Top New/Improved LinkedIn Features for Recruiting Professionals

March 16, 2021

Many recruiters may recall the days before LinkedIn as one might imagine the days before electricity. It’s astounding to think of the ways LinkedIn has transformed staffing and recruiting from the days of posting job openings in the newspaper.

LinkedIn continues to evolve, and 2021 is looking like another banner year for the platform. With LinkedIn’s new and improved key features, staffing and recruiting firms have more options than ever to:

Find and connect with the best talent
Take their company branding to the next level
Publish compelling content in new, engaging ways
Engage in a deeper, more meaningful way with clients and candidates

New view & expanded capabilities of LinkedIn Company Pages

The new view and capabilities of LinkedIn’s Company Pages feature just got a big redesign to help more companies humanize their brand and engage with their network like never before. Here are a couple new features we’re excited about:

Sharing content with your community easily and more often by posting as a page or member of a page
Quickly view engagement metrics for individual and company updates
A dedicated page for members to view company updates
Real-time engagement with your community via LinkedIn Live Streaming
Grow your community from your network with Invite to Follow feature
Improved content recommendations
New lead gathering options
View Page Followers feature

With these latest updates to LinkedIn’s Company Pages, businesses are now able to take a more integrated, targeted approach to branding, leveraging the profiles and networks of their employees to help spread their messaging.

Get face-to-face with video chat in messages

For users who want a more engaging chat experience, LinkedIn created video chatting in LinkedIn Messenger. Adding video capabilities in Messenger is a great way to take a brief discussion to the next level.

Video capabilities in chat are especially useful in a time when people are less likely to meet in person, helping to create an even more authentic experience between users or groups sharing career advice, discussing job opportunities, or catching up in virtual group meetings happy hours.

LinkedIn takes a note from Instagram with Stories

Companies and their users are now able to more easily share images and short videos with a loose, shoot-from-the-hip feel with the new LinkedIn Stories feature. LinkedIn Stories is similar to other platform’s stories with:

Full-screen view on content
Stories only available for one day
Another, even more genuine way to publish content
Allowing members to engage with each other via private messaging

With stories, users can even guide readers to a URL or landing page, by adding a “swipe up,” action to their story. Just one more way LinkedIn is further our ability to maximize conversions and audience engagement. (This feature is limited to LinkedIn Pages or users with at least 5,000 connections who’ve set the “Follow” button as their profile’s primary action.)

On an anecdotal note: many of us at Parqa only use Instagram for their stories feature. If LinkedIn’s stories becomes as widely used as Instagram’s, the possibilities here are very promising. Especially with LinkedIn’s push to focus on content, their algorithm will likely favor those early adopters of LinkedIn stories.

Your profile’s new “featured” section

LinkedIn’s new featured section (you can find it between the “About” and “Experience” sections) is designed to allow users to display their expertise front and center on their profile. Since the arrival of the new featured section, we’ve seen several users find creative ways to fill this section with their best work.

Some other ideas to make the most out of your new featured section:

Use it to feature posts and articles you’ve written and published on LinkedIn
Post links to external websites like a portfolio, blog or other websites that provide useful information about you and your work
Use the featured section to create a cutting-edge feel to your profile by changing content frequently

Build your brand and drive demand with LinkedIn Events

More than ever, businesses are looking for a way to safely meet and connect with people. LinkedIn events provide a trusted space for hosting public and private events. Similar to virtual events on Facebook, hosts and attendees are able to invite other users, see who else is attending, and chat with participants in the event feed.

Which event is right for you? We’ve found this handy guide helpful for creating and hosting a variety of events depending on your needs:

Boosted public events without registration for maximum outreach and brand awareness
Public events with registration to amplify your ability to collect leads
Private events for building community with a targeted audience

Events with LinkedIn make a lot of sense, especially when you consider how LinkedIn has found a wealth of activity in groups like workplaces, recruiter or alumni organizations. Whether you want to find creative new ways to build leads, get your brand top of mind, or just engage with an audience, you’ll find a lot of extra value hosting and participating in LinkedIn Events.

