What’s Changing in Hiring and Talent Right Now and Why It Matters

Episode 1: Jen L'Estrange

In this episode of Conscious Wealth with Brandon Hatton, the conversation begins with what’s unfolding right now in the world of hiring, talent, and workforce dynamics, what’s changing, what’s creating pressure, and what small businesses are being asked to navigate in real time.

Brandon sits down with Jen L’Estrange, CEO of Red Clover, to explore what she’s seeing across small and mid-sized businesses as they adapt to AI, remote work, regulatory uncertainty, and a shifting talent pipeline. Together, they examine how these changes intersect with growth, resilience, and long-term decision-making.

Rather than hindsight or fixed frameworks, this conversation focuses on present-day patterns and what they may signal for entrepreneurs navigating scale, uncertainty, and responsibility.

In this episode, they discuss:
• What’s shifting right now in hiring, compliance, and talent strategy
• How AI is reshaping entry-level roles and career pathways
• Where small business owners are feeling the most pressure
• How uncertainty impacts hiring, retention, and long-term planning
• The human side of building teams amid constant change

These conversations are designed to slow things down. The goal is helping entrepreneurs make sense of what’s unfolding and decide how they want to respond.

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Transcript

Brandon (00:22)
We have Jan Lestrange on the show. She is a CEO of Red Clover, which provides fractional HR services to family offices, small and mid-sized businesses. Dear friend of mine, and I am so excited to see you. Yeah. I want to know what's going on in your world right now. What's going on in the world of.

Jen L'Estrange (00:37)
Now I'm really excited to be here.

Brandon (00:45)
of running the, to me, what I really like about your firm is it provides such value and it's such a niche service that people oftentimes don't even know exists.

Jen L'Estrange (00:55)
Yeah, there aren't a lot of us. I mean, we're systems agnostic. So we don't care what payroll system the client's on or if they're in a PEO or not in a PEO. We're basically like their HR team, but it's contracted through us rather than a direct, you know, a direct hire.

Brandon (01:11)
Yes, and I think so that makes a lot of sense because a lot of entrepreneurs so you get beyond that beyond the solopreneur and you don't want to be bogged down with HR.

You're using words like P.O. and I'm not sure everybody all... Yeah.

Jen L'Estrange (01:23)
Maybe I'll back up and explain that. We are the embedded HR team for our clients. An alternative to that, is what would be called a PEO, which is a professional employment organization, which is when you contract with...

Brandon (01:33)
Yeah.

Jen L'Estrange (01:43)
And oftentimes it's the same companies that provide payroll services, but they offer an option where they can become the employer of record. And it is a way to get additional services from them, usually starting with the ability to access group health care plans through a larger organization, which can at times result in more cost effective options for a small employer. We're not that, so we're not a PEO or an employer record service provider. We're just straight up consulting.

Brandon (02:10)
And so if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a business owner, I don't want to hire HR. I'm not large enough to have HR, but I need the services and I come to you.

Jen L'Estrange (02:19)
Yeah, and so we're able to put together different skill sets based on what people need. So some people will want, hey, I want someone to help me figure out my employee handbook. Great, we can do that. Or I want someone to come in and help us with performance development in a way that kind of reinforces culture without it feeling like, a performance review. So we can come in and support with that. And sometimes just by having a third party in the mix

Brandon (02:33)
Yeah.

Jen L'Estrange (02:42)
It kind of professionalizes the function in a sense. Most of our clients come to us and they've never had HR. So the idea of bringing in someone who's like, okay, this is how we're gonna do it. This is why we're doing it this way. This is our expectations out of the process. This is what we're expecting from the managers. This is what we're expecting from the employees. It just makes everything move a little smoother.

Brandon (03:00)
So you've helped me out in our company and your firm has helped us write an HR handbook, which I think is super interesting And I know a lot and I can figure out a lot because I'm an entrepreneur, but there's a lot I didn't know. And that's why I think it was really valuable. I'm using terms that really are

Jen L'Estrange (03:14)
Yeah.

Brandon (03:19)
really used anymore when writing a handbook. And there were a lot of stumbling blocks that I would have been like, well we'll just have paternity and maternity leave and we'll have all these different things and the world doesn't work that way anymore.

Jen L'Estrange (03:31)
It has changed a bit. think a lot also changed with the pandemic. One of the things we bumped into, I want to kind of hang my hat on the pandemic with this is we had for the first time so many small businesses where like, hey, we've got 25 employees, but we're in six states.

Brandon (03:48)
Yeah.

Jen L'Estrange (03:48)
And we never had that before, but the pandemic forced us all to do this over Zoom cameras. like, well, you know what? I'm not limited to my search for talent, to my immediate geographical area. I can go get great people anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world or whatever it is. And then the compliance questions came up, right? And part of it's accounting, but part of it's HR. And it's, know, what are your responsibilities as an employer if you've got someone who's working remotely but they're based, in your case you're in Atlanta, but you bring someone in who's out in Colorado, what do do?  So handbook is one thing, but it impacts a number of different processes and how it kind of operates.

