MarketPro, a WBENC certified business, opens office in Philadelphia to serve customers in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC.

We are excited to add this location to our current offices in Atlanta and Detroit.

MarketPro – Philadelphia

12^th Floor- East Tower

1500 Market Street,

Philadelphia, PA 19102

About MarketPro:

MarketPro is the leading marketing staffing and marketing recruitment 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 all marketing related disciplines and does so in less time with a higher success ratio than anyone else in the industry

Each new job sounds good when you start, but how can you tell that offer you are about to accept is really going to move your career forward?

At its core, each career transition has three components and if you are an “A” player you want to make sure all three are positive, in order for the move itself to be considered successful.

Ultimately there are no guarantees and things will change after you start or their will be facts that impact your transition that you do not have at the time you must make a decision.

The best place to start is to make sure these three items are in alignment with your ultimate career goals.

1. Role – Is the role a step forward in your career?  Is it either a step-up in responsibility with a like size organization or a lateral move to a larger company?  Additionally does it move you forward on your path to your long-term career goal?
2. Manager – Are you about to go to work for someone you respect?  Most importantly, someone you can learn from?  Someone you will enjoy working with everyday for the next three – five years?
3. Company – Are you about to go work for a great company?  Is it growing?  Is it in an industry that will grow?  Are you passionate about what the company does?  Do you see yourself as someone who fits well into the culture?  Do they have a defined culture?  Can you grow your career without having to leave the organization?

Ultimately on you can decide what is going to be the best career move for you.  How much you are moving away from pain or towards gain? How each step you take puts you on the path to your ultimate career goal.

Also see:  How to Interview

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.

By Bob Van Rossum

Interesting times we are living in, looks like many people are being lulled into a false sense of insecurity.  A belief they can wait until the market turns before they need to take action.  The market is creating a situation where good business people are pretending they do not know how to run their business because they are unable to grasp what to do next.  While others are seeing it clearly and using this as an opportunity to hire the best marketing talent and they are doing so with alarming speed.   We lost a top executive level marketing candidate today as our client has been slow to make a commitment, the second such top candidate we have lost on this search alone. 

But this search is not unique, our clients who are succeeding are the ones moving fast and our clients who are acting like a deer in the headlights, well they are slowing down their search as I will only let them hire an “A” player.  The myth is that there are a lot of talented people in the marketplace.  Reality is there are very talented people looking for a job, but the other reality is companies by and large did not cut their top people, they cut the bottom ten percent.  So you have a dynamic where the marketplace has lots of unemployed people and around 10% – 15% are worth hiring.  For the placements we have made in the last six months, over 82% of candidates hired had a job at the time we found them a new one.  In my decade as a recruiter, I have never seen a better time to add talented marketers to your team and never has it been harder to separate “A” level talent from everybody else.  Our business is growing as companies are realizing the need for an experienced marketing professional to recruit and screen marketing talent, as those looking for a job have become talented at interviewing. 

The most important aspect of what is going on in the market is the work and results being driven by these new marketers.  Our clients have seen themselves leapfrogging their competition with regards to brand awareness and revenue.     

http://www.marketproinc.com

By Bob Van Rossum

Now is a great time to give your company a Talent Advantage.  At a time when most companies are scared to make permanent headcount additions, you can hire an interim CMO on a full-time or part-time basis for less than you can imagine.  Need someone to set online marketing strategy, no problem.    Top companies are not running scared but using the opportunities available in the marketplace to strategically improve their marketing programs for years to come.

Outside experts bring valuable experience to your company.  Now is the time to move your company forward not sit idly and wait out the tough times.  It is time to utilize contractors / consultants to evolve your business. 

Top reasons to move your company forward with outside talent:
Many companies are finding that they get more bang for their buck by consulting with outside experts instead of hiring new staff people. Here’s the logic:

·    Executive Level Talent without a long-term commitment. Most companies avoid hiring the senior level talent they need due to the long-term overhead commitment.  Bring in an executive to set a new course and when they hand over the new plan you existing staff can execute.  If you are expecting your existing staff to get you any farther than they already have, you are likely expecting too much.

·    Ability to insert an entire team.  Many organizations have an area of their business that is behind the competition.  People on your team are already too busy to fix this, but you can easily insert an outside to completely revamp an area of your organization.  We have found many companies have failed to keep pace with web / online marketing.  Good news is help can be on the inside of your organization in about a week.   

·    Ability to scale up or down at will.  Having contractors on staff is much more like dating, as opposed to marrying a full-time employee.  If your needs change, so can the people you have working for you.   

·    Fresh Ideas.  The new team comes from a variety of experience and backgrounds. All companies suffer from group think and limitations based on what they see.  Outsiders avail you to an entirely new set of thoughts and ideas.  They will provide a unique perspective that will increase the productivity of your existing workforce.   

·    Peace of mind.  Would you like a chance to try before you buy? The risk of hiring someone into your organization is significant.  The reality is you can try before you buy at most any level of the organization.  Hiring an employee into your organization means you have made at least a short-term commitment.  If you hired your CMO or web designer on a contract / consulting basis and they are not a culture fit, making a change is fast and easy.   

The concept of outsourcing your CMO is new, while outsourcing your CFO or CIO is more common.  Ultimately outsourcing the CMO function makes more sense.  Companies with more than $ 1B in revenue must have a CMO, about half of smaller companies are better off with a strong VP and they bring in an interim CMO for 3 months a year to set strategy.  The quality of your marketing will increase and the cost saving is tremendous.  

By Bob Van Rossum 

www.marketproinc.com

By Bob Van Rossum  

The average CMO tenure is 18 months and the responsibility of this is shared by company and candidate.  Ultimately neither side knows how to properly run the interview process.  Both sides end up making a decision from far too little data.  If you are interviewing for a CMO job and want to make sure you can succeed when you get there you need to prepare properly for the interview.  From the interview, the candidate needs to glean the corporation’s vision of marketing.  Does this vision actually match the expectations of the job you will do? 

