By Abby Breckenridge

Image by Rachel Adams

There’s a misconception about staffing firms—that we simply pocket the gap between what a client pays and what a contractor earns.

The reality is more complicated, and it’s where you can tell the difference between a transactional staffing vendor and a true talent partner.

At 2A Recruiting & Staffing, we believe great people do their best work when they’re supported well. That means much of the spread between bill rate and pay rate is invested back into employee experience, operational support, and long-term business health.

Here’s a rundown of what the staffing fee actually covers.

1. The consultant salary

Yep, that’s the one you already knew about.

2. Employee benefits and infrastructure

This bucket is the direct cost of supporting the consultant, in their job and life.

That includes things like payroll taxes and benefits, including:

• Health, vision, and dental insurance
• Life insurance
• 401(k) matching
• Other benefits like disability insurance, parental leave, fertility and fitness benefits, and professional development funds

It also includes a lot of infrastructure that people don’t always think about:

• Laptops and equipment
• Software licenses
• Phone and internet stipends
• Security and compliance systems

Some staffing firms intentionally minimize these investments to maximize profit margins. Lower benefits. Minimal support. Bare-bones tooling.

We’ve taken the opposite approach.

Strong benefits and reliable infrastructure help attract stronger talent, improve retention, and create a better overall consultant experience. In a competitive market, talented people have options. The firms that invest in their consultants tend to attract the people clients actually want to hire.

And from the client side, that stability matters. Consultants who feel supported are generally more engaged, more reliable, and more likely to stay through the life of an engagement.

READ MORE: Hiring managers: 4 questions to ask when choosing a consulting agency for contract roles

3. In-role consultant support

The best staffing firms don’t disappear after placement. Without active support, small issues can become major retention problems.

That’s why we invest in ongoing consultant support, including:

• Regular employee check-ins
• Career guidance
• Contral renewal support
• IT troubleshooting and onboarding help
• Recognition gifts and morale boosters
• Team events and community building

This layer of support often gets overlooked because it’s harder to quantify than payroll or benefits. But it has a real impact on performance and retention.

Consultants who feel connected and valued tend to communicate better, ramp faster, and stay engaged longer. Clients benefit from fewer disruptions, stronger continuity, and better long-term relationships with the people on their teams.

In other words: support isn’t fluff. It’s operational stability.

4. Recruiting, operations, and business support

This final bucket is the cost of actually running a staffing business.

Behind every successful placement is an operational engine that includes:

• Sourcing, vetting, and staying connected with top talent
• Sales and account management
• Payroll administration
• HR and compliance support
• Finance and accounting
• Legal oversight

And yes—profit.

Why this matters

Healthy businesses need margin in order to continue investing in people, tools, and service quality. The problem isn’t that staffing firms make money. The problem is when firms maximize profit by cutting support everywhere else.

That shows up eventually in the form of poor communication, weak recruiting, consultant turnover, and inconsistent delivery.

Two firms may quote similar rates while delivering completely different consultant experiences and wildly different levels of support.

At 2A, we’d rather build a model that supports both the client and the consultant for the long term. Better-supported people tend to do better work. And in staffing, better work is what everyone is actually paying for.

By Abby Breckenridge

Image by Guangyi Li

Subject matter experts can be B2B tech marketers’ most persuasive storytellers—and they can also be their biggest bottleneck. SMEs—we’re talking engineers, product owners, key customers, strategic partners—have the insights your audience craves, and they’re also busy doing the actual job. Accessing their knowledge and getting their sign-off can take weeks, and that’s time that neither the marketer nor the SME has to spare.

That’s where we come in. Here are three ways we can help you build effective, voice-of-the-expert content without burning your relationship with your SMEs, or impacting your schedule.

1. We’re already ramped, so we don’t need much of their time

Nothing drains goodwill faster than asking an SME to brain dump everything. We come in pre-loaded on your solutions, your space, and your audience. That means we ask sharper questions, need fewer meetings, and can translate rough input into something polished. Your SMEs stay focused on their day jobs, and still sound brilliant.

2. We run the process, so you don’t have to

Scheduling, follow-ups, wrangling feedback—it adds up fast. And it usually falls on marketing to manage it all. We take that off your plate. As active project managers, we coordinate directly with SMEs, adjust to accommodate their needs and preferences, and make sure deadlines don’t slip. You get progress without the overhead.

3. We turn expertise into assets that work

Great insights are only half the equation. The real win is packaging them into content your audience needs and your SMEs are proud of. We shape raw takes into clear, compelling assets—eBooks, videos, case studies, whatever you need—that land with your target audience and reflect well on the experts behind them.

