Marketing is becoming increasingly fragmented, with niche specialties offering tremendous opportunities for those who can take advantage of them. But that often requires a very unique set of technical expertise, industry experience and a mindset that thrives in your corporate environment. In order to draw the specialized skills you need to your team adjust your hiring strategy to get the attention of more qualified candidates.
It’s already difficult to find individuals with the right combinations of skills, experience and attitude. Filling positions with very specific and uncommon marketing talent is even harder—especially since all the best marketers who have it are already employed and not looking for work. If you’re having trouble finding qualified applicants, use these tactics to get their attention.
1. Improve Your Job Description
The talent you need is almost certainly out there—but maybe they wouldn’t know how to find you even if they were looking because your job description is outdated, poorly worded, or written by someone with little understanding of advanced modern marketing. Using an archaic title or the wrong vocabulary for the skills you need mean it’s difficult for qualified marketers to encounter or be interested in your job.
Make sure you’re using the appropriate industry terms and modern explanations of the role’s responsibilities. You might have a very clear vision of what this role will do, but it will go unfulfilled unless you can translate that to a language top marketers understand.
Not sure what’s right for your description? You’re not alone. Marketing is evolving so quickly, what would have made a perfect posting a few years ago is often completely irrelevant now. Unless you have a constant bird’s-eye view of the industry, it’s difficult to keep your marketing needs updated. Consider looking for a competitor’s description of a comparably position, or consult with a marketing job description expert like a marketing recruiter.
2. Optimize Your Employer Brand
Just as you sell your consumer brand to customers, you also sell your own brand as an employer to potential workers. A strong employer brand as a good workplace for marketers will increase your visibility and attractiveness to qualified candidates of all kinds. Nurture a reputation as an employer that treats its marketers fairly, encourages them to innovate and provides great opportunity for growth.
If you haven’t put much thought into your employer brand yet, you’ll have to start with an objective self-evaluation. From there, you can improve it by making the candidate experience less stressful, taking care of your current employees so they become brand advocates, and adjust your recruiting and hiring processes so they provide a consistent experience. For more on optimizing your employer brand for marketers, click here.
3. Reevaluate Your Compensation
Everyone has a price. If you know people exist that have the skills and experience you need but are still not willing to make the switch, it may be because you’re not offering a sweet enough deal.
Career moves are disruptive and sometimes risky for employees, occasionally requiring relocation and lifestyle changes. And the cost of top-tier marketing talent has risen significantly over the past few years. If you haven’t been hiring a lot of top-level marketers, your current perception of a reasonable rate might be outdated.
In order to bring in high-achieving marketers, you have to offer compensation that’s competitive enough to consider the change. You must also provide other less tangible, yet no less important things that results-driven individuals want:
- The ability to grow their talent and opportunity to advance their career
- Interesting and compelling new challenges
- Greater authority and responsibility
- Recognition and reward for their success
If you don’t quite have the budget to make it work, you may need to reconsider your hiring strategy. Maybe using a flexible staffing solution, training your current marketers, or looking for a more junior candidate would be a better solution.
4. Use Expert Talent Hunters (Like Marketing Recruiters)
For you, finding rare individuals with very specific marketing capabilities is probably not a common occurrence. But for others, it’s their daily work. Marketing recruiters work day in and day out to find, contact, and attract top-performing marketers of all kinds for their clients. From established positions that are staples in any marketing team to highly specialized niche experts, to experience leaders and marketing executives, they encounter and place marketers of every field and level on a regular basis.
Top marketing recruiters build vast networks and deep talent pools to draw on at any time. They know which regions breed the best in specific fields and where to look for specific skillsets. Just as importantly, they know how to communicate with performance-driven marketers and can convince them to consider a job switch.
Instead of burdening your hiring team with what seems like an impossible search, you can save time and resources by turning it over to marketing recruiters. They’ll take time to understand your situation, needs, and vision for the position, then leverage their experience and network to identify and get the attention of qualified candidates.
