So many staffing agencies are spending way too much on job boards! What if there was another way to find suitable candidates? Today on The Staffing Show, we are joined by the co-founder of Boostie and Bullhorn Automation, Travis Arnold, to discuss the changing landscape of the staffing industry. Tuning in, you’ll hear all about Travis’ interesting career and what led him to staffing, what his company Boostie does, the changes he sees in job boards and sourcing in staffing, and so much more! We even delve into what we can learn from the E-commerce mindset about sales and how implementing those tactics can improve how staffing industries operate before discussing the value of retargeting. Travis even shares advice for staffing agencies and for anyone entering into the industry. Thanks for listening!
[0:01:14.4] DF: Hello everyone, thank you for joining us for another episode of The Staffing Show. Today, I am super excited to be joined by Travis Arnold, who is the co-founder of Boostie, as well as the co-founder of Herefish, which is now Bullhorn Automation. Travis, good to see you, super excited to have you on the show.
[0:01:31.0] TA: Hey buddy, yeah, good to be here, and thanks for that intro.
[0:01:34.5] DF: To kick things off, I know, a lot of people in the staffing industry already know who you are but could you tell us a little bit about your background, and also how you got into the staffing industry?
[0:01:43.3] TA: Yeah, sure. 2007, I walked through the doors of a software company in Clayton Missouri called Sendouts and the rest is history. You know, Sendouts was an ATS back in the day, it’s pretty competitive with Bullhorn and Maxxhire and you know, for a lot of years, and then eventually, got acquired by Bullhorn in 2012 and you know, throughout my period of time at Sendouts, I was kind of ran marketing, ran the show there.
And then, yeah, worked with the Bullhorn team post-acquisition for a while and did some marketing services for them and – and then we kicked off a little company called Herefish in 2014, 2015, and now, we’ve like – and I think the latest is like, it’s automated two and a half billion things.
[0:02:25.6] DF: That’s amazing.
[0:02:26.9] TA: And we were acquired in 2020. So yeah, it’s pretty wild, it’s been a fun ride, I made a lot of good friends in the space, and kind of seen all the things and you know, that kind of led us to our kind of current venture, which is Boostie and all that good stuff, so.
[0:02:43.8] DF: That’s awesome man. I think that Boostie, you’ve got the team back there, kind of got the band back together.
[0:02:47.7] TA: Yeah, we do. Kevin, my co-founder of Boostie, was our co-founder and CTO at Herefish, he and I both stuck around Bullhorn after acquisition for around a year and you know, did some consulting work for Bullhorn after that, and then our third leg of the stool, Chris Dues, our head of sales and accounts, he is the – was our head of sales and accounts at Herefish. So, he was running with Bullhorn for quite a while, post-acquisition, to help them kind of you know, cement themselves as the automation platform in the staffing space.
And – so yeah, it’s good to have everybody back. I get to work with the people like you and cool – cool other founders and other software companies. So, it’s [inaudible 0:03:30.1]
[0:03:31.1] DF: I love it. Today, for the audience, we’re going to be going into marketing best practices, kind of the changing landscape in the staffing industry, before we talk about all the fun stuff and what’s going on in the market, get your perspective on that, just tell us a little bit about what is Boostie.
[0:03:45.5] TA: Ah, yeah, the thousand-dollar question. So, Boostie is a talent marketing platform, that’s what we say for you know, Google search but really when we think about that, it’s how do we kind of bake in marketing best practices that I knew and have used in SaaS capacities for like, 20 years. I mean, how do you bring that to a space that’s kind of dying for this stuff who – since I’ve been in the space since 2007 people, like, I – you know, job boards are great but I kind of want to get off it.
I want to figure out how to do this myself. We’re still kind of answering that question with Boostie. So, what we are, we kind of look at the entire marketing funnel that exists in staffing and hiring, and we have a platform that addresses that. So, at the top of the – very top of the funnel, we have our promote tool that targets the right individual person for a specific role. So, rather than posting on a job board where anybody can go apply to it, if we’re hiring, you know, electricians, we put this ad for electricians on Google search and social, down funnel.
Again, kind of like, if you take the mental model of E-commerce, if you’ve got into a site, you’ve been targeted, you’ve gotten to the site, you haven’t done something, they’ll throw a pop-up your way. In our case, our pop-up is just a more active job alert, where we get a little bit of information that we can kind of use to start progressively profiling that passive candidate, and put it into a like actionable talent bucket.
So, that’s our capture tool, and then below that is our apply tool, which to me is like, really where the rubber meets the road. I think kind of the current state of affairs is we ask the same exact questions regardless of the job and we also complain like, as a space, we complain about we get so many – so like the quantity is so high, and we have no way to figure it out, and I think that’s, you know, it’s self-inflicted when in the sub bases but we look at the applied process is really where the friction exists because it’s so inflexible.
