Social Media Headhunter

BlogTalkRadio: Career Conversation With Elizabeth Lengyel

Harry Joiner, the Marketing Headhunter, and I will be live on the Career Conversation Blog Talk Radio program with Elizabeth Lengyel.

We'll be live at 7:00 CST talking about how to get found in a Web 2.0 world. This program is primarily for job seekers, but it's also good for recruiters who want to know how to source.

Elizabeth Lengyel, our host, is a career expert at PeopleCoach.com. Her show prep is listed at her site.

If you or someone you know is looking for a job – or just getting started – don’t         miss my next Career Conversation Radio Show!
 
My special guests are:
 
Jim Durbin, VP of Social Media -- Specializes in social media consulting,  web design and development, and branding, www.DurbinMedia.com.
 
Harry Joiner, The Marketing Headhunter -- Specializes in integrated marketing and new media, www.MarketingHeadHunter.com.

Key takeaway: How to use marketing and social media tools to catch the eye of top-notch recruiters!

Building A Job Description For A Social Media Position

What does it mean to be a social media expert?  Seeing as just two years ago, no one would know what it even meant (and few do today, as well), it's not like we have degrees, or titles, or even a standard list of questions that can be used to hire someone into a social media position.

To complicate the matter, many social media experts (myself included) started out in fields separate from Marketing, Corporate Communications, or Information Technology.  How then can we determine what someone's value is in terms of their background, when the tools we use define our position, but not our experience?

What exactly is a social media consultant, and how can we build the business case to hire one internally?  How do you go about writing a job description?

 

1) Define your goals:  The biggest danger of Enterprise 2.0 projects is a desire to have a social media team without having a clear business goal to achieve.  We talk about metrics of traffic, SEO, reach, influence, and transparency, but what are these  supposed to achieve? Have a point, and you'll find metrics are much easier to create and sell.

 

2) Search for relevant experience: If you can determine what your business goals are, it should be easy to determine what skills are needed to reach those goals.  An example would be building a social network to improve customer service communication.  Knowing what you want, allows you to pick the tool, and then hire a community manager to run the process.  Only after the goal is defined, can you determine if someone's experience building a not-for-profit online community is an experience you need, even if the individual has no customer service management background.

 

3) Base salary range on the business metrics.  Many people want to leave their careers for a job in social media.  That's okay, but you shouldn't be paying for them to make an equal salary jump.  At the same time, creating an entry level salary isn't going to get you the talent you need to succeed.  Once again, it comes back to the business goals you wish to achieve.  If your goals are increased revenue, paying someone in the six-figure range is acceptable.  If your goal is increased publicity online and testing the waters, you can achieve that for $50-$70,000.

Hiring a social media candidate is not as simple as other positions, but it also shouldn't be a guess or a shot in the dark. Understand what you want to achieve, and then set the salary for a level that makes sense for your organization.

 

Social Media Explorer Hires Kat French

Jason Falls hired Kat French of That Darn Kat to help work the social media practice of Doe-Anderson.  It's great news because one, it looks like a great hire for Jason, but it's also a sign that a social media expert can find employment just on their social media skills alone.

I know I've been harping on people getting hired for their SEO, SEM, and PR skills, but Jason was looking for someone who could actually run and manage social media projects, and Kat is definitely the blogger to do it.

In typical Social Media fashion, Jason described the process:

If you look back at that job posting, you’ll see I was looking for someone with a strong social media marketing background, even though the field is still in its infancy. The offering produced 25-30 legitimate inquiries, about 20 of which officially applied for the job, in as much as saying, “I’d like to be considered,” to me made it official. Of those, I had idyllic notions of picking three candidates to interview then selecting one. We had such a strong array of candidates, I could only narrow it down to seven. Eventually, and after phone conversations, discussions and many days of me pacing around the office with a scowl on my face, we picked three and interviewed them. Ultimately, however, one young lady stood out as the person we were looking for.

I'm hoping to get more out of Jason (no secrets of course) about the interview process and his suggestions for others looking for similar work or hiring, but it's clear bet that Kat wasn't listing the number of friends and followers she could amass for herself when she interviewed.  An intriguing question is what she has to do with her old properties.  As a new member of Doe-Anderson, who owns her work off hours?  These are the kinds of questions that older employment contracts don't answer, and we'll all have to work through them as we move forward with social media hires. 

