How to Hire a Marketing Director
Looking for a manager to develop and execute effective marketing solutions to cultivate growth? Here are some tips for incorporating the best hiring practices into your search.
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Adding marketing positions can be a tough choice for start-ups and small businesses. In many cases, founders like to personally manage sales and marketing—or else, they designate someone else on staff to handle marketing even if that person has no prior experience in the field. When it comes to hiring a marketing staff, experts recommend that entrepreneurs reach outside of their comfort zones, and find a marketing director with experience in the industry—but also a very different pedigree.
"You might want a few people who come from a different perspective and can challenge you," says hiring expert Roberta Chinsky Matuson, president of the Human Resource Solutions, a consulting company. "If you end up with eight Harvard guys in one office, they may be brilliant, but if you are marketing a product to the rest of the country, it might not work."
The ideal new hire should bring to the table a slate of fresh ideas, new uses for technology, and contacts from the industry. But before starting your search, it's important to identify exactly what the position entails. The simplest method: Take the time necessary to carefully craft a job description and clearly define what you're looking for.
"Sometimes when you think you need a sales manager, you actually need a marketing manager, and vice-versa," Matuson says.
Dig Deeper: A Hiring Checklist
Hiring a Marketing Director: The Job Description
The first item under the job title should be a summary overview of what the position entails. Depending on what your company needs in a marketing director, that list could include identifying opportunities to launch new products or to enter new markets; managing marketing budgets; projecting revenue and growth potential; identifying technology and marketing partners; conducting necessary market-research studies; and building and overseeing the company's marketing staff. Bullet points work best for organizing these responsibilities.
It's important not to forget a catch-phrase line to include additional "duties as assigned," just in case the job morphs over time or a meaningful duty is accidentally omitted. "Basically, it's so a hire doesn't come back and say 'that wasn't in my job description," Matuson says.
When the job description is clearly laid out, it's time to decide the budget for the position in term's of compensation.
Dig Deeper: View a Sample Job Description Template
Hiring a Marketing Director: How to Determine Compensation
To arrive at a competitive salary, an entrepreneur should check out the latest HR salary studies and look at information on sites such as PayScale.com or Salary.com. Browsing current job listings posted online by companies you consider to be in your peer group can help to paint an accurate picture of what candidates are expecting.
That said, it's perfectly acceptable to ask applicants about their salary expectations including whether they expect some sort of bonus or incentive compensations. It's also worth asking what sort of salary scale the candidate expects for the rest of his or her staff.
And don't ignore the power of benefits to affect a marketing director's decision to join your company. In small companies, benefits send important signals about culture and stability. "If you're like Google and have incredible benefits, then you might not need to pay that much. But if you don't offer health insurance, you might need to pay more," Matuson said.
Location matters, too. Workers living in or near urban centers will demand higher salaries to cover their much higher living costs, while those in rural areas will demand less. An experienced marketing director would likely expect a base salary of between $140,000 and $208,000 in New York City; in central Wisconsin, a salary range between $113,000 and $170,000 is more common, according to Salary.com.
Dig Deeper: The Right Way to Pay
Hiring a Marketing Director: Attracting the Right Applicants
When the job description is clearly laid out and agreed upon by management, and a salary range is set, it's time to write and post the job listing. In addition to the overview and list of responsibilities found in the job description, a great job listing highlights the behavioral characteristics you hope to find in a candidate.
For a marketing director, admirable behavioral traits could include self-direction, motivation, high energy, financial ambition and persuasive communication. Lines in the resulting listing might read: "Ideal candidate will couple strong managerial skills with detail-oriented research ability, and will work well in a fast-paced, energetic environment while striving to meet high goals."
You must also consider how to convey what kind of candidate will be a strong cultural fit. Performance-management expert Jamie Resker, president of Employee Performance Solutions, suggests looking for characteristics that already exist in your office. "It's not an exact science, but you want to find out whether this person is going to be a good fit culturally in the office is important," she says. "For that, you just need to tap into the best qualities your existing employees share."
Next, include at least a paragraph detailing minimum qualifications, including preferred educational background and experience. Being detailed will help narrow the applicant pool, and this is another place where you can underscore key behavioral characteristics. Instead of writing a bullet point that says "10+ years experience required," consider something along the lines of "Team player with strong leadership skills and 10 or more years of demonstrated ability to manage effectively."
If you fear getting a flood of applicants, listing a salary could narrow the pool. Otherwise, experts suggest it is not necessary. With the listing complete, post to your company website, and supplement that with listings in targeted trade publications and specialized media and postings on online job sites. If sites such as Craigslist.org and Monster.com seem too general-interest, don't worry. In the era of spider-search sites such as Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com, your listing will be crawled by search engines, and qualified candidates will have the opportunity to find your post.
Once applications start coming in, it's up to you to sort through them, and to find out who fits your qualifications and with whom you'd like to talk. Even the experts say this process is always subjective.
Dig Deeper: Recruiting and Hiring Tips
Hiring a Marketing Director: Interviewing Applicants
Once you've narroed down the applicants you'd like to consider, it can be useful to add a step before beginning the formal interview process. Conduct brief phone interviews with the top dozen candidates who you like on paper. It's always easier to end a 15-minute phone interview with "thank you very much; we're just making calls right now" than to risk wasting an hour on a bad face-to-face interview.
When you get into the interviewing stage, keep in mind that your key objectives are to learn the following: Can this applicant truly do the job? And will they fit into my company's work culture? Depending on the size of your business, you also want to screen for flexibility and nimbleness.
"In an interview, you want to go over job responsibilities and skills, and then the other component is behavior," says Resker. "Especially at a start-up, the entrepreneur typically wants someone who is like moldable clay, not someone who has the personality of a steel rod. Will they go with the flow? Because a small business works a lot different than a big company."
As you craft questions to ask candidates, think about how best to knock them off guard--and therefore, draw them out. For example, asking a candidate whether they function well under pressure is likely to elicit simply a "yes." Asking him or her a question that directly applies pressure, such as "What makes you think you are better for this job than all the other candidates?" or "Which co-worker at your last job did you not get along with well and how did you handle that situation?" is more effective, and will likely yield a telling answer. Hypotheticals about a candidate's future employment at your company can be even more revealing.
As you ask these open-ended questions, listen not only to the content of a candidate's response, but also to the voice and manner behind it. Matuson says: "Are they pretty lethargic? Are they being honest with you? Did they do the right thing? Did they ask for help when they needed it? After a while it becomes really obvious this person is a go-getter, or they work hard, or they make good decisions."