So, you look at some of these web platforms, they can, yes. First, they might have ask for an email, phone number, resume, that’s kind of table stakes, and while that’s cool, it doesn’t really help my recruiter make a decision on who to talk to first, and so our applied tool, we look at the individual job, we have – we base the rules on like titles and categories and locations.
So, we ask specific questions that you know, really help qualify a person on the intake, and then you know, we have AI, and automation kind of sprinkled throughout the tool. Obviously, we’ve built Herefish, so automation is going to be baked in, and then while we were building, it’s kind of the resurgence of AI and large language models. So, it’s really, we’ve kind of baked it in at every little step that we do with the tools.
So, our goal with building software has always been we shouldn’t make our customers have to bend and jump through hoops and figure out how to use it. Like, it should just kind of work and that’s what we’re doing with Boostie to make this like, very complicated, you know, big fuzzy, scary cloud of marketing and give you the keys where you put a script on your side, it’s no code and it’s just up and running and now, you can, you know, reduce dependence on job boards and start owning your marketing universe a little bit more, so.
[0:06:48.0] DF: Well, that’s great, and I’m super excited to see what you guys do because I know we talk about this a lot on the show but the spend in marketing, kind of the marketing expertise that’s improving and increasing in the staffing industry –
[0:06:59.2] TA: Yeah, yeah.
[0:06:59.8] DF: As a whole, I think the industry is still largely laggard when it comes to marketing tech and how things are being approached. I think the most recent stats I saw was like, staffing industries are usually spending one to three percent of revenue and what a normal business would be five to 10% will be going towards marketing, and with that, let’s go ahead and jump in.
So, like, you kind of touched on a few of the elements here but what are you seeing in terms of the changing landscape and you know, where staffing is going when it comes to job boards and sourcing?
[0:07:29.6] TA: Yeah. The job board one is tricky because I do think there’s some relevancy there. So, I’m not like this – I don’t think job boards are this big baddy that you have to like, completely disregard. Like, there’s some roles that job boards are great for. Like – that you can get in front of and get in front of some really active candidates but to spend your entire budget, it’s like 93% of the budget goes to a job board.
It doesn’t even get categorized as marketing, it’s usually an operational expense at this point, and I think that’s kind of silly. It’s just kind of like, “Well, at the same time, you’re complaining that we get too many leads, we get too many candidates.”
[0:08:04.9] DF: Yeah.
[0:08:04.8] TA: So, it’s like, okay. Like, let’s stop for a second, you’re getting 300 applicants per job and you don’t even talk to those 300. Like, why do you still do this? Like, what’s going on here? So, what I’ve seen and what we’ve talked to, we have staffing customers, we also have corporate customers, and it’s kind of like, they have this very similar problem. Like, we get a lot of people, we don’t even know where to start, for one.
We have no way to qualify people on the way in for two, and it just gets to this point of like, “Well, we just – we spent a million dollars last year, let’s spend a million dollars this year.” And I think what we started to see is more of an understanding that we need to start owning our world a little bit more. You know, when you look at a typical ATS, there’s hundreds of thousands, if not millions of candidates in there, largely unengaged, largely kind of left to die and be forgotten.
I think tools like Herefish or Bullhorn Automation kind of help with that but ultimately, then this reliance on a single source and me, as the marketer, like, cool. Like, if I’m first starting a company, I will probably spend more of my budget on paid media, on ad words in this, let’s use that as an example. I might spend 90% of my budget on ad words because I don’t have any other channels that I’ve built up yet.
But as that starts to move, as like, my content marketing gets better, as my presence gets better, as my outreach and email marketing and all that stuff gets better, my lead source doesn’t have to be super dependent on paid all the way. It can be this owned stuff that I have internally and then – then you kind of move on, you have like a pretty healthy marketing mix but staffing is still like, 93 – again, 93% is on this one source.
[0:09:45.1] DF: Yeah.
[0:09:45.4] TA: It’s never moved, it’s never gone to this other spot. So, to me, we’re seeing more of those conversations. I think Indeed in particular has, you know, kind of raised their hand. Like, “Hey, the staffing space is like 700 billion dollars, not just 36 billion dollars.” So, we might – we might have to go charge after that a little bit, and so if I were in that world and I would kind of like, “Oh, okay, let me think about this a little bit more.”
Like, “I don’t need to spend a bunch of money with Indeed when I can, you know, kind of start leveraging my internal database from a marketing perspective.” Those are conversations that we have kind of every day and that’s been cool, and then you know, kind of layering on the toolset and layering on a mental model that everybody understands of E-commerce is then pretty helpful, so.