Bottom line

You don’t need more time from your SMEs—you need to make better use of it. That’s how you get stronger content, faster timelines, and happier experts.

By Abby Breckenridge

Image by Emily Zheng

So, it’s time to hire. You’re thinking: post a job, run interviews, make an offer. Done, right? Not quite. The true cost of hiring goes far beyond salary. When you factor in time, risk, and lost momentum, the DIY route can quickly become the most expensive one.

Here’s where those hidden costs can show up:

• Productivity drain: Hiring pulls your team away from the work that drives results. Writing job descriptions, reviewing resumes, interviewing, and aligning on decisions take up valuable time your team isn’t spending on their core jobs. As roles sit open, teams stretch to fill the gaps. That can lead to burnout, delayed priorities, and managers spending more time hiring than leading.
  
• Mis-hire risk: A great hire takes time to ramp. A bad hire takes even more time, and then you’re starting over. Performance improvement plans, backfills, and another hiring loop can cost up to half the role’s annual salary, not to mention the disruption to your team.
  
• Missed opportunities: If you’re hiring, it’s because there’s work that needs to get done. While the role sits open, that work stalls. Projects get pushed, pipelines slow, and launches lose steam. For fast-moving teams, those delays can translate directly into opportunities passing them by.
  
• Limited talent access: Job boards mostly reach active job seekers. Many of the best candidates aren’t applying—they’re being recruited. Without access to those networks, roles take longer to fill and quality can suffer.
  
• Losing top candidates: Strong candidates don’t stay on the market for long. A slow or inconsistent hiring process can mean your best options accept other offers before you’re ready to move. In some cases, that means restarting the search entirely.

This is where a skilled recruiting partner can change the equation. We help you fill roles faster with less strain on your team by bringing a vetted network of talent we’re constantly developing. With more than a decade of experience as a creative and recruiting agency working with some of the top companies in tech, we understand the roles, skills, and collaboration it takes to build high-performing teams.

When you’re deciding whether to partner with a recruiting agency for an important hire, be sure to look beyond the upfront agency investment. The hidden costs of hiring on your own tend to compound over time. We can help, and it’ll save you money.

By Abby Breckenridge

Image by Guangyi Li

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. While it’s true that our creative agency helps tech marketers make effective marketing content, there’s a secondary value that runs alongside the standout assets like animations and messaging frameworks that we offer. We help our clients look good—really shine at their organization and out in the world.

And we’re here for it. As a service company, we love to help our clients look sharp. So we’re kicking off a new series called Made ya look good, where we break down the real, practical ways we help our clients win.

First up: we know your visual brand

When you’re a marketer at a big tech company, brand is a big deal. It’s a complex system with rules, tools, and defined patterns. Entire teams are responsible for making sure it’s executed consistently and correctly. It’s a thing of beauty when it’s done well, and it takes work.

Walking into that world unprepared slows everything down.

That’s why our design team does the work to get up to speed and stay current. We come in already fluent in your typography, your layout logic, and your visual tone. We know how your brand flexes and where it doesn’t.

How does this help our clients look good?

• Their internal brand team is delighted instead of skeptical
• Feedback cycles are faster and more focused
• Most importantly, assets get approved and perform in the field because they look exactly like they belong

Recently, we were closing out a handful of assets for a client at Azure. Like most brands at enterprise organizations, they have a rigorous internal brand review process, the kind that can result in detailed, line-by-line feedback and multiple rounds of revisions. It’s a necessary step, but it can slow things down and create extra work for already busy marketing teams.

The brand team came back with a couple small suggestions and some praise. One comment summed it up: “This eBook looks fantastic! It really reflects the brand, while aligning with style guide points.”

Our client built trust with their brand team without needing to become a brand expert, moved their asset forward faster, and saved meaningful time in their day. Looking good! Want to experience something similar? Let’s talk!

There’s more to come in our series, Made ya look good. Stay tuned.

By Abby Breckenridge

Image by Nicole Todd

“Violence against women affects me as a human being—my message shouldn’t be a feminist message. It’s a universal message.” — Bad Bunny

Is it a cheap trick to open with a Bad Bunny quote? Probably. Am I above it? Certainly not.

As a women’s studies minor and lifelong feminist, I have spent a lot of time mulling over feminist issues, and I firmly believe in the concept behind what Bad Bunny is highlighting here. Most things we call women’s issues are just human issues and segmenting them off usually does their cause a disservice.

I feel the same way about parental leave. It’s on all of us to help make sure folks can have and raise kids, and adequate parental leave is part of that.

