3 Tips for Recruiting Successfully as a Marketing Employer

Service-based marketing organizations often wrestle with turnover. More recently, however, they’ve joined the ranks of employers battling for talent on a much larger scale.

A Modern Way To Work has engaged with a number of marketing employers over the years and developed several strategies for successfully recruiting top talent—regardless of market events or the reasons behind them. We've put together three tips for successfully recruiting as an employer. The best part about the three tips we’ve shared here? They’re based on concepts marketing companies used in the real world every day!

Start With a Strategy

As a marketing professional, you already know strategizing is the first step to producing great work. So why should your recruitment efforts be any different? Consider this: When most hiring managers search for candidates, they typically start with their network and then base their outreach on job titles. Sometimes they use other companies’ job postings as a starting point.

Ironically, if those same managers came to you to create a campaign, your strategy would likely start with a series of deep-dive discussions to determine goals, target demographic, and unique differentiators. Our first step with recruitment clients always includes a lengthy discovery session aimed at drawing out:

• The company’s specific needs about the role they’re looking to fill
• Which competencies they require most
• How their particular job differs from others in the industry

Interestingly, as companies articulate their needs, what they initially thought they wanted often changes. By strategizing around your own recruitment efforts this way, you can better clarify the role you need to fill, ensuring you create a great job ad that will streamline your selection process.

Compose your Job Posting Like the Ad That It Is

If we rated the average job posting like an ad, most would receive a failing grade! Take the role of account manager, for example. Despite the incredibly different experience it offers working at one agency versus another, most job ads don’t reflect these distinctions. As an advertisement for both your company and the role you’re “selling”, your job posting should read completely differently from anyone else’s. In practice, however, there’s usually little variation between one company’s ad and the next.

Remember: your job posting has the power to attract or repel based on the way you describe your role and the outcomes you’re after.

And like any great ad, it will prove more successful if you:

• Aim for clarity
• Speak to your ideal candidate
• Avoid ‘HR-speak’

Not only should candidates find it easy to read your ad and understand exactly what your role entails, disclosing salary on job postings will further clarify the type of applicants you’re looking to attract.

Create a great place to work

We don’t need to remind you that if a client has a terrible product, there’s only so much marketing can do about that. Your product is the company culture you create. And its selling features include the strength of your people managers and the systems you have in place to support staff in doing their best work.

Creating an environment that promotes engagement—one where people want to come to work—is the best way to ensure you’ll always have talented staff sustaining your organization. And as an employer in the marketing space, you’re uniquely positioned to put your gifts to work attracting and recruiting that talent.

About Amanda Hudson: Amanda Hudson is a double-certified HR expert changing the way organizations perceive and use HR to build their business. Throw in an executive MBA, almost 20 years of people management, plus a sixth sense for problem-solving and you’ve got the credibility behind her consultancy A Modern Way To Work. Amanda’s philosophy on modern HR is one you won’t hear anywhere else: the sign of a job well done is when you’ve coached a team so effectively, you’ve worked yourself out of a job.