[0:10:31.4] DF: It is interesting. I don’t think I always think about it the way you’re just describing it but most businesses, you look at any other sector, SaaS, you’re going to start with paid ads, and then eventually you’re like, “Okay, like, let’s start building content, let’s build our organic platform, you know let’s make sure that we are divesting for paid as quickly as possible.” Because – and this is then true for software businesses paid ads will drive leads but the quality is going to be lower.
[0:10:58.7] TA: Yup.
[0:10:59.3] DF: Consistently lower than somebody finds you organically, find you through their content and that’s usually like a pretty rapid shift in the staffing industry it seems like it’s kind of the defacto like, “Oh, we just spend this. This is just what we do,” that’s how we –
[0:11:12.1] TA: Yeah.
[0:11:12.5] DF: They’re pulling candidates, and yeah, I think it’s –
[0:11:15.3] TA: Yeah, and it’s changing. It’s bureaucratic, it’s like, “We spent it last year, we have to spend it this year.” And it’s like, “Oh, okay.” That’s okay, that’s silly, for one. Like, we just kind of keep mainlining the job board drug and it’s insane. So yeah, it’s making a change. I think the – for me, like, your biggest marketing asset is your website, and so I think you’ve got, you know, you have this reliance on job boards, and your path away from that or less – be less dependent is start investing in what you own.
You own your website, you own the leads in your ATS, like, start to like, work with that a little bit more. There’s no point to keep paying for the same people over and over again, your clients are posting to Indeed already, so why are you doing the same? There’s a bunch of little things you could start to widdle away and start to pull that – pull that spend internally a little bit more on other tools, on other services that aren’t just, again, they’re not just completely dependent on a single source. So, yeah.
[0:12:17.2] DF: Yeah.
[0:12:16.9] TA: That’s what keeps me up at night. There’s one source that people spend money on, it’s like, “Jeez, I can’t imagine it as a marketer.” I’d be like, the minute you turn off that tap, everything dries up. So –
[0:12:28.0] DF: Yeah, what happens to your business if –
[0:12:29.2] TA: It’s completely not sustainable, like, when you look at it that way.
[0:12:32.6] DF: If Indeed doubles their prices tomorrow, what happens to your business?
[0:12:35.4] TA: Right, exactly. Yup.
[0:12:38.2] DF: I was having a conversation with Dan Mori recently, and he was talking about the – just in terms of differentiating your agency, and you know, right now, what we’re hearing a lot of is we need more clients, depending on what sector you’re in, job orders, clients are still one of the top things that’s demanded right now. The supply and demand, I guess, charge is kind of flipped on its head still in staffing right now. It’s harder to get job orders than it is to get candidates.
And with all of that in mind, the customers can post to Indeed just as easy as you can. I think you used to be able to say, “Hey, we’re a staffing agency, we got access to this job distribution, we’ve processed these jobs, they’re connected to our ATS.” We have all these unique components around how we manage our job boards but I think that a lot of that has kind of gone away and it’s not as unique now, and I think that there’s more than ever, customers looking to hire a staffing firm their practice to something beyond, “Can you do the same thing on Indeed to me?”
[0:13:35.0] TA: Yeah, right.
[0:13:36.4] DF: It’s a risk that exists in the market today.
[0:13:38.9] TA: Totally, absolutely. Like, you look at – you look at the talent pool it’s like, and this is another area that we like, kind of keeps me up at night like, you’ve got this ATS, it’s largely – it’s kind of loose data, you might have categorization on a candidate but it’s like, “Okay, how do you take your ATS and like, make it actionable and put it to work?” And that’s again, another way of like, that’s your secret sauce.
Like, how do you engage with this group of people that live inside of your ATS in a way that makes you super valuable to a company that you’re trying to fulfill roles for? It’s not just like, yeah, again, anybody can go post to Indeed and get the same amount, same candidates that you’re doing. Let’s kind of up your value and your enterprise value a little bit more of like, “Here’s why we matter and we have, you know, we have a thousand frontend engineers across the United States so we can deploy very quickly for pretty much a wide band of roles.”
And it’s that kind of being able to dip into your ATS, look exactly who you have, and put them to work or at least, submit them very quickly. That’s going to be the game-changer, I think, kind of going forward, and then now you look at – you look at the agency of tomorrow with AI and automation, that changes too.
Like, traditionally, a 20-user, like a 20-recruiter shop would be 20 million in revenue. You know, in the future, a 20-user shop could be a hundred million in revenue. We just – we don’t know, but we do know that AI and automation maximize, you know, recruiter productivity and output, and so what’s that look like, you know, in the future? So, I don’t know, it’s going to be interesting. Yeah, I think short-term lens is like, again, start bucket all your stuff and understand who you have inside your ATS.
[0:15:23.1] DF: I think, you know, similar to what you’re talking about, there’s obviously the AI category, which you and on the Mingle Podcast stopped talking about it, especially the AI.
