Dimitri Boylan
Welcome to another episode of the Talent Transformation Podcast. Today, we have Rachel Raymond, the Director of Talent Acquisition, People Technology and Analytics at Jack Henry. Rachel, hello! Thank you for joining us.
Rachel Raymond
Thank you for having me.
Dimitri Boylan
It’s great to have you here, Rachel. I think we should start with Jack Henry. Tell me a little bit about it. It’s not exactly a household name yet, so I want to get into it.
Rachel Raymond
Yeah, and it’s funny, I started as a recruiter there nine years ago, and so I was often battling, “Are you calling from a law firm or a staffing firm?” But Jack Henry has been in business for over 45 years. We’re a publicly traded organization focusing on financial technology, supporting small and mid-sized financial institutions across the United States.
Dimitri Boylan
Okay, so the first thing I think about is open banking.
Rachel Raymond
Yeah. So we do a lot in open banking. We’ve really transformed the last few years. We do the core systems, so that’s where we kind of got our start. So, running the core of the financial institution is all about your transaction processing, teller system, and other things like that. But we do everything from those core systems to digital banking to payments and mobile applications. So if you are a customer of one of those financial institutions and you’re, you know, using their mobile app or you’re using one of their online banking solutions, it’s often Jack Henry.
Dimitri Boylan
That’s good. You’ve been there for nine years. So you said you started as a recruiter there?
Rachel Raymond
Yes.
Dimitri Boylan
And how did you end up in the role you have now? Because now you’ve got a couple of big things.
Rachel Raymond
Yeah, it’s been an interesting journey. My background is in technical recruiting. I started in a software consulting firm, moved to Kentucky with my husband for his job, stumbled across Jack Henry, and didn’t really know what I was getting into when I joined.
I was supported. And so I was in the recruiter role for 4 or 5 years, and then moved into a talent advisor role and then a talent acquisition leader. When I took over that role, we had some organizational changes. And so I also got more of TA Ops, our vendor staffing, contingent labor, intern programs, and anything that kind of goes along with that. And then in that role, I implemented our ATS with you all through Avature.
It was very interesting. We started the implementation in March of 2020 and went live on June 1st. So, during the pandemic, when everyone was doing puzzles, I was configuring workflows. So, I was in that Talent Acquisition Manager role for several years. We ended up bringing our HR technology team back from tech services into HR about 15 months ago.
Dimitri Boylan
Okay.
Rachel Raymond
We’ve moved that team a couple of times. I was actually on maternity leave and came back, and my boss, our CPO, said, “Would you like the tech more?” Because I had been successful with the Avature application and I seemed to be relatively more technical than I had thought I was. And so, ended up there. Then, analytics was kind of a natural progression.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. We discovered the inner technologists in people in the HR world.
Rachel Raymond
It’s interesting. I mean, I can barely update my iPhone, but, you know,
Dimitri Boylan
… Building workflows and creating portals, right? Yeah. Yeah. So we like that.
Rachel Raymond
Yeah.
Dimitri Boylan
We think that’s good.
Rachel Raymond
Right.
Dimitri Boylan
Because we think that you really know what you want, and I think our vision of modern managers is that they just do get their hands on technology because it’s just the way technology is. There is no way to do your job without it. Whereas you could do your job without it 30 years ago, and you could still be successful, I think you can’t be successful today without some ability to execute technically.
Rachel Raymond
Yeah. We make a lot of eyes wide on our team when we talk about what we were doing prior to Avature. Watching wheels spin while waiting for resumes to load and things like that. So, we’ve done a pretty significant technology transformation on the talent acquisition side over the last couple of years. And now we’re trying to transform that into other areas of our people and culture team.
Dimitri Boylan
Let’s talk about culture because culture is very important in every company. But when you’re trying to compete in the tech world, culture is even more important because all of your employees really have a large number of options. You’re never really locked into a job in tech job. So, what is the culture there?
Rachel Raymond
Yeah, Jack Henry has a pretty unique culture. It’s a very humble organization. One of the things that I found challenging in the recruiter role was that we actually didn’t talk about ourselves enough. I’m like, I need people to know who we are and what we do.
