Success in a tricky hiring landscape: An industry bellwether bears all

Aaron Green has been in the staffing industry for over 30 years, during which time he’s brought an innovative approach to numerous staffing-related businesses.

Professional Staffing Group (PSG), which he started in 1996, has grown to become one of the largest staffing firms in Massachusetts. PSG staffs office support, creative, technical, HR, healthcare, and financial positions.

Given his unique position at the coalface of staffing over three decades, we were excited to sit down with Aaron to discuss his experiences and to delve into some of his insights as to how to succeed and do recruitment right.

The 411 of the job market today

Aaron is someone who has seen so much change happen over the years around the transformation that the recruiting world has undertaken. He started out, in his words, “doing advertising in the newspaper, and now he’s talking about programmatic advertising.”

Today the challenges are stacked against the recruiting ecosystem, as we enter this ‘post-COVID’ era, or perhaps better phrased, ‘trying-to-deal-with-COVID’ era. Aaron mentioned a couple of the trends he’s grappling with amongst his recruiting peers: the increased choices enabled by the ability to hire anyone from anywhere given more remote and hybrid models being adopted, and the now heavily uncertain and complicated HR environment around vaccine mandates, which is “slicing up the workforce into smaller segments.”

Ripping up the hiring rule book: an early adopter of programmatic ad tech

I think last week was the biggest interview week our company has ever had since inception.

Aaron Green, CEO and Founder, Professional Staffing Group (PSG)

Aaron tells us, “I think last week was the biggest interview week our company has ever had since inception and we’re seeing a ton of demand from healthcare clients, now the demand has come back as a result of COVID, and traditional employers thinking it’s time to hire again, and we think vaccine mandates are going to drive significant turnover within certain organizations locally, which will cause even more hiring to take place.”

But even with the job economy fueling hiring demand, it’s clear that Aaron and his colleagues are head and shoulders above others in the industry when successes in finding the people to fill these roles are proving tough. Nailing down why this is, Aaron shared that he has always been an early adopter of technology and has always been data-driven. But it’s really his quest for finding a dashboard to understand their job ad results and conversions in around 2016/2017 that led him to programmatic and the successes that has helped deliver.

When distributing ads, it’s critical to understand how much to spend, measure what’s working, and consider the best time to place them, along with many other interwoven factors. So, Aaron was looking for a solution that took all the complexity, people-power requirements, and guesswork out of the equation. Aaron and his team have implemented pandoIQ from PandoLogic, which provides them with data around what ads are working, why they’re working, keywords that are functioning, and ultimately the “hard to get at data.”

We are seeing better and better results for the same investment of overall dollars and that’s measured by our placement activity and interview activity.

Aaron Green, CEO and Founder, Professional Staffing Group (PSG)

Now Aaron and his team can benefit from this programmatic advertising technology as they have “AI and PandoLogic in-house expertise around what to bid for, where to place those ads, and connecting the end result with the initial starting point.” And they’ve seen their ads performing better and better in terms of conversions, as a result.

Having an organization and a software tool that is learning and helping to make decisions for you, so that you can instantly react to the marketplace, is core to what we do, it’s why I’m personally involved in this. Using this tool [pandoIQ] has made us more effective and we weren’t going to build it on our own.

Aaron Green, CEO and Founder, Professional Staffing Group (PSG)

Still not sure what programmatic advertising technology is?

As HR and recruitment professionals strive to come out on top, revamping hiring systems and capturing today’s top talent by investing in technology like programmatic advertising is critical.

But it can be confusing and daunting to know how exactly this technology can help, and where, and how, it fits into your current technology stack.

That’s why we’re thrilled to have recently hosted a live, interactive webinar with PandoLogic, PSG and WorkTech to dive into the findings of our latest report, “The VP of Talents Guide to Modern Job Advertising.” Watch the webinar on-demand today!