Location Strategy: Building Resilience in Volatile Markets

[0:00:00] John Lynch: I see a few folks already joining. We're going to wait for a minute or two while the audience number ticks up. Good day to you all. Thank you for joining us.

As we get started, please make sure you drop your name or say hello in the chat. We're here to talk location strategy, so if you have any location headaches to share, drop them in there. Otherwise, it'd be great to hear where you're dialing in.

I see some familiar names already. This is pretty cool. Thanks for joining. Can everyone hear me, okay? Awesome. Thank you.

Alright. So, we're going to get started a little slowly as everyone joins. But we're here to talk about location analysis. I’m going to get rolling here in a moment. Michigan, Basel, Switzerland. Wonderful.

Alright. I'll start with a little introduction so we can get rolling. My name is John Lynch. I lead communications and content at TalentNeuron, and I'll be facilitating and presenting a bit today for our session on location strategy.

At TalentNeuron, I have the privilege of working with some brilliant people, especially our Strategic Consulting Team members. And I'm lucky enough today to be joined by Lynne Mayers to share her wisdom and experience.

So, Lynne, maybe you're the best person to introduce yourself here.

[0:01:42] Lynne Mayers: Thank you so much, John. And my audio is now — I was letting you know it wasn't working at first, but it is working now. Awesome. So, I’m Lynne Mayers, I'm a Senior Consultant at TalentNeuron. I work with our consulting engagements and custom research solutions. And John, I'll hand it back to you to do a little bit of housekeeping.

[0:02:05] John Lynch: Yes. Thank you. Your audio might come in and out a little bit. If it does, I'll let you know, and then we can switch the cameras off or figure it out. But I'm sure to give you a heads-up.

So, I'll do a little table setting. Today, our session is about forty-five minutes to an hour. We have a presentation and a Q&A at the end, so keep that in mind as you listen in. At the end of the session, we'll have a survey. It's a valuable way to gather feedback and hear what we're doing well and what we can improve. So please stick around and fill it out.

Also, today's webinar has been approved by HRCI [HR Certification Institute] for qualification credits. For our HRCI audience, welcome. The program approval number you need will be shared at the end of today's session, and you can find it in the deck.

Let me quickly go over some housekeeping items regarding your webinar experience. What you see in front of you is the webinar room. As I mentioned during the webinar, you'll have a chance to ask questions in the top right-hand corner in the purple square. Folks are already in the chat, so that's great.

Under the Q&A tab, you can drop questions as we go. We'll review them and make sure to answer them at the end. If we don't get to all the questions during the session, we'll follow up with you afterward.

In the docs section, you can download the presentation slides. If you have any issues, check there for the slides, but I'll remind you later.

The chat is where you can share your thoughts and interact. We'll be monitoring it throughout, and we want to hear from our audience because this is an interesting and dynamic topic. I want to know what's on everyone's mind, and hopefully, we'll have some good questions to answer at the end.

To optimize your viewing experience, since we will be covering some data today, there is an icon in the bottom right-hand corner of your presentation screen. You can expand it to see the slides in more detail.

If at any time during the webinar you'd like to learn about TalentNeuron and how we support location analysis and strategic planning decisions, you can hit the "Request a Demo" button at the top. Our team will be glad to follow up with you.

So, thank you for your patience. Lynne, I suppose this is the time when we start talking about our location.

[0:04:48] Lynne Mayers: So, you know, we joke sometimes that every webinar seems to start with, "We're facing a period of unprecedented volatility." The reality is we are. Before diving into our current situation, we wanted a quick recap. Here's our timeline charting out some of the major events from the past seven years. I joined TalentNeuron in mid-2016, so I tend to think about what clients need help with at different periods.

In 2018, we had restrictions on H-1B visas, which created a sea of headlines about US tech companies establishing offices in Canada to take advantage of a more flexible immigration policy. We also had the beginning of the trade war with China and the shift in thinking about optimal locations for global manufacturing.

2020, of course, was the beginning of COVID-19, which had immediate and profound effects on everything and further exposed global supply chain risks. But by 2021, not only had the labor market recovered in many sectors, we saw what I characterize as just a hiring frenzy across the board — white collar, blue collar — as organizations responded to increased consumer demand and were flush with cash.

