As digital marketing professionals, we know change is a given. Digital marketing trends change each year, and audience preferences make microscopic shifts all the time.
Seeing any measure of success amid the constantly shifting landscapes (including business demands, updated algorithms/features, and varying user behaviors) requires resilience, smarts, and the ability to turn research data into actionable steps. But what about the changes within your organization?
With all the client needs and project deadlines to be met, it’s easy to let the needs of your growing digital marketing agency fall by the wayside. We don’t need to tell you how fatal a mistake this can be. One of the first and most crucial challenges that organizations all around the globe face is hiring the right people.
According to the Manpower Group, a lack of applicants, experience, and hard/soft skills are among the top reasons why US companies have a tough time with recruitment. To top it off, there’s intense competition as other agencies look for the same experienced, skilled individuals. So how do you cultivate an edge in when it comes to finding and hiring talented professionals that’ll help grow your agency? Read on to find out.
Explore alternative hiring methods
Your first instinct may be to post job openings or scour LinkedIn profiles. With the number of big-name companies doing the same, however, you aren’t at an advantage. And if that’s not grim enough, it turns out that 86% of the candidates who’d be most qualified for a position are already employed. So what’s the best way to find candidates?
Go non-conventional. Look for potential candidates elsewhere. Need programmers? Attend a hackathon. A graphic designer? Check out events and academic programs related to design. You get the gist. The point is not making your hiring strategy solely ad-based. Send feelers out into social networks and events that already house the talented individuals you seek.
Digital Agency Network’s dedicated job board can be an exceptional alternative for digital agencies too.
Use your marketing expertise to create your recruitment brand
It’s your specialty, after all, so why not put it to good use? With the competitive recruitment market, it’s important that prospects get a clear idea of your company’s values and what’s expected of them in the roles you want to fill. Besides, sometimes it’s not the high paying companies that win, but the ones that offer more growth opportunities and long-term possibilities.
Look to your existing data
As digital marketers, we’re all about analytics and connecting campaign KPIs with actual ROI for our clients. Well, we can take that same, data-driven approach to talent acquisition.
Where did your current employees come from? What attracted them to work for your agency in the first place? It’s good to know where and why you’ve succeeded in the past so you can replicate what already works.
Plan talent acquisition around the future of the business
Most companies hire to fill roles based on urgency. But scrambling to find the best candidate under time pressure forces you to settle for “someone who will do for now” instead of the candidate who’d be the best fit in the long term.
Avoid this bad hiring habit by planning ahead. Where do you want your business to be in 3-5 years? What kinds of campaigns will you be running? What sort of hires will you need to make in the coming year to achieve those goals? Is it possible to hire someone less experienced and then develop their skills further so they can confidently jump into more complicated, necessary roles in the future?
Positioning Your Agency for Growth
Finding the right talent is worthless unless you’re able to keep them on. And in the words of Jim Benson, founder of digital marketing giant HubSpot:
Better moods = better performance. Hostile or even boring working environments are not sustainable. Poor work product and attrition result.
So how do you make employees happy and productive? How do you bolster retention? Well, it turns out it’s not all about offering cool perks, although those are, well, cool. Employees stay and leave because of an array of problems affected by and at times even caused by company culture.
This doesn’t mean that the employees you take on should dress similarly or come from the same backgrounds – not at all. In fact, diverse companies are more successful, generating 19% more revenue.
What we’re referring to are company values and the authenticity with which those values are carried and acted on by everyone in the organization – top to bottom.
Building trust among vastly different personalities coming from all walks of life is hard. But through transparency and great leadership, it is attainable and has a tremendous impact on the quality of output, general happiness in the workplace, and team cohesion. Otherwise, talent acquisition can be meaningless.