Stay connected with coworkers with Teammates

It’s only natural the people we spend the most time with at work become some of our closest friends. Here are some interesting statistics that demonstrate the power of building relationships at work:

63% of people have relationships with coworkers outside work
60% of LinkedIn members are more likely to like, comment, share, or message coworkers vs. their other connections
95% of people agree it’s good to have friends at work

LinkedIn Teammates allows users to further manage and interact with their professional network. In Teammates, users can tag coworkers, managers as well as direct reports as part of their immediate network and current team. Depending on a users privacy settings, LinkedIn will alert users to the activity and important milestones of team members, such as posts, shares, comments and birthdays and work anniversaries.

For companies who are looking to build a strong sense of community and culture at the workplace, LinkedIn Teams is a great way to bring coworkers together.

Try new things and remember: failure is not fatal

It’s natural we’d be a little hesitant to post our first LinkedIn story. And what if we mess up starting a video call with a potential new employee? Trying new things can be daunting and time consuming. But LinkedIn does a great job with making intuitive changes that are fun and easy to pick up like a pro (even for your first try).

Most importantly when you try new things – your audience will notice. Especially on LinkedIn, audiences react to users and companies who go out on a limb with them. And with these new features, businesses and individuals have never had so many options to live into a genuine online presence with authenticity and the human touch. Remember, nothing ventured, nothing gained – and it certainly beats posting openings in the local classifieds.

The Importance of Content in Your Staffing Firm’s Marketing Automation Programs

February 23, 2021

Content is oxygen. Content is the force that breathes life and authenticity into a staffing firm’s marketing strategy. But like any business, streamlining our marketing drumbeat with automated programs can lead to a dependency on a call-to-action. It can be easy to overlook our most powerful tool – content.

We Help Staffing Firms Develop Genuine Content. What’s Yours?

It all begins with content. Come to think of it, it ends with content as well. Here at Parqa, our team of demand-generating experts focus on four rules of developing authentic content:

Avoid being overly promotional
Get vulnerable
Remember your audience
Don’t be afraid to be a maverick

Keeping these four simple steps in mind we focus on developing stories from our industry, and of our candidates that are compelling. We’ve discovered what makes us passionate about our work, whether it’s the people we serve, how our partnerships can empower other staffing firms to achieve great things. This is what motivates us.

We’re not alone. Many staffing firms are also seeing the value in maximizing storytelling to gain leads. But content alone, isn’t going to move the needle. That is why we believe to make content truly effective it should be paired with a savvy automation strategy.

An Effective Equation: Content + Marketing Automation = Deals

Marketing automation is an extremely effective way for staffing firms to show up regularly for their potential audience. Automation can be a great way to plan, build, and maintain vital campaigns. It can reduce unnecessary time wasted on busywork, and maximize the time a sales team could otherwise spend winning clients and closing deals.

The basics of marketing automation can be simplified to 5 quick steps:

Creating great content (see above).
Build your marketing funnel.
Create a clear call-to-action (preferably one that helps your prospects to solve a problem).
Broadcast relevant messages on a timely schedule targeted to your prospects at their various stages of the sales funnel.
Empower your sales team to create a delightful sales experience for your prospects and customers and help them every step of the way.

Once your firm has settled on a content strategy and automation, check your work. Is it working? Are the leads coming in? Just like making pancakes, the first efforts may be a flop. You may need to tweak your technique. (It helps to think of automation as an ongoing, constantly evolving process.)

How Can Parqa Help Your Staffing Firm Build an Effective Content + Automation Program?

At Parqa, we were born in staffing and recruiting, and we’re proud to give back to an industry that has given us so much. It is our goal to create the very best connections that last.

If you like what you hear, we’d love to tell you more. Get in touch with us today and find out how we can help you create an automated marketing program with heart.

Staffing & Recruiting Behind the Scenes: The Importance of Digitizing Your Company

February 16, 2021

HealthCare Recruiter International’s President & CEO Jon Guidi joined our very own Kelli Schutrop in this fireside chat to discuss the new digital transformation sweeping the staffing & recruiting sector. Gain insight on the following:

Benefits of Digitizing Business (e.g., recruiters can work with people seeking their expertise, high-interest convos)
How to Create Demand (seeing an opportunity in the market and building/attracting lead interest through marketing)
Importance of Diversification (especially given these unique times)
FTE vs Outsourcing Marketing
The Power of a Dashboard (making data-driven business decisions)
And more!

