By Bob Van Rossum

A recent article on www.cnn.com, entitled “Say goodbye to full-time jobs with benefits“, discusses the trend we are seeing towards an interim workplace.  Employers are looking to simply get work done, not necessarily add to headcount.  The article does a good job of describing the trend and why it exists.  Ultimately it understates how high up the corporate ladder this change is taking place and for how long the change will occur.

The fastest growing part of our business is our interim marketing executives.  Not necessarily the Chief Marketing Officer, but every position reporting to the CMO is now open for a discussion on whether it needs to be a permanent headcount or whether the needs of the corporation are better served by an interim professional.

Historically our contract staffing business has been more tactical (junior level) professionals and our executive search group handled placing marketing executives directly into corporations.  Currently our contract staffing business is experiencing growth, but it is at the senior strategic level where we are seeing the biggest shift.  Now for every two senior searches we engage in, one is for an interim marketing executive.  

This shift is significant and logical.  The world is changing quickly and as a CMO, the talent you need today might not be the talent you need a year from now.  Are you sure you want to invest in full-time headcount when the world around you dictates their skills might be less relevant to you in a year?  Do you really need an expensive marketing consultant when an interim marketing professional with strategy and implementation experience is available to you?  

The shifts in the marketplace regarding an increased pace of change and continued pressure on costs are here to stay, which means this trend is here to stay as well, long after unemployment dips back below 5%.

By Bob Van Rossum

There is a lot of bad data out there on how to prepare for an interview, much of which is actually counterproductive to the process.  Please DO NOT go out on Google, search for sample interview questions about behavioral interviews or any other type of interview process and waste your time writing out and memorizing answers to these questions.  The result is likely to be disaster, first you have no idea what type of questions the interviewer will ask. Even if you hear from someone who has interviewed there before that Company X uses behavioral interview techniques, you do not really know if they do or just the person they interviewed with did.  Additionally, no matter what methodology a company uses there are always multiple high ranking employees who can’t be bothered to learn the process and therefore interview the same way they always have.   So now your friend told you to prepare for behavioral based questions and you spend hours doing so and you go in and the very first interviewer asks none of the questions you have painstakingly memorized questions for, first you get a little nervous, second your confidence goes downhill and next you are fumbling for answers to even the most basic questions.  You just lost the opportunity to work for this company.  Worse is you go in and they ask you exactly the questions you are expecting and you answer them all based on the memorization game you played with yourself.  You leave the interview feeling great and you never hear from that company again.  You have been rejected and they never even bothered to call and let you know, let alone let you know why.  In this case the reason you were rejected was your answers sounded rehearsed and therefore fake.  Best case scenario is you lacked credibility, worst case scenario they just flat out did not believe you.   When you interview you are competing and when you compete with others of similar skills and background, it is individual most prepared who will win.  How are you separating yourself from the competition?

Check out:

How to Prepare for an Interview

The Phone Interview

MarketPro – is the leading marketing staffing and marketing recruitment firm utilizing top marketers to find you top marketing talent.

 By Bob Van Rossum

After you know How to Prepare for an Interview you can learn some specifics about the phone interview. 

The phone interview is inherently challenging as you lose the non-verbal feedback you receive in a face-to-face interview.  Ultimately this leads to some common mistakes.  

Phone interview Do’s and Don’ts:

1. Do NOT under any circumstances have the pages of notes you have created about your career in front of you when you interview.  You do not want to use the notes as a crutch, you do not want to be fumbling through paper looking for an answer and most of all you do not want to sound like you are reading the answer.
2. Be in a quiet place where you can focus on nothing but the interview.  Door closed.
3. Do not be doing anything else, watching the news, sending an instant message, checking e-mail.  The interviewer deserves your undivided attention.  Television off, computer off, cell phone off.
4. Make the call from a land line.  Nothing ruins a phone interview faster than a dropped cell phone call. 
5. Be formal, interviews are naturally a formal process.  You need to be at least as formal on the phone as you would be in person.  Leave the sarcasm and wit for after you already have the job.
6. Do not feel the need to fill up every moment of silence with the sound of your voice.  Answer the question, fully and completely, demonstrating results / achievements and be quiet.  The interviewer is now deciding which question to ask you next, a common mistake at this moment is to get nervous due to the silence and spend the next 30 minutes giving the interviewer a running commentary on your life since age 2.  I have never seen this work very well, I have seen candidates do this after I have warned them not to. 
7. Do have 4 or 5 questions prepared for the end of the interview.  You should have approximately 3 questions prepared related to the company and the job. 
8. Most importantly, close the interview showing you are results oriented, you are interested in the job and ask for the next step.  While you are at it, go ahead and learn what the real job description is:

