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On Coming Together https://lnkd.in/gucMBQji Henry Ford captured something timeless about teams when he observed: coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, working together is success. In 25+ years of building and leading talent organizations — and as a Detroit-based leader watching successive waves of automotive transformation — this principle has been one of the most consistently true. The practical implications I see across the teams I've led and the client teams we serve at TRG: 1. Coming together is hard. Getting the right people to choose your company in the first place — over competing offers, over the comfort of their current roles, over uncertainty about what your organization will deliver on its promises — is meaningful work. Most companies underestimate how hard this is in talent markets where capable people have options. The companies that have built compelling employer brands, strong candidate experiences, and credible promises about what working there is actually like — these companies are doing the work of "coming together" deliberately. The ones that haven't are usually filling roles slowly, with second-choice candidates, who arrive with skepticism that takes months to overcome. 2. Staying together is harder. Getting people to stay — through difficult quarters, through reorganizations, through compensation cycles, through competitive pressure — is the next-level challenge. Most companies focus disproportionately on hiring relative to retention. The math doesn't support this allocation. The high performers walking out the back door usually cost more than the new hires walking in the front door save. The retention work — manager development, career growth investment, recognition, compensation maintenance, cultural cohesion — is what separates companies whose teams stay together from ones who keep cycling through people. 3. Working together is the actual goal. The team that stays together but doesn't work together effectively is producing static, not progress. The team that has figured out how to integrate diverse capabilities, navigate productive conflict, deliver consistently under pressure, and continue developing across years — this is what high-performing teams actually look like. Working together well requires deliberate work. Team norms. Decision rights. Conflict resolution patterns. Recognition systems. Shared accountability mechanisms. None of this happens by default. 4. The patterns scale across the organization. The team-level dynamics scale to the organization-level dynamics. Companies whose teams have figured out how to work together produce different outcomes than companies whose teams are technically together but functionally not. For senior leaders, the work of building team-level capability is often the highest-leverage work available. It compounds across years. It shapes everything else. Make the investments. The compounding over years is significant. #humancapital

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Why Technical Staffing Has Become More Specialized — and More Strategic (Part 2) https://lnkd.in/dbbbV8F 4. Evaluation has become more rigorous. The technical interview process has evolved. Take-home assessments. System design discussions. Live coding sessions. Behavioral interviews calibrated to specific roles. The companies that have built sophisticated evaluation processes hire dramatically better than companies still operating on conversational interviews. The staffing partner that doesn't understand the modern technical evaluation landscape sends candidates who fail in ways that internal teams could have predicted. 5. Speed matters more than ever. The best technical candidates with strong skills are usually placed within 7-14 days. Companies and staffing partners operating on 4-6 week timelines are systematically missing the top candidates. Moving fast — without sacrificing rigor — is the operational discipline that separates effective technical staffing from ineffective. What we work on at TRG: Deep technical specialization. Our recruiters often have technical backgrounds themselves. They understand the difference between someone who claims React expertise and someone who can actually build production-grade React applications. They can have substantive conversations with candidates about their work, not just about their availability. Client partnership. We invest time understanding our clients' actual technical needs — beyond the job description. The technology stack. The team dynamics. The technical challenges. The cultural patterns. This understanding is what allows us to identify candidates who will actually succeed in the role. Market intelligence. We stay current on what technical talent is actually paid, what they're looking for, what alternatives they have. This intelligence shapes how we engage candidates and how we advise clients. For any company hiring specialized technical talent in 2026 — the staffing partner that operates on 2010 methods is increasingly failing to deliver. The partners who have invested in modern technical staffing capability produce dramatically different outcomes. Make sure you're working with the right kind of partner. #technicalstaffing #recruitment #humancapital