In the staffing agency world, benefits like parental leave are rare. Most staffing models treat staffing consultants and contract workers as temporary resources: deliver the work, finish the contract, move on. Benefits are minimal, and life events are often treated as inconveniences to the system.

But having children isn’t an inconvenience. It’s how societies continue. If we want thriving communities, people must be able to have and raise children without sacrificing their careers. That responsibility has not been picked up by our government, so for now it belongs to all of us, including companies.

That’s why we provide paid parental leave to our staffing consultants.

Our team is made up of experts who help our clients ship campaigns, launch products, and scale content programs. They’re professionals with careers and lives. Supporting them through major life moments is good policy. And it’s good for business.

People do their best work when they know they’re valued as humans, not just as billable hours. And by respectfully handling our consultants’ parental leave needs, including temporary replacements and overlap time for handoffs, we’re also helping our clients. Win/win.

By Abby Breckenridge

Image by Rachel Adams

Our clients are smart. They market cutting-edge products, which means they’re always looking for new ways to make their efforts more effective. So the line of questioning we hear most consistently from them is: what’s working? What are your other clients doing? What’s hot in B2B tech marketing?

Right now, the answer is letting real experts speak directly to buyers. Not brand voice, not canned demos, not vague thought leadership—but credible, knowledgeable people who clearly know their domain and aren’t afraid to say something specific.

Buyers are overwhelmed. Social media feeds and inboxes are flooded with generic content, most of it interchangeable and written to satisfy an algorithm. In that environment, content that clearly came from a real person with real experience immediately stands out. When buyers hear from someone who has hands-on expertise, like an engineer, a product leader, or a satisfied customer, they’re more likely to pay attention and trust what they’re hearing.

This approach works across a range of formats. We’re seeing strong performance from:

• Written case studies that go beyond surface-level metrics and include expert commentary on how and why results were achieved
• Video case studies where customers or internal experts speak plainly about challenges and outcomes
• Engineer-driven blogs that explain architectures and the reasoning behind decisions
• Founder or executive POV pieces with anecdotes that reflect lived experience
• Original research with new takes and insights

Credibility is what wins today. When customers are looking for reasons to believe, the most persuasive marketing isn’t louder—it’s grounded in real expertise and feels more specific and human.

By Abby Breckenridge

Image by Rachel Adams

“2A is great, they don’t freak out.”
I overheard a long-time client say this to a colleague while convincing her that our creative agency was the right team to help get an executive keynote presentation across the finish line.

It made us laugh, and it perfectly captured something I’ve come to value in marketers. Whether I’m hiring for our creative agency or helping our recruiting and staffing clients build their own teams, I look for candidates who are flexible. In other words, they don’t freak out.

A lot can change over the course of a tech marketing initiative. Executive priorities shift. Tools and channels gain or lose effectiveness. And we’ve all seen AI reshape workflows that, not long ago, were considered best practice.

Great marketers aren’t overly attached to any single tool or tactic—they stay focused on outcomes. When something stops working, they test, learn, and adjust without panic.

Translating change into opportunity 

Product change adds even more complexity. In tech, features are added, removed, or repositioned frequently as roadmaps evolve in response to customer needs and competitive pressure. Marketers who struggle with change risk misalignment and missed opportunities. The strongest ones stay close to the product, translate updates into customer value, and evolve the story without unnecessary friction.

This doesn’t mean the fundamentals don’t matter. A deep understanding of marketing principles, the ability to tell a compelling story, and a strong grasp of the product and/or industry are still essential. But on top of that, the best marketers quickly absorb new information and evaluate how it changes their course.

When you’re hiring a marketer, look for the ones who can adapt, recalibrate, and move forward confidently. Your team (and your customers!) will thank you.

By Abby Breckenridge

Image by Nicole Todd

I’ve been noticing more friends taking on fractional roles. Maybe it’s because the fractional model is catching on with businesses looking for access to skills and experience they may not be able to afford full-time. Or maybe it’s because a lot of my cohort have hit the point in our careers where we’ve racked up some real experience, and now we get to use it in more flexible ways. Either way, fractional leadership is having a moment, and for growing companies, it’s a game-changer. 

Fractional hires bring leadership without the long-term commitment 

A fractional executive is a seasoned leader who joins your team part-time—usually a few days a week or for a defined project—to bring executive-level strategy and oversight without the full-time commitment or investment. Think of them as your interim CMO, COO, or Chief of Staff who can quickly understand your business, set direction, and build momentum. 

