The Evolving Landscape of HR Services: Laurel Cline’s Perspective

Intro  

Welcome to another edition of inspired stories where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes, how they’ve overcome adversity, and explore current challenges they’re facing.

Anthony Codispoti:
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Cotis Bodhi, and today’s guest is Laurel Klein. Laurel is the division CEO of Herbein HR Consulting. Herbein had traditionally been an accounting firm, and they were able to expand their offerings into HR services when they acquired Mosteller and associates. Today, Herbein HR Consulting provides and supplements human resource solutions to a wide variety of clients, primarily in the eastern and central part of Pennsylvania and across many mid atlantic states. Laurel is a seasoned human resources professional with over 25 years of experience spanning multiple areas of HR, including compensation, benefits, training and development, recruitment and employee relations. She has a BA from Penn State, is a graduate of the PA Bankers Association Intermediate School of Banking, and has completed the principles of executive rewards and advanced concepts in executive rewards coursework. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company add back benefits agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over dollar, 900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our proprietary programs. Results vary for each company, and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today@addbackbenefitsagency.com. dot now back to our guest today, Laurel Klein. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Laurel Cline 08:53

Thank you so much, Anthony. It’s great to be here.

Anthony Codispoti 08:55

So, Laurel, let’s go back to the beginning. What first got you interested in the human resources field?

Laurel Cline 09:02

That’s a great question. So, you know, when I think back about, you know, college and trying to decide what to do in high school, I had done some work in restaurants, and then throughout college I was an assistant manager in the dining hall at school. And so I had, and even in high school I was the assistant manager of a small restaurant. So I had done some people management, and I knew that I liked that, but I didn’t necessarily wasn’t sure what I was going to do after school. So I interviewed for a number of, like, retail kinds of positions, retail management kinds of jobs, operations manager types of roles, ended up at a financial institution and really thought my track was going to be going into retail banking. And then a position became open in the HR department and I interviewed and they hired me for that position. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Anthony Codispoti 09:55

So it’s interesting to me because a lot of the business leaders that I talked to, their least favorite part of running and operating a business is the managing people part of it. People are really challenging. I mean, you need them. And building a great team is the difference between a company being really successful versus failing. But not everybody enjoys this. What is it about your personality that you think drew you to this really challenging aspect?

Laurel Cline 10:26

I like to problem solve. So I look at any situation and think, okay, what are the motivations of the individual in the situation? What are the external kind of pressures on the situation? And what do we have control of and what don’t we have control of, and how can I help that person or that business figure out options to address whatever the problem may be? And there’s really not one solution. But I do think that helping people identify what they own within a situation, whether it’s the organization or the individual who’s having difficulty, or a department or manager or whomever, what do they have control of and what can they work on? That’s what really I find fascinating and interesting about human resources. How do you help move an organization and individuals forward?

Anthony Codispoti 11:18

Almost like a, like a psychologist role? Did you have a background in any of that or.

Laurel Cline 11:23

I don’t, other than a lot of individuals in my family with mental health kinds of issues. And so I’ve been done a lot of work around those kinds of things, and so think a lot about that. One of our long term clients is a substance use disorder treatment facility, and so certainly worked with them a lot and understand a lot about, really the serenity prayer type of thing, except the things you cannot change. And I’ve learned over my career that that’s a really great mantra for people, just in general. And so that’s kind of my perspective on that.

Anthony Codispoti 12:07

Now, the role that you’re in now, you certainly, you’ve risen to a much higher level. The CEO of the division, do you get the opportunity to interact with employees on the same level that you used to when you were sort of kind of rising through the ranks?

Laurel Cline 12:24

No. I mean, it’s certainly our own team. You know, obviously I have a lot, it’s a small. I’m, you know, I would love to, you know, make it sound like it’s really not. I interact with people every day and, you know, don’t consider myself to be any different than, than anybody else, just different responsibilities.

Anthony Codispoti 12:42

Let me build you up. Laurel, come on. Don’t. You’re great, but, yeah, go ahead.

Laurel Cline 12:47

I appreciate that. I appreciate it. So I don’t. I don’t get the chance to deal with employee one on one employee issues the way that I did. However, I do have a number of relationships with presidents, CEO’s of organizations, and so they do still call me about employee issues one on one, in that situation. So I do get the occasional opportunity. One of. One of the things I really loved to do when I was, I’ll say, just consulting, when I was consulting more hands on was employee investigations really always found that to be fascinating in terms of really trying to get to the root of the problem and offering client suggestions for not just dealing with the particular investigation issue, but what’s the more global issue that needs to be addressed with those things. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti 13:39

And so how did you find your way to Herbein?

Laurel Cline 13:43

So, most darn associates was the organization that Herbein purchased. I. Excuse me. Mosteller Associates was started in 1996 by Chet Mosteller. Chet Mosteller had been the head of human resources at Meridian Bancorp, which was the bank that I was working for when I came out of college. So I knew of him and certainly worked with him over the years. When I left banking, I went to work in manufacturing for a couple years. Chet had started the business and happened to be doing some work for the client that I was director of human resources for. So I was still kind of in touch with him, and I lost my position at Morgan. There was an executive change, and as happens many times, when the leader goes, so do the other executives in the organization, which was fine for me at the time for lots of reasons. And so Chuck reached out and said, hey, what do you think about consulting? And my family was young, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to have more flexibility, work more part time hours. Fortunately for me, my husband had insurance and a good full time job and was very busy. So it was kind of worked for our family at the time, and that’s a, that was the beginning, and it’s just kind of rolled from there.