And we had the two wars, Russia-Ukraine and Hamas-Israel, which led organizations to reevaluate their presence in high-risk regions. In late 2022–2023, we had what I call the "Great Rationalization." That was when organizations cut back on spending. They were forced to rethink how they were spending on talent and where.

ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, which, of course, sparked the Gen AI boom. And then, across all of this, we've been confronting growing climate risks. So there's a lot that's been going on.

So let's talk about the repercussions of each of these, not all, but some of them, and how they might continue to play out. John Lynch, do you want to take us through the H-1B shakeup?

[0:06:51] John Lynch: Yes. That's a good place to start. When we started discussing this topic, we realized that the period of volatility could extend back several years. As regulations around immigration visas have been in the news recently, a good place to start is H-1B visas. So, it's recently reemerged and is at the top of the minds of a lot of our customers. For those unfamiliar, the H-1B visa is essentially a permit that allows US employers to hire foreign professionals, usually in specialty occupations — things like theoretical and technical roles. It's a three-year visa initially.

So, in 2017, the US government started to cap access to H-1B visas, or introduced a new low cap and limited the number of approvals for those visas. Because of the connection to technology and technically skilled roles, this had a significant knock-on effect and was very relevant to how organizations make location and strategic workforce decisions.

For example, several large US technology companies announced at that time that they intended to open or grow operations in Canada. Canada has a more flexible immigration policy, particularly for high-demand workers.

So, Lynne, I know that Canada specifically was of interest to you.

[0:08:21] Lynne Mayers: I looked at our competitor module in our platform, and a lot of the data that folks will see in the next few slides comes from that module. It's really easy just to plug in whatever roles, locations, or competitors you want to see trends on there. So, I looked at software developer hiring by the big US tech companies over the past two years in the US, India, and Canada. As you can see in each of the three charts here, there was a strong hiring recovery in all geographies in 2024. That's where those lines slope upwards. But then we get to around October 2024 and hiring drops sharply in the US and India. And by the way, I'm seeing that across most of our markets for all employers, so we really need to keep an eye on that. But if you look at Canada, the hiring curve is deepest there, and it just keeps going. There's not been a drop-off.

So what does that tell us? These large US tech companies have been really doubling down on hiring software developers in Canada while pumping their brakes elsewhere. And a lot of them have offices there now, so it's easy for them to do that. So, it will be interesting to see how things play out with immigration policy in the US and globally and the moves that organizations make as a result. Some countries have been courting immigration, like Portugal, and others where there have been pullbacks, so it's definitely something to keep on the radar screen.

So let's talk about our next event, which is the pandemic, on the next slide. And, you know, COVID-19 needs no introduction. It was the black swan event that looms large in collective memory. Although there have actually been quite a few in the past three years — the dot-com crash, 9/11, the Great Recession of 2007 — black swan events being those large, global events that shake markets and create huge upheaval. So, anyhow, it's not out of the question we'll see more of these.

The impact of COVID, though, on labor markets globally was an immediate sharp slowdown of hiring demand. Hiring just fell off a cliff, as you see here. This is US data, but we saw this play out globally. And we also saw global supply chains seize up. Manufacturing output dropped, and raw materials and goods were disrupted. But then something else happened that was unanticipated on our next slide. Hiring demand not only recovered but rose to levels that we just hadn't seen ever before. You're seeing data here for the US and the UK, but we saw this across almost all markets.

And while the recovery wasn't even across different industries, we saw a huge surge in demand for both blue-collar and white-collar workers. So, across 2021 and '22, I had more conversations with clients about what to do about frontline worker attraction and retention than I'd ever had before. Organizations just couldn't find enough warehousing, production, hospitality, and healthcare workers. And suddenly, they had to think carefully about where they opened new plants or new warehouses. Were they going to be able to staff these locations? And they had to adjust wages and offer new and different kinds of incentives and benefits to attract and retain talent.

Things are better now, but it's still not easy on this front. And then, on the professional worker front, we had clients coming to us saying, "Just tell me where to find the talent globally, particularly for tech talent. We'll hire people anywhere we can find them." So organizations were just hungry for talent. They had money to spend. And everyone working remotely was relatively unconstrained by physical office locations. So you had this massive geographic dispersion. And I do think that opened a lot of organizations' eyes to the potential of global labor markets and even kind of underrecognized domestic markets, but they also faced unprecedented challenges of retaining talent in hot markets like India and Eastern Europe.

