Hiring Marketing Talent: 26% of Marketers Say It’s a Problem… A Marketing Executive Search Firm Can Help
With each new marketing channel and tool, marketing analytics becomes a bit more layered and complicated. Understanding analytics and how to apply them to your future marketing campaigns is essential to your company’s growth. But it turns out that not all companies are able to find the help that they need. Marketing executive search firms can help to identify this unique marketing skill-set.
Of all of the options 26 percent of those surveyed said that hiring data-savvy marketing talent was the most frustrating. And we understand that pain! Marketing requires a special set of skills. There are the technical skills that go into understanding and using analytics tool, and there is also the creative side. Getting the right combination of those skills in the same person – for the right price – can be difficult.
If you agree with the marketers in Marketing Sherpa’s survey, there’s something you can do about it. Working with a marketing executive search firm, rather than going it alone, can help you easily find the contract, direct-hire or contract-to-hire expertise that you need at your company.
A marketing executive search firm can help you screen through candidates quickly to find out if they have the important data and analytics skills that you need. They can even find a contract-to-hire marketers so you can “test drive” their skills.
What You Need to Know When Looking for a Marketing Leader – Tips from a Marketing Executive Search Firm
Adding new employees to your company is always a challenge – but it can be especially difficult to find the right marketing leader. Marketing leaders can make or break your company’s future. Their leadership directly influences every other part of your business. So you need to be sure you’re making the right selection.
Here’s what you need to know when you start looking for a marketing leader.
Get clear on what you need.
A successful hiring process starts with knowing what you need out of a marketing leader. You’ll need to create a summary overview of what the position will cover. This includes not only the day to day responsibilities, but any opportunities that might lie on the horizon. This could include opportunities to launch new projects and handle special tasks.
In addition to the details about the position, you’ll also want to include some behavioral traits that you’re looking for in a marketing leader. For example, marketing professionals in a leadership position should have managerial skills, be detail oriented, be able to work in a fast-paced environment and be self-motivated. Any of these traits should go into your needs list which will help you create an advertisement for the position.
The business mentality that your staff operates under shapes the company culture. If you don’t have this clearly defined, you can start by asking a series of questions like “What is valued and rewarded in our workplace?” “What is it like to work here?” and “What kind of personalities succeed here?” Getting a clear idea on who you are will help you find the right fit.
Consider Getting Recruiting Help
Finding a marketing leader isn’t like making a hire for the mailroom. There’s a lot of thought and consideration that needs to go into hiring the right marketing talent. That’s why top companies look for marketing staffing agencies to help fill these key positions.
Marketing executive search firms know who the top people are in the field, so they’re more likely to find a fit for your company than if you tried on your own. They’ll also be able to ask important questions about your company culture and your requirements so you can find the leader who will take your company to the next level.
Why is Cultural Assessment a Key to Recruiting Marketing Talent?
What makes your company tick? If a hire is going to be the best fit for your company, they have to both have the marketing know-how and be able to fit in. Top marketing recruiters know that without a cultural assessment, the whole marketing recruitment process will be a waste of your time and money.
Since nobody wants that (especially me), there are some important questions your marketing recruiter should ask before starting your search.
Asking the question “What is your company culture?” rarely produces a good response. So we’ve come up with some specific questions that we use to complete a cultural assessment.
They include:
What is valued and rewarded in your culture?
What is it like to work in your culture?
What does it mean to be a good steward of your culture?
What kind of personalities succeed in your culture?
What kind of personalities struggle in your culture?
Questions like these help us become a fly on the wall in your company—without actually being on staff full time. They help us get to know who you’re really looking for. Resumes don’t tell the whole story. Two candidates could have nearly identical resumes but fit into the culture totally differently. With a culture assessment, we’ll be able to tell which of these candidates would be the best fit.
Getting to know your company the best way to screen people and send you the top candidates. Is your marketing recruiter using a cultural assessment? If not, it may be time to find a new one.
Do you have a lot of marketing talent to hire in a short amount of time? You know they have to be right on the money so how do you do it? I find that many of our clients that come to me are in the same boat and here’s what I recommend: Recruitment Process Outsourcing, or RPO
The most effective tool I’ve employed to help top agencies recruit large numbers of top marketing talent is Recruitment Process Outsourcing. RPO offers you many benefits: rapid staffing of the best talent, reduced costs, and lower risk.
I also recommend choosing a marketing recruitment firm because I believe it takes a talented marketing recruiter to identify a talented marketer. Here are some tips when selecting a marketing recruiter or retained marketing search firm:
Hiring marketing talent should be the ONLY focus of the marketing staffing firm.
The marketing recruiter should be able to scale up and down quickly, with a lot of agility.
The marketing recruiter should be staffed with marketing professionals who can quickly identify the right talent.
Make sure you partner with a marketing recruiter that understands your company culture.
