How to Build the BEST Marketing Team to Grow Your Business Faster
Eric Siu walks through recruiting marketing talent by studying competitor structures on LinkedIn, using interview questions to assess long-term goals and humility, and running written assessments and personality tests to match candidates to roles. He recommends the book Who by Geoff Smart and stresses that time spent hiring well now makes scaling easier later.
Chapters
If you're looking to build the best talent, 'cause we're talking about the best marketing talent here, you have to go out there and find them yourselves. Today we are going to talk about how you can build the ultimate marketing team, the best marketing team, so you can grow your business faster. First things first, what you wanna do is you wanna take a look at your competitors. So you would go on LinkedIn, take a look at your competitors. Ideally, there's someone that is significantly larger than you. You can see who they have on their team. So if you're looking to hire paid media managers, you're looking to hire executives for your team, Oftentimes you're going to see a trend that these companies that are larger than you, they have a similar structure and you want to hire people that are all-stars, right? And when you take a look at their LinkedIn profiles, you can see what they've done, what they've accomplished. And what I look for ultimately is tenure, right? Tenure. How long do they typically stay in a place? Are they job hopping all the time? Because you want someone that's reliable, someone that's going to stay with you for the long term. The second thing I look for is do they have a history of getting promoted, right? If they are getting promoted, that means they have a history of doing things well. And then you also want to look at their past too. Have they been promoted in the past? And if someone's early in their career, you can also just ask them, hey, like what have they done earlier in their career and how have they been promoted earlier in their career? Then what you would do is you'd reach out and you say, hey, you know, my name's Eric and I'm with Single Grain. We work with companies such as X, Y, and Z. We're looking for someone that can lead paid media efforts or SEO efforts or data efforts or whatever it is exactly. Do you know of anyone that would be interested? And there's a good chunk of time where people would just raise their own hands. And oftentimes they'll often even just refer someone else. But that's the most disarming message that you can send. If you want to build the ultimate marketing team, you have to block out time, right? Because us as marketers, we often think about, oh, you know, how do you do something? How do you do something? But as you grow as a business, you have to think more so about who can do it, who can solve the problem for you. And that's how you build true leverage. That's why the best companies in the world, they're often scooping up the best talent because talent, it's a war for talent. That's what really matters at the end of the day. What I would do is block out time. Maybe you're blocking out out at least an hour a day to hang out on LinkedIn if you're really looking to scale your team out, right? If it's early days for your company, maybe not so much, but you still want to build that muscle, that LinkedIn muscle, right? Especially if you're a CEO that's listening to this. The CEO, one of their main jobs is recruiting, right? And by the way, if you're enjoying this right now, if you want more tips on business and marketing, hit the like and hit the subscribe button because it helps us grow. The other thing is I really recommend reading this book called Who. It's by Jeff Smart. And that book is great because it teaches you how to screen. And so when you're screening for people, when you're talking to people initially, keep in mind you reached out and it's almost like a sales conversation. And what you're doing is you have to sell, right? You have to kind of sell what the vision is. You have to sell what the role is, and then you can ask these screening questions and then you have to sell again, right? If people are coming to you, they're applying directly, well, that's fine. But oftentimes the best talent, they're often not looking and they often already are employed, right? Now I want to give you an example of some of the key questions that you can ask when it comes to who's screening. First and foremost, you can ask, what are your long-term career goals? They can answer that however they want, but you want to understand how their mind is thinking about where they want to be going. Do they want to become a director? Do they want to start their own business? Are they happy where they are? And does this align with your values as a company? What are you world-class at? That's another one. And what actually gives you energy? So you want to understand, hey, like what tasks are they actually good at doing? What responsibilities are they actually good at? And does that fit in with what you're looking for? Now, on the flip side of that, what are you not so good at? What are you not interested in doing? So someone might say like Excel pivot tables. Right? And in fact, you might need that for the role. And if they're saying that, there's not a fit there. And by the way, with this screening, you can get this done in about 15 to 30 minutes or so. I would recommend going more on the 30-minute side because you are the one that reached out and you have a little bit of a selling job to do. But when you ask these questions, another question would be, you know, tell me about your last 3 managers. How would they rate your performance on a scale of 1 to 10 and why? And when sometimes people would just answer 10s across the board and give no context, Those are not necessarily people that you want to work with because the makeup of an ideal team player is someone that's humble, someone that's hungry, and someone that's smart. You know, humbleness is thinking of yourself less, right? It's not thinking less of yourself, but it's thinking of yourself less. And so when someone's saying 10s across the board, they're not really thinking through their answer, and they're not— when they're not elaborating on it, maybe their idea of a 10, it shows that they're not that hungry, and maybe they're, they're not that humble either, right? Um, so Again, these questions are all designed to help you kind of sidestep any, any potential landmines. Now, the other thing that we do when it comes to finding our rockstar marketers is we will send them an assessment. And oftentimes this is an assessment. It for sure is a written assessment, right? We want to understand how they write. We want to understand how they think. Now, if they're writing in blocks of text and they don't know how to space things out, they're not thoughtful with their words. Then we know this is how they're going to interact with potential other customers or people on the team. And that's not going to be a good fit. We want people that are able to think for themselves and people that are able to write at a high level. What else you might want to look at is Principles You, and that's a personality test that we use. And Principles You is great. It's a test by Adam Grant and Ray Dalio. And the reason that test is great is because I find it to be probably 85, 90% accurate when it comes to working with someone. This is not to say that anyone's personality is set in stone, but it's who they are at the moment, right? And so if you need someone that's actually very detail-oriented for the role, it's going to show how detail-oriented they are. If you need someone that's growth-minded, someone that can take feedback well, someone that has high composure, it's going to show you that as well. And don't ask me the science behind it, but we've just seen that it's been very accurate across the board. Those are just a couple of things. And what I would say as a final note is these are not designed to make things very difficult. It's designed to make things easier for you with your hiring process, right? The more work you put into it in the beginning, the easier it's going to become for you in the long term, right? If you yourself, you're looking for a role, At our agency, Single Grain, we're always looking for great people. So if you just go to singlegrain.com/work, again, singlegrain.com/work, you can go there and you can apply. This is just one of our ways to find rockstar marketers. But let me know in the comment what you think I might've missed and let me know, um, what you'd like to hear from me next on. And don't forget again to hit the like and the subscribe button and we will catch you later. Later.