Anthony Codispoti 15:00

And so you were able to kind of level up with some of your experiences and broaden the range of skill sets that you had while you were with Mosteller.

Laurel Cline 15:09

Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, Chet’s position was always, hey, if you haven’t done it, give it a try, you know? I’ll give you an example. We had a client that wanted some affirmative action plan training. They were implementing an affirmative action plan across a very large organization, needed some training, so they reached out. Now, I had done affirmative action plans on the inside of a company, but I never, you know, I didn’t, didn’t have any great depth of experience in it, but Chuck was like, yeah, we can do that. Sure. Sure, we’ll give him a proposal. I don’t think I made any money on that project because I think my hourly rate, having to try to learn everything and ramp up was pretty low. But I, it was a great opportunity. And from there, that’s the approach to a lot of different things. If I didn’t know, I studied, I figured it out and grew and developed my skills over time with different clients. And then in July of 2021, so Chet, as a part of his exit of the business, needed to sell the business. And so Herbein was one of the individuals or one of the companies, I should say, that Chet had talked with, and it was a good match for us. And so in July of 2021, they purchased us, and we’ve been with them ever since.

Anthony Codispoti 16:23

And so since the acquisition has much changed about what you do, the way that you offer it, how you, how you run the business.

Laurel Cline 16:33

Not really. One of my co workers likes to say, you know, same Twinkie, different rapper. It’s our team has, has stayed. I shouldn’t say we’ve not. We certainly had some folks leave and move on, turn over and things like that. But in terms of how we interact with our clients and things of that nature and the services we deliver, that has not changed some of the, what I would say, internal workings that, of course, and it continues to evolve. That has to change because we’re part of a larger organization. Herbein offers other advisory services, risk management, management advisory services. So we’re part of kind of a broader offering of advisory services as part of Herbein. It gives us opportunity to have, you know, HR services provided to us, and it, and like, we’re, and we’re part of a larger team, which is great.

Anthony Codispoti 17:29

I was going to say, you know, between Mosteller and Herbein, if I’m reading your LinkedIn page correctly, you’ve been there combined over 26 years, is that right?

Laurel Cline 17:38

I was a child. I was a child when I started, obviously.

Anthony Codispoti 17:42

Right?

Laurel Cline 17:42

Yes. Season really means old. That’s what that means.

Anthony Codispoti 17:48

I mean, you don’t see that kind of longevity at a company very often anymore. What is it that has sort of kept you there?

Laurel Cline 17:56

Well, I think a lot of things. One is that, for me, the environment provided me with an opportunity. As my life changed, changed. As my children got older and those things transitioned, I was able to change my schedule. So I was part time. Then I was able to be full time when I needed to be, and again grow and acquire new skills and new responsibilities as the organization grew. So from that standpoint, from my career standpoint, I think it afforded me what I was looking for. And I like to be challenged. I like to learn new things all the time. And so being able to go into different companies sometimes every day, you know, when I would have multiple clients where I was their onsite human resource director or human resource manager or what have you, you know, sometimes it’d be like, okay, it’s Tuesday, where am I, where am I going? But I loved being able to be at different organizations and learn about what their needs were, what, what made them profitable, how they, you know, kinds of people, issues they had, and what, what kinds of opportunities do they have for providing solutions that could maybe resolve some of their, again, problem solving? That really is the theme that I think runs through everything that I do. I really love that. I love, you know, was in financial services, then went to manufacturing, and now in consulting. We really are so fortunate to have the opportunity to work with a number of different organizations and industries. So, you know, healthcare was not something I had worked with, but I’ve worked with a number of continuing care retirement communities now find that to be really interesting. Manufacturing all different types of manufacturers. We’ve done some work with some retail establishments, and of course, financial services has been a thread throughout my career here, certainly. So I love really catering services and solutions to whatever that organization’s needs are. And, you know, not all financial services companies or manufacturing companies have the same needs or issues. And so it’s not like you have a cookie cutter solution in your back pocket to say, oh, Anthony, you know, you’re this type of a company. So here’s, you know, let me tell you what you need to do. So that’s, that’s what’s kept me interested, engaged and wanting to. And I work with a great team of people. I mean, honestly, that’s makes a big difference. What makes everybody come to work, right, is being able to work with people that you enjoy being around, that you’re, that you respect.

Anthony Codispoti 20:37

Yeah, just a group of people. You said something interesting there because you started to talk about seeing the different problems that some of your clients have. And then you chose a different word, which I think shows a lot about your personality, what kinds of opportunities exist for them to problem solve? And I think that that’s really important because a lot of times we get our heads sort of wrapped around all the problems that are in front of us, all these mountains that we have to climb. And I’ve noticed this, personally about myself. When I can be curious about that obstacle in front of me and not look at it so much as a problem, but more as an opportunity to grow, to pivot, to do something different, something unique, that’s when I find that I’m really coming up with some of the best ideas, the best solutions.