Regardless of the short time period within which your team must be hired, a marketing recruitment firm will be better able to understand your success factors and values, so that you are provided with the right talent. I believe it takes more than just core competencies and technical skills to build your team; you need people who will be a perfect fit culturally as well. An experienced marketing recruitment firm will have experience vetting people for your desired cultural qualities as well as the core competencies you need.
If you are interested in finding out more about RPO services please contact me at bob@marketproinc.com and make sure to check out our video page to hear directly from clients that have taken advantage of this service to meet their needs.
About MarketPro: Marketing Recruitment – By Marketers for Marketers
MarketPro is the leading marketing staffing, marketing executive search firm and marketing RPO firm in the USA. Whether your need is interim / contract or direct placement, we provide top companies with talent that exceeds expectations both functionally and culturally. Our recruiters know the best marketing talent, because they are experienced marketers. MarketPro places talent in all marketing related disciplines and does so in less time with a higher success ratio than anyone else in the industry.
With a new year brings new marketing projects and initiatives. If you are tasked with doing more with less resources, I often recommend contract marketing staffing as a way to help companies stretch their budgets even further. You can run a tighter, more competitive marketing department and complete more of your projects if you take advantage of some of the benefits of using marketing contract staffing. Here are 5 reasons why you should consider contract marketing staffing:
1) Bridge Your Budget Gaps
If your CFO is balking at the idea of adding additional full time employees, you don’t have to sacrifice your operational goals. Contract marketing staffing can help your meet organizational needs for period of 18 months or longer, bridging the gap as you develop your budget.
2) Invite a Creative Approach
Contract marketing staffing allows your team to “think outside the box” without depleting your marketing overhead dollars. Whether your goal is to bundle products or services or something more basic, such as developing pricing and promotion for wider appeal, bringing in talented contract marketers can give your team the fresh perspective and energy they need.
3) Leads, Leads, and More Leads
It doesn’t seem to matter what industry you’re in; I frequently hear from CMOs that generating customer leads is a continual challenge. One of my favorite ways to use contract marketing staffing to benefit your business is to have a marketing expert engage in a variety of lead campaigns.
4) Reduce Your Overhead
While you may pay your talented contract marketers more in terms of dollar per hour, through deployment of contract staffing, you can save the overhead expense of full-time employee benefits. What can you do with the money you will save on health insurance, retirement pensions, and vacation pay?
5) Legal Insulation
The task of hiring or firing a permanent employee is not an easy task anymore, legally or organizationally. A reputable contract marketing staffing firm insulates your business from potential costly co-employment issues.
These are just some of the reasons why our clients are planning contract marketing staff in 2013. If you are considering contract marketers for your team please contact me at bob@marketproinc.com.
About MarketPro: Marketing Recruitment – By Marketers for Marketers
MarketPro is the leading marketing staffing, contract marketing staffing, marketing executive search firm and marketing RPO firm in the USA. Whether your need is interim / contract or direct placement, we provide top companies with talent that exceeds expectations both functionally and culturally. Our recruiters know the best marketing talent, because they are experienced marketers. MarketPro places talent in all marketing related disciplines and does so in less time with a higher success ratio than anyone else in the industry.
By Bob Van Rossum, President of MarketPro, Inc – a Marketing Executive Search Firm
In talking to business leaders, I’ve discovered that many of them share a common headache: obtaining the best marketing services on a tight budget. As the President of a Marketing Executive Search firm, it’s my priority to find the right talent for a variety of marketing needs. Sometimes, you simply cannot justify high salary positions, but accomplishing your goals without the right talent can be painful. Because interim marketing leaders work on a contract basis, you can bring in top talent at a lower cost without making a long-term commitment.
I’ve found that an interim marketing leader is one of the most effective solutions to help companies reach their goals. An interim marketing leader is an executive level, highly experienced, contract employee who comes into your company for a specific length of time.
When you are making big changes to your brand, introducing a new product or service into a new or existing market or starting a marketing department from scratch, an interim marketing leader will create the most successful strategy, no matter what the size of your company. Interim marketing leaders also offer flexible solutions for your business when you are unsure of what your marketing needs will be.
Whether your goal is to carve new revenue streams or implement rebranding initiatives, an interim marketing leader is an ideal pain reliever that doesn’t add to your long-term bottom line. If you are operating on a sleeker, tighter budget that most of us are learning to navigate, you can now take advantage of a highly skilled marketing strategist to get your plan launched while leaving long-term execution to your core employees.
Not all Marketing Executive Search firms offer Interim Marketing Leader placements; however, MarketPro not only offers this solution to help your business, we excel at it.
If you have any questions about Interim Marketing Executives or how a Marketing Executive Search firm can help your business, please contact me at bob@marketproinc.com
About MarketPro: Marketing Recruitment – By Marketers for Marketers
MarketPro is the leading marketing staffing, marketing executive search firm and marketing RPO firm in the USA. Whether your need is interim / contract or direct placement, we provide top companies with talent that exceeds expectations both functionally and culturally. Our recruiters know the best marketing talent, because they are experienced marketers. MarketPro places talent in all marketing related disciplines and does so in less time with a higher success ratio than anyone else in the industry.
