Do you know where your leads are coming from? Are your marketing efforts even working? Before marketing attribution, these very simple questions had very complicated answers. 

When Toby Hoskins joined Parqa, we weren’t just looking for someone with impeccable taste in hot sauces and hamburgers around the Twin Cities. We needed an industry expert in marketing technology & automation who could answer those questions for our clients.

Toby and his team soon took Parqa years ahead of our time in understanding and implementing data and analytics to create better marketing – marketing that works. In doing so, we got a peek at the future of marketing that looks much different from what many companies are doing now. 

Current Marketing Vs. Marketing With Attribution

It’s fair to say, there has always been skepticism around marketing. That’s likely due to an unclear or confusing ROI on marketing efforts. Those were the days before attribution, gathering the real ROI of a $2,000 monthly spend on digital marketing could be very difficult. Even harder would be linking a precise cost-per-lead to those efforts.

With only vague and sometimes misleading information, many decisions for future marketing and strategy were based on a hunch or intuition. The infographic below demonstrates what many staffing agencies are currently working with – a lead responds to an ad on Monster or Indeed, after which their candidate profile is created or they’re placed in a role with little or no tracking.

Did the lead come from Monster, or Indeed? What campaign were they responding to? If you were able to glean any data from that placement, it would have to be gathered and input manually, which is a tall order for an already overworked staffing agent.

But with marketing automation, leads are created in Bullhorn upon application, tracked along the candidate journey and ultimately provide insights of how your marketing is working. And it’d be automated to boot.

Imagine what you could do with the time saved and all that rich data! You could:

• Pull resources from a campaign or platform that is underperforming, or delivering unqualified candidates
• Allocate those resources to double-down on the efforts that are delivering results
• Quantify what marketing is doing for lead generation and help define a baseline cost-per-lead
• Deliver an on-demand staffing experience with rapid turnaround and screening

On a higher level, you’ll create a better overall candidate experience with attribution. You’ll give your leads the opportunity to drive the conversation by replicating messaging that got a positive response. And for candidates who want to know their status in the screening/interviewing/hiring process, you can actually track them in your ATS and give them an accurate answer.

What Attribution Taught Us About Our Marketing ROI

In only the short amount of time since Toby began pulling marketing attribution for our clients, we’ve uncovered a wealth of information about the campaigns we’re creating for our client, and the platforms on which they publish. 

Four our quarterly business reviews, we now have the capability to not only deliver a much clearer picture of the ROI for their marketing efforts, but which campaigns are working the best, and which platforms are delivering most, high-quality leads.

It’s important to note the current market right now, in which many staffing agencies are having a hell of a time finding quality leads for their clients. If ever there was a time to create better marketing that can connect with more leads of a higher caliber, it would be now. 

And we see a huge potential to discover so much more with attribution.

And that is not even mentioning the time and money saved from moving away from campaigns that aren’t yielding results, and concentrating those efforts on the campaigns or platforms that deliver.

What Are The Tools For Marketing Attribution?

For marketing attribution, your ATS such as Bullhorn is going to be your source of truth. Bullhorn powers automation, attribution, and makes delivering a better candidate experience possible with on-demand staffing.

From your ATS, are two more crucial tools:

• DaXtra Capture
  • Cleans data, makes data useable in your database for automation
  • Tracks the source of your lead (attribution)
• Herefish
  • Powers marketing automation (depending on your data)
  • Uses your data and your ATS to build scaleable communication
    • Communication on behalf of your organization (thought leadership, blog, traditional marketing)
    • Communication on behalf of the recruiter (recruiter emails that are personal, relevant, and timely)

Even though marketing attribution is just one component of a bigger marketing strategy, it becomes essential when you see, as illustrated below, without a clear ROI, your agency will have a difficult time understanding what campaigns and platforms are delivering results.

Work With Parqa For Better Marketing Attribution

At Parqa, we believe in the power of marketing. And we’re prepared to put our money where our mouth is and deliver not just the results your staffing agency is looking for, but a clear picture of what’s working, and how we can make it better. 

For better results in attracting and engaging with your clients and candidates, contact Parqa today, and get a more clear return on your investment with better marketing. 