The Presenters:

Kelli Schutrop
Director of Sales & Marketing, Parqa

As Director of Sales & Marketing, Kelli helps CEOs, owners, and visionaries transform their business goals into realities by building brands and driving qualified leads. She formerly managed marketing and communications in-house for leading executive search and consulting firms, and now with Parqa has provided marketing consulting to hundreds of staffing and recruiting firms nationwide. Kelli has spoken on the topic of digital marketing for the staffing industry through podcasts, webinars, and industry conferences.

Jon Guidi
CEO, HealthCare Recruiters International

Jon is currently the CEO of Healthcare Recruiters International and leads the Executive Search practice. Jon has managed many key relationships across a variety of sectors and is an expert in developing recruiting strategies to scale a business that requires a specialized workforce. He is also a regular speaker at global recruiting events and is widely considered a thought leader on innovation and technology usage in the recruitment sector.

Staffing & Recruiting Behind the Scenes: The Importance of Social Proof

February 16, 2021

What is social proof, and why does it matter to you as a staffing and recruiting professional? Our Kelli Schutrop teamed up with Adam Conrad from Great Recruiters to bring you a fireside chat talking about this important subject.

In this talk, you will learn:
• What is social proof and how it shows up in life (non-staffing industry, in your day-to-day purchases)
• How a candidate’s journey is changing in this new digital transformation landscape
• The importance of attracting quick feedback as candidates and clients experience working with you
• What to do with the candidate and client feedback
• Use cases for social proof in the staffing industry

The Presenters:

Kelli Schutrop
Director of Sales & Marketing, Parqa

Adam Conrad
Founder, GreatRecruiters

Adam is the Founder of GreatRecruiters, a real-time experience and reputation management platform specifically built for recruiters and staffing firms. He’s been in and around the staffing industry for over 20 years. He’s had roles as a recruiter, managed recruitment teams, and led operations for a $40 million staffing firm. He’s always been an early adopter of technology and how it helps create more trust and transparency between recruiters and their candidates. Connect with Adam on LinkedIn.

Staffing & Recruiting Tech Stacks - Parqa Marketing

Common Marketing Tech Stacks in Staffing & Recruiting

January 14, 2021

After the fallout of 2020, it’s become abundantly clear for staffing and recruiting firms that it’s no longer good enough just to “do” digital marketing. Everything is getting more competitive online. From paid advertising to LinkedIn, the ante is being upped—daily.

The firms that are committed to an informed, holistic marketing strategy separate themselves. Those that aren’t fall behind.

As firms continue to build out their marketing initiatives in 2021, many may be overlooking the potential of one critical component: tech stacks. Leveraging marketing tech stacks is a fundamental pillar that supports and facilitates much of what you’re trying to accomplish. While a few, isolated technologies will make an impact, the real power comes when these technologies are grouped together, synergize with one another, and produce more value.

For example, your CRM and ATS system delivers incredible value on its own. But integrating a tool capable of automating the communication throughout your entire recruiting cycle can eliminate the busywork immediately. Tools like Herefish by Bullhorn and Hubspot seamlessly connect with your ATS to get a deeper view of your candidates, contractors and clients and effectively makes it that much bigger of a tool for your team. Not to mention your recruiters will have more time to actually recruit.

Let’s look at another ubiquitous component of the staffing and recruiting world: sourcing. The bread and butter of recruiting.

While you may have honed your old fashioned sourcing skills over your many years of recruiting success, today, you don’t have to do it all on your own. Use your own human facilities, stack them on top of a few technologies, and you emerge as a much more efficient, capable sourcing machine. Here are a few options to consider:

CareerArc: helps you communicate your employer brand at scale through social media, enhancing who you reach and how effectively you reach them.
VONQ: leverages data to help you identify the most opportune media channels to promote certain jobs
HiringSolved: automates some of the lower-level components of the sourcing process to find the most qualified candidates.
RecruitmentEdge: a real-time, comprehensive candidate recruitment platform that allows you to search for candidates with specific skills

As the above list begins to showcase, one of the biggest obstacles, when agencies begin to build out their tech stacks, is the sheer amount of tools out there.

To make this a bit more manageable, we’ll go over a few of the most important marketing tech stacks in staffing and recruiting below.

