next thing and build and move on to the next thing and build. It's just not scalable. And it's going to be easier to do when you have all of that, the goals and the talent pipeline, the orchestration of talent happens within a single component.

Chad Sowash (27:14.702)

and you have wins too, right? You've got, look, there's a win, there's a win, there's a win. And it just continues to, you you have that winning IU season.

Quincy Valencia (27:23.709)

Or, this doesn't work, let's not try and roll it out to the rest of the company because it doesn't work.

Chad Sowash (27:27.906)

Yes, exactly.

Joel Cheesman (27:29.873)

Quincy, I want to look at the other side of the coin on this one. And we know that job seekers are becoming more and more equipped to automate their job seeking adventures. And we talked to more and more employers that are like, I reach out to someone and they and they are like, what job is this? Who are you? Like, they just don't know because the robots are doing all the work. Are we in a position where like we have no other choice but to automate because our consumer slash job seeker

They're automating in a way that we can't handle. Like, it feels to me like we're going to robots interviewing robots no matter what we do, right or wrong.

Quincy Valencia (28:06.305)

Yeah, I think right. But only up to a certain point. Like I do not want, if I have a thousand applications, I do not want my recruiters screening a thousand. I want them to be able to get the best, but they can't do that manually. Like for the very reason you said, there's too much there. So we have to be able to automate the smart bits.

the ones that will add value so that when they get to that recruiter, the recruiter or the hiring manager, they're spending their time with the right people doing the right things. Everybody's been saying this forever. There's nothing revolutionary about that. It's just what does that mean now is quite different. I'm working with an organization now. It's actually a frontline high volume solution. No, Chad, no, I'm not naming.

But they have some roles that do, you know, they do like merchandising in stores. So they're working in retail organizations, people that go in and, you know, put the stuff on the shelf for Nabisco or whomever. don't know, I made that up. I don't know that that's true, that that company's true. But anyway, so the problem is some of them, they just need to be able to go in and get the stuff and put it there on the shelf. But the other one, they need to have a little bit more discernment. They need to be able to maybe negotiate with a store manager for an end cap or something there. And the way that their process is running now, they can't do it. They don't really see

because the volume is so high, the hiring managers don't really see the candidate and don't really get to interact with them too much before they're hired and it's too late before they know. So in that case, there's technology that we're recommending that they're working with that actually simulates the job for them, a back and forth conversation.

that would work quite well for them. You know them well, it's Tatio. So we're working to see how we can bring that in where they're simulating that actual job. So now the hiring managers in a very short period of time are being able to see.

Quincy Valencia (29:49.801)

what they're getting from someone and vice versa. The candidate is able to say, yeah, I don't want to do this or yeah, this is great. This works perfectly for me. So there's that layer. It's the perfect application of technology to get benefit on both sides to both speed up the process, but also make it a better quality of process. So it's what are you doing? Where are you and where are you putting it in there so that when it gets to that human layer, they have more information to go on rather than starting over from, you at least 18 and are you legally eligible to work in this country, which is.

ridiculous.

Chad Sowash (30:20.534)

I love the proof, right? Because one of the things we're always asking people, can you, can you, can you, well, yes, yes, yes, of course I can. But to be able to use a platform like a Tadio that definitely, it demonstrates whether you can or you can't. And as you had said, and I think this is incredibly important, because how many employees come in and wash out after a week, right?

Quincy Valencia (30:45.655)

Right.

Chad Sowash (30:46.454)

because they really didn't understand what the job was going to be like and what types of tasks they were going to be performing on said job. Now you take them through that simulation, not only have they proven they can do it, they also know that they want to do it. Those are two big things that, I mean, we've never really been able to do unless you have like, you know, a full week or so with interns or things of that nature.

Quincy Valencia (31:11.957)

Yeah, and then that translates again, it's that entry level, I'm going to call it it is it's mostly entry level, who you still need, even if you get robots to stock yourselves, you still need these people, eventually to who's going to manage the who's going to be the district robot manager, who's going to be the leader in the company who's going to do these. So you still need some of these humans at this level.

And then you need within the organization to be able to identify those humans so that they can lead your company into the future. Otherwise, you've got a bunch of C-suite people or vice president people and a bunch of robots. I don't want Elon Musk robot.

Chad Sowash (31:44.91)

Skynet or the Matrix? Those are the two that I'm thinking. Either the Matrix or Skynet is gonna take this shit over.

Quincy Valencia (31:50.837)

I'm thinking Skynet still, that's...

Joel Cheesman (31:51.569)

Do the robots look like Sydney Sweeney? That's my concern about this whole issue. Tracy, Quincy. I did it again. I'm awful. Such an inside joke. Sorry guys. Quincy, small businesses as we know is the bulk of the hiring that goes on in this country. I would think that a lot of them look at automation as a gift from God.

Chad Sowash (31:57.295)

You couldn't get any work done.

Quincy Valencia (31:59.329)

Did you just call me Tracy again? What is happening? Are we in...

Quincy Valencia (32:13.42)

Yeah.

Joel Cheesman (32:19.313)

We don't have to have our own team. We don't have to outsource this stuff. We can just buy a solution that will interview and pre-screen and do everything. Where do they fit in all this? Because they're not going to have internal mobility processes. They're not going to have like, this is a godsend, yes or no? And do we get to a point where like employees figure out like, well, it's

Okay, I got to go to this fast food and I got to do the kiosk and the food, or about if I can go to In-N-Out and I actually talk to a person like that's where I want to go. Do we get to a place where your employer is just like, who has humans and who doesn't? And I want to be in an organization that has humans that are.