[0:15:29.8] TA: It’s 2025 now. So yeah, you can’t talk about anything.
[0:15:33.9] DF: Tell me, they’re like if you aren’t building, you know, AI agents or their software and service no longer. It only really matters –
[0:15:39.8] TA: Yeah, yeah.
[0:15:41.2] DF: Yeah.
[0:15:40.9] TA: Everything’s agents.
[0:15:44.4] DF: When it comes to – you and I talked about this a little bit before but the kind of shift of thinking about the staffing agency for more of an E-commerce mindset. I was thinking about the travel industry because you know, it’s near and dear to me, it’s my background.
[0:15:55.8] TA: Yeah, yeah, right.
[0:15:56.7] DF: Like that, that’s like a very close parallel. I think E-commerce is the same parallel. Talk a little bit about what you’re seeing from that perspective and how the E-commerce mindset could help staffing agencies improve their – how they‘re operating today.
[0:16:12.0] TA: Yeah, I think if – well, I mean, every single person that’s listening to this podcast has bought something online. I will raise my hand and put that flag in the dirt and diagonal but –
[0:16:21.9] DF: You tell me, I want to know.
[0:16:23.4] TA: Or yeah, or that, you’re good at boosting, Boostie [crosstalk 0:16:26.1]
[0:16:27.0] DF: I have you on the podcast, like –
[0:16:28.5] TA: Yeah, exactly, please, please. Yeah, how have you lived this way for so long? You know, I think for me it’s like, you look at E-commerce and we’ve all been targeted on social media or somewhere, where it’s like, “Oh, you know, that’s a belt. That’s a cool belt.” And they targeted me because I’m outdoor, like I go outside, I ski, I bike, and do all the stuff, and that belt is for those types of people.
So, they had a profile, they knew the ideal person that would buy that belt. I clicked it, I got to the site, I’m not ready to buy, they throw an offer in front of me, and then you know, two days later or two weeks later, I end up purchasing. So, like, we all know that flow, right? And it’s pretty efficient, it starts at the top of the funnel by targeting the right ideal person, and when I look, again, another kind of rub against job boards is like, posting a job for a licensed clinical social worker and I get people with forklift credentials applying for the role.
And again, I think the industry beats up on forklift drivers, I’m not trying to, it’s just the easiest example we can all give because like, it literally happens all the time. So, I think it’s like, let’s start with like who we’re targeting first. Like, let’s have a pretty good ideal candidate profile and persona that we go after, and then we just kind of work down the funnel. Like, again, follow what you’ve experienced by buying online and apply that to your current candidate experience, and it’s probably very misaligned.
Like, if you’re targeting passive candidates and you’re going on job boards, you’re not targeting passive candidates. Like, you have a whole – you may have a whole sourcing team and they do an excellent job trying to get in front of people but let’s get in front of people that are just like, casually browsing on the web or might be searching, passively searching for a new job but they’re not ready to commit to a specific role or anything.
So, it’s like, how do you catch, like how do you balance between like, “Hey, we’re targeting the right persona, we want to capture that person, put them in a bucket that we can like, stay engaged with them, and then get them to a point of like, where the checkout process is easy, right?” I think the most optimized experience we encounter as like humans is the checkout process of E-com.
Like, you hit a button, like, you’ve done it once, you don’t have to do it the same, you don’t have to enter your credit card when you’re on your phone, like, it’s just there and you can – and go to the races and you know, we look at that the same way. Like, it should be very easy to apply if you’ve applied before, and even the first apply should be pretty easy, stepped through, and very relevant to the role.
So, not all roles require a resume, so why do we ask for it, you know? That is a fall-off point or an abandonment point that we want to eliminate and so as far as what you can learn, I think just go through your process. I’ve heard this for the past 10 years, like, just go through your apply process, you know, see how bad it is and we’re still having those conversations. So, I think it’s gotten to a point where there’s people kind of trying to address this and I think that’s great for the entire space.
I think that if you can streamline that experience from top to bottom from a marketing standpoint, and get the right person just with their eyes on your company in the first place, and you do that at scale, you’re building the engine to have long-term sustainable growth that isn’t reliant on a single source. That’s how – that’s how I look at it, just based on kind of my experience of running SaaS –
[0:19:36.9] DF: Yeah.
[0:19:36.6] TA: You know, marketing teams, like, you pay for a little bit, and you try to own as much as you possibly can because it’s more sustainable and you own your – you own your outputs a little bit more when you kind of got that route, so.
[0:19:48.9] DF: We are – and I’m hearing more from agency owners, like, I want to have as little percentage of my placements coming from –
[0:19:56.0] TA: Yeah.
