EP98: Fike + Co - How to Scale with Fractional Leadership Solutions

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.

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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.

My name is Lydia, and joining us today is Anessa Fike, CEO and Co-founder of Fike + Co. Welcome to the show, Anessa, and thanks for joining us.

Anessa: Thank you so much for having me.

Doing Fractional Work Before It Was Cool

Lydia: Tell us more about the company, Anessa. Maybe, how you started it, what's kept it all going so far? I understand it's been 10 years now.

Anessa: Yes, 10 and a half years. So, Fike + Co really focuses on fractional and interim people and talent leadership. When we go into organizations, it's around the time when there's a transition or a transformation, or they're really looking to pivot their entire business, and they bring us in to help be that leader, that leadership, that expert presence in their organization.

We got into fractional work before it was even called fractional work. I jumped in and I thought, "You know what? I don't want to have an agency model." So, I looked around, and I thought, "I don't want to do that." I started out just myself at that point (we have a team now.) But at that point, I thought, "I don't want to be working myself to death. How do I do this so that I can fit what I love and what I'm passionate about doing into my life, as opposed to having it dominate my life."

So, I looked around and I thought, "I think I'm going to do what a lot of lawyers do and do retainers. and talk about how can I provide you a service for a flat rate fee every month for a certain amount of time." And that really worked. It was interesting explaining and educating early clients on what that looked like, because it was a very different business model from what they were used to, especially on the recruitment side. It was very much embedded recruiting and it was very much retained recruiting but it was a little different than your RPOs.

A lot of recruiting agencies, especially in the US, have gone to that embedded model now, but it was not something that you saw back then. So, that's how I started out. Over the last 10 years, we've had a team for the last six or seven years and have grown the organization since I founded it in 2013.

It's been a fascinating ride because we've actually been able to work with more than 120 organizations and companies around the world, and we've gotten to work with thousands of leaders in 30+ countries, and it has been amazing.

Lydia: Looking back, now you have that portfolio, but when you started out, you probably didn't and when you want to build a team, I'm quite curious to find out, how do you build that team when you're setting yourself out there to create that portfolio, and you don't have these names and these credentials to talk about?

Anessa: When I first started out, it was just me. We have really worked for the last 10 and a half years off of referrals and word of mouth, and I would say that’s probably at least 95% of our business. It was thinking back through, “Is there anyone that I want to work with that I’ve worked with previously that might be in a good spot to be able to come and work with me now?” When I was thinking through that, I thought about a person that I had worked with earlier, a couple of years before then, and she was actually an intern for me at an organization, and through her internship with me, she had decided, “I think I’m going to pursue HR for my degree program.” I reached out to her, and I said, “How much do you love your current job?” And she said, “It’s fine.” And I said, “Okay, would you like to come and work for me?” And she said, “Yeah, that’d be great, actually.”

So, it was just one of those things where I had a thought to myself, “You’ve got to know someone that you’ve worked with before and that you’d like to work with again.”

We’ve grown to have a small team and now we’re able to plan and also utilize everyone’s strengths for what projects and what teams they are working with. For instance, my husband actually joined me in the business right before COVID, and so he is one of the other fractional executives that work underneath Viking CO., and he is super great at employee relations and setting up entire HRBP programs within organizations. He loves spreadsheets, and he loves data. I, on the other hand, can do a spreadsheet but don’t love it. So for me, it’s like you find those amazing pieces that the people you’re working with are really good at and they really like to do, and you let them do that. That’s really been key for us in our success; focusing on what people like to do and making sure they’re doing more of that.

Lydia: In terms of scaling the business, have there been any challenges or obstacles that you've had to face or overcome? I'm sure there are, right?

Anessa: COVID was interesting. Because that was also a time when I think no one knew what was going to happen. So, it was a lot of, “Oh, geez, what’s this going to look like?” Especially for recruiting. Over the last four years, it’s really been up and down. It’s been this massive up and down, just extremes on both ends for recruiting and talent that we’ve probably ever seen in our lifetimes.

