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.
