Even in these unprecedented economic times where millions of people have lost their jobs, there are still tech companies that are in full hiring mode! Today's "Business as Usual" debuts a new focus -- "TechVibe Talent" -- to profile local tech companies that are building their workforces. We have representatives from CGI and TeleTracking Technologies to talk about the positions they are hiring for, recruiting challenges and how they have been land the right talent to date. Look for more TechVibe Talent segments in the future.
With Special Guests: Will Freker, Director of Consulting Services, CGI and Hanxu Fan, Senior Technical Recruiter and HR Generalist, Teletracking Technologies
Transcript:
Good afternoon, this is Audrey. So it's a Monday. Happy to see everyone here. I run the Pittsburgh Technology Council and I'm joined by Jonathan kersting. He's the Vice President of all things media. And we are pretty thrilled about kicking off a Monday with what we're calling TechVibe talent. And it's our special edition of business as usual. And we're going to be focusing on some talent needs with some two really great people who have the frontline view of what's happening in terms of tech in their respective companies. So thank you all for joining. So just I want to give a shout out and appreciation for Huntington bank, Deloitte and sheetz, who actually are sponsors of businesses usual and if you don't know any of them, you really should Huntington has been with us right from the onset and and helping lots and lots of companies through The pandemic times and beyond in terms of small business association related loans. And then we also have Deloitte who's very active in the innovation community, through their regular services, as well as providing the kind of support to the local ecosystem and then their sheetz, sheetz. Actually, if you don't know sheetz By now, you should. But one thing about sheetz is they're always working on innovation, and they actually have an innovation center located in Pittsburgh. So I wanted to give a big shout about that. So just some programming notes. We have some great upcoming sessions this week. Tomorrow we're hosting our friends from beauty shop.
We just received some ink today about Arsenal motors, which is it's their new co working space in Lawrenceville. They'll be joined by tomorrow's program with by JLL and IKM architects we talk about what's the future of commercial real estate, in the optimism of post pandemic but certainly during the pandemic, but what happens in the future and then Wednesday. We're going to talk to two prominent operators of skilled nursing homes. And why is that so important because that is really where a lot of the epidemic and the pandemic have occurred in nursing homes. And it's, we flattened the curve for a little while, and now it's back up. So we thought it was really important because each and every one of us are certainly touched by people who are older than us and are more vulnerable. And so we're going to be shouting, loud and strong to talk about what the issues are there. And then Thursday, we have Mayor Peduto. And he's going to help us celebrate our hundredth session that we're doing, I just can't even believe it. And then we're going to wrap up the week with Travis sheetz. He is the chief operating officer of sheetz, so we'll get a chance. This is a great week, and we'll get a chance to hear about what's happening there. So a couple of things. microphones are muted. Just don't want to hear anything in the background. If we can help it. You may hear Jonathan's dogs but other than that, it will be pretty quiet. And we also have a chat. So we're going to use this chat as an opportunity for you to ask your questions of our two guests. So I am going to jump right in and tell you about who the two people are here today. We're joined by Hanxu Fan he is the he is a SHRM, which is Society of Human Resource Management professional, SCP, and he's a Senior Technical recruiter at teletracking. And will freker, he's director of consulting services at CGI. Both of these organizations have several hundred people in our region at least. And they'll talk a little bit more about who they are, and what kind of talent that they're looking for. So we're calling it tech five talent, as I mentioned earlier, and it's designed to showcase companies that are growing and onboarding people during this pandemic.
So we're going to just enough said in terms of my intro, and so with that, I'm going to start with will and then I'll bring Han on, and good afternoon. Well, thank you for joining Really appreciate your time with us and would love for you to take some time to just introduce yourself talk about your role at CGI share about the company's mission and some of the history in Pittsburgh, including there was an acquisition of a tech company so well, so CGI is an international company. We are pretty much across the globe. We have over 77,000 consultants currently started off with two in Canada quite some time ago. It started off pretty, pretty small. So came in here we're pretty focused on the financial services and banking industry. The acquisition that she's referring to is a company called Summa technologies, which is a bit of a bigger footprint here. And a result of that last year, we actually created an Innovation Center here in Pittsburgh for CGI. So CGI was one of the first Pittsburgh's one of the first innovation centers for CGI in the US. We're pretty proud of that. My role I'm the director of consulting services, primarily in the banking, financial services injury industry here. My career, I've been pretty much in every industry that there is in it. I have a lot of experience with bringing on our college grads. So a lot of my team are made up of college grads, I also have experienced people as well. But for some reason, they thought I was a good fit to do the college grad thing so they
can relate. Right?
