HRExaminer Radio is a weekly show devoted to Recruiting and Recruiting Technology airing live on Friday’s at 11AM Pacific
HRExaminer Radio
Guest: Maren Hogan, Founder & CEO, Red Branch Media
Episode: 148
Air Date: February 3, 2016
Maren Hogan is a seasoned marketer, writer and business builder in the HR and Recruiting industry. Founder and CEO of Red Branch Media, an agency offering marketing strategy and outsourcing and thought leadership to HR and Recruiting Technology and Services organizations internationally, Hogan is a consistent advocate of next generation marketing techniques. She has built successful online communities, deployed brand strategies and been a thought leader in the global recruitment and talent space. You can read more of her worn on Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and her blog Marenated.
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Begin transcript
John Sumser:
Good morning, and welcome to HR Examiner Radio. I’m your host John Sumser, and we’re coming to you live today from beautiful downtown Occidental, California, which is just a five mile romp over a couple of small hills to the ocean, and another five mile romp down the street to the Russian River. We’re lucky to be here. Today we’re going to be talking with Maren Hogan, who is the founder and CEO of Red Branch Media. If you haven’t come across Maren before in your journeys around the industry, what you should know is that Maren has been part of the generation of leaders who took their way into the recruiting and HR industries about ten or fifteen years ago as social media was becoming a force to be reckoned with. Maren has been sort of at the head of that class from the beginning, and today she runs a media company out of Omaha, Nebraska. We’re going to learn all about that today. How are you, Maren?
Maren Hogan:
I’m good. I’m good. The sun’s finally shining here in Omaha, so that’s something to be happy about.
John Sumser:
Why don’t you take a moment and introduce everybody to Maren Hogan. It would be great. I’m sure they need to hear your story.
Maren Hogan:
Well, I don’t know if we have time for my entire story, but I’m Maren Hogan. First and foremost I’m a mom of three and a wife to one … For now. No. I run Red Branch Media, which is a full service advertising and marketing agency for B2B services and technology. We work with ninety percent B2B folks. Ninety percent of those folks are in the HR tech space, whether it’s sourcing engines at the beginning of the spectrum, all the way through to outplacement at the end of the spectrum. We have a pretty broad view of the HR industry. When I first started, I remember Kris Dunn always says, “The reason I asked you to write for Fistful of Talent all those many years ago was because you compared onboarding to waterboarding.” It’s been kind of a really long education because I really understood very little about recruiting or HR when I first started in this space.
John Sumser:
That’s funny, waterboarding versus onboarding. Have you changed your mind, or is that still the same thing?
Maren Hogan:
It was truly obviously a statement born out of ignorance. Now, because I have an agency, we hire a lot of people, and we onboard a lot of people, I have definitiely changed my stance in that I understand what it is. Now I work with several onboarding vendors as part of our client family, and I’ve realized what an important piece of the puzzle it actually is. We’re doing some really interesting work around figuring out how to optimize that, how to make that better, how to make people feel more welcome. It’s been a great parallel as we’ve watched a lot of startup companies, smaller agencies, the people that employ sixty percent of the country really build that out to be better than just a here’s your manual, here’s your laptop, get to work kind of experience.
John Sumser:
That’s great. How did you end up doing this? I can’t imagine that when you were a little child you sat in kindergarten with blocks trying to build an agency out of the blocks, imaging the day when you’d be running your own agency. How do you get from being a normal person to the founder and CEO of a media company?
Maren Hogan:
Well, I don’t really know how to answer that. I know when I was a little girl I wanted to be three things: a rock star, movie star, and Miss America. So far, none of those have panned out, so I settled for what I consider to be the next best thing. I started being the sort of VP of Business Development, I think, was my very fancy title, when my husband and father-in-law opened a recruiting agency. That’s, as you said, when the social media wave was starting to crest. I basically rode that into where you and I met, into a stint as the CMO of Recruiting Blogs, which is now Recruiting Daily. Noel Cocca, and Matt Charney, and Ryan Leary are really making that a force to reckoned with.
