Flex Staffing And Its Impact On The Future Of Work, With James Terry

Flex staffing is rapidly reshaping the employment landscape, offering both companies and workers unprecedented flexibility and dynamic opportunities. In this episode, J.R. Lowry sits down with James Terry, Head of US Revenue for Indeed Flex, a leading tech-driven staffing solutions provider. James unpacks how Indeed Flex is revolutionizing the job market by leveraging technology to connect businesses with qualified, flexible staff, and empower individuals to choose when, where, and how they work. From its innovative origins in the UK to navigating the challenges and shifts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conversation explores how flex staffing has evolved and its critical role in meeting the changing demands of today’s economy. James also delves into the shift in worker expectations, the increasing need for flexibility from employers, and how data-driven models are transforming the traditional hiring process. Join us to discover how flex staffing is not just a trend, but a fundamental shift that’s driving the future of work and creating a more agile, responsive, and worker-friendly job market.

Check out the full series of Career Sessions, Career Lessons podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/james-terry/.

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Flex Staffing And Its Impact On The Future Of Work, With James Terry

Head Of US Revenue At Indeed Flex

This show is brought to you by PathWise.io. If you want to take control of your career, join the PathWise community. Basic membership is free. My guest is James Terry. James is the Head of US Revenue for Indeed Flex, a leader in fast, flexible, tech-driven staffing solutions. We’re going to be talking about Indeed Flex, the flex working market, or the gig economy, and James’ broader career journey. Let’s get going.

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James, welcome. Thanks for joining me on the show. I appreciate your time.

Thanks for having me.

Tell us about Indeed Flex.

Indeed Flex, in a nutshell, is trying to remove the friction in people finding work and trying to remove the friction in employers finding the right job seekers. We use technology to be able to drive that and, ultimately, how we can provide a staffing service, which, at the end of the day, is a very human process. You’re bringing on people to go and work for you. It’s important to have that human connection. What we’re doing is seeing how we can leverage technology ultimately to drive better outcomes in the result, both for the job seeker and for our clients.

From Temp Agency Troubles To Instant Jobs: Indeed Flex’s Mission

I know you joined in 2020. The firm got started before that, though. How did the firm get started? What was the impetus for it?

I joined it in 2020. We were founded in 2015. There were two founders, Novo and Jack. It’s quite an interesting story. Indeed Flex is founded in the UK. Jack was at a university in Wales, in Cardiff, which is a big university town. When you think about Wales, there’s the little city of Cardiff, and then outside of that is like the Downton Abbey and these huge, giant manors and estates.

What would happen is that he worked for a temp staffing agency and did a lot of event-type work. A lot of people would have weddings and giant events at these beautiful manors and estates. This temp agency would tell him, “Jack, can you drive out twenty minutes to go and work at this client or that client?” He’d say, “Sure,” and would go out there.

What they realized is that he had a car. After a couple of months, they said, “Jack, would you mind going and picking up a couple of people on the way, driving them up there, and then dropping them back off at the end?” He said, “Sure, no problem.” Jack liked doing it. He ended up referring one of his roommates, who was a bartender. This bartender didn’t have a car. This temp agency knew that.

They would assign this person work that was local at the local pub here or there, but within walking distance from where they all lived. Jack wondered, “This isn’t fair. I should be able to choose. Maybe I don’t want to have to drive North, South, East, and West and pick up people and chauffeur them around.” He realized that because they knew he had the car, they were selecting the type of work that he was going to pick up. He didn’t have the control and the choice to be able to decide where, when, and how he would work.

That’s where the impetus of Indeed Flex came from. It is giving job seekers the ability to choose where they want to work. The interesting part is that we found that as we give the control and choice to the job seeker, newsflash, they enjoy the role more. They like the job more, which means that they turn over at a lower rate. They are more consistent. They are happier and do better quality work. When you give job seekers the controlling choice, it drives a better result for the customer in the end.

Where did Novo come into the mix?

Novo is more of the operational and product side. Jack, historically, was always the salesperson, and Novo was the operational person. You think about a lot of startups and Y Combinator. I don’t know if you’re aware of that startup organization. One of their things is that you have to have two founders. It’s because these yin and yang can work well together. The results worked well for Novo and Jack.

How true is the firm state to its original vision?

Our motto is that we help people get jobs instantly. People always ask me when I’m doing interviews, “Why do you like Indeed Flex?” That’s my answer. It’s the motto. How great is it to wake up every day and work for a company where you help people get jobs? We don’t live to work. We work to live. You’re getting these jobs to be able to put food on the table or be able to save up money for an engagement ring, a car, or a down payment on a house. There are people that I’ve talked to who work for us who are able to turn their electricity back on or sign a lease on an apartment. The mission and the motto for us are still central and core to what we do.

