 Live from Washington D.C., if the Cube. Covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. And welcome back to Washington D.C. I think you can kind of guess where we are. I see the big Infor over my shoulder there. Inforum 18, along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. We are live here at the Walter Washington Convention Center for this year's show. We're joined by Martine Cadet, who was the Vice President of the Educational Alliance Program at Infor. Martine, good to see you. Thank you. And Jennifer Buchanan, who is a senior manager and head of the Infor practice at CFO Solutions. And Jennifer, good to see you this afternoon. Thank you. All right, let's talk about the program. Martine, you can give us, first off, the inside scope of this. And Jennifer, you're on the other side of the fence because the very people, the individuals that Martine and her program are training, you're hiring. Absolutely. So I want to hear first off, let's talk about the program in general. And then to you, Jennifer, about why? What do you find really attractive about these people? Martine? Absolutely. So the Educational Alliance Program is four years old this year, actually. So we're very excited about that. And what we really set out to do was build a talent pipeline that our company and our ecosystem of partners and customers can tap into. So there's been a lot of conversation about the fact that there's not enough talent to fill the positions that are in the industry. So we wanted to do something different whereby we could actually grow that talent organically. So instead of going to the oracles and the SAPs and having that revolving desk of, okay, I'm gonna leave this here and go to this competitor and work for them and be experienced, we need to find another way to be able to grow our talent so that as an organization, we can continue to be innovative and grow as we move forward. So EAP really serves within that gap. But we do it a little differently than some of the other programs. We really focus on not just identifying talent, but really training them on the industry's skill set. So what people learn in school is amazing, but it's usually more theory. How do you take that theory and really apply it to what is really needed in the industry today in a real job today? And that's where the educational alliance program really kind of serves in that niche. And generally speaking, the age group would be what then? So the majority of the people that we train are more colleges, so 18, all the way up to I would say early 30. So early in career talent is what we think about. Okay, are they in school? Some, yeah, the majority of them right now are in school, but we also welcome people who are outside of school. We've kind of involved our program where it's not just partnerships with colleges and universities, but we train people who come from training organizations like YesWeCode and New York Urban League and things of that nature in Europe is another great partnership that we have started having relationships with. So we do everything from the traditional integrate within a classroom setting to more of a bootcamp model where talent gets trained over the course of a couple of months to meet the business needs that we have in the here and now. Okay, and so Jennifer then on the hiring side of this, the advantage to you is what? Well for us, we're always looking for folks that coming out of school, whether it's a master's degree or bachelor's degree, that they have a little bit of a focus. Going into consulting and implementation services, there's a mix of skills that you look for. Some of it is that commitment to being a forthcoming service-oriented person, somebody with a little bit of perspective. And when we met the EAP students, that ambition just comes right out of those folks and they have a purpose in mind because they've started to get a little bit of a taste of the real world of what they want to do. So they've got context and they've got direction and a lot of the folks that we've met with had some good accounting and finance knowledge which we value, plus they had the IT component where traditionally if I just go to try to do some campus recruiting, I might get one or the other, but it's hard to get both. So you're trading that revolving door that Martine described, which there's still some of that going on, but you get a lot of tribal knowledge. They know where the skeletons are buried and they can fast-pass some of it. Trading that for excitement, diversity, maybe different type of creativity, certainly not as much. Well, that's the way it's done in the enterprise, right? Maybe discuss that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. The folks that what we need coming in have that creative element and they're not just punching out and doing maybe the theory that you had mentioned that they've had a little bit of experience on the practical side of things, of understanding how to apply technology and solve business problems. Because that experience that they go through in the EAP program is almost like a simulation and gives them a little taste of that. And when we talk about what we do and we introduce them to our business and try to look for a fit, they have better understanding of what we're talking about and what we do. So, Martine, in the four years since we first met, what has changed, has the scope of the goals expanded? What did you not predict that actually happened? Maybe you could share some of your experience. Yeah, so in the four years, we've gone deeper around role-based training. So when we started, it was more around exposing students to different career opportunities, to what is ERP? I've been in industry forever, but I was always more on the consumer side, so I didn't know what ERP was as a seasoned professional. So helping students see the opportunities there was kind of the initial focus and getting them to have a kind of a toe in the water. We've gone much deeper this year, in particular, going to role-based training. So what do you need? What skills and companies do you need to be an amazing sales professional versus somebody who's going into the development space or