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How do world-class agencies continue to grow profitably and hit their goals, even through the choppy waters and challenges of agency life?
How do leaders like Tiffany Sauder, Marcus Sheridan, Jay Acunzo, Shama Hyder, David C. Baker, Nikole Rose, and Zeb Evans think?
Join Agency Journey host Jakub Grajcar as he interviews agency operators and leaders to share insights, actionable tips, and hilarious stories from the builders who live in the agency trenches.
Each episode focuses on crucial aspects of growing an agency like building the right team, delegation, project management, client success and retention, and operating frameworks like EOS.
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00:00
All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is your host, Gray MacKenzie from Zenpilot. This week, I've got the pleasure of bringing on my friend Erika Zeigyte from Prosana. Nice pronunciation. I'm going to read my last name pronunciation on a scale of one to 10, and then tell us a little bit about yourself. 10, I rate your pronunciation 10. It was really good. So yeah, thank you very much. Very nice introduction. I'm Erika, yes, and I founded an agency called ProSana.
00:26
We primarily focus on recruitment and we help agencies as well as e-commerce companies build their teams. On the other hand, we also help a bit with processes, team structure, and so we know kind of the agency set up quite well at this point. So yeah, so that's a bit about myself. That's awesome. How long have you been running Prasana? Oh, it's been three years and a bit, I guess. Three and a half, I guess, yeah. Cool. I actually don't remember how we originally got connected.
00:56
I should. Maybe LinkedIn. Probably LinkedIn, yeah. I would imagine, yeah. But we have some shared clients. We sent some folks over your way. I don't know who's public and who's not public in terms of who's worked with you. But I just saw you're hiring again for a client who sent your way maybe a year and a half ago or something, a year ago. Yeah. So, yeah. So it's super cool when there's service providers who we're referring out to and you see.
01:25
There's so many agencies that we're working with who have needs in complementary areas. We're not in recruiting space. And so to find folks where there's been a consistent track record of sustained success is awesome. There's a lot of, I think, the third or fourth different recruiting firm that we've sent different folks to. Or just we'll often try it ourselves first.
01:54
Not all those experiences have been great, but it's been awesome getting the, getting some expertise in agency space. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, thank you for sending some people over. We did end up, I think, working with one or two for sure. Yeah. What, so let's talk about kind of who fits in an agency ecosystem. Cause that, I guess I want to start with theme. I'm listening to this right now. Okay. What keeps me tuned in is like, we're trying to find great people who are fit.
02:23
both for like right people and also the roles that we have, and then also fit in the agency sphere. Maybe we could start and then work our way to some of the recruiting and hiring process. Off course. All of those kind of goodies. Maybe we could start with what makes someone a fit for the agency ecosystem specifically, because that is its own set of challenges. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I mean, I actually think I've heard about, because I started my career, well, kind of started my career in an agency.
02:49
And I think it was just natural for me because it's so fast-paced, nothing is really like staying the same for too long. Things are changing quite quickly. So I think for you to enjoy the agency life, you have to love the fast-paced environment. So there's going to be loads of challenges, loads of changes. You know, I want to say multi-tasking, but on the other hand, I just hate this word so much.
03:15
But you have to be able to shift your brain from one client to another client and then be able to deliver the same quality service. I think it's not for everyone. So 100% a person to fit in an agency is a person who loves challenges, fast-paced environment, is not afraid to solve the problems. As common as it sounds, they have to have the solution-oriented mindset. This is very important.
03:43
this is the ideal person fitting in the agency. Yeah. How do you vet in this, like, you can put out there, hey, fast-paced environment. How do you know if someone can actually hang in a fast-paced environment? It's actually a very good question. I would say, first of all, I mean, when you go on a conversation with a person, like when you do the interview, you kind of start grasping how they, you know, how they feel. You also ask certain, like, situational questions.
04:12
and see how they answer. But I would say a lot of the things come also from experience. We've been interviewing for agencies mainly and we've been in agencies ourselves. We also know how we are and what kind of people we are. So we try to mirror that as well. I mean, talking about mirroring is quite a good tactic. For example, if you have someone in the team who's really performing well, when you go out there and interview, you try to basically mirror and look for the same qualities.
