In this episode of B2B Marketing Methods, Terri welcomes special guest Raegan Hill, a seasoned marketer turned recruiter who gave Terri the idea and inspiration to start her own company while she was looking for a job. Raegan shares her journey from marketing to focusing on helping other companies find that right mixture of talent, sometimes convincing them to think far outside the box. Terri highlights Raegan's innovative thinking and her commitment to providing both clients and candidates with valuable and honest feedback has helped to drive her career.

The episode also discusses the intricacies of modern recruitment, covering topics such as budget constraints, salary negotiations, and defining marketing needs. Raegan emphasizes the importance of open dialogues between clients and professionals, ensuring suitability and alignment with job responsibilities. They also discuss the challenges of remote versus in-person roles, the need for strategic leadership, and the significance of industry relevance versus a balanced skill set in finding the right fit for marketing positions.

To learn more and connect with Raegan, visit: https://www.raeganhillgroup.com/

To connect with and learn more about Marketing Refresh, visit: https://MarketingRefresh.com

Key Topics Covered:

• Raegan Hill's successful placement of a VP-level candidate for a client
• Terri Hoffman praises Raegan for her innovative thinking and integrity
• Managing budget constraints and salary negotiations in recruitment
• Challenges and opportunities in remote versus in-person roles
• The significance of strategic leadership and mentoring in marketing roles
• Understanding market needs and aligning job responsibilities
• The process of defining marketing needs and job description development
• Industry relevance and the balance of skill sets in recruitment
• Raegan's personal insights on communication, managing time, and her favorite music and book
• Raegan Hill's transition from marketing to recruiting and the impact of her integrity
• The importance of culture fit and the use of "wild card" candidates in recruitment

This is B2B marketing methods. I'm your host, Terri Hoffman, and I'm the CEO of Marketing Refresh. Let's face it. Embracing digital marketing is daunting. This podcast was created to make it more approachable. Join us as we talk to CEOs, sales leaders, and revenue growth experts who will share lessons learned and tips from their own journeys. Hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the B2B Marketing Methods podcast. I have a really special guest today.

I'm gonna tell you a little bit about her before I introduce her officially, but this person is very special to me because she helped me get started on my journey of starting Marketing Refresh, which is my marketing agency. She's the one that kinda gave me the the push I needed to dive in and become an agency owner, and this person is named Raegan Hill. Raegan Hill is our guest today. I'm really excited for this for this interview and discussion. Raegan is a marketer turned recruiter, and she's gonna tell you what that means and how that makes her such a rock star at what she does. But the things that I'm hoping we'll talk about today are mainly about resourcing. You know, how do you go about resourcing and defining roles that you need in the marketing department for your for your business? How do you go about making sure that person is going to fit in your company culture, which is extremely important? And then I think I'm sure there are many more gems. Raegan will drop on us throughout the conversation.

But, welcome, Raegan. Thank you for joining us today. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah. Yeah. So I wanna start by talking about your start. So you've worked for some pretty huge brands, definitely well known brands in the Houston market and the Texas market, but also known nationwide. So maybe you can talk a little bit about how you got started in the field of marketing and some of the companies that you've worked for.

Absolutely. Well, so I've got involved in marketing just as a wee little baby, and when I was a whippersnapper in my twenties. But I actually was a a self taught programmer and worked for Halliburton and BMC Software as a developer before I got into marketing. And then I reached as far as I could go at the time working in for BMC Software on the website, and I was asked if I wanted to move over into the marketing department. And that's how I got into marketing. I mean, I've I've been involved in marketing back in the day when it was flyers and trade shows. You know, it's like they would ask you, you know you know, what's the ROI on that? Oh, everything's good. It's all good.

Yep. People showed up. And that was pretty much the extent of it, which marketing is very different today. Fast forward in my career back in, 2004 after working on working for the NFL, I managed the super this the volunteer program for the Super Bowl for the NFL. I used to say if I didn't throw up, it was a good day. Very stressful. I actually was hired by a staffing company as a recruiter. It was the first my first staffing job as a recruiter for a big giant publicly traded recruiting agency, and that's how I got involved in recruiting.

Several years after that, I took what I call a leap of fear, total fear, no lie. A leap of fear in 2014 and decided to start my own recruiting agency for very specific reasons. 1, I wanted to spend more time with people. Candidates are human beings. Yes. It's a product, but it's they're human beings, and I wanted to really devote more time. I wanted quality over quantity, but I also wanted to select the clients that I worked with because integrity was very important to me, and I wanted to make sure that I put people where I believe that they would be successful. So that's how I got started in owning my own recruiting agency.

And then, of course, we all went through COVID in 2020, and I went from being a local, well known recruiter for clients in Houston to suddenly I was having clients that were reaching out to me all over the United States because they were open to candidates who were working remote. And so now it's more the norm than it is the abnormal for me to have, say, a a CMO role or a chief growth officer role or vice president of digital marketing role 100% remote for a relatively nice sized company. So that's how I managed to get a US footprint from going from just a local footprint was through that 2020 drama that that we've all had to go through. That was sort of the silver lining of it, and that's me.