Email & Marketing Automation (Herefish by Bullhorn, Constant Contact, Hubspot, Zapier)
Digital Advertising (Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising)
CRM/ATS (Bullhorn, PCRecruiter, Crelate)
Social Media Management (Hootsuite, LinkedIn/Facebook Ads)
Search Analytics (SEMRush, MOZ, Google Analytics)

The right tech stacks and products will be more or less suitable based on your agency’s size, focus, and composition. As with any business decision, take time to assess which tools would be most beneficial and conducive to your specific agency before you commit to implementing them.

Committing yourself to understanding and leveraging these tech stacks can be incredibly valuable and save your recruiters time, resources, and many steps within the recruitment process.

Marketing Automation 101: The Basics of Building a Marketing Machine (2021)

January 6, 2021

“The core problem we’re going to have going forward is that you have two forces [that will] govern much of what [happens] in the future. The first is globalization, which we’re not going to repeal, and the second one is automation, which we’re not going to repeal.” – Eric Schmidt, Former Executive Chairman of Google, Inc

With the marketing world moving steadily towards more automation, it’s natural to take a step back and wonder: what is automation?

Automation has been around since the printing press, the loom, and even the wheel. Throughout history, humans have found ways to automate repetitive or laborious tasks to machines: why would we stop now? While automation can conjure up images of machines from the Matrix, it’s less dystopian and more beneficial than you might think.

Simply put, automation allows humans to do more with less.

Think about it this way: where would the automobile industry be without the creation of the assembly line? Where would we be without the machine-based search algorithm that Google built? Automation is a part of your smartphone, your coffee maker, and countless details of your everyday life.

Marketing automation can be thought of in the same way that every other form of automation can be: it allows you to do more with less. Think of marketing automation as a way to do the work of a large marketing department, but for the cost of a single marketer.

Marketing Automation Basics

With automation, you can scale your staffing & recruiting business without having to scale your marketing team. In today’s world, how valuable is that?

In essence, with the proper techniques, you can create a marketing machine.

Marketing automation consists of software and tools that allow you to efficiently market to your customers throughout the entirety of their buyer’s journey. You nurture prospects with engaging and relevant content and then, with a few loving prods and pats along the way, you turn those prospects into customers. It’s one of the reasons that Netflix is ranked one the most reputable companies on the planet: they don’t just sell to their customers, they provide value-added service to them at every stage of the funnel. They have built a marketing machine that removes the friction between the customer and the company.

Here’s how you can get started.

5 Steps to get started with marketing automation:

Generate relevant leads by creating great content and driving traffic to your website. Focus on making your content informative, not promotional. By providing educational information, you help solve your prospect’s pain points which allows them to move smoothly through the rest of your funnel.
Build your marketing funnel using landing pages, email marketing, and content that is valuable to your prospective buyers, whether that’s a blog, an ebook, a whitepaper, etc.
Create content that includes calls-to-action with other relevant content that will help your prospects to solve their problems. If you’re discussing obstacles in the recruiting world in an article, you should link to another piece of content at the end that helps solve those obstacles or presents new ideas.
Send out relevant and timely messages to your prospects at the various stages of the funnel. Your prospects are always on the move, their information and needs change everyday–it is your job as a marketer to figure out what information will help them progress along their journey. Sending the right information at the right time is critical to building trust with your customers, and solving their problems, even after they’ve become a customer, is how you build a reputation as enviable as Amazon’s.
Work with your sales team to integrate your marketing and sales efforts, by creating a delightful sales experience for your prospects and customers, your sales team will begin to understand your customers from their perspective. Rather than interrupting your leads with irrelevant messages and cold calls, marketing automation allows your marketing and sales department to work in harmony to understand and help your customers every step of the way.

The key to successful marketing automation is remaining customer-centric. Much like Netflix’s mission of being the most customer-centric company on the planet, marketing automation is all about your customer, not you.

Where we see many fall short with marketing automation is when they only focus on their existing mailing lists and ignore the rest of the 99% of the market out there. Marketing automation is not just emailing your leads to death; it’s a holistic approach to creating great marketing that is non-intrusive, relevant to prospects, and delights the customer at every stage of the funnel.

Going All In in 2021

December 16, 2020

For most of 2020, I really felt like I was in a game of high stakes poker….and now, I’m all in on 2021.