[0:19:56.4] DF: Job boards as possible over time. And which makes sense because it’s just that – then you have a more scalable, more profitable business on the E-commerce side of things. The – and the apply thing, I mean the one that comes to my mind, I was in Shopify, and like I need to go – I used to go find a product on a website and then go to Amazon to buy it because I didn’t want to go – because I didn’t want to –
[0:20:15.3] TA: Yes, yes.
[0:20:16.8] DF: I don’t want to go through this process. I don’t want to like, I don’t want to buy direct, I have to go create an account, and like especially if I’m on my phone, it’s like impossible and now, now you get to a website that has Shopify and there’s like the one click, it has your credit card, and I’m like, I don’t – I am happy to buy direct, and what that does for that, the margin that that brand just got because they optimized one little process, they did something.
They omitted an Amazon fee, which is significant at scale. So, I think it’s the same concept that applies for what you’re talking about with Boostie right now.
[0:20:50.8] TA: Totally same, the genesis of Boostie, you know after Bullhorn and kind of the acquisition, kind of took some time off. We had a couple of kids, like wasn’t planning on starting anything, and then ’23 rolls around, I’m getting the wild hair, and like I’m buying a pair of shoes or something, I’m like, “Damn, that was pretty easy.” And then it’s like, “Oh, like if we targeted our…” And then just like my mind starts unraveling and then you’re –
You know, I’ve spent like three months in the whole kind of digging into how we could use alternative channels to really drive this kind of e-com process, and you know we started with Boostie Promote, and then you know, always baked into that was this apply process, and then we just decoupled it, you know, six months ago and started getting it on the client’s websites and it’s just that same thing of you make it easy, people will do it.
You can make it easy and still qualify and I think that’s what people get hung up on. It’s like, “Well, I should only ask for the same email address.” And it’s like, no, if you set this up in a firm and user experience standpoint the right way, it makes it fun to use, it makes it feel good. Like, when you can just tap through and you’re just tapping through like answering a couple of questions and you submit, awesome.
And then on the backside of that, we’re putting a fit score that’s comparing to the job description. So, there is a bunch of stuff that you can do that for the candidate it feels great, it doesn’t require them to like pull out, like you know, their blood sample or anything like that. It’s just simple and clean, they could do it on their phone when they’re riding the metro to work, you know? So, it’s kind of the thought there.
[0:22:24.3] DF: Yeah, and one thing you’ve also just – you touched on a little bit but the retargeting is something that most – I mean, that’s the – when I had my marketing agency, the first thing I did for every brand that I worked with regardless if they wanted it or not was set up retargeting because it’s a base layer, I think, must-have for every business, and the ROI is there.
It’s not always the easiest to attribute it but it is an awareness play that you can make to the people that you are trying to literally at the bottom of the funnel that have engaged with your platform a lot. Do you have any idea how many people in, like what percent of staffing firms are doing that? Like, when you’re talking to staffing agencies, are any of them running –
[0:23:07.2] TA: Zero percent, I would just say people I’ve talked to. Well, I do know like I do – yeah, we do. To be fair, we have, we’ve talked to some folks like after that are like, “Oh, yeah, yeah but we’ve done that before and we did a little bit of this.” It’s, for us, it’s always again, what’s the most relevant thing. So, for – again, I don’t want to go down like a product path but you know, kind of similar to you.
Like, you just deploy this for everyone. Part of our promote tool is retargeting, it’s baked in. So, every visitor that hits the landing page we automatically categorize. Again, we use an AI agent to automatically categorize those folks, and kind of normalize all that data, and then we can say, “Okay, for these jobs in this location, here’s an ad that’s like currently being promoted, let’s put it in front of this person.”
And so, it’s the exact kind of ever-present position that a company can have that they just haven’t had before. So, it’s something that they didn’t have to do, they didn’t have to set up anything special, visitor hit their site, they didn’t do what we wanted them to do, they didn’t apply, and so now, let’s follow them around, and let’s just have our brand in front of their face when they are hanging out in ESPN or they’re doing whatever.
So, to me, those – I love retargeting, it’s one of my most favorite things. I think there is a way you set that up where it makes sense, you drive them to a thing with paid, and then you have this very low-cost retargeting channel that’s always running to the most relevant people, the people that have interacted with your site in some capacity, and showed some sort of buying signal, you can get in front of them.
So, yeah, we love it, we’re fans. We may have something up their sleeves regarding retargeting in the future but –
[0:24:43.6] DF: I think the – when I think about retargeting and staffing specifically and also like alternative sourcing some of these areas that we’re talking about, the real value is that you’re activating talent that isn’t going to go apply necessarily to the 20 of your competitor’s jobs. You might actually be finding candidates that aren’t, you know, literally, just one click applying everything that they come across on Indeed and therefore, finding candidates that are unique to your network, so.
