“It is our ambition that we get to a point where coaching is a given for every person in the workforce — making it such that everybody, everywhere, can have access to a coach,” says Lindsay Witcher, global managing director for Randstad RiseSmart.
The global talent solutions organization, focused on talent development and career transition strategies through a coaching-centric approach, is resolute in its goals. And this ambitious approach to democratized coaching is an important piece of Randstad RiseSmart’s mission: To help as many people as possible to thrive in their careers.
“We want to give people the tools and resources to find the most fulfilling work they can and lead careers that exceed what they thought was possible,” says Marketing Manager Chris Perkins.
Randstad RiseSmart strives to achieve these goals through its disruptive approach to the two primary industries in which it operates: outplacement and workplace coaching. Whether that’s internal career coaching for development and advancement, coaching for redeployment as a result of restructuring, or outplacement in the event of a layoff, the primary aim is to enable businesses to bring people in, develop them, move them and see them depart at some point, having the best possible employee experience wherever they are in their career.
How it started
Randstad RiseSmart is now a business within Randstad Enterprise, an operating company of Amsterdam-based multinational HR consulting firm Randstad N.V. Under the leadership of CEO Michael Smith, Randstad Enterprise has an executive committee that runs its various enabling functions and individual business lines, which collectively offer talent solutions across the whole talent lifecycle — advisory, acquisition, development and transition.
Today, Witcher leads the Randstad RiseSmart business, including career transition, outplacement and coaching services offered in more than 100 countries and 40 industries. Her journey to this role, however, began nearly 14 years ago, when she was hired as a career coach and resume writer for RiseSmart, a Silicon Valley tech startup at the time.
“We started at the very beginning as purely an outplacement provider,” Witcher says. “One of our founders — Sanjay Sathé — went through a legacy outplacement program and found it lacking.”
The legacy program did little more than provide some coaching on how to look for a job and then gave Sathé hundreds of job listings to sift through on his own. With the belief that there had to be a better way, Sathé, along with fellow entrepreneur Dan Davenport, built a smart matching tool that assessed millions of job vacancies online and ranked them in order of fit against criteria an individual could specify for their job search.
“The founders’ rationale was that, when you had been laid off, if you had a way to ‘search smarter,’ you would ‘rise faster’ — hence, RiseSmart,” Perkins says.
The tech company was officially founded in 2007, and Witcher joined the team in 2011.
“We were the first virtual outplacement organization, and we were the first to bring to market this idea of a team of three to support people in transition — a dedicated coach, a dedicated resume writer and a dedicated job concierge,” Witcher says. “Between the technology foundation and the human touch, we built a very disruptive and differentiated approach to the outplacement market.”
The founders subsequently extended their SmartMatch outplacement tool by providing online coaching — RiseSmart recruited coaches nationwide and offered individual clients the best match for their needs, industry interests and career goals. This again broke with the outplacement industry norm at the time, when providers tended to match clients with the nearest available coach in a local office.
To further meet client needs, RiseSmart then expanded its offering to be used for redeployment, helping people find alternative roles internally when their company was restructuring.
In 2015, RiseSmart was acquired by Randstad, which ultimately provided extensive global reach, strong infrastructure in the recruitment world and investment to further develop their offering.
How it’s going
A couple years ago, at the request of customers, the team decided to expand their service offerings and launch a digital coaching solution based on their years of experience helping professionals with their careers.
“For a long time, our customers said, ‘You do such an amazing job helping our people as they’re leaving our organization; how can we bring those great services to our people who are staying?’” Witcher says. “So we launched our own digital coaching solution in 2022. Now we have not only our outplacement solution to support our customers, but a really robust, differentiated coaching solution so employees within an organization can get the great benefits of coaching to help them thrive in their careers.”
In developing its coaching solution, the team again harnessed its longtime disruptive mindset.
“When looking at emerging digital coaching providers, they all talked about ‘democratized coaching’ and making it available to everyone, but the license model they use makes the reality of that cost-prohibitive for most organizations,” Perkins says. “Coaching provision was still concentrated among leaders and high-potential groups. This needed something disruptive to truly enable an organization to offer coaching for all in an equitable and inclusive way.”
Randstad RiseSmart’s coaching model operates at scale on a pay-as-you-go basis. Companies pay for individual coaching sessions as they are used, eliminating the cost of individual licenses at thousands of dollars each, as well as the administrative burden of keeping track of who’s using their coaching and applying to transfer an unused license to someone before it expires.
“That’s a really important differentiation,” Witcher says. “Let’s say you have a budget of $1 million, and you can impact 400 people with that budget. With our model you can launch coaching across a 50,000-person workforce and still spend that same million dollars, but actually touch so many more people. It’s flipping that traditional model on its head. And we have a lot of customers now that are launching this across their entire workforce, at all levels, from entry-level, early-career individuals to their most senior people.”
The beauty of this model, according to Perkins, is that it affordably brings coaching within reach of previously uncoached populations.
