David Muret and Kara Bradford from Viridian Staffing (photo by Harley Lever of Harley’s Eye Photography).
Back in 2013, Kara Bradford sat in the main meeting space at Delta 9 and listened with her future business partner as multiple I-502 license applicants and ancillary businesses presented their companies to a handful of people who constituted the earliest members of the Washington Marijuana Business Association.
Bradford had been one of Seattle’s preeminent tech recruiters, attending and helping organize industry mixers in the Pacific Northwest for years. It was one of those events, the Seattle Tech Meetup, that Bradford met David Muret, a recent transplant to Seattle with big dreams and a shared mutual interest in the cannabis sector.
Despite her background in recruiting, the 2013 meeting at Delta 9 was Bradford’s first networking event in the cannabis industry.
As she listened closely to each of the presenters, she detected a subtle, but consistent theme: the need for qualified, professional talent to help move these businesses forward. Given the fact that the recruiting industry is so big in the greater Seattle area, and that so much attention was being focused on the emergent cannabis industry in general, she initially assumed someone else would have already identified the market need and was already providing such professional services to the industry.
After some research, however, she was surprised to learn that at that time, nobody was providing cannabis-industry employment services in Washington State.
While Colorado appeared to have a single firm providing low-skilled labor (trimmers, budtenders, etc.), it became clear that there wasn’t a single bona fide, experienced recruiting or human resources professional actively and explicitly serving the industry.
Since no business can excel without great talent, or avoid unnecessary liabilities without a good working understanding of HR best practices, Bradford and Muret decided to step up and answer the call. Within a month, Viridian Staffing was born.
“We quickly realized that the majority of these business owners had already burned through their list of family and friends to staff their operations,” Bradford recalled.
Bradford and Muret agreed that in order for canna-businesses to succeed, they were going to need the best and brightest, not unlike the tech sector.
“For us it wasn’t just about the market opportunity or first-mover advantage, but a genuine desire to help the industry succeed and enjoy the respect it deserves,” Muret said. “We expect competition in this industry to be fierce, and the regulators to be particularly thorough and unforgiving.”
Gone are the days in which businesses active in the cannabis industry can afford to play fast and loose with their HR practices, or to source their talent entirely from their immediate peer groups. Some will certainly try, but may quickly find themselves outpaced and outclassed by companies who take such matters more seriously.
It took months of hard work to lay the foundation. But now that I-502 businesses are finally being given the green light, Viridian Staffing (www.viridianstaffing.com) is scaling fast and leveraging the top recruiting talent in the Pacific Northwest and beyond to support the tidal wave of job requests.
Viridian has already doubled its staff in Colorado and is flexing in some of the most senior recruiters from Fortune 100 companies like Amazon and Microsoft, most of them long-term friends and associates of Bradford, who is deeply networked in the recruiting space.
“Outsiders fail to realize what a small community it is, and that most of us who have been doing this for more than 10 years know each other personally and meet on a fairly regular basis to share stories and tips, which is how we have managed to stay on top of our game for so long,” Bradford said.
Viridian has certainly had to battle its fair share of misconceptions. The first being that all it does is place trimmers and budtenders.
“We’ve been at this for nearly a year now, and we’re just now starting to see the first requests for those types of positions,” Muret said. “We’re happy to supply our clients with whatever they need, but the vast majority of the positions we’ve filled so far, and where our value is most apparent, is closer to the top of the food chain — your master growers, C-level executives, engineers, chemists, doctors, research scientists, sales managers, etc.
And it’s not merely your grow ops and retailers. Matter of fact, most of Viridian’s earliest and most loyal clients have come from the ancillary businesses: testing Labs, extraction technologies, clinics, packing and logistics.
“Even people active within the industry are just beginning to appreciate just how broad and sophisticated the industry is becoming.”
The second misconception is that Viridian Staffing’s services must be particularly expensive.
“When I tell people I have an MBA in human resources and over 14 years of Fortune 100 recruiting experience, the conversation often pivots immediately to cost,” Bradford said. “And rightfully so. Elite recruiters like myself and the majority of my peers bring down as much as some attorneys because we’re good at what we do and our services are in high demand. But where the jaws really hit the floor is when I tell my fellow recruiting friends how thin our mark-ups are, approximately 50 percent less than most agencies, because the vast majority of businesses in this industry are still start-ups and we started Viridian to be of service to these companies, not merely to exploit a short-term market opportunity at the expense of developing long-term relationships.
“But yeah, my friends question how we can afford to stay in business or remain motivated, to which I answer ‘the love of this industry and the people we work with.’ Profitability has never been and never will be our number one concern. Our philosophy is, do what you love and do right by your clients and the money will come.”