Brandon (04:24)
Mm-hmm.

Jen L'Estrange (04:33)
but I don't think we're ever going back to the model where people don't have some sort of remote workforce, not in all companies, but the ones that started doing it in 2020, they're like, we're never going back.

Brandon (04:45)
and that comes to the point of acquisition. So what are you seeing in terms of talent acquisition and talent retention right now?

Jen L'Estrange (04:54)
it's moving at two speeds. We have some industries where certain skill sets are really hard to find. I'll use tech as an example on one side because that's proving to be kind of an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, it's really hard for certain employers to find skill sets in some of the highly sought after technical skills. Particularly if they are skills where previously they were being fulfilled by visa holders and the changes in the H-1B visa structure at the start of, well really the end of last year, has meant that they're not finding people and they can't bring people into the country and sponsor them because it's just becoming financially untenable to do it. So that's one side. On the other side,

Brandon (05:27)

Yeah.

Jen L'Estrange (05:45)
We have never seen so many younger professionals, so more at the start of their career, finding so much difficulty finding roles because a lot of the larger organizations are using AI to substitute for what was those entry level roles where we all started, right? Like I started in IT back in the 90s and my first job was really basic, right? Like it was...

Brandon (06:09)
Yeah.

Jen L'Estrange (06:12)
The first things that I did coming in was really rudimentary. That job wouldn't exist now. And we're starting to see it for some of these kids who graduated maybe two, three years ago. They went through their first job or they're looking for another job or they worked for a smaller company that maybe didn't do so well. They're back on the market. They're not finding the jobs as easy as they did maybe five years ago.

Brandon (06:35)
These generations who are graduating school right now are not finding work. And so structurally that can impact businesses, but it could also structure the way that they create jobs for themselves.

Jen L'Estrange (06:46)
I can see a few things happening and I'll go back to when offshoring first started to be like all the rage, right? so the first one, went back to like. Early 2000s, but I'm sure they were there before, right? That some of the consulting companies were doing offshoring model even when I first started work, right?

But what I found super interesting as we sort of went through this process over the course of like, you know, 20 years or whatever it is, is as you start to see leaders rise in the organizations, the ones that were getting the right skills to develop and grow were no longer coming from the countries where the headquarters were, they were coming from these other locations. And so you see a shift that it's not good or bad, it's just different.

Brandon (07:12)
Sure.

Mm-hmm.

Jen L'Estrange (07:33)
a shift in the cultural makeup of the leaders that make up some of these organizations. I think now as we look at what's happening with AI, if we're not creating the opportunities for younger professionals to learn and grow inside some of these larger organizations, they're going to turn to the smaller businesses or they're going to create their own businesses. Because at the end of the day, it's like, all right, so how am I going to bring income in to pay my rent? Right. It comes down to basics and

Brandon (07:50)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Jen L'Estrange (08:02)
I think we may see a much larger percentage of people looking at small business ownership or entrepreneurship and building their own thing or freelancing or whatever it is because the jobs that they thought they were going to go for when they graduated simply aren't there anymore.

Brandon (08:21)
Before I asked you to do our HR handbook, I may have looked at chat GPT first. And I was like, I wonder if I could just do this. And I quickly realized that I didn't. But then I found out you're using AI when making handbooks. So I find that super fascinating.

Jen L'Estrange (08:28)
Yep.

So yeah we have a licensed software product that people can go out and buy right we have an like an enterprise license as a consulting firm but it does a couple things one it it allows us to be able to produce handbooks for any state really quickly right because it's got all the right language

The firm was originally created by like a couple of lawyers, right? So they came from the background of knowing what they needed to do. But what's really interesting about it is getting the updates and that's where the AI is interesting. So you can get semi-dynamic updates where it's like, okay, this law changed in this state, this is the change you need to make, or this is what you need to communicate to make sure you're still in compliance for your employees in that state. And so we get those updates and we're able to filter it through and be, contact the clients as it applies and we'll handle the communication, but just so you know, this is what's changing.

Brandon (09:26)
But a lot of the change right now is simply bananas in terms of what's coming down the pike or all the uncertainty. One day's tariffs for this. One day is that. How is all of this government imposed uncertainty impacting your clients, ⁓ because I know our clients want to learn more about that.

Jen L'Estrange (09:46)
it's a little hard to plan for what's happening these days because there is so much unexpected change. Like I don't know that anyone expected, I'll go back to the H1B example, because the guidance that came, from the government actually changed over time. So first they were saying, you know, if you're going to have anyone who's in H1B, if you're going to sponsor them, you you're going to pay $100,000 per position. And that just kind of made it untenable for the vast majority of small businesses that are hiring, it just increased the cost of hiring them to the point where like, all right, we can't do it. Then they gave guidance and said, well, if they were educated in the U.S. and they're on an H1B, then that's okay, then you don't have to, pay the amount. But it took them some time to come back with that guidance, so it kind of shifted things a little bit.

