No marketers, no leads. No leads, no sales. No sales, no money. At one point or another you, intrepid and unstoppable recruiter, will find on your desk an open req for a marketing role or two, and it's not going to be enough to tell them you've got a hot new opportunity. You'll need to know where to look, how to qualify them, and enough about the industry to determine whether they're truly a good fit. A herculean and thankless task, to be sure, and even that isn't the end of it. As with all professions, there are an influx of average candidates, and a very small amount of really great ones. The former have a sneaky habit of disguising themselves as A players, so if you wind up recruiting marketers and you want to find key players, you've got to see through the smoke and mirrors.
Connecting the Dots
The first thing to look for in a great marketer is their ability to see the big picture. If you're hiring a content writer, you aren't just looking for someone with a nice turn of phrase and an affinity for puns. They've got to be able to understand intimately why this role is important to your company's marketing, and how it plays into larger awareness and sales goals. Further, it's not enough to be able to scrape together an essay a couple times a week on a topic important to your audience. They need to be able to write non-contextual website copy, advertising copy, mass emails, social media posts, and a myriad of other types of content.
If you're hiring someone on the demand generation side, one way to figure how much of the picture someone sees is to ask them about their funnel. When marketers talk about their funnel, they refer to the journey a contact takes all the way from having no awareness of the company at all to eventually becoming a customer. A sharp marketer will be able to explain to you in depth the numbers at each stage of their own funnel, explaining where people spent the most time and how they went about conquering that.
Are They Plugged In?
For just about any role, you're going to want someone who keeps a beat on their industry. Ask your marketing candidates to list off examples of companies whose marketing they admire, or what resources they read to stay on top of the competition. If they can't list off a couple blogs or companies with stellar marketing, chances are they're not paying much attention to their industry outside of their own responsibilities. Someone who isn't plugged in to the industry will end up being a follower who creates uninspired and unoriginal work.
Sorry for Marketing
As you probably know, there are many different ways to be a marketer. There's product marketing, customer marketing, content marketing, sales enablement, email marketing, and several others. A few years in to their career, most marketers will have tried their hand at a few of these and settled on one area to focus. Ask them why they decided on one area, what they like about that one particularly, and about their experiences in the other branches. This will help you further understand the scope of their knowledge and understanding about how the entire marketing process hangs together.
Had some luck hiring marketers at any level? I'd love to hear about it! See you in the comments.
