Why Internal Candidates Matter | SuperNova Interview with Peraton's Cari Bohley
Peraton, a next-generation national #security company, is continually searching for talent including employees with high-security clearances. But the real win for Peraton has been courting internal candidates.
The company is an integrator and enterprise IT provider for the US government. Peraton provides #cybersecurity, #digital, #cloud, operations and #engineering services for #space, #intelligence, homeland security, health and #defense, among others.
In Peraton's Supernova Award entry, the company noted it saw internal job board applicants increase 9.8% and more engagement overall. Larry Dignan, Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights, caught up with Cari Bohley, Vice President of Talent Management at Peraton, to discuss the Supernova finalist entry in the Future of Work: Human Capital Management category.
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Hi. I'm Larry Dignan for Constellation insights, and we're here with supernova Award finalist Carrie Boley. She's a VP of talent management at paraton. Hi, Carrie, thanks for joining us. Well, thanks for having me.
So I guess let's just start from the top and explain what paraton does. It looks like you all have some cool projects you work on. Yeah, we are a government services contractor. And really what that means is that all of the work that we do is for the US Federal Government. We are really a national security company. Is a good way to describe the type of work that we do for the federal government. Work on things like launching rockets in the intelligence space, collecting and analyzing intelligence, data, maritime security, it modernization, I mean, just a lot of really cool projects for the federal government we're getting now into space exploration, space resiliency. So a lot of exciting projects and exciting work that we do really to keep our country and our nation and its citizens safe.
And the company was built by mergers and acquisitions, yeah. Well, Paraton itself started as a spin off of a company called l3 back in 2017. I joined the company in 2022 and at that time, we had just gone through quite a significant amount of M and A activity with the IT Services Division of Northrop Grumman, as well as the acquisition of the entirety of a company called perspecta, which in and of itself was the legacy of several different mergers and acquisitions. So here we are, almost three years later, and we're about 19,000 employees, and in doing really well, it's a really exciting time, because really, even though we've been around since 2017 and if you can, if you count the legacy of all the different companies, we've got people that have, like, 30 years of tenure, but because of years of service, but we're really just a young company, you know.
So we operate as a young company, being only about three years old, as this talent pool built, built, I recall in your application, you know, you need some way to filter through the talent. Can you walk me through the project and what aI had to do with it? Yeah, so, like many companies, I mean, there's, there's a lot of great talent out in the industry, but the market is very, very competitive. And so when you open up a requisition for a job, the competition is fierce, and we've got some very, very unique requirements that we're trying to fill. So to really parse through, really effectively, parse through all of that information. It takes a lot of time and effort, so without having something like AI to really look for some unique information and indicators, it's really difficult.
The other piece of that is looking for what we call passive talent. So not everybody's always actively looking for a job. So you know, like many companies, we're also looking for people who aren't necessarily looking for a new job. And an AI helps us identify who that talent is. Helps us look across different areas of the internet to find who that talent might be, people who maybe have written white papers, people who have, you know, a profound on LinkedIn or other social media sites, people who don't use social media, but, you know, maybe they presented at a conference and presented something really interesting that we may, we may want to get in touch with. So we've got different ways to find individuals who may be somebody that we want to talk a little bit further with.
When did it hit you you needed AI as a front end or what? I guess, when did it hit you that the scale of finding talent was challenging?
Um, you know, in 2022 we've worked with this company. We've worked with seekout for a few years. A lot of companies in the space, a lot of companies across multiple industries, work with companies like seekout. And it wasn't until we've, we've recognized that we needed to have more power than just, you know, trying to find this passive talent and that the type of work that we were bidding on in the government was much more complex, much more complicated, and the level of effort that it takes to submit proposals for the government, because that's essentially how we work, was becoming increasingly complex, and part of that effort requires being able to put together things like staffing plans, so without having a tool in place to help us that could leverage AI that could again go through large amounts of data in short periods of time, it really handicaps what you're able to do.
And so when we look at, you know, all of the different tools that are out there, when we looked at the relationships that we had already in place with seekout, it just made sense for us to explore some of the expanded capabilities that they already had that we weren't taking advantage of. And that's really when we started putting two and two together. And it's like, you know, it just makes sense to go further down the road with them. And then, in addition, we were also looking at, you know, we can bring talent in the door. How does what seek out offers also play into our retention strategies and that's where we started looking at some of their other modules around career development and career growth, and it really played right into what we were trying to accomplish from a career development standpoint for our employees. Really played right into the data that we were seeing from our employee engagement strategies, and it really complemented what we were trying to do and help our helping our employees build their careers, so they felt that they had a place to stay with paraton. They didn't have to go and look someplace else for a job.
What were some of the main business metrics you used to justify the project?
Turnover is the biggest one. So retention, yeah, retention and being able to ensure that we could keep our employees within the company and that we could so retention is the starting point, and then mobility is another. So not only do we retain our employees, but we have a place for them to grow their careers so that we can move them throughout the organization. And if we were able to do that, then we could bring in, you know, new employees from outside the company and staff programs from the bottom, and help build employees' careers throughout the organization.
