Don’t Hire a Dud! How to Hire Staff for Your Digital Marketing Agency

It’s a given that your digital marketing agency is only as good as your people, people meaning your partners as well as your inhouse staff. Today, whether you outsource and resell white label digital marketing services, hire a team or do both, you need to be able to handle more diversified services than in the past. Digital marketing becomes more complex and exacting each year. The time is gone when one or two generalists can be expected to handle all the marketing.

But if you are a smaller agency, it’s clear you can’t hire a specialist in every area. But if you don’t want to outsource everything, you still need to think about hiring the best staff to move your agency forward.

The Costs of a Bad Hire May Be More Than You Think

The cost of a bad hire is not limited to just their compensation. It may cost you around $240,000 depending on your size and the position. In addition to compensation, there are also the costs of hiring costs, benefits, disruption to your company, severance and mistakes, failures and missed business opportunities. Making the wrong hires can cause expensive turnover and create inefficiencies rather than increasing productivity. You are looking at thousands of dollars even if yours is a small agency.

And it’s not easy to make the right marketing hire who sticks.

• LinkedIn studied turnover rates in a variety of industries, and found that at 17% turnover, marketing had the highest turnover of all the industries they addressed.
• Compare that to 11% turnover rates globally on average for all industries.
• Some marketing roles had even higher turnover. For example, marketing specialists turned over at a rate of 19.8%.

This means you need to give a great deal of thought into who you hire and what you offer to keep them happy at your agency.

It Starts with Your Objectives

This may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how often agencies don’t start with listing their objectives in making a hire before they write a job description.

Common reasons for bringing on new people are to give some relief to already-overloaded marketers or bring in additional expertise in an area the agency would like to build. Decide what you want to accomplish and then determine what kind of skill set can help you. But always keep in mind that you can also use white label digital marketing services for most areas.

There are a lot of categories and specialties where you might be looking for help. Here are a few:

• Sales: Every agency needs someone to beat the bushes for clients and nail down appointments.
• Marketing content: You may want to bring in someone who can turn out a lot more content that you can presently. But what kind? For example, do you need a writer who can grab an audience’s attention and sell? Or do you need someone who can educate about complex issues? Though you may find someone who can do both, writing riveting email campaigns that excite people and compel them to take action is not the same as writing educational blog posts.
• Analytics: It’s important to track and monitor trends and tweak campaigns. You need someone strong in analytics to be sure you are going in the right direction.
• Design: Even if design isn’t your focus, you may want someone who can design websites, collateral, presentations and more to support your clients’ messages and highlight what’s important.

These are just examples. What else is important to help your agency succeed?

Are Generalists or Specialists the Way to Go?

There is a temptation particularly in small agencies to look for hires who can do it all. There is something to be said for generalists who can see the big picture and can handle a broad spectrum of tasks.

How often have you seen an ad for a marketer who can write all sorts of materials, design websites and collateral, and manage SEO? Though you might find someone who can do all of these, it’s highly unlikely they will be at the top of their game in all three.

If you expect one or two people to do it all, the quality and quantity of your agency’s work will suffer. In fact, a Stanford University study shows that multi-tasking impairs productivity. And that’s not all.  Multi-talking shapes the brain in such a way that when a multi-tasker tries to focus on just one thing, productivity is still reduced.

You know your agency’s focus. But before you hire someone with the vague notion that you just want someone to take the load off you, think about how you want your agency to expand. What kind of hire would fit into your agency’s culture but still bring strengths you currently lack? For example, if you are primarily a web design firm that does a bit of SEO, you may want to bring in a stronger SEO expert and build up that part of your business.

Your agency doesn’t have to do everything. If you have a client who needs a service you do not provide, you can resell expert white label digital marketing services. With that in mind, rather than hiring a generalist who does a little bit of everything, you may want to hire a specialist who has deep expertise in an area that makes sense for your agency.

Remote Employees Expand Your Pool of Talent

Working remotely at least part of the time was already on the rise before the pandemic. But since the pandemic, the option to work remotely has become an important checkpoint on the lists of many job seekers. The move to working remotely was a key to survival for many companies during the pandemic. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, it’s going to be impossible to stuff it back in.

A recent Mercer study indicated that

• 70% of companies plan to adopt a hybrid work model.
• Only 20% plan to return to a predominantly office-based model.

According to FlexJobs’ 10th Annual Survey

• 58% of respondents report wanting to be full-time remote employees post-pandemic.
• 39% want a hybrid work environment.

Granted, we might expect high numbers on a FlexJobs study, but it can’t be ignored that an eye-popping 97% of respondents wanted some kind of remote work.

What does that mean to your agency? It means if you are unwilling to offer flexibility in working locations to your employees, you will miss out on a lot of talent your competition can then snap up. It also means you will limit your candidates to those in a small geographic range.

Don’t expect a drop in productivity if you hire remote workers. The FlexJobs survey indicated that over 51% of people are more productive from home while 95% are either more productive or have the same level of productivity.

That doesn’t mean you don’t need to look for some specific skills when hiring a remote worker. Though the following are desirable in any employee, it is particularly important when hiring a remote working that they

• Are self-motivated and don’t need close supervision
• Can communicate well
• Have experience working with remote teams
• Fit your company culture. This is just as true for remote employees as it is for those working on-site.
• Are well-organized

Be Prepared for the Interview

I think most of us have interviewed for jobs where was clear the interviewer had not so much as glanced at our resume in advance. Don’t be that interviewer. Don’t wing it.

Prepare your questions. There has been a trend in recent years toward “fun” unconventional questions. Google’s famous for it. Questions such as “Who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman?”  But these types of “creative” questions are losing steam and even Google is phasing them out.

Ask open-ended questions to help you determine

• Why they want to work for your agency
• Skillset
• Work ethic and ethics in general
• Why they left or are leaving their last job
• Ability to handle the job and fit into your agency’s culture
• Communications skills
• Entrepreneurial spirit (if relevant to the role)
• Anything else (with the bounds of the law) you need to know to make a good hire

Research good interview questions and tailor them to your own agency.

And keep in mind: You may be interviewing the candidate, but they are also forming an opinion of your agency. You need to sell your agency to the candidate not just ask them questions.

Don’t Waste Time

Your star candidates may like your agency, but they are also interviewing elsewhere.

It’s fine to have multiple interviews, but does your candidate really need to interview with everyone down to the junior staff? If you intend to hire by popular vote, expect to make a mediocre hire. Yes, you want someone that fits into your company. But you are hiring someone to do a job, not be voted Miss Congeniality.

Do your due diligence. But if you take too much time with unnecessary interviews and second-guessing, you may lose your candidate.

Yes, Google puts candidates through multiple lengthy interviews with multiple people and multiple callbacks. It can take a long time. But few companies have the cache of Google. If you find a great candidate who can do the job and fit into your agency well, hire that person.

Prefer White Label Digital Marketing Services? Call Umbrella 

If you are trying to decide what skill sets to hire and what white label digital marketing services to resell, let’s talk. We can discuss everything from sales development reps to Pay Per Result SEO and much, much more.

Contact us for a free consultation.