Writers are a dime a dozen. But writers who can market? Those are a bit harder to come by. Over the past five years, we’ve interviewed over 75 different content marketing specialists and evaluated hundreds more.
In the following video, I talk about the tips we’ve learned over years to not just find a writer, but find a great marketer, too. And although it’s specific to content marketing, the same tips can apply to other job fields as well.
Video Transcription
Hi, I’m Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media, and today I want to share some tips on how to hire amazing content marketing specialists. We hire a lot of content marketing specialists here at Siege Media and hopefully have some lessons we can share with you if you’re trying to hire some of your own.
1. Use Applicant Filtering Techniques
What I mean by filtering techniques, is at the bottom of your job description, say, “Please send your resume to X email and include Y in the subject line.” For example, we like using bacon, or syrup, or anything variable to each specific job description you have. And specific to content marketing, it allows creativity to shine through. And it also saves you time because if they’re not even seeing that at the bottom of your job description, they don’t have attention to detail.
So sometimes, people will just say bacon as a subject line, and that’s kind of a nod that this person maybe isn’t thinking too creatively compared to that person who applies a nice spin to bacon in the subject line to make it fun, make it creative. And that’s the kind of person that will stand out in an inbox and knows how to market themselves generally.
2. Leverage CTR Tactics in Job Titles
So we’ve been lucky enough to win some awards in recent months, and we’ve noticed a noticeable uptick in applications once we added that into our job description title.
So what I mean by that is, say you’re coming to Craigslist, you’re looking at marketing descriptions, and you see “Content Marketing Specialist,” just generally, and then you see the job description below it and it says, “Content Marketing Specialist for Award Winning Agency.”
Which one are you clicking first? You’re probably clicking the “Award Winning Agency.”
And similarly, it doesn’t have to be an agency if you’re not an agency, or maybe you’ve done something else great as a company that is worthy of inclusion and pushing in that job title area. I think that will make you stand out and the same reason that you’re hopefully a great company worth working at will highlight yourself against the other very vanilla, blah, job description titles that are there and will consider you first amongst the other crop of mediocrity that’s out there.
3. Rank for “Best Marketing Jobs/Agency in X”
So we’ve actually noticed kind of indirectly that we got some good leads of people finding Siege Media through searches like “Best Marketing Jobs in San Diego.” And this came just because someone happened to have written a post about that exact thing and mentioned us. And after that, we realized, “Hey, this is actually how great candidates find companies.”
It’s because they’re trying to work for the best of the best. They’re actively finding those jobs, they’re actively pursuing directly versus going to Craigslist. So if you specifically seek out those rankings, whether it’s getting listed on those pages, finding ways to work with people to get included on posts that already exist, or coming up with ones from scratch, I would bet you’ll find a notable uptick in great candidates from that process.
4. Run a Three-Hour, Remote Outreach Test
And finally, is running an outreach test before you meet those people in person. We like to do a three-hour test where we say, “Block off three hours and tell us when you’re ready to start.” And then we send them a little description of an outreach test, a hypothetical, where they would be pitching two different assets of two different types.
We get a sense for who they’d be willing to pitch, who they’d say is not a fit for that content, and just them thinking through that process and also how much do they get through in three hours is a great indicator for how this person thinks about digital marketing and content marketing. And that’s been a great way of filtering, again, the great from just the good. And that’s been a great path towards us getting solid content marketers here and hopefully can help you as well.
So those four tips in total, I think would help you get great content marketing specialists, especially those with a focus in SEO. So if you have any tips yourself, please let me know, shoot me an email, and thanks for watching.
If you liked this video, please subscribe to our channel.