It seems like two or three years since I wrote my blog talking about “Why President’s Club Still Matters,” before we went to Puerto Vallarta to celebrate in March of 2020. But before I could even unpack my suitcase when I returned home, everything had changed. More than eight months later, most of us would never have expected that we would still be dealing with the pandemic and all the fallout that accompanies it.

In business, it feels like I have been stuck in a never-ending game of high stakes Texas Hold’em ever since the pandemic started.

Let me start by coming clean and saying that I am a horrible poker player, mainly because I have no patience and I think I can count cards but, in reality, I can’t. In fact, I am such a notoriously bad player that, every year for the past 16 years, there has been side bets on whether or not I will go out first in our neighborhood tournament.

As this year began to wind down and I spent time reflecting on 2020, I started to see why it reminded me so strongly of a game of poker.

You see, the really good players wait it out. They might play 1-2 hands an hour. They are protective of their chips, but, when the timing is right and they get their pocket aces, they push their chips in front of them, look at the other players and say, “I am all in.” This is when the other players look at each other and know this player is serious and must have a hand; they’re in it to win it!

For the most part, this is how I have felt this year in business. When the pandemic hit, we were hit with a decade’s worth of uncertainty, and there were few places to turn to for advice—no one had ever experienced anything quite like this before.

I have always been an owner that was all about investing dollars on growth and pushing profits/chips and going all in on the future. This was different. I had to learn patience (this is very hard for me, you can ask my wife!). I had to wait, I had to protect our company, my future.

I couldn’t be reckless and go all in with all of the uncertainty surrounding us. We had to wait and wait and wait to make sure we would survive but, more importantly, we had to make sure we were set to THRIVE coming out of this in 2021.

We just had an all company Versique/Parqa meeting earlier this week. Just like in poker, we were patient. We learned from other recessions, we waited for that right time and then, when the time was right, we said to our team, “It’s time to have some fun.”

During these meetings over the past several months, I’ve shared with them and tried to communicate clearly how we have been doing every month.

This month was different—we finally got our pocket aces.

I ended the meeting telling the team my patience has run out. We are all in for 2021!

Wishing everyone an awesome 2021!

And thank you Versique/Parqa team for being patient with us. Let’s have some fun in 2021.

Who’s in?

Parqa Marketing Solutions for Staffing & Recruiting

Ready to connect with more clients and improve your bottom line with the staffing and recruiting industry’s favorite digital marketing agency? Contact Parqa Marketing today to get started! Whether you need help driving more traffic to your website, help building a stronger brand, or want to dive into new marketing technologies, we’d love to be your guide.

Prefer the DIY method of marketing? No problem, be sure to check out our free handy Marketing Strategy Guide for some pro tips, industry secrets, and more!

5 Eye-Opening Reasons to Outsource Your Marketing to an Agency (Staffing & Recruiting Edition)

October 29, 2020

With around 20,000 staffing and recruiting firms in the country, how does the lone agency stand out in today’s competitive market?

Hint: The secret isn’t much of a mystery; it’s just having outstanding marketing.

If done right, marketing genuinely has the power to help your business connect with more clients, candidates, and partners over time.

The challenge is often that staffing, recruiting, and search firms aren’t doing enough marketing or run into barriers when they do it all in-house.

Listed below are five eye-opening examples of how outsourcing your marketing to an agency can improve your bottom line, supplement your existing marketing team, and drive more traffic to your business.

It’s Cost-Effective

Marketing agencies frequently get a bad rep for being exorbitantly expensive. With how tight budgets are right now, outsourcing to an agency may appear not to be the most financially-sane option.

However, outsourcing marketing to an agency is surprisingly more cost-effective than you would think, especially when compared to marketing in-house.

Example:

Let’s say you’re considering hiring an internal marketer with a starting salary of 70K, with another 30K in costs with benefits. You’re looking at around 100K each year for their full-time help.

Now, consider the cost of an agency. With an average rate of $150 an hour, let’s say you purchase a monthly retainer of 40 hours. After a year of outsourcing your marketing, you’ve only spent 72K. The difference? The outsourced agency offers a team of marketing specialists at your disposal vs. a lone marketer.

Complements Your Existing Marketing Team

Even if you have an excellent full-time marketing team that’s effective, it rarely hurts to bring extra help for special projects or offload tasks on an as-needed basis. Many staffing and recruiting firms rely on marketing agencies to supplement or even enhance their existing marketing team when projects pile up.

