What do you add if we already have a recruiter?
A recruiter can save you a great deal of searching. My part is helping you work out what the marketing role needs to be and whether the shortlisted candidates can do it.
I look at their work, ask about their decisions and help you compare them against the job you actually need done. Then, after someone joins, I work with you both on the handover and first project. You or your recruiter still handles finding candidates.
How do you tell whether someone is good beyond what’s on their CV?
I ask them to show us the work and explain it. What were they trying to achieve? What did they personally do? What did they learn from customers? What happened when the work was used?
Their answers help us see where they’re strong and what still needs checking. Someone may have excellent campaign results, for example, but have relied on another team for the research and writing your role needs.
The engagement includes reviews of up to four shortlisted candidates’ work and participation in up to three interviews. You receive a written comparison against the role we’ve defined. You make the hiring decision.
What if we hire someone and start to think we’ve made a mistake?
We need to take that seriously and look at what’s happening. I’d want to see the work, what they were asked to do and what they had to work with.
Missing customer information, unclear priorities and a skills gap need different responses. I’ll tell you what I think the problem is, why, and what we can address during our work together. I can’t promise that every hiring decision will work out. Decisions about the role and employment remain yours.
How do we work out what kind of marketer we need?
Start with the work you need them to do first. “Take over marketing” can hide a very large job.
We’ll look at how you win customers, where you need help, your budget and who else can contribute. That gives us a basis for choosing the experience and skills to look for. Someone who needs to research customers and write the website will need different strengths from someone taking over established campaigns.
I turn that into a role brief we can use to assess candidates.
Will you find candidates for us?
You or your recruiter handles the search and applications. I help define the role and assess the shortlisted candidates. If you need someone to find people as well, you’ll need to allow for that separately.
What do I need to hand over? Most of it is in my head.
That’s often where the useful parts are. The explanation that finally made a prospect understand. Why you stopped selling a particular service. The promise you’ve learned to avoid making.
Bring the material you have: sales notes, customer feedback, previous marketing and product information. We’ll work through it with your marketer and build a shared reference for the first project, including the questions we still need to answer.
You don’t have to write a company handbook before we can begin.
How do we choose the first project?
We look at what matters to the business and what we can usefully complete with the evidence, time and production support available.
That could be messaging and homepage copy, or a campaign brief, landing page and three emails. We choose one project for one audience, agree who does each part and decide what we’ll review once it’s in use.
The point is to give your marketer a useful piece of work to get into, with the help they need to finish it.
What if hiring takes longer than we expected?
The engagement allows up to twelve weeks for the hiring work, followed by twelve weeks from your marketer’s agreed start date. If the dates move, we’ll review the remaining work, agree new dates and reconfirm my availability. There’s no automatic holding fee.
If you stop hiring, we agree a close-out against completed milestones. You won’t be charged for undelivered work that was due to happen after the marketer started. A long pause may affect when I can resume; any additional work needs an agreement before it begins.