Jeff Standridge (Intro):
Welcome to season five of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. In this season, you’ll learn from successful innovators who have influential stories, practices, and strategies that will have your gears turning, prepare to be inspired, challenged, and empowered. This is the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys. Welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge, and I am flying solo today. The other Jeff, Jeff Amerine, is actually out traveling, and so it’ll just be me and our special guest today. So glad to be with you again. Our guest is Jonathan Romley. He is the founder of Global Talent Firm Lund and one of the world’s foremost experts on global talent management and the future of work. He has a new book that was released just a couple of months ago called Winning the Global Talent War, how to Find the World’s Best Employees and Thrive in a Competitive World. Through that book, Jonathan provides critical insights and methodologies that have transformed talent acquisition practices worldwide, from startup companies to Fortune 500 enterprises. Jonathan, good to have you with us today. Thanks for joining us on the Innovation Junkies Podcast guest.
Jonathan Romley:
Thanks, Jeff. It’s good to be here.
Jeff Standridge:
Good, good, good. So let’s start by telling our listeners, if you will, a little bit about your origin story. Maybe take a minute or two, talk to us about who Jonathan Romley is and how you got to where you are today as the founder and CEO of Lundi.
Jonathan Romley:
Well, Jeff, I’m from California, so I grew up in the States in southern California, moved up to the Bay Area and was involved in some pretty cool startups there. One of them sold to Google about a decade ago. So where I think the most interesting, that could have been the whole story, right? Yeah, it could have been the whole story.
Jeff Standridge:
I have one of those or two,
Jonathan Romley:
But Well, in the case of Lundi, that’s where the story really begins, because while we were a company based in Silicon Valley, this is a different company, not Lundi, the one that was bought by Google. We were half a dozen people in Palo Alto and a hundred people in Ukraine. That wasn’t a company that I founded. It was one that I was recruited to join as an executive, but I actually had never been to Eastern Europe, had been to Berlin, but that’s not actually in Eastern Europe. But in my mind at the time, that was a pretty unusual place on the other side of the world, and so well having something like over a hundred people in Ukraine in Kiev.
Jeff Standridge:
So where in Ukraine, by the way?
Jonathan Romley:
In Kiev.
Jeff Standridge:
In Kiev, okay.
Jonathan Romley:
Yeah. And well, I decided to do some traveling after that and went to Vegas as you do, went back to Berlin just because, and then I eventually went to Ukraine and well, I made a decision to move to Ukraine after a few weeks there. What we had done was 15 minutes in TechCrunch in the valley in Silicon Valley, and at the time, it was the largest exit of a venture-backed company in Ukraine, and the data point for foreign direct investment into technology. Now, the ecosystem, the startup ecosystem was pretty nascent a decade plus ago in Ukraine. But we’ve seen many more companies with a much cleaner, homegrown story than the one that I was involved in. But anyway, decided to stay and get involved in the tech ecosystem, which led to building businesses there, because I understood that if I wanted to build an AI research lab in Silicon Valley, even though what we did was pretty cool, it would still be pretty difficult for whatever company it was that I would start or get involved in to hire talent. And that’s something that almost all companies struggle with. And so I thought, well, okay, we did something cool. If I hang out here in Kiev, I’ll be able to build a team a lot easier than I would have in California, and people might be more sticky, and it might work out, and well, it did. It did. That company that I ended up starting, it didn’t, but that happens. We have hits and misses in life, whatever.
But well, that’s where I started to set up. And so I spent quite a bit of time in Kiev. I was living there for a few years, then I came back to the States, then I moved to China for a bit, did a cross border e-commerce venture out of Guanjo. And one of the things that we struggled with as we went, as I built a business in China, built a business also in Poland, built a business in Ukraine, and of course also built American companies in the us. And one thing that was universal between all these businesses is we often struggled to find the talent that we needed to grow the business to get our, even when we did raise money, having a bag of money is only a new bag of problems, actually, for sure, because then you need to spend it. And well, we struggled in all those businesses with finding talent and really how Lundi got started.