They’re a good fit for growing B2B tech companies 

Fractional executives fill that tricky middle space: you’ve outgrown one-person-does-it-all leadership but aren’t ready for another full-time seat at the table. Or maybe you have budget for one full-time executive, but you need support that spans a few roles.  
Fractional hires can: 

• Bring outside perspective. Because they work across companies and industries, they bring playbooks with proven outcomes and fresh ideas you won’t get from inside your business’s bubble.
  
• Flex with your goals. As your needs change, their involvement can scale up or down. It’s executive leadership on demand.
  
• Bridge the gap during transitions. Whether you’re between full-time hires or expanding into new markets, fractional leaders can provide steady, experienced guidance when continuity matters most. 

We can help   

At 2A, we’ve seen the power of fractional leadership firsthand. Or another way of putting it, we’ve been doing it since before it was cool. We’ve been placing temporary teammates in strategic roles for years, and our network is only getting stronger. We can give you access to marketing and operations professionals who’ve guided companies through change, challenge, and scale. We can help you find the right fractional fit—someone who can start strong, move fast, and make things happen. 

By Abby Breckenridge

Image by Emily Zheng

As the owner of a creative agency, I’ve always believed in pricing based on value, not effort. Or to put it another way, pricing marketing assets by the hour feels backwards. Why should a client pay more because something took longer? I’d pay more to have it done today. That’s the difference between effort and outcome. 

The same logic applies to ebooks—longer is not better. In B2B marketing, ebooks can play an important role: they explain complex ideas, answer objections, and help generate leads. But if you can convince your prospect to move down the funnel in four pages, then there’s clearly no need for six. The goal is clarity and impact, not length. 

Here’s why a shorter ebook might be exactly what your demand generation campaign needs.  

Shrinking attention spans 

Your buyers don’t have the time, or patience, for bloated ebooks. Between inbox overload, back-to-back meetings, and constant digital noise, the odds of someone finishing a 12-page ebook are slim. Most people skim. Many never make it past the intro. The reality is that readers are busy and distracted, and value per page matters far more than page count. A concise ebook that delivers value early is far more likely to be read, remembered, and shared. 

Perceived complexity 

Longer ebooks don’t just test attention, they can also make your topic feel harder than it really is. When readers see too many pages, they assume the subject requires a steep learning curve or that your solution is complicated to use. A shorter, well-structured ebook sends the opposite signal: this is approachable, clear, and worth their time. 

Thought leadership in the age of AI 

AI can generate thousands of words at lightning speed, but it can’t generate authentic perspective. This is where true thought leadership comes in. B2B buyers don’t need long-winded rundowns; they want sharp, differentiated insights. The best ebooks highlight your expertise, connect the dots, take a position, and say something original. A four-page ebook that sparks a lightbulb moment will always outperform a 15-page summary that says what everyone else is saying.  

Of course, not every ebook should be short. There’s a place for longer assets that dive deep into technical specs, step-by-step how-tos, or detailed guides for do-it-yourself readers. Those meaty resources are valuable when your audience is ready to roll up their sleeves. But for demand generation and thought leadership, shorter content almost always wins. 

Build less and say more 

A tight, well-structured ebook isn’t easy to write. It takes a sharp team of marketers and product experts to distill complex ideas into a clear story. Next time you’re tempted to throw more pages at your marketing challenge, ask if they’re truly adding value. And before you start generating content, make sure you have the right team in place to define a differentiated story. Need a hand? We’re here to help. 

By Abby Breckenridge

Image by Jenni Lydell

“What are you doing right?”  

It’s what my friend and fellow business owner asked me a few weeks back after I explained that our recruiting and staffing practice had taken off over the last year. In simple terms, I realized it’s because we’re kind. As a small player in an industry where scale often overshadows individuals, we’ve backed into a differentiator that I love.  

By kind I mean we know all our team members that are embedded in other companies, and we check in with them regularly. We offer good benefits, paid time off, and morale boosters. We negotiate on their behalf for raises when they’re due, and we research and cover training to boost them along their path.  

Lucky for us, we’re noticing a trend—clients are recognizing the gap left by larger staffing firms, where contract employees feel more like a line item than a human. Our recruiting and staffing clients, the ones that work daily with the skilled (and human) folks that we employ and place in roles with them, want to be sure their team is well taken care of. And they’re not finding that at the global staffing firms where procurement algorithms select talent agencies for their low margins. Increasingly, they are turning to boutique agencies that prioritize well-being and meaningful connection. 

As a human, I’m thrilled that what we’re doing right is treating our team with kindness. As a business owner, I’m also thrilled.  When employees thrive, clients benefit from stability and engagement, and agencies stand out for the right reasons. In a competitive industry, kindness isn’t just good—it’s strategic.