Laurel Cline 21:29

Yep. I think, yeah, we just lost power for a moment, so I apologize if I went dark.

Anthony Codispoti 21:35

That’s all right. We’ll roll with it.

Laurel Cline 21:38

Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti 21:39

But do you find the same thing for yourself?

Laurel Cline 21:41

I do, and I, you know, we all. Look, I will be the first to admit that there’s days when I feel like the issues that I’m trying to solve are, you know, weigh. Weigh me down, and they’re, you know, insurmountable. And, you know, if I look at a theme for myself, I. Okay, well, I told you, Anthony, I’ll just.

Anthony Codispoti 22:06

Warnings. It’s the full moon you were talking about.

Laurel Cline 22:11

Oh, my goodness.

Anthony Codispoti 22:12

We’ll just roll with the strobe light effect.

Laurel Cline 22:15

Yes, that’s fine.

Anthony Codispoti 22:16

But it’s interesting that you’ve still got Internet, so you haven’t lost full power. Just the lights have kind of dimmed.

Laurel Cline 22:24

I don’t know what is going on. I think they’re doing some work in the parking lot, which was one of the things when I arrived, I was like, huh, lots of trucks here. That’s never a good sign. But the opportunity and the issue piece,

Laurel Cline 22:40

I sometimes get too stuck on. I’m not a person who gives up. Right. That’s just my personality. I don’t give up. But sometimes what I’m trying to remind myself as I get more experienced, aka older, is that there is not necessarily a perfect way through or a perfect solution to a problem. So sometimes I spend too much time and energy trying to figure out the best or the most perfect solution. It just has to be, you need to look at options and figure out what are the ramifications of those options and make a decision. I don’t have difficulty making decisions, but certainly feeling the weight of lots and lots of opportunities out there. And even that is a great. In this business, there are so many opportunities as a consultant. Right. Literally tons of opportunities, figuring out which of the opportunities that are most appropriate for us to go after are going to provide the opportunities for the team to grow and be successful and for her buying to grow and be successful. So those kinds of things are the fun and the really great opportunities out there.

Anthony Codispoti 24:03

Laura, I wonder if maybe we could try something if this would make a difference. If you have a cell phone, if you could turn the light on and maybe set it underneath and see if that will illuminate your beautiful face here.

Laurel Cline 24:15

We will try. Let’s see. Is that. Do I look ghostly?

Anthony Codispoti 24:24

I think it’s definitely an improvement from not being able to, basically just being able to see your silhouette. So I’d like to hear a little bit about how you think about the different services that you guys provide at Irvine. How would you kind of put those into different categories or pillars, and maybe we can pick some of them and you could talk about, like, a specific example of how you deliver that service and what it looks like in practice.

Laurel Cline 24:52

Yeah. So Irvine overall, of course, you know, there’s the accounting audit, you know, the typical, we have, you know, kind of a CFO for hire accounting services, for hire type of practice, management, advisory services, risk management, which I mentioned, and then the human capital practice, which includes my practice, our practice, and then also we have a leadership organization, a couple of leadership focused organization, leadership development focused organizations. The Herbein HR consulting practice is really made up of, I guess I would say four pillars if I was going to identify it that way. We have the total rewards practice, which is compensation and benefits. So any type of base pay market studies, competitive market studies, incentive plan design. We do executive compensation. We don’t do benefit. We don’t broker benefits, but we do provide just guidance to clients in terms of what would be solutions, maybe that your employees would be interested in, or how do we work with the brokers with you to get the best result for you as an organization? That’s really kind of the extent of our benefit practice. We have the talent acquisition team, which does contingent recruiting, retain search, more executive and retain search services, as well as outsourced recruiting. So recruiting is just a specific process. So we have clients that don’t have internal staff to handle their talent acquisition. So we’ll do that for them on an hourly basis. So that’s. And we also will work with clients who, particularly since COVID you know, as it’s been more and more difficult to attract employees, figuring out, you know, the best way to optimize your organization’s talent acquisition position in the market, like, you know, how are employees getting to you? What does your website look like? How easy is it for them to apply? How long is it taking you to respond to them? So optimizing really your talent acquisition process, that’s something we work with clients to do in that space. We have organizational development. We do succession planning work with, do executive coaching with clients. We’ll do 360 evaluations with them and then that often leads to coaching assignments. We also do a lot of leadership training, everything from supervisory managerial on up the scale. And that’s been interesting post Covid. We had a lot of focus on the compensation area of the practice because everybody was trying to figure out, as we all remember, inflation was crazy, wages were, it was just a crazy time from a compensation standpoint. Now there’s been more focus on, okay, so I’ve worked on attracting my talent and I still need to focus on retention from an employee engagement standpoint. But part of what I know people want is they want that development piece. So we’ve seen an increased interest in training and development at frontline supervisor level in particular, which I think is fantastic because those are the people that interact with your team every day, in and out, and they have the most, I think, the most impact on the success of your organization in terms of productivity, in terms of managing turnover, making sure that people are feeling like the work environment is both positive and productive. Last but not least, we have the HR operations and strategy practice, which is all of our team that do, excuse me, really HR generalist types of work at different levels. So everything from, we have small clients that are 15 employees and they just need really any type of HR help. Two, we have clients that are 10,000 employees and they might need some services to be plugged in. So whether it’s they need a handbook or they need, hey, we need a new human capital management system and we don’t know which one to select. So can you help us pick the solution that’s going to be right for us and then help us implement it and really digitize our processes? Lots of organizations have opportunities for what I call interim HR assignments, which was something I used to do a lot of. So your HR director leaves. You need somebody to fill that role for a period of time until you can fill it. So oftentimes we will both act as the interim HR department or director, as well as we’ll have our talent acquisition team source for that replacement, because then we have really an inside knowledge of that client and can better help the talent acquisition team understand the culture and what’s really needed in that role. So investigations, employee investigations, all different types of things. Our HR operations team is really kind of the, the utility team that can do really all things HR.