Yeah. And I so your your career has definitely taken a lot of twists and turns, but I think that is a pretty good reflection of how people end up in marketing. Right? It's that's a pretty consistent story that I think a lot of people go through. So talk to me about the candidate process because and, actually, let let me say one thing first. So I met Raegan because I was one of her candidates. So Raegan screened me and coached me and lined me up for interviews at a point in my career where I was going through a transition and and a job change. And, you know, I kind of said at the at the very outset of the podcast that she's the one that gave me the push I needed to start a marketing refresh. So this really speaks to her integrity, and I do wanna tell this story.

So when I was working with Raegan, she had me lined up for what I thought was a great job role. I was very excited about it. I was going to prepare for the final interview, and she threw me a major curveball and said, you know what, Terri? I think you should start your I think you're an entrepreneur, and I think you should start your own business. And it just stopped me in my tracks, and I decided to to sleep on it and give it some thought and woke up the next day and said, you're right. I don't wanna go on this job interview. I'm gonna give that a shot. And Raegan gave up the potential for, you know, her fee getting landed, you know, landing that and kind of closing that deal for herself. And at that point, I just really learned who Raegan is as a person and how she operates with integrity because she was not only operating in my best interest, but she was also looking out for her client's best interest because the worst thing in the world that can happen to a recruiter is they place someone, and then that person is unhappy in the role, and they have to refill it, and the client is frustrated.

So sorry for the long winded story, everyone, but I think it just speaks so much to who Raegan is as a person and how she manages the candidate process. So thank and also thank you, Raegan.

It's a do the right thing mindset. I remember that. I remember that. I mean, I was sitting there in my head that, you know, I had the one side of my brain going, oh, she's so perfect for the job. She's so perfect for the job. And I'm sitting there talking to you and I'm like, she's gonna own her own agency. She that that you just you already knew it. You just needed someone to mirror it back to you.

And I thought I gotta do the right thing. And that is that is how I have always done businesses to do the right thing. And that doesn't always mean that the right thing is gonna be monetarily to my benefit, but it's gonna mean that from an integral standpoint, everybody wins however that however the cards land. You know?

Yeah. You know, we have a lot of marketers who listen to this podcast, and so I I want you to talk about your candidate screening process and how you go about building you know, I'm gonna call it a pipeline of candidates, and that sounds like such a impersonal word to use to put the word pipeline in there. But one thing that people should know is if you're in Houston and you're in marketing, you are definitely connected to Raegan. And she has way more people asking her to get placed in job roles than, she could possibly manage. So talk to us about how you manage that candidate pool and what you look for in those top candidates.

Sure. So, you know and the thing about when we think about a recruiter's pipeline, I mean, I've had clients who reach out and they'll say to me, hey. We've got this director of marketing position open. Do you have a pipeline of candidates you before we sign a contract? Do you have a pipeline of candidates that you think would be a fit? And I and I I kinda chuckle inside, and I, my my internal answers answer is no because I'm not submitting a resume. I'm submitting a human being. And I need to understand what it is that you, mister client or miss client, you need in this director of marketing, not just in terms of skill, but in terms of personality fit. And I know it sounds cliche, but culture fit as well. So, you know, I continuously keep, a matrix.

We'll call it a matrix of candidates that are passing through my applicant tracking system. An efficient recruiter is what we do is we try to determine what we're gonna anticipate in terms of the roles that our clients are gonna need, and now a lot of that just had often has to do with the uniqueness of each recruiting agency. So I tend to get reached out for a lot around those really specialized digital marketing roles. And so what I do is I try to keep sort of a roster of people that are ready to go that are good professionals, might be a conversion rate optimization special. It might be a SEO specialist. It might be a chief growth officer, say, from the professional services industry. Industry is one of the most important criteria that I look for in terms of background. It's the number one deal breaker, in fact, that companies will ask for when they've hired me to fill a position within marketing.

It'll almost always be we need someone who's got B2B, b to c, all the other B2B to b tos or professional services, and then it'll be the industry relevant experience. These are the 2 most important criteria that recruiters are asked to focus on. And then, of course, it's skill. But one of the things that's that may separate me or make me a little bit unique from how other recruiters work with their clients is, 1, I've been a marketer. Do I know everything? Absolutely not. But what because I've been a marketer and I love marketing, when I get a unique role that a client wants to have filled, I the first thing I do is is I research the role. I so many other someone recently called me a method actor. Have you ever heard of that phrase? And I'm like, what do you mean I'm a method actor? But they but it made sense to me because what I do is once I get a position and I really absorb myself into the brand, I understand.

I'd ask my client. I'm like, look. Tell me the good, the bad, and, hey, give me the ugly. We've got a contract. We signed an I signed an NDA. You can tell me what's the ugly because I need to find you someone who can deal with the good, the bad. And if there's a little bit of ugly in the beginning, maybe it's a messed up technology that marketing's having to deal with, or maybe there's a an aggressive, stakeholder within another department that isn't always gonna play nice in the sandbox. I need to know that so that when I find you the skill set, which isn't skill set's pretty easy to find, but I wanna find you the person who's gonna be able to interact and handle whatever that ugly is.

So building a pipeline of people, yes, we do it to to to the best of our ability based on what we are anticipating our clients need. But at the end of the day, when a client comes to me with a need, it's a completely brand new search, looking for a unique personality type in addition to the skill set. So I'm more of a hunter proactive recruiter, whereas a lot of recruiters tend to wanna cast out a net, get a lot of applications, and see what comes in, which is fine. I mean, there's some of that that makes sense. I'd say 70 to 80% of my time is more spent understanding from the client. What tell me tell me what you really, really need, what you really, really need, what you no. I'm sorry. I got the song in my head now.

