December 31, 2018
Happy New Years Eve! The end of the year never ceases to be a time of beautifully orchestrated chaos. Deals are closed, payrolls settled, and Secret Santa gifts have been given. While there is usually a method to the madness at the end of the year and it’s natural to get focused on what is to come, it’s also a great time to be thankful and reflect on the past year and how we got to the present. As we are busy preparing for 2019, we wanted to take the time to share our progress and be thankful for our journey this year and contemplate on the present as we thoughtfully plan for the coming year. This year I am grateful to our clients and our tribe here at Proactive Talent for how far we have come together. Through overcoming challenges, growing stronger as a team, and unlocking our potential, 2018 was our best year yet!
As we look back on 2018, we are incredibly proud of our accomplishments and are allowing ourselves to brag (just a bit). This year we have worked with some stellar new clients across the healthcare, technology, hospitality, manufacturing, and even landscaping industries. In working with these companies, we saw how well our holistic approach to supporting our clients throughout the entire talent lifecycle can work and were able to grow as a company in both revenue and capabilities. In 2018, we grew from a team of 12 to 40 employees and independent entrepreneurs. With this growth, we were able to open our new headquarters in Austin, Texas – complete with a multi-media room, state-of-the-art conference room, and a beautiful lobby.
As our team has grown so have our services. In 2018 we added a media agency service to help our clients be the best they can be! Our Media Strategies and Solutions offering was a new addition after we identified a gap in our clients’ recruitment marketing needs and what we offered. In addition to employer branding and recruitment marketing strategy and content execution, our clients wanted us to be a partner to help with managing their recruitment media strategies and campaigns. Through this new agency offering, our wide partnerships across the recruitment media publisher ecosystem, and the addition of Ryan Affolter, Manager, Media Strategy & Solutions, with his over 15 years of experience in the field, we now provide advanced recruitment media solutions by intaking employers’ critical recruitment goals and objectives to plan, prescribe, execute, and optimize the best digital marketing and advertising strategies. Data and analytics drive decision-making and power smarter, more productive marketing strategies. This service is proven to save time and effort as well as deliver more ROI for our clients’ recruitment media budgets.
You may be wondering how we did all of this in one year? Well, we could not have done it without our incredible team, amazingly supportive clients, and our partners. Our unique business model permits our entrepreneurs to remain experts in their respective area and to create and manage their own projects autonomously while working as a part of the tribe at Proactive Talent. We focused most this year, our 3 full year in business, on building our internal team and capabilities, financial and operational structure, as well as improving our sales, account management, marketing, and business processes to better identify and service our clients.
This year we also have worked hard to create and maintain a unique culture founded on our core set of values:
· Do What’s Right: by partners, colleagues, and customers
· Kaizen: Continual improvement (object in motion stays in motion, object at rest stays at rest)
· Accountability: to the team and our results for clients
· Autonomy: you have the ability to create your own career path
· Show Your Work: share ideas, collaborate with colleagues, selfishness will NOT equal success in our community
We focus on fostering these values and are confident in our abilities, not just as a company but as a community, to help businesses revolutionize their recruiting strategies.
Though we have achieved an incredible amount, these successes did not come without their challenges. Some of the challenges we ran into in 2018 included how to manage a mostly remote workforce while keeping them engaged and team-oriented, keeping our voices and content fresh across all marketing and social media platforms, and, like many companies in this era of low-unemployment, struggling to retain top talent. To combat these challenges, we held our annual retreat in Austin, Texas with our core team of entrepreneurs. As a 90% remote company, we know the importance of coming together to hear all perspectives in order to strive for improvement and address the challenges we are facing. We recognize that many minds are stronger than one, and thanks to this extended time spent together, we feel more confident than ever in our team’s ability to tackle 2019, whatever the challenges may be.
On this New Year’s Eve 2018, we want to thank you for allowing us to share with you all that we have accomplished and struggled with this year and hope you will join us on our journey in 2019. Proactive Talent is on the path of continuous improvement – we never want to stop being a revolutionizing force in the Talent Acquisition industry. So, here’s to the journey that brought us here and here’s to what is yet to come!
Have a Happy New Year,
-Will Staney
Founder & CEO, Proactive Talent
