This is a blog with tips for hiring marketing and digital marketing professionals for your team.
Marketing is an essential function in any organization.
In today’s digital landscape having a strength for digital and your marketing strategy is more important than ever.
The landscape for hiring digital folks can become daunting or even potentially overwhelming.
There are a lot of types of marketing people out there and it can be difficult to hone in on the right person for your team.
FINDING THE RIGHT PEOPLE IN THE RIGHT MARKETING SEATS
Having the right marketing people in your organization can make or break your opportunity of increasing your marketshare for your service or product.
It’s important to have a solid strategy for hiring marketing people.
This is true whether you have a backfill, a replacement that you need to fill or are hiring a new marketing role within your organization.
PAINTING A CLEAR PICTURE OF YOUR NEED
The first critical step is to make sure that you have a clear picture of the organizational structure of your marketing team.
You want to have a solid organizational structure built out for your entire company.
This way it’s very clear how your marketing team will interact with all the other teams.
If you’ve got someone who has hired marketing people before on your team, this gives you an advantage to lean on this person’s experience a bit.
QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU GET CLEAR ON THE ROLE
It’s important when you’re looking at filling this role to get very clear on what the position will be.
Is it going to focus on a particular market segment?
Or is it more of a general list type role?
Will it be focusing on a specific marketing channel?
Or will it be more of a multi channel marketing role?
You want to have a target market, demographic and geographic region flushed out for your company.
This will help to inform you what you need from a marketing perspective.
DRIVE FOR CONTENT OR DESIGN AND CREATIVE
Marketing can also go in other directions which are more creative or brand oriented.
Do you need somebody who is content driven or has a strength for design and creative?
If so, this can take you in a different direction as well.
The important part is to get really clear on what the important functions are that you need this person to have.
Are you requiring someone to check multiple boxes and is finding someone like that is realistic?
DETERMINING WHETHER THE NEED IS FOR ONE OR TWO ROLES
You may find that you need two marketing people, depending on the different functions they need to have.
If you have other marketing people on your team then it’s important to see how this person will fit in with those different functions.
Having a well rounded marketing team and strategy is critical and you likely will need more than just one person.
CONSIDERING THE AUDIENCE
Once you get clear about what type of a marketing person you need something else to keep in mind is audience.
Will their experience in this area be important to the audience this role is marketing to?
Do you need somebody with consumer experience?
Or somebody with more B2B experience?
Or maybe doesn’t matter?
WHAT ABOUT YOUR INDUSTRY OR VERTICAL?
The other thing to look at is the industry or vertical you’re in.
Is your industry very niche, which requires someone who understands your product, service and industry to market it effectively?
Often times this is the case, but not always.
Many times industry and vertical experience is translatable.
Sometimes this is even better than having somebody from the same industry as you get some fresh thinking and perspective.
CREATING A CLEAR JOB DESCRIPTION
It will be important for you to put together a clear job description of the position and a description of the right candidate.
For any job description it’s important that you are addressing both areas.
These include what the required skills are and what the actual job will look like on a day-to-day basis.
Having a solid job description is going to go a long way in attracting the right kind of candidates.
A job description that does not accurately describe what you want can be extremely detrimental.
A poor job description can cause potential candidates to pass right over it because they think it isn’t a fit for them.
It’s important to list your ‘must have’ requirements and your ‘nice to have’ requirements.
Too many must have requirements is going to narrow your pool down too much.
It’s important right off the bat to be clear about what you must have and what would be nice to have.
SPECIFYING THE NEEDED SKILLS FOR THE ROLE
Next, it’s very important to flush out what you need from a soft skills perspective.
We recommend putting the types of soft skills needed on your job description as well what kind of personality traits, cultural traits, etc. you need.
This is good for people to see and will help in the interview process.
This will allow you to structure your interviews in a way that screens people for hard skills as well as for soft skills.
TESTING CANDIDATES’ HARD AND SOFT SKILLS
Lastly, if your position requires some type of technical proficiency, it’s good to find a way to test potential candidates ability to do the job.
This can include things like working with an email automation platform, with some type of CRM system, or even a creative/design/content aspect.
That might mean seeing sample work or having them write up some simple copy or content as an example.
You might need presentation skills, so perhaps having them do a simple presentation.
It might be a technical test with specific questions about using an automation software or CRM software or some other sort of software.
The bottom line is you want to test a candidates skills so you get an idea of what the person will be like when they’re in the seat.
TIME TO GET RECRUITING
Once you have a clear description and a picture of both the hard and soft skills, you can then get to recruiting.
Posting on job boards and on LinkedIn is going to be useful to some degree.
You’ll need to find a way to have a proactive headhunting strategy to go out and find the really solid people who aren’t looking for a job.
You need to find a way to find the people who are never going to find you on their own.
Nine out of ten candidates we place for our clients are coming from what’s known as the passive talent pool.
Again, the people that are not necessarily looking for a job.
This is where you will find the best talent.
You can’t trust nowadays that the right talent will just come to you – you have to go out and find them.
IN CONCLUSION
If you take all of this into account it will make a big difference in your being able to hire the right marketing people for your team.
Often a bad hire is not that the candidate wasn’t right for the job, but because the employer did not adequately flush out their need.
Take the time to get clear on your need, create a clear description and find that passive talent to recruit for your team.
Here are just some skills you can consider for your next digital marketing role:
https://bit.ly/2nVptgv
