Last week, PayStream Advisors was fortunate enough to sit down with iCIMs CFO, Ron Kasner. Ron served as the CFO of another solutions company prior to his time with iCIMS, so he is well qualified to give us insight for our upcoming report, “A CFO’s Guide to Human Resource Management.” iCIMS is the leading provider of SaaS talent acquisition solutions, and their top product, the Talent Platform, is used across many industries to help hire and retain the greatest of today’s workforce.

While speaking with Ron, we were interested to know how HR and Finance collaborate. Ron feels there can be collaboration among many workforces and from many different standpoints, and these interactions become clearer when he breaks down the two worlds into their component parts to see how each contributes to a business. For Finance, Ron see’s the accounting side and the budget analysis and planning side, while for HR, he draws the distinction between talent acquisition, talent management, talent engagement, and talent development. Next, he looks at the interactions between those worlds to find the touch points. Within the financial world, the predominant touch point in accounting always centers around payroll and other employee interactions; in budgeting and planning, there’s significant collaboration around analytics.

iCims utilizes detailed analytics with their talent acquisition and talent management, focusing mainly on the performance of employees. Ron’s company believes cost per hire analysis is very important across different areas of an organization’s hiring process. iCIMS can pull relevant information from their own system to compare it to industry data regarding cost-per-hire ratios or interview-per-hire managers, and they can also learn from the performance data they take from their own licensed products. iCims is working to make these industry benchmarks available to their clients to help them in their own analysis.

Ultimately, iCIMS is trying to build up and drive their talent pipeline. They use their acquisition tools to engage with potential hires before jobs are open so that when positions become available, they will already have connections ready to go. Ron believes it is important for iCIMS to know and be known by job seekers, which makes building a talent pipeline an essential process.

While this dedication to making connections with potential employees is striking, what iCIMS does with that talent is even more exciting. We asked Ron about some of the top problems HR organizations were trying to solve. For iCIMS in particular, the focus is on employee retention. Ron explains that when scaling a business, an organization can think in terms of people, process, and systems. If they focus on the people and acquiring the right people, the right process and systems will follow. However, part of what makes up a good staff is how easy they are to retain. There are several things a company can do to keep turnover down, like culture, engagement, and benefits, but that’s only one piece of it. There will still be a leaky bucket in any organization, and the biggest HR challenge at the end of the day will be hiring the right people to fill that leaky bucket so that the company can continue to grow. For companies who don’t grow quit as fast as others, the challenge is still the same—how do they get the next best people in the door?  And, how does a company stay ahead of turnover by replacing those employees with better people?  To get the best quality talent into an organization, Ron believes it is essential that the right tools be in place.

We were impressed by iCIMS’ mission to bring a company the best quality hires, but we were interested to know about the direct results an organization can experience if they choose to work with iCIMS. Ron doesn’t believe the most effective way to measure results is through trying to calculate ROI, but rather by gauging productivity. This is all about narrowing the focus to specific areas a solution affects.  When choosing a solution, a company should look at a specific part of their process and ask themselves how the solution will make that process better. For Ron, this standpoint comes from how he works as a CFO. He considers himself an operational CFO, meaning that he doesn’t look at the bottom line cost of the solution, but at how the solution operates to improve a business. Companies that only consider the bottom line will tend to pick solutions that save them money but don’t always make them better. Ron sees this as a downward spiral, because those solutions won’t actually save money—they will only lose the money that could have been put into effective solutions. “Efficiency is in effectiveness,” Ron says. “Just because something’s cheaper, it doesn’t necessarily make your business better.”

PayStream Advisors enjoyed this one-on-one time with Ron Kasner and iCIMS, and we feel that our upcoming report will really benefit from the wisdom of a CFO that is focused on greater final quality rather than a quick fix. Look for “A CFO’s Guide to Human Resource Management” this third quarter