Anthony Codispoti 30:15

I mean, that is what you just went over there is a lot, and it’s a little eye opening for sort of a layperson. I owned and operated several businesses in my life, and probably like most business owners, HR is a necessary component, like hugely important. But it wasn’t something that I got super involved with or would consider myself an expert in. But to hear you talk about this wide range of services that you provide that falls under this HR umbrella. Again, I’m going to use the term eye opening, and I’d like to kind of go into some of them a little bit more so we can kind of understand some specifics.

Laurel Cline 30:57

Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti 30:58

The first one that you talked about, the total rewards, compensation and benefits. This one, again, to a layperson from the outside, seems like it would be relatively simple. It’s like, what am I paying somebody? What’s the health insurance? What’s the retirement plan? And yes, there’s research that needs to be done into the insurance and the retirement plan and all of that, but once it’s in place, it’s like, okay, now it’s done and we move on. I’m sure that I’m missing a lot, though, like help me fill in the gaps. What is sort of entailed under this compensation and benefits umbrella?

Laurel Cline 31:38

My background is compensation. I’m at a number of different things, but among them is the compensation work. And so I’m a little bit of a compensation nerd. So I’ll try not to go, I’ll try not to go too deep into that. But what I think is always really interesting is every organization is different and compensation is not like, here you go, just let’s plug it in and we’re going to leave it there and we’re going to move away. To some extent, I feel like benefits can be there, although I do think every year you need to tweak them and look at do we want to offer pet insurance this year or what do we want to do? Four hundred one k, the same thing. But once, you know, competitively within your industry, what is an industry standard and what can you afford to do? Like what do your resources look like? I mean, that’s always a challenge, too, stepping back and looking at the organization’s resources and saying, how much do we want to put in benefits? How much do we want to put in compensation? How much do we want to put in the pension piece. What happened during COVID was there was so much focus on just pay, base pay that has continued, and there’s all kinds of discussion we could have around generational issues with that and how that’s changed over the years. And I’ve clients that have been way too focused in their benefits piece on investing in that piece versus their. Their base pay, their salaries, etcetera. But what’s fun to me about the compensation work that we do is every organization’s different. So you could say that you’re a CEO of your company, but what that means for your company might be very different. And that may not be the best example because there’s a lot of similarities in what CEO’s do. But let’s say it’s a customer service position or some other goal. When I look at your title, that might indicate one thing to me, but when I read your job description, that might be very different. Or if you don’t have a job description, if we talk about it, I’m like, huh? That’s not really what customer service does at this other organization. We need to know what the job actually is so that we’re going out to look at the market and determine what is the best data to be pulling to match to that position. That’s the art of compensation.

Anthony Codispoti 33:49

So that you’re competitive with what else is out there, correct?

Laurel Cline 33:53

Correct. And that you’re matching it to the right skillset, because that’s not, you know, that’s not necessarily the same across the board. So we have a number of databases that we have access to that we can use. A lot of smaller organizations don’t have that benefit. Right. They can’t afford to go out and purchase, you know, three or four different large national databases. Even if they’re, you know, maybe they have locations across the country. You want to know what is that position paid geographically? It’s different in San Francisco, obviously, than it is in Philadelphia. So all of those nuances come into play with compensation. And then are you a large enough organization that you need to have a salary structure that you can work within from a pay administration standpoint or not? And even if you’re not, you need to have some way of looking at internal equity within your organization. You know, pay transparency is something that, although it’s not mandated in the state of Pennsylvania, there’s a number of states across the country that certainly have paid transparency regulations. What is.

Anthony Codispoti 34:57

And what does that mean? Like, your pay has to be published somewhere?

Laurel Cline 35:01

No. So pay transparency is, you know, it’s a little bit different by state, but primarily at the moment the focus is on, it really came out of sort of the me too movement. So it was and still is primarily focused on the difference between the pay rates for men and women. But it’s really trying to say you need to publish what the pay range is for this job when you post it, like being transparent externally about what the pay range is. And when it started, it was as simple as you’re not permitted to ask somebody what they’re making today because, right. If you think about it, like, if we’re perpetuating that, that gap, that pay gap, if I’m asking you, so, Anthony, what are you making today? And you tell me I’m making $50,000 even if the range I have is budgeted for 70, I’m going to say, well, gosh, Anthony might take the job for $55,000. Right. So that’s what pay transparency was initially trying to address is that is the pay gap between, between men and women, which exists today. But that’s, that’s where it came out of. I believe it will and has in a couple of states gotten to also addressing that inequity among minority,

Laurel Cline 36:18

other aspects of equity within your organization. But that’s really what paid transparency. Colorado is probably, Colorado and California are probably the more highly regulated states. And so you do have some companies, there’s a tech company I know out there that literally publishes all their rates. Of course, an executive comp, if you’re publicly traded, that’s public information. So that’s pure pay transparency.