04:42
Another thing is, of course, you can do an exercise and try to understand, you know, like what is the ideal agency player in your case, in your agency, and try to identify like the top players in your agency, identify the qualities they all share, and then again, look for those qualities in the candidates. And how to look, you know, there are like multiple ways. You can ask situational questions, you can prepare certain tests, you can also do personality assessments, which can also give a lot of insights.
05:10
So I would say it's quite complex, but there's definitely multiple solutions to this problem. How do you balance the wanting to deliver a good experience on the applicant's side with also trying to truly vet, hey, how are we gonna make it in the day to day? So I want to know, can you handle some of the chaos and some of the context switching that happens in the typical agency? And I wanna put you through as realistic of a...
05:39
interview process is possible to find that out. How do you juggle those two things? I don't want to stress people out completely. For the applicant side, I also need to stress test it to figure out, hey, are you actually going to be able to hang in our day-to-day environment? Yeah, but you were talking more in the recruitment phase. Like how do you balance those two things? I mean, one thing, and I think this is applicable in every single situation, you need to manage expectations, right?
06:06
Like if you set the tone right from the very beginning and you say like, this is going to be the process, we need to test it, this is important, then I think the applicant also sees this whole process differently. If you of course surprise them at every stage, then you know, they will be overwhelmed and maybe they will also drop off the process. So I would say it's really like it's managing expectations, right? And then also, you know, ensuring the transparent and very open communication.
06:33
And maybe even over communication at some point, like really just being, how to say, as detailed as possible and at every stage, people usually appreciate. And of course, kindness always helps when you're nice to people and you know, just you care about them. Right. Makes sense. What you can do a ton of agency recruiting. What are the most common positions you're recruiting for? The most, I would say it really depends on the agency, like what service they offer. For example, if it's like, um,
07:02
say inbound marketing based on HubSpot, then it would be lots of HubSpot positions. If it's a performance marketing agency, then paid social, paid search positions. I would say it really depends. The toughest ones these days probably would be developers. Those are really hard, especially Shopify developers, like very much in demand, hard to find really good people. So I would say like there's no like one particular position, but definitely like
07:30
performance marketing roles, also assistant roles, common. So it sounds like a lot of specialists are individual contributor roles. Or is it more common to do individual contributor roles than account manager, project manager type roles? They're hard to say. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say like it's only that, you know, specialists are in need. There are generalists as well who are needed. Um, we noticed a lot like.
07:57
A lot of people are looking for assistance, you know, administrative assistance, virtual assistance, executive assistance, operations assistance, and so on. And those are also quite challenging to find mainly because you are hiring for the attitude rather than skills. And attitude is one thing, it's quite hard to evaluate during the hiring process. But also another thing, usually the people who are applying for assistant positions or whom you're headhunting for those roles are usually very junior, right? So they are quite young.
08:26
right after uni and as strange it may sound, with generation changes, also changes the work ethic. So you really need to be able to qualify those people well. So I think it's quite actually challenging also to hire junior people these days.
08:45
This is a totally off the wall question. Have you found any good assistants who grew up wealthy? How did we find a really good one? No, no, no. Have you found any good ones who you know grew up wealthy? Very, yeah, very unique question, Gray, I have to say. No, I'm not sure, actually. I never.
09:14
Never would ask this of candidates previously. And now I hear a lot about how they grew up, to your point about work ethic. If you find a young person with a really strong work ethic, and it's weird for me to say young person, because in my head, I'm still like 24 years old. Even though I'm a decade older. But when you find early career stage folks with a really strong work ethic.
09:43
that's usually associated with a situation where they had to work hard from a young age and that's already built in. You know what, like one of the, for me the key question we ask in interviews is what was the hardest you've ever worked in your life on? Like that's the key question that we ask. You know, if they say, oh, I worked hard when I was in school because I was, I don't know, you know, studying a little bit here and there, but then I also had some...
10:11
outside curricular activities, then I'm like, hmm, really, did you have to work hard? But if the person says, you know, I was in university, I was full-time student, and I had two additional part-time jobs because I had to provide for myself, then I would be like, wow, okay, that's quite good. I would imagine you could handle the stress. That's an awesome question. What, so we can, a little bit of, kind of, hey, generally, what are we looking for in agencies? What does, digging into some of the hiring process, what does...
10:40
a first class hiring process look like? I mean, there are a few criteria that I would recommend to have in order to have a really solid hiring process. So one is to have multiple steps in the vetting process. So multiple interviews, include the testing as well, like provide the test to complete. It doesn't have to be, as I always say, like AI generated test. It can be very like practical to task test.