The interesting part of it is that because we’re a very disruptive technology, we’re driving and taking customers on this journey of change. You can see through the results and the data that we have by democratizing the process a little bit more is driving better outcomes. There’s a little bit of change management you have to do for the customers.

We’ve held firm to making sure that we are not just taking the requirements of a customer and saying, “We’ll do it for you,” but stopping and saying, “If you do it this other way, this way that we support, these are the results that are going to drive better outcomes for you.” A central tenet of what we do is making sure that we’re using the technology to be able to allow positive outcomes.

When you joined back in 2020, what was the state of the company then?

Pandemic Pivot: Indeed Flex Adapts And Thrives

I started in February 2020. We were purchased by Indeed in June 2019. I started in February 2020 and moved out to London, England. That’s where we were based at the time. This was a month before COVID. 95% of Indeed Flex’s business was in the hospitality market at that time. I started all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in London, excited to go and light the world on fire as the new leader of the sales org. A month later, we lost all of our revenue. It was a blessing in disguise because it forced us to pivot into the light industrial sector and also into the clerical call center and retail sector.

While hospitality declined, people weren’t going out to bars and restaurants and having weddings anymore. During COVID, they were going to the grocery store. There was a huge spike in demand for a lot of retail roles. Also, they were ordering stuff on Amazon. They were ordering stuff from online retailers. It allowed us to pivot our business into these other sectors, which has been great for us.

As we’ve expanded to the US, the market that we address in the US and the total addressable market in the US is much more focused on those types of roles I was mentioning as opposed to hospitality. It focused us. Also, it gave us the opportunity. It forced our hand to broaden our skillset and start using the technology to be able to drive these types of changes across different industries as opposed to just hospitality.

Thinking back on that early time of COVID, there was the beginning where it was like the world stopped, for the most part, but then pretty quickly, after that, you had industries that plugged on remotely. You had some that went into hibernation mode, like the hospitality industry, but you had other ones where there was, all of a sudden, this massive need that hadn’t been there before. I would imagine that as a temp staffing platform, you were able to pivot quickly and probably benefited from that ability to provide resourcing for some of those unforeseen needs that popped up during the early days of COVID.

Undoubtedly. You think about it from a business perspective. They were all of a sudden sitting there with a huge amount of demand that they had never seen. It’s not just typical demand, but it was a different type of demand. With grocery stores, never before had there been a huge push for home delivery, but because of social distancing, they needed to be able to have home delivery drivers. That was a part of their business that a lot of these retailers, as an example, had to scale up on very quickly. That’s true.

The other part of it that’s interesting is that on the job seeker or on the worker side, we had a huge inventory of workers that had spent weeks, months, years, or decades, in some cases, working in the hospitality industry. By being able to reposition them, it allowed them to be able to have employment and not a huge drop in their earning potential.

We had a couple of people who had been working in the hospitality industry. I’m sure you know the hours of that can be a bit unforgiving. After working in these other types of roles, they said, “Even when COVID is over and it opens back up again, I like this new way of working. I like the fact that I have a schedule, I go to the same place every day, and I know what I’m going to do.” There was a little bit of a silver lining that allowed them to force their hand to broaden their horizons and look at other opportunities as well.

You mentioned that you were bought by Indeed back in 2019. How did that change? I know you came in a bit after that. How did it change the face of the organization? How involved are they in the day-to-day of what you guys do?

One of the great things about the relationship we have with Indeed is that they let us, for the most part, run very independently. Don’t get me wrong. The laptop that I use is an Indeed piece of hardware. We’re able to use a lot of the things and the resources they have, but ultimately, Indeed is a marketplace for job seekers to be able to find permanent work.

The temporary staffing market, while it is still employment, is a very different market. It is much more operationally heavy, and they’ve allowed us to be able to operate pretty much independently. With that being said, there is an overlap with a lot of the customers who hire permanent and also temporary. We try to look at where the synergies are to be able to have those types of conversations with customers where there might be synergies and an opportunity to be able to have a cross-functional relationship with some of the stakeholders that Indeed might have.

The nice thing about it is that they’re allowing us to largely build our business independently with the longer-term goal of creating a total talent solution. Too often, you’ll have permanent hiring and temporary hiring, and never the two shall meet. In reality, if I’m at a warehouse, if I’m at a call center, or if I’m running a hospitality organization, I need people who are good at their job to do a thing.