“Coaching should not be reserved only for those who meet certain criteria; it should be a benefit available to everyone,” he says. “We think of individual contributors and frontline employees as the heartbeat of an organization. Offering coaching to them can power organizational performance improvements in an unprecedented way.”
And the coaching is squarely employee-led.
“An employee can choose to talk with a coach about whatever they want,” Perkins says. “Our holistic coaching model covers every aspect of work life — you don’t enter into coaching with objectives mandated by a line manager or HR. You can have a single session to talk about a specific issue you want to work on or speak to a coach regularly to focus on something longer-term.”
According to Witcher, putting the power of coaching in the hands of the individual is something that allows Randstad RiseSmart to truly differentiate itself.
“No one knows better what an individual person needs to thrive in their career than that individual,” she says. “So rather than this prescriptive, top-down approach to coaching of ‘we’re going to fix you in these ways,’ we want to provide you (the individual) with this benefit of coaching so that you can work with a coach on whatever it is that YOU are finding challenging, or opportunities you see, and for what matters to you.”
By putting the power in the hands of the individual in terms of where the coaching focuses, Witcher says, you get a much greater ROI for the organization because you’re getting at the root causes as opposed to applying everything with a broad brush.
“The traditional means of coaching can be impactful if you’re trying to increase leadership behaviors among your managers,” she says. “But the reality is, you may have a manager — let’s pretend it’s me — I have wonderful leadership behaviors in general, but I’m really struggling balancing being a mom of two small kids and working a big job. If I can sort that out, I then can apply those leadership behaviors that I’m currently not leveraging. Whereas if you’re just focused on my leadership behaviors, you’re ignoring the root cause of why I’m struggling, and you’re not going to get the impact you need.”
The WOW factor
One of the driving forces behind Randstad RiseSmart’s work is simple, but it packs a punch: to deliver a “Wow!” experience.
Whether that’s the experience of end users, the ease with which HR and L&D teams are able to do business with Randstad RiseSmart, the quality of reporting and insights for clients, or how they deliver for colleagues internally, it’s a primary focus, Perkins says.
This WOW factor can be measured in terms of both individual and client satisfaction, as well as internal team morale.
“We see that show up in our results; we see that show up in our testimonials,” Witcher says. “When people have gone through other outplacement programs or other coaching programs and then work with us, we get tons of feedback about how it is really, really different, how much they benefit from it, and how robust and thoughtful our approaches are.”
On the internal side, Randstad RiseSmart employees have access to their own coaching and career development hub, Career Vitality, that promotes internal moves. Across the Randstad ecosystem, there’s a robust learning and development organization that offers a plethora of L&D opportunities for the various teams. And they block out two “no meetings” weeks each year to allow time for employees to invest in their own development and growth.
Witcher also credits the company culture with being “extremely purpose-driven.”
“The end result of everyone’s day-to-day work here is that someone is getting true help to either get through a difficult time or to really thrive in their career,” she says. “I think that purpose orientation drives high engagement on the teams.
“So much of our lives is spent at work, and if we can do something to help people find roles that are better connected to who they are — their skills, their passion, their purpose — and find more satisfaction and success as a result of that, I think that’s what really drives so many of us here,” she continues.
What’s next
Randstad RiseSmart’s story is one of entrepreneurial vision, tech innovation and a relentless drive to transform the career landscape. The team is proud of what they’ve built and excited about how their solutions are being adopted by their clients.
“One of our customers, Cisco, has made the investment to make coaching available to their entire workforce — 80,000-plus employees around the world can access a coach at any time,” Witcher says.
Witcher is proud of the value that clients, like Cisco, see in their democratized approach to coaching services. It is a step toward the realization of their ambition — to reach a point where coaching is a given for every person in the workforce.
“Coaching is an incredibly powerful enabler of individual and collective success,” Witcher says. “It is, in my opinion, one of the highest-ROI things a company can invest in for its people.”
In further support of career mobility, Cisco also gives its full workforce access to Randstad RiseSmart’s resume services, which helps them to better articulate their skills and navigate their career mobility within the organization. An added benefit for Cisco is that they are able to capture this rich employee data to better understand their workforce.
This approach aligns strongly with Randstad RiseSmart’s full spectrum of coaching offerings — from career development to redeployment to outplacement.
“There’s research that shows that the emotional impact of losing your job is second only to losing a spouse. It’s an incredibly difficult moment in a person’s life,” Witcher says. “Our goal is to turn what often is considered one of the worst things that has ever happened to a person into one of the best things, because they end up finding a new role that’s an even better fit, that matches their purpose, that’s a dream job. And so I think a big driving factor — whether it’s in our outplacement business or in our coaching business — is really about helping people to thrive in their careers.”
Randstad RiseSmart is a corporate member of BetterWork Media Group, the parent company of Chief Talent Officer. Learn more about Randstad RiseSmart by accessing BetterWork Media Group’s Corporate Member Directory.
