Nicole Martin – The New Face of HR Outsourcing and Consultancy – HRBoost
A company is always on the lookout for able and skilled personnel. As manpower is the most crucial resource on the planet and in the world of business a good, skilled and expert manpower is hard to lose. As it is the people working in a business/firm that make or break the company. Thus, it becomes a rather important and complex task for a company to hire the best people suited for their company and provide the desired levels of efficiency and lead to the overall growth of the company.
These simple yet tedious tasks are handled by the HR firms or departments in a company, their task not only revolves around finding the right person for the job but also the well-being of the company and its employees. Since the market is such a huge place to find the right and talented individual it often involves tedious efforts and resources.
HRBoost is one of the leading and reputed names when it comes to HR services and consulting. They not only provide talented and skilled personnel to the companies but also cater to the company’s needs, their budget, etc. They have a large number of clients who are progressing ever rapidly due to their precision and on-point services, providing them with the best possible skilled and talented individuals, adhering to the company’s pace, demands and pay scale.
In conversation with the CEO of HRBoost, Nicole Martin. Let’s hear more about the company, their services and about her entrepreneurial journey.
Tell us about HRBoost, the initial challenges and the reasons you feel led to its growth.
HRBoost offers small and midsize businesses HR services on an ala carte, project, or retainer basis. We meet our clients wherever they are on their journey to be an employer of choice and we also meet them at their pace and budget. Our Shared Services approach allows us to build HR departments from scratch and align them to business strategy. While we see great value in the middle market, we do have some larger companies that augment their internal HR teams with strategic project initiatives from our team.
Software is not HR. And HR is more than payroll and benefits. Building a high-performance culture that drives innovation and profitability requires leaders at all levels. HR infrastructure can uphold the Culture Invitation and once it is strategically aligned and reinforced a company can create workforce alignment empowering leaders to innovate amidst even the toughest climate in business.
Like any business, talent outsourcing is critical to growth and skilled talent is critical to our business. As a result, we have reinvested in our talent and our approach to not only acquire talent but enable it. HRBoost has also been careful to listen to our clients, their experiences, and ways we can better serve them. Our flexibility and custom approach to how we work with clients has fuelled our growth and success. The challenge will always be access to capital, both financial and human. As the business grows, those challenges just increase in scale.
Only the truly forward-thinking companies will make winning moves even in the downturn of the economy.
Nicole Martin
HRBoost practices what we preach. This means we accept passive talent interest, and we pipeline our talent. Usually, when we have a need, we do not have to post an ad and wait. HRBoost usually has someone ready to go and waiting for the call. This is essential to our continued growth. What has been interesting during the pandemic is the out-of-state interest we have received from HR talent. It has us thinking. After all, we do believe in open sourcing talent, especially now.
Tell us about the products/services offered and how do you take them a step further.
Given we are not your Broker, your Attorney, or a 1-800 number. HRBoost believes HR expertise is essential to any business as they grow their enterprise. Our Shared Services approach allows businesses to access strategic HR at their pace and budget all while taking a holistic approach to integrating a culture plan that enables their strategic and/or operational plans as a business.
HRBoost deliver skilled talent to our clients. HRBoost also believes they need both strategic and tactical resources at the same time. One human is not ideal as there are various cognitive abilities to optimize HR strategically. HRBoost believes our shared services approach to the middle market is the PEO Alternative. And yes, the middle market needs an alternative.
HRBoost recently engaged a partner to be the HR Expert on Demand and this truly takes our bench strength to small businesses across the country via the phone or their chosen mobile device. While we prefer in-person like everyone these days we have gone digital.
Please tell us about your professional experience.
I feel I’m an accidental entrepreneur. I looked back after starting my own business and said, ‘I started a business. Whoa!’” I didn’t set out to create HRBoost. I followed my passion to help clients understand the importance human resources can play in developing a strong business. Today, I am a successful entrepreneur and an HR industry innovator who is dedicated to helping small to mid-size businesses realize their potential through their employees.
Right out of high school, I got a job as a receptionist at a pre-Y2K firm where I found my passion quite by accident. “They were hiring all these computer experts from overseas, but when they arrived, the company just put them in the reception area because they didn’t know what to do with them,”. “It was just inhumane.”
During the same time, I was working on a training program for a college human resources class. “I wanted to help these guys out in the hallway, so I just marched into the director’s office and asked him if he wanted to see the training program I created for school.” When I was finished with my presentation, the director created a human resources department for the site, hired a manager, and moved the 18-year-old me from reception to human resources.
I have been building HR departments from the ground up ever since. I feel what makes my approach so unique is that I begin with the business’ vision and create HR programs that are completely integrated with that vision. From the hiring process to annual reviews, the programs I create are designed to further the business, boost productivity, and help employees understand why and how their contributions are meaningful.
There’s a lot of misinformation out there in the business community. These big businesses are coming into small to mid-size companies, and they are offering something that they call full-service HR, but it’s not. It’s tactical HR. It’s just taking care of payroll, benefits, database stuff. It’s not the strategic integration that helps a business thrive and perform.
Today, I am doing my best to represent this industry, not just as a senior executive, but as a public speaker, thought leader, blogger, board member, and volunteer. As an ambassador for 101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For™, I am also helping Chicago businesses to see all the benefits a fully integrated human resources department can bring. “If you go into a business and they are a 101 Best and Brightest Company to Work For™, you can feel it. You would see on the people’s faces, the authenticity, the honesty, constructive criticism (which is level of respect) not complacency where managers think something in silence and don’t communicate it.”
But my brand, HRBoost is a full-service integrated HR that provides more than just a corporate culture boost or a good office vibe. I often link HRBoost’s services directly to profitability time and time again— and I have got the analytics path charts and the logic models to prove it.
Your take on employee relations and the competition in the market.
I am blessed to have truly blessed people on our team. Thankfully, they live our core values and instead of me recognizing every time a core value is witnessed, they have taken peer reward recognition to be a strong reinforcement. Even today, I was thanked by my Admin Extraordinaire for her shoutouts as she just cashed in on a new car seat for her beautiful child. What more can I say? It is all about how you make people feel.
Ironically, the biggest threat to the marketplace is talent, even now. Only the truly forward-thinking companies will make winning moves even in the downturn of the economy.
The best people are just competing against themselves. The concept of the best is to be rooted in continuous process improvement. The one thing that won’t change is changing itself.
