TrueBlue: The People Company

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TrueBlue leverages technology to connect people and work in increasingly innovative ways

TrueBlue is all about connecting people and work. In 2022, “the people company” did that more than 600,000 times, helping 84,000 companies find talent around the world. The $2 billion-plus light-industrial staffing company operates mostly in the U.S. but also in Australia, Western Europe, and Canada. Through its staffing business, PeopleReady, it matches clients with contingent labor for on-demand staffing by job type. Its recruiting process outsourcing (RPO) business, PeopleScout, does large-scale recruiting for major corporations. With Staff Management, TrueBlue provides on-site industrial labor for industries like consumer goods, warehousing, and manufacturing.

Jeff Dirks

Matching 30,000 to 40,000 associates with clients weekly, TrueBlue knows a thing or two about finding the right person for the job. The person tasked with overseeing TrueBlue’s digital transformation is Chief Information & Technology Officer Jeff Dirks, who shared with BOSS how TrueBlue is making itself into a tech-powered staffing company for the future.

“There is an enormous amount of focus on leveraging technology to build staffing solutions that continue to make a difference for our customers and for our associates,” he said, “a tremendous amount of energy in technological innovation. There’s a very strong and vibrant tech engine driving the growth of the business.”

Dynamic Data

To deliver the right workers for a job on such a large scale, TrueBlue has been upgrading its JobStack mobile application to better predict which associates are best suited for a given job.

“What that means in very simple terms is, we're building algorithms that allow us to predict who has the highest probability of showing up and successfully completing their shift at a client work site,” Dirks said.

Driving client satisfaction and associate engagement makes both sets of stakeholders happy with TrueBlue, and it serves to improve fill rates on jobs, making it win-win-win.

Across the enterprise, TrueBlue looks for ways to leverage and monetize with predictive analytics that can, for example, warn when customers might be getting ready to leave, allowing TrueBlue the opportunity to reach out and make efforts to retain them. To ensure customers don’t want to leave, the company is exploring dynamic pricing to determine the optimal pay rates clients should offer temp workers to optimize fill rates.

Given the labor shortages and inflation of the last couple of years, workers have been able to command higher wages than companies might have offered previously.

“We believe AI-driven dynamic pricing will give us the opportunity to have a more real-time conversation when we're building a work order for a client to say, ‘Hey, look, I can understand why you want to pay $22 an hour, but if you do this at $25, there's an 80% probability of an 80% fill rate versus a lower fill-rate due to a less attractive associate pay rate,’” he said. “A lot of folks will go for that as long as you can rationalize how you're arriving at that bill rate.”

TrueBlue has made it easy for associates to find work close to home, with a schedule that works for them, in an industry that interests them. Rather than having to go to a branch office and wait to be dispatched, they can now on board digitally, match to a job digitally, have their I-9s validated digitally, and get paid digitally. Coming out of the pandemic, that technological edge has helped TrueBlue make the associate experience as smooth as possible.

“That's proven to be a very powerful kind of point of attraction for us to temp workers,” Dirks said.

Driving Growth

That leveraging of technology makes life easier for TrueBlue’s recruiters as well. The company is researching and conducting early pilots on whether generative AI can make sourcing and scheduling candidate interviews more efficient, freeing up recruiters to spend more time actually speaking with candidates while the AI does the administrative work. It’s early days, but TrueBlue believes generative AIs can play a role in improving recruiter efficacy.

Tech partners like Amazon Web Services facilitate that type of innovative experimentation.

“Because it's in the cloud, it's on-demand consumption economics. We don't have to spend a lot of money on computing and storage up front, we simply pay for what we use,” Dirks said. “We'll spend relatively small amounts of money, and for the things that do work, we don't have to pay in front of the demand curve because these new ideas take time for adoption to grow, which translates into revenue growth. We don't have to spend way ahead of that revenue growth curve. We can just pay for it as demand grows and not overspend on failed experiments. AWS makes it easy to fail fast.”

To keep its environment, and in turn, all that data secure, TrueBlue turns to Microsoft. “They have made significant leaps and bounds in the sophistication of their cybersecurity with their E5 Security suite which includes endpoint detection and response with automated investigation, Identity Management, Security Incident & Event Management and more.”

With partnerships like that, TrueBlue can continue introducing technological innovations that drive higher-margin organic growth in its core businesses and develop new approaches to connecting people and work, such as white labeling and staffing platform as a service. The goal is to remain a staffing company but become an increasingly diversified enterprise with both traditional and completely digital-enabled staffing companies.

Whatever it becomes, TrueBlue will remain a company that lives its values, delivering a positive associate and customer experience.

“It’s a very customer/associate satisfaction-focused company,” Dirks said, “but secondarily, we’ve really developed a lot of muscle around looking at hard business problems or adjacent markets and then working backward around how to leverage technology to deliver solutions that matter in a way that creates a competitive advantage for us.”

Doing both in concert helps TrueBlue connect people and work in ways that work for everyone now and in the future.