Anthony Codispoti 36:46

And do you do work with publicly traded companies in the compensation space?

Laurel Cline 36:50

We do. Some of our financial services institutions are publicly traded. So that’s not the majority of our clients, but we do in that particular aspect of it.

Anthony Codispoti 37:00

So you were sort of touching on something there. I’m a little bit curious about the diversity equity inclusion Dei that’s been increasingly a kind of a hot button issue. We saw a big movement towards it at the beginning of COVID George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and it feels like now things are kind of swinging back the other way. Is this something that you’re seeing with the clients that you work with as well?

Laurel Cline 37:29

Yeah, I mean, our clients were a little bit insulated from some of that because our market tends to be more what I would call middle market. You know, the family owned organizations, closely held, you know, somewhere between 55 hundred employees. We do have certainly have larger clients.

Anthony Codispoti 37:48

But not getting the national attention that create pressure to move one way or the other.

Laurel Cline 37:53

Well, and Pennsylvania is not one of the states. Not that we do certainly have clients in New York and Maryland and New Jersey and other states, but a lot of our clients are still, probably 70% are still in Pennsylvania, where that is not a requirement. However, when we do compensation work, one of the things that we always do when we’re doing a market study is to say we point out like, hey, you have ten incumbents in this position. Two of them are, you know, 20% higher or lower than the rest of the incumbents. Or there’s an inverse relationship. Your newer, your newer employees are making more than the employees who’ve been here for ten years. Like that. That’s not good, that’s inequitable, creates compression. And if you, there can be lots of reasons for that. But we try to point out this is what it looks like on the surface. If, for example, you have two female employees who are making less than the rest of their male counterparts, or people of color or whatever the case may be, people that are over 40, you need to look at all those factors and at least point it out to say, hey, barring some documented reasons for this pay disparity, that’s something you need to address because it’s a concern.

Anthony Codispoti 39:12

I’m curious, you mentioned that a lot of your clients are from 50 to 500 employees. In my mind, I would think especially as you get 100 plus employees, you’re big, even smaller than that, you’re big enough to at least be able to afford your own HR person internally. And as you get to 500 employees, you’ve probably got a small department of people.

Laurel Cline 39:37

Absolutely.

Anthony Codispoti 39:38

And so I’m curious why when they’re big enough that they can afford to have their own internal HR, do they contract with you?

Laurel Cline 39:47

Sure. So I think that’s somewhat dependent. The answer to that is somewhat dependent upon the service. Even if you’re 500 employees, you may not have the need or choose to invest in somebody on your team who has compensation expertise because it really is a skill set that not every HR person has. Pretty specific. Correct. And it’s somewhat more analytical than some other aspects of human resources. Sometimes it’s just not an area of expertise that an organization has. So we can fill that and they don’t need to have a full time staff person doing that. So we can be the outsourced compensation team for your organization. So that’s one way that we’ve kind of worked with organizations. Another aspect is on the talent acquisition. You may have a team, but if you’re two people with 500 employees or three people even, you may not have the, the skills or the time. Certainly talent, talent acquisition has become much more time consuming. It’s always been time consuming, but it’s definitely, and the skills required to navigate the technology. I might do what we call post and pray. I post my position and pray that somebody applies for it, but that’s not the way that you’re going to acquire talent these days. You know, really, if you’re actively trying to find somebody who is really not only just got the skills that you need, but also going to be a fit for your organization and really kind of push you forward, you want somebody who is going out to what we refer to as passive candidates. They’re not actively looking for a job, but we’re going out to them and bringing them into the position. So that’s a really different skill set. And frankly, many HR professionals, it’s just not something that they like to do. You know, I kind of equate it to more of the sales aspect. As an HR professional, even when I first started, I’ve always considered myself to be a salesperson for the organization. That’s part of what I have to do. Right. But many HR people, you know, they go into HR thinking they want to help people or they, you know, are more in the regulatory bent, so to speak. But it’s today, you really need to be active out there networking, trying to bring in the talent and tell the story as to why somebody wants to work for your company. That’s not something that every organization has the time to do. And again, on the HR operations side, maybe they’re buying a new HRIs system and they need help to implement that. The key with those is they need to be set up correctly so that they can help you. It’s a terrific, if you haven’t already digitized your HR processes because there’s a lot of paperwork in HR, way more than is necessary in many aspects, I think. But if you’re going to use technology effectively and digitize that, you need to be really thoughtful about how you’re setting that up. Some people don’t have the bandwidth to do that, so, and again, with the training programs, those, you know, if you’re doing, you have, you know, 50 supervisors and they all need to be trained. Do you have the bandwidth among your staff to develop the program, to go out and deliver the training? Generally not. So that’s, that’s why they use our services.

