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The Marketing market
I’m seeing a regular pattern in the Marketing world, and it’s becoming increasingly frustrating for my candidates.
It’s the 21st century, and we’re legit building robots that can make coffee for us, but god forbid a marketing specialist suggests rolling out a campaign to target a specific niche with analytics to back up the requirement alongside a plan for ROI.
Despite marketing roles really having some great traction in the market at the moment, there are increasing occasions where candidates will come to me stating that a company has made the entire Marketing team redundant.
What? Why? Why are you doing this? Please stop.
It seems that the ‘marketing tasks’ are being absorbed by other areas of the business. ‘Sandra in Accounting has a Facebook account…Hey Sandra, here’s an idea! Can you also handle the companies’ social media?’
Now I’m being overly dramatic about this because it’s a very small minority in the grand scheme of things that do this, but it does baffle me that it’s still going on.
The issue seems to be twofold:
1: Marketing professionals constantly trying to justify their worth and the importance of what they do to stakeholders and business leaders.
Despite probably being the signature on the dotted line, giving manager’s permission to hire the marketing staff required, a common theme for marketing heads, is the constant pushback from business leaders that cannot see the value in their function of the company.
It’s an increasing cry of ‘please allow me to do what I was hired for, trust me, I am experienced in my field, help me to help you’.
It must be a big frustration to have a strategic plan for how you’d go about nailing a project, pitching it with excitement, and being told no. The end game of being constantly being told no, is that nothing changes, the company doesn’t progress, and who gets the ‘blame’ for that? The marketing team. It’s a bit of a vicious circle.
My advice to candidates in the marketing space is to ask questions at the interview stage, really dig into how much of a company’s focus relies on the marketing. Also, check out Glassdoor reviews, have a look and see what departing employees have to say about their experience and the role.
My advice to companies is, that with marketing, you do have to spend money to make money, but there are some incredible candidates out there, and sometimes handing the reins over completely, and letting them try their hand at something new is the best way to go. To get something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done, right?
2: Companies getting overly excited about Marketing and wanting to throw everything at it, but with unrealistic timeframes, budget, or results.
This is the other end of the scale, where businesses really understand that marketing is important, and throw around buzzwords like SEM, SEO, PPC, and some leaders even know exactly what these acronyms are meant to achieve, but potentially have no idea how quickly the results can be seen, or on what scale.
Unfortunately, it’s not a case of putting $10 behind a Facebook advert, and expecting to see 76,325 warm leads within 24 hours.
A great marketer will be able to look at your current methods, look at what you’re trying to achieve, and give you a very clear picture of what they expect to achieve from a particular strategy. When recruiting for these people, don’t necessarily go for the candidate that claims they can make you the most money in the quickest amount of time. It’ll cost you a lot more to hire the wrong employee than it will to hire a great PPC specialist who will achieve what they set out too.
My advice to employers, if you don’t already have a specialist in the team, speak to others in the industry, the marketing world is warm and friendly, and there will be a multitude of people that, although aren’t looking for work may well be able to advice what they can imagine the work you need doing looking like. This way, when if a candidate promises you the world, then you’ve benchmarked and can identify that it is unrealistic.
My advice to candidates, do not overpromise. There is nothing worse than overpromising and under delivering. With it being a small world in the marketing sphere, word travels fast, and you don’t want to tarnish your reputation for the sake of landing a job.
If you’d like to talk about how to land the next best marketing role, or if you’re looking to take on some killer candidates for your team, get in touch.