11:06
that usually involves the activities that they would do. So have those and have multiple people also participate in the interview because you can be, humans have so many biases without even realizing that. So you want to be as objective as you can. And the best way of course is to have certain questions and know certain answers that you're looking for, but also to have multiple people participate in the process. The process that we follow that worked for us is
11:36
I mean, we have quite a few different stages that we also deliver to our clients when we interview candidates for them. So we have the application questionnaire. So we don't look at CVs at all. I mean, I have this weird probably opinion that CVs are outdated and it's just not the best representation of the candidate skills or work ethic or personality or anything else. Like it's just not the right approach. So instead we have a questionnaire that we prepare.
12:04
with very specific questions with our non-negotiables. That allows us very easily to like shortlist the right ones. So we have the questionnaire, then we have like a 15-minute screening call. That can be on the phone, that can be on Zoom, and in that like 15-minute screening call, you can ask additional questions that are very important that would allow you to further qualify them. I mean, in screening calls, you can also evaluate like their language skills.
12:29
Like how they communicate, because it really depends on the role, but for some roles, it's really crucial that, for example, they are really good at communicating or that they speak English, like if it's an international hire. Then after the screening call, and screening call, by the way, is performed by one recruiter. Then the second call is the proper interview, full deep dive into the experience, understanding their cultural fit as well. And as I said, this is like a more in-depth.
12:58
And then we have the test, which is a practical assessment. Very important. You know, I always say you have to do it. Don't take shortcuts. Do the test, even the simple one, because it would tell a lot about their attention to detail, dedication, thinking process, problem solving, like everything, literally well-designed test can reveal a lot. And then it is a client interview with the candidate just to see how well they vibe together.
13:27
If they get along, what is their intake and so on. So I would say this is like a pretty good process. That's not too long. That involves just enough people, not too many to, you know, just drag the process over, and this, this actually proved quite well for us, like it's working quite well. If we keep going from there, does that then go to just most common, like it doesn't have to be every, I mean, it's different for different roles. Does that go to a?
13:55
another group interview internally or is that, okay, we made a selection, now we're moving to references and then negotiation and then signing? Yes. Yes. So basically, the interview with a client can involve several people. Can we involve the founder, for example, of the business or department lead or the hiring manager and can involve one other person. From there, usually they already have a good idea. If the person is good or not, then we will do the reference check.
14:22
and then we would go into negotiation and close the deal. Yep, makes sense. So we've based a lot of our hiring process on the classic, like the who process. There's some top grading, there's like a handful of things. Are there any sources, obviously you've taken it and you've modified it based on what you found works, but any sources you draw inspiration from?
14:47
I mean, a lot comes from practice for sure. A lot comes also from reading, just taking the best practices. There's a guy called Jeb Blount. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. You probably did. Yeah, I think Hiring Rockstars was his book that, something about rock stars. Took some ideas from there as well. I mean, to be honest, we've tried the scoring system as well, keeping it as subjective, sorry, objective as possible. I do not.
15:16
at this moment believe that this works as a best solution. I think really good questions with answers, like, and knowing the answers you're looking for is a better approach than like just grading someone, because even grading is very subjective at the end of the day. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about sourcing. Mm. They already start. How do we, how do we recruit? How do we, the right number of
15:43
applicants for jobs? Are there any benchmarks you go through? Where are agencies finding talent? I mean, on one end, it really depends again on the position. For some positions, you can just put a job ad up and you will get a lot of applicants. Usually that's like junior positions, maybe creative roles like graphic designers or video editors. You can get quite a few applicants if you just put a job ad. Otherwise, I would say headhunting, sourcing, like active sourcing is the best approach.
16:12
There's no set number of people you need to have in order to qualify one candidate. There's no such thing because again, it depends on the role. It depends on the quality of those applicants. I personally at this moment, unfortunately, I don't think job ads give the best result, mainly because even in the US, I think the unemployment rate is record low, it's like 3% or something. So it's very low, meaning that everyone has a job.
16:41
actually a lot of people passively looking for jobs. And those are the people that you should reach out to, head hunt, try to sell the position and get them on a call. And sometimes, I always say, it only takes one good candidate to close the job. So no benchmark, but sourcing is the way to go, unfortunately, unfortunately, probably. Well, it's great for your business. Oh yeah, true. And I'm glad it isn't, no. What, you know, in like sales prospecting?
