All-In Recruitment is a podcast by Manatal focusing on all things related to the recruitment industry’s missions and trends. Join us in our weekly conversations with leaders in the recruitment space and learn their best practices to transform the way you hire.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Lydia: Welcome to the All In Recruitment podcast by Manatal, where we explore best practices, learnings, and trends with leaders in the recruitment space. If you like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for our weekly episodes.
I am your host, Lydia, and with us today is Hubert Winter of Quest Diagnostics. It is great to have you with us, Hubert. Thanks for making the time.
Hubert: Thank you for having me. I would love to talk a bit about my work, just because I like working in this field of technology in HR and really understand how I got there when I'm doing it for many years and am pretty passionate about it.
Optimizing Hiring for 57,000 Employees
Lydia: You have plenty of things to share with our audiences as we go along this interview. So, going back to what you just said, all of your experience working with technology, corporate technology, and now you're looking into HR technology, what sort of pivotal points in technology that you can share in this journey that you've had?
Hubert: Because I'm a bit older, I have experienced a lot so far, everything on-site and in-house, to building it on your own. The big thing was actually cloud technology, so you don't need to have everything inside anymore, and you outsource more and more. But you also trust vendors with that because you don't get everything you would like as a company, and you standardize more due to processes given to you by your cloud vendor. You don't need to invest in your technologists anymore. You need more people who understand the business process, the solution, and what is provided by the vendor.
Now, everyone is looking at artificial intelligence and how it can help in HR, our employees, our managers, and our HR professionals.
Lydia: So in Quest Diagnostics, you have been the Senior Director for HR technology now for several years. What are some key areas you are looking into for technology within the HR side, Hubert?
Hubert: I'm working in HR, reporting to our head of HR. I have a counterpart in IT who works with me, but overall, I'm responsible for the technology in our HR space. I mean, we now have 57,000 employees—most of them are hourly employees—and since we are a big company, we hire 10,000 to 15,000 people every year.
So, starting from this process, it's about getting the right talent in quickly. Because, as you can imagine, if we don’t get talent in on time, it costs us money—we don’t generate revenue if a position remains open for too long. On the other hand, we have highly qualified people in, let's say, our research and development department. We have pathologists working for us, as well as medical professionals, which involves a very, very different hiring process than what we have for hourly employees.
Lydia: So, how would you describe the difference between these two? One is very niche, very specialized, and the other is hourly. How would you describe the difference generally in the hiring process?
Hubert: I think it's mostly about time to hire and the selection process. It even starts with how employees apply. You wouldn’t expect a person we hire for, let’s say, a part-time job as a driver—someone who picks up specimens and works, say, four hours a day—to go through the same recruiting process as a medical professional. So, it’s very, very different.
On our side, we also have a slightly different organizational structure built around it. We have recruiters who specialize in hiring our medical staff and research staff. On the other hand, we have recruiters who focus on hiring more quickly, like for the logistics driver role I just mentioned.
Yeah, so it’s a very different process, with very different time-to-hire and decision-making. On one hand, you may have, let’s say, 10 interviews. On the other hand, you may have just one with the HR recruiter.
Making HR Tech Work for You, Not Against You
Lydia: So, in terms of HR technology that is used across these different processes, what kind of impact does that make? How does that impact your assessment of HR technologies that come in?
Hubert: Technology is best when it just works. You know, that’s the one thing that’s really important to me. It might sound a bit silly to say that technology is just something that works, but we all know that when you rely on something day by day, and it suddenly stops working for whatever reason, it’s extremely frustrating.
Take recruiting as an example. If we can’t hire a person, that’s really bad. Managers get upset, and candidates may move on and apply for a job at another company. So that’s the first thing, it needs to work. But it also needs to help us be efficient, especially with the selection process. I’m not talking about AI making decisions or anything like that because then you run into issues with biased decision-making and so on. You have to be very careful about that. It’s really just about presenting the right candidates to the recruiting manager.
Because if you have 200, 300, or even 400 people applying for a job, you can’t go through 400 CVs. Even with a recruiting staff involved, you don’t want to manually review 400 CVs. So there needs to be a process that helps compare candidates based on the material they provided. It should be structured so that the manager can quickly find the right person they like.
Then there’s scheduling interviews, which is another challenge. On one hand, employees within the company have specific schedules, but those schedules aren’t visible to candidates outside the company. So you need tools and technology for that. Otherwise, something as simple as scheduling an interview becomes really difficult.
And then, there are legal requirements that need to be fulfilled—from a reporting perspective in the U.S. and other countries—where we have to prove compliance with various regulations, as well as our internal policies.
So, as I said, technology has to meet our requirements, but above all, it just needs to work.
Lydia: To kind of a guiding framework, or in general, just a way of looking at things when that could help you decide between having to maybe build your own custom solutions or buy existing platform.
Hubert: So lately, it's more about preferring not to build things ourselves. There are certain things we would—sorry, I meant that we don’t like to build things but instead subscribe to a cloud solution. However, there are special cases.