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There are a growing number of marketing technology tools out there for your staffing agency. But are they really helping you? Chances are, over time, you and your team have added several tools that either duplicate tasks, create a bad candidate experience, or are racking up a costly tab while you’re trying to run your business.

This new year, we suggest doing some nerdy housekeeping. Mapping your technology stack will help you start your year free and clear of unnecessary, inefficient, and costly tools. They aren’t doing your staffing firm any favors. And, when you’ve mapped out and optimized your tech stack, you’ll be poised to:

• Streamline and update your internal workflow with automation and data integration 
• Eliminate time-wasting recruiting efforts
• Attract better candidates (and avoid the less qualified ones)
• Provide a legendary candidate experience

To help us understand the ROI of mapping your tech stack, we tapped Toby Hoskins, our marketing technology expert. He gave us five easy tips for mapping out your tech stack and how it can make your staffing process leaner and meaner for the new year.

Why Mapping Your Tech Stack Is The Best Housekeeping Your Staffing Firm Can Do In 2022

If you need to travel two miles, you’re not going to take an airplane. You’ll want to take a car.

In the same way, mapping out your MarTech stack can make your recruiting efforts leaner, cheaper, and more effective. In short, you’ll be able to do more with less. You’ll use your platforms as they were meant to be used. It all begins with a simple question: what are your business needs?

It’s a simple question, but often, staffing agencies lose sight of their ultimate business needs – especially over time. They’ll adopt new technologies without getting the results they’re looking for. They’ve heard about the incredible capabilities of recruiting technology and they’re always chasing the newest, shiniest platform, and they’re not getting results. But why? 

Adopting a new platform means dealing with change, and change is hard for many businesses. Many other businesses may be acquiring the right technology to solve the wrong problem. Eventually, businesses are finding their marketing efforts are being driven by their technology, rather than the business driving their tech stack. 

To avoid going into a tech spiral, and to get the most out of these incredibly powerful tools, Toby has created five easy steps to help staffing agencies optimize their tech stack.

1. Determine Your Goals: Don’t Let Technology Drive Your Business

Many recruiters are finding their staffing efforts are being driven by their tech platforms when it should be the other way around. 

When you determine your business goals you’ll be able to identify the gaps in your Tech stack. For example, maybe you have a great ATS system, but you don’t have texting. Or, maybe you have several tools that do the same task.

We’re finding many staffing agencies have, over time, gathered several tools that have outlived their usefulness. This is especially true for legacy tech that was acquired long ago. Maybe the employee who pushed for a new tool has moved on. Or, you might just forget how to use it anymore.

You’d be surprised how common time or continual misuse can sabotage your recruiting efforts. And you’d be even more surprised at the amount of overlap between the tech you have that are duplicating tasks and complicating things. By determining your goals, you’ll be on your way to discovering where those overlaps are, and where you can begin paring down your stack to cut down on time-wasting tasks.

Better yet, you’ll be in the driver’s seat again, instead of your tech platforms.

2. Compile A Current List Of Your Recruiting Technology

Whether you’ve been at your current company for many years, or you’re in a new role, making a current list of your tech platforms is an essential step for any staffing agency. 

By helping recruiters make detailed lists of their tech platforms, often we’ll find they have an ATS or CRM platform, but they’ll also have Sense which offers so much more.

But making a list of your platforms doesn’t just identify redundancies in your stack. It could help you better understand what the platform is and what it can do. Even if you aren’t very excited to go down the rabbit hole learning everything there is to know about one tool or another, you’ll still benefit from finding out where that technology overlaps with others.

Ask yourself these essential questions for gauging the capabilities of all your platforms: What can it do? And what are we using it for? You might find some platforms overlap so much you could drop one that’s being outperformed by other programs.

3. Create A Visualization Of Your Stack

Even a moderate collection of tech platforms can be confusing, even in a list.

After making a list of your platforms, use the list to create a visual graphic to map out what you’re working with. Toby suggests creating a bubble chart because it’s such a visually simple way to understand your stack of platforms.

With a bubble chart, you can illustrate how each platform connects to and works with each other. Any graphic will help you visualize things like two-way integration, where your data is flowing from and what platforms it’s going to. 