Congratulations to both of them, and expect to see a lot more of this in the coming months. 

There's A Second Social Media Headhunter

Jeremiah spoke with a Matt Raggio, a recruiter in specializing in hiring for social media startups, about how to hire a VP Marketing who understands the divide between marketing experience and social media.  His piece asks the question:

What do you think, is it easy to find a VP of Marketing that gets both worlds of natives and immigrants and do an effective job?

My thoughts are that the impact of social media is big, but it shouldn't be treated as such.  A VP Marketing shouldn't be any harder to find if they are implementing a social media strategy, anymore than if they are implementing an SEO strategy or a direct mail campaign.  Asking the right questions and hiring the right people (including consultants), is the same across all industries, and if you have a candidate who is open-minded, flexible, and smart, you can coach them where they need to be (I actually just did that with a client).

I wrote it before, so let me reiterate - you don't get paid for your social media experience.  You get paid for your experience in driving results, and increasingly, SEO and SEM marketers see the value in social media in their fields.  That's what you look for.  A background in marketing and a vision of where it's going is what I look for.

For many clients, there's a real danger in hiring a heavyweight in the social media space, because they by nature are excellent at self-promotion, and its too easy for them to move around.  Jeremiah's a good example.  He went from Hitachi to Podtech to Forrester, and if he wants to move somewhere else, plenty of people would hire him. He's good, and his blog shows us how good he is.  It's doubtful he'll ever have to look for a job again. 

This can work out really well for a company.  Think Marshall Kirkpatrick, who moved from TechCrunch to Splashcast.  I was blown away at how effective he was pushing their social media strategy, and when he left, he left a great platform.  But I've also seen (and so have you) social media hires where the candidate really struggled to get buy-in, and then threw in the towel because the company wouldn't or couldn't change fast enough.

Hiring a VP Marketing who understands this (or who can be coached) is difficult, but it's not more difficult than any other search.   

Back to Matt, he's not the only other recruiter I've heard of making social media placements, but he's only the second I've heard of specializing in social media recruiting.  His geography makes it an easier sell, but I'm okay with that.  He may bill more than me, but I'm the better brander.

At least according to Google.

Candidates Learning To Take Jobs Without Recruiters

The following is a guest post from Robert Neelbauer of Job Matchbox. 

A few months ago a good friend took a job working for a startup company that you’ve probably heard of.   He had been having informational interviews with the top startup companies from around the area.  I say informational interviews and not interviews because these were more like conversations about what he wanted to do and whether or not they could line something like that up.  There were no developer tests or technical screen interviews (at least not in the early stages) or other major hoops that he had to jump through.  The companies that he interviewed with had an edge over the competition, but not a silver bullet.  Three of them had active community engagement programs.  One of the three didn’t have the flexibility to make a role for him, but the other two did.  He ended up taking the best opportunity of the two.

Facebook Webinar Feedback

I finished the webinar, but had a gap in the middle where we lost connectivity with the audio.  There is a video playback available for those who registered, and they are editing the gap out, but I want to hear what your thoughts are. This is also important for those of you who didn't get a chance to view the presentation live, or who failed to get the sign-up e-mail.

I've offered to redo the webinar and record it so people get a clean presentation, and I'm considering recording it for myself for sale on the site.  If I do that, I'll be offering it to everyone who registered. It's important to me that you all feel like you got real value from my work.

That said, it went fairly well.  It wasn't my best performance, as I got a little rattled trying to back up and cover information.  I encourage your feedback, both positive and negative.  I will only edit cursing - everything else if fair game.   And if you have specific questions or want to know more, feel free to follow up with me.

Thank you to all who attended.  From what was said, it was the largest webinar Hireability has done so far.

Next up:  MySpace Recruiting in June, and In July, Social Media 2.0 tools in Recruiting.  We're going to be tackling Twitter, Click to Call, Squidoo Lenses, and StumbleUpon.

Social Media Means More Than Having A Facebook Account

Jeremiah recounts a situation where an agency vendor pitched a $110,000 blog project when said agency had no experience in the blogosphere.

I concur at my marketing firm's weblog, brandstorming, but wanted to apply it to social media candidates.