No. But tell me what let let's talk through what you think you need. And then as a marketer, I can help them really decide. Is that really what you need? And then once we determine that, then I I talk a lot about who their competitors are, who their peripheral competitors are, and then I go on a hunt. And I start looking, and it may not necessarily be someone who's gainfully employed. And that'd be a good thing to talk about as, you know, a lot of a lot of candidates a lot of people wanna know, do you prefer Raegan someone who's working to place versus someone who's, I call it, in between successes? Would you be open to placing someone who's in between successes? And I'd love to answer that. But I'm really more I'm like a method actor in the sense that I wanna absorb everything there is about a company's brand and be that extension of their brand. And if I have somebody in my pipeline that I think could be a fit, then I'll have that conversation with them and pitch them to the client.

But if I don't, that's where I go out and I do the hunt. That's when I really start going out there and looking for someone that's gonna really be a good fit, not just on skill, but personality and culture. I know it sounds cliche, but it's so important.

Well and and it can sound cliche if I think someone's not actually delivering on it, but I know you, like, really put a lot of time and care and thought into that. I wanna ask you about something you mentioned a minute ago, and that is clients really prioritizing industry experience. What do you ever push back on that? Like, if you feel you've found someone and they don't have the industry experience, what's your view on that?

Well and that's something I talk about with my clients upfront. I mean, there are cases where the industry relevant experience might make sense, but I do I I do we chew on it. Let's put it like that. And I what I always do with my clients, especially the ones who know me well, is I I say, look. I'm gonna present who you say you want. I'm gonna represent you 3 to 4 people, but I want you to be open to seeing the 5th one, and I'm gonna call that my wild card. And the wild card is gonna be somebody who may not come from the industry, specifically industry relevant background, but I feel like they've got there's just a gut feel it's the gut feeling, the recruiting gut feeling that I have, and my clients are always open to that. They're always like, okay.

We trust you. Yes. We'll be open to seeing your wild card. And 25 to 30% of the time, the wild card gets the job. There are times where, like, I had a client last year that's at a professional services B2B business advisory. Their challenge when they said they want it and it was a chief growth officer position. So fair enough. That's a big role.

That was a bit of a deal breaker because they needed someone who could hit the ground running and understanding how to create revenue through marketing within the accounting and business advisory industry, and they were also doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions. The challenge with that was that there weren't really a lot of chief growth officers from the accounting space, right, who were really worked you know, who who seemed to have be in the know of how to create the kind of growth marketing that this firm was looking for. So the compromise was finding someone who had been working in the business advisory space professional services at some point in their career, maybe not necessarily as an executive marketing leader, but having enough or or, you know, in that case, another compromise was having someone who's been in a very highly matrix organization such as b two b SaaS. Could have been the legal industry, but there weren't that many marketers in that space that would have been a fit for. But so, yes, there is a pushback. There's a conversation. We'd we'd chew on it to make sure because there's they're gonna miss out a lot of times on some really great talent that may not have industry relevant experience. And I'll give you a quick fun story.

There was a candidate that I had one time. It was when I was placing somebody at an oil this is several years ago with oil and gas company, and they were adamant. We wanted a mark we wanna marketer, Gotta have oil and gas background. Gotta have oil they gotta understand upstream, downstream, you know, whatever stream.

Well, that is a giant vocabulary you have to learn. So

Yes. It is. It is. So and so, you know, I was presenting professionals that it came from oil and gas, but the challenge, you know, at the time was not the ones that I was finding had the had the industry relevant experience, but were really a little bit light on some of the kind of marketing that they were wanting to think about at the time. So Yeah. Here's an example of where I I think around that, and it's, I I wound up placing a professional who's was a 4th generation I call her 4th generation oil and gas baby because her parents worked in oil and gas, Her great grandparents worked in oil and gas. Her great great and they've just been around her whole life, had never worked in it. She had actually worked on the in in marketing agencies, but had never but she knew the lingo.

She I mean, her whole her family was involved in oil and gas. And so I said, hey, client.

Okay.

Let me present you this person. And, you know, they were open to it, and she got the job. So it's thinking through how you know, why does a company need industry relevant experience, and is there a unique way that we can arrange that when when I submit somebody who maybe it's not exactly, hey. Yeah. This person's been working in oil and gas, but, hey. They've been around it their whole lives. Their parents were in it, and their grandparents were in it. That kinda thing.

Yeah. But I I think, you know, what's interesting is you get very strategic. You get very strategic with your candidates and your clients to make sure that you're sometimes, surfacing things that they may not have considered are important so that you're getting them to help you set how these different factors are prioritized. Right? Yep. That's that's something I think you do very well. And being that my my company works with a lot of B2B industrial brands, and they have, like, really complex sales cycles, very complex product offering, multiple stakeholders involved. They're usually very focused on, like, talking to an agency or having that in house director of marketing be someone who knows their their business already. And so that's, you know, it's not unimportant.

It is very important

Yeah.

To know and learn that business, but I don't think it always has to be as high of a priority as a lot of the other things that you may need to look for. It's so hard to find the right fit for any kind of company when they're when they're going through a hiring process. Right?

Yeah.

So, yeah, I I love that you get that strategic, and you kinda challenge those thought processes and then ultimately help them guide you on, like, what their priorities are. That's that's huge.