Actually, through COVID, we only had two full-time staff members. So, over the last four years, we’ve worked a lot with flexible resources as well. Flexible resourcing for me, and I think for a lot of organizations, is where you can get that competitive advantage as well. When we have other projects and when we need to pull people in, we have an amazing referral system. We have an amazing network of contractors and freelancers that we can work with, and we pull them in as needed, and they actually pull us into other projects, too. So, it works out really well.

What Is Fractional?

Lydia: Now going to fractional. You mentioned earlier that you were already in that space before it was even called fractional. Today you see it quite just about everywhere it's fractional this, fractional that.

How do you define that, and how did you go about presenting that idea when you started out and in what instances can businesses benefit from having fractional executive, so to speak?

Anessa: So, fractional is, I like to describe it in terms of advising, consulting, and freelancing because a lot of people think that fractional is one of those things, and it’s slightly different from all of those things. A fractional executive is someone who comes in and really is not typically there 40 hours a week. It’s not normally a full-time engagement. It can be, but it’s not normally full-time, 40 hours a week. Typically it’s for a couple of hours a week, and they pay you for basically a fraction of the time.

What you’re doing is you’re bringing expertise, likely across several businesses that you’ve seen and your executive experience, to an organization that might not be able to afford a full-time Chief People Officer where they are in their business yet, but they need that expertise, and they want to have someone who’s been there and seen that and can help them avoid pitfalls. So, they bring in a fractional executive.

And a fractional executive also does two things. They both do the strategy side of the business. So, if you’re looking for someone to come and help you strategize how to set up the people and the talent functions, then they also do the execution operation side of that. So, they’re doing both strategy and operations and execution.

When you talk about consultants, they typically come in to execute a strategy that already exists. So a consultant will come in and say, “Okay, this is your overall goal as a company. These are your OKRs or your KPIs. OK, this is the result that you’re looking for or something you’re trying to solve. OK, great. We’ll help you solve this piece,” And they take a piece out; they might give you loose strategy on that piece, and then they’re going to execute on that piece.

And so really, being able to have a fractional person in at that time is a competitive advantage for the business, and it also helps save the business from losing out and going down the wrong path and sometimes not being able to recover.

Lydia: That's a great point. In terms of looking at trends and matching the patterns with the needs, I'm sure you would have seen almost every way in which your clients benefited from this.

So, are there any success stories that you'd like to share with the audience in terms of getting the fractional executive through the door?

Anessa: There are lots of amazing case studies that we’ve had. For us, we’ve worked across different industries as well. So, for instance, when we were one of the first outsourced people—I would say at Uber—when they decided that they wanted to expand Uber Eats. When they first started Uber Eats, we worked with them on the corporate side to come in and help them expand all of the corporate roles that they were looking to have for Uber Eats on the East Coast, through the Midwest.

So, we helped them to figure out, “Okay, what is a little bit of workforce planning? What do we need? Who do we need in this role? What are we looking for? And really help them not only with the process on that side but also to help them find the people to fill those roles. So it was a brand new business function for Uber because Uber Eats didn’t exist. They were really just a ride-sharing firm at that point, and delivering food was not something that Uber was known for previously. So, that was a brand new business venture that we were brought in to help be successful.

Another one that’s more recent is NPR, National Public Radio, which is huge around the world, a nonprofit organization. It’s one of the very few, if any, media nonprofit organizations left in the United States. So, it’s an interesting dynamic of a business because you have a media organization that’s competing against the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post and even USA Today and some of the other pieces, and they’re still a nonprofit while everyone else is a for-profit business. That’s a really interesting dynamic of a business to come into. But we were brought in because we were asked to completely reimagine the talent team.

Lydia: The talent team alone?

