The World of Digital Recruitment Marketing with Jared Hummel from Parqa


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Aug 25 2021 28 mins  

MAX: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster, and today on the show, I'd like to welcome Jared Hummel, who is president at Parqa Digital Marketing Agency in Minneapolis, and Parqa is an agency that's focused on recruitment marketing for the staffing and recruiting firms. So we'll get a chance to ask Jared about this world and how it's evolving and how it's adapting to new technologies. Jared, welcome to the show.


JARED: Hey thanks, Max. Appreciate you having me.


MAX: My pleasure. And would you mind giving us a quick overview, how you ended up in the ungrateful cutthroat world of recruitment?


JARED: Death in recruiting, right. Yeah, I got lost along the way. We have a sister company in Versique Searching and Consulting which is a recruiting agency in the Minnesota, Twin Cities market, and I applied for a job with one of their recruiters, of which she then asked me if I wanted to be the CFO oversee, which I thought would be a good idea. Learned a little bit there for a few months and then got asked to run Parqa, which is the sister company of the digital marketing agency that was kind of floundering around at the time I came around and we saw a pretty good market opportunity. And so the last three to three and a half years I've been focused on growing that with our client base in North America.


MAX: And so you could say that you came into this recruiting world a little bit later in your career right. It was not like coming out of school or anything like that, which is where most of the industry comes from is, this is a great way to make money at the start of a career if you're good on the phone. But I've noticed others have come into the industry later in their career and their experience is quite different. It's more like, wow, this is how you do things here.


JARED: Yeah, well, like you said I have come from outside the industry I guess ignorance is bliss sometimes right. And so, I think for being probably early to mid-career versus straight out of college I'm still naive enough to steam my opinion to the owners, right out of the gate and tell what I think from a different industry perspective. But to your point, like I've got to be on the other side of it. I've even worked in manufacturing and then in the home service business. We would have the big companies calling on us all the time, trying to push labor into us and so now seeing it, not only from our sister company Versique from the industry as a whole in Parqa, to be having clients throughout North America from IT to hospitals to finance and like seeing kind of the whole picture has been a pretty interesting experience.


MAX: The questions that you come into your customers at Parqa when you enter a new working relationship. What are some of the probing questions that you may ask to validate if some company needs your help, so we can situate your range of services?


JARED: Yeah, so, Parqa itself is a full-service digital marketing agency so we can solve any critical pain point in the marketing arena for staffing and recruiting firms. As we were talking before Max, especially in the United States, I can't speak, necessarily worldwide but recruiting firms are generally, five to ten years behind from a marketing perspective and so as we go into them, even if they have a CMO or a couple of marketers, technology is moving so fast in today's world that it's really hard to have an internal marketing team unless you're a very large company that specializes in SEO, pain management automation, martech stats, website development, job board integrations programmatic advertising. And so that's one of the ways that we enter in with new clients is either they have a CMO that presents a good strategy but doesn't have the labor to necessarily execute at a high level, or vice versa they might have one or two entry-level marketers, but they're just kind of flailing with organic social media or something that is not driving results. And they would come to us to put something more holistic together to try to drive an ROI.


MAX: You were giving me earlier a range of clients in terms of revenue, but I'd like to, for listeners who haven't run an agency wouldn't know what those revenue numbers represent. Could you frame that in headcounts, what's your typical staffing firm customer size?


JARED: Yeah, so, we're constantly trying to push the envelope so we're constantly trying to provide new services that are for bigger and bigger firms but, kind of our wheelhouse at this very second is probably a headcount of 50 to like five to 10,000 so, in US dollars that would be 20, million to close to a billion. So, our agency at this point, maybe necessarily hasn't worked with the top five to 10 global staffing firms but some of our bigger clients are multinational corporations.


MAX: You said, some of them were 1000s of headcount so I would assume that at that stage that they would have a dedicated digital team, but I would assume wrong, it sounds like they still come for help. They're a little bit late for the dance.


JARED: Yeah, yeah. The thing I learned coming from outside the agency is staffing or recruiting is kind of the consummate sales profession and so probably, I don't know what the number is, but probably 80-90% of staffing firms are run by a leadership team of sales executives and so what I've learned coming from outside the industry is that the solution to every staffing firm owners problem is hiring five or 10 more recruiters or sales representatives to solve a revenue growth problem and that is something we're trying to fix. Because I can promise you that there are more efficient ways to go about it and ultimately, that's why we're talking today. We're trying to make you do things to make it a more automated and efficient process for organizations.


MAX: Well, you're trying to find some similarities between our businesses, but in fact what I'm hearing is that I resemble perhaps more closely the typical profile of a staffing firm company because I come from sales and I've often made the mistake of let's just hire more headcount, in my case more sales guys, but if it's staffing or more recruiters to push revenue up. And, of course, you get a short-term lift but long term, you're not creating differentiation. So, the investments that people have to make in databases and websites, and SEO. These are things that take a while to yield results. These are long-term investments. Can you give us an idea of how patient a staffing firm would need to be before seeing some returns?


JARED: Yeah, well, as you said, I guess, to me, it's almost a no-brainer because if you look at a fully loaded compensation for a recruiter and say you have to hire 10. I mean you're talking, close to a million dollars. And then you have to deal with turnover, you have to deal with them not meeting their quota, all of that stuff and from a marketing perspective you can see results fairly quickly. I mean, with the way the world works today whether that's programmatic job board advertising, whether that's Facebook integrations to their job feeds, marketin...