Flex Staffing: The really nice thing about our relationship with Indeed is that they’re allowing us to build our business independently with the long-term goal of creating a total talent solution.

While there might be a cost component that they have to think about and the amount of demand that they have, it’s going to help them load balance where they are hiring. At the end of the day, effective employers aren’t distinguishing a lot of the time. A person is a good worker whether they’re coming from a temp agency or whether they’re hired permanently.

Too often, a lot of organizations focus only on permanent or temporary. The nice part of what we do at Indeed is that we say, “For us, it’s six of one, half dozen of the other.” We’re here to give you the data to help you make a more informed decision about whether you should hire permanent or whether you should hire temporary. We’re not trying to force their hand either way. We’re helping to partner with them and be a trusted advisor to allow them to make the most strategic decision for their type of business.

You’re managing billing to your clients and payroll to your labor force. Is it all in that 1099 contractor mode?

Our labor force is all called flexors. That’s how we refer to them. We do not work on 1099 at all. All of our workers are W-2 workers. In that sense, we tend to be a little bit more of what you would call a traditional staffing organization. Almost all staffing in the US is W-2 labor. Quite often, an organization, as an example, will have 80% of its staff be permanent and then a 20% flex up and down based on peaks, troughs, and demand. There was a blockage in the Suez Canal in 2021, so we needed to be able to significantly decrease our labor supply or labor demand. Temporary labor allows people to be able to have that type of flexibility.

Ultimately, the job that a lot of these workers are doing is that they are working together in the same job. These people who are being hired full-time are working right next to temporary labor. Based on that and the way the Department of Labor looks at it, they should both be W-2 employees, whether they’re working for a staffing agency or for that end employer. All of our workers are W-2. That’s something that we will not change because we’re very worker-friendly. With the 1099 type concept, there’s not as much protection for the workers. They don’t have a lot of workers’ comp, insurance benefits, and whatnot, so we only operate within the W-2 market.

Operational Depth: AI And Human Touch In Staffing Solutions

You mentioned earlier being operationally more complicated. You guys are a massive firm in terms of the number of people that are on your W-2 roster relative to mothership Indeed, which is pretty much a platform that helps people with the transaction of finding a job, but doesn’t have that ongoing relationship necessarily with the person who’s looking for jobs. It’s a completely different business model in a way.

Indeed is more of a technology organization and a product-led organization. Indeed Flex is very much product-led as well. There’s a huge operational part of it. We have people who are calling workers or messaging with workers in the app to make sure that they don’t have any questions before their first day. We interview every single one of the workers that we have to make sure they’re vetted and qualified. We certify their skillset. If someone says that they’re a forklift operator, we’re going to ask questions to validate that they are a forklift operator. It is so that when they get the job offer or when a client posts a role, we’re making sure it’s only going out to those qualified people.

Where there’s synergy is that while we interview all of our workers, we can use technology to interview them.  One of the parts that we’re doing is we’re starting to use AI. We’re building our own AI interview system to be able to, hopefully, allow for a faster recruitment process of the workforce and allow workers to be able to interview on their own time. Maybe they work a schedule, and they can only interview at 9:30 or 10:00 at night. We should allow our AI interview system to interview them and validate the skillset. That not only allows workers to be able to interview on their own time, but it also allows us to move a lot faster as opposed to having a human being do an interview every time.

How well developed is that?

We’re using it. We don’t use it across all of our roles. With that, though, we are still in the process where it is machine learning or an LLM model. We are still in the process. Most of the interviews are still reviewed by an actual recruiter to validate the point of continuing to get the system better. Ultimately, longer-term, our goal is to be able to allow our Indeed customers, whether they use Indeed Flex for temporary staffing or not, to be able to leverage the system.

Flex Staffing: Longer term, our goal is to enable our Indeed customers, whether they use Indeed Flex for temporary staffing or not, to leverage our AI interview system.

We’re building it with the idea of going and offering it to the Indeed client base. You can see it as Indeed Flex is customer number one. We’ve built our own payroll system as well, which we think about starting to offer to SMBs to be able to go to market or Indeed to go to market with. Indeed Flex is customer number one. My paycheck comes from Indeed Flex for the product that we built ourselves.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but now I think about it. My daughter is in the job search process, and it’s very frustrating. You apply for a job and you’re one of hundreds, typically, which has been made worse in some ways by all the technology because it’s easy to send in those applications. The beauty of what you guys are doing is that it gives everybody the chance to go through a screening interview of sorts.