Well, there’s a whole bit of it, the book, but I mean, the short of the already long story that I’ve just told you is that I was sitting in Berlin again, sitting in Berlin again, sitting in Berlin again, talking to a buddy that had set up an operation in Poland, and they were struggling. It was a logistics operation, e-Commerce logistics, and they were struggling to find people. That sounded kind of strange because all of the data for that business indicated that it was a sound investment, that they made the appropriate choice of location based on unemployment, talent, availability, whatever the factors were that led this company into building a warehouse in the west of Poland. And they said, well, hey, we’ve got a problem. We built it, but nobody wants to work here. And well, that’s one of the reasons that we started this company actually. The way that we got started was by solving that problem for that company. And we first did it by physically moving around people for work, which is kind of like the old way to do it. And when Covid hit, we thought about, well, are we out of business or are we going to adapt? And what was a business initially built around moving people to work? Physical labor, mobility became a business today about moving work to people
Jeff Standridge:
Like it. So as you were going through that, I thought you were kind of pranking me and reading my own bio, because we have a lot in common. I started a company in Poland, worked for a publicly traded data analytic, and I don’t want this to be about me, I want it to be about you, but I want talk about where we’ve kind of crossed over about five years before you, I was just looking when you said a decade ago. Mine was about 15 years ago, started a company in Poland because I had gone to the UK to acquire as part of a publicly traded company called Axiom Corporation, which was the precursor to LiveRamp, if you know about LiveRamp, that’s in the Silicon Valley area now. But 21 companies, seven countries in Europe. We acquired them. I went to do the mergers and acquisitions, due diligence and the integration had a hard time keeping my developers in London because they kept getting pulled across the river by the financial institutions.
So I started putting developers in our Warsaw office and really doubled the size of the Warsaw office with employees that were supporting my business in the uk. And when I returned back to the US that were just supporting my business in the us, CEO said, how’d you do that? And had I not know how you did this? And I said, I just did it. And he said, well, I need you to go create a new company over there that does just that. So created a company in gsk, Poland, scaled it to about 350 people, and it was a global service center that we would have do our work for us out of the uk, out of the us, software developers, testers, database, administrators, what have you, getting ready to fly home. One particular Friday, I got a call on Thursday night that said, Hey, you coming home tomorrow? And I said, yeah. And they said, don’t need you to do that. Need you to go to Ukraine buying a company that’s based in Florida that has a software shop in Ukraine, need you to go put eyes on it. And that was in STO, down where the black fleet is.
Jonathan Romley:
Yeah, Crimea.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Beautiful place, by the way. And we ended up doing that deal. Then I went to China and started another global service center for the same company. Nanton China scaled it to about 150 people or so. But it was all about creating centers where we could take the work to them, not really hiring remote workers, but putting them in centers of talent, so to speak, and going from there. So anyway, we’ve kind of crossed paths in terms of similar kinds of work. Well, I want to jump into one of my first questions is that, gosh, during that time, and maybe even before that, we were talking about the war for talent, particularly in tech companies. We were talking about the war for talent. The war for talent has increased in its complexity. It’s crossed over into virtually every industry, even the skill trades. And what I’d like for you to do is talk about the landscape today that you see in terms of this concept of the global war for talent, and what things do we need to think about as employers and perhaps even get ready for as it continues to shift?
Jonathan Romley:
Easy question, big one to unpack, understand. So let’s start with the landscape. We used to compete locally for talent. That might mean in your city, in your region, in your state, locally now means your country, right? As companies hired from California, companies from California start hiring in Texas to reduce costs, and then they start hiring a lot more far away than Texas. So now local, if you’re an American company, just means hiring in the United States doesn’t mean hiring in your neighborhood. If you are now, of course, if you’re running a restaurant, that may or may not be true. If you’re in a business that requires physical presence, for example, if you’re a surgeon, it is a bit difficult, although hypothetically, not impossible to do it remotely now that they have surgical robots. But anyway, I think that this is just already a fact, right? Hiring locally now just means hiring anywhere in the US if you can. And unless the job requires physical presence in some physical locality, the shift from this now is while hiring locally, I think that if you’re hiring locally, remotely, or if you’re hiring anywhere in the United States remotely, because remember now local is the US. Well, what can be done in Boston can be done in Buenos Aires.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, for sure.
Jonathan Romley:
And I think that the shift that we’re seeing, particularly in large enterprises, is they’re looking at mandates for operational efficiency in the world that we’re living in currently in the business climate and a challenge. So there’s two reasons now, probably three, that companies start to look beyond the new local, which is nationwide to international markets for hiring. And well, two of those are related to expansion. One is expansion for operational efficiency or reducing talent costs compared to wherever you are in the world. The other one is of course, international expansion for growth. We’re launching a new, I don’t know, we’re taking our business to APAC, so we want to set up in Singapore and we need to hire a country manager or a regional vice president
And build out a team around them. And then the third one is just that we cannot get the people in place for the jobs that we are hiring for. We are either not competitive enough or it’s not that we’re not competitive, but everybody’s more competitive than us, or we don’t have the same budget. Now, I mean, it doesn’t matter where you are in the us. We work with companies in Silicon Valley at Lundi that they’re hiring all over the us even though they’ve got a headquarters in San Francisco, Palo Alto, wherever, they’re still hiring all over the US. So it doesn’t really matter if you’re in San Francisco, San Diego, New York, or the middle of nowhere, with all respects to the middle of nowhere, people are coming for your people.
