Jason Falls recently hired a social media expert for Doe-Anderson. He posted the job on his blog with specific instructions on how to apply, and then went about filtering, interviewing, and eventually hiring Kat French.
Doe-Anderson is an advertising agency in Louisville. They do branding, and they blog. And so it made a lot of sense for me to ask Jason the specifics of how he went about hiring Kat. The following is a lengthy interview with Jason on how to hire from a corporate standpoint. It's remarkable both for how much information he gave us, and for the care he put into hiring. Try to think of another industry where a manager would give out the secrets of a great hire. In social media, it's not as difficult, because you either get it or you don't. If you get it, then these aren't secrets. If you don't, nothing you read is going to give you a competitive advantage.
What you can take from this is that if you're looking for a branding agency, you now know at least one who takes social media seriously, and you would be well advised to put your account into their hands. Now, the interview:
Questions:
1) Did you write your own job description? Was it tough to get through Human Resources? And did that description change as you went through the interview process?
I wrote my own job description and had our HR director (a Sr. VP and
board member) approve it. The description didn't change at all. In
fact, when I first told her I wanted to post the opening on my blog in
such a way, she said, "That's great. I'm always looking for new and
innovative ways to find good people."
2) Did you get better resumes from job postings or from your blog and other social media avenues?
Most definitely from the blog and social media avenues. However, I
expressly said in my posting that I didn't want resumes. We also
pointed all of our official job postings (LinkedIn, Louisville AdFed,
etc.) back to my blog post, so most people who reached out about the
job got what we were shooting for. Thankfully, I only got a couple of
real resumes, which were immediate rejections, of course. If you're
online and you connect with me about the job, your LinkedIn profile and
a Google search is really all I need.
3) What was the most common error that candidates made in applying to this position?
The two that standout were the couple of folks who sent me resumes despite my expressed, written instructions not to do so and those who thought leaving comments on my blog post was enough. The three words on the post, "Connect With Me" were linked to my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Five people responded in the comments that they were interested. Only one of them reached out to me in the three avenues I suggested. The others assumed I'd read or see the comments, which is a reasonable assumption certainly. However, as luck would have it, the Wordpress email-when-comments-are-posted feature is buggy and I didn't see any of them until we were already narrowing the field down. Since they didn't go the extra mile to aggressively find a response from me, I assumed they weren't quite what I was looking for.
4) In looking through resumes/url's, what caught your eye in determining who got an interview?
Entrepreneurial spirit in social media activity. If you had a blog, managed a community, did web video just for fun or to figure it out ... anything that said you were exploring, learning and doing. One young man, who I ultimately interviewed, built his own Ning community around doing video resumes so each profile was, in essence, a LinkedIn profile but all geeked out with multimedia. I thought that was particularly cool. Plus, seeing a three minute video on who he is and why he's passionate about social media told me almost everything I needed to know about assessing his want and ability to do the job. (Ultimately, he did not get the job, but was a finalist and is someone I'm very happy to know and keep an eye on)
5) Once you narrowed the field down, how did the questions change? Was it a matter of "fit," or were you looking at hard metrics?
It was a matter of fit, both personality- and skill-wise. Hiring someone just like me is illogical. I have weaknesses and balance in staffing makes the organization stronger. But we also make sure the personality is going to work. Doe-Anderson uses Predictive Index measures to gauge an individual's personality indicators. We not only use these to assess the candidate, but how that personality profile fits with the other members of our team and how they would interact with one another. It's not the ultimate factor we use in hiring, but it helps us better understand how one person may fit in comparison to another. If I were starting a business on my own or moved to a company that didn't use the PI score, I'd insist we incorporate it. It's fascinating to see how it all works when used properly. And when you see your own PI you'll get the heebie jeebies a little. It's dead on you.
6) Does experience in SEO/PR/Marketing make for a better social media candidate?