Anessa: Yes, the talent team alone. So, we were asked to completely reimagine the talent team, to build the team back up, to reimagine processes, and how the team was even viewed internally. There wasn't a good view of the talent team previously at NPR. So, how do we even shift the mindsets in the organization? So that was really fun as well. Those are probably two of the stories that stick out in my mind of what we were able to do on that side, especially pertaining to talent and the recruiting side.

Don’t Use Tech in Recruitment as a Blanket Piece Across Everything

Lydia: You also talked about technology and implementing these tools. So, what do you think is the impact of recruitment technology so far in these 10 years that you’ve seen, or even before, in your previous roles as recruiting director and others?

What do you think has been the impact of recruitment technology—AI and even generative AI, things that we're seeing now in terms of efficiency, streamlining the process and just getting the results?

Anessa: It’s been phenomenal to watch. I am one of those people, though, who’s still really mindful, and especially in recruiting, I always want to make sure that the candidate experience is the best that it can be. Sometimes those AI functions can help you do that; sometimes they go against that. So, I think especially with some of the tools, you’ve got to vet why you need it, and you’ve got to make sure you’re doing the demos and make sure that you’re able to really dive into what is happening.

So it’s one of those things where it’s really getting smart with how you’re using technology, and not just putting technology as a blanket piece across everything because that’s not going to work. There is still this dynamic of humanity that needs to happen in recruiting because it’s still humans hiring humans. Yes, if we can combat bias as much as we can, absolutely we need to put that in place. But there still is a human relationship. It’s still understanding what that human can bring to the table. Robots and AI can’t see that yet so there definitely needs to still be this human-to-human dynamic.

I would say one last piece on the tech side is a lot of HR tech, especially in recruiting, is started by non-HR and non-recruiters. Understanding that allows you to understand why certain technology was built in certain ways because if someone’s looking into our space and they’re trying to build tech, they don’t always understand the dynamics in place that we’ve all had experience with.

Lydia: So in terms of using data and the numbers that are being brought up by all these technologies, I mean, technology being the driver towards efficiency, but you also have the treasure trove that comes from data.

So, how do you make the most out of the data that you get from these technologies? User-friendliness is one thing, but also making sure that you know how to maximize or optimize that tool is something else.

Anessa: Data is the key piece in anything that you’re doing, but I always like to caution people to say, that data is one point. It is one piece of everything, just like on the people and HR side, I often caution people not to just use employee engagement surveys. That’s only one piece. Have other conversations, have human dynamics, have those one-to-ones, those chats with people, to understand both the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of it.

So, I think that for data, it is understanding and being able to discern when the data is useful when something is off with the data, what the key source is—you know why it might be off. But also using that to show trends, using that to show how you can move forward in the next six months based on what the last six months were like.

But I really think that in a lot of ways, we’ve almost moved too much into the data camp, and we need to come back to the middle. I think there’s a pendulum that swings quite a bit in a lot of these things. For me, it really is making sure that you’re taking the data piece as just one part—that is the quantitative part. You also need the qualitative part. You need the anecdotes. You need the context. Because if you just go forward on the data, sometimes the data is telling you something that you might have just a very small piece of understanding of the whole pie about. So you really need to understand as much of the whole pie as you can before you move forward.

Challenges a Chief People Officer Faces

Lydia: Anessa, moving on to the people space. We talked about fractional Chief People Officers and fractional executives. But in your experience, having been in the talent space for all this time, has the role of Chief People Officer changed over these years? Especially in the past critical three years that we've been seeing?

Anessa: Yes, absolutely. I think the Chief People Officer right now has the hardest role in the C-suite. The reason is because, number one, we are dealing with people who are really nuanced and really complicated. We have the most nuanced and complicated piece of the business. It’s also, in a lot of organizations, what makes the business the business. It’s the people that make the business a business. They are huge assets to an organization.

I saw a statistic a while ago that said that 50 years ago on Wall Street, the companies on the S&P were 80% inventory and 20% intangible assets, and that’s where they got their value from. Well, that’s flipped. Companies now on the S&P get 80% of their value from intangible assets, which includes people. Only 20% comes from inventory and very tangible assets.