You may have 500 people apply for a job, but the recruiter probably looks at enough resumes to get themselves the top 10 candidates. There could be some great people, but they never got to the pile. This potentially allows people to get themselves more deeply into consideration through their AI interview, which could be great for people who find that the whole process of being among hundreds is a demoralizing experience.

I was talking to a customer earlier. She was telling me how important the interview was for her. She wants to bring people in, and she wants to interview them in person. I’m going to directly quote what she said. “I need to see them face-to-face and look into their eyes because I’m going to be able to tell if they’re  going to do well.”

In the back of my head was playing a survey that I saw. I forget exactly who it came from, but they said, ultimately, human beings are not very good at interviewing. We make a lot of bad hires. There’s not a lot of statistical significance around how much we interview and whether or not someone’s going to be of good quality.

Flex Staffing: Human beings aren’t very good at interviewing; we make many bad hires. There’s not much statistical significance to how much we interview and whether someone will be good quality.

What we’re trying to do at Indeed Flex, a little bit of our longer-term goal, is we want to be able to remove the resume because it’s not just the interview. Over 70% of people lie on their resumes. If you’ve got 3 out of 4 candidates that we know are not truthful on their resumes, what good is a resume? We know we’re not going to an interview. We’re not going to resume. What can we do?

What we’re doing at Indeed Flex is that when a worker starts working, they’re able to get rated by the customer or by our client and by the manager. The workers can also rate their experience. What we’re doing is we’re building a verified profile. You’re going to be able to go in if you’re a customer and be able to see all the different workers who have validated skillsets.

They’re not just validated by our interviewing and our recruitment program, but they’re also validated by the customer. You can see this person is rated 4 stars as a bartender, but they’re rated 5 stars as a banquet server. Now I know that I’m willing to employ them as a banquet server, not a bartender. I can see all of the different companies that they have worked for, so I can see they’ve worked at this hotel down the street or this convention center across town. I have this validation.

You almost move into this world where if you’re trying to hire someone permanent, if I know that you’ve worked 150 shifts and you’re a 4.8-rated worker, do I even need to interview you? I’ve been able to use the marketplace to be able to qualify as a potential long-term permanent candidate. I don’t even need to interview you because someone else has already done the heavy lifting for me.

Data-Driven Hiring Vs. Traditional Methods: What’s The Difference

Compared to the traditional hiring mode where a recruiter, hiring manager, or others interview, and you make a decision. You’re making a decision based on a resume and what you can glean from the person in terms of social media or any other factors in your interviews. You don’t have any performance data on how they perform the job that doesn’t come from them. You may do references. References are harder to do. Most companies don’t want their employees to give references for former employees, positive or negative. You’ve created a model that has massively more information for a prospective hire than the per-model does.

Think about it. For almost every company that’s out there, your labor is your largest cost as an organization, but it’s also your biggest asset. You cross-reference that with the fact that you can go on your phone and see ratings for hundreds of different toilet papers on Amazon.com on the app. You can choose exactly what you want for largely a commodity, but for hiring your biggest asset as an organization, we’re still using gut feel to a large extent. How can you put data and the actual information out there so that ultimately, it’s a meritocracy? May the best workers get the best roles, have the most career opportunities, and have the opportunity to be able to grow. That’s what we’re trying to do at Indeed Flex.

It’s a much more data-driven model. Coming into this conversation, I didn’t appreciate the extent to which you could create that kind of construct and the type of model that you guys are out there with in terms of your flexors.

If you think about it, there are networking social media sites that are out there, and they’re great, but you can see a recommendation. You could go on my LinkedIn and write me a recommendation about how great I am, but we haven’t worked together a lot, so you don’t know me that well. This gives the validation of, “You’ve done this role. A manager has rated you,” and you can see their success. Having that visibility is one of those things that you think to yourself, “Why didn’t I think of that? That’s a good idea.”

What are some of the other things that you guys are working on to bring new technology to bear?

Beyond Matching: The All-Encompassing Solution

There are two parts to our products. There’s this marketplace which you’ve been talking about, which matches the job seeker, our flexor, with the client. The other side of it is, if you think about it, a lot of organizations that are out there might have 30 or 40 locations across the US, the UK, and multiple different geographies. Since the staffing industry is such a local gain, it becomes very difficult for any one supplier or vendor to be able to supply workers across all of their locations.

Also, a lot of the time, if you have a staffing vendor that you use, the quality can vary a lot by location because it’s being recruited locally by a recruiter in a location and a branch manager who manages them. The quality can be different across the two different sectors. What we do is we also use our technology to create the same type of visibility with all of the other staffing agencies that are out there.