Too often, corporations have lofty marketing goals, but are unwilling to give the CMO the latitude to create marketing programs that will make those goals possible.  Bottom line is to achieve success in today’s marketplace you must successfully differentiate your brand and products.  However most corporations take a risk adverse approach to marketing that leaves them with a lot of me too advertising, you can throw away remarkable amounts of money when your advertising looks like all your competitors.  You always have to protect your brand, but you can do that and still have great marketing.  Unfortunately it is rare a CEO knows enough about marketing to understand what differentiation is, let alone why it is important.  That is not to take anything away from a person who is probably extremely qualified to be the CEO, most CEO’s simply have not spent any significant time during their careers in a marketing role.  So they manage the CMO the same way they manage the CFO and it quickly becomes a disaster. 

As a candidate for a CMO gig, you need to ask some vital questions?  Some of which will seem very basic, but are overlooked most of the time:

1.       How do you plan to define success for the new CMO in the first 12 months and the first 3 years? 

2.       Does [COMPANY NAME] have a marketing strategy to differentiate itself from the competition or are you looking for the CMO to create such a strategy?

3.       How does the company’s culture impact its marketing?

4.       How would you grade the company’s marketing over the past year?

5.       How has marketing impacted the company’s bottom line over the past couple of years?

Properly hiring a CMO is the most important and challenging task any organization has.  Unfortunately the CMO candidate often fails before they ever started because they did not find out enough about the opportunity before accepting.  CMO will have big deliverables, which can be obtained if they hire the best possible candidate and give him/her the enough latitude to truly differentiate.  Too often new CMO’s are expected to do great things while only painting inside the lines.    

Recommended CMO Reading:

1. Eating the Big Fish
2. The Speed of Trust
3. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

www.marketproinc.com

Simply having a professional looking and up-to-date resume is no longer enough to help you secure a new marketing position. Web 2.0 exposure is quickly becoming a real-time living, breathing demonstration of your expertise. Social networking sites can tell colleagues and potential employers what you know, who you know, and what you’ve done. But in order to leverage that tool for your next marketing job search, you need to know which sites to concentrate on. Then, highlight your skills and expertise for the whole world to see. You never know who may be “following” you—possibly your next employer!

Whether you’re looking for a job now, or anticipate making a change at some point in your career, now is the time to put your best foot forward in the social marketing arena. Recruiters and prospective employers will be googling your name and seeing what pops up. Years ago, resumes and CVs were the main tool for showcasing your past positions and skills, and while they are still important, interested parties can find so much more information online. They can see how involved you are in your industry, get a sense of your personality, and see if you play (interact) well with others. No matter how far off your next job search is (and do you ever really know?), you need to utilize Web 2.0 to stand out above the crowd.

The best social networking sites allow you to interact with others and make your statement on the marketing world by building your name recognition, highlighting your accomplishments, and building valuable connections.

LinkedIn is one of the top social networking sites in the business world. There you can fill out your profile (don’t forget to upload your professional headshot!), connect with other people you know and trust, and post questions (and answers!) to your group.

Article marketing can help develop your expert platform. Pick a topic you know and write an article about it. Send it to professional associations you belong to, post them on your website or blog, and submit them to article submission services. Don’t forget to include your author box, which is like free advertising for your business. A word of caution though—make sure your articles contain useful information and aren’t overly self promotional or they might get rejected.

Blogging is an effective tool for easily demonstrating your expertise.  Remember to keep your blogs relevant and that quality is more important than quantity. Schedule “write blog post” assignments in your calendar so you don’t forget to update it. A couple times a week is ideal, but no less than a few times a month. And don’t forget that blogging is a two-way street. Comment on other blogs too! Readers of popular blogs may just click back through the comment you left and become new fans of yours. Look into guest blogging opportunities, comment on local news blogs, industry blogs, and on blogs of colleagues with similar interests to yours.

Twitter, a site for microblogging, is a rapidly growing, low-time investment way to keep active in your profession. Short, 140 character updates go out to those subscribed to you. Just like blogs, don’t forget to comment on other people’s posts to build relationships.  The real value of Twitter is in who you chose to follow, if you chose wisely you might just learn something yourself.  Try TweetDeck to keep it all sorted.  

Of course, there are many more social networking opportunities out there and new ones crop up all the time. Look for those that allow you to showcase your expertise, connect with others you respect, and grow your fan base. Don’t forget to update your status and posts regularly, just as you regularly check and respond to emails and keep appointments. Networking with fellow marketing colleagues today may just land you a great new marketing position tomorrow.

www.marketproinc.com  

By Bob Van Rossum 

By Bob Van Rossum 

Gone are the days when throngs of salesmen in penny loafers knocked on businesses’ doors one by one in hopes of introducing, educating, and converting those “blind” prospects into long-term customers. Thirty years ago, there were only a handful of ways prospects could get information from anyone other than your sales force. Now, your marketing department has assumed the role of educating your customers, and your sales team’s role has shrunk to simply converting interested and educated prospects into buyers. Plain and simple, marketing has trumped sales in the corporate hierarchy.

Marketing today is a complicated game. Back in the 1970’s, your company might have spent almost its entire marketing budget on television commercials to run during I Love Lucy, or bought up a bunch of newspaper ads or radio spots. These choices alone would allow you to reach your target audience. Not anymore. Focusing your marketing efforts with laser accuracy has replaced broadcasting. Now your marketing department needs to know where and how they can reach your targeted demographic.

Read more: http://www.marketproinc.com/success/why_marketing.html