Phone interview Final Questions: (Separate yourself from the others)

The final two questions I want you to ask after you come up with two or three of your own.  The 2 or 3 of your own will be around the job / company / opportunity.  These are the standard questions about products, job, scope of responsibility, etc. 

The final two questions are important, just like an in person interview, people will remember the beginning and the end.  Your goal at this point in time is to be invited in for an in person interview.  Do not put the cart before the horse and ask for the job, they do not have enough data on you to award it yet. 

The last question you want to ask the interviewer will vary based on who you are interviewing with hiring manager or human resources. 

Time is precious in the interview and asking the right questions is as important if not more important than answering questions well.  Assume you are competing against other talented professionals and everyone will have strong answers for the interviewer, so far you are only equal to the others.  Now is an opportunity to separate you from the pack.  You will not receive the same amount of time to ask questions that the interviewer will so let’s make sure the questions you do ask really count.  

Hiring Manager:

Second to last question – [FIRST NAME], I really appreciate your time today.  The [INSERT JOB TITLE HERE] role is one I am very excited about, it is a great next step for my career.  I believe I can really come in and add value to the role and the team.  Let’s look out 12 to 18 months and assume I have been able to exceed ALL your expectations.  What have we accomplished and how is the company better off for the effort?

That is a long question but as I said, you do not have much time to communicate your questions.  With this question, you have actually accomplished 4 very important things.

1. You have shown interest in the specific role, the importance of this cannot be overstated.
2. You have shown you are team oriented.
3. You have shown you are results focused.
4. Most importantly if you listen carefully you are about to understand:
   1. The real job description
   2. How to be successful in your first 12 months.

The real job description is something you need to uncover in the interview process.  Chances are the written one was created five years ago by someone other than the hiring manager.  Uncovering the true needs of the position is going to help you prepare for your in-person interview. 

The first year on any job is your most critical time.  Of the people who do not succeed, sometimes it is truly a lack of ability.  Most often it is a misalignment of hiring manager’s expectations with what the new employee sees as important.  New employee is using the job description the hiring manager received from HR and never actually read.

Last question – [FIRST NAME], this sounds like a great time to be joining [COMPANY NAME].  I am impressed with where the company is going and what I have learned about the team.  Do you have any concerns about moving me forward to the next step in the interview process?

With this question you have accomplished three critical items.

1. You have shown interest in the company.  This is equally and important as showing interest in the job and almost always over looked.
2. You have opened a window for them to express any concerns / objections they might have and therefore an opportunity for you to overcome them.  Many times a simple miscommunication derails an interview process.  If they have already decided to take you to the next step or to eliminate you from the process they will not mention anything.  If they are unsure of their decision they will share a concern with you.
3. Psychologically it is harder to say no to someone who asks to go to the next step than it is to say no to someone who does not.

By Bob Van Rossum

The most important thing to remember when preparing for an interview is:  The Company is NOT hiring you, they are hiring what you can DO for them.  The second thing to remember is interview performance is not indicative of job performance, which means the best candidate does not get the job, the candidate who interviews the best does.   An interview is an opportunity and when opportunity meets preparation you get success. 

The key to success in any interview is professional self awareness. 

If you have ever left an interview and thought of a better answer to one of the questions on the way home in your car, you were not appropriately prepared when you walked in.

