How To Find and Hire a Great Marketing M

How To Find and Hire a
Great Marketing Manager

SCENE I:

It’s crunch time and you’re overloaded with meetings, deadlines, work, work, and more work. Adding to the pressure, your company’s annual meeting is weeks away. Suddenly, you hear a knock on your virtual office door. “Got a minute?” It’s right about then you learn that your marketing manager has just resigned. “Perfect," you think to yourself. All of that know-how is running right out the door. Panic begins to set in when you think about all the details the departing employee handled so that you wouldn’t have to. Business needs to keep moving forward and soon, it will all be on you. Now what?

We’ve all been there, and it doesn’t feel good when an employee leaves you, regardless of their reasons why. Today, I’d like to share some easy and actionable tips on how you can find and hire a great marketing manager.

First, make it super easy for people you know to spread the word about your job opening.

As soon as your departing marketing manager leaves your virtual office, stop everything you’re doing and get busy by generating an updated job description, along with a brief announcement indicating that your company has an immediate opening for a marketing manager and, by the way, the position reports directly to you. Be sure to include: “For more information, please contact “your first name, your last name, your title, at your email address.”

Next, rattle the chains in your networks to communicate the marketing manager job opening and ask people to pass the word.

Be sure to:

Email the job opening announcement to your “key influencers,” people whom you know who know a lot of people.
Send out a company or division-wide email announcement to your co-workers.
Alert your LinkedIn Connections.
Notify your vendors.

The best candidates tend to be referred and you may be pleasantly surprised to learn who knows whom. For all of the above tactics, repetition is your friend. One message is simply not enough to get people to act on your behalf. A week later, re-send your job opening communication and, in another week, send it again. Each time don’t forget to ask people to pass your announcement along.

Important: Don’t rely solely on HR to source candidates for you.

No disrespect to HR, but they will never have the same sense of urgency as you do, the guy or gal who is suddenly down an employee, with the workload avalanche looming. As soon as you get the word on a potential candidate, pick up the phone and have a conversation with them on the very same day. Do not wait for HR to schedule an interview! If your initial conversation with the candidate goes well, don’t let that fish get away. Run, do not walk to the HR Director’s virtual office, and ask them to set up the “official” first interview so you can work through your company’s proper hiring channels.

Finally, be willing to reach out to recruiters who specialize in finding the kind of candidate that you are looking for, in this case, a great marketing manager.

If you require very specialized skill sets, say a marketing manager who knows CRM, SEO and PDQ (I made the last one up), you will save yourself a lot of time in the long run by hiring a specialist recruiter. Sure, it costs money, but which is worse? Spending some cash to get the right person on the bus STAT or you burning the midnight oil as the “new” marketing manager, in addition to all of your other job responsibilities?

Key takeaways when you are looking to find and hire a great marketing manager:

1. Start by alerting the people you already know, there’s a ton of them.

2. Make it super easy for your contacts to pass your job opening information to people in their networks.

3. Depend on yourself first, not the HR Department, to find a great candidate.

4. Don’t be a cheapskate. Hire a recruiter, especially if you are looking for very specific marketing skill sets.

Effective marketing for any enterprise starts with having the right people on your bus. If you want to find and hire great marketing people for your team, contact Lynn Hoban at Lynn@LynnHobanMarketing.com to find out more.