107. How to help your clients hire a marketing manager

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If you're in a marketing strategy/advisory role, you'll inevitably be called to ask to help hire someone in-house, whether it be a marketing manager, content person, or something else.

Here's my general approach for helping clients find the right candidate.

1. Provide a sample job description
   • Ideally, you have a template you can use. Otherwise, you can find a few similar job descriptions in the wild and send it to them to prepare a draft.
2. Explain the few things that matter most for the position
   • Written communication skills
   • Attention to detail
   • Similar experience
3. Publish jobs on Indeed and LinkedIn
4. Ask them to create a short list of resumes to review together and reduce down to a small handful to interview
5. Once they've interviewed people, see who they feel is the best fit
6. Suggest doing a paid trial project or period
   • Project manager - two week paid trial
   • Markeitng manager - audit the marketing and suggest ways you'd seek to improve things
   • Writer - give them a brief, get them to audit the current content marketing and propose ideas, create a draft article + social media posts for them

The key part of all of this is the trial. I've seen a lot of people who look good on paper and end up being terrible hires. 

The thing is, you never know who's going to be good until you work with them. Get them to do either a trial project or work for two weeks and see if it's a mutual fit.

Hire right, not twice!

Have you hired before and done things differently? Any insight to share? Let me know in the comments below!

—k