So, if you think about it, your Chief People Officer is in charge of 80%, or nearly 80%, of a company’s value. It’s nuanced and complicated. We’re also in charge of a lot of the organization’s value.

We keep getting things added to our plates. There is no other C-suite executive that I know of that has 150, 160, or 170 things that they are in charge of and need to keep tabs on every day. But a Chief People Officer does if you go down through and check on everything that has to do with people and talent and organization. It’s a lot.

Especially in the last three or four years with COVID-19, we’ve had to manage an entire pandemic and years of a pandemic and the stress and mental health behind all of that when that’s not our expertise. We are not former CDC people, we are not former pandemic experts, but we’ve had to be over the last three or four years. We had to be because we were on the front lines.

We had to figure out what to do with organizations and with people before any other agency told us what to do. We couldn’t wait on the CDC, we couldn’t wait on SHRM. We had to make calls before anyone else was making those calls because we had to make sure our people in the organization were safe.

I remember in 2020, in the early days of COVID-19, it was like the end of February, early March, and I remember as a fractional CPO at the time telling our clients, “You’ve got to have people go home. You’ve got to have them be remote if they can be remote.” And they said, “Oh well, should we plan for this for the next month or so?” I said, “Oh no, you should plan for this for the next several years.” And they said “Years?” At that point, they were like, “No way. Years?” And I said “Years. You should plan to work this way for the next several years.”

And all those leaders I worked with during that time came back to me and said, “Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for pushing us. Thank you so much for telling us to do that.”

Lydia: What was the initial outlook, though? Was it just, “Oh, this is just a two-month thing?”

Anessa: Yes, it was just a two-month thing. “We’ll be back in the office by summer.” That’s what everyone thought. Because we know how people react and this is what we do every day, I said, “Oh no, it’s going to be years before we get back to this.” So many of those people came back and just like, “Thank you. We were so glad we had you as a guide because everyone was saying we were going to go back to the office, and you knew better, and you kept saying, ‘Nope, nope, don’t do that. We’ve got to plan. We’ve got to put things in place so people feel supported when they’re at home because this is going to be a long-term thing.’”

Many of the things that we put in place then they still use today, and many of them are successful where their counterparts were not; their counterparts went out of business during that time. So, this is also the point of like going back to what fractional is because in instances when you need an expert, that expert knows exactly what to do and can literally save your business.

With a full-time CPO, they might not have had that experience across several different organizations to be able to do that for you. So, it was key in those times across several clients that I was a fractional CPO for at the time to say, “No, this is what we need to do.”

So yes, back to CPOs—it’s changed dramatically. Those who have had experience in HR and leading HR teams previous to COVID-19 and those after are two very different roles. I always like to say to people, “I don’t want to hear any expertise from anyone who hasn’t been in the trenches for the last three to four years because they have no idea what this role is now. They have no idea what HR teams go through on a day-to-day basis now.”

It has changed the landscape. We are not going back. Everyone keeps wanting to get back to like normal in 2020, as a society. We’re not going back there. We can’t. We’re all super changed by COVID-19. It’s not going to go back to fit back into the box. We now need to deal with a new reality of what the world is post-COVID-19.

Smoother Recruitment Process with Better Candidate Experience

Lydia: We've looked at COVID-19 and post-COVID-19, how things have changed, and the new CPO that we're looking at. So, let's envision the future of recruitment. How do you envision the future of recruitment, or work for recruitment professionals in the coming years?

Anessa: Absolutely. So, I think it’s almost like going back to the tech piece. For me, it’s about how you get smart with the tech you can utilize to almost empower and make your work more impactful, but not replace you. It’s figuring out, I think, in the next five years, what are those pieces of tech that we can implement to make processes smoother but not at the expense of candidate experience. That’s going to be really key.

