Woman Fired Over A Blog Turned HR Side Hustle Into A $12 Million Business — Forbes Listed It Twice

Jessica Miller-Merrell runs a human resources training company with four employees that reaches close to one million professionals every month. Third-party business data estimates place annual revenue for her company, Workology, at roughly £9.5 million ($12 million).

She did not raise venture capital. The whole operation is managed through Xceptional HR Consulting, a workplace consulting firm Miller-Merrell owns in Austin, Texas.

'Workology is a training and learning destination for, really, the entire human resources industry,' Miller-Merrell said at SHRM's 2022 annual conference, speaking on Business RadioX's Workplace MVP podcast. 'We help HR professionals be their best selves with a lot of digital resources and training.'

A £200 Budget and a Dating Website

The business traces back to a £200 ($250) quarterly recruiting budget at a Target store in 2001. Miller-Merrell had just graduated from college and was three months into her first HR role. The money went entirely on newspaper classifieds.

So she went online.

'In 2001, the two main reasons you were on the internet were that you were looking for love or at NSFW websites,' Miller-Merrell told Voyage Austin. She chose the former, sourcing candidates through free dating platforms.

Between 2007 and 2009, her internet recruiting accounted for 30 per cent of her hires. Candidates sourced through Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace had higher retention and lower turnover than those found through traditional channels, she said.

Her employer did not share her enthusiasm. 'My blog got me fired,' Miller-Merrell told Voyage Austin, 'but I also started my own company.'

That company grew out of a job search blog she launched in 2005 called BloggingforJobs, which she later rebranded as Workology.

Where the Revenue Comes From

The primary revenue driver is Ace the HR Exam, a monthly subscription programme preparing professionals for SHRM and HRCI certification tests. In a Workology video covering corporate social responsibility and HR certification, Miller-Merrell described herself as 'the founder of Workology and the creator of the Ace the HR Exam programme.'

Students report a 95 per cent pass rate. 'I created Ace the HR Exam because I wished there was something like it for me when I was studying and taking my own HR certification exams,' she told Voyage Austin.

Beyond the subscription product, income flows from content creation, demand generation for HR technology clients, advertising, and speaking. In the same video, Miller-Merrell cited research showing companies with strong CSR programmes 'can see sales up as much as 20 per cent from their initiatives' — the kind of business-focused insight that anchors Workology's content for its finance-minded HR audience.

The site now hosts over 8,000 published resources. Forbes listed it twice as a top 75 career resource.

Original Research and Industry Recognition

Miller-Merrell has also invested in proprietary data. Her quarterly HR Benchmark Survey, launched in 2022, collected 457 responses from senior HR leaders in its first wave. The data showed the average HR leader juggles 11 separate priorities, with onboarding, culture and engagement, recruiting, and employee experience ranking in the top four.

'We found the HR responses in the survey said that they have 11 different initiatives or priorities for HR,' she told Business RadioX. 'If I think about my day and what I try to do as an HR leader, 11 sounds like a lot.'

Miller-Merrell holds SHRM-SCP and SPHR designations. Forbes named her a top 50 social media influencer. The Economist featured her in its C-Suite series on HR leadership. Her most recent book, Digitizing Talent: Creative Strategies for the Digital Recruiting Age, was published in 2023 by SHRM.

The HR Benchmark Survey continues to collect responses on a quarterly basis. Miller-Merrell said the goal is to give HR leaders data they can take directly to their executive teams to justify department investment and structure.