But they’re just really focused on doing the right thing, doing what it takes and having fun doing it. And that’s kind of what they live by. So, they’ve created a really good culture of family values and a people-first approach. Their view and our view is that if your associates are happy, they’re going to make the customers happy, which then makes your stakeholders happy.
It starts with the associate and then carries through. And so, they lead by example. Our leaders are very open and transparent. They do a lot to make sure that associates are taken care of and communicated to, and I think that consistency in that expectation of being part of the organization has helped us maintain that culture.
Dimitri Boylan
Okay, You ended up with a tech group? What surprised you about that when you got it?
Rachel Raymond
For me, I mean talent acquisition and HR tech, you don’t typically see leaders on both. And so, I think recruiters, we’re good salespeople, right? We’re loud; we talk a lot. And, you know, I got to the tech team, and they were like, “Wait, do you want me to turn my camera on? You want to talk to me? What are we doing here?” So, it’s a little bit of a culture shift for me in terms of leadership.
But I think the biggest surprise was probably on the other side, on the recruiting side, I was like, “Oh, just add this feature or let’s do this or let’s do that.” And I didn’t realize how much I was probably driving the tech people crazy when I was making those requests because they were kind of sporadic or at the moment. I’d leave the Avature conference, and I’d be like, “I have six things that we want to do next week.”
And so I really learned the importance of understanding the scope of what you’re trying to do, the dependencies of what you’re trying to do, the effort, an, I don’t think I had that kind of full realization until I started. That was a big shift.
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah, that’s interesting because I did recruiting and then I did technology, well I did technology first and then recruiting and then technology. And recruiting is, “Hurry up!” Everything immediate and technology needs a plan and a very defined scope. But you’ve made the adjustment.
People analytics now. Are you happy with where you are with your people analytics? Do you think that your people analytics is… I mean, the dream of people analytics is that you can understand your culture through the work, through your analysis. Where are you on that journey?
Rachel Raymond
So, I took over leadership of the people analytics team about nine months ago. And so, I took the first couple of months to kind of evaluate. Where are we? What are we doing? What data are we missing? I would say we’re still in the early stages of the journey.
We have good foundational data and good standard reports, and we do a good job getting the data in front of the people about where we’re trying to really push the envelope is the correlation between the programs. Right? I think if you look back, you know, 6 or 7 years ago, talent acquisition managed talent acquisition data, learning managed learning data.
But now I think the human resources space is so intertwined. And so we’re trying to start correlating a lot of dependencies. How does learning impact internal mobility and then internal ability employee engagement? And how does the comp ratio potentially impact these things? And so we’re trying to start correlating data from different systems and starting to kind of bring the picture together to understand how all of our work on the HR side connects together.
Dimitri Boylan
Connects together and sort of achieves its goal. Moving the right people into the right jobs. Moving other people into jobs where they can be successful. Right? And when you can’t do that, finding people outside who can do those jobs and having a learning plan for somebody who’s close to being able to do something but not quite there yet. And it’s all timely information, too. You want to analyze and understand, and you want to take that data and then actually translate that into action in all of these programs, which are often in a lot of different systems, too. So it can be difficult. But I guess if you’re at it for nine months, you would be just logically at the early stages of it. I mean, it would be hard to be anywhere else.
Rachel Raymond
A few weeks ago, I asked, “Does anyone have a full picture of all the data we have, like all of our data sources, where we’re pulling it from just collectively as an HR team?” I put the list of data sources in front of everyone, and people said, “Oh, wow. That’s a lot of places.” And so they started to understand where the challenge is to bring that together and drive that strategy. So we’ve got a lot of plans in place over the next couple of months. And I probably think it’s going to be a multi-year journey.
Dimitri Boylan
So, you have talent acquisition, people analytics and HR Tech. So, do you have all of the HR tech?
Rachel Raymond
I have most of the analysts on our team. Historically, we’ve had HRIS analysts on the HR side. Then, they were moved under the tech service umbrella and then back. They have also been singularly focused on HCM. What we’re trying to do now is expand more over function. So, having analysts focus on our skills strategy, which may be in multiple applications, and driving what the requirements and needs are. And then bringing in the right technology partners.