Yeah. It's a con it's it needs to be a conversation, not a job order. And because I I'm a boutique recruiting agency, and I wanna stay that way because I really enjoy giving as much time and energy as I is necessary to each one of my clients so that we can make sure that we that we make them successful. And one of my the funniest things I love doing is when I get a client who let's say I put I place you know, maybe I place the leader there, and the leader turns around and says, hey. I'm I have headcount. I need I need to start filling out the team. And so by then, I know the company so well, and, of course, I know the leader, and I could help develop a teams a team. So I'm not just presenting, an SEO specialist and a marketing coordinator and a and a, marketing strategy, but I'm I'm really thinking about all the personalities that need to fit together in this team that I'm building for that company.

So working with companies where they need multiple people within the the the marketing department is one of the funnest things that I love doing because some I feel like I'm part of the company, and I could help. It's like building the personality of the marketing department. Right? Instead of you you don't you don't want a bunch of aggressive go getter type a personalities all sitting, in a meeting together whether it be remote or in person. You need to have the thinker. You need to have the the the the the person who comes up with 10 ideas before anybody can spit one out. You need to have the one who pushes back. And so if you don't think about that as a recruiter when you're filling multiple roles for a company, you wind up just filling all of the same exactly the same personality types, and that doesn't always work well for us a department at all.

Yeah. You're definitely thinking of the big picture for yeah.

When I think about marketing and you said, you know, Raegan, you're strategic about about it. 2 the 2 things that I that really come up that I that a lot of careers may not think about when they're placing people, and I've learned this the hard way is that, you know, there's really there's really 2 types of marketing departments. There's the type that tends to be more the resources department where they're they're reacting to what the company needs. So you they'll have internal stakeholders who say we need x y z, blah z blah, and they're they're really more like an internal resource, and they're reacting, and they're providing those types of things sort of on the fly with a little bit of strategy strategy. And then there's more of that aggressive revenue generating proactive, marketing department that is telling the stakeholders and the other departments, hey. This is how we're going to get more revenues. This is how we're going to to to generate growth, and this is what we need you to be able to do within your team. They're they're more telling the company, this is how we're gonna do it.

Whereas you have other marketing departments that are more, hey. We're reacting. Oh, you need us to take care of this. Okay. And that's fine. That's fine. They both have their purpose. One of the biggest things that I think I see a lot I see recruiters go go wrong, and I did this the I learned this the hard way years ago, is they put that proactive, strategic, aggressive wanna generate revenue marketer into a reactive sorta order taking marketing department or vice versa, and it's in and it's a dismal failure.

Because the marketer it's kinda like putting a saltwater fish in a freshwater pond. Right? Even though they're both fish, they're not gonna be able to survive because they're in the wrong environment. And so I think that's really important for marketers to think about.

Yeah. Wow. That's so insightful. That's very insightful. What would you what would you say to a client who's sort of at the other end of the spectrum where maybe they're not trying to build out a robust marketing department. They're trying to make that first hire, and they might have a job description and a job order that they're coming to you with. Where do you how do you go about starting that conversation to fill that role? And, I mean, I definitely have a purpose behind asking this question because I think a lot of people who are just hiring that first marketing role or trying to define Do you see that? Do you experience that? And how do you start that conversation?

I do. And and and and it's so, you know, it's it's gonna vary, but it's so, yeah, those and those are the some of the most challenging roles. And one of the things I have to explain to clients is if it's a new role, right, it's like, well, do we need a senior person or do we need a more of a internal sort of, you know, coordinator manager level? And the challenge if you know, the challenge in that case, as I talk to them, is understanding if you bring somebody in at more the coordinator or manager level and they don't have a marketing leader to report there, they're they're still in the tactical executional stage of their career path where that's what they're really good at. They're not strategic. And so they're gonna be waiting for someone to give them strategic direction. And if it's the first person a company's hiring and marketing, that's not gonna be successful, nor is that person gonna probably be very happy because they need the leadership and the mentoring as an executional tactical marketer. Same scenario if it's a company that has, let's say, that they are using external agencies. I've had situations like this where companies have been very successful with a couple of different agencies or even an agency of record on the outside, but then the frustration gets to it gets to where it's like, hey.

There's nobody on the inside to catch everything that the that the agency is doing for us, and there needs to be somebody on the inside that's gonna go chase after the internal stakeholders, make sure things are executed, react, get things back to the agency. And that person, we have to sit down and really define the level of strategic knowledge this person needs to have. And a lot of it has to do with on how mature a company's marketing already is. Because if you hire a thoroughbred marketing leader maybe you have the budget for it and you hire a thoroughbred, but you realize when they come in and they start putting together the strategy that a lot of what they're saying you need to do really can't happen for 6 months because there's so many things other things that have to be figured out, you're probably gonna lose that person. On the flip side, if you hire someone that's not quite strategic enough and they've gotta hit the ground running more on some pretty aggressive strategy concepts, they might be in and over their head. I've actually had a client, 2 clients actually in the past where they had this problem. 1 had a had an external mark a couple of marketing agencies, one did not. What I wound up doing, I tried my best to help them figure out what they needed.

We I asked a lot of questions about budget and what their revenue goals were and what tool but, nonetheless, we still face a bit of a challenge, of trying to figure out what they really needed. So what I did is I just contracted them out a marketer who was in between successes who basically helped them define what kind of marker they needed, and then that marketer helped they worked with me to to really develop that job description. I've had that happen twice.