Why Technical Staffing Has Become More Specialized — and More Strategic (Part 1) https://lnkd.in/dbbbV8F Technical staffing has changed meaningfully over the past decade. The model that worked in 2010 — generalist recruiters working from job descriptions, large databases of available candidates, transactional placements — increasingly doesn't deliver the outcomes companies need. What's changed: 1. Technical roles have become more specialized. The "software engineer" role has fragmented into dozens of specializations: front-end React developers, backend Java engineers, ML platform engineers, cloud infrastructure architects, security engineers, embedded software engineers, automotive software architects, FinTech architects. A generalist technical recruiter often can't credibly evaluate candidates across this range of specializations. The technical depth required has grown beyond what generalist recruiting can sustain. 2. Technical talent is more discerning about opportunities. The candidates who can credibly fill specialized technical roles have meaningful options. They evaluate opportunities on more than comp — technical challenge, team quality, technology stack, growth potential, work flexibility, mission alignment. The recruiter who can't speak credibly about these dimensions loses candidates to recruiters who can. 3. Sourcing has become more complex. The best technical talent is rarely actively job-seeking. Reaching them requires sophisticated sourcing across GitHub, technical communities, conference networks, alumni networks, and industry-specific platforms. Generic LinkedIn outreach has rapidly diminishing returns. The sourcing capability that produces results today is dramatically more specialized than what worked five years ago. #technicalstaffing #recruitment #humancapital #leadership

Why Corporate Culture Is the Most Strategic Talent Asset You Have (Part 2) https://lnkd.in/gCRWnH67 5. Cultural patterns travel through layoffs. The companies that handle layoffs with respect — clear communication, generous treatment, support for affected employees — preserve cultural trust that survives the difficult chapter. The companies that handle layoffs poorly — surprise terminations, cold communication, minimal support — damage culture in ways that years of subsequent investment struggle to repair. The cultural moments of truth are the difficult ones. Leadership is revealed in how those moments are handled. 6. Culture is shaped by the founder/CEO more than they recognize. The small behaviors of the senior leader — how they treat the receptionist, how they respond to bad news, how they handle disagreement, how they show up under stress — establish the cultural norms the entire organization operates within. Most CEOs underestimate this multiplier effect. The cultural patterns they're producing through their own behavior often surprise them when surfaced. 7. Culture is a hiring criterion that most companies handle badly. Most companies say they hire for cultural fit. Most actually hire for cultural matching — selecting candidates who look and sound like existing employees. The result: homogeneous teams that aren't actually adding the cognitive diversity that drives better outcomes. Real cultural fit is about values alignment, not background matching. The companies that have figured out this distinction recruit dramatically more diverse talent without sacrificing cultural cohesion. For any CEO reading this: culture is the most leverage-able strategic asset in your talent portfolio. The companies that invest seriously in cultural infrastructure — through hiring, promotion, leadership development, and operational discipline — produce talent advantages that competitors can't easily match. Make the investment. Sustain it. The compounding is significant. #corporateculture #leadership #humancapital #employeeengagement

Why Corporate Culture Is the Most Strategic Talent Asset You Have (Part 1) https://lnkd.in/gCRWnH67 Corporate culture has been one of those topics that gets discussed extensively and managed badly. After many years building teams across global operations and watching cultures form and fade, here's what I've come to believe: Culture is your most strategic talent asset — and most companies are unintentionally weakening it. What I see consistently: 1. Companies talk about culture more than they invest in it. The values posters. The mission statements. The cultural surveys. These artifacts often substitute for the actual work of building culture — which happens through hiring decisions, promotion decisions, accountability conversations, and leadership behaviors that get repeated thousands of times across years. Culture isn't built through statements. It's built through practiced patterns. 2. The single biggest cultural variable is who you promote. When the people who get promoted in your company match your stated values, your culture compounds in the direction of those values. When they don't — when high performers who treat people poorly get promoted, when politically savvy mediocre performers advance over higher-performing teammates — your culture compounds in the direction your behavior is actually rewarding. Most companies don't honestly examine the patterns in who gets promoted versus what they say they value. The gap between the two is usually where cultural decay lives. 3. Culture shapes who you can attract — and who stays. In talent markets where capable people have options, culture is increasingly the differentiator. The candidates with multiple offers choose based on more than comp. They evaluate which company they actually want to be part of for the next 3-5 years. Companies with healthy cultures attract talent that companies with toxic ones can't. The compounding over years produces meaningful capability gaps. 4. Remote and hybrid work has made culture work harder. The hallway conversations, the in-person mentorship, the cultural transmission that happened informally in pre-2020 offices doesn't happen automatically in distributed environments. Companies that recognized this and built deliberate cultural infrastructure have maintained cohesion. Companies that haven't have watched cultures erode. The shift to distributed work isn't reversing. The cultural work it requires is permanent. #corporateculture #leadership #humancapital #employeeengagement