Anthony Codispoti 43:14

So there’s, so what I’m hearing you say is that there are so many different aspects of HR. It’s difficult, if not impossible for the average company to be an expert in all of those things. They can draw on your experience across so many different companies. You’ve seen so many different things, and you’ve had to tailor implementations and solutions for each of these clients in different ways, that you’ve got this breadth of knowledge to pull from to be able to help them and steer them in the right direction where, you know, yes, they’re in HR, but they don’t know about this specific area. They don’t know what to do. They’re stuck.

Laurel Cline 43:56

Correct. They need just. And they need, sometimes they just need an additional set of hands. Right. To get. To get a project done.

Anthony Codispoti 44:05

You said something interesting, that the talent acquisition process has become a lot more time consuming. And initially I thought that surprised me because I hear people using a lot more AI to sift through resumes and applicants and all that, and it’s making the process more efficient in that way. But then I hear you talk about, hey, oftentimes the best strategy isn’t just to look for people who are actively looking for jobs, but it’s to mine those people who are probably pretty happy where they’re at already and see if you can draw them in. And am I correct in assuming that is what takes so long? Yeah.

Laurel Cline 44:47

Yes. Because if you’re not actively looking, maybe you don’t respond to my outreach right away. Or, you know, maybe it takes, you know, if you’re in a. You know, we really try to take advantage of our industry knowledge and presence to build networks within those industries so that when we have a client that has a need, we can say, hey, yeah, I talked to somebody a couple months ago, and they might be a good fit for this particular role. You know, it’s building, it’s. It’s about relationships, it’s about relationships, it’s about networks, and it’s about knowing. You could interview ten human resource professionals who might all be terrific human resources directors, but they’re not all going to fit in the same company because each organization has a different culture, has a different mission, values, those types of things, and it’s knowing what’s going to be the best fit for that organization. That’s the secret sauce, I think.

Anthony Codispoti 45:42

I like to ask this question of a lot of CEO’s and business owners that I interview. And I think you would have a particularly interesting perspective on this because most of the businesses I talk to, they’re still experiencing. It’s a very tight labor market. It’s hard to find good people. And then once you find them, how do you hold on to them. And so I always like to ask business owners C suite levels, like, what is it you’ve tried? What have you found is working on both the recruitment and the retention side and you being an expert in these areas in dealing with this across so many different companies, I think would have a particularly interesting perspective on is it the pay, is it the benefits, is it the training? What do you find are sort of the most important things to recruit and retain good folks?

Laurel Cline 46:35

It’s yes, and it’s all of those things. And I think so as an HR professional, what’s shifted for me when I look back at trends over the years, it used to be, I always said people don’t leave companies, they leave supervisors. And that still tends to be true. It still tends to be true. But really, since COVID the studies that have been done show that people really are leaving for money. Years ago, we used to say that was number five on the list of things that you would leave a job for. That’s not the case anymore. And I think we can’t ignore the economics of the situation and the publicity around that has made people feel like I should be making more money. I just read an article yesterday saying that particularly the younger generations are feeling like they want to see more in their compensation because they’re still feeling the pinch of economic changes and they’re not getting nine and 10% adjustments like they were two years ago. Right. But they’re like, well, what are you paying me now? So there is definitely still a lot of pressure on compensation benefits. I don’t see as much. But at the same time, right. It’s like, if it’s not, if somebody takes away benefits to put into compensation, I don’t, I can’t imagine that you’re going to have people going, oh, yeah, that’s okay. That’s fine. I’m not worried about that. So it’s, as a CEO, what I feel like is that the trick is to attract the talent that we need and offer as many, excuse me, opportunities and options as we can, because not everybody wants the same thing. Depending on where you are in life. And I always say, sometimes, you know, you have to pick. You have to pick what it is. Sometimes you just need flexibility because you’re a young parent and, you know, your family needs that flexibility. Sometimes it’s all about the money because you’re the sole breadwinner or you just like, that’s just your focus. Like everybody’s, everybody’s got to pick what is what, what they’re looking for. So it’s it’s about knowing what youre a, what your offerings are and being able to best fit those to the needs of the individuals that you’re trying to attract. I myself, I’ll admit it’s a struggle because, again, I try to have as much flexibility in both the total rewards that we offer as well as the types of work that we can provide people. I was interviewing an individual, and I said to him, what’s your biggest challenge? Who is managing a large department? And he said, it’s. It’s trying to give people enough of the work that they want to do so that they’ll do the work that I need them to do. And I thought that is 100% what, what I, what I struggle with, because we all have things that we like to do and things that we don’t like to do. And, and so, you know, as a, as a leader, you want to give people opportunities to grow. You want them to be challenged, you know, and then there’s stuff that you just need people to do, because that’s. That’s what you. That’s what keeps you going as an organization. Right. You know, behind it all, I always say this is a for profit business, so, you know, not for profits are a little bit different, although they still need resources to be able to survive and meet their mission. But, you know, we are here to make profit. And so there’s sometimes things that you just need to do. It’s that balance of environment to, like, what, you know, what’s that equation? It’s a two way street, you know, meaning what employees need and what you need as an employer. And that conversation, I think, always needs to be happening on both sides.

Anthony Codispoti 50:26

Laurel, how do new clients find their way to you and Herbein? Are you. Do you guys actively market? Is it all word of mouth?

