Last month, Kinetix celebrated its 15th official Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA. According to Shannon, our CEO, this serves as “a time for us to reflect on the prior year, celebrate our successes, and get physically together” since COVID turned the company fully remote in 2020.
In so many ways, COVID changed everyone’s lives and, six years later, is still forcing continuous change in us, our clients, and Recruitment Process Outsourcing as a whole, which is why “change” was the theme of this year’s meeting.
Given Shannon’s history as a track and field, soccer, and field hockey star, the competitive sports attitude has always been a core piece in Kinetix’s school of thought. Additionally, when Kinetix was still operating in office, casual Fridays often came with the battling of sports jerseys, so the title of Champions of Change came organically from the team as a shoutout to the early days of the company and the even earlier days of its team captain.
Some of the unexpected changes Kinetix and other RPO services faced in recent years came from external factors, such as system updates and clients’ own financial stressors. In 2025, in addition to some clients having system changes, our Applicant Tracking System (ATS) issued an update that impacted our team’s day-to-day functions. It was a big adjustment to adopt, but we felt like our data, tools, and processes wouldn't be the best it could be, without changing. By sticking to what was comfortable, we were being left behind in the RPO world. Luckily, the ATS upgrade caught up to our wants and needs, thus making an unexpected challenge easier to swallow.
People really took on roles to keep Kinetix alive, and after 2024 (our roughest post Covid year), having people who were willing to not just change their priorities to what the company needed, but also take on responsibilities in addition to what they already had was what led Kinetix to be able to get back into the ‘Kinetix Way’.” – Data, Analytics, Reporting, & Technology (DART) Team Member
As a talent acquisition and talent consulting company, Kinetix’s success is dependent on our client’s success. During 2020 and 2021, the government poured a great deal of funding into the market, people, and individual businesses to try and mitigate the pandemic’s impact. This placed many companies into what our CEO calls the “post-COVID bubble”, where they could float just above the water’s surface and keep the company alive. 2024 was a reset, and once the bubble “popped”, many companies were laying off employees in large numbers and not hiring at all. Kinetix has been trusted by many with our talent acquisition solutions, and our scalable recruitment services are made to “flex up or down with you”, but with no jobs to fill, there’s no scaling that can be done.
We get paid to fill jobs – it doesn't take much to figure out what [COVID] did to us. It underscores why I’m so focused on supporting more clients and ensuring business diversity so we, and others like us, can survive stuff like this. – Kinetix CEO
Perhaps the most influential change that has occurred in our lifetimes is the ever-expanding advancement of tech, which has always been shaking up the way things have been done. Though the exact numbers are fuzzy, the time it took for radio and television to be adopted into everyday life was over 30 years from invention. It took Apple 3 years to hit 50 million iPods sold, and Facebook took two years to get 50 million users. The speed at which AI Chat bots became commonly used seemed to take just mere months. Technology is evolving so much faster than it used to, and its impact is noticeable, especially in the workplace.
So, how are we supposed to run to the finish line when the whole race has been called off? Coach would say it’s time to compete in a different event; do the marathon instead of the sprint. In Kinetix’s case, it meant waiting it out with our clients, bringing our focus back to Direct Hires, and improving our custom hiring strategies. According to Harvard Business School, “organizational change can either be adaptive or transformational” – Kinetix utilized both: the small, incremental adjustments of ‘adaptive’ change that brought us back to Direct Hires, and the large, structured adjustments of ‘transformational’ change in our ATS, data & reporting, and recruitment scalability.
Sure, we’re pros at managing change now, but we won’t gatekeep how we got here. Traditional Change Management with a dash of Agile helped our team leaders guide the company forward with confidence and ensured success after the “bubble pop”. In our Change Management BOSS Leadership Training course, we discuss how managers can work with their employees to accept and thrive with change, why people hate change (even if it’s good change), the best ways to incorporate Change Management in your own company, and so much more.
Employer needs are constantly changing, and RPO needs to scale accordingly to keep up; the good news is, whether you need a job filled, or guidance on managing change, Kinetix has got you covered.
Business is change. Change is survival. – Kinetix CEO