Then after that it was a series of jobs as a CMO or VP of Marketing, depending on who you asked, at several HR tech startups. Finally I said, “You know what? My favorite part of my entire career to date was in working with multiple people, finding multiple solutions.” I really do like working within one company, but I wanted that to be my company. All the new ideas, the innovations, the planning, the excitement that comes from being the kind of person that I am, which is definitiely a starter. I think I have twenty first chapters of a novel somewhere. That’s what you get when you have multiple clients, and you get to say, “Okay. This amazingly off-the-wall idea won’t work for client A because they have a very corporate voice, and that’s not the direction they’re going. It doesn’t fit their goals, but it might work for this client over here.” You still get to experiment and do some of those things that you know will work if you just have a client that’s game enough. That’s kind of how it started. I wanted to be a consultant, but it grew, and now it’s a little agency.
John Sumser:
I don’t have any sense at all about how big the company is, and what your span of services are.
Maren Hogan:
Oh my goodness. Our services would take up the whole show and would probably bore the tears out of your listeners. Suffice it to say anything that you would have a marketing department do internally you can outsource to us. For some companies, we’re their entire marketing department. For some, we simply do their social media, blogging. For others, we just buy their digital media, and still for more, we handle sort of communications, and place articles in industry publications.
However we never have [inaudible 00:06:34] out higher than twenty. Part of that is because of office space, and part of that is because as the agency has grown, as I said, I never intended for it to be the size that it is. I never intended for it to be outside of my own home. I have had to learn how to be a manager and how to be a leader. I have a lot of good friends and mentors that have helped me along the way, but as you can imagine in Omaha, a lot of my clients aren’t actually here. I need to have it be a slow burn in terms of growth.
We offer a lot of services. I’ve been told by clients and others that they’re on par with anything you’d get from one of the bigger, better, fancier agencies, but because we’re in Omaha, Nebraska, we happen to be a little bit cheaper, a little bit easier to get ahold of, and a little bit more accessible.
John Sumser:
Cool. What’s a regular day look like for you?
Maren Hogan:
Well, usually I get up. My office is a mile and a half from my work, so in the summer I run in. In the winter, I stay in bed as long as I possibly can. Then I run into the office. My husband usually complains about the heat and turns it down when we get there. Then we all start working. One thing that people consistently say is that our office is really quiet for a media agency. I think people might be reminiscing about Mad Men too much, but when they think of a media agency, I guess they think of people tossing footballs at each other, or spewing out creative out ideas. There’s a lot of just administrative, doing the work, the implementation work, is what people trust us with. There’s a lot to get done in every day. Our employees tend to say, “This day has passed so quickly.” There’s a lot of writing, a lot of talking, a lot of phone calls, and a lot of shipping.
John Sumser:
Great. It sounds like a lot of fun. It sounds busy and energetic. There must be some complexity in juggling the priorities of a houseful of different customers with different needs. How do you do that?
Maren Hogan:
It’s not a science. We have this joke about a Thai food restaurant down the street from our house that I go to literally every day. You ask for a spicy six, or a spicy nine, or a spicy eight, or whatever. We always joke that there’s no meter back there. There’s no little spice-o-meter dial that people turn. I think it’s kind of the same with marketing, right? You can build a marketing funnel. Same with recruiting. You can build these models, but humans are complex. Why they click or don’t click, or followup or don’t followup, or enter their information or don’t enter their information, all of those things are a variable that you just cannot control for.
It is difficult, right? Sometimes marketing feels very much like science, and it’s a bunch of Excel spreadsheets, and numbers, and budgets. Other times it’s absolutely an art. Something goes viral, and you have no idea why, and you have to figure it out. It feels very forensic in that application. I honestly don’t know. I think the best way to do it is to talk to your clients on a regular basis, and then sort of give them guidance when you feel like, “Okay, maybe that’s not the best option. Maybe that’s what you’ve been doing for four years. Let’s try something different.”
