Intro to Career Cast by Onward Search

Onward Search Career Cast, Episode #1
Welcome to Onward Search Career Cast, the podcast that brings you the latest insight and career advice from experts within the Internet marketing and creative space. Onward Search is a leading nationwide provider of web-based talent and offers a full range of recruitment and staffing solutions.

If you’re looking for a career in search engine optimization, interactive design, or emerging technologies, you should apply online at onwardsearch.com or call 800.829.0072 and speak with an experienced recruiter today.

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Episode #1 Transcript

Published on January 26, 2010

Peter Clayton: Hello, and welcome to the inaugural episode of Onward Search Career Cast. We’re in Wilton, Connecticut with Ken Clark who’s the Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of Onward Search and Josh Gampel, Vice President for Onward Search.

I’d like to start with you Ken, can you give us some of the background of Onward Search, a little bit of the back story how this whole company started, what your vision was?

Ken: Onward Search is a company that my brother and I actually founded several years ago and it came really as a result of a kind of complementary background that we’ve had in both the marketing, and technology, and staffing industries. A couple of years ago, we were looking at the search engine optimization space, and it’s pretty amazing even with kind of the economy we’ve had over the last or so, the online marketing industry is forecasted to literally double over the next five years, and one of the big challenges that companies have right now is finding the talent that can power their online marketing initiatives.

Both Kevin and I, as I’ve mentioned, have had experience founding other staffing businesses, and we started Onward Search with the goal of becoming the number one provider of internet marketing and creative talent in the country. So what that really means is we have a temporary staffing company with actually an executive search division as well, that provides everything from search engine optimization experts, to social media consultants, to Flash developers, graphic designers, usability experts, really anyone that helps a company market their company on the web.

Peter: To your point, there’s been a lot of publicity recently about Pepsi’s decision not to sponsor the Super Bowl this year and to put their money into all of the social media.

Ken: Yeah, and that’s indicative of what all companies are doing right now. You know, if you look at the trends, print and traditional marketing, advertising budgets are literally being slashed and marketing dollars are being spent online and these answers are pretty simple; (1) it’s because that’s where people are going and (2) it’s such a quantifiable and measurable form of marketing. You know, I can look at for my company a number of reports online right now and I can tell you exactly how much every lead is costing us and that’s what companies are doing all across the country.

Peter: Josh, can you give us an idea of what kind of professionals Onward Search looks for, for staffing?

Josh: Sure. As Ken mentioned, on the broad level, internet marketing and creative talent. We do this all across the country and invasively what does that mean? That means anybody that is involved with acquisition of customers via the web; so whether it’s search engine marketing professionals that are working on a pay-per-click basis, search engine optimization professionals that are doing organic search, social media professionals – I’m sure everybody out there is familiar with Twitter, it’s the most popular form of marketing right now – we deal with acquisition of customers to their website. But once they get to the website, we also deal with the creative aspect, the information architecture, the user experience, the web design, the graphic design, you know the total look and feel, the site is all part of the internet marketing and creative buckets that we consider that we recruit for.

Peter: As Ken mentioned, these are all temporary assignments, so how long is a typical temporary assignment with one of your clients?

Josh: Sure. Great question. I can’t give you 13 weeks as a finite number because every assignment varies. It depends on what the projects are for the company. We have several assignments that are three months in length. We have others that are two years in length. It all depends on exactly what the client is looking to execute. We have a certain client right now that’s doing a complete website redesign. Once that design is done, the project is over, it’s slotted to be a four month project but it’s most likely going to take about six months.

On the other end, we do temporary staffing. We also have an executive search division. The executive search division is permanent only so those assignments are indefinite in length.

Peter: Is there a chance for a temp position becoming a permanent position?

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. Most of our clients, that’s one way they like to evaluate talent, to make sure that the culture fit is right on both ends, the skill set is right. It’s also a way to just try before you buy on the client end. So temp to perm is a very popular model that we have. It also allows the candidate to determine if they like the company. I mean, in the search engine marketing world, the demand is very high, the supply is constrained, and that’s still the case today in even the economy that we’re in. So it allows both parties to make sure it’s the right fit before you jump right in and commit to each other.

Peter: Are most of your assignments onsite or are there opportunities for remote employment?

Josh: There are opportunities for remote, it depends on the client. I would say 90% of our assignments are onsite. It gives you a chance to go in, meet face to face. If you do remote work, most likely you have the ability to get to the office one or two times a week for meetings.

On the social media front where you can really, it’s a virtual world out there, we tend to have some more remote work but all of our needs are dictated by what the client wants and we really produce the candidates to match up with what their projects are.

Peter: Ken, what kind of clients do you normally work with?

Ken: The majority of our clients are actually what I generally categorize as Fortune 1000, Fortune 2000 clients. We certainly actually do a decent amount of work with internet marketing and advertising agencies out there as well but if you look at the bulk of our clients, they’re the big names in the industry that you’d read in Fortune magazine, frankly.

Peter: And what makes your staffing company unique or different from the other staffing companies out there?

Ken: I think it really gets back to what we started with when we talked about the premise of how we started Onward Search. There is not a single other company in the country right now that focuses on the niche that we specialize in. We have the DNA from the minute we started this company that internet marketing and creative staffing is what we do. When you look at the way, again, that the global trend line is going to online, we have the experts in that industry, that have been recruiting in that industry for years. Literally, everyone that’s on our team has unbelievable amounts of experience recruiting in this niche. We’re at the trade shows, we’re participating in the online communities. We really understand the space, frankly, better than any other company out there.