I think also during the last, probably the last two years, I would say candidate experience has been abhorrent. There are so many horror stories where I think a lot of people were so overwhelmed because their counterparts were laid off, or they have so many roles to fill, they’re so overwhelmed that they can’t take the time needed for candidate experience. I really think we need to get back to that. We need to get back to creating experiences that people enjoy going through.

Because I’m hearing, I don’t know what it is about the last couple of months, but I’m hearing from several friends in the space that they have seven to eight interviews, and then interviews keep getting stacked on.

For me, unless it is a C-suite role, or an executive role, there is no reason why you need to have more than four interviews. If you need to have more than four interviews, then you need to start over. You need to pull different people into the process because you don’t know what you’re doing and it’s very apparent.

Lydia: Why do companies have six to seven interviews, or even maybe 10? We've heard 10. Why do they need so many interviews?

Anessa: I think it’s a couple of reasons. In my opinion, number one, they don’t actually know what they want, so they’re trying to find the thing that they want. It’s like when you go shoppingม you’re like, “I need something new to wear, but I don’t know what it is. Oh, I’ll know it when I see it.” That’s how companies recruit. It’s like, “I’ll know it when I see it.” Because then we just keep going on this thing for whoever knows how long because they don’t know what they want.

Number two is, I think that recruiters are still bombarded and overloaded—the recruiters that are in the organizations—because of the layoffs, budget cuts, the resource cuts. They’re overloaded so they can’t give each process the time and attention that it needs.

I think the third reason is people aren’t always trained to be good interviewers. So, what I have found over the years is that people want one more interview, one more thing, let’s have one more person talk to this person, it’s because they’re not actually confident in their ability to interview effectively. They’re not confident in their ability to figure out what questions to ask that person, how to interact with that person, to understand if they can do the role.

So, I think there needs to be this mechanism of training, this mechanism of understanding and teaching people how to do recruiting well. I have also found that when you’re able to take the time to train and teach people how to do great recruiting, there’s also less bias that comes into the program overall. Because you’re able to say, I’ve heard so many times—as I’m sure everyone in recruiting has— “I just liked them or I just didn’t like them.” And it’s like, “But why?” And if you can’t tell me why—if there’s no real reason, it’s just like, “I kind of feel it in my gut,” or “I just kind of like this, I have an instinct.” Okay, If you can’t tell me a pinpointed reason as to why you feel that way that’s based on their skills for the role, then I don’t want to hear it.

It’s those three things together that create these really long processes. Also, by the way, make that candidate experience way less stellar than it could be.

Lydia: Yes, and this is definitely going to be a lesson to be learned once you're in. Then you can do interview number five, and you've got someone who's just popped off, and you're like, “Oh, why is that?” You realize you've got to go back to the first step and try to look for the next candidate.

That's another time-consuming process altogether. That's one of the reasons that lengthens these processes and gives over, maybe resulting in the Glassdoor review.

Anessa: Yes, exactly.

Skipping Steps to Get The Results

Lydia: Anessa, you've shared so many of these recruitment stories, and fractional assignments that have come your way. In terms of recruitment, in your experience, what has been your most memorable recruitment story so far?

Anessa: I’ve had lots of fun ones over the years. It’s probably back to my early days because I think it was probably at The Motley Fool. The long story is that we had a relationship with AOL from when The Motley Fool started; that’s where it started—on AOL. Fast forward almost 15-20 years probably, we still had that relationship with AOL. There was a time when we were going to start to host a lot of their servers. We were going to have hosting mechanisms and take on a lot more of the tech side from AOL than we previously had.

I remember the CFO at that time came to me and said, “We’re going to need a lot of engineers really quickly.” And I said, “Okay, what’s ‘a lot’ and what’s ‘really quickly’?” So tell me, what am I working with here? And he said, “Well, if everything goes through and everything works out and we sign the agreement, we’re probably going to need 10 engineers in the next two or three weeks.”

