u/Novel_Savings_4184

We recently brought in a new head of marketing and one of her priorities has been moving influencer work back in-house. They did a decent job but we were always one step removed from the creator relationships, and any time we wanted a straight answer on performance it took them multiple weeks to come back. Her plan is a phased handover over two quarters rather than cutting them off in one go. The agency is being cooperative so we're getting contacts, briefs and past performance. We need to start doing our own discovery I'd like to know what you are using in-house for this. We're mostly interested in discovery and keeping track of who we've briefed and how they performed

For about two years I convinced myself the hair in my shower drain was normal. Everyone sheds, right? It wasn't until I started actually counting strands on bad days that I admitted something had shifted. Not alopecia, not a medical issue my dermatologist could identify, just a gradual increase in shedding that didn't have an obvious cause.

I went through the usual checklist. Stress, diet, iron levels, all checked out fine. My dermatologist suggested looking at my routine rather than adding supplements, specifically whether anything I was using was contributing to mechanical breakage rather than actual follicle loss. That distinction matters because breakage looks like shedding but isn't the same problem and doesn't need the same solution.

I started auditing everything. The culprit I kept coming back to was my shampoo, a clarifying formula I'd been using because my scalp ran oily. Strong surfactants, high lather, the kind of clean that squeaks. My derm pointed out that aggressive cleansers can cause scalp inflammation that weakens the hair at the root over time, separate from the dryness and breakage they cause at the lengths.

Switching to a gentler bar was the first change I made. Within six weeks the drain situation improved noticeably, not gone but meaningfully less. I've been using the kitsch rosemary biotin shampoo bar, the rosemary extract supports scalp circulation which my derm said is one of the few topical factors with actual evidence behind it for retention, and the SCI base doesn't trigger the inflammation cycle my old shampoo did.

I'm not saying bars cure hair loss. I'm saying aggressive cleansers might be contributing to shedding that gets blamed on everything else, and that was true for me.

Looking for what people did when they hit this exact wall because I'm there. My dog itches, has been itching consistently for four months, vet workup is done. No fleas, skin scrape clean, no mites, no ringworm, bloodwork normal. We did a 10 week elimination food trial on venison and sweet potato and nothing changed. So now the vet says environmental allergies which is a diagnosis but isn't actionable.

The next steps offered are intradermal allergy testing which is hundreds of dollars and may or may not give us anything we can use, immunotherapy injections which are a multi year commitment, or staying on apoquel indefinitely. None of those is exciting to me. The testing might not change anything, immunotherapy is a long road, and apoquel forever is a thing I'd like to avoid if there's a reasonable alternative.

So before I commit to one of those routes I'm trying to figure out what people actually did when the obvious options were exhausted. Did you do the allergy testing and was it actionable. Did you find a supplement stack that managed it well enough to skip the prescription path. Did you just accept a moderately itchy dog as your reality.

Not looking for "try fish oil," I'm fishing for what people did after fish oil was already on the list.

We run a 14-person staffing firm out of Ohio. Most of our placements are skilled trades into mid-size manufacturers and a couple of food processing plants. Aerotek shops the same accounts and we lose on speed maybe 60% of the time. Their bench is just deeper.

Trying to figure out where to invest. ATS we like, sourcing is the problem. We have a Bullhorn seat, run Indeed Sponsored, and pay for LinkedIn Recruiter that nobody on the team really likes.

For the smaller and mid-size firms here placing into manufacturing or industrial. What's your sourcing stack actually look like in practice? And how do you compete against the agencies with 10 times your bench?