Clients come to me with specific business needs.  They want those needs filled, and potentially see the hiring of a social media employee as the solution to that problem.  For far too many candidates, social media is the destination.  They want to be paid to replicate their self-promoting efforts.  But companies don't pay you to promote you. They pay to solve some business need.

Thus, if you want a job in social media, solve a problem using social media tools, and then use that experience to get the job you want.  Some companies might hire  you because you have a lot of Twitter Followers or speak Facebook, but you won't keep that job long if all you can do is write about yourself.

Business is about solving problems.  If social media doesn't solve problems, it doesn't belong in business.  And if you don't have a track record solving problems, you're not a social media consultant, you're a social media consumer.

Creating My New Career In Interactive Marketing Recruiting

One of the chief complaints of candidates in any field is the lack of knowledge of the recruiter.  In Information Technology, candidates want you to be a Java programmer, or a Database programmer, or understand use cases and database queries.  If you can't program, at the very least they want you to understand the difference between a programmer and a hack (in many cases, that's shorthand for everyone else is a hack, and the candidate in front of you is a programmer). Some recruiters even go get their CIS degrees to be more competitive.

In finance, candidates warm to former auditors (although I don't think bookkeepers do so well).

In interactive marketing, having the expertise to filter a candidate based on SEO/SEM/Social Media and Agency experience is truly a boon.  As I delve more fully into the experience of recruiting marketing folks, I'm finding that I can help people learn more about the industry, guide them on career paths, prep them for interviews, and most important, assess their salaries accurately based on what they can get paid.

As a practitioner (I consult for companies in this space), my advice is taken as a colleague, and not as a recruiter, and that's something that is rare for both candidates and recruiters (it's certainly new to me).

I used to dismiss the idea that practical knowledge of an industry was essential to being a recruiter. What it takes to recruit is different than what it takes to do the job.  Recruiting is a mix of sales, research, interviewing, and negotiation.  It's not difficult, but it is hard work.

Marketing, certainly online marketing, is a very similar beast. The biggest difference is that sharing information is a two-way street for marketers, but a one-way street for recruiters (referrals or submittals).  In just two months, the recruiting portion of my workday has doubled, and it threatens to grow as large as I let it.

It seems I am truly lucky - as I'm be able to mix my two greatest strengths into a cohesive career.  Isn't that what Pamela Slim and Seth Godin keep telling us what to do?

Social Media In Recruiting

I'm going to be on the Animal Radio Show in just a few minutes, talking about social media in recruiting.

http://recruitingshow.com/

Call into 646-652-2754 and listen, or be heard.  Open to all, and there will be audio playback.

Walk Your Candidates Into Interviews

It's the little details that make a difference in the quality of your placements.  Meeting candidates, asking the tough questions, actually checking references, and looking for respect from the candidate in the interview process are small things that lead to big dollars in placement.

One of those details for third party recruiters is walking candidates in the door for their first in-person interview.  There are two primary reasons for this:

1) I want to control the situation:  If the manager is late, I need to be there to talk to the candidate and find out when and where the manager will show.  Same goes for the candidate.  Some people don't follow travel directions well (I'm one of them), and in unfamiliar territory, it's best to have someone there in case you need to be guided towards the right building. 

2) I like to prep the candidate beforehand.  This involves a series of advice comments, followed by direct questions that are intended to get the candidate talking about something.  Anything to warm them up.

One of the best questions I use is the simplest.

"What is the job you are here for?"

If you take the time out of your day to drive to a new company and meet with a manager, you should at least know what you are interviewing for.  You should be prepared to answer this question, as simple as it sounds, because far too many people list the title of the job (often incorrectly), and then sit there with a not-too-bright look on their face.

If you are an SEO consultant - and you answer, "It's an SEO position," then you probably won't get the job.  This answer signifies that either your recruiting firm failed to tell you specific details when narrowing down the applicant list, or you weren't paying attention and hoped to "wing it" in the interview.  The question in the manager's mind at this point is why this person sitting in front of them is wasting their time when they don't even know what position they are interviewing for?

Take the time prepare yourself for the interview.  Ask questions before you get in the door.  Review them with your recruiter before you agree to meet the hiring manager.  A bad interview doesn't just prevent you from getting one job.  It often follows you around as managers talk to each other about this candidate who came in with a great resume, but messed up the interview in the first minute.