[0:25:11.9] TA: Totally, yeah, and look at – you know, look at job boards, I’m like, they really target like an active job seeker at the bottom of the funnel. Like, they’re already there, they’re ready to apply, you have them, and that’s great. Like, if you can get a percentage of your people that you hire from that and it’s pretty cost-effective, you can get some eyeballs on your jobs, no question, like that’s going to happen, you’re going to get applications.
That’s just the nature of it but to your point, like everybody has talked about for decades, like I love these passive candidates, I love referred candidates, like those are my favorite ones. They have the best placement rates, they have longer tenure, we redeploy them more often, all the things, all the things that staffing firms care about usually comes from non-job board candidates. So, again, it’s kind of a mismatch of like what people say they really want but where their money is going and I think it’s, again, I use the, you know, it’s a drug. It’s like, they’ve been on this drug for 30 years, make sense – again, ’07 it’s been exactly what people are wanting to get off of but here we are, 18 years later, and we’re having the same very similar conversations to back then. So, just kind of wild.
[0:26:20.2] DF: Yeah, it is, and I think the – I mean, it’s an interesting market because it’s also Indeed is targeting the customers equally and –
[0:26:30.6] TA: Yeah, yeah.
[0:26:31.9] DF: They’re not working as closely with the staffing agencies as they are with the customers of the staffing agency in many instances, which is an interesting component to it as well, so.
[0:26:42.0] TA: Yeah, you know we see that. I mean, we work with, again, we work with corporate customers too and you know, they’re like, “Yeah, we have jobs on Indeed.” They’re also working with staffing firms that have jobs on Indeed, and it’s like the same job, why are we doing this? Why are we having this conversation? Again, to your point, like the unique value of a staffing firm is like the relationships they have with their candidates. So, you’re not – I don’t think you’re getting that through Indeed if you are, lovely so.
[0:27:06.2] DF: And now, we live in that. We were talking about this yesterday in the conversation but the world of AI automated applicants and also the proliferation of job postings that I think there is a Wall Street Journal stat about 20% of all job postings aren’t real [crosstalk 0:27:24.8] it’s absolutely crazy, and so like –
[0:27:27.9] TA: Do say.
[0:27:28.4] DF: But I remember the resume blackhole was like, yeah, one percent response rate or something crazy, and now it’s like yeah, not only are you unlikely to get a response but there’s also a whole series of jobs that just don’t exist.
[0:27:42.8] TA: Just getting a candidate, just doing this, and I think it’s great. It’s like, the AI-generated job is going to fight with AI-generated resume and the applicants, like where are we going? So, yeah, I mean, I think we look at that as like we look at, you know, candidate data walks through and like, “Okay, is it augmented with AI?” and we look at that it’s like, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.
I think that’s good, like if I was applying to jobs today, I would definitely use some sort of large language model to help me kind of round out my skillset to make sure I was aligning with the job description. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I think is there a way you can use that and are there other frauds and like signals to like, “Oh, a bot filled this out, and here’s how we know that.” I think that’s where we look at, you know again, owning the apply process on the client’s side, kind of pretty –
It gives us a unique insight into that process and like tracking where you know, where people are coming from but yeah, ultimately, ultimately there’s never going to be a hundred percent failsafe against it. It’s all moving so fast and again, it’s fun to watch. The fake job orders kind of perplex me a bit, it’s like is it coming from a specific brand, is it just a fake company that’s doing it? It’s like, it’s kind of weird.
[0:28:57.3] DF: It is weird. I mean, if you could spin up an AI agent to apply but then also do the job.
[0:29:03.6] TA: Yeah, yeah. Well, still, yeah, right.
[0:29:08.3] DF: Like, it will interview and also do the work, it will just run full circle, so –
[0:29:13.3] TA: Yeah, I mean they’re – what’s stopping it?
[0:29:15.5] DF: Get your AI agent a social security number and you’re good to go.
[0:29:18.2] TA: Yeah, I know. It’s really getting into the point of like, if I am a corporation or even like a staffing firm where I’m working and I’ve got a job to fill, like, “Okay, what do I do, how do I figure this out, like is 60% of this work able to be done by an AI agent?” And so, I think those are questions that companies have to ask themselves like I think we’re definitely going to see some impact.
What it looks like? I don’t know. I always use the ATM example, like ATMs hit the street in 1975, a good TED Talk I like to share, like annually I think but the fear was it’s going to put all these tellers out and the tellers are going to be just homeless living on the streets. It’s like what happened was those tellers then became like loan officers, and those companies all exploded. So, are we kind of freaking out for no reason?
Again, I think the – you look at the agency of the future, 20 people, you know it used to be you know, about 20 million bucks and now 20 people, maybe in the 100 million bucks, and how did that math all work out in the future is yet to be seen but –
[0:30:16.6] DF: Yeah, it is going to be interesting. I follow this person on TikTok actually, he’s an AI expert, he’s –
[0:30:22.1] TA: Not for long.