We are seeking an experienced IT Infrastructure Analyst with expertise in Epic Integration to lead interface configurations and optimize data flows. Key qualifications include: - 7+ years of experience in IT infrastructure/integration, with a preference for 3+ years in a healthcare setting. - Proficiency in Epic Tapestry, specifically in Utilization Management, Enrollment, or Appeals. - Strong understanding of SQL and/or PL/SQL, along with medical terminology. - A proven track record of at least two major system implementations. This is a contract/consulting opportunity that is remote, with minimal travel required when the project goes live. Apply: https://lnkd.in/g7ytZYmQ

Why Sales Growth and Talent Strategy Are More Connected Than Most CEOs Realize https://lnkd.in/dhMMJdTW After leading sales operations at scale across multiple talent businesses — Kelly Services, K&A Resource Group, and now TRG — here's something I've come to believe about the connection between sales growth and talent strategy: They're more connected than most CEOs treat them. The traditional view: sales growth is the revenue function's job. Talent is the HR function's job. They're related but separate. The more accurate view: sales growth is overwhelmingly determined by the quality of the salespeople, sales managers, and sales infrastructure the company has been able to recruit, develop, and retain. A few specific patterns I see: 1. The sales hire profile determines the customer experience. The customer experiences your company through one human being most of the time. The quality of that human being — their judgment, their integrity, their technical understanding, their ability to listen — shapes the customer's perception of your entire company. Get the sales hire wrong and you're not just losing a deal. You're often losing the account, damaging the brand, and losing the opportunity to expand. The research is clear: the salesperson is the largest single factor in B2B buying decisions. Companies that understand this invest accordingly. Ones that don't are leaving meaningful revenue on the table. 2. Sales manager quality compounds across the team. Great sales managers develop strong sellers. Mediocre sales managers produce inconsistent results regardless of seller quality. Bad sales managers drive out the talent that would have produced. The leverage in sales growth often lives at the sales manager layer. Companies that have built genuine investment in sales manager development — selection, training, ongoing coaching, retention — compound advantages across years. Most companies underinvest in this. The ones that don't dramatically outperform. 3. Sales hiring discipline is often weaker than other hiring. The pressure to fill sales roles fast — combined with the difficulty of evaluating sales candidates — produces hiring decisions that are made on less rigorous data than other hiring. The result: variable sales performance, expensive misfires, and team disruption. The companies that have moved to assessment-driven sales hiring — using validated tools that predict actual sales performance — fill roles faster, with better candidates, who ramp quicker and stay longer. The ROI is dramatic and replicable. 4. Sales retention is often the weakest part of the talent function. Top sellers are recruited aggressively by competitors. The company that loses three top sellers in a year often discovers that the comp adjustment that would have kept them was a fraction of the cost of replacing them — let alone the lost revenue, customer disruption, and team morale impact. #salesgrowth #humancapital #recruitment #leadership