John Sumser:
That’s really interesting. Are you building out a team of account managers and learning how to retire with all of the wealth you’ve created, or are you-
Maren Hogan:
Well, that was the plan. As many people who know me might know, my husband and I usually take the month of July off. Out of that month long vacation, where we completely unplug, was born sort of account managers that manage out and are the point of contact while I’m gone. However, recently we realized that our agency is still young enough that people do want to hear from me on a regular basis. Now what we’ve done is we’ve sort of divided the account manager into client facing, which is still me, and then agency facing, which is the person in charge of getting the work done internally.
Then we’re sort of co-PMs, for lack of a better term. I handle the strategic, “Okay, what are we doing next? What’s going on with events? How are we going to hit this year end goal?” Then the PM in the agency says, “Okay, tactically here’s what we did this week, and here’s your deliverables for next.” That’s been working really well for the last few weeks. Although it’s not totally sustainable. We can’t grow that way. We’ve talked about whether or not we really want to top that twenty employee mark. We have a pretty special culture, and we want to grow that culture instead of just adding people to the roster for the sake of my ego, or some other ridiculous thing.
John Sumser:
In order to do the things that you’re doing, there’s a content factory of some kind involved. You have to be putting out fairly significant volumes of relatively original ideas in a very specific subject area. How do you get people smart enough to do that?
Maren Hogan:
Well, we’ve done a lot of different things. The reason that people are smart enough to do that is because Red Branch runs on a gas that is called accountability. Everyone that gets a job at Red Branch Media, immediately we assume that they are adults. There are things that they can learn. Most of them are under thirty, so we can say, “Hey, confused about something? Feel free to Google it. Feel free to look through our archives, our Dropbox, our Evernote folders, our Google drive, our knowledge bank, then you can come ask me if you still can’t find that question.” I would really say that it’s research. That’s modeled after my own journey, right? Again, I once compared onboarding to waterboarding, not because I was trying to be cute and clever … A little bit because of that, but because I genuinely didn’t know what it was. I really didn’t. I’m just lucky that people were nice enough to me to humor my simile there. It was really pretty ignorant. What I learned from that was a couple of things, which is ask questions when necessary, and people are always happy to share their knowledge.
We have lots of partners that are great. Crystal Miller, we’ve worked with in the past, and run employee brand audits by her when we had no idea if we were doing them correctly or incorrectly. We’ve worked with Kyle Lagunas to help him train our … We have marketing analysts, so it’s not to be confused with analysts as we talk about it, but have him train our internal analysts. This is how you look at data. This is why you need to question it this way and this way.
Then of course everything that we do is campaign driven. It didn’t used to be this way, and we were very much a content mill. It didn’t necessarily hurt us so much as hurt morale of the content writers. They couldn’t see the purpose in what they were doing. They couldn’t see how it impacted anything. Now that we’ve moved to a more campaign driven mindset where every month this is the goal. We’re driving towards this goal. Your social, your content, your whitepaper, your landing page, your email campaign, they all go here to satisfy this goal. We set the parameters up front so that everyone’s driving towards that. It really engenders the sense of teamwork, and it allows the content writers specifically to work with the social team. To say, “Hey, what stats have you seen? What are other people doing online? Are there any online chats that are talking about this? Do you [inaudible 00:14:48]?” That’s been really helpful, as well.
John Sumser:
Okay. Okay, so that’s an interesting rhythm. What makes Red Branch Media different from the competitors?
Maren Hogan:
I don’t know if this is necessarily true anymore, but I was talking to … You know Jason Warner?
John Sumser:
I do. I do.
