Introduction
Welcome to the second episode of Hire We Go!, the podcast where we break down the ever-evolving world of talent acquisition. In this episode, we have an incredible guest – Tracy Parsons, co-founder of Flockity. Tracy has been shaping recruitment marketing since the days of Myspace (yes, really!), and today, she’s here to talk about the future of talent attraction, influencer marketing, and why it’s time to shake things up.
Ashlie Collins: Welcome to Hire We Go!, where we’re chatting all things talent acquisition transformation. Whether you’re an HR vet or someone who’s simply fascinated by how to find, attract, and engage talent, you’re certainly in the right place. I’m your host and director of solutions here at Joveo, Ashlie Collins, and joining us today is Tracy Parsons, co-founder of Flockity. Thank you so much for joining us today, Tracy. Why don’t we get started by you telling us a little bit more about yourself and Flockity.
Tracy Parsons: Absolutely, it’s great to be here Ashlie. Thank you so much for having me. As the lovely woman said my name is Tracy Parsons and I’m the co-founder of Flockity and I have been doing recruitment marketing and employer brand work since the late 1900s. From one of the original banner ads on the internet for recruiting in the ’90s to getting companies involved in social recruiting on Myspace, I have kind of seen it all and Flockity is designed to continue to push the talent acquisition and talent attraction industry forward by starting to leverage influencer marketing for jobs.
Ashlie Collins: That’s amazing and so given that you’ve seen just about everything – including Myspace – that’s a phase of my life I would like to pretend never happened.
Tracy Parsons: Oh no, I think we should go directly back to that era. We all learned HTML on the fly because we wanted to be friends with Tom. That’s awesome
Ashlie Collins: Maybe some of my photograph upload choices were not the best, so perhaps that’s why I try to push that one out of memory, but I’d really love to get your thoughts on what you make of today’s talent attraction landscape.
Tracy Parsons: I mean it’s a mixed bag right? So, if you think about where we’ve been in the last 20 years, we’re still doing a lot of that same stuff! From job boards to social recruiting to you name it, I think what we are trying to see and trying to understand is how we get at not only the 26% of the workforce that’s actively looking, but the 74% who’s not. Right? Everybody keeps talking about how the job market is so hard – it really is! There are more job seekers than ever right now and companies are taking their time and not communicating with them. Where I think we are in the talent attraction landscape is maybe emerging into new technologies and new tactics. We’ve been doing email marketing for 15 years. We’ve been doing social media for almost 20, and that’s why we think influencers are the way forward because people trust people. That’s the reality: people believe people.
Ashlie Collins: Yeah, absolutely. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts moving into this space because I don’t think it’s being done at large. Certainly outside of Flockity, I haven’t been personally involved with it. What do you think have been some of the biggest positive impacts of moving into this new influencer-based approach?
Tracy Parsons: Well, one of the things that lights me up from the inside is that we get micro-influencers sharing jobs with their followers. So, our micro-influencers maybe have a thousand 5,000 some of them have 50 thousand, some of them have hundreds of thousands followers. What I think is really fascinating is seeing the impact of influencer marketing on the very tippy top of the funnel. Most of the recruitment marketing that we’ve been doing historically has been straight mid-funnel. It has been about conversion conversion conversion and what we have found with Flockity and leveraging influencers to share jobs with their followers is that 98% of the traffic that we drive to our customers is net new – they’ve never been to the career site before. So, when we talk about that full funnel or even the infinity loop of talent acquisition, talent attraction we oftentimes forget that there is an awareness component that is missing for many, many companies. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says “Oh, I wonder if AutoZone is hiring today?”. Nobody wakes up and says I wonder who’s hiring today, so it’s this opportunity to build that awareness – and building awareness through trusted voices, quite frankly, is what brand marketers are doing and what talent attraction marketers should be doing
Ashlie Collins: Absolutely, thank you so much for that insight and I know we sent you a little something. We want to give you the opportunity to answer your very own magic wand question. So, let’s have at it. If you had a magic wand, what would you change about talent sourcing in 2025?
Tracy Parsons: So, I’m going to wave my magic wand and I am going to ask everybody in the talent attraction space to just take a minute and POOF, let go. I would POOF let everybody let everything go. Here’s the thing… When it comes to new ideas in our space, and they are rare and few and far between, it always comes back to the organization, the company, the employer saying “We can’t do that. How do we control that message? How do we control anything?”. I’m like, girl, you don’t have control now It’s an illusion of control and and when we’re talking to anybody about anything in the industry, from social to influencer to job boards, we have to remind them that you’re in control of this much of what happens to your message and when we tell people that anybody could go go to your career site right now and get a job and post about it. They’re doing it already, so let it go. Channel your inner Elsa in 2025 and let it go. Embrace change. Embrace the lack of control. You don’t know the magic and the beauty and the absolute upside that you could be realizing by just letting go just a little bit.
Ashlie Collins: I love that so much! I think that is a fantastic way to send us all off into 2025. You heard it here first folks. Let it go!
Tracy Parsons: Thanks so much, Ashlie!
Ashlie Collins: Thank you so much for joining us today.
Tracy Parsons: Let it go! You’re so welcome – thanks for having me!
Conclusion
And that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Hire We Go! Tracy reminded us all to channel our inner Elsa and let it go when it comes to outdated recruitment mindsets. The future of talent attraction is evolving, and if there’s one thing to take away, it’s this: people trust people. We’ll catch you with more insights, strategies, and game-changing ideas. See you soon!