Ultimately we want to avoid this scenario.  I get a call from the candidate after they leave my clients office after running through 4 or 5 interviews with various members of the team. As I pick up the phone, I am immediately struck by their enthusiasm.   “Bob, thank you for sending me in to this interview, this is a perfect next step for me in my career.  This opportunity has everything I am looking for.  The company is growing, the hiring manager is someone I can learn from.  I will have the opportunity to really create something.”  To which I say, “Great, tell me about how the interviews went.”  Oh everything went fantastic, I really felt strong I answered all the questions really well, there was this one question I did not answer very well, probably not a big deal, but if I just had more time to think about it, I would have had a great answer for them.  As soon as I got to my car I remembered the perfect example to share with them.    Should I mention something about it in my thank you note?  To which, I already know that the thank you note is now completely irrelevant. 

If you spent 2 hours learning about the company, you need to spend 8 hours relearning yourself.  If you have been in the real world for more than 100 days, you have accomplished many things and forgotten most of them.  Trying to remember them on the spot in the middle of an interview is an incredibly bad idea.  It only takes one bad answer to ruin your chances at the job of your dreams. 

I want you to sit down in quiet place and hand write out everything significant or interesting you have done in your career.  You need to hand write it as most of us are more creative when writing by hand versus typing.  You are going to break your background into 3 separate areas, first functional, second is leadership and third is culture.  I want you to take time to go through every role you have ever worked in, this could be multiple roles within the same organization and answer some very important questions. 

In regard to your specific job / function:

1. What was it like to work at the company during this time?
2. What were our challenges?
3. What were my individual goals?
4. Most importantly what were the quantifiable results achieved.  What would I define as my biggest accomplishments?
5. Why those results were important to the company.

In regard to your leadership ability: (if you have not had management responsibilities, you can skip this)

1. What is my leadership style?  Why?
2. Number of direct reports in each of your previous roles and total # on your team.
3. Top hiring success?
4. Example of a time I turned a mediocre performer into a top performer?
5. How do you motivate your team?
6. Most difficult management decision?

With regard to culture:

1. What was the culture of the organization?
2. Did the culture help or hinder success?
3. What would I have changed about the culture if I was empowered to do so?

After you go through all this one time this will become a working document.  You will add notes in the margin as you think of them.  You want to review your notes in detail 3 or 4 times prior to your interview.  Leave the notes at home, you do not want anyone you are interviewing with to see it.  If this is a phone interview DO NOT have the notes in front of you while you are on the phone.  It is not appropriate to be fumbling through your notes looking for answers, nor do you want to sound like you are reading your answers. 

The ultimate purpose of doing this is threefold:

1. To bring all your significant accomplishments to the top of your mind where you can easily access them.  You are now prepared to answer any question they ask because you know yourself.   You can easily access your best answer every time.
2. To increase your confidence in the interview.
3. You will have such ready access to the best answer you will actually be able to determine in the interview if this is really a place you want to work. 

Preparing this way will make every answer you give incrementally better, when you add all those increments up it makes a huge big difference in setting you apart from your competition.

Also check out The Phone Interview.

Thanks Elaine.

From the article in BrandWeek:

Marketers, then, may be worried, but Van Rossum said this new talent force is in no way a permanent replacement for or danger to the full-time CMO. 

“What we’re seeing is the CMOs themselves are looking for interim marketing execs to come in and fill in gaps in their current team,” he said.

By Bob Van Rossum

A recent BusinessWeek article discusses “The Disposable Worker”.  It does a great job describing the challenges facing today’s workforce.   But for the biggest brands, it shows a growing and necessary trend.  How do I compete on a global scale deploying talent on an as needed basis, increasing my flexibility and decreasing my cost?  Ultimately how does this trend impact how marketing is done inside the enterprise?

Marketing departments are required to provide ever increasing ROI with fewer resources and less budget.  This is difficult to do when you have a large headcount filled with too many generalists.  The marketplace is changing so rapidly it is impossible to keep the perfect balance of skills on your team.  CMO’s are increasingly turning to interim marketing executives to; build an analytics function, launch a new product / brand or handle merger integration. 