We have staffing agencies that are a part of our program where we can allow a client to be able to go on, post all the roles that they need, and be able to select which staffing agency, whether it’s Indeed Flex in our direct W-2 flexors or any other number of staffing agencies. They can choose which agency they want to send that work to.

Within there, they’re also able to validate the same type of thing. They’re able to see, “Does this agency have well-rated workers? When we send them a role, how often do they fulfill it? What is the turnover rate for these staffing agencies?” We’re trying to create that same type of transparency from worker to customer or worker to business on the staffing agency to end client use as well.

We can allow clients to have a single pane of glass over all of their temporary staffing. They post it all in one location. They can access a network of different agencies that are out there. They can have the analytics and reporting sitting right there in the middle to allow them to make pivots at its changes as they see necessary based on the data that they’re seeing.

Who would you guys see as your biggest competitors?

We have a lot of competitors and also no competitors. I believe that there’s only one organization in the world, and they’re located in India, that does the entirety of what we do, which is providing staff, having our own internal homegrown technology, and also leveraging third-party agency partners. We compete with staffing agencies on the staffing side. We compete with vendor management solutions on the technology side. We compete with managed service providers on managing that program side, but no one else does all of what we do.

That’s interesting.

A lot of the time, what will happen within these situations is you’ll have organizations that will want this overarching solution, and they’ll cobble together a third-party technology, another managed service provider, and then a host of different staffing agencies. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Spider-Man meme where, when things don’t go well, everyone is pointing at each other around where the problem is. Whereas the nice thing with the way that we operate is there’s 1 hand to high-five or 1 throat to choke if there’s an issue. You can ensure that you’ve got one point of contact that is a strategic partner with you.

Key Success Metrics: Quality, Fulfillment, And Worker Happiness

What are the metrics that are most important for you guys in terms of how you measure success?

The metrics that are most important are probably the 3 or 4 main things. Number one is I’ll talk to you first on the client side, and then I’ll talk to you on the worker side. On the client side, it’s fulfillment. If someone needs 100 workers, what percentage of them are we giving them? That’s number one. Number two is quality. What are they rating the workforce that they’re getting to make sure they’re getting quality workers?

Number three is the consistency or turnover rate of that worker. If you can get them what they need, and they rate them well, and the workers are staying, you’ve got a very happy customer. On the worker or the job seeker side, one of the biggest parts that we focus on is applying for work. How quickly can we get someone from applying for a job to being able to get them to work?

If you can get them from application to working very quickly, you tend to be able to retain and grow that worker and retain the long-term value of that worker. That’s so important because when someone’s looking for a job, they’re not applying for one, two, or three roles. They’re applying sometimes for 5 or 10. The faster you can allow them to get access to work, the better.

The other thing that we look at for the workers is how closely we’re matching their desired hours to the actual hours we’re offering them. You could have workers who say, “I want to work 40 hours a week.” That’s the standard of what we all think about. There are a lot of workers who also say, “I want to work 50 hours a week. I want to work from 9:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday, but I also want to be able to do concessions work at the local football game on a Saturday or a Sunday.”

We are able to offer them enough opportunities and enough variation of the types of roles that they can piece those things together. The other important part of it is ensuring that we’re allowing them to get a role that has the pay rate that they’re looking for. If they have a skillset that demands an $18-an-hour role, we need to ensure that we’re giving them that opportunity, not giving them only roles that are $15, because that’s a mismatch.

Let’s talk a little bit more about the broader gig economy. From the client’s perspective or the employer’s perspective, what’s changing in terms of how they think about fulfilling their labor needs?

What we talk about so much with customers is having more flexibility in the way that they’re scheduling their workers. I was at a supply chain logistics conference. I remember a bunch of operators who managed these supply chain logistics organizations were up on stage, and they said, “Look at how great we are.” It was the garment clothing distributor. They said, “You can order something online now. As long as you order it by 11:00 PM, we can guarantee it’s going to get to you the next day. If you don’t like it, you can send it back. It’s free to do. Look at how much we’re giving choice to the consumer.”

Another person was saying, “With us, you can customize the bottle.” It was a consumer-packaged goods brand. You can customize the bottle and design it as you want, and we can send it to you within a week.” After that, I got on stage and had a little talk. I said, “These are great examples, but keep in mind. These consumers are also the people who, every day of the week, are coming and working for you. You’re building this world where you’re giving this huge amount of flexibility and choice to them in the way that they’re interacting with you as a consumer, but then you’re telling them that they have to work Thursday, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays for twelve hours, and that is what it is. Take it or leave it.”

