Well, Dawn, great to see you again. For those of you that don’t know, Dawn and I started Hirewells marketing practice back in, what was is? 2015? 2016?- ish around there. It depends on how you define start. Yeah. We started working in marketing recruiting before we officially had a marketing practice. And my, how times have changed. The old days when, remember when all we heard was like “digital transformation” over and over again. That was the buzzword and just like- I haven’t heard digital transformation in a very long time and I couldn’t be happier about it. So what we did want to do is just kind let everyone know what’s happening in the marketing, like what’s happening now.
You know, what are actually the trends we’re seeing across the marketing area. I know there’s a lot of things that are happening since I kind of stepped out of the role and you’ve taken things over and making us do a better job in that area. So thank you again. You mean, you’re not in our marketing practice anymore? No.
Does it still say that on my LinkedIn profile? It might. I’m not sure.
Anyways. So the first thing is what’s in the highest demand in marketing? When clients are coming to you, what are the things you’re seen most often? And what’s the team working on the most? Yeah, there’s a lot of things. I think the best way to like break it down is sort of by types of companies.
The way that we bucket the marketing practice and the companies we work with is put them into three different areas. So B2C companies, B2B companies, and then agencies, and obviously agencies can support either B2C or B2B, but how they hire and the types of people that they hire sort of vary.
So we separate that out. On the B2B front, which is really where we’ve seen the most demand in the last let’s call it six months or so but really sort of increasing throughout this year, it’s a lot of demand gen and a lot of product marketing. And those functions seem to be like the hot ticket, every B2B company, especially in like the software tech space, which is what a lot of our client base is,
are building out demand gen teams, demand gen functions, product marketing teams, product marketing functions. And then as they get a little bit more advanced then really adding marketing operations, that sort of third tier, like the people that manage the process and the data and all of it behind the scenes. On the B2C front, I mean, that kind of runs the gamut, but I think what
we’ve seen the most of really in 2021 is product managers. So a lot of our B2C clients tend to be more digital e-commerce focused. So people that are really sort of owning the product roadmap from a digital standpoint, we’ve seen just more growth in that area than any other area. And then agency is kind of the same thing, all over the place, but very, very heavily focused at least in our client base, which tends to be more
advertising agencies. Some creative agencies too, but heavy asks from agency clients on just paid media across the board. And I think that happens to be a place where both B2B and B2C companies tend to outsource when it gets to a certain size and scale. And so that’s an area that’s just ever-growing and sort of focus and ask on the client’s side.
Let’s walkthrough all of those three areas we talked about. So we talked about B2C clients, B2B clients, and agency clients. Even within, beyond skillset when you’re looking at like the types of people, the levels of people, what other trends are you seeing in hiring?
If you want to kind of break each down, kind of one at a time. Yeah, I think I can kind of group together, and we’re talking about B2B and B2C companies like internal hires. What we’re seeing is that companies are tending to go more senior on those roles. They need people that are more strategic in nature because they’re building out these specific areas.
Like they need people with expertise in those areas so they’re not looking for just like a general marketing manager when they need a demand gen manager. They need someone with expertise in demand gen, and that takes time to build up. Same thing on the B2C front, you’re talking about content marketing and things of that nature.
Like you just need- they’re going on more senior hires and then where they are supplementing or when they are bringing in agencies, those tend to be specific agencies, but various focus areas. So we’re seeing a lot of agencies pop up that have like demand gen focus or product marketing or marketing operations or content or creative or design, whatever that might be.
And so internal companies are supplementing from an execution standpoint with agency resources as needed, but then hiring more senior internally. So that’s where we tend to see on the agency side more junior hires. They can build out teams with less experience with one person sort of leading the charge or multiple people leading the charge but with bigger teams underneath them, that’s far more junior resources.
So we’re just seeing more of a slant towards senior internal hires and then more openness to junior hires on the agency side. Got it. What about interview processes? Have you seen any change between one, the pandemic and everyone being remote and two, just like how chaotic it is.
Everyone’s trying to hire so quickly and that the competition’s up. What are companies doing to kind of compensate and kind of change up how they go about the interview process? Yeah I mean, I think I’ve seen just in two years, right across the board, all interviewing on Zoom and it’s happening
remotely and that’s just hopefully the norm forevermore, quite frankly because it’s making things move quicker and faster and easier. But I think over the course of these two years, what we’ve seen more of is just companies being more decisive, shortening their process, not needing to involve 20 people for a manager hire, but really bringing in the right people early on and moving quickly and swiftly to get to a decision.
And then removing things that are just general roadblocks in the process like projects and presentations. And if they are doing those things, they’re making them easier and shorter to execute, recognizing that someone putting 10 hours into a project for an interview is just not realistic. So something that they can knock out in an hour or less and still get the same value out of.
I think probably the most important, and I don’t know if it’s specific to marketing or just overall generally, companies have stopped setting the expectation that they need local talent. That was the thing we saw a lot of early in the pandemic and really into early 2021 too. We were okay with them being remote, but we need someone who’s within 10 miles of our office because one day we’re going to go back.
And now they’re like probably not one day, but even if we do we’re okay, because you succeeded for two years with the remote workforce. So we can probably do it for the future of the company. And so they’ve been able to just open up their talent pools, get more qualified people quicker, and actually just
embracing that has been the biggest change for most companies in actually being able to hire in this market. Awesome. I think this was a good snapshot that will be helpful for everyone out there who follows us and everyone who uses us. So if you have any questions, if you’re out there, if you’re hiring marketers and you want to know what you could be doing better in your interview process, Dawn is the most skilled recruiter I’ve ever worked with.
Contact her. She’ll be happy to help you out. Say that one more time. Once is all you’re going to get.
