While it costs money to have an open billet, bad hires are a long term, hidden drain on the budget. Coming off a year of uncertainty and a shift in processes and procedures, it can be easy to want to ramp up quickly. However, lost revenue, lost productivity, and performance management, and training resource are hidden costs. When resources are spread thin, like they have been this past year, new hires are bound to have less oversight and a greater negative impact if they’re the wrong employee. The more senior the position, the greater the impact will be. As top performers share stories of feeling undervalued and overworked in the remote environment, it can make the new hires in the second half of the year a bit more important to get right the first time. The key is to invest in the hiring process. It is challenging to quantify the benefits of the investment, but it can be the difference between growing as an organization and winning more contracts or facing an organizational restructuring, AKA a reduction in force.
Layoffs Impacting the Cleared Industry
| Rackspace |
Speaking of “organizational restructuring”, Rackspace shares their plans for funding more growth, by “an estimated $95 [million to] $100 million of gross cost savings as a result of enhanced automation as well as restructuring programs to realign resources from mature and declining areas of the market, accelerate best shoring initiatives, and reduce general and administrative expenses.” However, on Rackspace’s SEC filing, they state their plans for a 10% reduction of force in order to fund their growth: “On July 21, 2021, the Company committed to an internal restructuring plan, which will drive a change in the types of and location of certain positions and is expected to result in the termination of approximately 10% of the Company’s workforce. The Company anticipates that approximately 85% of these roles will be backfilled in the Company’s offshore service centers. As part of the plan, the Company also is expanding its internal training program to further develop expertise in cloud services. The rebalance in workforce is a component of a broader strategic review of the Company’s operations that is intended to more effectively align the Company’s resources with its business priorities in high growth areas. Substantially all of the employees impacted by the reduction in force were notified of the reduction on July 22, 2021 and will exit the Company over the next 12 months.” |
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Hiring impacting the Cleared Industry
| BlueHalo | BlueHalo is an integrated national security and technology company, has chosen the MaxQ site in Albuquerque, N.M. for a new state-of-the-art campus to facilitate their acceleration into production.
The development will bring hundreds of BlueHalo’s Albuquerque-based employees into a consolidated ecosystem. Its decision to expand in New Mexico over other locations preserves the existing 260 New Mexico jobs and creates an additional 64 jobs with an average salary of $90,000. The total economic impact for the project with existing and expanded operations is $3.2billion over the next 10 years. “We are excited about the selection of the MaxQ site for our new franchise technology campus in Albuquerque,” BlueHalo Chief Executive Officer, Jonathan Moneymaker, said. “This site represents BlueHalo’s long-term commitment to New Mexico and will not only enhance the company’s ability to support current and future programs at Kirtland Air Force Base, but will also serve as one of the major hubs across the BlueHalo Labs national infrastructure designed to fuel future innovations to solve some of the most complex technology problems and transition those to full production, getting real capability into the hands of those who need it most.” The new space includes an office complex, laboratories, manufacturing facilities, test areas, and secure spaces. BlueHalo will manufacture several critical products at the new facility in support of space, directed energy, and air and missile defense for the government and commercial customers. The BlueHalo Max Q site is located adjacent to Kirtland Air Force Base (KAFB) on Gibson Blvd. SE, provides adequate space and an ideal location for the expanding company. The BlueHalo team working at the New Mexico campus will be focused on continued technology innovation and rapid transition to manufacturing for the Space Technologies across Advanced Radio Frequency (RF) Systems; Laser Communications; and Space Qualified Electronics and Systems, including Stabilized Precision Optics and Tracking(SPOT). Additionally, BlueHalo’s Directed Energy (DE) division, which includes its LOCUST DE Weapon System, key Acquisition, Tracking and Pointing (ATP) systems, and advanced DE instrumentation solutions, will be developed and manufactured at the new complex. The expected completion date is October 2022. |
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Cleared Employer at Work: Northrop Grumman
At Northrop Grumman, you can visualize a career that can take you places, build your skills, and grow – not just for a project, but for a career. Discover a role that’s right for you. Explore opportunities.
Opportunity to Watch
Recently, Booz Allen made a strategic investment in Latent AI, Inc., a rapidly growing company with an award-winning suite of software tools that enable adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) at the edge.
Particularly for defense organizations, the ability to deploy and run AI/ML models at the tactical edge is critical to achieving situational awareness, and AI is an increasingly essential component of mission success. Latent AI technologies simplify and accelerate traditional AI workflows, from model training and optimization to enhancing the way AI models are deployed, for more robust, efficient, and agile Internet of Things (IoT) applications that improve user adoption and mission impact.
“The National Defense Strategy calls for a more innovative, resilient military to maintain the U.S. competitive advantage, and the ability to collect, analyze and quickly act on data is at the core of that national security mission,” said Steve Escaravage, senior vice president at Booz Allen. “To fully leverage a force that is interconnected and information-advantaged, defense organizations need optimized, scalable AI and data compression at the tactical edge. Booz Allen’s investment in Latent AI will help enable our clients to implement ML models on small form factor chip-sets and into highly sought-after end user devices, which will increase AI adoption and return on investment.”
The Latent AI Efficient Inference Platform™ (LEIP) is a modular, fully integrated edge AI development platform that optimizes the compute, energy consumption and memory allocation of tactical edge devices without requiring changes to prior model infrastructures or edge system designs. LEIP enables rapid, highly scalable and adaptable AI application development at the tactical edge regardless of framework, operating system, architecture or hardware.
Latent AI was co-founded in 2018 as an early-stage venture spinout of SRI International and is funded by Future Ventures, Autotech Ventures, Perot Jain, and other prominent investors.
“We founded Latent AI because we saw an opportunity to help developers and organizations transition more efficiently to the edge—and we have only scratched the surface of what is possible,” said Jags Kandasamy, co-founder and CEO at Latent AI. “Both Latent AI and Booz Allen are dedicated to helping organizations achieve significantly more with their AI systems, and we are excited to have Booz Allen as an investor and partner as we pave the path forward to a smarter edge.”
As one of the largest providers of AI services for the federal government, Booz Allen already delivers some of the most advanced AI, ML, and data architecture technologies, services, and strategies through its work with the Joint AI Center, Army Futures Command, and U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command, among others.