Quincy Valencia (32:57.581)

Yeah, I don't know for small businesses. don't I don't think this is necessarily going to be the panacea for them that you're saying for a lot of reasons first and foremost is cost Second, it's just very these they're too expensive for them looks relic those of us who deal in enterprise quite frequently are like, oh, this is cheap This is nothing and those who deal in I've got

two openings on my night shift or like this is way too expensive. So cost is the first one. The second is, I spent the last, before joining Card Ferry, the last several years before that and even prior to that working in for a software company that works just with high volume frontline hospitality and.

know, quick service restaurant primarily. And even though it may be a big name, it may be a McDonald's or Wendy's or wherever, they are mostly franchise owners. so you start looking, it's like, it's McDonald's, they can afford it, but you look back down and that's a franchisee who owns 10 locations. So you're back to the money issue again. And if you look at what they're looking for and their leaders, it's the ability to run the operation as a store manager, but they also have to have the ability to...

hire the right people and train the right people and keep the right people. And they're not doing that without people. still want people. The people they're hiring have to represent their business, their front-facing. So no, I don't think it is the panacea for smallest businesses at this point in time, maybe parts of it. We know, we saw what Paradox did in Macire for McDonald's for the scheduling of organizations, but now a lot of them are abandoning it and going to other technologies or back to some of what they've done previously. So no.

Joel Cheesman (34:27.697)

Don't you think a lot of that gets commoditized though? A lot of that technology gets commoditized and it's either free or really cheap for a lot of these small businesses too.

Quincy Valencia (34:31.062)

Yes.

Quincy Valencia (34:35.493)

Yes, yes. And I actually see that that's a lot of the acquisitions that we're seeing and that continued consumer back in that consolidation cycle is going to help that. So at some point, yes, that will do exactly that. But that still doesn't take the human layer out. If I'm the franchise owner, one of the when I started in the software for this particular, let's go back to QSR, my first client that I had was a a Chick-fil-A franchisee.

And was he and the co-owner who were actually still doing the interviewing after they got somebody in and scheduled and screened all that. They did that. They were doing that automated. They were using our software to do it. But once they got them in, they still had to talk to them because there was still a feeling there's a brand that they needed to represent. There's all of those things that they still wanted to talk to them and make sure that it was somebody they wanted. And for some brands, I don't see that going away, no matter how commoditized the speeding up of the process goes.

Chad Sowash (35:31.119)

Quincy, you've worked with some big companies, notably Home Depot, HD Supply, and then you've worked obviously at ADP, Cielo, mean, you're now at Korn Ferry, so you've been working with big companies for a very long time. You watch your ass. You just said that I was older than you, so you watch your ass right now.

Joel Cheesman (35:31.313)

Fair enough.

Quincy Valencia (35:41.943)

Walmart? Don't forget Walmart.

Joel Cheesman (35:45.425)

You've done so much for only being 29 years old, Quincy.

Quincy Valencia (35:48.749)

I'm not 29, I'm 64.

Quincy Valencia (35:56.909)

I look good for 64, that's all I'm saying. So do you, Chad.

Chad Sowash (35:58.479)

You look good for 29, shut up. So at the end of the day, you've worked with these enterprise companies for very long time. You've heard the stuff. It seems like they're always pointing their fingers. It's the ATS's problem. It's the HCM's problem. But they're never pointing the fingers at themselves, right?

Quincy Valencia (36:17.261)

Mm-hmm.

Chad Sowash (36:18.668)

And that's generally where the problem is, especially when we're talking about this process problem, this organization problem. Do you think that we're ever going to get to the point where we can have a nice, solid, fluid talent organization that focuses on acquisition, retainment, development, and obviously upward mobility? Is any of that going to happen?

Quincy Valencia (36:40.204)

Yeah.

It is, and that's my whole premise. That's why I'm calling this year the big reckoning, because all these people have just thrown their hands up in the air and said, I don't know, I can't do it, are going to be forced to do it, because the executives have approved these line items for huge investments in this technology. then let's start with TA. They're improving these investments. Now, TA can say, we've saved 18 hours a week in scheduling and 400 hours a week in whatever it is. And they're coming back in the hiring managers, and the rest of the executives are going, yeah, but what have I gotten for that?

Chad Sowash (36:50.222)

you

Quincy Valencia (37:12.587)

What am I doing? And so they're not going to blame the tech. The C-suite is not going to blame the tech. They're going to blame the leader of the organization who they've given all this money and authority to, who's coming to them with pretty dashboards, like I said, and showing what they're saving here. But the organization is not feeling the impact of better talent. And so it's like we started out saying, the AI is just highlighting and accelerating the vision into an organization that's not fit for purpose.

It's really just showing what's broken and what's not working. So something's going to happen. We gave you all this money for tech. You said if we gave you tech, it would work. It is working in its silo. It's not having meaningful business impact. And so these leaders need to understand that they need to have different organizational structure. They need to orchestrate the talent, orchestrate the flow throughout the organization, or they're going to be gone.

Chad Sowash (38:04.576)

orchestrate, orchestrate, orchestrate, Reckoning.

Joel Cheesman (38:07.419)

Quincy Valencia, everybody. Thanks for joining us, Quincy. For those of our listeners, viewers that want to connect with you, learn more about you or your employer, where do you send them?

Quincy Valencia (38:12.96)

Bye.

Quincy Valencia (38:19.455)

On LinkedIn, Quincy Valencia, I think I'm the only one, or you can email me, quincy.valencia@kornferry.com or just kornferry.com.

Joel Cheesman (38:28.539)

Fair enough. It's a reckoning kids. It's a reckoning Chad. That's another one in the can. We out.

Chad Sowash (38:29.774)

Too easy.

Chad Sowash (38:34.86)

We out