Jeff Standridge:
You can’t just, yeah, no, I don’t mean to interrupt you. So I live in a small community, 70,000 people just outside of the capital city of Little Rock, Arkansas, a little community called Conway. Great place to live, great place to work, great place to raise a family, great place to start a business with the advent of the remote workforce or the proliferation, not the advent, but the proliferation of the remote workforce. People can now work anywhere, which means if we don’t stay on our game in terms of being a quality of place to live, work, start a family, grow a business, then they can leave here to go live anywhere else and continue working here. We want ’em to live here and work wherever. So that whole concept of remote workforce has a lot to do with the quality of where it is that they live and their ability to move somewhere else.
Jonathan Romley:
Well, Jeff, and when you talk about live here and work here and stay here, this is a problem that has affected international sources of talent through kind of the brain drain effect.
I think one example, although I wouldn’t call an example of the brain drain effect, is a country like the Philippines, which has double-digit GDP contribution from overseas remittances. And what I mean by that is that somebody goes to work abroad, like a special word for these overseas foreign workers, FWS, there’s a special line for them at the airport in Manila. It’s a little bit unusual, but nevermind that go abroad. And they’re not necessarily working in technology. So this is not a brain drain issue, but people go to work abroad and they send money home. But if you’re working abroad and you’re living abroad, well, you have expenses abroad. You’re not at home. You’ve got higher expenses when you’re living at home. So you’re not sending all that money back into the local economy. You’re sending a bit fraction. Now, a lot of that particular labor migration is about physical work.
But if we look at that from another perspective, if a person doesn’t have to move, moving around sucks, right? I mean, really, some people enjoy it. I enjoy it. I’ve lived in a lot of countries. But for your average employee, and not that employees are average, but if we’re making a broad stroke for your everyday average employee, if you said, Hey, you know what? We really want you to be a, I don’t know, an administrative assistant or an accounting analyst or just kind of a line knowledge worker type job, but we want you to move halfway across the world to do that job. Don’t worry, we’ll pay you more money. But well, the truth is, everything will be more expensive too,
Jeff Standridge:
For sure.
Jonathan Romley:
And so what you’ll end up with at the end of the month might not be the same. And I think the opportunity, just to finish the thought is for people to stay where they are, to stay in their community, to stay with their families. And I mean, that’s good for everybody. That’s good for the country where they are, because more money will flow into their economy. It’s good for the person in their family. They don’t have to move for economic opportunity. As long as the country where they are is safe, this is a much better route than shipping people to other countries or having people basically move in order to improve their economic outlook in life.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, for sure. I remember when I expatriated to the uk, I was blown away at the cost of living there. So completely, it’s expensive. Let’s talk for a moment about some of the strategies that you recommend to your clients and to companies that you work with that are trying to source talent from geographies out, maybe a single geography outside their own or multiple geographies outside their own.
Jonathan Romley:
The first thing that we recommend is what we call a global talent blueprint. And that’s before you build a house, you get an architect to get some blueprints, and you don’t actually maybe even hire a contractor. You don’t start pouring a foundation. You just start doing anything until you’ve approved the plan. And one thing that we see pretty often is that companies kind of, well, they make a plan, but that plan is based on maybe what they see other companies doing or some opinion of leadership in the business. And well, it might not be based on data. And I’m a pretty analytical person, and I like to have data when I make decisions. And what we find is that, well, many companies don’t take that approach. They say, Hey, you know what? Call centers come from the Philippines. Engineers come from Eastern Europe and shared service centers come from Poland or whatever, and manufacturing comes from China.
And you go, okay, well, everybody does that, so we’re just going to get on that bus, and that’s what we’ll do too. And the challenge with that is, and we see this a lot, a really common example is Costa Rica. We get a lot of inquiries at Lundi about hiring Costa Rica, by the way, Lundi in 70 countries. Costa Rica is one of them. But the truth is that Costa Rica is more like a signal for, I want to hire in a time zone that more or less matches the central US and I want to spend less money than the us. And I think that starting, I mean in anything in business, starting with what are we trying to achieve here is better than starting with a geography. Because you might say, okay, I want to cut costs by 60%. Or you might say, you know what? I don’t really, cutting cost is not the primary driver for this decision.
It’s resource talent availability for this role that we’re struggling with. So of course, we expect that if we hire someone that has a lower cost of living, that probably the talent costs will be lower, but it’s not the primary driver for this decision that is going to give you a very different path than I need to save 70% compared to my cost. And by the way, 70% compared to your costs, it is a little bit different if you’re in different parts of the us. If you’re in New York City or San Francisco, 70% of your costs, you might just go to Canada for that. You might not have to try too hard.
