You can formulate the idea of a perfect marketing specialist for a long time, and still hire the employee that doesn’t meet the expectations. Why does this happen?
When hiring, the executive often forgets to answer himself a single fundamentally important question: why do I actually need this employee?
In the minds of most, there is no fundamental difference between a marketer, a content manager, and sometimes a ROP to boot, which is the main problem within recruitment.
Let's define: a marketer is a specialist who creates a STRATEGY for promoting products and services in your company. A marketer does NOT interact directly with customers. Similarly to a salesman, a marketer creates a portrait of the target audience, analyzes competitors' strategies and thinks through a strategy of communication with customers — which ultimately leads to sales.
Now, that we have decided clearly who we need, let's make a clear checklist of what needs to be discussed at the interview so that the candidate you have chosen is not a "dummy":
Ability to count. Contrary to popular belief, a good marketer is more of a technician than a humanitarian. We’ll discuss the knowledge of technical aspects later, but remember: in marketing, almost everything can be counted. If you entrust the budget to a specialist who says "I’m not good with numbers," you will waste money. A marketer must have at least basic knowledge in the field of statistics in order to conduct tests and evaluate the results.
-Understandance of business metrics. A marketer should know how the cost of attracting one customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, CAC) is calculated, and the amount of money it will bring to the business (Lifetime Value, LTV). He must understand that different channels cost differently, that they attract different categories of customers, and that each initiative needs to be calculated.
-Ability to make data-based decisions. In modern marketing, you have to make decisions very quickly based on the changing data, literally within one day. For example, if a marketer sees that the indicators of a Facebook campaign have begun to deteriorate, he should be able to quickly analyze what "broke", and why the results have become worse. Then he should decide to stop the campaign and launch a new one, or change the settings and fix the current campaign.
-Knowledge of web analytics and technical savvy. There is no need to require a marketer to write code, but there are technical tasks that must be solved independently, without involving third-party developers - for example, connecting Google Analytics, or setting up autorun of emails, putting a pixel on certain pages of the site that will allow to collect data about users. If a marketer is afraid of such actions, he will not be able to use these tools, and therefore it will affect the results negatively.
-Ability to work with other teams. The marketer must build constructive relationships with the sales team and other internal departments so that all processes work synchronously, without failures. Otherwise, the marketing budget may go down the drain. He should also be able to work with external contractors, for example, set the tasks clearly for a SEO project and provide everything necessary so that the SEOs can do their part well.
Finally, match the candidate with your personal preferences. Does he correspond to your ideas about the ideal employee? Will he adjust to the corporate culture? Will he be a full-fledged member of the team or will simply waste the work hours?
And the most important thing: give the marketer freedom!
If you’ve found the perfect employee, do not impose your vision regarding the logo, landing page, etc on him. Good marketing is a lot of tests, formats, messages, creativity, channels. Decisions can only be made on the basis of the data obtained.
Remember: it's hard to find an ideal marketer, but it's definitely worth it. This is a small step in building a truly strong team and a unique product.