17:10
Me, everybody listening, you, we all get quick question, subject line, emails 10 times a day with sales pitches. From a recruiting side, how do you reach out to somebody who you think, hey, this might be a good candidate, and actually get a response from them? First of all, if the company has a good reputation, you mention the company name. That sells itself, right? If the company doesn't have a good reputation, I'm not saying bad reputation. Well, if they are not well known.
17:40
Focus on the benefits, reach out and basically say what the benefits are. We do a lot of outreach just through connecting with people. So in the connection message, you just can openly say we have this position. These are the benefits. And then also, of course, you can compliment the person, say that you see that they have a lot of potential and we see them as a potential fit for the role. Overall, I would say it's very similar to sales and prospecting.
18:09
But at the same time, it's different, because people want to know what's out there. Not only because they are thinking about changing the job, but also because they want to see what other companies offer. Maybe they can use that information then to go and negotiate with their current employer. Yeah. So yeah, I would say it's a bit different, but just complimenting, saying exactly what grabbed your attention in their LinkedIn, let's say, profile.
18:38
And then mentioning the company, the benefits, that usually gets attention. When you said benefits, like in my head, that goes to the main one is, hey, comp, you're an account executive, like this role is full-time role, 130 to 170 on target earnings. And then I assume if there's anything outstanding about your, hey, this is a, we work four days a week or 32 hour work week or whatever, but is it any benefits that you've seen, like wow, this one,
19:07
Should they be very unique to the company? For us, if you are a true click-up nerd, there's not a better place to go to go be. If you love agency process development and helping people get more productive, Zempel, it's a great place to go. If you could care less about either of those two things, there's not a whole lot in terms of our positioning in the market or who we serve that you're gonna be super thrilled about. Yeah, but these are good benefits.
19:37
I would say, you know, really like as a company, every company has its benefits. It just need to identify. And for every role, there are certain benefits that matter most. Of course, if we're talking about the salesperson, the best benefit is gonna be like, what is the bonus system? How much money can you earn in this position? If we're talking about like operational role, the things you mentioned will work quite well. Like, you know, very structured environment, like click up nerd group, like a...
20:06
mastermind group or whatever, that will work well. So I would say if you have a position, try to understand what motivates those people in that particular position and try to use those benefits in the message. But startups, yeah, and also something else I wanted to add, I work a lot with startups as well, and they often say, oh, but we don't have those benefits that Google or Facebook or whatever has, what can we advertise? I always say startups have so many benefits and people are craving for those things.
20:35
Like flexibility when it comes to where you work, when you work, learning opportunities, growth opportunities, feeling that you are doing something purposeful because usually that when you're in an organization, like a big corporation, you don't feel that, um, as well as like equity options, like there's so many different things that startups can actually offer, you just need to, um, identify those and make sure to word it in the right way to attract the attention of people. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about one of the favorites.
21:05
topics of mine in regular service, which is the tool side of things. Okay. What, let's say I'm a 30 person agency, got somebody leading ops internally, I may use an outside service like Prosana, but I wanna also have a recruiting arm internally. It's definitely for, you know, it's part time, it's not somebody's full time role. It's a team size, but what should my tech stack around recruiting, hiring, people ops look like? Mm-hmm.
21:33
If your recruitment needs are not huge and you don't recruit lots of people at the same time, lots of different positions, I would say keep it simple. I'm pretty sure you can utilize ClickUp for this. We use Asana, we are Asana pros. For a very long time, especially when I was in the agency myself, we've used Asana for it. We would collect applicants through the... I said that we have this application form. That was Asana form.
22:03
Applicants would come into Asana, then we would build a funnel and then we would basically keep their cards in there. To be honest, even now we use Asana. For example, when we get the applicants from our applicant tracking system, we create the cards in Asana and that's where we keep the whole information about the candidate, like interview notes, questions asked, recordings, and so on. So I would say, if you're not recruiting for many roles, I would keep it simple and I would just utilize the tools you currently have for project management or process management.
22:32
If you are recruiting a lot of positions, then I would recommend to even utilize like an applicant tracking system, ATS. And there's so many of them out there that I cannot like say which one to use. We've tried recruit CRM, we tried Manatel, those are like quite small ones. We've also used Breezy HR, like there's so many tools out there. It's incredible. I think it just makes sense that you go out there, evaluate the pros and cons and choose the one that you think will fit best.