So, if we need to work with developers on our tech services side, integration teams, and security, they’re kind of pulling the pieces together to help get the work done. So, we’re taking a slightly different approach. We’re starting to bring in those analysts to support other applications that historically the SME leader over, maybe learning, has been kind of the sole point person trying to kind of haphazardly like navigate, “Who do I go to when this happens?” We don’t want this to happen, so we’re trying to bring a little bit more consistency and support to all of our applications.
Dimitri Boylan
So, are you trying to develop an overall framework that all of these applications sit in in terms of how you think about it, not just in terms of, well, obviously, data, because you have been mapping where you or your data is coming from?
But when you talk about skills, for example, most of our customers have skills in three or four different systems, and they’re struggling with A) the idea that skills are going to intelligence. Right? AI is impacting skills in a good way. But B) when you have four different systems that are doing it, some of the challenges are: who governs what the skill should be? Is it this customer, that system? And then, you get the impedance between these two different systems. How are you dealing with that? Do you have a lot of legacy, or are you digging out of a big legacy situation?
Rachel Raymond
Yeah. We’re modernizing all of our solutions. We are in the process of moving our HCM to a cloud-based solution. We’re an on-prem solution right now. So that’s in flux and in process.
So, we’re doing major upgrades on the majority of our systems and really trying to understand what the use cases are. What is the source of truth? What is the temporary source of truth? Because some things may move into the new cloud base. So, the HCM solution right now, we’re not doing a lot of new in that because we’re transforming it. So we have solutions that kind of bridge that gap for the next two years as we’re going through some of these major shifts and implementations.
Dimitri Boylan
I’m very impressed. You’ve come from recruiting to managing tech in a tech company. Yeah. Okay. How does it feel to be managing tech in a tech company?
Rachel Raymond
Like I’m generally over my head most days. And then you talk about imposter syndrome.
Dimitri Boylan
Sometimes, you think, wow, it’s a real phenomenon.
Rachel Raymond
I have very good leaders who report to me in each of my function areas… They really keep me in line. I’ll say, “I’m going to start talking about this, but feel free to cut me off if I’m saying the wrong thing over here.” And so I’ve learned a lot from them.
They’ve got years in their industry and deep knowledge. So, having good leaders is really helpful so that I can navigate more of a high-level strategy, move the roadblocks out of their way, and let them do their jobs.
Dimitri Boylan
And figure out how to weave it all together so that it has a wide impact. This can be difficult when you’re a tech person running a tech group. It’s very hard to tie that to impacting a company. Yeah, you need somebody above you to help you do that. And I think, even in software companies like ours, there are a huge number of technical people. But when we’re designing products, some of those people’s backgrounds are very varied.
And essentially you are sort of constructing a large product that serves the strategic objectives of the organization. And it seems like you’re having fun doing it. It seems like you’re very excited about it.
Rachel Raymond
Yeah. I’m sort of someone who has never had a career plan, which kind of puts people off when I say that. I was asked if I ever wanted to manage anyone four or five years ago, and I said, “Probably not.” And here I am with three or four different teams.
Dimitri Boylan
I have a habit of putting people in management who say they don’t necessarily want to manage people.
Rachel Raymond
Yeah. I just like challenges, you know. I like puzzles, I like being challenged, and interesting conversations. When I get bored with my work, that’s when I probably do my worst work. I enjoy the change, I like the interconnectedness, and I feel like I’m finding pockets of things we’ve missed over the years and start pulling them together. It’s been fun, busy, good.
Dimitri Boylan
And just in case you get bored, we have artificial intelligence coming along to kind of throw another element into the soup. How much are you thinking about that? Are you still mostly getting your hands around the legacy in the infrastructure? Or are you starting to already think about how AI is going to impact?
Well, let me ask you something different. How much time do you spend talking to the tech people who build the products and solutions that you provide to the banks?
Rachel Raymond
We’re bringing AI into our products and solutions at Jack Henry, which is huge for bankers. Being able to navigate customer questions and policies and things like that and bringing the chat into our digital banking—yeah, that’s been really great. So I know we’ll have a lot of interest there.
We just had our conference last week, where we announced a lot of those programs and releases. So that was good. And then, across the organization, we have an AI governance council. But really, I think someone mentioned it on the stage earlier today. We really kind of democratized AI in the sense of, “Here’s some tools and see what you can do.”