Example:

You might have a phenomenal digital marketing manager, but they don’t have any video marketing experience. The digital marketing manager comes up with a delightful idea to turn a salary guide into a video series, but since they don’t have any first-hand experience with video or have the necessary equipment, they look for outside help with a local marketing firm. The firm steps in and gets the project done, while the digital marketing manager can focus on other marketing initiatives. Additionally, the marketing agency remains on stand-by if the company decides to make more videos.

Access to Emerging Technology

Typically, experimenting with new digital marketing technology in-house comes with a bit of risk, especially when you factor in ramp-up time to learn the technology and trial-and-error from using it. Marketing agencies have a clear advantage because they often have experience working with emerging digital marketing technology and knowing what works and what doesn’t. It would be like trying to learn how to use a seismograph on your own even though there’s a seismologist down the street who would be willing to teach you how to use it for only a few bucks.

Example:

Say you want to implement a recruiting chatbot on your website. It sounds simple in theory, but after doing some research, it requires a bit more work than you thought. As a business owner, you’ve got many more important things to worry about, so you call your friendly neighborhood marketing agency to help get it setup. Not only do they get it all installed and ready, but they also show you how to run it so that you can continue to prosper from this technology.

ROI-Driven

At the end of the day, results matter. Are you getting the number of new clients you wanted through ads? Is your firm ranking first on Google? Marketing agencies are extremely metrics focused. Within an agreed-upon timeframe, you can easily tell if your marketing efforts are paying off or falling flat. Any noteworthy marketing firm will be able to literally show you that the work they are doing is paying off in four, five, or even six-figure outcomes.

Example:

Let’s say you work with a marketing agency to develop an in-depth eBook that’s meant to drive new business. After promoting the eBook for a month on LinkedIn, the marketing agency tells you that the eBook created 50 leads, 10 of which turned into sales that generated over 100K in revenue.

Outsourced CMO

With an average salary of $174,234, Chief Marketing Officers are a significant investment for any business. Not only do they oversee lead generation and brand credibility, but they also provide a strategy for maximum online visibility. With a high-performing marketing agency, the strategy, planning, and decision-making that comes with a CMO is baked into the hourly agency rate.

Example:

For that mere $150 an hour, 40 hours a month rate we discussed earlier, you’re getting an entire team of marketers, including the CMO — all for 72K a year!

At the end of the day, outsourcing your marketing to an agency has a relatively low risk, especially when you factor in its high potential to offer a return on investment.

Parqa Marketing Solutions for Staffing & Recruiting

Prefer the DIY method of marketing? No problem, be sure to check out our free handy Marketing Strategy Guide for some pro tips, industry secrets, and more!

3 Components of a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

October 12, 2020

Content is still king.

It’s what fuels nearly every digital marketing initiative and genuinely has the power to transform opinions, convey targeted messages, and even make someone fall in love with your recruiting style.

While there’s no exact recipe for content marketing success, there are a few core components of content that every staffing and recruiting business should do to help fuel their marketing strategy.

Listed below is some handy information on each of the core content elements and how they specifically help power your marketing initiatives.

Component 1: Blog Content

Back in the early 2000s, blogging was insanely popular. And guess what? It still is. In fact, two million blog posts are published every year worldwide.

To stay relevant in your industry, blogging needs to happen. And not just blogging for the sake of blogging – but having a proper blog strategy. Every blog you publish should address the pain points of your buyer persona(s) (client, candidate, etc.) and then write keyword-based blogs around these pain points.

How it Helps
Drives more traffic to your website, positions your business as a thought-leader, and establishes trust within your network.

How Often You Should Do it
Realistically, a blog a week is a fantastic goal to shoot for.

Pro Tip
Make sure every blog has a call-to-action of some kind. Whether it’s encouraging your visitors to sign up for your newsletter, directing them to your job board, or reading another blog post — every blog should have a next step.

Component 2: Website Content

Website content is what organically brings traffic to your website, compels visitors to trust you, and brings in business.

Today’s buyer conducts a lot of research before they deem a vendor worthy of their engagement. That means that they’ll be hopping all-around your website to see if your firm is credible enough to solve their business challenges. Is the content on your site going to demonstrate your firm’s reputation accurately? Or will your content fall flat and send them seeking out another firm?

The content on your website must convince visitors that your firm not only understands their unique pain points but has the ability to solve them.