So, I mean, it's, it really becomes an end-to-end process for helping our folks build their careers within the company, starting from when they when they sign on with us. You know, they can look and see that hey, you know, it's not only just this project that I, that I started with, or this job that I started with, but there are other places where I can go. I don't have to stay in this one position and be here for the entirety of my time with paraton, I can move around to different types of jobs and different types of opportunities within the organization, but being able to create the picture that you know, we can reduce turnover, we can increase engagement, we can increase mobility and staff our programs internally, instead of having this churn of people coming in and having this revolving door of employees. I mean, those are the things that are the metrics that our leadership team paid attention to, what roles are most difficult to hire and retain in our industry, it's really highly clear talent. These are the people that are doing top-secret work for the government. And there is, you know this, you would think that it's a pretty big market, but it's not.
It's a very, very small market. There's several companies that do the type of work we do, but it's really a very small industry, very small. And so trying to find the right talent to do the work that we have to do to keep our nation safe is challenging and that's the that's the talent that that we use, you know, our partner and seek out, that we use them to help us find what were some of the surprises with this project?
See, some of the surprises was, I would say at the beginning, it was really creating a business case that resonated with our leadership team. In hindsight, it's like, oh, it makes so much sense to just pick out these couple of metrics, and that's what everyone is gonna buy into. But in creating the story that was a strong business case, and making sure that we had that business case in place, is something that it's a, it is it is an effort to do that, so that you do it. Well, certainly not impossible, obviously, because we did it, but making sure that you've got a strong business case so that you can get the buy in that you need, and having a sponsor to help you with that is incredibly important. And I.
Yeah. And I think probably the most surprising thing for me was that when you have all of those things in place, it becomes much easier to position a project like this and an investment like this to an organization. What does seek out to sit on top of is it sit on the HR system or, I guess, what? What's it? What's it integrated with? Yeah, we integrate it with a couple of different systems. We integrate it with our talent acquisition system, our ATS, we integrate it with our HRIS system, we integrate it with our learning management system. We integrate it with it's not really an integration, but we input our career development framework into it so that it understands all of the different job families and things like that. So it really is like a hub that sits on top of all of these different tools and systems, so that, depending on what we're using it for, it gives us, it gives our employees the information that they need.
You know, for example, on the talent acquisition side and on the career mobility side, like it knows all of our open positions, so that you know, if I'm an employee that's looking for a new role, I can see what all those roles are. And because we feed all of our HRIS system, it knows who I am, and because our job families are in there, it knows what what is next in line for me, if I were to go on a kind of a step by step approach, but also because it sits with our on our HRIS system, it knows other people who are like me in the company, who have maybe gone down a different path, and it aggregates that data so that it gives me good recommendations that Maybe are things that I haven't thought of before. So it's not just a traditional career path of if I were in finance, moving, you know, finance analysts, 123, but maybe I want to go into data science and I, or maybe I hadn't thought about going into data science, but because, you know, there's some overlap between skills, between finance and something like data analytics, it will show me those different career paths that maybe I hadn't considered before, and so that opens up a whole world of opportunity for our employees. And then it'll also feed me from our learning management system, the type of training that maybe I haven't had that will help me develop in that area, so that I become upskilled, and then can start to apply for those types of positions.
What are some of the differences between sourcing talent internally versus externally? Quite if there's a few differences. I mean, internally, we know our candidates. We know you know where they're coming from. We know the types of projects that they've worked for. You know, we know what their performance has been on. So, you know, they're a known quantity. When we're sourcing candidates internally, you know, versus externally, when you know it's we don't have that level of data. There's not fidelity in the data on that individual and those candidates that are out in the external to the organization. So it's, you know, when we're looking for, especially for more strategic positions, it really helps us to be able to source internally when we've got so much more data on our employees and on the individuals that are that we're trying to position for those types of roles in the organization.
From an external standpoint, you know, looking at Canada candidates externally, there's also, you know, if they're, if they're posting for a position with us, they can also be posting for a position with, you know, five other companies. So they're much less committed to a position than somebody who's already within the organization. They're already on our payroll, they're already getting our benefits. So their stickiness, if you will, just doesn't exist. So from a value proposition standpoint, if we can source our candidates internally whenever possible, then you know, that's, that's what we want to be able to do now, with a company like ours, where growth is part of our strategy. It's not always possible, it's not always desirable, but when it makes sense, where we can do that, that's part of our strategy. What? What advice would you give HR, leaders, going into AI?
You have to go into AI. You don't have a choice. It is, it is part of our future. One thing that there are a couple of things. One is that AI is going to be one of your best employees. It's going to be an employee. I use AI a lot because I have a very lean team, so I use AI in a couple of different ways. When I'm going through a lot of data, when I'm trying to develop a new training module, when I'm looking for ideas on how to further a strategy, I use AI because I don't have the people resources to do so.
AI also helps me with my team in terms of giving them new opportunities. So there's really a lot of, you know, there's a lot of ways to apply AI that we hadn't thought that we, you know, haven't been doing traditionally in an HR in an HR role. So it's not just for the tech folks that are out there. It's really for all of us to take advantage of. And honestly, if you're not ready for that yet, it's really time for you to start doing some research, reading up on it, and time to get ready for it. Otherwise it's you're just going to be left behind. All right. Thanks for joining us, and congrats on being a finalist. Thanks so much.
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