Yeah. And we have a really nice program for onboarding folks. It's not just college grads, also, people who are changing careers and different industry going through boot camps to take on new we have a really solid program about that. For quite a few companies in this. This company does that very well getting people who are new to the industry up to speed. So
what kinds of positions in terms of college grads
So college grads, typically we're either looking for developers, business analysts or testers are hot but outside of the college grad piece right now, if you're a job a full stack developer yesterday
we're bringing on about eight people every week right now.
Bringing on eight people a week that are just out of college or a total total onboarding. So our onboarding program, typically summer fall, or sorry, winter in the fall. Okay, we just wrapped one up. We'll be starting another one in the fall.
We get between 10 and 15 people through those.
Take them through that whole soar program. It is a pretty extensive program. And I can go into more detail on that later if you'd like. So
it's a CGI footprint trying to grow in this region.
Yeah, so Pittsburgh is a prepared for CGI, one of the local clients here is actually the second largest and all CGI, account wise, and all the countries that we're in. So it's a pretty important region. So the way CGI is broken up, broken up into businesses, they're called strategic business units. And that's designed to give the presence so you're close to your your people. we've kind of gone a little bit around that and leveraged the rest of the network by this remote capability lately, but primarily our focus is to be close to the clients. So the Great Lakes business unit, which is what Pittsburgh is part of the center of that is Pittsburgh, but we also go into Ohio, Michigan, and I have Michigan in western Pennsylvania focuses that area. So it gives you that feel where we are very large company but still very entrepreneurial, focused and you have that feel that you're in a startup but you have the backing of large institutional.
And that's great. So let me bring Han on Han. And I introduced Han briefly, but what I'd like to do is Han, I want to ask you the same question. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at teletracking. How long you been there? And what you're what you're recruiting for in the mission of the organization.
Absolutely. Great. Thank you, Audrey. Yeah, so my name is Han. I work in the people and culture department here at teletracking. primarily responsible for recruiting on the technical side, as well as helping with just general HR duties and responsibilities. So teletracking has been around since since 1991. And we're Pittsburgh homegrown company. We're based here in downtown Pittsburgh. And, you know, we've been growing tremendously, especially in the past couple months around, just hiring a lot of engineering positions as well as product management and a few marketing roles. So our organization, we really, you know, focus around our mission statement, which is to ensure that no patient has to wait for the kidney. And essentially, our goal is to help with the overall operational efficiency of various hospitals and health system. So what that means is, you know, cutting down on patient wait times, tracking of hospital assets, equipments, rerouting of ambulatory services, and most recently, as you may have seen on the news, we're very much involved with HHS on a COVID-19 dashboard capacity and census data collection projects. So, as a result of all this, we have been quite busy. In the last couple months I mentioned before hiring predominately mostly software engineering roles at various skill levels, from entry level all the way to senior level positions, as well as several data engineer and big data type roles as well. on the product side, I know my colleague, she is question busy with various rules on product management, you know whether product owner product managers, project managers as well. So, yeah, it's been definitely been a hiring push, and last couple ones. Well, how has
it been? Hon. And then I'll go over to you Well, how has it been in since this pandemic? How's that affected? hiring? What's changed? And how do you sort of convey what your culture is through? You know, through this new world?
Absolutely. Yeah, I would say definitely has changed. I know, for one of the first things we had to do was kind of positioned ourselves around the idea of working remotely. I know some of our teams internally, such as some of our you know, our engineering teams are a little more accustomed to that than others, but trying to getting our own culture aligned understanding that we have to work through, you know, zoom calls or slack channels, etc. Just kind of knowing that you had to build a relationship virtually. You don't have the luxury of having face to face interaction, bringing someone to the office and giving it a tour getting an overall view of what it's like working there on a day to day basis. So, in the candidate interview process that I'm involved in, I barely had to, like, you know, drill down and kind of explain our culture and, you know, share with them, what we do how we work remotely. And I asked them is one of my questions typically is like, you know, what are your thoughts about working remotely? Like how do you would you like to be ingrained in our team, you know, what are some things that you would like to see So, just kidding that together, all of our onboarding is done remotely as well. So we've been shipping all the equipment in here that the employee needs to their home, and we've done the training for for our products, pretty much every two weeks now. So all the new hires kind of get together and ask questions and get to learn and, you know, it's definitely been tough, it's not easy to do it. It's definitely a so called the new norm. Now, I hear that a lot, but um, you know, be adjusted as we can.
