This is Part 2 of our mini-series on how to build a marketing team from scratch. Check out Part 1 if you missed it.
Hiring is anything but a simple process. You need to find the right candidates, scan through resumes, and market your brand to attract the best talent.
Metadata’s Jason Widup, VP of Marketing, and Mark Huber, Head of Brand & Product Marketing, have managed their fair share of hiring processes. In this episode, they talk about the challenges of hiring, compare different processes, and explore the idea of marketing your brand to attract the best of the best.
Tune in to the full episode to learn about the dos and don’ts of hiring a marketing team, or read the top three takeaways from the episode below.
Watch the full episode
Three top takeaways:
Takeaway 1: Branding is key to attracting top talent
If you want to attract talent, you’ve got to give them a reason to want to join your team, plain and simple. That means you need to focus on more than writing a world-class job description. You need to be thinking about marketing and branding as well.
When you’re hiring marketers, having a solid brand is more important than ever. So treat hiring like you’re marketing to a prospect. Approach potential candidates as you would a prospect with a cold email and be sure to throw in some ‘social proof’ if you can. Don’t be afraid to namedrop some of your biggest clients if you know that’ll get the potential candidate’s attention.
It’s not just enough to just make your brand known. You also should try to humanize it as well. Metadata’s team made it a mission to humanize the brand so it didn’t look like another faceless company.
One tip is to encourage your current team to be more active on LinkedIn and interact with others in your wider industry.
Takeaway 2: Look beyond the resume
A resume is only part of the story. It’s impossible to know a candidate solely from a piece of paper. Instead, try to look beyond the resume and get to know the person behind it.
One way to do this is to simply start a conversation with people on LinkedIn before you even ask them to apply for a job. As soon as someone becomes a job candidate, they can become a little closed off and guarded because they’re trying to impress. You will get a much better sense of what a person is like to work with if you can interact with them before all that.
Qualities to look for beyond the resume include passion, resilience, and a good attitude. These qualities are often much more valuable than having the perfect experience.
Takeaway 3: Don’t wing it
The hiring process for many companies is pretty inconsistent, especially as the company scales and develops.
But as the company scales, the need for more structure and set processes becomes clear. It becomes harder and harder to just wing it and rely only on gut feelings during a big recruitment drive.
As you start to hire for more roles, you also need a process for keeping track of applicants. Firing off a bunch of LinkedIn messages and having no system to track them is a surefire way to end up lost and confused. So, get organized, keep track of interactions with potential candidates, and remember to follow up later to keep the dialog open.
Next steps
Get the exact questions you should be asking when hiring a demand generation manager in our blog post: 7 Questions You Need To Ask When Hiring a Demand Generation Manager.
Or you can steal our exact job description template so you can hire your next demand gen manager.