But then came what I call the “Great Rationalization,” which is on our next slide. So, things started to shift in the latter part of 2022 and 2023. Interest rates started to rise. Organizations had hired and spent like crazy on talent, but then they had to shift their focus back to the bottom line. So, there was a wave of tech layoffs in early 2023. Talent competition settled down — it didn't go away, but it wasn't at that fever pitch. This graph tells an interesting story. We're looking at demand for recruiters in the US from February 2022 to now. By looking at the demand for recruiters, you can tell a lot about what's going on with labor markets and what organizations are planning to hire. And basically, it just fell off a cliff in early 2022. It hasn't really recovered in the US.

So that's just a quick tip for you: use hiring demand for recruiters to get those early signals about what's happening with the labor market. And that downturn was pretty global. But since then, there's been a recovery, but it hasn't been everywhere. So, if we jump to our next slide, if you follow me left to right, on the left, we're looking at global hiring for software developers from early 2021 to today. And you can see it's recovered nicely, but not everywhere equally. So, in the middle, the recovery has been more muted in the US; it's been stronger in India.

And what we saw was organizations saying, "After spending heavily on talent everywhere, this just isn't sustainable. We haven't really rationalized how we think about location relative to our talent objectives." So, our team wound up doing a lot of advising on that with clients. Think about the type of talent you're hiring. Is it key strategic talent? Is it operational talent? Is it more your services talent? And then align your location objectives with your talent objectives. Is the key consideration cost? Is it possible to acquire those critical differentiating skills? Let's help you find the right markets for your needs.

Clients also said, "It's just really hard to manage this geographic dispersion." So let's think strategically about how we can consolidate around a number of hubs, whether for centers of expertise or business services. And we think that trend is definitely going to continue as organizations are likely going to face significant cost pressures moving forward.

And then, next slide. Of course, one of the seminal events of the last few years was the launch of ChatGPT and other large language models. I think we all remember where we were when this happened, but it just marked a great leap forward in generative AI capabilities. And again, it sent organizations into this hiring frenzy for talent with these Gen AI skills. So while we were seeing hiring for other types of tech talent was more volatile, we've just seen, as you can see there, that straight upward trend in hiring for those Gen AI skills. And that's likely to continue, although some regions might have more regulatory guardrails.

And then, next slide. The final big trend we'll hit is the manufacturing shift away from China. And this started in 2018 with the first round of tariffs, and it's continued for many reasons. We've seen other geographies in Asia like Thailand and Vietnam benefit, as well as increased nearshoring to Mexico, driving up demand for production talent there, as you can see on the right.

And we think that nearshoring and friendshoring trends will continue as organizations continue to de-risk their supply chains. But, you know, it's tricky because Mexico and other countries are also in the crosshairs for tariffs. So until it becomes clearer how the trade wars are going to pan out in the longer term, organizations seem to be trying to hedge their bets by diversifying their supply chains and ring-fencing as best they can. And building plants is capital-intensive, so it's not always easy to turn on a dime. But if you manufacture via a partner, you may have more flexibility to move your activity around geographically.

So that's just a run-through of some of the volatility we've been through in the past several years and some of the trends we think are going to continue. And, of course, how you can use location intelligence to track trends and signals that you can use to equip your business leaders and HR leaders as they plan.

So, John, I'm going to turn it over to you to bring us into the present.

[0:17:23] John Lynch: Thank you, Lynne. I think the need for those signals and data has become more apparent this year. At the beginning of this year, perhaps nobody would have expected such an intense disruption, but it's been a very notable first quarter of 2025. The extended period of volatility is not over. In fact, there’ve been multiple events that have either introduced new challenges for HR or organizations and compounded the issues that have been observed over the last several years.

So this is just a snippet of what we've seen so far in 2025: elections and new administrations in the US and Germany, tariffs and trade disputes, technological advances, particularly in the fields of AI and machine learning, and negative impacts on consumer confidence, employee confidence, and economic stability. These events have knock-on effects in the near and long term, and we'll talk about those briefly.

In the meantime, it would be great to hear more from our audience about what you’ve found is impacting your organization. So, I'm going to launch a little poll here so we can discuss the results. It'd be great to hear from everyone; you should be able to see it now.

Essentially, of these new or continuing issues in 2025, which would impact your organization's talent strategy this year?

