Poaching Top Marketing Talent Amidst A Digital Skills Shortage

Marketing is undergoing radical change. Change that, without doubt, you’re finding tough to keep up with and even tougher to resource.

Marketing professionals now need strong digital skills alongside more traditional capabilities, meaning the lines between marketing and IT are becoming blurred.

On top of this, technologies are developing at warp speed, so your business needs to source the right marketers with the right skills to stay competitive.

And it’s a pressing problem.

The battle for a limited pool of qualified candidates has never been fiercer. Recent research shows that more than half of all CEOs are concerned about a lack of digital skills within their organisation and over a quarter, or some 1.6 million of UK businesses, are planning to hire temporary or contract staff to help plug the skills gaps created by the digital explosion.

"The battle for a limited pool of qualified candidates has never been fiercer."

Furthermore, the top talent knows exactly how valuable it is, so even when you’ve secured a great person, you can’t afford to get complacent because with attractive salaries and career opportunities at an all-time high, loyalty is at an all-time low.

Which skills should you be looking for?

Consumers are increasingly tech-savvy but are time-poor and easily distracted by the barrage of messages they receive every day. Your marketing department needs people who can respond to this by driving genuine engagement with audiences, moving beyond general awareness or ‘likes’ on YouTube or Facebook.

Which means they’ll need to be armed with an array of skills.

They need to inject life into websites, understand email marketing and lead-nurturing tools and confidently use CMS, CRM and Google Analytics data to inform and develop their campaigns.

An understanding of SEO is a must, and skills in PPC and programmatic advertising are valuable, so marketers can get to grips with the technical, the content, and the link-building features of online campaigns.

Data science skills are in short supply and yet all the more essential. With a mountain of information now available, marketers must be comfortable wading through big data to select those pearls of wisdom that will drive better decision-making.

But don’t forget the traditional skills. Marketers still need to be able to write, to be creative, to understand their audiences inside-out and have excellent interpersonal skills.

Crikey…it’s quite a tall order.

So how are you going to attract and keep the best people?

The likelihood is that your department has senior staffers with bags of marketing experience but is low on the new tech skills. And the CVs you’re getting for junior roles contain good digital skills but few pure marketing qualities. So, it’s vital you recruit people prepared to connect with others so you can foster a happy marriage between these differing skill-sets. And we’re not pretending that isn’t a tough ask…

But fear not. We’ve got ideas to get those marketing marvels flying through your doors:

• Look for people who can adapt, learn, and develop – candidates need the ability to learn new and evolving technologies fast, and keep on top of developments.
• Insist on great team workers – new recruits need to work in partnership with people with different marketing skills to themselves, as well as with the experts in IT, so they must have great communication and collaboration skills. Highlight this when recruiting and ask for evidence.
• Promote development and career progression – the collaborative and knowledge-sharing environment you’ll want to create will be attractive to top talent because they enjoy team-working and learning new things. It will certainly appeal to Millennials who expect to have their needs for regular progression met.
• Offer flexible working – a modern, dynamic and tech-driven organisation needs an equally up-to-date work environment. Consider ‘core hours’, part-time or remote working, supported by the right technology.
• Create an Employee Value Proposition – this well help you win talent by over emphasising what other factors, besides money, you offer. These can even be intangible rewards such as working on interesting and meaningful projects, not just free pastries on a Friday. You’d be surprised how the little things can sway decisions when it comes to competing for talent.
• Put in place diversity and inclusion strategies – candidates are increasingly attracted to ethical organisations. You’re also more likely to fill vacancies by reaching under-represented groups. In the long run, you’ll increase loyalty and retain employees if they like the company culture.
• Use specialist recruitment agencies – hiring is time-intensive and top talent tends to be happy where it is. It takes a gargantuan force, that of specialist marketing headhunters, to coax the best talent away from their current place of employment and bring it to your hiring table.

If you want to connect with trusted, specialist marketing agencies quickly to cast your (candidate search) net a bit wider, check out Hiring Hub’s marketplace.

"If you want to connect with trusted, specialist marketing agencies quickly, check out Hiring Hub’s marketplace."

It’s free-to-use and, during the last 12 months, we’ve helped some of the UK’s leading companies fill hundreds of specialist marketing roles. You can book a demo here.