If you’ve been hiring (or trying to hire) marketing analytics talent to grow your business lately, you’ve probably noticed that it’s really, really difficult. But as analytics becomes an increasingly critical pillar of any modern marketing strategy, that difficulty is a challenge businesses must be able to overcome if they hope to remain competitive and drive better marketing ROI.
The first step to overcoming any challenge is understanding the underlying factors that cause it. Here are the major obstacles that make finding, recruiting and hiring the brilliant marketing analysts your business needs such a struggle:
The Name of the Game Has Changed
Analysts have traditionally played the job of “number cruncher,” analyzing hard data and producing reports.
In today’s marketing, that just isn’t good enough. Modern marketing analysts must be more than just data processors; they must be able to transform their findings into actionable insights for marketers. Marketing analytics recruiting should prioritize identifying people with a marketer’s attitude and viewpoint to discover the actual potential behind the data.
Marketing experts’ notion of success has shifted. Instead of just reporting, today’s marketing analysts are required to convey stories and participate in high-level strategic decision-making. This necessitates a rare blend of hard and soft talents, as well as the ability to evaluate data implications on a macro level for the organization as a whole.
This significantly reduces the possible talent pool since it means you can’t just hire any analysts and expect them to fit into your marketing department.
Demand is at an All-Time High
Demand in marketing analytics has grown steadily since interest in the discipline first spiked around ten years ago.
Click here to see the most up-to-date interest trend from Google.
But as the value of exceptional digital analytics talent has become more evident and more companies have opened up related positions, not enough expert analysts have stepped in to fill those seats. At this rate of demand, our economy will be facing a shortage of nearly 200,000 needed analysts within just a couple of years.
That talent isn’t going to come out of nowhere; great marketing analysts don’t grow on trees. And colleges aren’t in a position right now to be producing effective marketing analysts that are ready to enter the workforce and hit the ground running. This deficit is driving many organizations toward marketing analytics staffing to get immediate access to to desperately needed marketing analytics insights.
These kinds of professionals only develop through time and hands-on expertise, meaning the supply will take quite a while to catch up to the demand. In the meantime, that will also mean that the top professionals in the available talent pool won’t come cheap.
Proven Rock Stars are Hard to Find
You’d think that in a field full of data trackers and attribution specialists, everyone would be very good at showing their prior performance and describing how they contributed to an organization’s marketing growth.
However, we’ve discovered that this isn’t always the case. Even the most brilliant marketing candidates for a marketing analytics executive search aren’t always conscientious about documenting their work and demonstrating their worth. Many phenomenal professionals work in businesses that concentrate monitoring on “soft” measures or out-of-date KPIs, which limits (to a degree) the information they can offer about their progress.
Separating the excellent from the exceptional analysts becomes much more difficult as a result, and the significant investment in fresh analytical talent becomes increasingly riskier.
They Favor Exciting, Exotic Career Opportunities
The kind of professionals that make excellent marketing analysts are also the sort of people that actively pursue novel, cutting edge positions at trendy, exciting companies.
Nearly every business of any size can make use of marketing analytics experts–but those experts tend to look for opportunities in extremely innovative, dynamic organizations. So they may be inclined to overlook your positions in favor of that hip new startup or flashy tech giant, even if your company is a great place to work. If you want to attract them over trendier competition, you’ll have to find ways to spice up your marketing analytics recruitment and catch their eye.
Keeping Up With Analytics is a Never-Ending Race
The field of marketing analytics is constantly in flux. It’s hard to become an expert in the first place–and even harder to stay that way. One-time pros who were once the cream of the crop can move back to the middle of the pack in just a year or two if they’re not keeping their skills sharp and staying on top of the latest tactics and tools.
As demanding as most marketing analytics jobs are, most professionals don’t have a lot of spare time to spend researching new trends or learning emerging tools. The few individuals who can consistently perform at work while staying on the cutting edge of analytics are incredibly rare.
The Analytics Language Barrier
Marketing analytics has become so advanced, it has its own diction full of acronyms and highly technical terms that practically sounds like a foreign language. Individuals that aren’t fluent in analytics-speak will have a hard time engaging an experienced expert that thinks in those terms. As smart as he or she may be, your standard HR recruiter or hiring manager very often will not be able to understand or communicate with an advanced marketing analyst about their experience, success, capabilities, and interests. This may discourage many individuals, who prefer to work in an environment where their abilities are fully recognized.
At the end of the day, this is why a majority of top companies rely on their collaboration with an experienced marketing analytics recruiter. Whether it is within or outside of the company, you need someone who can have meaningful conversations with top analytics talent and draw them to your business.