• Global conflict

• Trade tariffs

• Federal workforce and spending cuts in the United States

• Growth of AI and machine learning

• The regulatory split around AI is occurring between the US and the E.U.

• Climate change, the long-term issue with near-term impacts

If there's anything else not included in the poll, we'd love to hear from you, drop it in the chat, please. Also, if you have any questions as we go through this, please drop them into the Q&A tab on the screen.

Alright, we're getting some good results. The continued growth of AI and machine learning is our audience's most significant concern. Trade tariffs, unsurprisingly, are a concern for our manufacturing audience or anyone working across borders.

That's wonderful, thank you. Any thoughts on these results?

[0:20:33] Lynne Mayers: I can't see the results, but it sounds like you're saying the growth of AI and machine learning was the number one and tariffs number two. Is that right?

[0:20:42] John Lynch: That's right. Oh, yes. You can't see the results. So, "Continued growth of AI and machine learning" has 30 votes. "Trade tariffs" — 14 votes. Those are the top two. And the third would be "Global conflict." So certainly, the continued growth of AI and machine learning would be the most keenly felt concern.

[0:21:07] Lynne Mayers: Great. Thank you for that. We're going to hit on all of those, but we wanted to talk about how some of these trends will affect us this year and into the future and what that means for HR.

Let me hit on each of them briefly because we want to discuss how HR can respond. We're going to start with trade wars and tariffs because they've been so much in the news recently, and they're probably going to be with us for a while. For each of the next slides, we've outlined some short- and long-term potential impacts and what it means for HR.

When it comes to tariffs, in the short term, they're likely to increase costs for businesses and consumers. How much and whether that eventually leads to economic slowdown and businesses cutting staff remains to be seen. But between the tariffs and the continued high level of geopolitical risk we're seeing, it's likely that organizations will continue to diversify their footprints and supply chains to de-risk. We may see some reshoring, although the cost of manufacturing in countries like the US, UK, and Western Europe is high. More likely, we'll see continued nearshoring and friendshoring, looking for low-cost countries that are lower on the radar screen, such as Vietnam, Thailand, and other Latin American countries.

HR needs to stay close to the business to understand how the broader macroeconomic and political environment impacts the company and prepare for potential slowdowns. In industries with complex supply chains and large global footprints, HR should be prepared to share a constant stream of location intelligence, both in labor market data and macroeconomic and political risk data. We'll talk more about that in a bit.

Let's go to our next slide. Trade wars create macroeconomic and political risks, but we're dealing with other types of risks, making for an extremely complex environment. There are shifting political alliances and ongoing armed conflicts — all against the backdrop of climate change, where we just had the hottest year on record, surpassing a critical threshold. We've seen the effects across the globe.

Now, we're getting requests from clients to incorporate climate risk data into their location analysis. By the way, when we do these location analyses, we bake in a broad set of risk scores. Again, we're likely to see organizations continue to de-risk, and diversify location footprints, restore, nearshore, and friends here, looking for lower-cost locations that are under the radar. For example, Morocco has become a key hub for auto manufacturing, and there's increased interest in Peru for tech and services.

Organizations will be constantly recalibrating their risk tolerance. How much are they willing to pay for safety? What types of risks matter most to them? They will expect HR to provide constant insights into the global labor market landscape, both from a talent and macro risk perspective. Expect questions from your leaders like, "What's going on with our site in Chennai? Should we be ramping up in Mexico City? Where are competitors looking for talent? Where are they retreating? Why? Help us see ahead."

The next slide is where we discuss the continued acceleration of AI adoption. On the AI front, we expect organizations to continue accelerating their AI adoption, leading to increased demand for talent and skills to develop AI applications. At the same time, we'll see some role displacement and skill evolution. More and more clients are asking us to help assess how extensively roles will be impacted by automation and in what ways. What are the skills that need to be developed now? Where can AI talent be found globally?

In addition to our global talent intelligence, we now have models that help clients analyze a role and determine, for example, that up to 20% of it is automatable. We can identify the specific tasks that can be automated and the new skills needed. This provides an incredible ability to plan workforce strategy in ways that weren't possible before.

The regulatory environment around AI is also likely to become increasingly fractured. The EU is adopting a greater level of regulation, and other regions may follow. This means HR must be prepared for the challenges that will arise. Regulations will impact AI use in HR functions like hiring and recruiting. HR teams must become well-versed in AI ethics and compliance in different markets.