23:02
Why do you use an ATS if you have the backend? Is it the, you know, hey, I want integration into other job boards? Is it apply with LinkedIn? What are the big benefits? Yeah. All of what you mentioned. So basically, we have integration with other job boards. So when we post a job ad, it goes on our website, but it also gets distributed to like 20-something different platforms for jobs, also LinkedIn included. So that's the benefit of having ATS.
23:30
It's like a centralized place to store all of the candidates. And at this moment, we probably have over 19,000 of candidates' database, which is quite huge considering that we haven't been out there for too long. But yeah, definitely, ATS makes sense when you have multiple roles open at the same time. Yeah, makes sense. What I think would probably hit some of these, obviously.
24:00
If I'm an agency listening, I'm thinking, should I be tackling this in-house? Should I be working with a recruiter? When is it the right time to use a recruiter instead of trying to recruit in-house? Okay. I would say, first of all, look for certain symptoms. And the symptoms are you always leave recruitment as the last thing on your to-do list. And I know that agency founders, agency leaders, should they just don't...
24:29
They don't like to deal with the people side of things. They'd rather do marketing, they'd rather do sales, business development, because it's fun, and then the people side will get left for the last. So I would say when you feel like, you know, recruitment is the last thing on your agenda, when you are being very reactive when it comes to recruitment, when you keep on like rushing through your hiring or you continuously get mis-hires.
24:56
these would be the signals that you may want to actually either outsource or get an in-house recruiter. Now, there are pros and cons with each solution, but I would say the biggest benefit that the outsource recruiters bring is access to a larger talent pool, expertise. It can be a much quicker process as well, and at the same time, it saves basically a lot of time and a lot of headache.
25:26
We develop, like we basically vet the candidates from A to B. The only thing that you have to do is to review the candidate presentation, which literally we'll literally prepare with like all the recordings, our insights, notes, everything else, you just review and you choose the person that you want to interview. So this is like the best thing, right? That you can get. Sure. Yeah. That's awesome. I want to, you gave such a good nugget earlier that I want to go back to the well and see what else, what else to pull out.
25:55
So the question around, you know, what's the hardest you've ever worked in your life, I think is a great one that people can take and plug in right now. Joey Gilkey, who's been on the podcast before, like one of his favorite questions is kind of in the middle of, and he recruits or interviews a lot of sales folks. So in the middle of the interview, just kind of stop things and ask, how do you think this conversation is going? And try and throw people off a little bit, see how they respond. Are they overconfident? Are they, you know, kind of humble and grounded? Are they completely lose their cool?
26:25
Do you have any other favorite interview questions, whether in general or in specific situations? I'm trying to think. I would say for me, it's not the questions that I prepare in advance. It's the questions that follow my original question. I naturally think I'm quite good at asking questions, especially the follow-up questions. I think those reveal the most.
26:53
I mean, when you ask the question exactly, you are looking how the person responds. You know, if they are still staying cool, if they are staying confident, or if they are basically just, you know, getting a bit lost with the question. I'm trying to think if there are any other additional questions that probably depends on the position. So for example, if I'm looking for someone who's very like, motivated, I want to say motivated but probably motivated is not the best word.
27:22
who's someone who's very ambitious. I would also ask, you know, if, for example, if they've been, or actually I know what is the good question. Basically, what's the hardest thing you've worked in your life, that's one part. But also, I always want to know like how were things when they were at school. So for example, were they a good student or were they actually doing additional things? Maybe they were in sports. Because when someone, for example, played basketball, then you know that they are very competitive because they've been in that competitive environment.
27:52
If someone was a good student, that means they're hardworking and they will put in the effort. So I would always formulate a question about, tell me about your school years, tell me about your childhood, how you work, how you studied, how you worked and stuff. So that usually tells actually a lot. Yeah, that makes sense. That's awesome. I can keep bugging you with questions. I know we're out of time. All good. The site is theprosana.com. Is that the best place to send folks?
28:22
Yes. Yes. Or my LinkedIn as well. Awesome. Cool. We'll make sure both of those make it to the show notes. Erika, this was awesome. Thanks for being willing to come on and let me, let me grow you around hiring and recruiting. This is super fun. Thank you. Thank you, Grae, for having me. It was a pleasure.