How to Hire an Inbound Marketing Superstar

By now we all know that Content Marketing and its big brother Inbound Marketing are here to stay. Traditional marketing companies need to adapt, restructure, re-skill and most of all (re-)hire. But how do you sift through the mountain of applications and candidates? How do you find the right fit for your organisation? And how do you identify the abilities your next Inbound Marketer needs? In this blog post, The Ultimate Guide to Hiring Effective Marketers, Eric Siu provides helpful insights into the hiring process and lays out what you need to do to find your superstar.

The first step to hiring is to know what kind of person you need for the role. Marketing needs a wholly different set of skills than say, programming or operations. And since future steps depend on knowing who you need, we’ll spend major time in this section. Why? Look at one troubling stat in this summary, from a three year study by LeadershipIQ.

• 46% of newly hired employees will fail within 18 months, only 19% will achieve unequivocal success. 

The study goes on to say, “… 26% of new hires fail because they can’t accept feedback, 23% because they’re unable to understand and manage emotions, 17% because they lack the necessary motivation to excel, 15% because they have the wrong temperament for the job, and only 11% because they lack the necessary technical skills.”

If you study the preceding statistics, it points to one truth: lackluster technical skills don’t cause most failures.

The biggest problem lies in the candidates not having the attitudes to succeed. And this is just talking general candidates, over a span of fields. Think about the implications for marketing: marketers need specific attitudes to succeed, not just a general list of traits like “able to manage emotions” or “has the necessary motivation.”

We all know how important hiring the right candidate is, after all, you’re only ever as strong as your weakest link, scary right? To avoid making mistakes in the recruiting process, read the full article on the Hubspot blog.

And if you want to find out more about Inbound Marketing itself, download our free ebook below.