How to Find a Marketer: What to Look for in a CV and What to Ask at the Interview

 

Today everyone and their dog call themselves marketers: those who have completed training, received a specialized education, and even those who have watched a YouTube video on SMM or read a book on how to compose an email newsletter effectively.

Most of the market specialists are self-taught enthusiasts, which means that it’s not easy for a business to find a worthy candidate. And this is a matter of the utmost importance because due to illiterate marketers, the company incurs losses and spoils its image. 

So how do you find a good marketer, and where to find one?

Determining Who Needs Marketers

Everyone needs marketers, and that’s a fact for the business that wants new customers and for those who want to retain their market share. Even bloggers today need a strong marketing team.

It all depends on the scale. For example, startups can address small business marketing consultants, and companies that are more or less on their feet can assemble a strong team of experts to build capacity. But they all need marketing power.

Marketers are those who combine the overall strategy of an enterprise with the ability to present a product well. In the entire business system, these are the people who don’t forget about the consumer, who, in fact, brings profits.

There are 4 areas a marketer is responsible for, regardless of the business niche:

• The attraction of clients. How to bring people to stores, websites, social media accounts, and so on.
• Customer retention. How to get people interested so that they don’t leave.
• Monetizing clients. What tools to use so that people don’t just review the product but pay money for it.
• Returning customers. How to be remembered and how to remind about the brand so that people come back.

How to Find a Marketer? 

It is important to understand that the era of the passive search for specialists is over. And looking for experts on recruiting websites is no longer effective.

There are several ways to find a great digital marketer:

1. Search on social media for groups with professional content for marketers. Then start to identify people you like. Let’s say they write meaningful comments. Or you fancy the content on their pages. Although this is a rather shallow analysis, you can still write a private message to these people.

2. Search for a marketer by referrals on LinkedIn or by reviews on the Internet. You can also find articles about successful promotion cases and try to find out from the authors what a legendary marketer has been engaged in.

3. Take away a marketer from other companies where you see awesome results. It may sound not very ethical, but from a business point of view, there is nothing horrible. You just offer the specialist better conditions. Hiring is the same marketplace where business owners compete for strong talents. All in all, each company should always carry out stay interviews so that extraordinary experts don’t want to leave to other projects.

Typically, managers recruit employees according to the following formula: 40% – studying a resume with a description of education and experience, 40% – transparent communication at the interview, and only 20% – reviews of other specialists about the candidate’s skills.

But in marketing, this formula, unfortunately, is fundamentally wrong. Why?

Practice makes a good marketer. Education is good, but if a candidate cannot use the knowledge in practice, what is the use of it?

A marketer needs to be flexible, be able to make quick decisions, find solutions for each specific business, constantly follow trends, master new techniques, and test unknown mechanics. And this is not taught even in the best universities.

The marketer is a specific position, with often abstract job responsibilities. The resume may indeed say “Marketer,” but what’s behind that? Did the specialist develop strategies or just coordinate the launch of the advertisement? This is why it’s important to find out everything about the candidate at the interview and not just hire an abstract specialist by thinking that he can do everything.

How to Interview a Marketer? 

The first stage is general questions to determine the potential of a person and learn about the experience.

The second stage includes questions for marketing managers. From general – how a person defines what marketing is, how to attract an audience offline, what other tasks a marketer performs – to detailed ones, for example, where to place a banner, how to define the target audience, and what to offer.

The third stage is a practical block. Now you can set a potential employee a specific task from your business and see how a person thinks.

You can also give a test task to see the candidate’s experience. It can be real-life cases, for example, how to increase the audience of the Facebook community, a sales text, or an exciting TikTok video. You can even set a bit complicated task and ask an applicant to create a video collage, create a clip in MKV video editor or use a particular free video editing software, for example, the Adobe Premiere Rush. 

So you will see if you can entrust the marketing of your business to a person with potential and the right mindset.

Final Words 

Some projects still perceive the presence of marketers as a tribute to fashion or business image support without realizing the real value of such experts.

But it’s also pretty difficult to find valuable marketers who would become the guiding star of your business. Follow our tips and check out the hacks for hire, so you can find a real marketing gem in the dust of garbage job applications.