Recruiting For Marketing Professionals – What NOT To Do! Are You Making These Mistakes?

Are you one of the many organizations trying to improve the effectiveness of your marketing team in house only to find the marketing professionals you have recruited are incapable of meeting their KPIs?

OR

Are you just not sure what ‘success’ means when you find someone who you think meets your requirements?

If you ‘still haven’t found what you’re looking for’ U2 are not the only group to have sung this tune!

At best, the recruitment of marketing professionals is a challenging task for most businesses, given the lack of understanding of what they really need, and how to go about searching for it.

Common mistakes in recruiting for marketing professionals are made by business and recruitment agencies alike, the amount of time and money spent on finding and selecting the right individual is rarely proportionate to success in the outcome. Most recruiters exist to ‘sell’ you a marketing professional, yet all that glitters is not gold! They are interested in closing the sale, not the longevity and fit of a new team member. Usually recruiters of marketing professionals are neither willing nor able to ‘get their hands dirty’ and examine what your business really needs, nor do they know which language and method to use to find it. We exist in an anomalous realm where we both understand how to help you to determine what you need, and how to find it midst a sea of potential candidates.

The main issues with recruiting fall into two categories – not knowing what you need, and not knowing how to recruit.

Almost every job ad on SEEK and other recruitment sites echo organizations’ confusion regarding who they are looking for, this is reflected in a plethora of marketing job ads that contain a shopping list of ‘must haves’, which are usually impossible to find in one individual. Seeking a ‘Marketing Co-ordinator’ which is junior role, as well as seeking a ‘Marketing Strategist’ which is a senior role – will find you someone who is either under-skilled or overqualified and increase the chance of staff turnover, wasting your time and money.

Casting a wide net and listing multiple functions in the one marketing job description, hoping to snare the one person who is out there to answer all your prayers, i.e. looking for a designer, copywriter, and search engine optimiser… will only find you someone who at BEST will be good at one of these things but great at NONE!

Combining inappropriate functions such as business development which is about sales, within a Marketing Strategist’s job description proves you don’t know what you’re talking about and provides an open invitation to those who are great at selling themselves to apply – functionality and suitability – optional.

If you’re considering traditional recruitment methods like resumes and psychometric testing – think again

These methods have been superseded by the use of convincing portfolios but mostly by projects. Firms who mean business are now asking candidates to do real time project work, either solo or in groups, otherwise known as “projeclications” or “applijects” wherein potential marketing professional candidates work on a task they could well be tackling in the future – editing a keynote presentation, for instance, or help redesign a social media campaign – the results of which are considered more indicative of a candidates real potential.

All is not lost when it comes to finding the right person to meet your requirements, avoiding these common errors is a start, however it is essential to make use of talented marketing and advertising agencies for areas of specialisation which cannot be found in one individual.