Reality is your headcount is lower than it has been in years leaving your team overworked.  Your internal team does not have the skills or bandwidth to handle a large influx of work and move from execution to strategy.  Outsourcing to an agency or consulting firm is too expensive and your results are limited by the talent they have on their team / bench.  Alternatively for significantly less money, you can have an interim executive who has direct industry experience working by your side on a daily basis. 

In the end you get much more than just a recommendation you would receive from a consulting process.  You get a recommendation from someone who knows what it is like to live in an enterprise like yours, so the recommendation is one that can be implemented and then they stay around for as much of the actual implementation as you see fit.

By Bob Van Rossum 

The CMO role is changing more rapidly than any other “C” suite position.  CMO’s and the COO’s or CEO’s who manage them are scrambling to keep up.  While CMO’s used to be able to get away with understanding brand and advertising, this is no longer enough.  Any CMO with this selective toolbox is only going to provide a very limiting solution to their employer.  Hiring a CMO with this limited view of marketing is one of the reasons the average CMO tenure is 18 months.

Today’s CMO needs to understand how the business works.  This seems obvious, but too often marketing is relegated to the “make things pretty department”.  Only a CMO who understands the business deserves a seat at the big table.  If you are savvy enough to drive corporate strategy then you have the insight necessary to be a great CMO.

Analytics will drive your decisions.  Historically the most persuasive person on the marketing team was the one who was able to get ideas started and implemented.  Today, it all starts with customer data and dispassionate analysis.  We are seeing a trend of top analytics executives being promoted to CMO.  I expect the pace of that trend to accelerate. 

The CMO job is getting more difficult by the day.  New pressures include the evolving media landscape, economic uncertainty and responsibility for corporate strategy.  Continually we are in a period where more is expected with less. 

In addition to all the traditional responsibilities (branding, direct marketing, market research, etc.) we place on the CMO’s plate.  In order to keep their jobs, CMO’s need:

• Innovation – Both in products and how they market them. 
• Revenue Growth – Sales team is execution, marketing owns the sales strategy.
• Alignment – Cross-functional, global, executive team all need to be aligned with customer.
• Accountability – Both in investment and a focus on constant improvement
• Strategy – Top level CMO’s are driving corporate strategy, marketing strategy and sales strategy using customer centric data.

The result is when done correctly, the CMO is the second most powerful role in the organization.  In the future we will commonly see CMO’s promoted to CEO.

Researchers Also Develop Framework for Classifying Variances in Marketing Leadership Positions Across Companies and Industries Based on Scientific Analysis of Job Descriptions

Atlanta (PRWEB) November 18, 2009 — New research appears to indicate that, despite the volatility that sometimes surrounds the position, the role of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is being created with increasing frequency among publicly-held companies. This finding is the result of two studies conducted by Rajdeep Grewal, Professor of Marketing and Dean’s Faculty Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University, and Rui Wang, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Peking University, Beijing, China. The results are published in the current volume of The Chief Marketing Officer Journal (www.ChiefMarketingOfficer.com).

The purpose of the research effort was to answer several questions about the role of heads of marketing, such as: Are all CMOs created equal?; Are there any systematic differences in the job descriptions of CMOs versus those of a vice president (VP) of marketing in firms without the CMO position?; What are the ramifications of any such differences in the role and expectations of CMOs and VPs of marketing for firms and the heads of marketing?; Is the “Chief Marketing Officer” title just glorified nomenclature for the VP Marketing?

Read more: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/11/prweb3218374.htm

By Bob Van Rossum 

We are seeing many companies invest in senior level strategists in areas of innovation, brand, e-commerce, etc.   This makes perfect sense as both large and small organizations need to compete in the current economic climate but do not want to add to full-time headcount.  Bringing in a marketing consultant for 6 months allows you to move your company forward but not permanently increase overhead.

So if you find yourself in the position of needing some top notch talent to consult on your marketing needs, what should you be looking for?  Interestingly, not a consultant, you need a marketing practitioner. 

