If there’s an industry more challenging than staffing, it could only be staffing services that cater to the health care industry.
Historically low unemployment, COVID-19 considerations and the Great Resignation have all taken bites out of the local talent market, which in health care’s case, had already been running at a deficit for years.
That’s what makes Chad Sideris’s four-year track record with Triage Staffing so impressive. Despite all the market challenges before him, Sideris has led the company to record numbers, done largely by intelligent use of technology and social media marketing.
“We’re really looking for people who are giving us signals that they want to do something and we’re looking at them primarily through Google Search and basically some contract negotiation,” he said, being careful not to disclose the secret ingredients to his successful recruitment formula.
Brave New World
Sideris might play cagey with his strategy — and with good reason — but the results speak for themselves. During his tenure, Triage’s lead generation efforts have increased 580%.
In 2020, the company’s best year to date, Sideris’s lead generation resulted in half of the company’s new business, thanks to smart use of Google and Facebook ads and forming strategic media partnerships.
“In the world of Google search, I was in the really fortunate position of having worked at a place called Proxibid where we were doing auctions for anything under the sun,” Sideris said. “I kind of learned what does and doesn’t work for different categories, based on search volumes and things like that.
“I was able to apply that working knowledge of things that would and would not work in searches and use that to find [Triage] candidates en masse in ways that most people don’t know how to do.
Learn to Pivot
Sideris’s career game plan, after earning a degree in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2013, was to be a copywriter. Those jobs proved scarce at graduation, so he took a role in digital marketing. His boss moved on to Triage Staffing and invited her former team member to come along. The move resulted in a match made in social media marketing heaven.
“I enjoy a lot about this line of work,” Sideris said. “I think Triage is really on the cutting edge of this space. It’s fun to try to find holes in the product, the process and automate/improve upon it in ways that I don’t think our competitors have thought about yet. Maybe that’s cocky, but that’s what I’m trying to do.”
Another element of success is the ability to adapt to future trends, which is exactly what Sideris is focused on having been promoted to the company’s director of marketing technology and lead generation a few months ago.
He said the company that best accelerates processes and streamlines operations via technology holds the upper hand in the cutthroat traveling staffing market.
“I think the way that the market is headed is emulating the trajectory of Google, working towards empowering the actual traveler [employee],” he said. “For a long time, agencies have owned every part of the process. If you needed your resume, you’ve got to say, ‘Hey, can I please have the resume you built for me?’ That’s not what we’re looking to do here.
“We’re moving away from that model of the agency owning the process and instead giving power to the traveler as everyone who’s making headways in these spaces has done. A lot of companies really don’t like that shift, but I think it’s going to help us win.”