Interestingly, I saw an article recently suggesting that HR might take the lead in overseeing ethical AI adoption in organizations — introducing the idea of a Chief HR AI Officer. Organizations will need to define their stance on AI and its workforce impact, addressing this in their EVP and culture statements. Are they radical adopters pushing AI forward at all costs? Or will they invest in reskilling to transition their workforce?

Finally, let's move to our last topic, particularly relevant to the US. Go to the next slide. The extent of the impact remains unclear as the US undergoes retrenchments in the federal workforce and budget reallocations. However, we already see layoffs and hiring freezes in federal contracting, research institutions, and NGOs. This will likely lead to greater talent availability in key areas and wage compression in sectors where supply outpaces demand.

This isn't just happening in Washington, DC; over 80% of the federal workforce lives outside the DC area. Looking at long-term effects, will we see a brain drain from the US as skilled professionals relocate to global research hubs? Will there be future federal worker shortages? Will certain activities shift to the private sector? These outcomes remain to be seen.

HR must remain mindful of the potential impacts on parts of the organization that depend on federal work and labor markets across the US as reductions in the sector take hold.

Okay, John, let me hand it back over to you. Any questions?

[0:29:08] John Lynch: Yes. There are couple of great questions. So I will, thank you, Marie and Emily. Wonderful questions. “Could you share more details about how TalentNeuron can help us quantify some of these risks?” So, I think across those four categories, perhaps, that's the place to start. A brief overview would be great, Lynne.

[0:29:40] Lynne Mayers: Sure. So, of course, this is a core part of our solution: the ability to look at how labor markets are trending in terms of talent supply, cost, and competition. I am really getting a sense of risks in terms of those core talent factors and components. Seeing what, in particular, your competitors are doing, where they're investing, and what types of skills and products they're investing in is a key part of it. But then, you know, we also bake some of those other macroeconomic, geopolitical, and climate risks into our custom research and consulting solutions.

Let me know if you'd like any further refinements!

[0:30:23] John Lynch: Awesome. Thank you. And I was looking for the name, and it was Rupert. Thank you, Rupert, for your question. You have a great follow-up question. We'll get to that in just a moment. And, in answer to your question, Peter, yes, the slides can be found in the doc section. Keep asking your questions. We do have time at the end for Q&A, so we can get into more depth. But we want to talk more about the kind of recommendations we can make, which will help answer one or two of our questions.

[0:30:52] Lynne Mayers: Absolutely. So, let's jump into our mandates for action. These are our four mandates for action for HR. This is a synthesis of what you need to prepare to take action.

Top left: You're going to be asked to equip business leaders with location intelligence to help them plan. And by that, we mean data on domestic and global markets. Our leaders are facing an incredibly complex environment. They're going to be doing more frequent scenario modeling and planning. They're going to need HR to support them with robust external location and talent intelligence. And I'm not just saying that because this is what we do for a living. Our clients are saying that is what they're getting asked for.

Top right: Integrate location decision-making into strategic workforce planning. If you've been on webinars with me, you may have heard me say this before. It's even more important today. There's just no room for error on location. It can't be done in a siloed way. It can't be driven purely by real estate considerations. It needs to be part of how organizations are planning their workforce strategy. And how we do workforce planning itself needs to be an integral part of business planning.

Bottom left: When making location decisions with external intelligence, we need deep insight into the labor market, data, talent supply, cost, and competition. But increasingly, we must also consider the risk environment.

Bottom right: We also need to take AI automation risks and the regulatory landscape into account.

So, let's hit on each of them if we jump to the next slide.

I just said that businesses will need location intelligence for business planning and that we need to incorporate location decisions and data into strategic workforce planning. Let me expand on that.

What you're seeing here is a high-level view of TalentNeuron's workforce transformation model. This is how you take strategic workforce planning to the next level. We're doing a lot of deep consulting on this right now because so many organizations are focused on maturing their workforce planning strategies.

It's based on three fundamental components: Understand, Plan, and Transform. Most workforce planning frameworks only focus on Plan and, to some extent, Transform. But we believe strategic workforce planning must be fully aligned and integrated with strategic business planning. By that, we mean not just operating downstream from business planning.