What’s happened is that as we’ve created an economy where people have so much more control and choice over the way that they’re interacting with the brands that they respect and love, they’re demanding that same thing in their work life as well. They want to be able to decide, “Maybe I can’t work on Wednesday evenings because I have to take grandma to the doctors.” You need to be able to give them that type of flexibility because that’s what people are demanding. It’s so important to make sure that you’re meeting workers where they are.

Flex Staffing: Having created an economy where people have much more control and choice in how they interact with respected and loved brands, they now demand that same control and choice in their work lives.

A big part of what we do is we’re trying to empower talent acquisition and the HR teams with data to be able to allow them to go to the operational teams. These are the teams that typically set the schedules and say, “When you have this schedule, our turnover rate is 10% higher and our worker satisfaction is 5% lower. If we made these switches, Indeed Flex is telling us that we’re going to have a lower turnover rate. When we have a lower turnover rate, that means less onboarding that we have to do every other week for new hires, which means we’re not going to have to worry about lower productivity workers in a longer ramp-up.”

We’re trying to equip our clients with the information to be able to go to the rest of the business and not have HR be a cost center, but have them be a profit center where they’re driving organizational changes based on the data that they’re giving. We’re trying to be the mouthpiece of the worker to the employer because we have so much data about what the preferences of our workforce look like.

What about from a worker’s perspective? What’s changing in the way that they look at the world?

It’s a lot of what I said. They want more flexibility in the way that they’re working. There was a survey that said that something like 40% of college graduates aren’t using their degree. The reason they’re not using their degree is that a lot of the degrees that are out there, especially as things have gone back, you have to work in the office, and you have to work consistent hours.

Some of them are saying, “Maybe that’s not for me. Maybe I want to be able to do food delivery, ride share, and also pick up a couple of shifts with Indeed Flex.” In the past, you had to go and graduate from college and get a 9:00 to 5:00 job. People are looking at it and saying, “I want to have a quality of life.” Sometimes, it’s not sitting in a car and commuting to work every day. You can’t make a value judgment on that. That’s what people want.

That doesn’t mean that they’re bad workers. That means that they have a different priority set. A lot of them are very good quality workers when they are clocked in and they’re working. What employers can do is they can say, “How can we make sure that we’re giving this type of opportunity to people? If we can, then not only are we going to attract these types of workers, but we’re going to retain them and we’re going to become an employer of choice. We’re going to become a more competitive job opportunity for people than the traditional organizations that are saying, “Sit in the office and work 9:00 to 5:00 every day.”

Impact On Traditional Corporate Models: A Shift In Worker Expectations

I wonder a lot what this all ends up meaning in the longer-term for the traditional corporate labor model. If you go back a generation, people worked a lot of their career with the same company. Loyalty worked both ways. Maybe you have to go back two generations for that. In my generation, we’ll change jobs four, five, six, or seven times in the course of our careers. The 22-year-olds will probably change dozens of times in the course of their career.

You guys are in the UK and the US. You’ve worked in both places. You know that the healthcare model is very different between the two countries. Healthcare has always been a bit of an inertial point for people in the US because they’re like, “I’ve got to keep this job because I need the healthcare benefits.” If you provide more flexibility on that and give people that backstop in some shape or fashion, then they can mix and match as they choose. It gives them more flexibility in terms of dialing up, dialing down, what days of the week they work, or whether they check out for a while because they want to travel.

It won’t work everywhere, but in a lot of places, we’re going to see a lot more of that because of the friction. You talked about friction at the beginning of our conversation that you guys are trying to eliminate in this process. Historically, there’s been a ton of friction. If you can eliminate that friction, it makes it much more of a true free agent model where the gig economy becomes the main economy.

Potentially. It’ll be interesting to see what it looks like in a few years. Ultimately, what organizations have realized is that in 2021, I believe it was, or in 2022, it was hard to hire people. There was a huge amount of demand for the workforce. There were way more jobs than there were people that were applying for jobs. It was because of that that there was a point where people were able to demand a lot more, so wages started to go up. You then hit a ceiling where people said, “We can’t continue to have wages spike so much because it becomes unsustainable. We have to end up passing this off as far as the price that we charge to our customer because our labor cost is going up.”

A lot of organizations have started looking at different ways that we can offer a similar type of incentive or similar type of benefit to workers that is not necessarily going to cost us as much. If I have a warehouse and I know that I need 100 people a day, but I have a pool of 300 people that have all worked here that I like, does it need to be the same 100 people every single day of the week, or can they flex in and flex out? Those are the types of things that I’m interested in seeing. It’s not necessarily that everyone’s going to be gig, but you could have a lot more labor sharing.