Pretty creative.

Yeah. It was just like, well, wait a minute. You know, we're because one thing I don't wanna ever do is I never wanna start working on, filling a position until the client and I are crystal clear on their absolute must haves. Don't present unless you send me this. Because one thing this that is different about me is I only submit 3 to 5 people. 5 people means that somebody got submitted and they were not a fit, and I need to understand why. But when I submit someone to a client, they're gonna they should go to an interview. And if they don't, then I look at that as a failure on my part.

I'm like, okay. I didn't hear something or I misunderstood something that you needed. So in other words, I'm not quota driven, and I'm not sending out 15 resumes to a client and asking them to pick 3. I'm sending out Yeah. 3 candidates, and all 3 should go to interview, and one of those 3 should get the offer. But if they if the client pushes back, I tell and I tell them, tell me. If I, like, was sleeping at the wheel or sleeping at the computer, tell me because I don't wanna ever invest time or waste time with a client submitting the wrong person just because we misunderstood what they really needed. So yeah.

Does that make sense?

Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. Clear as mud?

That could well, I understand what you're saying. It probably feels clear as mud if it's the first time someone's going through that, but I I can definitely appreciate the value of what what you're describing that whole situation. Another, I guess, hot topic that definitely emerged post COVID that I wanted to ask you about is virtual versus in person. If someone originally starts the conversation and says, hey. We need a person who lives in x y z city. Here's what we're looking for. And you know, wow, if they would open this up to be in a virtual role, it would just open up that candidate pool. Talk to me about, like, how you push back or how you'd really dig into, does this truly need to be in person, or could it be virtual? Because that that's, like, really tough for a lot of companies if they're not used to a virtual work environment.

Right?

Right. Well and so, certainly, the answer to that is yes. They would have a much bigger candidate pool if the position were virtual. My what I'm you know, what I wanna be very careful of when I open up that conversation with a client and and talk to them about taking them the role remote is making sure that I don't convince them to do something that ultimately they don't wanna do. Because then I'm gonna be pulling a professional possibly from another job and placing them in a a, an artificially remote role. It really never was remote, but the company got sold on the idea because it was a shiny toy, and Raegan said, hey. You'll get a better candidate. And then they hire the remote person, and they're not even and then they're not even set up really to make that person successful remote because 98% of the company isn't remote, then it's not gonna be successful at all.

So really, the the remote, it's really dependent on whether or not the company has adopted the concept of remote. And if they haven't adopted the concept of remote, then they they're not gonna be structured to support that person. And I think that that's gonna be a fail. So for me, I wouldn't that I would say where I where I've had this conversation is more when I've had a client who has an on-site position. I actually had a manufacturing client year before last. It was a new role. It was the first marketing position within their, internally manufacturing company, so they weren't real, you know, big on marketing internally. They had an agency of record, we'll call it that, or they had but that agency was struggling because they never could get a stakeholder on the phone to get content or do whatever.

So we placed this marketing specialist there. But when I first got the position open, I said, hey. You know, it was a marketing specialist role. So it was, you know, a a certain a person at a certain stage of their career was likely gonna be the one that I that I presented. I said, can it be hybrid? They said, absolutely not. Like, they said, we don't even want someone who has the mindset that that it has to be hybrid. Like, we're never going to let it be hybrid, you know. And and if I and I I asked 2 or 3 times just to be sure because I and I would present a couple of people and say, I have someone really interesting what they're interested in hybrid, and they wouldn't budge.

There are other time we filled it, but it was hard. It was hard to find someone. So it took me, you know, it took me longer. But there it's it's really more the positions that are, you know, on-site versus hybrid. I I see more people super interested in, like, hey, Raegan. I'll do hybrid. I love hybrid that can be especially extroverted people. Right? Us introverts, I'm an introvert.

Believe it or not, I'm an introvert. We like remote. We're like, give me the remote job. I wanna be behind a computer all day long. But, you know, the the extroverts, they are like, hey. You know, hybrid's great. But I'd say I would never I never wanna convince a company to consider going remote, if the company isn't really set up for it because everyone's gonna be it's just gonna gonna be a successful placement to begin with.

Yeah. You you want it to stick. It's, like, really insightful and helpful for people to understand. I and I'm gonna I'm gonna, like, move right on to another another hot topic that I think is I would imagine is a challenging part of your job, and that's budgeting for a role. Like, who wouldn't want to think that the budget can be lower than what it maybe should be to find the candidate that would really be the best fit. But I'm imagining that when you're talking to a client and also to a candidate, there's a lot of friction around the budgeting conversation for for a particular role. So how do you go about helping each party figure out what the right fit is? You know, it

doesn't actually it doesn't actually make it doesn't feel like a friction conversation. In the beginning of my career as a recruiter, when I realized how much money I was gonna charge people when I'd have to get on the phone and make a call call and go, yeah. This is how much I charge. I was like, what? I have to say that. That's how I'm gonna but, you know, now now that I've done this, what, 19 years I've been in recruiting, it's, money conversations come so easy for me. In fact, I gotta be careful when I'm out in my personal life and I'm hanging out with people and I meet someone new, and I'm like, yeah. How are you? You make look like you make about a $110,000. You know, it's because I I get I can usually tell what somebody makes just by when they tell me what they do for a living.