[0:30:23.5] DF: Yeah, not for long, so we have four days left. We’ll see, but two of his predictions for the year one, you’re at a large corporation, you’re going to have an AI coworker. You’re going to have an AI agent that you are working with, and then his outside-the-box forecast was that there will be a – the first paid AI Only Fans.
[0:30:42.9] TA: Sure, guaranteed, like just in no time, in no time we’ll let it happen, especially this year. It will be ’25, it will be the year for that.
[0:30:53.2] DF: ’25 is the year. What – I know we’ve kind of bounced around a little bit on the marketing side but –
[0:30:56.7] TA: Yeah.
[0:30:58.0] DF: As an agency owner, what are some quick wins? You know, if you were to give advice in kind of where the digital landscape is today, any – what would you suggest that they take action on?
[0:31:09.6] TA: There are facets there. I think if I were to start, if I were to walk in the door of a staffing agency as a marketer, I’d be like, “Okay, what’s our audience look like?” Let’s make sure that our ATS and the audience we’re trying to talk to is the right one to start, like we have these sites of jobs, do we have these types of candidates? That’s the first step and then to me, it’s I’m kind of going to try to minimize my kind of paid spend.
Kind of paid ads, I think for like, you know, traditionally called paid ads to job boards and figure out if, “Is there a way to cut that from 100% to 60% and then where does that fill?” And I think it’s investing in your website. It’s investing in, you know, self, certainly it’s investing in Boostie but I think if you would invest in something like Boostie, there is plenty of competitors or if you were to say you know, there is referral, right?
I think referrals like Staffing Referrals like I don’t want to – I am not trying to pump your tires here but I think that when you look at that like most companies have a staffing referral program and that lives on a spreadsheet and it’s highly interactive, it’s all those things that you know but it’s like, “Okay, let’s just start to like systematize these things that we’ve been doing manually forever that are actually real drivers to growth and revenue for us.”
Then we can see, “Okay, now let’s be more discerning about what we spend externally,” be it a job board or whatnot, and then that’s when you can start to say, “Okay, now let’s analyze all of this, let’s have a good sense of like the, you know, attribution reporting of like, this source led to this placement, these leads, and then starting to go from there.” I think that’s kind of how you approach it. Like, you can’t just kind of boil the ocean with marketing.
I think it definitely takes some time to get your arms around, and if I were to be like, you know, kind of sympathetic, empathetic to the firm owner, it’s like, “We’ve done this, it’s how we’ve done it for 30 years, so like we don’t know any different.” So, it’s like, I don’t expect somebody that owns a firm or like an ops person or a CIO that’s kind of in charge of this now to say, “Oh, now I’m a CMO all of a sudden, I know all this like, very in-depth marketing, you know, facts, and processes.”
It takes a little time and I think we’re starting to see it. You know like, you brought it up earlier from a business development sales standpoint, I think sales is still kind of like a hot button for some folks but if I go back to like ’08, ’09, it was a hot button then. You know, job orders kind of died, a bunch of candidates, a lot of layoffs, and then that was like the hottest thing for like two years, and then they just went away.
And not that it’s just going to follow the same cadence this time but I definitely think you should, you should always be developing business. So, I think that’s one thing, like from a process standpoint for staffing firms, like you just kind of always got to be doing it rather than when it hurts but I think you got to look at, look at it all, and again, I’ll keep beating it, like you just got to own your marketing universal more than you do today.
And, that starts, to me, it starts with the audience, it starts with your assets like your websites, emails, outreach, all that good stuff that you have control over.
[0:34:19.9] DF: I don’t have a direct stat on this but I would – when you look at the agencies that have scaled rapidly over the last five to 10 years, the ones who dialed in, I mean, they’re – you can’t tell. It’s like chicken or egg, like did the marketing look good first or did they, you know?
[0:34:36.9] TA: Sure.
[0:34:37.3] DF: I think, yeah, part of it is they focused early on marketing, invested in marketing –
[0:34:42.0] TA: Yeah, yeah.
[0:34:42.7] DF: Figured out who their audience was, figured out the positioning, and then that’s actually what was the key driver in terms of the scaling faster than the competition, so –
[0:34:51.8] TA: And you know how it is, like riding a rocket ship from a marketing standpoint. It’s super fun, it was like, “Oh, we hit it.” Like, now we’re like, we were owning everything, every email we send out, we get this return, every post we make we get that, and so I think you look at those companies that kind of spun up in the past like you said, five years, and you see this – yeah, they have great brands, they talk the right – they say the right things to candidates.