Maren Hogan:
Out of Seattle, yeah. Well, no, it’s Oregon now. Anyway, we were talking a little bit about the fact that we have a lot of people in our lives that are standalone consultants or solo practitioners. Those are great people to talk to. Friends of ours have grown really huge agencies, and those are also great people to get advice from, and mentorship. There’s something very unique about the place where we are, which is small enough to pivot quickly, humble enough to do implementation, because as you know, there’s a lot of strategists out there. I think you were the one that told me once the world needs thinkers. It does, but the world also needs people that just do the thing, right? I thought of this thing. It’s a great idea. Now somebody go do the thing, because someone has to pull the levers, and push the wheels, and hit the go button. I think that’s what we do differently. We approach it from a very strategic angle, but we recognize when it’s time to stop talking about it, and get it shipped.
John Sumser:
That’s interesting. Do you see competitors who don’t do that?
Maren Hogan:
I would say so. I think it’s getting better lately. Like I was saying when I first started this whole thing, I see a lot of consultants doing that. The problem with that is just like a team of twenty, it’s still not scalable. You run out of hours in the day. The consultants can do that, but for fewer clients. The big agencies can do that for more clients, but it’s for a lot more money. Very often you’ll find that the really large agencies, especially when it comes to some of the offerings, and I mean the very large offerings for employer brand, they’re not getting the tactical implementation. They’re like, “Well, you need an email campaign that does this, this, and this.” Well, who writes it? Who designs it? Who reports on the numbers? There are very few of those people, so you end up getting fifteen people who agree that all of these are very good things to do, and one intern that has to do it. I don’t think that makes sense.
John Sumser:
That’s interesting. In construction there are architects and general contractors. A challenge with the positioning that you’ve laid out is you could get confused for being a general contractor when I believe that what you’re saying is that you do architecture and general contracting in a very specific arena. Is that reasonable to take from what you’re saying?
Maren Hogan:
Yeah. I think what I’m saying is I’m an architect that’s not afraid to pick up a hammer when nobody else will do it.
John Sumser:
Okay. That’s pretty interesting. Who’s the target customer?
Maren Hogan:
Well, that has grown. Every year we set corporate goals. Last year we decided we wanted to build out an employer branding offering. We had been doing it as a value add for our clients in the HR tech space for a long time, and because of my reputation in Omaha proper, we had been asked to do it a couple of times. We started doing that, like I said. The work that we were doing, we ran it past trusted friends and people we were talking to, and totally nailed that. First original group of target customers, HR tech folks, usually a CMO or CEO within the agency. Sometimes we work with a lot of sales folks trying to hit sales goals, and we can help them do that. I mean like the Chief Sales Officer, or VP of Sales within usually B2B companies. We do HR tech, but also some [inaudible 00:19:10] tech, and some nonprofit work.
Then the second group we wanted to tackle was employer brand. We realized, again, strategy is great. Strategy is wonderful. We respect strategy. We partner with strategy, but implementation of getting it done is often what stops these people in their tracks. These are the biggest companies in the world, and they don’t have anyone to do that work. We tackled that last year. Nailed it. Had an engagement with one of the largest companies in the world, food companies in the world, had a year to hire fifty-five people, did it in nine months. Soup to nuts, event booths, college recruiting, emails, social, the whole kit and caboodle. It was an amazing project.
This year we are tackling business to government marketing. I’ll tell you at the end of the year how that works. We recently had some clients in town, and they’re building an agency that wants to model government procurement after small business, after entrepreneurs and the way that we do business. We’ll see how that goes. It’s a huge project, and so that’s our big target customer, and sort of thing to tackle this year.
John Sumser:
That’s great. What you’re saying is that you’re running the company so that you learn by trying new things every year, is that right?
Maren Hogan:
Yeah. I don’t think that was my goal, but that’s pretty much how it’s happened, yes.
John Sumser:
That’s pretty exciting. What a cool thing. You’re in Omaha, which I think is a dramatically underrecognized place to build a business. It’s at the center of the company, and Warren Buffett finances everything in Omaha, right?