So, I came up with a way that we were able to figure out how we could get enough people in the door to be able to result in 10 offers for engineers. What we actually did was we completely threw everything else out the door that we had done before. I gathered a bunch of engineers, I gathered a bunch of experts, and I said, “Alright, who is open to interviewing with me?” And I had probably 10, maybe 12 people raise their hand and say, “I’ll help you with the interview.” I said, “Okay, we’re going to block off two days. In the next three weeks, I understand you all have a lot going on. You’ve got deadlines; I understand. Can you block off two days for me? A day and a half, whatever you can give me; block it off.”

So, we all settled on one or two days—I think it was like one and a half, maybe two days. We settled on the dates, and we said, “Block these off. These are our interview days.” And then we went out and put out a different job description than we had ever been done before at The Motley Fool—and I had ever seen anywhere—and it basically was like, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Here is our process in full. Here is what we’re looking to find: We need 10 engineers within the next couple of weeks in every job description.” We were just like: “This is what we need, and here’s how we’re going to do it.” We put our entire process out there, “Here’s what to expect. Here are the dates of the interviews. So, be ready if you want to apply. These are the dates you’re gonna have to come in.” We put everything out there.

Lydia: You just bypass three or four steps.

Anessa: Exactly, and this was in 2011. This was 13 years ago that we did this. We basically were like, “We’re going to manage expectations for everyone. We’re going to say, this is what we want, this is what we’re looking for. Here’s how we’re going to go through this process. Here are the dates—you already know when you need to come in.” What we did is we actually found interview rooms; we literally had 8, 10, or 12 interview rooms, and they were blocked off as well. We had our person stay in the interview room, and they would just have candidates switch. So basically, it would be like, “Okay, every 30 minutes everyone switches.” And it was this well-choreographed logistical thing of, “Okay, go.” And we had people that would guide the candidates to their rooms whenever they needed to be. It was a whole event.

Then after all the interviews were done, we said, “All right, everyone is going to talk about everyone they interviewed. We’re going to decide when we leave this room in the next two or three hours who we’re going to send an offer to.” It was like the biggest debrief you’ve ever seen. It was like, “Okay, let’s just get everyone in a room and debrief.” We went through and found out these are the 10 we’re going to offer. By the way, we have got two or three backups.

So, I sent out the offers. Everyone accepted. We just got creative. We figured it out. We worked as a team and got it done. It was a phenomenal thing for me. This is why I love this story because I always think back to what we need to do to get things done, what is our time dynamic, and throw everything else out the window. Then figure out how to do it right, so you get creative in those moments.

Lydia: It's also getting past the desperation like, “I need to get this done quickly. I need to tell them what they're supposed to expect.” Rather than back and forth, you cut the time spent going through all those communications and achieving those results. I think it's tremendous and congratulations on that.

It's great to see that whole process being reproduced or rather replicated in different instances. I think this is a great anecdote to share. Thanks so much.

Anessa: Absolutely, yes. It was a fun thing—doing it at the moment and also thinking back on it.

Lydia: This is great. I wish we could speak more about this process, but we're running out of time. So, thank you so much for your time and your insights, Anessa.

To those listening in, anyone who wants to know a little bit more about that brilliant process that you came up with, or they might want to pick up a conversation with you, where can they find you?

Anessa: Absolutely, yes. So, find me on LinkedIn—Anessa Fike, and connect with me there. Or you can go to my website, which is fikeandco.com.

I also have written a book that's coming out on February 20 and it’s called “The Revolution of Work.” So, if you want to get creative with how you're thinking about work and reimagining how we all work a little bit better, that book is for you.

Lydia: Excellent. Thanks again, Anessa. It's been great having you on the show.

Anessa: Thank you for having me.

Lydia: We have been in conversation with Anessa Fike, CEO and Co-founder of Fike + Co. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe to stay tuned for more weekly episodes of All-In Recruitment.