We’re starting to look at specific roles in the company and kind of coming up with profiles to see how you can leverage AI for kind of your standard worker. Some people think, “Oh, AI, it’s not going to do anything for my job.” But, you know, here are the ways it can. And so helping with writing prompts and presentations and understanding your data.
So we’ve been we brought Copilot into the organization. And just trying to find your use cases you want to work on, and play around with it. Don’t do anything silly. Don’t put our code in it.
Dimitri Boylan
We have that rule, too!
Rachel Raymond
But see what you can do and just try to figure out how it works best for you. We conducted an AI survey across our entire associate population to get a sense of how people are feeling about it. What’s the sentiment? How are they using it? What tools are they using? Just to get a baseline, it was all over the place. I mean, it was like 50:50. Should I use it or not? Some people were like, “It’s evil, it’s going to take my job,” and others see its potential.
So, for us right now, it’s a lot of presenting how you can use it, how it will benefit your job, how you can upskill, and things like that. A lot around communication and just on what we’re doing with it is really critical.
Dimitri Boylan
Right. Yeah. It’s going to have its impact in lots of little areas, which is hard to quantify. And then, of course, in some cases, there’s going to be some big boom impact. But it’s hard to know exactly where they’re going to be right now.
Talk to me a little bit about internal mobility. Do you do it a lot? Do you have systems for it? Does it have a big impact on your organization?
Rachel Raymond
It does. Yeah. So, we have made a pretty significant effort over the past four years to focus on internal mobility. I think somewhere, maybe 2020, 2021, somewhere in that time—I feel like those years got a little fuzzy—we had some really conservative policies around internal mobility, and it was causing us to lose people because they could not even apply for positions if they had not been in their role for at least two years. And so we were losing good talent because they felt stuck, so we put some business cases together, changed the policy down to six months, and really created a lot more transparency. We went live with an internal career site. We created a lot more personalized touchpoints with the recruiters and our associates to make sure they don’t get missed in the process.
One of the challenges was we had a lot of—prior to our ATS implementation—we had a lot of associates that were getting missed. We were tracking them by spreadsheet because we couldn’t pull that unique identifier out of the ATS we were using previously. So we had a lot of people that were getting missed, they were feeling disgruntled about the process and so we totally revamped it and we changed our policy.
So, we went from having about a 16% internal mobility rate to between 29 and 32%. If you actually take out our four entry-level jobs, we have some jobs that no one is ever moving to internally because it’s baseline entry; if you take those out, we’re about 40% of our jobs filled with associates.
A lot of the reqs that we fill are kind of a downstream impact of just associates moving. And so, it’s been great because it’s increased retention, we have happier people, we focus on career growth and development.
Dimitri Boylan
People who know the company better.
Rachel Raymond
They know the company well. So that’s been good. And we’re trying to find ways to help the business be a little bit more purposeful with internal mobility. So, for example, we have some really old technology, like, we still hire RPG programmers.
Dimitri Boylan
Oh! RPG3 or 4?
Rachel Raymond
3! We’re on the i series. You know, we’re one of the biggest IBM consumers. No one teaches RPG in school, and no one wants to go into RPG. But we have people from our contact center who understand our products that move into implementation. And then we’ll educate them on RPG. They’ve got this whole career path now that they came for a contact center job and are now programming.
Dimitri Boylan
Its life-changing.
Rachel Raymond
It’s really cool. And it fills a gap that we have where we can’t really go to the external market and find a lot of people who want to do it. So we’ve been very intentional with some of our programs like that so that we can really build those talent pipelines but still support that culture of mobility and learning.
Dimitri Boylan
It was interesting that you said that you’re trying to get more intentional about internal mobility. I think a lot of our customers start with internal mobility by releasing the policies of they have a lot of policy constraints. Right? So you kind of like say, “Okay, we’re really going to do this because we know it’s going to lower turnover.”
It’s particularly important with the younger generations, who are less willing to stay in a job that is no longer interesting to them. We’ve taught them from school that you always have to be interested in what you’re doing, and so they need to be challenged a lot. But you release the policies, you let people move around because it keeps people from leaving, but then they start thinking about this intentionality, and they say, “Okay, but there could be a strategic tilt to this, right? I mean, yes, we want people to move around so that they don’t leave and so that they’re happy. But we also have very specific goals that we need to accomplish.”