They say the right things to potential customers and they actually care about those experiences a little bit more, and I think it’s you know, it’s part of the digital transformation scale that we’re all still in, and that’s just a – it takes a bit for firms to adopt that but I think it’s speeding up. I think AI’s helped that. I think some external pressures, obviously, economic factors helped that too. So, it’s – I’m super encouraged, it’s cool to see, you know, marketers from outside the space starting to get into the agency world and the staffing world, for sure.
[0:35:53.4] DF: Yeah. It does seem like the agencies are starting to adopt more modern tactics and strategies. Last question I got for you and then we’ll do the speed round.
[0:36:01.1] TA: Oh, sweet.
[0:36:02.6] DF: What advice would you give to somebody before entering the staffing industry?
[0:36:06.3] TA: Oh boy, as an owner or?
[0:36:09.3] DF: Let’s go with, “As an owner.”
[0:36:10.9] TA: Owner. I would say, how do you figure this out at a minimal level of overhead? So, that means, like not hiring recruiters, not hiring account managers right away, to how can we use tech to scale this in a way that’s kind of responsible and sustainable, and then start hiring those folks with that tool and with that process in place where it’s like, “Hey, you’re a recruiter, you’re going to be able to do five billion dollars’ worth of business, no question.”
I mean, that’s where it’s like, to me, is super interesting. I think the tech is there now where you could go in, have a blank ATS, get some customers, get some job orders, start sourcing in a smarter way versus just posting and praying on a job board. I think ultimately that’s how I would like, start to talk about it and I’ve had this conversation with agency owners recently and it’s like, “Yeah, it’s like, the whole world’s changing, what do we do?”
I think talent marketplaces are super interesting, those are cool. Cool things come out of it. So yeah, I would just kind of have them be on the tech train early versus later, and have a kickass brand that kind of addresses – honestly, the concerns candidates have with working with staffing firms. Sometimes, like the employer brand is kind of misaligned and it’s not great. So, it’s how do you build this trust pretty quickly with a candidate you just built a relationship with. So, that’s how I would approach it.
[0:37:31.9] DF: That’s great. All right, so, speed round of questions.
[0:37:34.5] TA: Okay.
[0:37:34.7] DF: What is a usual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
[0:37:39.1] TA: Oh shit, Taco Bell.
[0:37:40.5] DF: Taco Bell, all right.
[0:37:42.1] TA: It’s absurd, and I know it’s awful but I love it, yeah.
[0:37:46.6] DF: What book or books have you given most as a gift and why?
[0:37:50.4] TA: Rework by the 37signals guys. Why? Because I’ve read it in like ‘08, ‘09, whenever it came out, and I’ve read that thing like 30 times. I think what it does is ground you in like, “Here’s how work can be, it doesn’t have to be insane.” The follow-up book of that is It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work, which is also a book that they wrote because our whole goal with any company we’ve built is let’s have a calm, measured company.
It doesn’t have to be insane, we don’t have to be high-stress and like, not sleep and like, hate our lives. Like, so those are the two books. The one though, I’d say, Rework, hands down. Read it if you haven’t.
[0:38:30.7] DF: I’m pretty sure you recommended that to me. I think I –
[0:38:32.5] TA: Yeah-yeah. I may have given you as a gift, sorry if I didn’t, and I’ve given it to a few people.
[0:38:38.6] DF: In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?
[0:38:43.3] TA: Sleep matters. That’s probably the number one. I spent my 20s and 30s as a short sleeper. I go to bed at midnight, wake up at five, get to work by six, seven, and just hammer for 15 years, and then finally, “Okay, I have to change, change all this.” So, yeah, I haven’t set an alarm for like, eight years, nine years, I think. So, it’s been pretty great, yeah. Unless I have to, like if I have an early flight or something but –
[0:39:06.1] DF: Yeah. You just got that internal clock, just waking up, yeah.
[0:39:09.2] TA: It’s great. Yeah, I got two kids too, they help with that.
[0:39:12.6] DF: Travis, it’s great having you on. Do you have any closing comments for the audience?
[0:39:16.8] TA: You know, other than I think – I think I’m excited about the future for, kind of, the hiring space at large. I think we’ve gotten – we’ve gotten to a point where we have the toolset and the tools available to really change how candidates interact, how the companies and internal people interact, and just have meaningful connections with everyone. Like, I think – I think the goal is like, let’s make software better for everyone.
And we’re getting to that point where not only is the software great but the hiring processes and the experiences can be great because the tools are there. You don’t have to build everything from scratch now, it just already exists. So, I think I’m just encouraged with the future of all this.
[0:39:56.9] DF: That’s exciting times for sure.
[0:39:58.3] TA: Yeah.
[0:39:59.4] DF: This is a great conversation, thank you so much for being on. I hope you have a great day.
[0:40:02.4] TA: You too, buddy. See you.