Yes. But that's kind of like saying does experience with Excel make for a better secretary. It all depends on what you're looking for, but additional knowledge in any regard makes for better candidates. SEO is important to understand when working in the online world. It's not as all-powerful as search marketers like to think, but not knowing SEO certainly can cripple you. PR is very important to be familiar with if you're doing blogger outreach or community relations activity and isn't that what social media is really all about? I'm biased, certainly, but I have always thought of social media or social media marketing as online PR. I'm doing the same things I did for 11 years as a public relations professional. Only now I'm doing them with online communities and media outlets. Whether it's intranets (internal communications), extranets (online communities), web development (messaging and positioning), social networking (community relations, event management) or blogger outreach (media relations) social media seems to me to be PR for the web. Since PR is an arm of marketing, I would say an understanding of marketing is a given/imperative when looking into a social media job. But those who have a community relations/pubic relations mindset and not one that is sales driven are going to standout more in my mind.
7) A lot of people look at social media as an opportunity to escape their industries or start a new career path. Is knowledge of social media sufficient to get hired, or do need specific business experience? If so, what do they need to know?
Well, just because you have a MySpace page and read blogs doesn't make you qualified to work in social media. But, if someone is, say, a real estate agent and they're all over the place with blogs, podcasts, social networking activity and so on, they wouldn't be eliminated from consideration because what they're doing is marketing themselves through social media. So, no, knowledge of social media isn't sufficient to get hired. Understanding how to use social media to communicate messages to an audience is.
8) How did you decide on a salary range for this position. Would you compare it to similar positions (Account executive, SEO consultant, copywriter), or is it made up out of whole cloth? Any suggestions for salaries for different social media jobs a) Community Manager, b) Director, Social Media Marketing, c) Social Media Consultant (entry-level agency). ?
We based our salary more on our company structure than anything else. Relative to our client services team, our PR account team and our media department -- all of which parallel our social media effort -- an account manager makes a fairly predictable range. For the Louisville market and in very general terms, I'd put a $40K-$75K bracket around it, with senior account managers meeting and exceeding the high end of that. Understand that the salary would probably move up in different markets. I've heard of positions I would consider at a slightly lower level than what we hired for in Silicon Valley paying almost twice as much. But they also pay 3-4 times as much to just have a place to live. We did have several candidates from larger cities decline pursuit of the job because of the salary, which is understandable. But the cost of living in Louisville, our agency's revenue model and thousands of other factors make what we were offering quite fair in our minds. We certainly did not see the average level of the talent pool drop because of the salary.
One thing I would add on salaries is that we don't really have a strong grasp on what the value of social media really is. For now, that means we have to compare it to parallel positions. At Doe-Anderson, we see social media as a sister discipline to public relations, so we have a benchmark. Other organizations may see it falling more in line with interactive and digital marketing disciplines, but how can you adequately compare an ASP.net developer to a social media strategist? (I know, apples-to-oranges, but that's really the point.) As the field matures, we'll start to see long-term impacts of social media programs, tie-ins to bottom lines for revenue and, I think, a C-level awareness and understanding that, like public relations, you can't be very successful without it. Then the salaries will become better defined.
a) A community manager (forum, message boards, blogs) is a customer service agent to me, but a specialized one. In the Louisville market, I can see these positions starting in the mid-30s and moving upwards of 60 or 70K, depending upon the size and scope of the community or brand.
b) Director of social media marketing is going to be akin to a director of public relations or marketing, in my mind. Again, in Louisville, this person would probably command a salary of 40 to 100K with non-profits and very small organizations on the lower end of that spectrum. The larger the brand or company, the higher the salary. There would even be a few in that position in Louisville that would make more than 100K as we have corporate headquarters for several very large companies here (Yum Brands, UPS, Humana, etc.) You could even make the argument that, for those large corporations, 150-250K wouldn't be out of the question.
And a c) social media consultant, entry-level agency person I'm assuming would be an account manager or assistant account manager. Right out of college, I would think low to mid-30s to start. Temper that with the fact that I haven't set salaries for more than a couple of positions in the social media field, however. That said, it's probably two more than most people have.
9) Any finalist candidates that you really liked, and would recommend that managers reading consider hiring?
Absolutely. In fact, if I do my job really well and we have a lot more social media clients in the coming year, I won't be posting another call for candidates. And if anyone is looking for a social media manager with a track for becoming a higher-level strategist, I've got a few names for you.
Jason Falls is the Social Media Explorer, and can be reach on his bloged.