Are you at that stage? You sound like you’re getting to that stage where you say, “Our mobility has to be more than just keeping people happy.”
Rachel Raymond
Yeah. We’re trying to be intentional and solve business problems with it. And so, trying to kind of bridge that gap. I think you’re always trying to, whenever you’re looking at programs, there’s obviously what’s in it for the business, but also what’s in it for the employee or trying to kind of merge those more.
We still expect people to manage their careers. We’re not going to say, “Hey, we’re going to fill out your application and tell you to go here.” There is still some onus on those associates to take the classes, take the job shadowing opportunities, and learn from the group. Be proactive and manage your career. But we’ll give you some guidance from some paths that have been really successful for others. So it’s a balance.
Dimitri Boylan
I’ve noticed in Avature that there’s a little bit of internal recruiting going on. Did you notice that? Somebody’s looking around ,and it’s kind of interesting. It’s a different dynamic than, you know, you would see years ago. I guess it may have happened at some level, but I think now it’s something you just have to get used to. Somebody is making a pitch to somebody else because they want them.
Rachel Raymond
I’d say that’s a balance too. We’ve done a lot to be focused on working as one Jack Henry approach where we’re seen as one company and not these divisions, which has been really helpful. But managers don’t like when you tap their employees on the shoulder and say, “Hey, you want to go over here?”
Dimitri Boylan
No, but I’ve noticed that, to some extent, your manager has to be able to keep you interested in what you’re doing for them. So, if somebody else in the organization comes along and says, “You really should be doing this because this is better for you.” If you don’t hear anything from your old manager… “Okay, I_ guess somebody wants me.” You should always be in a state where you know that your manager wants you, right? And you understand that if you do well, people do come and ask you to work for them.
Rachel Raymond
We added our career conversation prompt to performance management so that our associates can add their career aspirations, and their managers have to respond. So we know that even for those leaders who may be hesitant to have those conversations, they are at least doing it twice annually at their mid-year check-in.
I had an associate on maternity leave, and a job came up. I called her and said, “I know you don’t have access to the system right now, but we have to get you access because this is your job.” And she’s thrived in it. And, I share that story with people and they’re like, “Wait, you told your employee to apply to another role?”
Dimitri Boylan
Yeah. It was the right fit.
Rachel Raymond
It was the right fit for her. I’m not here to own her career; it’s her career. And then we’ve introduced some things, like we’ve used an opt in campaign through our internal mobility portal that we’ve pushed out to all our associates to complete their profile, add their skills, but then also ask them their preferences. What are you interested in? How much time do you have a week to potentially get on some special projects so you can gain some experience? Things like that. And we’re working on pushing out communications so that we’re not necessarily targeting individuals per se. But we can say, “Hey, everyone has opted in, they want to move to a new role, and they’re interested in these areas. Here are some roles that are open. And here’s what we’re doing in this space.”
So, we’re having more targeted communications around development opportunities.
Dimitri Boylan
That is so important because I sometimes see companies that create an internal mobility program and they stop with the internal career site. And many people don’t believe in internal mobility. They say, “Oh, you know, that doesn’t exist. So I’m not going to go to the site.” And the engagement is low. You don’t get the impact. But I always say that internal mobility has to have an outward engagement. But you came from recruiting, so this is almost an instinct.
So, is there anything you’re not doing right now that you’re really eager to do, or do you just sort of have your plan for a while?
Rachel Raymond
I think we’re accomplishing a lot of what we want to do. We’re trying to be a little bit intentional on the skills approach. I’d say that’s kind of a balance.
We’ve got use cases around different areas, but we don’t have a long-term plan for using it for workforce planning. So we’re kind of evolving some of that into that talent strategy. Then, we’re just focusing on the technology and how we interconnect our work. And be really solution-focused as an HR team and not so singular. So, I don’t know if I need to add too much more to my plate, hats in a lot of areas. It’s all exciting.
Dimitri Boylan
I think you’ve got it all covered. All the things you’re doing sound like the things that people are either doing or want to be doing. And so, it’s great to hear that. I’d love to hear how that goes as you progress, I think that would be interesting. It sounds like you’re doing really all the right things.
Thanks a lot for coming in; I really appreciate it.
Rachel Raymond
Thank you for having me.