For example, if a patient wants to book an appointment at one of our patient service centers, that’s something we would build and connect to a scheduling system. But the scheduling system itself is something we would acquire as a cloud solution. So, while we build the appointment system—where the patient selects a time at a patient service center—the scheduling system it connects to is purchased.
On the other hand, in my case, I work in HR technology, so I have nothing to do with the appointment system itself. However, I am involved in integrating it into our system to ensure we have resources available in the patient service center.
Another example is our employer solutions. We have a great program for our employees called Blueprint for Wellness. When it comes to health, we look at different criteria—things like blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and even measurements such as belly button circumference to assess obesity. If an employee meets at least three out of five health criteria, their healthcare premium is lower. So, we incentivize employee health.
Now, the technology behind this program is integrated with HR technology and employer solutions to manage testing and ensure incentives are applied correctly. This part is built in-house. However, the processes that help employees select the right benefits and handle premium deductions are managed through a cloud solution.
Why HR Tech ROI Isn’t Just About Cutting Costs
Lydia: Moving on from that question, how would you build the business case for major HR technology investments, and what sort of maybe metrics do you have to use to demonstrate ROI from this?
Hubert: This is actually the biggest issue. I mean, it’s easy if, let’s say, you have a solution implemented—let’s stick with a cloud solution—and you pay, for example, $800,000 a year. Now, if a competitor offers a similar cloud solution for $600,000, you save $200,000 per year. But you may have an initial investment. Over a five-year period, you might save $1 million, but if you have to invest $200,000 upfront, your business case comes out to $800,000 in savings.
However, very often, it’s not that straightforward. More often, the new solution allows employees or managers to be more efficient, and that’s where it gets tricky. For example, if I have 5,000 managers and save each of them one hour per week, I could estimate an average manager’s salary—let’s say $100 per hour. Now, $100 times 52 weeks gives you the potential cost savings. You build on that idea to make the business case.
The challenge is that this doesn’t represent real money saved because you won’t reduce headcount just because of this one-hour gain. However, if you take these efficiency drivers into account, you can still make a solid business case. Even if it’s just an hour per person, technology solutions that improve efficiency can lead to bigger revenue opportunities. Sometimes, these benefits are difficult to quantify, but it’s possible.
In most cases, you don’t have a simple cost-cutting case like reducing subscription prices or eliminating headcount by saying, “We don’t need these specific roles anymore because of the new solution.” The problem is also that, at least for me, I don’t like cutting jobs just because of a new system—I always try to find other valuable tasks for those employees.
That said, reducing headcount is often the easiest way to justify cost savings, especially in a department like HR. We can’t directly increase revenue; we can only cut costs. Revenue impact is more indirect—if we make employees more efficient, they can focus on generating revenue for the company.
But overall, I’d say our main focus is on reducing costs. However, we should never overlook the indirect benefits, such as making employees and managers happier and enabling better decision-making. These factors don’t generate immediate revenue, but in the long run, they add value.
When I create a business case, I differentiate between direct cost savings and indirect benefits, listing them separately. Many senior executives want to see immediate dollar savings, but they also understand that long-term benefits—like happier employees and more effective managers—are just as important. While harder to quantify, these factors absolutely belong in a business case.
Driving HR Tech Adoption in a Large Organization
Lydia: When it comes to new HR technologies just coming into the company, how do you look at making sure that there's successful adoption of these technologies across an organization, especially one is layered and large as Quest Diagnostics?
Hubert: I started with Quest a little over four years ago, in the middle of COVID. It was July 2020, and I had my laptop home-delivered. I never met anyone in the company in person, and that already impressed me—how you can onboard during a time when you don’t meet anyone. Even today, I work remotely. I go into the office a few times, but overall, I work remotely.
When I joined, one of my key tasks was building a team. So, speaking from my side, the first step was having the right people. Then, I had to think through our HR technology roadmap—laying that out and establishing some guiding principles. Like you mentioned before: Do we buy or build? When do we make these decisions? Where do we have deficiencies?
One of the first things I built was a customer advisory board. I meet with supervisors and managers once a month to discuss how we can help them manage their employees. I also use them as a focus group—my "guinea pigs" for new technology. I ask them, “Would you be open to using this? Is this something that would be useful to you?”
Very often, I think a certain technology will be great, that they’ll love it. But then they tell me, “No, what we really need is a report showing employee anniversaries and birthdays.” It sounds simple, but something like that can have a bigger impact than the advanced technology I had in mind. So, I take that feedback and adjust our priorities accordingly.
Another important factor is looking at statistics—how many people are logging into the system, how they are using it. It’s better to analyze this at scale, looking at 100,000 employees rather than focusing too much on individual stories. If you concentrate on a single case, it might be an outlier due to unique circumstances, and you can’t always solve for that.
Instead, I focus on covering 80–90% of cases. The remaining special cases have to be handled manually. If you try to design technology to accommodate 100% of cases, it gets tricky. Payroll is the big exception because we have to pay everyone. But even in payroll, not everything can be automated. Sometimes, special bonuses or adjustments need to be entered manually—still processed through payroll, but not fully automated.