So that's sort of interesting. I never thought I totally zoned out about that. So essentially, if I come to work for you, I'm going to get like a delivery Yeah,
you'll get it. You'll get a pretty big box.
laptop, some you know, tchotchke goodies, teletracking you know, and a welcome package essentially. Yeah, that's cool.
What else in your welcome pack? That sounds interesting. I
like Ah, yeah. So usually the employees will get some sort of backpack or like, suitcase type thing to Japan with one pick up a shirt, like a T shirt or something, hands a mug. Anything else they've requested through the onboarding paperwork. So certain equipment, monitors, whatever that they need to know to get their job. Done.
That's cool. Love it.
You hiring people that are from outside the region? We are Yeah, we are. Yeah, office. Absolutely. Yeah. So we made that shift. For sure. Now, for a lot of our roles. I can pretty much all now are all you know, 100% remote is fine. You know, you can work anywhere in the US. So yeah, absolutely.
Well, that's great. So now let's jump to Well, I'm going to ask you The same kind of questions what it what it's like, since the pandemic and Are you hiring remotely excetera?
Sure. So, as I mentioned earlier, we do tend to focus on that Metro model. But this has extended the opportunity for us to go outside to other be used and we are hiring remote people as well now, so we are pretty much 100% remote with all of our clients at the moment. The transition for us wasn't actually that painful. We were in the middle of transitioning to Microsoft Teams. Thankfully, we finished that right when this started. So themes is a bit more collaborative in nature than the user x and Skype and it is the one tool that herbs and cap collaborators really helped us out. And additionally, we are a globally global delivery company. So we're locally focused, but we have that global delivery capability. So we when you work here, you may be working in Pittsburgh, okay, we work with people all over the world that will be on your team as well.
So if I'm if you have Hire me and I'm located in Kansas City, huh? You might hire me for the Pittsburgh Office if I'm located in Kansas City.
So right now you would do that and leave your remote correct. Long term we don't know how this is going to play out under the the regular model, we prefer our people to be in the metro model and would would obviously pay for that
relocation thing, or if they didn't want to locate it'll be interesting to see.
And we have offices everywhere too. So the you know, we could always find work for you. That's the one nice thing about this company is that we'll find something for you somewhere if you want to be there. Okay, we use we market our people to all all be used. So you're the one thing nice thing about CGI is you're considered a member, not an employee.
So how do you so how do you when you're new how what kind of management processes do you have in terms of Measurement of performance.
So we are heavily involved if you're not measuring it, you know, you can't you can't fix anything. So yeah, we measure everything here. We have several different assessment tools for all of our different stakeholder for our customers, we have a member of satisfaction that it goes on every year as well. And then we have our, our stakeholders. So for as far as measurement we do have required checkpoints with all of our members, especially as it becomes more important now that we're remote. Different checkpoints where we're checking on people's progress, making sure everybody's okay if they need anything. Goals are specifically set that are measurable every year and we try it we have several meetings during the year to track those. It's not just a once and done thing. And really just having regular checkpoints, especially in the COVID and remote environment is having those regular checkpoints and sessions and virtual happy hours to stick to keep that personal fun.
Okay. All right. Well, what let's go to Han and then Jonathan, you see that question that Anita asked.
I do. That's a good one. I'm really excited to hear their response to these questions for sure. Should I ask the question out to you? Yeah, yeah. So this is curious. So Han doesn't hiring from across the country to hurt local talent?
Is he tone muted?
there?
Yeah, I'm still there. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, so the question was, if I heard correctly on hiring talent from outside of Pittsburgh hurt local talent, right, Jonathan?
Yeah. Or Yeah. Or the inverse doesn't help.
Does it help? Okay. Yeah, sure. I think, for us, our philosophy when it comes to hiring is, you know, the best candidate for the job regardless of where they are, right. I mean, obviously, we want people in Pittsburgh, we want new people that can you They're live here already and can help grow here. But given the circumstances, you know, opening up nationwide and just being able to kind of see that, you know, Canada pool from all over the country is definitely helped. I think it's a win win. You know, we we interview all across the board, right. I know, when I talk with the managers and directors, you know, they prefer people that will eventually come to Pittsburgh, but they understand the situation the matter at hand. Right. And we've also seen that since we've worked remotely since about March now, are all of our employees are working remotely, the productivity has actually gone up for a lot of our employees as well, surprisingly. So. I think that it's factored it into like, Oh, this the work can be done, you know, wherever they're sitting, you know, even at home, you know, there's just as engaged and, you know, we're getting a lot more work out of especially on the engineering team, so it's a win win.