How it Helps
Attracts job seekers and clients to your website while convincing them that your firm is the best one out there.

How Often You Should Do it
Think of your web content as a houseplant that needs watering occasionally. You should spend a significant amount of time getting your content nearly perfected for your audience, SEO optimized, and converting with the slight tweak here and there for improvement.

Pro Tip
When it comes to website content, think outside the box by incorporating other content like videos, chatbots, and testimonials to help craft your message.

Component 3: Long-Form Content

Long-form content is just a fancy way of saying content that’s large in word count, value, and impact. This can take the form of a whitepaper, salary guide, infographic, case study, and so much more!

Long-form content is a fabulous tool to get a visitor to take action on your website (other than filling out a contact form). While contact forms are amazing, many early visitors are not ready to engage with your brand that way until they build more trust, and they build more trust by reading up on you via the long-form examples above.

How it Helps
Educates your audience while positioning your firm as the expert on whatever material you’re covering.

How Often You Should Do it:
Realistically, once a quarter is a wonderful goal to aim for.

Pro Tip:
Pick a quarterly theme like “Job Hunting” and then create a long-form piece of content that supports the theme. For example, “The Comprehensive Guide to Job Hunting in 2020.” After the guide is done, you should be able to pull content you’ve already completed from the guide to use for blog and social posts. It’s like getting a BOGO for your content strategy. At Parqa Marketing, we exclusively serve the staffing and recruiting industry and we exist to help you grow your brand, get noticed, and get more leads. By working with our team to share your story, you’ll gain an expert digital marketing partner who has a deep understanding of your industry.

Get in touch with our team today to learn more about our approach to digital marketing.

Is the Staffing and Recruiting Industry Ready for Takeoff Again?

September 16, 2020

Unemployment is down, job orders are up, and marketing conversations are happening all the time.

Are we finally out of the weeds after a chaotic six months of uncertainty?

Based on the sheer volume of job orders our sister executive search company Versique has had in the month of September, and the nonstop inquiries for marketing help, we are cautiously optimistic.

With kids going back to school and rumors of a vaccine around the corner, what can staffing and recruiting firms expect over the next few months? This blog will dive into several promising indicators of growth.

Unemployment Rate Dropping

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that at the end of August, the unemployment rate fell to 8.40 percent! At first glance, this isn’t a brag-worthy unemployment rate by any means but compared to the 14.70 percent it was at in April, this is worth celebrating. The biggest question now is whether that number will continue to decrease to the record lows we experienced before COVID. While impossible to accurately predict, (knocks on woods), the unemployment rate is on track to continue dropping.

Marketing Investments

Are you wondering, “why would investing in marketing be a leading indicator of economic growth in the staffing industry?” Well, as a staffing marketing agency that lost a decent chunk of business during the economic downturn, we experienced firsthand that marketing and sales teams are typically the first divisions to be cut in most recruiting agencies. Once these departments are revived or resumed, it’s generally a good sign of recovery.

The good news is that we’re seeing a massive influx of interest in firms willing to invest in marketing initiatives again. Whether that’s hiring staff back or outsourcing marketing to an agency, this is a fantastic growth indicator.

At Parqa alone, we’ve partnered with more clients than we ever did pre-pandemic — which has been amazing to have so many meaningful marketing growth conversations again. Over and over, we’re seeing that many staffing and recruiting agencies are using this time to invest in their brands, redesign their websites, and unleash digital marketing campaigns.

Payroll On The Rise

Another key indicator of national growth is the payroll rate. In August, the total payroll employment rose by 1.4 million, which follows a pattern of large increases over the last three months. A few of the notable job gains include retail trade, professional & business services, leisure & hospitality, and education & health services.

In addition, our sister search company Versique is also experiencing a record month in terms of closing new clients and undertaking new projects. In fact, Versique is even ahead of where they were last year at this time.

In closing,

The pandemic is still out there and anything can happen. Despite that, we are indeed seeing some sturdy signs of growth, especially in the staffing and recruiting industry that has me cautiously optimistic for the remainder of the year.

My sincere hope is that this blog took a little of the “panic” out of pandemic and that your firm is on track to come out ahead. Are you ready for this next phase of growth?

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Unemployment Rate Dropping

Marketing Investments

Payroll On The Rise

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