What 25+ years in the staffing industry has taught me about why most talent strategies underperform — and how to fix it. (Part 2) 4. Misalignment between recruiting and hiring managers. The most common breakdown I see in talent acquisition: recruiters and hiring managers operating with different definitions of what they're looking for. Recruiters source against their interpretation of the job description. Hiring managers evaluate against their internal mental model that wasn't fully captured in the job description. The result: months of mismatched candidate flow, frustrated hiring managers, frustrated recruiters, and roles that go unfilled longer than they should. The fix is straightforward but rarely done well: rigorous role intake, calibrated against actual market reality, with structured feedback loops as candidates flow through. 5. Failing to build internal pipelines while focusing only on external hiring. Most companies are dramatically over-reliant on external hiring relative to internal development. The cost of this is real. External hires are more expensive. They take longer to ramp. They have lower stick rates than internal promotions. The companies that have built genuine internal mobility — career frameworks, development investments, internal candidate prioritization, transparent posting — fill many roles internally that they would otherwise have hired externally. The compounding benefits over years are dramatic. 6. Underinvesting in retention while overinvesting in acquisition. Most companies spend dramatically more on hiring than on retaining their existing talent. The math rarely supports this allocation. The high performers walking out the back door cost the company more than the new hires walking in the front door save. The retention investments — manager development, growth opportunities, recognition, compensation maintenance — produce returns that acquisition investment alone can't match. 7. Treating contingent workforce strategy as separate from full-time strategy. The modern workforce includes full-time employees, contractors, consultants, RPO-supplied workers, project-based talent, and increasingly, AI-augmented capacity. The companies that integrate all of these into a coherent workforce strategy have advantages over those managing each separately. This is one of the genuine strategic capabilities our team at TRG helps clients develop. The integration is valuable. Most companies haven't built it. A closing thought: The staffing industry has changed dramatically over the 25+ years I've been in it. The companies we work with — automotive OEMs, FinTech startups, healthcare organizations, technology firms - all face talent challenges that didn't exist a decade ago. The companies that are addressing them strategically are building competitive advantages that will compound across the next decade. At TRG, we're privileged to partner with clients on this work every day. After 25+ years, it remains the work that matter most.

What 25+ years in the staffing industry has taught me about why most talent strategies underperform — and how to fix it. (Part 1) I've spent more than two decades in the staffing and recruiting industry — leading US Operations and Global Operations at Kelly Services, building businesses, and now as President of TRG, where we partner with companies in automotive mobility, IT, healthcare, and FinTech to solve their most challenging talent problems. Across all of that work, one pattern has stood out consistently: Most companies dramatically underperform their talent strategy. Not because their people aren't capable. Because the structural decisions around how they acquire, develop, deploy, and retain talent are getting in the way of what their teams could be delivering. Here are the seven patterns I see most consistently — and what to do about each: 1. Treating recruiting as a transactional cost rather than a strategic capability. Most companies measure their talent acquisition function on cost-per-hire, time-to-fill, and similar transactional metrics. These metrics matter. They are also the wrong primary lens for evaluating the function. The right lens: did we hire the people who would actually drive the business outcomes we needed? Are they performing? Are they staying? Are they developing? These outcome metrics are what determine whether talent acquisition is creating value or just filling seats. The companies that have shifted to outcome-based talent acquisition consistently outperform the ones still measuring transactional inputs. 2. Underinvesting in candidate experience. The candidate's experience during the hiring process is often the first real signal they get about what working at your company would actually be like. Slow communication, unclear expectations, disorganized interviews, surprise rejections — these signals shape candidates' perceptions before they ever join. The companies that have invested in genuinely excellent candidate experience — fast communication, clear processes, respectful rejection, transparency about timelines — attract talent that companies with poor candidate experience can't reach. The competitive advantage compounds across years. 3. Failing to build employer brand strategically. Most companies treat employer branding as something HR worries about. The reality: in markets where talent is scarce, employer brand often determines who applies, who accepts offers, and who stays. The companies that have invested deliberately in their employer brand — through honest storytelling, employee advocacy, Glassdoor management, and consistent messaging — recruit faster, hire better candidates, and retain them longer. #humancapital #leadership #recruitment #executivesearch #rpo #retention #employeeengagement