Peter: I think one thing would be very helpful is for you to deconstruct what the difference is between a staffing company, an executive search company, a retained search, a contingency search – this is very confusing to a lot of different people.

Ken: What I can do is let me just start with how the temporary side of the business works and then Josh, why don’t you talk about the executive search side.

The core of our business is temporary staffing and in essence, when you work with a temporary staffing business, what we’re doing is we’re speaking with customers usually in major metro markets that we operate in and they’re coming to us saying they need the best talent to get their products completed. So what we do is we keep a database of the most talented folks, nationally and within our regions, and we help you find a job that best meets your talents. As Josh mentioned, most of our work is project-based in some nature on the temp side and what we do is we then become your employer. You get benefits from us, healthcare benefits. We offer 401K plan, we offer health, life insurance, kind of all the benefits that you expect to get from any employer, but the benefit on the career side is you have the flexibility of moving from assignment to assignment and in this segment, that’s critical because the key to driving your career path forward is to advance your career, get a diversity of assignments and always be on the cutting edge of technology. So, working with Onward Search is actually a great way to do that.

Peter: And Josh, can you tell us a little bit about the executive search business?

Josh: Sure. On the executive search side, the way it differs from what Ken mentioned in regard to the temporary staffing is that it’s permanent assignments. What we do is partner with our clients typically on 100,000 or above positions and we really search for the right fit on a cultural and skill set basis for the person. We work with very large clients, typically Fortune 500 or the Internet Retailer’s top 500 and we really look for the best of the best.

Most often our assignments are all across the country. We’re looking for senior VPs of customer acquisition, senior VPs of SEO, VP of marketing, anybody that would run a marketing or acquisition strategy for the company is typically where search for and we do a lot of work and really headhunting as opposed to temporary staffing.

On the temporary staffing, it’s all about projects executed right away and for the talent that’s out there that’s listening, it’s typically those that are in the market available for work or looking for long-term projects.

On the executive search side, most likely you’re working right now. You’re going to get a call from us, listen to what we have to say, if it’s not a fit for you right now, we establish a relationship for the future and kind of go from there.

Peter: So what kind of trends are you seeing for 2010 going forward in the staffing industry and executive search, Ken?

Ken: Well, probably the biggest trend that we’re seeing which will come as no surprise to the folks out there is the rise of what I call mobile application development, mobile marketing. That is absolutely within our wheelhouse, so to speak, in the sense of what we do.

We have a number of projects ongoing right now where we’re helping companies develop iPhone applications, Android applications for the new Google operating system, as well as Blackberry applications.

It’s kind of interesting, CES, which is a big trade show, one of the keynote speakers made a quote and I’m paraphrasing him that said, “Not having a iPhone app is like not having a website,” and that is so true in what we’re seeing in the marketplace. Mobile is moving very quickly and in light of that or in the background of that, as I mentioned before, the whole online space, social media, email marketing, SEO, SEM, per Forrester’s research report that they released this year around the state of the industry, as I mentioned, is scheduled to double over the next five years. So all of these jobs are moving fast, growing and companies need talent and they are looking very hard for it right now.

Peter: Speaking about that Josh, can you give us an idea of some of the hot jobs or the hot professions that you are currently looking for temp help for?

Josh: Sure. Ken nailed it right on the head – iPhone application developers right now are as hot as they come. What clients are looking for, especially the larger ones are those that have experience doing enterprise-wide iPhone applications. What I mean by that is for instance, a financial services company that we’re working with wants to build out an iPhone application that can leverage accounts across multiple areas and multiple divisions, tie them all into one so a user such as myself or you that are out there listening can easily go to their iPhone, log in to whatever their account portfolios are, look at their 401K statements, look at the stock market and know in real time what their portfolios are doing. It involves a certain skill to be able to build the application but also to understand what’s going in the database in the backend and is as hot as can be right now.

Other areas that are very hot are Flash developers, anything that has to do with the look and feel of the website and the usability. If you’re really good, you’re going to find great work in clients that are looking for you. The other aspect as we mentioned in the beginning is search engine marketing; it’s one of the fastest growing markets out there, the talent is very high in demand and if you’re good and you have proven results, then we want to talk to you.

Ken: Just one thing I wanted to add to what Josh was saying on the iPhone side; we talked about our client mix and how we really work with enterprise clients, I meant that niche of an enterprise level iPhone developer as opposed to not that iPhone developer that creates games or utility apps isn’t needed or wanted in the marketplace, but that niche of an enterprise iPhone developer is in hot demand.
My tip to the talent out there is get your Cocoa and objective C books out and really focus on that because that’s a hot industry right now.

Peter: Well, thank you so much for your taking time to speak with us in the very first episode of the Onward Search Career cast, and be sure to tune in next time when we will be describing how a typical assignment with Onward Search works and joining us again will be Ken Clark who is the Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of Onward Search and Josh Gampel, the Vice President of Onward Search.

Thank you for tuning in to Onward Search Career Cast. For more information on the career opportunities available through Onward Search, you should visit us online at OnwardSearch.com or call 800.829.0072, and speak with an experienced recruiter. And you should also follow Onward Search on Twitter at Twitter.com/onwardsearch.