Marketing has changed so much in the past 5 years and the velocity of that change is increasing.  It is moving so fast, a lot of marketers (not just consultants) find themselves in a place where their skills are irrelevant.  Ultimately, since 2005 the big changes have happened inside corporate marketing departments, not at consulting firms.  Therefore, you do not want to hire a consultant who has not seen any of these changes first hand.  What you need is someone who has successfully moved the needle from inside a corporate structure.  They will readily understand where your company is, what challenges you face and how best to overcome them.  You want someone from outside your organization to bring in innovation and to take your company to a place it cannot go with the current team.  Face facts: you cannot possibly be assured of success if you choose and individual or firm who has failed to execute something in the past 5 years or longer.  So where are we drawing the line?  Ultimately somewhere in 2005, if you are looking at bringing in an individual or firm, study their bios carefully.  If they have done nothing but consulting since 2005 or longer, they are no longer relevant as an expert marketer.  They have been removed from the corporation at a time when you cannot possibly appreciate all the change from the outside. 

Fortunately this is good news, with consultants come oversized mark-ups, bring in an interim marketing executive to improve results while reducing cost.

By Bob Van Rossum 

We all know that a top performer is ten times more productive than an average performer and they only earn about ten percent more.  The bottom line impact of having an “A” player on your team is enormous.  Ultimately, Corporate America is interesting in the fact that due to pay grades and internal equity, rock stars get paid about the same as the kid in the high school band.  No one needs to be reminded of the cold, hard truth that your job rides on the quality of the talent you are surrounded by. That in mind, who do you want to go to battle with everyday?  Bono or the pimply faced kid playing the trombone? 

As organizations have reduced headcount overall and eliminated the fat they have become laser focused on cost in ways that are counterproductive.  You cut the bottom ten percent of your workforce because expenses were out of line with revenues.  Now it is time to make some strategic investments in talent and your process for doing so is to hope you find an “A” player who fell into another corporation’s bottom ten percent?  If so, you are asking for an underperforming professional and to have to do the search over again in twelve to eighteen months.  It is true that there are some very talented people in today’s job market.  However they are clearly the exception rather than the rule.  If you look at the placements our firm has made over the past 18 months, 84% of the candidates we have presented to our clients have been in a position or employed at the time we submitted them for consideration.  These passive candidates resulted in 93% of our placements.  Interesting that at a time when unemployment is around 9%, our clients are overwhelmingly convinced the best talent is not out looking.  When compared side-by-side, you are able to see their simply is no comparison.   

Today it is more important than ever to have quality people in your organization.  Simple math really, you have fewer people doing more work.  With an increased importance being placed on marketing, nowhere is this more important than in the group responsible for differentiating you from your competitors.  Peter Drucker says, “All business in marketing and innovation, everything else is just an expense.”

Business is harder than ever, we are still in a recession and not sure what the new “normal” is.  Globalization puts constant pricing pressure on companies who do not have that level of competition built into their cultures.  If you hope to compete and win, it is vital that you have the best possible people on in your organization.  Yet the strategy many executives carry to their HR organization is DO NOT spend any money on search fees.  Even worse, they tie the bonus of the HR executive to how little they spend on search fees.  How about we tie the bonus of the HR executive to the quality of hire?  If you send your hiring manager enough average candidates, sooner or later they will find a bad excuse to hire one of them to the detriment of your bottom line.   

I believe that eighty percent of organizations have quality people working in HR and recruiting.  Problem is based on who they are, they cannot effectively research, target, contact and most importantly convince passive candidates to join your team.  RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) companies have not improved upon this they have just shifted an identical process to outside your company.  You get prettier reports, but not better talent.  The only tried and true method for attracting the best passive candidates to your team is to call an executive search firm.  Most importantly pick one who is at the top of their specialty.  The best search firms know they cannot be all things to all people and can move exponentially faster when they niche focused.     

Not everyone in the executive search business is an “A” player their respective niche.  The best ones hire people with domain expertise in the area of specialty and train them to be top recruiting professionals.  For example, you cannot recruit a top marketing professional if you have never worked in a marketing role.  Globally, the recession will end soon enough.  Your company’s ability to come out of its own doldrums and grow again is 100% dependent on the quality of your team.  Are you surrounded by rock stars motivated to do great things or kids from the high school band just looking to get by?  The deck is stacked against you if you are looking to hire another organization’s castoffs.