If your company is looking to hire a marketer, finding the right candidate for the role can have a profound impact on your business. When it comes to your company’s success, maintaining your image and growing your customer base, your marketing team can make a huge impact.

According to eMarketer, British and American companies have been spending 11-12% of their revenues on marketing. That’s the aggregate of all North American and UK companies, and marketing spend is trending upward. It’s projected that by 2020, total U.S. marketing spending will reach nearly $470 billion.

Recruiting in a Competitive Market

As 2018 comes to a close, more companies are pursuing marketing candidates with increased tenacity. The market has become so competitive that companies have hired new marketing employees on the spot, lest the candidate get cherry-picked by the competition in a matter of hours or days.

Since making the right hire is paramount, what can recruiters and hiring managers do to remain agile in a competitive market and ensure they hire the best candidates?

It begins with having an innate understanding of the position from a high level. What are the essential qualities that comprise the best-fit candidate? Most companies are looking for the perfect mix of proven experience and value. There are lots of candidates in the job market who either lack experience or may even be too senior for a role better suited for someone earlier in their career.

Understanding the Qualities of the Best Candidates

The best marketing candidates are well-rounded in that they’re great communicators, strategic thinkers, insatiably curious, self-motivated, unintimidated by a challenge, and trustworthy. This new hire will be spending your company’s money and impacting your business’s image.

In the digital marketing space, it’s not enough to be able to speak confidently about different channels like PPC, SEO, Social Media, Display or Lead Generation. With the wealth of information online, it’s not hard to get a working knowledge of the language around digital marketing. It’s much harder to masquerade as a true critical thinker. The best candidates will have the unshakably sound ability to reason well and think on-the-fly in ways that inexperienced or ill-fitting candidates simply will not.

Sorting through hundreds of well-qualified resumes and cover letters can also be time-consuming, so what can recruiters do to accelerate the process of identifying and vetting viable candidates?

Developing an Agile Recruitment Process

In a market where time is of the essence, having a road-worthy methodology is priceless. Communicating with hiring managers, searching for candidates and conducting pre-screening interviews takes considerable effort.

Closing the gap between someone who looks good on paper and someone who can handle the rigor of a marketing role and drive success is top-of-mind for recruiters throughout the industry. One of the most effective tools has been pre-employment screening software. Tools like these allow recruiters to measure how well candidates fit the model of the ideal candidate across a range of fields from aptitude to disposition.

One of the tools we’ve found indispensable for our recruiting efforts is the pre-employment testing tool Berke Assessment. It has allowed us to save our recruiters a lot of time and energy because our hiring managers have been able to look at their best team members and come up with profiles of what makes these people great. Berke can take these impressions and create benchmarks so we can see how well prospects match up to our best talents. We’ve also been able to streamline our interview process by utilizing their interview guides. We’ve used the guides to help us measure and improve our effectiveness by having a standardized interview format and timeframe. With Berke’s API, we’ve been able to port assessment reports and scores directly into our systems without having to toggle between platforms which have saved us a lot of time.

Employee Satisfaction and Retention

The benefit of selecting the right candidate is also valuable on the back end. By finding well-qualified people who are also good culture fits has helped us improve our retention rates and has saved us a lot of time and money. While culture fit may sound like hype to some, take a moment to consider the effect of turnover on your business. If you had a team of well-aligned players who could work well together, would it solve any of your current workplace issues? No one will be a 110% match, culturally speaking, but learning how to weed out ill-fitting or even toxic personality factors can do a lot to reduce strain on morale and improve the overall health of the company.