somebody who's going to manage kind of the cloud space, which is where our company is focused? So that's been one of the biggest evolutions that we've done within ERP over the last couple of years, and we're much more global than we were when we first started, so we're excited about that as well. And then in terms of things that surprised us, I think one of the areas that surprised us, it was a little bit harder to place students, frankly, than we initially had thought it would be, and so one of the ways that we've worked through that is we've worked with our talent science team, and they've been phenomenal in really helping identify fit. And so now we can have much richer conversations with the hiring managers around. Yes, I know that you would like an experienced hire, perhaps, but this is a reason why one of these more inexperienced hires is actually a great fit and will be your next superstar on your team. And on the flip side, we can have conversations with the talent around career opportunities that they might not have even thought about before, because now we've got kind of their fit for different roles. So we're certainly seeing in many business settings that gut feel is being replaced by data and fact. When it comes to hiring people, though, there's still that, well, there's several things. There's gut feel, there's rapport, there's biases, so are technologies like machine intelligence and programs like this cutting through that? Yeah, that's what we're trying to have happen. I mean, it's hard, it's hard. Everybody's trying to tackle these issues, but with technologies like talent science, with having programs which address the feedback of, well, I don't know where to find diverse talent. Well, if you go to the same three schools that you always go to that are, by nature, not diverse, then you're not going to find the diverse talent you're looking for. So if you can tap into a program where we go out of our way to make sure we're actually fishing in new ponds and that we're bringing amazing talent to the forefront that people can tap into, and we're really proud about that. Well, what's really key about that, and we were having this conversation earlier, is if you want to bring diversity into your organization, you have to look beyond your inner circle. But it's a pain to do that, it's time consuming, so what you've done is you've fast-pathed that and give an opportunity for somebody to dive in. Take it yourself, Jennifer, right, maybe? Sure, and some of those folks became part of our circle because a year ago we met a wide group of the folks in the EAP program and we were impressed by the broadness. Like I mentioned earlier, you've got some folks that are still sophomore, junior year, that are just getting started. We've got relationships founding with those folks. We have folks that were just getting ready to graduate and we have folks that have been in the workplace, came back. So we've got a breadth of experience, but folks from all over, and we were one of those folks that would go to the same school over and over and we would get good talent, but it's that breadth and that new perspective that comes in. And now that's our pipeline. We've got folks at different levels in their educational career that we stay in touch with and a lot of those students reaching back to us is what helped us make connections for folks to bring on. So how do you find me? If I'm an interested student, or how do I find you? Yeah. If I'm at a school, that's one question. And secondly, once I'm in, is it like ROTC? Like a three-year commitment after that? There's a uniform because we brand them. You're investing in me. That's a great idea. But a lot of resource time is being put into me, developing me, so what am I going to give you back? So take on both of those if you would. We find the member, it's more about finding the member institutions and then finding the right talents within those organizations, right? And so we do a lot of research and analysis on where we want to go. So we do want to make sure we're building pipelines that fit the business needs first and foremost. So where do we have a majority of our offices? Where do our partners and our customers have a majority of their offices? Where are the hiring needs and the types of roles? Then based on that, we look for organizations that actually have core programs that align to that. And those are the ones that we want to have relationships with first and foremost. And then we seek out the talent. We actually have marketing communications people who are out there and promoting the courses and the partnerships that we have in the classroom to hopefully get the talent to actually apply to the class itself. All right, so once I'm in. Once you're in. You've got me. I'm a junior, I'm studying, I'm doing my thing. You're training me. Well, I'm going to graduate in a year. So am I on the hook or will you place me? What's the commitment back and forth between the two? So we invest in their training and we also try to provide wrap around support services. So we've got people on the team who are beyond passionate and focused on making sure they've got the soft skills who are also focused on making sure they're introduced to hiring managers within our ecosystem and within our organization who might be interested in talking to them. We set up kind of meet and greets as well where we have events around that. So placement's important to us. We can't commit and guarantee a role per se, but we can open up opportunities that perhaps the students didn't have before and give them the training so that when they're compared against their peer, they can come out ahead. So having met Charles several times and interviewed a number of times, this is, it certainly feels more than optics. What are the success metrics that you look at and can you share some with us? Yeah, so we do look at how many people we've actually trained and made it through the program. We look at how many people have been placed within IN4 as well as our ecosystem. We are looking to see how many students were actually pursue a path to certification and go through the deeper training and learning. And then we look at see