Mm hmm. And so there's a question that says teletracking consider product managers outside of the healthcare industry in terms of expertise.
That's a great question. Um, I know the preference is someone who has worked in healthcare typically, because there's a lot of stuff and nuances you have to learn, you know, within that area, but we have hired people who have not been, you know, in the healthcare space as a product manager in the past as well. I could name just come up thinking of their names. Oh, my head. No, that is something that we're open to.
So it's, it's so interesting. So well, we recently had CIO insight series that where we have Chief Information Officers get together and we we've now expanded and included some folks from Columbus in the Columbus leader said they're happy to have people from Pittsburgh work for some of the Columbus companies and they can stay in Pittsburgh. And we said, Yeah, we're happy to have the Columbus employees. But it just turns your head upside down when you think about growth is really important. And one of the things that we care about is growth in Africa. Talent so sometimes they are mutually excuse exclusive and sometimes they're not any sense around that in terms of when you're talking to people and they are remote or their sense that they want to move to Pittsburgh or that they're happy where they are and they'll just worry about it close pandemic so right now we have not historically had a problem getting people to come to Pittsburgh it's pretty good place to live whether y'all know the weather thing but others when great an awesome California this year's awesome Yes, I the people that don't have a problem moving to Pittsburgh when we require it. So we don't know what how this is all going to play out long term though. So we don't have those answers right now. Right now we're leaving people if they want to stay remote, they can stay remote if they want to. If they're in Wisconsin, and we find them they can work from Wisconsin Bombus is actually in our business units area, so We have clients in Columbus also. Mm hmm.
Right. I think we have a little office in Columbus. So this question john said about culture, which I think is pretty important when you're trying to keep the culture as well as cultivate the culture.
Yeah. So anyone can take this question jump in. I think both you guys should actually answer this because I think we're really curious how your company's built culture. And have you made shifts in the approach to having employees feel connected in a remote work environment? Any creative ideas willing to share anything with with the crowd here today?
Yeah, yeah, I can I can start. So one of the things that I've seen since we started working remotely, our president ceo has pretty much done weekly townhall meetings at least once a week on a Wednesday, sometimes Friday typically. And you know, initially I started just talking about or seeing, you know, around our company, what our goals are, what we're trying to get to and and a lot about, you know, work with the government and just just open You know, sessions pretty much have like questions, q&a, you know, people have questions about, you know how overdoing this code crisis we're doing, you know, with with certain other things happening within our company. So I think that's helped a lot. I know within the department, we've had happy hour Friday kind of things as well, which is kind of fun. So we'll play like jackbox games on stream or just have like a fun little, like Jeopardy types, you know, trivia type stuff, just have fun. And I think it's good just breaks up the day. So that you're not just always about work and thinking through so, you know, it's great. In this day and age, we have the technology capabilities to do a lot of things that, you know, we wouldn't be able to do maybe like 1020 years ago, right? And having this FaceTime interaction, I think once a week with your team and department that's really helped and we really enjoy that. Mm hmm.
Anything that you want to add to that on your end? Well,
it's very similar. As I mentioned earlier, we do the virtual happy hours teams is really facilitated Continuing that culture of us working together and collaborating together being somewhat face to face, though, we were last week with our intern program we had was intern day last week. So did a virtual Family Feud session. So we had to play against each other doing virtual Family Feud on there. So similar things that what he's mentioning, Evan, were our impartial meetings that were just now happening over our over our teams instead of in person. Unfortunately, that still gives you that sense of Connect, being connected to everybody and keeping things enjoyable. He said, It is difficult to feel like you're a good one in the remote world. You have to give people those those chances to break that up a little bit.
I think Suzanne Madura from CG is actually given some other examples if everyone can see on the chat, that they're creating lightning sessions aim to candidate conversations. So You know, in terms of a multitude of topics, I don't know if he wanted to talk about that, just really listening. And with all the changes that have occurred with within the pandemic timeframe and Black Lives Matter and, and things that just sort of affect all of us during this period of time and beyond.
Yeah, the listening sessions started the first the first ones that we had were around the whole diversity and racial inequality issues that are going on in America right now. So if people had an open forum with our business unit, Senior VP, the pretty much it was a safe space, you could express your side of the coin you're on and get get that out and really have open discussions about things like that.