One of the key benefits of visualization is how it not only makes your MarTech stack very simple to see. But it can also help you notice gaps such as two platforms that can be integrated but aren’t yet. Do you have data aggregation tool? If so, is it integrated to other platforms to ensure you’re making the most use out of the your most critical information?

Creating a visualization of your tech stack can also help you actualize your business goals. You can find new ways to create better, more efficient ways for your recruiters to source and communicate with candidates. Or, if you’re considering adopting a new platform, you can drop that into your visualization to determine if it’s the right fit for you.

If your new software creates redundancies with other platforms, visualization will help you gauge whether you could drop one that doesn’t ladder up to your goals as efficiently as the other.

4. Optimize Your Tech Stack

To continue the metaphor of comparing your tech stack to a car, if you had a Ferrari, you wouldn’t only drive it at 25mph. You’d want to take it out on the freeway where it can perform like no other car could.

Optimizing could mean a lot of different tasks. Whether that’s comparing and contrasting platforms, eliminating duplicate tasks, filling the gaps in your stack, or dropping one platform that doesn’t perform as well as another. But whatever steps you’re taking to optimize, they should all help you to getting the most out of your platforms. 

Optimizing will put you in a better place to drop the tech that’s not working for you. You can also save money getting rid of the tech and the subscriptions that aren’t being used to their full potential.

5. Maintain Your Tech Stack For The Long Term

The platforms available to recruiters are a highly effective way to achieve your business goals and deliver the results you want. But the tech will only perform as well as you treat it. 

After you’ve defined your business goals, made a list and a visualization of your tech stack, and optimized your platforms, you’ll be in a great position to maintain your stack for the long term.

Mapping and optimizing your tech stack isn’t just nerdy housekeeping for your company, it can deliver a real ROI with the time you spend and the clarity and efficiencies it can bring. 

A healthy tech stack is going to perform the best, and revolutionize the way you recruit. Imagine optimizing your tech stack to the point that, instead of hiring more recruiters to expand your capabilities, reach more candidates, or execute your strategy, your marketing technology could do all that and more at a fraction of the cost.

Ready To Discover The Recruiting Capabilities In Your Tech Stack?

Never before has recruiting technology provided more tools to help you work smarter, not harder. If you want to leverage your MarTech to reach more candidates, fill more jobs and grow your agency, contact us today.

A year ago, large investments and acquisitions in HR Tech began to rock the staffing industry. While impressive in their sum and scope, it was difficult to tell what the transactions actually meant for the industry – unless you were looking closely.

What Parqa saw then, and what the industry would soon confirm: these were early indications that staffing was about to be turned on its head. 

This month, we look back on what can only be described as a crazy year for the staffing industry and for our company. 2021 is ending with waves of viral changes, the effects of which are only gaining momentum and spreading to affect all aspects of the industry.

Industry Trends Driving The Biggest Changes In 2021

Before 2021, there had been a perfect storm brewing in our job markets. And it has been playing out in plain sight:

Long-term labor trends contributing to the employment crisis

• Over 30 million baby boomers left the workforce in Q1 (up 2.7 million from Q1 2020).
• With restrictive immigration policies, staffing, consulting, and outsourcing firms experienced denials of H-1B applications, a much-needed source of labor, at rates as high as 40%.
• The American family has shrunk, meaning fewer workers have been replenishing retiring baby boomers.
• American workers are “upskilling,” leaving an even greater void of talent in manual labor and entry-level positions.

These long-term trends collided with more current events creating an employment market plagued by historic lows in workforce labor.

Employment trends and The Great Resignation:

By early 2021, the effects of the pandemic were dragging on, but there were signs that a rebound was soon to come. While optimistic employers were gearing up for recovery, the workforce was in a decidedly different mood. They were already underway with The Great Resignation.

Workers were fed up with an employment market that hadn’t caught up to current events. They were fed up with employers offering the same low wages, low benefits, same inflexible scheduling, and a painfully slow and impersonal recruiting and hiring process which lacked in communication and clarity. 

What The Massive Investments In HR Tech Really Meant

With both employers and job seekers at a seeming impasse, something inevitably had to give. Maybe this is why we saw the investments in HR tech as an indication of that solution. 