That’s where you have to make decisions—because automating everything can get expensive.
Lydia: So what is the next step that you should take, having made this investment, having rolled it out? What is the next step that should be taken if you've not seen the ideal figure?
Hubert: We have one example. I wasn’t here when our system was implemented, but we had introduced position management as part of the core HR system. Some people liked it, some didn’t. It was new for Quest when it was implemented. However, we ended up creating a new position for almost every new hire, which is not how position management is supposed to work. Ideally, you want to hire into existing positions.
So, we conducted interviews with different stakeholders, starting with managers, to understand how they used it. They told us, “Yeah, it’s just bureaucratic overhead for us because we always have to go through this position process,” and it was complicated for them. Then, we spoke with finance and HR, and in the end, we realized it was the wrong approach. We decided to take it out.
Right now, we handle headcount planning differently. We had never really done headcount planning using position management—it had always been dollar-based rather than resource-based. So, in that sense, removing it was the right decision.
For anyone in a similar situation—if you see that the numbers aren’t adding up, people aren’t using the system, and surveys or feedback show it’s not helpful—you should consider removing it. However, removing a system is often more complicated than implementing one. You have to do reverse engineering, reverse change management, and all of that isn’t easy.
But in our case, it was worth it. After talking to people, they’re much happier now. As I mentioned before, most of our recruiting is for hourly employees, where hiring is primarily job-based. In theory, position management would seem straightforward because you’re hiring for the same roles repeatedly. But that’s not how it works for us.
Sometimes, we combine positions, move roles to different locations, start with a junior position, or restructure by turning one senior position into two junior roles—or vice versa, merging two junior roles into one senior position. Position management simply wasn’t flexible enough to support this kind of process.
Turning Hiring Metrics into Stories That Resonate
Lydia: In this case, obviously a lot of data has informed that decision making, what do you do, what do you stop, what do you continue, and what is really useful for the end user within the company. So that's definitely an example of how data strategy has also helped you make those decisions, right?
Hubert: That's right, absolutely.
Sometimes, it's not just about the data. You have to tell a story with the data. People like to hear stories. They don’t want to just hear that we hire a certain number of people every year. Sometimes, it's more effective to tell the story of how we hired one person and then weave the data into that narrative. That approach resonates more with people than simply saying, "We hire thousands of people a year."
This kind of storytelling with numbers isn’t actually difficult. It’s about bringing in anecdotes that you’re familiar with. That’s also why I believe it’s important to stay in touch with your customers—especially in my role. As I mentioned earlier, we have a customer advisory board, and we regularly send out surveys.
For example, we send a survey to every new hire, as well as to their manager, recruiter, and recruiting manager, asking questions like: "Did you like the process? How was it? Was it difficult? What can we do better?" Then, we use that feedback to make continuous improvements.
We always prefer to improve in small steps because it's easier. But sometimes, you also have to take big steps. As I mentioned before, with position management, that was a big step, but it had to be done. Sometimes, it's better to tear something down and rebuild it with a new approach rather than trying to fix something that isn't working
Lydia: So in terms of when we look at companies that are just starting out their HR transformation journey, what are some key points that you would like to share with them, or experiences that might be useful for them as they look into bringing in more technology for HR?
Hubert: I think the most important thing is to think of a roadmap—not as something you create for the next five years and then never change but as a dynamic plan. Specifically, I’m talking about a technology roadmap.
You need to identify key areas and maybe even build a heat map to highlight challenges. For example, in recruiting, you might have inefficiencies or bottlenecks. Again, talk with people, analyze the numbers, and see where you can create a business case—whether it's by hiring faster or streamlining processes to improve efficiency.
For each area, I would first create a heat map, then outline the roadmap for resolving those issues, and finally, define the future structure. The future structure could be something like, "We want one cloud solution for everything." But in a large international company, that might not be feasible. You might have different payroll systems for different countries or unique processes that a single vendor solution can’t fully support. In that case, your strategy needs to reflect those realities.
Before making decisions about your roadmap, establish clear guiding principles. What are your priorities? Should the system be highly efficient? Easy to maintain? Or is the complexity of your business unavoidable, requiring a larger investment? Maybe user satisfaction is the top priority, but cost is also a major factor. Identifying these decision-making criteria upfront is crucial.
Write them down first, then build your roadmap. Use a heat map to highlight where investment is needed the most. Don’t be afraid to revise your roadmap annually. Check if it still aligns with business goals. Maybe the business model has changed. Maybe there’s more budget available, allowing for greater investment—or perhaps funds are tighter, requiring a different approach. These decisions should be revisited every year as part of your budget planning.
Lydia: Thank you very much, Hubert, for your time and your valuable insights. So whoever is listening in who might want to pick up a conversation with you, what is the best channel to connect with you?
Hubert: The best, I would say, is LinkedIn. Just send a connection request, and I will respond or accept it. We can then have a chat via email or in person. Absolutely, because I personally love talking about HR technology and meeting new people.
Lydia: Thank you again, Hubert. And we have been in conversation with Hubert Winter of Quest Diagnostics. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe to stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All In Recruitment.
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