Jeff Standridge:
Well, lemme ask you this question. So what about startup companies, particularly what kind of resource do they need on this side of the equation to be able to effectively manage the cultural language aspects of having workers in other geographies? Right. And I’ve seen that myself, and I’d just be curious to get your perspective. It doesn’t have to be a startup company. It could be any kind of company. I just know that most startup companies are fearful of being able to properly manage the work because they are so resource constrained, right?
Jonathan Romley:
Well, there’s an approach that I would recommend to a startup and well, the first one is don’t hire people that haven’t worked in the startup before. Don’t hire people that haven’t worked in the startup before. I keep trying to invalidate that. Really, we try to invalidate that from time to time and bring somebody that’s only, I got a corporate backgrounds even into our company at a later stage, and it usually doesn’t work out despite our best intentions and their best intentions. So, well, here’s the thing. You want to hire somebody with a fair amount of autonomy. That doesn’t mean you’re going to hire a freelancer, but if you are a startup and you’re dealing with your first few employees, I mean, these are the same challenges that if you had any number of employees, if you’re a business in, well, if you’re a business in Arkansas and you have your employee handbook, which if you’re a startup, you probably don’t have an employee handbook, but anyway, you have your employee handbook written for Arkansas and you hire somebody in Argentina and you send them your Arkansas employee handbook, there’s going to be some gaps there that don’t make any sense.
And I think just one thing you have to be aware of, well, a few things. One, when you think about how this person’s going to integrate with the organization, you think about what’s your working style? So how do we work? Do we know what asynchronous means? Do we work primarily in documentation and in a way that doesn’t require we sit all day in a Zoom or a Google meet together? If that’s how we work. We’re already in a really good position to be able to hire internationally, but to focus on someone that has a high degree of autonomy. But when I say a high degree of autonomy, I don’t mean hiring freelancers because if we go to a website for a marketplace for hiring freelancers like Upwork, great resource. But look, 1% of this 1 billion plus knowledge workers in the world are on any freelancing website.
The opportunity for a startup or any business when they’re hiring internationally is not to access the talent pool that’s already working abroad and already working with international companies. But you’re also going to have to keep that in mind when you start working with somebody that they may have worked in other small businesses, they may have worked in other startup companies, but they may have never worked for an American or whatever your nationality or background is, and they may not be accustomed to our management style. You may have to make some adjustments as a leader to the way that you engage with your team. I mean, there are a lot of nuances to think about as you kind of go on that path, but well, I think those are a few important points.
Jeff Standridge:
Very good. So Jonathan Lundi’s, the CEO, Jonathan Romley is the CEO of Lundi. There we go. I’ve done that twice now. I’ve gotten my words mixed up. So he’s with us today talking about the global war for talent and how to win that war. Jonathan, give us the 32nd or so elevator pitch for Lundi and how you work in this space, and then tell us where our listeners, where they can get in touch with you.
Jonathan Romley:
Sure. At Lundi, we help people to kind of wrap their head around that challenge of scaling your business internationally, really at any size based on, well, a few of the international expansion mandates that we’ve talked about here, right? One which is trying to reduce costs. Another one is just expanding the business to new countries, and then finally fill in gaps in talent. And there are really two ways that we do that. The first one is through helping companies to make a strategy around hiring internationally. So that’s where are you going to do it? Why are you going to do it there? And does the data on that market support it so that before you start building a remote hub or opening an office or form a company or hiring remotely, in any case that you don’t start in a direction that is at least from a data standpoint, unlikely to be successful. Then the second part of what we do is help companies to identify that talent. And they’re kind of mutually exclusive. We can do one and not the other, but in any case, we have built over the last five years and really in a very short period of time, and amid an 18 month sprint in the middle of this coverage in more than 70 countries with local recruitment and HR professionals on the ground, that well can help you to hire lots of people all over the world.
So that’s what we do. We are on the web at Hello Lundi. That’s L-U-N-D-I. And well, if you want to learn more about the book, you can go to Global Talent War, global talent war.com, global talent war.com,
Jeff Standridge:
Very good, globaltalentwar.com, Jonathan Romley, CEO of Lundi. If you are thinking about expanding your workforce beyond your current borders, you don’t have a workforce strategy or a workforce blueprint, as Jonathan mentioned, they can help you with that. Or if you have that blueprint and you want to validate that blueprint and also start looking for the talent itself accessing and acquiring that talent, hellolundi.com. Jonathan, thank you so much for being with us today.
Jonathan Romley:
Thanks, Jeff.
Jeff Standridge:
It’s been a pleasure. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Hopefully, next time you’ll have both Jeffs here, and I won’t be fumbling over my words like I did today. Thank you so much. We’ll see you again.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. We hope you gain some valuable insights and inspiration from today’s conversation. Be sure to subscribe for more episodes featuring leaders in the forefront of innovation. And don’t forget to connect with us on social media to continue the conversation. See you next time.