Laurel Cline 50:34

For many, many years, it was word of mouth. Chet was really among the only organizations that was a full service HR consulting firm. That has changed over the last, I would say, particularly five to ten years. I think we’re still unique in that we offer the full breadth of services. We can be like the single source solution for everything. But the competition has changed. So we didn’t really use to market. It was very much word of mouth, and we still got a lot of repeat business. I’ll do my compensation analysis this year, and two years from now, I’ll come back and do it again. I need this position filled, and then I need another position filled in six months. So there’s a lot of recurring and repeat business, but a lot of our project work. Our interim work is definitely word of mouth. Like, hey, Anthony, I know you said you really liked this, this person you worked with. Tell me about that. So it’s the networking piece, but we have for sure, over the last two years, learned that we need to be much more focused on external visibility, marketing. So that’s something we’re still working on. What does that sales process look like? How do we best? But I say to the team every day, the best thing you can do from a sales perspective is deliver the results that the client is expecting, because that’s what really, you know, that’s what it’s all about. It’s the relationship you have with that client. It’s the results that you’re providing them. If they feel that the service that they’re getting is valuable, they’re going to be willing to tell somebody else about it. And that’s what we have to rely on.

Anthony Codispoti 52:14

Yeah, word of mouth is incredibly powerful. The recommendation from a friend, a trusted colleague, is going to carry a lot more weight than a Facebook ad.

Laurel Cline 52:23

Right. I just, I don’t think in this business this is, you know, we want to be the, you know, you know, Herbein overall wants to be the trusted advisor for the business. You can’t be trusted if you’ve not, you know, been involved, delivered results, you know, that, that sort of thing. And you can’t. That’s tough to market. You want the name recognition so that, you know, you want people to know you’re there and know that you have the. What types of services you have. But that relationship is going to be really important and critical for developing the longer term client, which is what we want and what we’ve had.

Anthony Codispoti 52:57

Thankfully for those people listening, what kind of company is a good fit for Herbein? I think about industry, and size is maybe a way to categorize it.

Laurel Cline 53:08

Yeah. So I think the industries that I mentioned, manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, we do a lot of work with not for profits. And in terms of size, I really, I think our sweet spot is really the 200 to 500 in terms of the HR practice. Herbein as a whole, it might vary by practice area. We also specialize in working with, again, family owned businesses, closely held family owned businesses, which, which is a really interesting niche, to be honest. I enjoy it. I enjoy working with business owners and family members because there’s a whole lot of messiness sometimes in that and I think it’s fun.

Laurel Cline 53:59

And that’s across Herbein, all practices. We do a lot of work with family owned businesses and family owned businesses. You have to keep in mind can be our largest family owned business is 3 billion, and the smallest is probably 5 million.

Anthony Codispoti 54:16

That’s helpful. I want to shift gears now a little bit. Laurel, what’s a serious challenge, either personally or professionally, that you’ve had to overcome and maybe some of the lessons that you learned coming out the other side.

Laurel Cline 54:31

I think I mentioned before that my family has had a number of, you know, challenges with mental health. And that’s a, you know, that’s hereditary, so, you know, my parents, my grandparents, and so

Laurel Cline 54:53

I think that’s a, that’s a, you know, both a challenge just in terms of the human aspect of it. And I’ve also seen that play out in the workforce, you know, the challenges that mental health brings to employees. It’s probably one of the things that I’m most passionate about. I’m actually rolled off, but I was on the board of a local not for profit that provides mental health services and employee assistance services, actually, as well. For me, personally, the challenge there just came from

Laurel Cline 55:31

the personal aspects of that that you need to overcome, because you feel like when you, when you see people struggling like that, you sort of feel like you’re in an isolated situation and that other people don’t deal with that or that it somehow makes you less than. And while I don’t, I’m not sitting here saying I’m the bastion of mental health, but I don’t have a diagnosed, you know, situation where, you know, that I deal with. But I definitely have had to overcome the difficulties and challenges that my family has dealt with and the impact that that’s had on me. And I think one of the situations as a woman in leadership in particular, is that confidence is always something that I think women leaders are more challenged by, in my experience. And so that imposter syndrome, things of that nature, have certainly been a challenge for me. I can’t say that I fully overcome them because I think that that’s an everyday challenge. But, you know, my dad was in the military and navy, and he, like, even when I was a little kid, he would always say to me, just look like, you know where you’re going and what you’re doing and people will follow. And I always kind of kept that in the back of my head because it really is kind of true. Whether that’s good or bad, I’m not sure people should. But I have taken that to heart. It’s the old act, it just fake it till you make it type of thing. But every day there’s challenges with that.

Anthony Codispoti 57:10

Are there anything in particular that you found helpful in helping your family members or helping yourself as you’re helping your family members deal with some of the mental health struggles?

Laurel Cline 57:24

I think consistency and, you know, I think it’s probably similar to what anybody needs, is consistency, accountability and support. You know, people have to be responsible for their decisions and their actions. You can be there to. To support if things don’t go as planned. But at a lot of times, it’s frankly just listening, which isn’t that one of the hardest things to, at least for me, sometimes time, we’re all busy, so it’s just sometimes for me, it’s the patience and the time to slow down enough to pay attention to those things.

