Ep 174: Acquiring Digital Talent

Transcript:

Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:02]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 174 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Attracting senior digital talent is an issue for many employers as the pace of digital transformation increases. But how can smaller companies compete with competitors for talent who have bigger budgets and more resources? My guest this week is Jordan Meyer, founder of Granular, a 16 person company who’ve been brilliantly successful attracting exceptional digital talent to the business. Enjoy the interview.

Matt Alder [00:01:39]:
Hi Jordan and welcome to the podcast.

Jordan Meyer [00:01:41]:
Hi Matt, thanks for having me.

Matt Alder [00:01:42]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?

Jordan Meyer [00:01:48]:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m Jordan Meyer, located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and I founded the agency Granular. We are a digital marketing agency. We really kind of narrowly focus on paid digital marketing. So you know, we’re doing a lot of stuff that people have kind of a small sliver of in their agency, but we’re absolutely not a full service agency. So we’re not designing websites, we’re not good at design, we’re not good at a lot of other stuff that a full service agency does. So we kind of stay in our, in our lane, really going deep within digital marketing. You know, we’re an AdWords Premier Partner, a Bing partner, and then we basically run ads on pretty much anything that you can, you can bid on and flight within the Internet. We’re pretty small. We have 15 people going on 16 soon with pretty steady growth over the four years we’ve been in business and we only hire senior talent. So there’s definitely some hiring challenges and some staffing kind of roadblocks to work around. But yeah, I mean, that’s in short, pretty much who we are, what we do.

Matt Alder [00:03:11]:
And I kind of really want to sort of get into talking about hiring talent and the culture that you’ve developed and all that kind of stuff. But perhaps it might be useful. I mean, tell us a Little bit more about the story of why you started the agency and how it’s grown.

Jordan Meyer [00:03:30]:
Sure. So I’m fairly young, so I can actually say this has been my entire career has been in the digital marketing space. I started my career about a year or two after Google Ads launched. So I was pretty new into the industry that was new itself, which helped me really gain a good foothold in the industry and be very experienced nowadays compared to a lot of other folks in the industry. But I got my start at a small e commerce company. So I got thrown into the deep end really marketing kind of obscure products, selling them online, working in definitely online shop, but it was actually a kind of a catalog mixed with e commerce. So that was interesting kind of foray into digital marketing. From there I went to work at two agencies in town where I was kind of doing everything under the sun in terms of digital. I was doing SEO, email marketing, paid search, affiliate, you know, those were pretty much all under one bucket at that first agency. I quickly realized that I really was passionate about paid search and paid digital. So in order to focus on that I had to go to a larger agency which I did there. I got to work with a lot of other e commerce companies, but also a lot of lead generation clients where, you know, we had to drive qualified leads for a certain cost. I did good work there. I shared a lot of that on a personal blog and Twitter and really got my name out there and ended up being recruited by Best Buy Corporate up in Minneapolis where I moved and ran digital marketing there on a pretty big team. But I got to spend tens of millions of dollars and really drive a lot of revenue through their e commerce, which was exciting. From there I went on to two universities and growing up in my career ladder I got to basically build and lead digital teams. Everything from kind of where I started, every kind of aspect of digital marketing I was in charge of, but my passion was still in paid search. So actually on the while I was in corporate world because of the blog and because of my kind of profile, I was getting contacted a lot from other companies just to either try to poach me or I typically spun that into side business. So I would consult, I would do work on nights and weekends managing paid search, managing digital marketing for other companies where it wasn’t a conflict with my corporate job. And in 2013 that really kind of came to a head where I was running out of my nights and weekends. You know, I couldn’t sell anymore any more time because I didn’t have any. I’m really kind of a workaholic, but I kind of hit the limit there. So I was at a crossroads of, you know, do I go full time into this kind of side business and make it my full focus, or do I continue to try to balance this and turn business away or, or do I stay in the corporate world where I was pretty high up on the ladder already and I had a pretty good path carved out for me. And ultimately I was talking to one of my clients who happened to be in Milwaukee and they really wanted more of my time and I wanted to give it to them. And they also had kind of a shared vision with me of growing Granular because I kind of already created the brand in 2013, growing granular into something bigger. So December 2014, we officially formed a partnership and I put my house up for sale in Minneapolis, moved back to Milwaukee and officially started Granular. So Fast forward to 2019. We have 15 or 16 full employees. We’re still laser focused on paid digital and the vision has become a reality. But at each step, I continue to try to grow this thing and turn it into a real business.