We've seen that business leaders need location, talent, and competitor intelligence fed into their strategic planning process to understand the external landscape and risks as they plan and make decisions. This helps them make better decisions and avoid blind spots. Ideally, workforce planning and business planning should operate in a constant feedback loop.

On the left, HR needs to identify the right type and altitude of location intelligence and competitor intelligence the business needs and feed that into the planning process.

On the bottom right, when we get to workforce planning, forecasting future supply, demand, sizing gaps, and scenario modeling, location data is also crucial for making informed decisions.

So, let me unpack that on the next slide.

These are the types of questions that need to be addressed. On the left, during the business planning stage. On the right, during the workforce planning stage. It's similar data but at different levels.

The business will look for broad trend intelligence and signals:

• What are our key markets' talent, macroeconomic, and geopolitical risk trends?

• How are our competitors changing their location footprint?

• What are some key emerging markets in our industry?
  

For workforce planning, the focus shifts to:

• How can we optimize locations to meet cost objectives?

• How do talent, geopolitical, and macroeconomic risks impact our key markets?
  

As organizations decide whether to enter, remain, or grow in a location, HR must broaden its lens beyond the labor market to include macro risk factors. Let me explain what we mean by that on the next slide.

On the left, we've always helped organizations go deep into understanding what we call the three A's:

• Availability: Talent and skills availability in various markets.

• Affordability: Salary costs.

• Accessibility: Whether talent is available but in such high demand that hiring remains difficult.
  

On the right, we see a growing list of risks that must be considered: macroeconomic, geopolitical, and increasingly, climate risks. HR must become well-versed in all of these.

For example, I'm currently working on a manufacturing plant study for a client, and their executive team just asked HR to factor in climate risk, which is very interesting.

Lastly, let's talk about AI and automation.

AI and automation are certainly not new. Some of my conversations with clients about evaluating automation impact date back to 2018. But with new developments emerging every year, the landscape is evolving faster than ever.

Business leaders increasingly expect HR to quantify AI's impact on the workforce, not just which roles will be affected, but by how much. What's the exact percentage? How will those roles change? What new skills will be required?

This is a key part of strategic workforce planning. It impacts how we predict future demand and Plan for closing workforce gaps. Some gaps can be closed via automation, but we also need to plan for future skills needs.

Sometimes, the impacts of automation are surprising. When banks introduced ATMs, many assumed it would mean the demise of bank tellers. But ATMs actually reduced the cost of operating bank branches, leading to more branches and hiring more tellers.

We must anticipate both expected and unexpected impacts and Plan for all possible scenarios.

At the bottom right, you'll see a snapshot of our capability to size automation's impact on roles and analyze how it will reshape skill requirements.

John, let's pause here and see what questions we have.

[0:38:28] John Lynch: Thank you, Lynne. I think, as it happens, this was the perfect place to end as it is a segue to the first question that was asked. Thank you, Emily, for how we identify what percentage of a role can be automatable.

So as we start to, as organizations try to figure out which roles are most likely to be automated or which roles they can start to break apart to automate elements of, how do we do that? I think you touched on that a bit here, but it seems to be a hot topic right now for customers.

[0:39:06] Lynne Mayers: I started getting questions about this way back in 2018, but we just haven't had good answers and solutions for it. So we could not be more excited that, through our HRForecast team, their platform, and their capabilities, we are now able to provide much more precise answers in this space.

And the methodology, I'm sure I will underserve this. Still, there is just a huge amount of research that has gone into building these AI models, looking at data on how AI is impacting and shaping different roles, what the different technologies are, and how they come to bear on tasks within those roles so that we can take a role and analyze a couple of things. We can determine what percentage of that role is automatable, which specific tasks within it are automatable, and through what types of technologies. We can also determine how this impacts skills evolution and what skills are going to become more important for that role.

This is an area where we're starting to work with clients to bring insight and precision into their strategic workforce planning capabilities.

[0:40:40] John Lynch: Awesome. Thank you. I think we're going to have more content on that later in the year, so please stay tuned. It's an exciting capability, obviously. So, we'll be making the most of sharing insights on how to make those automation decisions.

We have some pretty good questions. Rupert has a second question that I wanted to highlight. One of the big areas of demand for my leadership is for tools like TalentNeuron to provide proactive alerts about these actions before they appear in The Wall Street Journal, trying to get ahead of the competition. Is that something you can provide?

That's a great question from our perspective.

