Eric Siu walks through hiring top marketers by creating a role scorecard with measurable success metrics like blog traffic and conversion rates, then testing candidates with real work samples. He cites two hires, Zach and Raghav, who proved themselves through copywriting and a blog proposal, and recommends LinkedIn outreach and referral incentives to source talent.
Here's how you can find that one A-player marketing that is going to change the trajectory of your business. The one thing that you have to do before you create a job description, you have to create a role scorecard. So a role scorecard will outline the outcomes that you're looking for, the competencies that you're looking for, and also at the very bottom outlining your core values so you can test for those core values. Let's say you are looking for someone that has driven a blog to 5 million visits a month. Those marketers are few and far between, but you have to define what you're looking for first. Maybe they have grown an email list to 500,000 people on the email list, or maybe they've increased the conversion rate to 2 to 3% or so, and they worked on a business that's similar to yours. And so you have to define what are these 3 to 5 outcomes that you're looking for when you hire for a role. It's not just copy and pasting someone else's job description, because if you don't know what you're looking for, ultimately you're not setting the right expectations and you're going to set that person up to fail. Now, when it comes to hiring, start producing content. I don't care how early or late you are going out there creating content. The content compounds over time. You teach people, people start to latch on to you. They decide whether they know, like, and trust you. Here's an example. We had someone from our team named Zach and another one named Raghav. And both of these guys, they actually saw my content first. And so, you know, what Zach did was he offered to do copywriting for us initially. And, you know, it worked out great. And a couple of years later, we ended up hiring him as a director of marketing. Now, Raghav, what he did was he saw our content. He went above and beyond for an internship job, and he actually wrote an 8,000-word blog post on what he would do for our blog. And so this is actually a good lesson here to test for what people would do for your business. That's important because you want to understand the level of their experience and their philosophy. Now the fourth one is sourcing, right? And so I've sourced a lot of amazing marketers through LinkedIn, but a lot of it comes down to your role scorecard again. What I do is I basically will reach out and say, hey, we are looking to hire for X, Y, and Z role. Do you know of anyone that might be interested? And a lot of the times they'll raise their hand and say, hey, I'm actually interested in this role. And then from there you can have a conversation around it. I'll give you another bonus too. If you have people that follow you on Twitter or LinkedIn, you can also ask, who is the best paid marketer that you know? Tag them in here. If we make the hire, we'll pay you a couple hundred dollars. And what happens is you incentivize people so they start tagging other people. So the final thing I'll add here is that, look, if you are looking to hire the right A-players, you also have to understand what is trending when it comes to growing your traffic and revenues, right? Which is why we made this video over here. So check out this video over here so you can understand those trends, and we'll see you over there.