But all kidding aside, you'd be surprised how many clients ask me to tell them what I think the salary should be for a particular role, with the exception being your really big big big big corporations. They've got your they've got very structured tiered criteria that determine the salary. But your your mid to slightly large and even smaller companies, they'll ask me. They're like, Raegan, what do you think what do you think we should pay for this person? And I I I don't say what's the budget. It's more like, if I don't know the answer and there's no magic wand. Like, there's not we can go to all these website and type stuff in and industry specific stuff and size of the company. It's still a ballpark because at the end of the day, a company's budget is a company's budget. So if I if I say to a company, hey.

Okay. You need a, you know, you need a marketing manager, and you've got a a team of 3 marketers internally that they're gonna be, managing as resources and but you need to implement an entirely new marketing tech stack, and they need to learn. Like, there's a lot of these little nuances. It's like, you're looking at someone around 75 to 8 I'm just making up the numbers. 75 to 95,000, And they're like, okay. Well, boy, 95 is gonna really hit us hard. I'm like, okay. Fair enough.

Let's let's and we start that you know, we start the first thing I'll do is I'll say, okay. Let's make sure that we're not if 95 is too much, for example, then let's make sure that we there's something in in in what we're talking about that we we can take out maybe. But what I do there is I say, hey. Look. Look at this job description I put together. Is this ballpark what you think you need? And they're like, yeah. What I'll usually do is I'll go and have a couple of touch I call them touch interviews where I'll talk with 2 or 3 people, and I'll just say, hey. Look.

This is the range the client is comfortable with. Where are you? And if I have 2 or 3 people in a row that are qualified for the rolling light, and they say to me, like, man, I wouldn't even touch that for less than a 110. Like, it's all about having an open dialogue. And that's one thing that I've always been for whatever reasons, I've been very professionals are comfortable talking to me about how much they make. I know in other states, you know, it's a faux pas for to ask somebody what they make. But for me, I'm more I think of it more like a Jerry Maguire moment. Right? Help me help you. You know, if you've never watched Jerry Maguire, you won't understand that joke, but it's more like I need to understand where a person's, what they think their market value is at.

I need to understand what a client thinks they can pay for a role. And then Mhmm. From my 19 years of experience, I can usually say, yeah. You know what? I think we're it's kinda like The Price is Right. Remember The Price is Right show, and it you know, you have to be in the range, you know, you it's a higher, lower, lower, But it's kind of like that. And then my job is to really broker the win win number. But a lot of times, it's really me going out and asking professionals, you know, like, hey. Look.

I've got this client. This is the range we're thinking ish, and they'll be like they're gonna hang up on me or they're gonna say no, but that's, like, 20 k. And so it helps me to determine it. And here's the thing, what I don't ever do, Terri, is, you know, yes. I wanna make sure I understand the client's budget and the range, and I'm gonna work with them to make sure that we're not undervaluing or overvalue valuing, right, the position. But what I don't do, Terri, is I never I never present a candidate to a client, and I tell the client this too. I never present them and say, hey, client. This candidate wants to make x.

What I do instead is I say, hey, client. They're within your range. Maybe a little bit on the high end, somewhere in the middle. They're gonna be coming in at a softer number on your but they're within your range. I keep it open. And I tell the professional that I'm doing too, which may I think makes them feel a little bit more safe and opening up to me about their their compensation. And the reason I do this, because I've, again, learned this the hard way, is that the candidate now goes on a couple of interviews, and the candidate comes back to me and says, Raegan, I love the job. I love the people, but did you know that they're actually asking me to oversee business development, and they want me to implement an like, they want me to implement an entirely new CRM, and they want me to scope it, and they want me to do this, and they want me and I'm like, no.

That never came up in my conversation with the client when I was working on the job description. Yeah. And so Yeah. Because I because I didn't pigeonhole the candidate into a specific number, which is unfortunately, I think what a lot of other recruiters might do, then that get allows me to go back to the clients and say, hey, client, I think we need to revisit the salary because, you know, we we don't wanna do is we don't wanna put someone in this role at a, you know, at a certain number, and and then we realize they have so much more responsibility than what you're paying them for and they leave. And so that's where, you know, it gives us the negotiating flexibility. I had an an agency that I, I'll give you another example, of how this you you know, how do we figure out the budget, or how do we figure out what the compensation is gonna be. It was a marketing agency here in Houston. She said she need needed a the director of digital marketing.

I took every this was this was the leader. I took I wrote everything down that she said she wanted, the everything in the kitchen sink. And I said, okay. Great. And so job description, everything, and I just kept going. This is a VP. This is a VP role.

Mhmm.

I I mean, I could just every time I chew on it and look at it, it's like, this is a VP. But she really was sold on wanting a a director. So the way you know, in this case, it was about understanding her personality and that she really needed to see what she thought she needed. And I told every professional, I said, look, this is, you know, like so I presented her 4 people. I presented her 3 directors, and I said, this is a very tall, meaty role. I think it might it might be VP level, and these were these are your people that were just coming up into director level. 1 was more of a mid level director. 1 was but what 2 were mid level.

So they weren't really ready to be VPs, but I told her it's a very meaty role. So I submitted that to her, and I said, oh, by the way, I said, listen. Just trust me on this. I want you to meet this person. They're from another agency, but they're VP level. AKA, they're gonna be about 40 40 k more in compensation. Like, I had to tell her that. Right? They're not gonna come in at the director level.