Anthony Codispoti 58:13

How about the imposter syndrome component? Because this is one, I don’t think it’s talked about enough, particularly with business leaders. People just, they sort of look at you and they think, oh, you’re confident, like, you’ve kind of got this figured out. Like you’re just wired for this and that maybe partly because of your dad’s coaching, like, that’s how you appear on the outside, but, you know, inside you’ve got all these doubts and these insecurities and who am I? Like, can I really do this? Is this going to work? Have you found anything that kind of helps, that negative chatter in your voice? I don’t know, meditation or any, like, books or podcasts that you listen to, any support groups that you’ve been part of and anything like that?

Laurel Cline 58:57

I do love to read, and I do think that any time, regardless of whether you’re reading or you’re listening to a podcast or you’re doing, you’re learning. Anytime you’re learning, that automatically feeds your self esteem. And I can’t remember where I read about that, but, like, there’s scientific backing to that. So I try to remember. I may not, I don’t need to, and I, nor do I know everything about everything, but I know what I know, and that may be different than what somebody else knows. And so what I bring to the table is valuable. So it’s kind of in my head playing that, you know, and I don’t need to know everything, right. There’s, you know, I don’t need to be the smartest person in the room to be able to add value, and that’s what I have to remind myself about. But I think it’s always good to be curious, good to be learning. And again, that, that opportunity, even if it’s an hour webinar on a topic, you know, that you’re interested in. It gives you self confidence. It gives you a boost to say, yeah, yeah, learn that. Yeah. And that’s, you know, one of the things that, that I try to remember. You know, sometimes I’ll make an active decision to be like, you know what? I’m kind of having a rough week. I think I just need to take an hour, pause for myself to go learn something because it, because it helps me.

Anthony Codispoti 1:00:22

Any places you like to go for that? Learning any specific categories of books or.

Laurel Cline 1:00:26

Podcasts or webinars, I’m, I’m very opportunistic, so I don’t invite you, but I get, like, 50,000 emails a day. I feel like, from all different kinds of, you know, resources. And so I’m, I will literally sometimes go and be like, well, let me pick this one and see if it’s. And sometimes that’s been great, and sometimes not so much. So, no, I don’t have a specific place that I go.

Anthony Codispoti 1:00:51

Laurel, I’ve just got one more question for you here today, but before I ask it, I want to do two things for those listening. If you like today’s content, please hit the likes, share or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. I also want to tell people the best way to get in touch with you. Laurel, what would that be?

Laurel Cline 1:01:06

That would be my email. LCline@Herbein.com. yep.

Anthony Codispoti 1:01:18

We’ll put that in the show notes, but I’m glad you spelled that out.

Laurel Cline 1:01:20

Thank you.

Anthony Codispoti 1:01:21

So last question for you. I’m curious, what are the big changes that you see coming in your industry in the next few years? How do you see things evolving?

Laurel Cline 1:01:30

Well, I think, like most industries that we see, technology is going to have a significant impact. It already is. AI, you mentioned that in terms of resume screening, I think AI is going to have a huge impact on all businesses. But certainly HR, I’m not concerned that it’s going to take over or replace or anything like that, because I still think that there’s that human intervention that needs to happen. Judgment. I don’t foresee AI taking the place of human judgment anytime in the future, but I do think there’s an opportunity for HR to capitalize on the aspects of AI that we can use effectively to do those tasks and those things that don’t really add a lot of value or don’t need the human touch, the human interaction, and just technology in general, how we use it, how we can optimize it to be more efficient, because, as I said, ton of paperwork in HR that is not adding value to any organization. But it has to be done in many respects from a regulatory standpoint and other standpoint. So that’s a huge, and I think just the number of generations in the workforce and what they want and what their perspectives are and how they were raised and all of those facets and that employee engagement piece, helping companies to continuously be able to change and grow and evolve as those needs change based on generations, based on changes in society, I mean, look at the reactions and the changes we still are dealing with. From COVID I don’t think that’s the last event like that that’s going to happen for better or for worse. And so I think just being able to be resilient enough to, again, focus on that positive and productive work environment, that’s really what HR is going to be challenged with.

Anthony Codispoti 1:03:23

You use that word again, opportunity, when talking about AI, and I think, again, that shows a lot about your personality and how you approach problems. I’m curious, as you talk to your peers in the HR space, do they look at HR? Do they look at AI as an opportunity, or do they look at it as a threat?

Laurel Cline 1:03:44

Most of them, in my experience, it’s an opportunity. I think most people are pretty excited about the opportunity to use it because, I mean, frankly, there’s a lot of tasks that we do that really just are not particularly fun. So if we can find a way to have AI help with some of those repetitive types of things or tasks where you don’t need that human judgment, I think that’s a awesome opportunity for us.

Anthony Codispoti 1:04:12

Yeah, that’s great. Well, Laurel, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Laurel Cline 1:04:19

And my shadow.

Anthony Codispoti 1:04:22

I think it was great how we just rolled with the punches on that. We made it work today.

Laurel Cline 1:04:26

Well, thank you so much, Anthony. I really appreciate it. I’ve enjoyed talking with you and I appreciate the opportunity.

Anthony Codispoti 1:04:32

Absolutely. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.