You Ask, I Answer: Hiring a Director of Digital Marketing?

In today's episode, Margaret asks, a friend of mine is looking to hire a director of digital marketing, hoping to expand an existing company and their online presence optimization customer reach. What are some of the absolute musts for a job posting and what would you consider overkill? Well, there's a lot of stuff in there, right? Online presence optimization, customer reach. With any kind of hire, with any kind of job, start with the outcome.

What are they expected to generate? Like online presence is kind of an amorphous concept, right? Like, yes, we have online presence. Well, great. How do you measure that?

What are what are the KPIs, the key performance indicators that this person will be responsible for? What will get them a bonus or what will get them fired? That's going to be key to making a good hire. If you know with clarity what it is that this person is ultimately responsible for at the end of the day, then you can make that part of the job description, right? You say, we expect you, director, to generate 2,000 qualified leads per year by whatever legal means necessary, right?

If you have that KPI, then it becomes much easier to figure out, okay, what are the skills and what are the the tools and techniques that you have available to you that would allow you to do that? So for example, you say you're required to generate 2,000 leads per year, and we are a company that is a a Salesforce.com company, and we have Salesforce Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud and all this good stuff, right? Now the job description's actually pretty clear, right? You've got to be able to generate leads. You'll have a target of, you know, however many, and you'll be managing a team of three people to achieve that goal.

And traditionally in the past, the company has used email marketing and social media, whatever. But an a really key consideration here is that if you start with the goal, if you start with the KPI, then as long as you set the parameters, like this is our our marketing tech stack, you don't have to list every single, you know, possible job duty on the job description. Instead, you list the goal, you list the tech stack, and you say when you come in for an interview or when you respond to this posting, tell us how you would do this. Tell us how you would generate 2,000 leads per year. Show us examples of lead generation that you've done in the past, and that will give the hiring manager um a lot of insight into well, this is this is how this person's gonna do the job.

The last director I hired, um, the big pain point for for me and the big responsibility for the job was uh managing a team, right? Uh managing a team well and getting the team to perform well. Uh and they did the the the director I hired didn't have a responsibility for lead generation because that was my job. Uh but the part that I desperately needed help with was managing the team. So when that job posting went up and when uh the job search was going on, that was the the lens through which we were focused and were able to make a really good hire.

If you try and throw every single thing in the job description, you know, uh every possible hat this person could wear, you'll run into two things. One, um, you will get a job description that is very unfocused and will probably be a turnoff to a lot of people because uh as you as uh David Maester says, you know, we we put a we put a little list of everything here so that it communicates clearly we are good at nothing, um and two, that's gonna really bump up the cost of the candidate, right? Because the can you're gonna weed out candidates who may or may not have every single skill, and those people who do, who are qualified are going to be very expensive because you're gonna need them to do everything if if you read the job description carefully. If, on the other hand, the job description is highly focused, your job is demand generation, or your job is audience growth, and that is the key priority for this position and what this position will be doing. We all understand, everybody understands that yes, jobs can change over time.

Uh, positions, needs, corporate priorities, those things change over time. But if you are and your organization is willing to commit time and money and effort to hire a full-time person, whatever that person's responsible for has got to be a pretty big priority. Otherwise, you would have probably outsourced it or hired a contractor or an agency to handle it if it was just a uh a shorter term need or was not a strategic priority that was literally uh the bread and butter of the company. You hire and go through all the commensurate difficulty of hiring for the things that are the highest priority. So, what is that highest priority?

Be a good partner to the candidate, too. Like I said, ask them how would you solve this? How will you approach this? How will you do this job? Uh if the goal is crystal clear, you must generate 2,000 leads.

Tell us how you're gonna do that. Assume you have a small budget, assume you have not nearly as many staff as you would like. Assume that you can't change the technology stack, even though that may or may not be true, how would you within those constraints do the job? And that will give you a tremendous amount of insight into the candidate, how they think, how they solve problems. And because the job description is so broad, so broad, it sounds like they've got the goods when in fact they don't.

They have, you know, their m their knowledge is a mile wide and uh centimeter deep. If on the other hand the job description is generate 2,000 leads a year, it becomes real clear uh whether somebody has the experience to do that, um, or they start throwing up red flags every year, you know, uh everywhere. Like uh, well, I would need a team of twelve to do this, or you know, my last job I have managed a team of fifteen people, and you start listening to this person go, well, what did you do exactly? Well, I managed this and this and this. Like, okay, great, you're you're you're a good manager if you can get the results.

Um, but if there's a if there's a component to the job that is essential to that KPI, and it sounds like that person doesn't have the skill to do that particular task, that will come out more easily if the job description is highly focused rather than a broad scattered mess. Especially if the people doing the interviewing do not have the subject matter expertise that they should in that particular task, which makes sense, it's what you're hiring for, right? Um but you want to be focused so that your BS detectors work better. When you press somebody, okay, well, two thousand leads a year. What's your what what is what are your first ninety days look like?

What happens that first ninety days? Because that's a quarter, right? That's 500 leads. How are you going to generate 500 leads in your first 90 days? You'll get some interesting answers.

And you'll very quickly get someone to realize, ooh, this a it's a a tough challenge. Or they may say, here's here's what we do. We immediately look at uh everything that is in the the sales pipeline is abandoned. Um but we do some retargeting to immediately try and get some easy wins. We what is your email marketing program look like?

When was the last how how often do you send out a newsletter? You don't send out a newsletter, great, we're starting one tomorrow. You start to get very clear responses. So that's how you tackle this. Be focused about the KPIs, and you will get a much easier time job with the job description and with the hiring.

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