Okay, good. So Hon, what about you and your end, anything that you want to talk about in terms of Yeah, keishon listening culture, and
there's some jobs that you're For sure, absolutely. Yeah, I know our president in our new Chief Human Resources officer key people and culture, we are going to start having listening sessions as well around especially the Black Lives Matter movement, and among other areas as well, starting in about a week or two, that was actually product in our last townhall session last week. So, you know, we definitely want to continue to engage, you know, all of our employees, you know, we've sent out survey monkeys probably every couple weeks as well on breyers topics to kind of keep tabs on on how they're doing and certain ones that you know, they mark that they want to someone from people culture, we try to follow up with them on certain areas. You know, I've had many conversations with other employees as well, maybe going through some stressful times, you know, whether personally professionally whatever it may be just kind of making sure that everyone is still mentally Okay, as well because it is tough, right?
Because we're not used to working remotely so much and not having that face to face interaction and engagement with with your fellow peers. So Yeah we do all kinds of different Can you see anyone working in the office? Is there any physical distance working in the office at either of these
companies?
Yeah, so for us
I think we only have our main it one of our senior IT folks works in the office she basically helped set up the equipment and ship out all that stuff and one of our just property managers essentially is that the owner pretty much everybody else is working remotely they need to come to the office we have to hit the let someone in people's culture knows that we give our you know, our I mean patient running the building a heads up and that's pretty much it, but everybody else's parents been 100% remote since March.
So there's, um, someone's asking versus asking, do you have any words of wisdom Han key advice for small businesses learning the ropes while hiring remote?
Yeah, that's a great question. I would say first and foremost. is just setting expectations up front right? I don't think we should be wishy washy about it, you know, if a position is going to be remote and stay remote, tell them if the position is going to remote and eventually we'll have to travel to Pittsburgh once this pandemic is over, tell them that as well. I think honesty and transparency, you know, trumps everything. That's the way we go about recruiting and and making sure that, you know, they understand the values of our company and our employees. And I think that's really, really critical on to that. Branding is important as well, you know, we had a shift a lot of our focus from like the typical college job fairs and recruiting through, you know, other career fairs and moving that online. So we've participated obviously with you guys PTC Anna and a virtual fair. You know, in the past, we've also done a lot of, you know, spend on LinkedIn as well and just kind of revisiting our band and kind of sending out different types of networking clothes with marketing, obviously, folks, you know, different types of branding and get reaching out to just technology. all across the country, you know, a pattern where all of our senior leaders, many of them, architects and engineers, senior engineers are coming to kind of do you know, q&a type question answers sessions with some of the candidates that are applying as well. So just making it just feel like you know, they have a way to reach us, virtually.
So to either of you have either of you done any face to face hiring over the last couple of months?
No, not at all.
Like Pittsburgh, and many places in terms of relationships, they're pretty important. So it'll be very interesting to see what happens in the whether we get to this post COVID in the next few months or not. Do you have any estimated time where you think you're going to the office or right
now is that open for both of you? So for us, it's pretty much client driven.
As mentioned earlier, we like to be close to our clients and with our clients. So if I Known as remote or remote, and currently right now in Pittsburgh, we're all we're all remote. So our offices, our local offices also close down at the moment. You get a waiver if you're required to go in by claim. But right now, none of our clients are saying that.
What about iams and a 30 day notice?
Yeah. So we're probably going to revisit and look at everything again after Labor Day just to see, but as of right now, we have no timeline as to when we plan on going back like that.
So thanks. So. So in terms of CGI, it's just getting closely aligned with their customers and making sure we understand their criteria as well. As Han is saying right now there's a September deadline. So I want to wrap up this and there's a statement that Michael signer who's comes and listens quite often then I just want to share relationships are important in Pittsburgh. This work from distance for the next year ahead is an opportunity to initially connect and later move new people to It sounds like a great opportunity, especially for us. That's a guy with a glass half full look and a big, you know, very bullish on Pittsburgh. But I think that everyone needs to know that the websites you should know everyone's websites, I believe cgis website has been posted as well as teletrack. If not, it's really easy to find out what they're hiring for. And hopefully, but we've shared the emails of both of us, and people can reach out. I know, this isn't just a small amount of time, but hopefully it gave our listeners a little bit of a peek into what the opportunities are, and what lies ahead for both of the companies here. So you're growing, and you're committed to the region and you're supporting work from home or work remote and realize that school is coming in session two, so I know that that is going to affect all of us who are parents of kids who are in schools. So the word is flexibility, right? It's adaptive and flexible. So I want to thank CGI and I want to thank teletracking both will and Han for the time that they've spent today. And for everyone who has joined us today. You heard that we have a packed week coming up, and we'll see you tomorrow. So thank you all for joining.
Thank you.
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