I think being nimble and being flexible in the face of changing rules and regulations is really important. It's just being able to kind of navigate what's coming down the pike and being like, How is that going to impact us? How do we want to develop our planning but still give us enough flexibility to adjust if things change over time. It's not that much different from what we've experienced in the past. It's just the context around where the change is coming from is a little different.

Brandon (11:02)
I would just imagine that all, for instance, tariffs and the uncertainty around tariffs makes it really hard to hire. And because our hiring rate is so low right now, what are you seeing there? Are you seeing it's different there?

Jen L'Estrange (11:14)
So that very much depends on the industry and what the business is. For our client base, the tariffs are impacting budgeting, not directly the hiring problem. So I'll use us as an example.

Brandon (11:18)
Yeah.

Jen L'Estrange (11:29)
When we went through our budget exercise end of last year we've kind of seen a general increase across the board as far as this products and services that we pay for on a day-to-day basis where everything's getting a little more expensive what's happened from a hiring perspective is we've

Brandon (11:43)
everything. Yeah.

Jen L'Estrange (11:49)
We're starting to look at, right, how does that impact what we offer for new hires, recognizing that salary expectations for the same, call it target population, might've been X. Now maybe it's X plus, because they've experienced changes in their purchasing power.

That increased salary expectation hasn't directly translated it really depends on what you're hiring for.

Brandon (12:15)
Yeah, that's right.

Jen L'Estrange (12:16)
For some skill set, it's much higher. For others, Are there more jobs than people? you're posting a job and you're getting 60 qualified resumes at a pop. In that case, the clients aren't increasing their salary expectations because they don't have to. So is it changing things? The answer is it kind of depends. It kind of depends on the industry. It kind of depends on the kind of talent you're going after.

How unique is that skill set? How important is it that you're looking for what we affectionately call the unicorn, where it's this unique mix of knowledge, skills, experience, and then an industry blend, and fits into our culture, and is in the right location, and all the things combined into the target three candidates in the whole wide world that fit that, then you gotta pay what they ask for, because if you really just want that, there's only three of them, then you're kind of creating a very narrow talent pool.

But we haven't seen too much, right? Again, we're in the small business space. All of our clients are under 500 employees. The vast majority are under 100. So I don't see a huge problem. We do have a few specialty areas where there's challenges, but that challenge isn't as much focused on salary. It's focused on just finding the right talent and the right skill match.

Brandon (13:08)
Mm-hmm.

In closing, what are you seeing out there for these small businesses? What are their biggest challenges or what are you encouraged by?

Jen L'Estrange (13:36)
I'm always encouraged by the grittiness that I see from small business owners, like their ability to kind of weather the storm. And with that comes the challenge that I think a lot of us are sensing is an inability to predict revenue, right? So like there's this old adage with no sales, there's no business, right? Like it's like, got it, the sale starts first. ⁓

Brandon (13:43)
Yeah.

The ability to predict revenue, yeah.

Yeah.

Jen L'Estrange (14:00)
And it's not so much the sales in and of itself, Like January was like, wow, like it's great. And that's been kind of a trend for a lot of the small businesses that I'm in contact with and also our client base. The issue is the predictability.

How do we understand what the deal flow is going to look like because it drives everything else? When do we hire? When do we put in new foundational software? When do we change our processes because something's changed in whatever the client or the product mix that we're putting to market. What does that change as far as market? It's driving everything and it's this roller coaster of like feast and famine. And I don't know that this is necessarily different from other years. I just think it's a little more exaggerated at the moment because I don't know that people were necessarily expecting things to start off as.

Brandon (14:43)
Mm-hmm.

Jen L'Estrange (14:47)
at an accelerated pace compared to what we were seeing in Q3 and Q4. it's, and it's figuring out, so coming back to the same thing, how do you keep things agile? You know, trying to figure out what are the ways, how do you leverage people, how do you leverage technology to be able to respond to the market dynamics when you don't have great predictability?

Brandon (15:11)
Mm-hmm.

Jen L'Estrange (15:11)
you know,

for us, we're, you know, it's what can we do to leverage technology to give us that additional lift when we need it? We also bake it into how we staff people where we always have reserves. And it's just baked into our model where we have resources we can tap into through our existing workforce because we don't over allocate them. ⁓

Brandon (15:33)
Yes.

Jen L'Estrange (15:33)
So if we do need to pop up, It gives us runway to figure that out where we can, we can figure it out in the short term, which buys us the time to find the right talent in the long term. So the, that's a little unique to professional services. ⁓ It's the ability for an organization to maintain a bench and how, how deep is that bench and how long is your runway? Which is largely math, but there, there's some art to it as well. Yeah.

Brandon (15:57)
I love it.

Here's to grittiness.

Jen L'Estrange (16:01)
Never, underestimate the grit and determination of a small business owner. Yeah, it was great. I'm glad we got to do this.

Brandon (16:07)
May we all have it this year. Thanks for hanging out with us today. Thanks for hanging out with me today. Yeah, cool.

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