If you think about it, you have organizations that build and manufacture things. You have organizations that then distribute them, and then you have organizations that do retail. A lot of the time, they’re not located too far away from each other. Could you build an ecosystem where a worker can go and travel across different organizations and clients as the demand for those customers starts to build and starts to increase?

I don’t think those types of ideas are necessarily new, but there wasn’t the technology to enable them many years ago. Now, we do have that technology. Even with what I’m talking about, around having a labor pool of 300 and allowing people to work and flex in and flex out, how were you going to do that? Were you going to have an email chain or a text message chain years ago? That was the only way you could achieve that. With the technology we have, like Indeed Flex, you can click a button and it’s done.

You have the ability to offer workers something that they’ve never seen before in their work life, and in their personal and consumer life, they’re already seeing. The fastest and the first movers are the ones that are going to be able to make quantum leaps, who are going to try different ways and different ideas about how to manage their labor force. They’re not all going to work. There are some that are going to work well for some organizations and, conversely, not well for others, but each company would be crazy not to try at least a couple of different things to see if they’re able to drive better results over the long term.

You talked about this earlier. One of your biggest costs is people. A lot of people are not good at making hiring decisions. I wouldn’t say the cost of being wrong is massive, but there is a cost. You train somebody. You onboard somebody. You invest in somebody. You pay severance. You have that on the backside if it doesn’t work out, and you don’t let them go for performance reasons and not pay severance in those instances.

There is a cost to making these decisions badly. If you can bring more data to the equation, as you were describing your HR function earlier, in terms of being able to say, “This is what will work. This will help increase productivity and reduce churn in people,” it upends the historical way that people have thought about matching work and labor.

That’s where we have a lot of fun at Indeed Flex. We’re a bit of a disruptive product where we’re helping take customers on a journey as we’re saying, “You don’t need to interview because we already have validated, verified skills and experience for someone. Look at this. Of these 500 workers that are in this talent pool, X percentage of them don’t want to work on weekends, but you’re mandating that everyone work on weekends. I’ve got all the good workers who all have good experience, but you probably don’t have the most attractive shift pattern. Let’s look at changes.” It’s not just about getting the best people. It’s also about retaining them and offering them the type of work that they want.

When we enter very strategic relationships with customers, one of the things that I say when we’re shaking hands and saying, “We’re going to get married now,” is, “We want you to know we are going to challenge you. That is our job. Ultimately, it’s your decision to make. If we make 5 suggestions that we think are going to drive better outcomes, and you decide you only want to say yes to 2 of them, that’s fine. That’s your prerogative.” We’re also going to say, “Here are the pros and the cons of each one of these ones.” That’s an important component of it because our job is to give them the opportunity to make changes. It’s ultimately up to them if they want to, but then they need to know what the downsides are of not moving.

James’ Journey: From DC Dreams To Leading Flex Staffing

Before we run out of time, I want to talk a little bit about your broader background. Clearly, this wasn’t something you’d probably anticipated doing when you were in school. What did you foresee yourself doing when you were coming out of your schooling, and how did that translate into what you started doing professionally?

James’ Career Advice: Two Jobs Ahead & Two Years Minimum

When I graduated from college, I had this goal that I was going to change the world. I went and lived in Washington, DC for a summer and worked for a nonprofit. It was not bad, but when you’re working for a nonprofit in DC, which is not a cheap market, and you’re not making very much money, and you’ve got a roommate, you realize that it’s a lot harder to change the world in Washington, DC than you thought. I realized, “That’s not for me,” and looked at what other industries or careers I could do.

I looked at sales. Sales is where I started after this internship. I got into a sales role and realized that when someone buys something, you’re creating value. Someone is purchasing a product that you have because they think that the value of your product is better than the money that they could be saving by not spending money on that.

I realized, “I can help people improve their business in the way they’re working. I can change the world by selling a product or a service.” As that evolved and I found Indeed Flex, our motto is we help people get jobs, and our goal is to talk a lot about what we’re trying to do. It’s pretty noble to be able to get up every morning and do that and to be able to be on the forefront of a lot of the changes that are happening in the economy and be a part of those conversations with our job seekers as well as our clients.

What kind of leader do you aspire to be in your team within Indeed Flex? What’s your style? How does it align with the culture of the company itself?

One of the things that’s nice about Indeed Flex is that we are not a bureaucratic organization like anyone else. Our CEO says this in all of our all-hands meetings. He says, “If you have any questions, any feedback, or any comments, put time on my calendar. My calendar is open. You can always put 30 minutes on my calendar.” He sticks to it. Myself and the rest of our senior leadership team, I stick to that, too.