Matt Alder [00:08:15]:
Now you mentioned that you only recruit senior digital professionals and recruiting digital professionals is probably a challenge, probably over generalizing, but maybe not much for pretty much every employer on the planet at the moment. And you know, it’s interesting that, you know, large employers, for example, like Best Buy, can sort of throw money and resources at the problem to try and solve that and build employer brand and do whatever they need to do to get people to join their business. I’m really interested in how a small startup agency, you know, goes about getting that senior digital talent to join your organization.

Jordan Meyer [00:09:01]:
Sure, you nailed it. And that’s what we’re up against as large companies start to notice us and notice that there’s a small pool here with a lot of talent, so they may as well fish here for their talent. Big companies can throw money around and they can throw a big project at you. That sounds exciting. What I’ve come to learn is that the culture and the work environment is sometimes, I would say often more important to senior search specialists and senior digital marketers than the flashy gig. So I’ve got kind of a really targeted and lucky type of personnel that I’m trying to hire here because by them being senior, you know, it helps my business quite a bit. I can charge pretty good rates. They’re very efficient because they, they don’t have to learn on the job. They’re self starters, they’re self managing. It’s it’s really an efficient workforce that we have. But on the, and another bonus of that is that they’ve seen kind of the other side of things. I’ve hired people from corporate, I’ve hired them from other agencies and they’ve seen at least a few workplaces, they’ve seen a few jobs, they’ve lived it, they know what they like, they know what they don’t like. And I think because I’ve had the same experience, I know how to play into those strengths and weaknesses of the employers where we can offer a very satisfying work environment. Here we’re a lot more flexible, there’s a lot more autonomy. The pay is pretty close to what you can get at corporate gigs, especially for. We’re seeing some corporate folks that just don’t understand the value quite yet. So they’re actually not paying as much as they should be and that gives us kind of an upper hand. But yeah, it’s definitely tough to attract digital talent. But what I’ve seen just with, I mean, the untargeted outreach is just really out in the marketplace too much. I’m getting targeted for entry level jobs still because people just send mass messages on LinkedIn and mass emails. They don’t really think about who they’re going after very much.

Matt Alder [00:11:42]:
Yeah, absolutely. Couldn’t, I couldn’t agree more. And I, I still get emails like that. I’m thinking sometimes they’ve come through a time machine from, from, from what I was doing 20 years ago. I’d really kind of like to dive in and talk more about, more about the sort of the culture and the, and the kind of the work experience that, that you’ve created. Before we do that though, could you, you know, so untargeted sort of unsolicited messages to, you know, senior digital professionals are kind of pretty much a non starter about sort of connecting with the audiences that you need to recruit so you can have the opportunity to tell them your story.

Jordan Meyer [00:12:24]:
I think our secret is a lot of what we don’t do. So we don’t post on job boards, we don’t go to job fairs, we don’t hire interns or post internships and we don’t use recruiters. I’m not saying any of those are bad, but they are bad for us because what you’re doing is just taking a really broad reach. You’re casting a very large net and hoping that you get a good employee in there. And you kind of wear yourself down by sorting through so many resumes and so many CVs that you really become, you know, it’s almost. It’s not fun to go through that many, you know, kind of applications and you kind of lose your passion of hiring, and you’re really just trying to fill a position at that point. So what we do is throughout the year, kind of on a monthly basis, we make a small target list of people that we would like to talk to or, you know, potentially have work for us. And we do kind of soft introductory meetings. That’s typically having a coffee or a lunch with an individual just saying that, you know, we want to get to know them. And, you know, it’s a little veiled, but it’s definitely not, you know, fully, you know, untruthful. It’s. It’s really good just to get to know someone at a human level and, you know, take each other’s guard down and really to see, you know, how their current work environment is, you know, how they’ve gotten to that point in their career, what they’re looking for in the future for their career, and tell them about granular. And typically it just kind of opens up a natural conversation where by the end of that meeting, they’re asking questions about how they work for us. And we’ve seen through experience of our own that a lot of these outreaches are very veiled. And you get five minutes into a conversation and it’s a recruiter or it’s a senior director at a place that is really trying to hire you that day, and it turns into a really strict interview. And I think that it’s a very contrasting difference where we actually want to get to know the person, because culture fit is very important to us. We’re not going to hire a jerk. We’re not going to hire a blabber mouth. We’re not going to hire people that just don’t fit our culture from a fit standpoint. Because at the end of the day, you’re working with these folks day in and day out, and that’s really important. So, yeah, I think from a recruiting standpoint, it’s really important just to ease into it and kind of build up this bench of people who are already warmed up to your company. And even if we don’t have a current opening, we’ll continue to do these meetings throughout the year just so we continue to nurture those relationships and really get to know some people. So when we do have an opening, we can go back to them and it’s a second or a third meeting versus a first meeting where we’re, you know, going from cold to hot, as fast as possible. Because we’re, we’re needing to hire. So I think it’s smart to build up that bench.