how many people are actually liking the program, like what they're getting out of it. We'd love to see, I personally would love to see in a couple of years that people have gone through EAP are now future customers, they're future partners. It's, you know, placement is one piece, but it's also how are we influencing the industry as a whole? If our competitors hire EAP students, that's actually goodness. Like we're trying to really change what's going on in an industry perspective on how we grow and change talent because the way it's working today doesn't work for everybody. So we've got to do something different. And the fact that IN4 has stepped up to actually grow it organically, I think is, you know, a testimony to Charles. That's a great mindset. I mean, you're not trying to just hang on and you're certainly embracing this, but if one, an individual leaves to whether even a competitor is just some pride in that. Like, hey, we train this individual, we're changing the industry. And you know, sometimes those things just have a way of coming back around. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Jennifer, from the client side, if you will, how big could this program be for you? Like how helpful has it been and how much more do you need it? In order to meet these employee gaps, because as we've heard, the numbers aren't adding up right now. Right, right. So for us, we've been having some conversations about how do we grow together on this. They've offered to say, hey, CFO solutions, would you guys like to be involved in some of the teaching opportunities? So we've been having dialogue about what that might be. And we've been talking about the particular skill sets. You know, they started out with kind of a broad skill set. And we work with a very specialized component of that. So we've been talking about the product mix that they involve in their program and bringing something more direct to what we're working with. So that's a big... Personalized learning. Yeah. So it's helping us kind of refine our pipeline because we know what's going to be coming out of it. And we know that it is getting that slice of the US and the world if necessary. So it gives us some little assurity that we can get folks at different levels of their career. We can start talking to them now and we can start working with these guys on honing the skill set that they'll be coming in with. And the soft skills piece that you had mentioned earlier was one of the real standout skills that we saw come out of this. All these folks, I can't overemphasize the drivenness, the commitment they had to communicating with me over a year period and their boldness because that's one of the main things that we need out of the folks that we bring and put in front of our clients. So this is all awesome touchy-feely stuff too, but at the end of the day, I've read that it has a business impact. Yeah, absolutely. And so what's your experience been in terms of the bottom line? Well, so business impact-wise, when we take a risk and bring somebody fresh out of school and we bring them to a project where you require very specialized skills, we need people that we can take a risk on that will hit the ground running. So if I go and grab somebody from anywhere, I don't know what I'm going to get. I don't know if they're going to like the career. I don't know if they're going to understand what we're doing. There's a lot of ramp up time. So that's time before I can bill for that service just to be practical. And when we bring in EAP students, I know that they've had a taste of it, that they're ambitious and driven for it, and I can get them billable more quickly. And then I can be proud to have them out in front because they can tell a story. A lot of this is a relationship business. I can have them come to a project kickoff and they can talk about what they've come from and that they've had an involvement within for. It's not just, hey, I'm fresh out of school. I don't know what I'm doing here. It's, hey, yeah, I've been working with a product for a couple years, even now, and they hit the ground running just so much more quickly. So faster time to value. Yes, faster time to value. We've seen internally for the folks we've hired that we've got 100% voluntary retention rate for early career talent, four years into the program, where that's about 20% better than the rest of the talent that we have, right? And so we're looking at retention because we know if you lose somebody, that's nine months of salary, probably to replace them and to retrain somebody else. Absolutely. Much easier to hang on to somebody than go find somebody new. Okay, so you're getting the billing faster, higher quality, I heard, which means better customer retention and better, less employee turnover. Less employee turnover. Which means lower costs. Absolutely. And on the recruiting side of things too, just the development of trying to find talent, there's a lot of time invested and we're a firm that has a very lean operations team, a lot of us wear many hats. So one of my hats is my recruiting and development and this just streamlines things for me and makes it so much easier. I don't have to spread myself then trying to find folks. I know I've got kind of a pipeline and I've been sharing that with my other leadership in the other practices to kind of share that across the firm. And to put it in context, I mean, so for the trainings that are around roles and careers, we're looking at getting the students to have 200 plus hours of training over a bootcamp experience. Now, put that against somebody else who has zero, right? You're getting to faster productivity, you're shaving off anywhere from three to four to six months of onboarding time by hiring somebody through this program. Yeah. And minimizing onboarding frustration, which we all sympathize with. Thanks, perfect sense. Great sounding program. We appreciate the insight today. Thanks for being with us. Yeah, thank you. You earned many hats. You'll need a rain hat out there today. I will. Congratulations. One more, yeah. Great program. Thank you ladies. We are back with more of our Live. The Cube is in Washington, D.C. in Forum 2018.