[0:41:24] Lynne Mayers: Yeah. It's a quick answer. Yes. Absolutely. This is where, as I mentioned at the beginning, we have a module. It's one of our several modules, but we have a module where we are continuously harvesting millions of job postings globally and extracting everything from those postings in terms of who the employer is, the skill requirements, where it's posted, and so forth.

That gives us tremendous capability to track and monitor markets in terms of location trends, competitor trends, skills trends, you name it. And what I noticed is that some of our most progressive clients have been using this data not just for HR planning, but they've been feeding it into their strategy teams and feeding it up to their business leaders for business planning.

We're seeing an interesting trend where talent intelligence teams that sit within HR are being asked to expand their remit into providing competitive intelligence. So they're basically becoming talent and competitor intelligence teams, and they're being asked to provide this kind of intelligence data to business leaders to help them with their business planning.

[0:42:59] John Lynch: Awesome. There's been so much interest in competitive intelligence in the last few months. We may also have an opportunity to do more on that. So, suppose anyone would like to hear more about specifically the types of data that can provide insight into what competitors are doing and what changes are in the market before The Wall Street Journal publishes news. In that case, we'd love to do a follow-up. Let me know if you want to hear more about that in the chat.

[0:43:27] Lynne Mayers: I think it's a great HR superpower to develop.

[0:43:32] John Lynch: It is. It's definitely a lot of fun. I have something more general, but this relates to some of the custom reporting you mentioned earlier. So, Michael Sunderland, thanks for your question. I'd love to hear more about best practices for the viability of a location. I suppose a lot could come under viability in that question.

[0:43:57] Lynne Mayers: Absolutely. And we want to look at it from multiple different lenses. So, location viability has a lot to do with things intrinsic to that market, the nature of the talent supply, the skills ecosystem, and the demand and competition for talent. We see a lot of organizations make the mistake of thinking because a market is huge, they're going to be successful there. Not the case, right? So we really have to look at those intrinsic market factors, but then also look at what your organization brings to the table in terms of its EVP and your risk tolerance, and help you to make that decision. You know, back to my point, we're going to help you make the best decision based on your talent and business objectives.

[0:44:48] John Lynch: Thank you. I think some of the coolest projects I've seen come out of your team have revolved around location analysis and factors like additional considerations for location selection, such as higher education and talent availability from higher education, proximity to an international airport; all of these factors are rolled into this kind of decision.

[0:45:15] Lynne Mayers: Yes, absolutely.

[0:45:17] John Lynch: I think I would like to go for one more question. If we didn't answer your questions, please rest assured we'll follow up. And we have a couple of really specific asks. Emily, Rupert will definitely follow up with you more about some of these capabilities. And there's a really great question from Lucas, and it could spiral into something bigger. But his question is: demographics are a factor that directly affects the availability of talent in various markets. Do you have any data showing how many people enter or leave the job market? We could approach that question in many ways, but I suppose just the multiple factors that go into talent availability.

[0:45:55] Lynne Mayers: Yes, and what that's getting at is not just, you know, what the market looks like today, but how is it trending? And we see a lot of interest from clients in evaluating those trends to understand the sustainability of a market. Right? So very quickly because I know we're at time. This is where we incorporate looking at how that talent supply is growing and what sort of university talent ecosystem is there. Right? Can we get geo migration inflows of talent? But it's also very critical to look at the demand side of things, and how competition is trending because a market that was once very favorable for talent, like Cluj-Napoca in Romania, gets an influx of competitors, and suddenly, it becomes very hard to compete there. So, yes, we do need to look at those trends.

[0:46:49] John Lynch: Amazing. Thank you so much, Lynne. We are on time, but we could cover a lot more ground with these questions and others. And like I said, if we don't have a chance to, you know, we will follow up on any questions that we haven't had a chance to answer. Lynne, thank you again for your time and for sharing the benefit of your experience. The last seven years have at least taught us something about how to deal with the future, no matter what happens. So, thank you again.

[0:47:16] Lynne Mayers: Who knows what's next? Thanks, John. Thank you, everyone.

[0:47:20] John Lynch: And to our audience, please, our HRCI audience, please find your approval number here. If you need to follow up after the event, it's in the deck. And please do keep in touch with us. You can drop any more final comments or questions in the chat here, and we'd be happy to follow up. So, thanks again.

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