Do you find it challenging to recruit and retain strategists for your online marketing team?
In my current and previous positions I have been tasked with recruiting, training, and retaining online marketing staff – both at junior and senior levels. In my career have even found that unpaid interns can move your marketing plan forward if you have the right approach.
In this post I wanted to share with you the top 5 best practices I’ve learned along the way related to finding junior talent who are trainable for online marketing work and those who excel in the field.
1. Make sure to recruit candidates with an entrepreneurial attitude and a passion to learn.
In my position at Environmental Working Group, I faced huge online marketing challenges (I managed almost a dozen web properties that needed SEO and analytics optimization, email fundraising, a Google Adwords grant, and a half dozen active social media profiles with only two designer/developers and part time social media person to manage it all).
After I hired a team member to run the email fundraising, I was still left with a TON of online marketing work. I decided to recruit unpaid interns to give me the manpower I needed. Out of the 14 unpaid interns working for me, I trained all but one of them in SEO/SEM strategy and activation from scratch.
It worked because every one of those interns had:
- A passion for learning
- An entrepreneurial attitude
- An ability to take the ball and run with it with little direction
- An interest in learning more about online marketing
I am proud to say that a good number of them are still active in the search industry like Alexa Loken, Eric Loken, Evan Jerkunica, Katy Pitkin, Catherine Wong, and Katie Shields to name a few.
Without their help I could not have launched EWG’s cell phone radiation campaign that drove over 1.2 million visitors a month to their site (up from 300K/month) – and that was after losing the site for the first four days due to heavy traffic.
At Ketchum, the challenge was different as I had the ability to recruit paid interns and transition them into paid staff members. I adjusted my approach to selecting candidates and developed more stringent standards.
2. Be stringent with recruiting standards
A high bar exists when you’re recruiting team members who need to be billable and who you hope to turn into junior staff. After much trial and error, here’s the process I put in place:
- I recruited only candidates that have marketing backgrounds, who are familiar with coding, and have managed social media profiles in either a paid or volunteer positions.
- During the interview process, I checked to see if they have used an insights-driven process in any of their past positions. I checked to see if they look at the data to adjust their marketing plans or if they had used Google Analytics or Facebook Insights.
- I checked to see if they were passionate about learning more about the space. I would often ask them what they were currently reading to enhance their own knowledge. Most online marketing tactics are self taught, and everyone in the space (including my team) needed to be comfortable learning on their own.
- I tested their writing. My team found that it’s tough to teach good sentence structure or persuasive writing to a new hire, and most online marketing work involves writing.
- I tested their internet research skills. I find myself multiple times a day doing Internet research to find influencers or to troubleshoot something. My staff needs to be able to do that as well.
- I asked them questions that will let them explain a technical situation in non-technical terms. All of my team needs to be comfortable doing this as we frequently explain online marketing tactics and strategies to internal account team members or clients.
Recruiting a good candidate was just the first step since each intern I hired needed to be able to pick up all of the tactical elements of online marketing. I found that each hire needed to go through our online marketing boot camp.
3. Educate them all on your online marketing approach
Once we selected an intern candidate, they then received training on all of the online marketing basics which included:
- A SEO/SEM overview (with an emphasis on how all of the online platforms are personalized to the end user)
- Tactical training on keyword research
- SEO copywriting
- Link building/online pitching
- Google Adwords
- Google Analytics
We then ensured that all of the junior staff got their feet wet quickly working on executing tactical elements of client plans with supervision.
After the initial period of “boot camp” training, every team member was encouraged and provided incentives to become certified in their interest area. We have memberships to Moz Tools. Also every team member knows which online publications to follow to learn about the latest search marketing updates.
It’s been my great pleasure at Ketchum to see that the internship program was a launching pad for many individual’s online marketing careers including ChanMi Park, Rachel Racoosin, Brittany Potter, Lexi Neaman, David Riva, Jane Connors, Danny Segal, Cory Sealey, and Anthony Caccavale – all of whom are working in the online marketing industry.
4. Develop a training system and culture that keeps them passionate and engaged
Online marketing is a profession where it’s critical that you enjoy learning on your own to keep your skills up to date.
As a supervisor of online marketing staff, I encourage my team to develop what Rand Fishkin describes as a “T shaped” marketing skills – broad expertise in all tactics and a deep expertise in one area. I let my team find their own passion area, and they become the defacto expert regardless of their role on the team.
With the search engines changing the algorithms daily, regular updates to Google Analytics and Adwords, social media monitoring tool changes, mobile app and website changes, and more than a dozen social media platforms to stay up to date on, I think it’s important to let your staff pick their passion and become deep in the area they are most interested.
5. Encourage the love of learning
All of my staff are encouraged to share insights they discover with the rest of the team – during our weekly team meetings, via email, or by writing up formal points of view or developing training for the rest of the office.
I also encourage my team to get involved in the search community locally – which is why I offered Ketchum’s office space as a location for the DC, VA & MD Search Engine Marketing Meetups for the last year and a half.
Personally I take great pride in those former interns that are now active in the space. I still firmly believe that marketers that understand online marketing have job security (even in a rough economy) and I’m glad that I’m able to help young people build those skills and add to the larger industry.