Maren Hogan:
Well, not Red Branch Media yet. We’ll see.
John Sumser:
You just have to stand outside of his office and look needy, and then he’ll give you millions of dollars. I understand that’s exactly how it works.
Maren Hogan:
I’ve heard he goes to Charleston’s Steakhouse a lot. Maybe I’ll just hang out at the steakhouse and wait for him to show up.
John Sumser:
That’s great. That’s great. What would I be asking you, because there’s a whole world of things that you do on a routine basis, and insights that you have that I don’t have. What are you seeing that I should know about?
Maren Hogan:
Well, we talked briefly about onboarding, and I’ve been talking about this with a couple of other people, as well. I think that onboarding, for a really long time, has been overlooked in this industry. I would know, right? I’ve worked with a lot of vendors in all these little niche areas of HR and recruiting. Really, most people just plug in a module in the middle of their HR system, and they say that it’s good to go. I think there’s going to be a lot more attention paid to that this year.
There are some really interesting things happening around entry level workers and interns. I’m particularly interested in that because, as I said, a lot of the people that I hire, this is their first job straight out of college. All the millennial debates, and stereotypes, and ideas about what entry level work used to look like are changing. From my vantage point, it’s like okay, how do I train these people? How do I give them something of value, right? As a small business, and in Omaha, because the unemployment is so low and the economy is so good, it’s like I’m not really paying that much more to start with than PetSmart is, right? How do I offer value to interns, to entry level workers, until they can get value themselves? Simply because enterprise is offering three percent raises annually, is that what I need to be doing, or do I need to figure out my own compensation structure? I think a lot of small business owners deal with this, but because of work in recruiting, and HR, and employer branding, it’s even more relevant to what I’m doing.
John Sumser:
Got it. Got it, so you’re learning about applying big scale HR to small operations on the fly while you do it. That’s pretty interesting. Let’s dig a little bit into employer branding … Blanding, I think maybe that’s closer, for just a second. It’s such an interesting area where there are no two definitions that are the same, and it’s probably okay that there are no two definitions that are the same. What do you think employment branding is?
Maren Hogan:
What do I think employment branding is? I’ve said this in presentations before and I still believe this, when you’re selling a job, and there’s research that shows … I’m terrible at siting statistics, everyone knows it, but it’s as stressful getting a new job as it is moving. It’s very close to when somebody gets divorced. It’s a highly stressful life event. I imagine as the economy has changed, and as the workforce has shifted, it’s slightly less stressful than it used to be sited in these statistics, but it’s still a big deal, right?
The way that you sell a job, and this I is a marketer speaking, and I’m sorry. We talk about authenticity, and we talk about human resources, and the definitions of things. The truth is, you’re selling a job. You need to sell what that job looks like. What is the lifestyle? It’s the same as if you sell an expensive car. It’s the same as if you sell an expensive purse. It’s not that the leather in that purse is any better than the Target purse. It’s the lifestyle that comes with it. Whether it’s luxury or value based, whether it’s really difficult and challenging, whether it offers a path to something bigger and better, you have to find out what you offer.
I’ve worked with huge companies with incredible employer brands that I would never, ever, ever want to work for. What they’re offering, I’m not buying. As stupid as it sounds … I’m not saying because they’re bad companies. I’m saying because it doesn’t appeal to me. Go ahead.
John Sumser:
I think employment branding might be how you tell if there’s a cultural fit, right? It’s a very complicated sport in which the company is more likely to tell a pretty story about what’s going to happen than the true story about what’s going to happen. That distance between the truth and the marketing is a primary characteristic of the culture. Primary characteristic of the culture, and so you get that.