I said, but just please trust me. Just please see this person. Because in my heart, I just felt like the amount of responsibility that she wanted this person to take on, even though she kept saying, oh, we can't afford anyone. This is all we can afford. Long story short, she interviewed the VP and hired the VP who wound up staying there for 3 years and has now moved on to, like, a big oil and gas company. But she found the money. She found the money. And it for me, it wasn't about, oh, hey.

I presented a higher level person, and they they made more money, so I made more money. No. It was more

about my concern that if she had hired a director, that that

director would have been set up

But if I hadn't taken that if I hadn't just gone Yeah. You

know, But if I hadn't taken that if I hadn't just gone

Yeah.

You know, and just at least said, hey. Just trust me and meet one VP. And if you're and I I even told her, I said, if I'm wrong, I'll buy you a bottle of wine. I said, I'll buy you a bottle of wine if I'm wrong because, you know, I've, you know, wasted your time. I'll buy you a bottle of wine. She she laughed. But she wound up hiring the VP.

I think that's what you you really have a special skill for is I sometimes, just having known you for so many years, I wish that you didn't have to call yourself a recruiter for people to understand what you do because I think what you do is so much broader than recruiting. It is you you describe yourself as, like, a consultative Yeah. Recruiter, but it's it's bigger than that. I mean, you're you are wearing multiple hats throughout this process, and, ultimately, it's still the candidate's decision to make. Right? And it's still the client's decision to make. You're just providing the context and also trying to guide 2 people to the right connection. And but they have to make that final choice. So even if you're putting something that they didn't necessarily ask for in front of them, you're not you're not forcing them to make that choice.

It's still their final decision. But I just I like I like that you're and always appreciate that you're able to think outside of the box. And and I'll I'll say this because we're coming to the end of our time for the interview, but, gosh, Raegan, I am not when I have guests on, my whole objective is to help our audience learn some things and maybe learn some best practices or challenges that other people have encountered that they can learn from, and I think you've offered a lot of that. But I'm also gonna be super bold and be and say, if anyone listening to this does need a recruiter, you need to call Raegan because she is that good at what she does.

She is

Thank you.

She's the top of the game in the country. And so I I would really encourage anyone listening to this who's trying to resource or is a candidate who is looking for that next next move they wanna make. You will not have trouble finding Raegan Hill on LinkedIn, except that you have to know how to spell her name correctly.

Yeah. So it's the r a e. R a e. Yes. Yeah. I actually bought the domain name. So my domain name for my website is reaganhillgroup.com, and it's raegan. Thanks, mom.

But I actually bought the domain name reagam because it just the brain just wants to spell it differently.

I didn't know that. That's

Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Yep. But, no, I would love I would love to be a resource to anybody, Terri, that especially that, you know, knows you. I love people. Marketing is my obsession. People are my passion.

And, you know, I think if a company's especially if it's a company that, you know, it could be a replacement position. It could be, a new position. But if they're looking for someone who is more of an integrity first recruiter who you know, money money is not green enough for me to do something that would cause somebody to either fail or not be successful. I I've had clients where I've told them, like, I can't fill this role and here's why. Like, you know, I'm honest about that because it's integrity first for me, not just with my conversations with clients, but with professionals. And at the end of the day, so many of the professionals that I've represented, Terri, have become clients. And, you know, then they move up in their career, and then lo and behold, one day, they're they're ready to to make another move, and they become candidates, and then they become clients again. So, you know, for me, it's the long game relationship that is critical to me.

And and it's important to me that I live out my values, which is authenticity, integrity, just honest with people. I've had a candidate one time. I think he wrote me a LinkedIn recommendation. It's somewhere on LinkedIn. He's I had to give him some bad news. I had to tell him the truth. Why he wasn't gonna I said, look. I can't place you.

He kept reaching out and reaching out and reaching out, and I just flat out just said, I can't place you, and here's why. And I explained to him because he was a creative who wanted to be a marketer. And I just flat out said, I don't have clients who look for someone like you, and here's the challenge you're gonna face. And here's why you're not gonna probably be successful in landing something. I just was very just direct and honest with him. And and he actually wrote me a LinkedIn recommendation and called me a year later, and he wound up he wound up I think he wound up starting his own thing. But he said, you know, Raegan, if if there's ever any bad news that I needed to get, I'd like it to be from you because you just have this way of saying things where you don't even feel bad. And he said, but you were honest with me.

You were just you were but it was you were honest and you were direct, but you were you know, you said in a way, he said, where I knew you were saying it in my best interest, not, you know, not because you were trying to be rude. I and I did. I just didn't want him to spin his wheels reaching out to all those all the other recruiters knowing that he'd not get any calls back, and I wanted him to understand why. You know? And that's the kind of attitude that I have with my clients, the companies that hire me, as well as the the professionals want to be represented through me. So Yes. I have I have seen it.

I've seen

you do that time and time again, and that's just one of the other things that I value about you as a person

Thank you. And that's just one of the other things that I value about you as a person and as a professional. So Thank you. Guys, we're gonna be posting in the show notes. We'll have a link to Raegan's LinkedIn profile and also to her website so that you can connect with her there. How do you prefer people get in touch with you if they wanna connect, Raegan?