Matt Alder [00:16:01]:
Fantastic. And that, that makes perfect sense. So just in terms of the sort of the story that you’re telling, what, what, what would you say is unique about the culture that you’ve built within the business?

Jordan Meyer [00:16:14]:
It’s, it’s a very laid back culture with kind of performance at the forefront. So while we have lofty goals for everyone that works here, it’s not a high pressure environment. It’s really, you know, building on each other’s strengths and building on everyone’s individual strengths to make as strong as a company as possible. Collaboration is kind of also at the core of granular. You know, iron sharpens iron. And we have a lot of senior talent here who may come in and think they were hired because they’re amazing at what they do. And they are. But then I talk to them a few weeks after they’ve started and time and time again they just say, wow, I’ve learned so much already from people and I really didn’t expect to learn that much because I thought we were all kind of senior level and I think it’s humbling. And I think that initial experience really helps grow our collaborative culture and it makes for a really cool environment because everyone is kind of at the same level and everyone’s here to help each other even though we don’t all work on the same clients. So that’s kind of the core. I mean, on top of that, we have a lot of good perks, but we’ve seen agencies and corporations try to follow in the footsteps of folks like Google and larger corporations where they have very fun, cool perks. They’re expensive, so we try to have some of that. But we are still a small business, so we don’t have everything they have. But we have a flexible schedule so people, within reason, come in when they want, leave when they want, as long as their job is getting done. Snacks, good coffee, cool office environment. We have standing desks and Herman Miller desk chairs. A lot of this stuff actually comes from my past experience and my past wants that weren’t fulfilled. I had a really low desk at an agency and I begged them to raise it and I asked that we get one standing desk that everyone can share and that never happened. I’ve had bad office chairs and I know how annoying that can be throughout your workday equipment and I know how that can affect your productivity. So I try to take out all those little Annoyances that people find in their day to day jobs. As they get into a job, smaller things can annoy them. So I try to get rid of all of that, try to have a comfortable, fun office environment, but also make it productive and kind of a good place to work without too many distractions.

Matt Alder [00:19:17]:
So, final question and you know, obviously you’ve covered, you’ve covered all of this already, but I’m just interested if you could perhaps summarize the advice that you would give to other employers who are looking to sort of recruit, you know, senior digital talent.

Jordan Meyer [00:19:35]:
Sure. So I think a big gap that I’ve seen in my professional career is the person actually reaching out and meeting with the potential recruit. I think it really helps to talk the talk and walk the walk when you’re talking to an individual with a skill set that’s not generalized. So if you’re talking to a digital marketing expert, make sure that you have a recruiter or at least an interviewer who has digital marketing experience that will go further than any other tactic you can think of. It works very well for us because my background is in digital, my VP’s background is in digital. We can really cut to the chase and talk, you know, deep digital trends and strategy and, and tactics with the recruit right away. And they appreciate that a lot of these, you know, a lot of folks in our industry aren’t super outgoing. It’s kind of an introvert, data driven type of person and I’ll put myself in that category. We kind of despise the lofty small talk, how are you doing type of conversations with recruiters who don’t understand our industry. So if you can really find someone on your team or outsource this recruiter that can actually talk to digital marketing, I think you’re going to be at a very big advantage over anyone else. And then just to harp on the fact again that we have a lot of soft meetings that aren’t really interviews before the interview. I think that’s really important just to start building a bench of potential talent throughout the year. Because just like anything, if you’re, if you’re trying to go on a date or if you’re trying to make a sale and you’re desperate, it’ll show. And the same thing shows when you’re trying to, trying to hire somebody when you desperately need to fill that position. So it really helps to have that kind of bench of talent waiting there.

Matt Alder [00:21:52]:
Jordan, thank you very much for talking to me.

Jordan Meyer [00:21:54]:
Yeah, thanks so much. It was great.

Matt Alder [00:21:56]:
My thanks to Jordan Meyer. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.