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"Talent has become really important, and you have to remain constantly focused on it\u2014today, I spend around 20% of my time on it." - Ross Tennenbaum, CFO, Avalara

CFOTL: What are your priorities for the coming year?

Tennenbaum: One is building out our finance and accounting talent to take us to a billion dollars\u2019 worth of revenue and beyond. We\u2019re at close to half a billion of revenue, and we\u2019re looking to go well beyond that. You really need the talent that has experienced a larger scale, knows how to achieve it, and can take you there. So, talent has become really important, and you have to remain constantly focused on it\u2014today, I spend around 20% of my time on it.

CFOTL: What does the phrase \u201cworkforce culture\u201d mean to you?

Tennenbaum: Beginning in my investment banking days, I\u2019ve studied many companies and management teams. I\u2019ve seen teams that were really high-functioning, really strong, great cultures. I\u2019ve also seen management teams and executive teams that were not cohesive. There was a lot of distrust and backstabbing. Each of these scenarios could generate great numbers and be performing well, but I would only want to invest my money in the one that has that trust and has a cohesive team\u2014and where this is really being driven forward in a cultural way. I don\u2019t think that Wall Street really has a view of this. There is really no metric internally\u2014and certainly not externally\u2014that gives this view on culture. But I think that investors are increasingly trying to get this view into talent and culture.

Drew Vollero, CFO, Allied Universal

When Drew Vollero arrived in the CFO office of security and facilities company Allied Universal in 2018, he understood that the primary constraint to Allied\u2019s future growth remained human capital. Like so many other meaty challenges, Vollero had helped to remedy during his finance career\u2013 Allied\u2019s new CFO understood finance must play an active role when it came to optimizing the company\u2019s \u201cemployee funnel\u201d. \xa0Then Covid 19 arrived - overnight elevating Allied\u2019s hiring hurdle to Vollero\u2019s top of mind status.\xa0 \xa0

We recently asked Vollero to explain how the company\u2019s hiring priorities may have been altered due to the pandemic.

Vollero: I would say that we hire 3,000 people a week. We see a million resumes a year here at Allied Universal. There's 150 million or so people employed in this country. So, you're talking about a meaningful number of resumes that this company sees. Our ability to hire the right people is really important. How do you do this at scale is really our challenge. Our strategy team has adopted a couple of new tools that helped us do that through the field. We now have an artificial intelligence vehicle that we're testing that will help us identify what are the key metrics when it comes to hiring and what are the key personality traits or key answers that applicants can give us that (signal) they will fit well with our culture, as well as indicate that they might be successful employees.

We're also using an automated workflow to really help us get through some of our staffing bottlenecks. Our challenge here today is we may get a resume, but we may not be able to call you for six to eight weeks. Managing that workflow better is very important to us and something that we spend a lot of time studying the employment funnel. How do we find 150,000 of the best employees?

We hire based on customer needs. Customers continue to need services and some have used less during the pandemic like the retail channel, or some of the local office buildings, but a lot of customers have asked for more hours. State governments have wanted more hours. Hospitals have wanted more hours.

As we manage through the pandemic we've really focused on three important pieces.\xa0 First, and foremost, we focus on our employees. We've instructed all of our employees to follow the CDC and WHO guidelines, social distancing,...