Maren Hogan:
It is, and I saw what you wrote about trust the other day, but here’s the thing. As a business owner, and I think that’s very hard to find in enterprise, that sense of ownership that you have, I never, every want any of my people’s time, or mine, to be wasted. I’m paying for that time. I’m very acutely aware of how much I’m paying for that time. I think when you get to the enterprise level, a manager, even somebody at the C-level doesn’t feel like, “Oh, I’m paying for this time.” You are, and when you lie about your employer brand, you are wasting time. You are wasting your recruiter’s time. You are wasting your manager’s time for someone that’s not going to be a fit. They’re just not, right? It’s a really great time for employer brand in HR tech to sort of shoot up right now. The economy’s good. The power balance between job seeker and company is more equal than it has been in a long time. Now’s the time to let the job seekers tell us what they need, and sort of revamp … Yeah?
John Sumser:
Yeah, so I hear what you’re saying, and you’re absolutely right, but I think it’s like this. You know what? I’m pretty sure that my wife is the prettiest woman in the world. I think it’s possible that somebody who looked at me might go, “Well, he’s got rose colored glasses on here.” To which I’d say, “Not only is she the prettiest woman in the world, but she’s the smartest, too.” You get that dissonance between whatever the reality actually is and the way that the people inside perceive it. It’s a little harsh to call that dishonesty. It may just be that they love where they are and what they do so much that they can’t see some of the other things about it. That’s, I think, a very large problem in employment branding.
Maren Hogan:
I think that’s true, but I think if we were to talk about your wife a little bit more, you’d be able to be honest about some of the challenges that exist, right? Just like I am with Red Branch Media, or even Jeremy. Handsomest man in the world, love him to death, snores like he’s sawing logs. I’m the only person that knows that. I’m the only person that can tell someone [crosstalk 00:28:41].
John Sumser:
Not anymore.
Maren Hogan:
You know what I’m saying? That’s the truth. If somebody wants to go on a trip with him, if he and Eric take a trip together, and they decide to share a hotel room, I should really tell Eric, “Maybe you should get your own hotel room because Jeremy actually snores, and you’ll both be exhausted in the morning.” Maybe companies should consider telling the ambitious go-getter who created an entire campaign for them even before their first interview, and really is excited about it, that their ideas are going to take some time in this organization. There’s probably a sixty percent change that their ideas will never reach the person that they want it to. That could be very discouraging and disengaging for an ambitious go-getter who might have a better career at an agency like mine where their campaign actually has a chance of seeing the light of day.
I’m not talking about being honest about the cruddy things. I’m saying be honest about the real things. There might be another person who’s ready to learn, and who wants to sit at somebody’s knee, and wants to take slow, methodical time to come up with an idea that will get the buy-in of all of their peers. It might take them eighteen months from their start date to even come up with an original idea. That’s fine. That’s the pace at which that organization moves. Just being able to understand-
John Sumser:
That’s great. That is the most common sense thing I’ve heard in a long time. Thank you. Thank you.
Maren Hogan:
You’re welcome.
John Sumser:
We’ve kind of blasted through our time together, so is there something that you’d like the people listening to this to take away?
Maren Hogan:
Yeah. I just wanted to talk to you, John. I don’t know what I wanted people to take away other than to recognize that Red Branch Media, although it’s in the middle of the company, is a force to be reckoned with. I very much enjoyed my time this morning.
John Sumser:
Okay. Well, thank you, and thanks for saying that nice thing. Would you reintroduce yourself, and tell people how to get ahold of you?
Maren Hogan:
Absolutely. I’m Maren Hogan, CEO of Red Branch Media. You can find us on redbranchmedia.com. I’m on Twitter at @marenhogan.
John Sumser:
All right. That’s Maren Hogan, who’s on Twitter at @marenhogan, M-A-R-E-N-H-O-G-A-N. She’s the CEO and founder of Red Branch Media which is an up and coming center of company based marketing firm for generally B2B marketing related things, and it’s been great talking with you, Maren. Thanks everybody for checking in with us today.
Maren Hogan:
Thank you.
John Sumser:
Have a great afternoon. Nice talking with you, Maren. Bye bye.
Maren Hogan:
Bye.
End transcript