Spotlights: C-Suite
It’s a shame, I think, sometimes companies don’t invest enough in de- veloping their people internally. They don’t bet on them as much as they should. I think what we’ll find is there are gems in every single company. By us giving our people the opportunity to rise up to the occasion, we get to take advantage of their talents. HM: Pursuing that a little further, when someone joins the company, what is a career path potential- ly like for someone? They come on board, and then, how would one advance? You’ve obviously progressed rapidly through the ranks of the company. BB: We have lots of different roles that we hire people into. As a staffing company, we have 4,600 employees, with $4 billion in revenue, and 63 offices across the U.S. and Canada. Ultimately, we’re a talent solutions company. We help put people to work inside Fortune 1000 companies, and even inside small and medium-sized companies, so most of the people that we hire are recruiters. Those people will start right out of college just like me. I went to Auburn, graduated and started working at Insight Global six weeks later. Some people we hire may not have a college degree. They’ll come in as a veteran of the military, or they’ll come out of a trade school or something like that. Upon starting, their job is really to learn the industry, to learn staffing, to learn how to interview candidates and how to understand positions from our customers, which are hiring managers. They learn how to find the right person with the right set of skills, who could go to work for one of our 4,000-plus customers. We are very deliberate in how we train and develop our people in their first year. From there, their career path can go a number of different directions.
HM: In that vein, tell us a little bit about IG University and how it’s helped shape the company. BB: So, believe it or not, for the first 17 years of our company’s existence, we had a training department, but we didn’t have a robust enough training department as we have now, in the form of Insight Global University. We had a few people and that was really it. We hadn’t made enough of a com- mitment to it. What we found was that the bigger we got, all of the little things that we had trained people on in the field, all the tribal knowledge if you will, had gotten diluted. It just didn’t scale. So we said we have to come in and make a huge investment in how we train people in the right ways. Every- thing from how to screen a candidate, to how to talk to a customer about filling the needs that would meet a $10 million hiring budget, we have to really dig in there. So that’s what we tackled. We built Insight Global University with the best of the best people in the field. We took some of our best performers, our best producers, and said, “This is going to hurt, but let’s go ahead and take you out of that production role, and let’s put you into this role to help run Insight Global University.” Those people are able to build and deliver amazing content to all of our people. We use Insight Global University as what we call the guardrails to our people’s careers. So much of why people stick around and stay with an organization is that they’re good at the job. We can talk about company purpose and things like that — which I’m a big believer in — but if you don’t make someone good at the job, a lot of people are going to leave that job. It’s hard doing things we’re not very good at, so we said let’s develop an organization like IGU to make our people really, really good at the job
As CEO of Insight Global, Bert Bean oversees a growing company with more than 60 offices across the country, more than 4,000 employees and annual revenue of $4 billion. In this interview, the 2004 marketing graduate discusses the emphasis on people and empowerment that has helped drive the staffing company’s success. Harbert Magazine: Insight Global is known for promoting from within. As a policy, how does the company make that work? How has that process evolved over time as the world of work has evolved? Bert Bean: The policy hasn’t really evolved over time, it’s just always been our belief that people can learn things, and that people, if given op- portunity, with the right set of work ethic and character, can learn, and they can evolve and they can grow in their careers. So, we really believe in giving our people first the oppor- tunity to be promoted from within before going to the outside. That’s what we’ve always believed since we started the company, and what we still believe today.
Harbert Business, Fall 2022 19
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