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How to Hire the Best Possible Marketer
Hardly a day goes by without someone calling me or writing me asking for help in filling a marketing position. Good marketing people are in great demand, especially in the performing arts and entertainment sectors.
What surprises me is that nobody asks me how to tell a good candidate from a poor or mediocre one. Maybe the people who call just assume that they'll know a good marketing pro when they find one.
With all due respect, my experience is quite the contrary. Most CEOs hire the skills, experience, and knowledge that agrees with their own prejudices and preconceptions of the world. We're all at risk of doing that. Lord knows I've done it myself.
We have to hold ourselves to a higher standard. We have to hire someone who is capable of divining what's going to be necessary for all those tomorrows that are coming down the pike. Strategically, today is so very yesterday.
Lately, a lot of marketing people are bailing out. They're not just moving to another job in the business, they're moving to another field altogether. They've had enough. Why?
Arts and entertainment marketing is tough, soul-killing, thankless work. When things go well, the artists and producers talk up their foresight, great judgment, taste, and skill. When things go poorly, it's all about how the marketing people don't know what they're doing. This is a tough environment to work within, and understandably, more than a few people are opting to work somewhere else.
If you want to work in the cultural sector as a marketer, you'd better be good. This business is no place for people without brains, backbone, gumption, strategic skills, a sense of humor.
But more importantly, marketing requires intense & active curiosity. Great marketing professionals are first and foremost life-long learners. They are people whose appetite for learning is never sated. They must know not just that something succeeded or failed, but why it succeeded or failed.
Good marketers are information omnivores with wide horizons and wide interests.
They are not people who believe you go to school to get a degree to learn how to do something, then go out to do it. They are not people who believe mastery is a destination; they believe it is a journey. As such, they are lifelong journeymen.
We already know those technical and marketing discipline-related skills and expertise questions. We're quite capable of appraising what people know now. What we need to be able to appraise is how well they will continue to learn what they need to know to succeed in the future. A CEO's primary stewardship responsibility is the future, not the present. That's especially relevant to growing markets and revenues.
Any CEO who is looking to hire a marketing professional would benefit from an interview process designed to reveal how candidates compare when it comes to active-learning habits.
Here are a dozen questions that will help separate the wheat from the chaff:
1. What's the most important thing you've learned in the last month? Week? Day?
2. Whose writing on marketing strategy is a must-read? What do you like about their thinking?
3. If you were to compare audiences from two spectacular marketing failures (or successes) that you've had, how would they be different?
4. What are your best on-line resources for learning?
5. Whose blogs do you read? Would you share the address with me? What's the most interesting post that you recall?
6. When you go to a conference, how do you choose workshops or sessions? What's the most memorable session you've been in for awhile? Why did it create value for you?
7. When it comes to marketing, what confuses you?
8. What are the data metrics that you believe this organization should use to measure its marketing performance?
9. What do you look for in your team-members?
10. When you decide to take a risk and experiment, what do you pay attention to before and after your decision?
11. What consumer magazines do you read? Why?
12. What trade journals are must-reads for you? Why? Tell me about a particular article that shifted your thinking or caused you to work differently?
If there is one thing that can go horribly wrong with people working in this sector, it's when they begin to act as if their self-concept is one of a seasoned, mature professional who knows what they need to know. When people stop learning - especially in the cultural sector - they become pretty much useless to themselves and to their organizations.
As Eric Hoffer said:
"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
Posted on October 8, 2006 10:00 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Great post and points well taken.
When you state that " When people stop learning...they become pretty much useless..."
This holds true for any sector. The "old school", which I am a part, can learn many new things from the "new school". When they both can work and learn together a wonderful union is made and great things can happen.
Thanks for the words of wisdom my friend.