I live in Austin. I’m down in Houston because I’m working with one of our individual contributor representatives to be able to help him get on board and understand how to do things. Rolling up your sleeves is important, but ultimately, from a style of leadership, I try to be what I would call a transformational leader.

If you can build a structure where the goals of the organization are known to everyone, and everyone buys into them, and the incentives and goals of the people are aligned to the organization, then you have a great system set up because everyone is running towards their own goals, and their own goals sum to the overall organizational goals. That’s important. It’s hard to do and it’s not easy, but if you can do it well, it can be successful.

What’s ahead for you?

At Indeed Flex, we’re on our path to becoming the largest employer in the world. What’s on the path for me over the course of 2025 and early into 2026 is that we have significant market expansion. We’re expanding to about fifteen new markets. I mentioned those two different product sets we have. We’re focused on bringing a lot of these larger enterprise clients on board to this more all-encompassing solution that we can offer and growing our footprint across the US.

When you say markets, do you mean fifteen more markets in the US?

Yes. Our footprint pretty much covers the entirety of the UK at this point.

Any last advice you want to offer our audience in terms of how to think about the job market or their careers more generally?

When you’re looking at your career and you’re looking at that next job, you should not be looking at the job that you’re applying for. You should look at the job that you want after that. Always look two jobs ahead because your career is a journey. The job that you’re about to take should be, hopefully, the step on the path to get you to that longer-term goal.

It’s so important not just to say, “I want to move into this job or that job.” What’s happening after that? If you go left or if you go right, that might impact how easy it is for you to get to that longer-term goal. Always be looking at your career as a journey, and make sure that each step you’re taking is going to help you reach that end goal.

That is good advice. People often think very short-term. Having a little bit longer perspective in mind will probably help you make better short-term decisions.

Another thing reminds me of some advice my dad gave me once, because you were talking about how many people move. I’ve worked for two companies in my career, so I’m a little bit more of that old-school style. He said, “When you graduate from college and you take your first job, stay there for two years because you get to truly learn the product and learn the process.”

Get good at your job. If you can become a top performer in that role, then you’re either going to create opportunities for yourself at that organization or you’re going to broaden your resume and hopefully build up enough experience for that next job you can take.” It’s important to give it a good two years to see if it’s a good company and a good opportunity, and also, if this line of work, whether it be operations, sales, finance, or marketing, is what I want to do.

A lot of people come out of school and they don’t know what they want to do. They probably have illusions about what the job market is like or what the world of work is like. They get into it and discover the reality both about what the job is like, what the work world is like, what it means to go to an office or go to a job every day, what their style is, and what they like to do. You see a lot of people jump immediately, and then in 3 or 6 months, they want to go do something different, or they lose patience. There is a lot of benefit to sticking long enough with something that you learn, and then you build skills that will benefit you and the roles that follow from there.

When you’re early on in your career, you don’t have that experience. You can’t demand that super high salary. You’re probably going to go into a job that I’m not going to say that you don’t like, but you’re thinking, “I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life.” That experience that you’re gaining is going to be so invaluable in the future.

I can tell you that I still pull experience from the first job that I ever had outside of college. It serves you so well. Sometimes, being the worker bee is an important way to understand how the business works, so that when you are in a more strategic or higher-level role, you have the ability to understand, “Here’s what the people on the ground floor are doing on a day-to-day basis.” If you don’t have that understanding and that context, you’re probably not going to be as strong a leader when you do grow.

That is a good place for us to stop. This has been great and thought-provoking, certainly in terms of how the work world is changing and the labor markets are changing. Thanks for taking the time to do the discussion with me.

Thanks so much.

Take care.

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Thanks, James, for joining me to discuss Indeed Flex, the gig economy, and a little bit about his career journey right there at the end. As a reminder, this discussion was brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, join the PathWise community. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the PathWise newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks. Have a great day.

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About James Terry

James Terry is the Head of US Revenue for Indeed Flex, a leader in fast, flexible, tech-driven staffing solutions. Indeed Flex’s platform delivers instant job matching and agile staffing at scale. Prior to joining Indeed Flex, James spent 11 years with ADP, a leader in payroll processing and business services.

James has worked in the HR and staffing sector for over 15 years and holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University. Throughout his career, James has built expertise in strategy, sales, and leadership, with a focus on driving high-performing organizations. His experience has broadened through assignments in multiple countries, delivering results in collaboration with local teams. He is based in Austin, TX.