As the President of MarketPro, the top Marketing Recruiters in America, I have the opportunity to meet a lot of people each day and introduce them to what we do and what makes us unique. MarketPro isn’t just any recruiting company we specialize in top-tier marketers and only work with the best and brightest in marketing. If you’re hiring an executive search firm here are 3 reasons why you need marketing recruiters:
Experience: Been There, Done That
When you’re seeking an accomplished marketing executive, you need someone who can work across all specialties, someone more than just an HR person matching skill sets to what they see on a resume. I’ve had CEOs, CMOs, Marketing, and HR Leaders come to us with a variety of needs. Whether they need a marketing executive experienced in public relations, a pro with lead generation, top talent that can hit the ground running with a new marketing campaign, or a web marketer focused on SEO, only a marketing-specific recruiter will understand the challenges and skill sets required for each of the more than 70 marketing disciplines.
Access to Top Talent: The Secret Insider
All of the Marketing Recruiters MarketPro have a marketing background, and there’s a big reason we only hire talented marketing execs to be a part of our team: marketing-specific recruiters are skilled in bringing in the most sought-after talents: the passive candidate. Passive candidates are typically already happily working and may not even be looking for a new position, but that doesn’t stop us. Because marketing is a rapidly-changing profession, actively working execs have their fingers on the pulse of the industry. Using a marketing-specific recruiter provides us with access to the best marketing talent, so that we can put together a team of brighter, better-suited marketing professionals with elevated credentials for you.
Efficiency: Fast Placement is Key
Marketing is one of those disciplines where other recruiters may say they understand it, but they don’t come from it, so they really can’t spot the perfect match when they see it. I call it a gut instinct – an “it takes one to know one” special sauce that can’t be found outside the industry. Our marketing recruiters are able to fill positions more rapidly because they understand how to utilize their experience and skills to recognize a good fit for each candidate placed. Ultimately, a marketing-specific recruiter saves time and money through an in-depth understanding of the industry.
If you are interested in finding out more about MarketPro, the premiere marketing recruitment firm, please contact me at bob@marketproinc.com.
Every company has a personality and a culture. According to George Brandt, your company’s culture is its only true competitive advantage. Whether you are looking for contract, direct-hire, or contract-to-hire expertise, it is important that you find people who have more than just marketing skills: you need people who fit your culture. You cannot build the right team by reviewing resumes. There are nuances to the skill base that make a difference between a talented candidate being a good fit for you and being a costly mistake.
As America’s top-ranked Marketing Recruiter, we know that it’s necessary to learn as much about our clients as we do about the candidates. We work diligently to understand your company and your unique needs in part by understanding your company culture. Business mentality helps shape company culture, but it’s not the only factor. Consider the words you would use to describe another person. Their values, motivations and goals come to mind, because all of these things make up who they are. You wouldn’t pick one trait to define a colleague; similarly, we wouldn’t rely on just one aspect of a client to help us recruit for them. The challenge is that companies don’t always have a strong grasp of their own culture, so they use abstract terms that don’t tell us anything. If they’re growing quickly or flying blind, they may find it difficult to define themselves at all.
We ask our clients a series of questions designed to get a broad sense of how much they really understand about their own culture. Some of these questions include:
What is valued and rewarded in your culture?
What is it like to work in your culture?
What does it mean to be a good steward of your culture?
What kind of personalities succeed in your culture?
What kind of personalities struggle in your culture?
Your answers help us identify the kind of talent you want to find, and then we use this information to spot, recruit, and hire talented candidates, painting a clear picture for them about what it’s like to work for you. The value of having experienced marketers recruiting your talent is our depth of experience in this field. Staring at 100 resumes isn’t going to tell you the kinds of things that one marketer can recognize in another marketer. We work diligently to understand your culture, because assessing senior-level candidates who fit that culture requires more than just vetting resumes; it requires a certain gut instinct. Ultimately, knowing your company’s personality lets us send you the most qualified, experienced marketing professionals with the personality and professionalism that perfectly complement your existing team.
About MarketPro:
MarketPro is the leading interim marketing executive and marketing executive search firm in the USA. Whether your need is interim / contract or direct placement, we provide top companies with talent that exceeds expectations both functionally and culturally. Our recruiters know the best marketing talent, because they are experienced marketers. MarketPro places talent in all marketing related disciplines and does so in less time with a higher success ratio than anyone else in the industry.
Each year the WBENC has its major conference. This year MarketPro will be there in full force. Check out our print ad that will be in the directory handed out to all attendees. We look forward to seeing you in Vegas.
About MarketPro:
A WBENC certified business, MarketPro is the leading marketing staffing and marketing recruitment firm in the US. Whether your need is interim / contract or direct placement, we provide top companies with talent that exceeds expectations both functionally and culturally. Our recruiters know the best marketing talent, because they are experienced marketers. MarketPro places talent all marketing related disciplines, including creative, digital, communications, market research, brand / product management and direct response.
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%.