Well, definitely, if it's a if if it's a company that needs a position filled urgently, I mean, I would say any way you want. Telepathy is fine with me, my phone number. I'll give you my address, like, whatever it takes. You just reach out to me. But I'd say, you know, I have a phone number, obviously, that we can provide after this call, but, it would be anybody can in mail me on LinkedIn. So I have an account that anybody can in mail me. There's a contact page on reaganhillgroup.com. The number that we can provide after this, this call is a voice over IP, and it receives text.

So if it especially if it's a client. You know, if it's a professional, I do appreciate if professional goes to reaganhillgroup.com. And if it's not easy to find, please tell me, but just click it should be a register link, and it's, like, literally a 3 minute application. It's it's super just dump your resume into my ATS and then follow-up with me on LinkedIns. Because if you just reach out on LinkedIn with your resume, that means I have to I have to spend 7 or 8 minutes downloading the resume, uploading it into the ATS, creating your record. So save my fingers some typing and do it for me. Only takes about 3 minutes.

Okay. That's that's awesome. I mean and if you're gonna place someone, they at least need to be able to follow some basic requests. Right? So

I try to get back to everyone, but it's not always easy. I feel listen. You know, it it happens. There are people that have reached out to me on LinkedIn, and it's like, as a recruiter, you know, candidates are they're they're frustrated because they're not getting callbacks. Get it.

Yeah.

And it's it's frustrating for me as a recruiter because there are times where I have to make a judgment call on, am I gonna return these 10 in mails today of people that have reached out, or am I going to get 3 people to my client who desperately needs this position filled by tomorrow? Like, to where do I where do I place my time? So sometimes I have to make some hard choices in that regard, but I do my very best to get back with people. It just sometimes is a little bit delayed.

Totally understandable. Well, I had a a couple of rapid fire questions that I want to ask you. And you so it's hilarious because Raegan and I had a funny conversation about this earlier in the week. So she might not want me to ask her all these, but I'm going to, and we'll see what she says. We'll just see how this little fun unravels. What if there's a musical artist or group that you could see in concert, dead or alive, who would you want to see?

Queen. Freddie Oh, yes. Freddie Mercury. I'm a say Freddy Krueger.

Okay. I'm gonna go with you.

Let's get you. Totally queen. Queen. Queen. Queen. I was, you know, just Freddie Mercury, especially Radio Gaga. Radio Gaga.

Oh, yeah.

You know

that one? Live.

I I love Queen. Yeah. I'm a huge fan.

No doubt.

What is a book that you find yourself constantly recommending?

The Bible. Yes. No lie. Okay. Look. No lie. Seriously. I mean, I have I have so many books.

It would make your head spin. There are times when I when I buy books and I don't even get a chance to read them. Like, I think what do I have? Somebody I have there's a question that I have on my when somebody, schedules time with me, the question is, what's the latest book you've read? And I have, like, probably a 1,000 where they're they're all different. But I think my latest one, I haven't had a chance to read it. It's called The Happiness Advantage. I don't even know if by shop. But for me, honestly, true story, I decided last December that it was on my bucket list to read the Bible. Like I said, I was gonna do it, and I put it on my bucket list.

So darn it. I'm gonna do it. And so I've been reading with a life application Bible, which is this thick. And it's quite interesting. I mean, it's quite it's like reading a New York Times bestselling novel. If you buy one that's that you can understand That it would be it would be that one. Yeah. It would be the bible, but that's just that's just me.

My listen. Look. I'm not too far from the way my mother's personality was. She read the dictionary for fun. Like, that was my mother. She read the dictionary for fun. So I'm like, I get it. I get a little bit of that from her.

So I like anything that's intellectual. I'm not a, I I read more things that are gonna make me grow. And it could be anything from like, you know, some sort of string theory topic to near death experiences to, mark I think I have a Marketing for Dummies. I actually I actually know the author. She's a chief marketing officer. I just talked to her yesterday. I have this book. I mean, it's I it's really all over the all over the place.

I just love to learn.

No. No. No. I can attest to that, though. You when you wanna learn about something, you do not go little. You go big. What this is my last question. What is the best job you've ever had?

What is the best job I've ever had? Well, that I

got paid for because I

was gonna say being a mom.

I I've had another guest who said being a dad was his favorite job he's ever had. So being a mom can definitely be your answer.

Being a mom. No. The the best the the best job I've ever had so you didn't ask me the most stressful. The best job I've ever had is the one I'm doing now. Mhmm. Hands down because it has allowed me to not only stay involved in marketing because remember, I was a marketer and then I became a recruiter. So I, you know, don't get to play in the marketing space anymore like the marketer, but I get to be around it with all the marketers. I had learned so many things.

I learned so many things. You know, I'm self employed so I can work from home. So my my introverted, nerdy psych can can, you know, cocoon behind my big three monitors. It would it would definitely be what I do now. Yeah.

Well, that's awesome. And I I, I'm not surprised by that answer because it just emanates from you that you love what you do.

Thank you.

Which makes it very fun to work with you. So Thank you. I thanks again for agreeing to spend some time with us today. And folks, like she mentioned a few times, she's an introvert. You would never have guessed it because she's so outgoing and so talkative. But I know I had to arm wrestle her into doing this. And, Raegan, thank you because I think you have so many insightful things to share to the people who listen to this show. And I, once again, just thank you so much for spending spending some time with me this afternoon.

It was fast. It was a pleasure, Terri. Thank you for the offer. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. Thanks for listening. Please be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast channel and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or visit our website at marketing refresh.com.