As it turned out, the industry was after an exceedingly simple solution: a better candidate experience.

As we saw it, the rapid pivot towards HR tech was a shift towards either automation – whether that was for background checks, workforce management, or candidate workflow – or optimization of the recruiting process, most notably with cutting-edge AI staffing technology. 

For candidates, this meant the industry was listening and making a big shift towards meeting them where they’re at, by providing them with the on-demand experience they’re used to getting in every other marketplace. 

For staffing agencies, it meant they’d finally have the bandwidth to provide the service and attention job seekers deserved – especially urgent now that job seekers had discovered substantial clout in a candidate-driven job market.

For an industry that has more than enough work keeping their existing pool of candidates engaged, while vetting the flow of new applicants, the shift towards leveraging technology indicated a fundamental change in the belief that any problem in staffing could be solved by hiring new recruiters.

How technology changed staffing and recruiting in 2021

During our time serving the staffing and recruiting industry, we’ve noticed that many agencies, to manage their substantial workloads, would simply hire new recruiters. Meanwhile, those same companies were reluctant to invest in the tech that could optimize and automate the work of their new recruiters at a fraction of the cost. 

In short, many staffing agencies were more willing to spend an incredible sum of capital rather than invest a fraction of the cost and accomplish more work and get better results. 

But then, when it comes to adopting new technologies, the staffing industry has always been behind in its capabilities of digitalization in marketing and technology. We estimate the industry is 5-7 years behind more forward-thinking industries. 

We get it, integrating new software with third-party vendors can be time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with breakdowns. This is especially true when improper implementation upends its ROI by making the tech clunky, robotic, and inefficient.

One reason for this – many agencies were sold HR tech as a one-size-fits-all playbook. But without a content strategy, the canned messaging and stock content was cutting them short of the true purpose of automation: delivering a better, one-on-one candidate experience.

At Parqa, we believe you can’t have great automation without a content strategy. While technology will always be the leader, content is the key. So, we decided, if recruiters don’t have the time or the expertise to build out the tech, strategy, or content, we’d grow our capabilities, and bring the whole package to them instead.

As long-time proponents of HR tech, we were excited and energized by the industry’s shift away from the old, manual recruiting methods. The new possibilities are incredible! Indeed, we believe the tech existing today will, for the next 5-10 years, totally redefine what a staffing firm looks like.

Even now, we’re seeing the “Uberization” of on-demand staffing right here in Red Wing, Minnesota. With the help of workforce management programs, Red Wing shoes is enabling workers to pick up one-off shifts to fill immediate needs in their manufacturing, warehousing, or shipping/distribution divisions. Workers can choose to work a four hour shift with very little training and, even better, without the lengthy and overly inefficient hiring process of the past.

Changes for Parqa in 2021

With the implementation of this new technology being the top priority for the industry, bringing that technology to life was a top priority for Parqa.

As Parqa grew by 13 new employees this year (!), we hired strategically to bring in the specialists who could leverage this tech for our clients. This is especially true for two of our recent foundational hires – Julie Halderson and Toby Hoskins – who bring to Parqa unmatched expertise and passion for data acquisition and making the highly effective automation campaigns of the future a reality for our clients, not years from now, but today.

We made a startling discovery on this path – while the market for job seekers is highly competitive, there is actually no shortage of workers. The workers recruiters are looking for are out there, and they’re responding to better messaging, better timing, better content that’s customized for them, rather than for the business.

Many agencies were beginning to catch on as well. By autumn, when Jared and Kelli attended Staffing World, automation and the candidate experience were dominating almost every conversation and seminar at the conference.

2021 wasn’t all business

We had a lot of fun along the way. Kenzie got married. Jared’s family grew by one, and Chanel’s family is about to get a new arrival soon! We’ve been working hard, but also playing hard as well. We have been so grateful for a year of productivity, growth, and building relationships like we’ve never experienced before.

We’re looking forward to 2022, with thankfulness, gratitude and high expectations – not just for the new landscape of staffing, but for how we can help to make a better world, and a better economy by helping our clients work smarter, not harder.

Here’s to bright horizons, and the opportunity to drive real change for our industry, and to build even more relationships and connections in the future!

Happy 2021 all!