In this conversation, Eric Siu and Neil Patel share practical, actionable strategies for sourcing top marketing talent in the latter half of 2021. They emphasize that hiring the right people outweighs any specific tactic, and they walk through a multi‑pronged approach: 1. Direct outreach on LinkedIn – spending 1‑2 hours daily sending concise, personalized messages and achieving about a 20% response rate. 2. Referral recruiting – leveraging existing team members’ networks, conducting one‑on‑one reviews of their connections, and scaling the pool of potential candidates as the organization grows. 3. Competitor‑based talent scouting – using SEO tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Ubersuggest to identify marketers who are driving strong results for rival sites, then approaching those individuals directly. 4. Assessing promotion history – prioritizing candidates who have been promoted within their current companies as a proxy for proven performance. 5. Tapping freelance marketplaces and niche job boards – finding capable marketers on Upwork, Fiverr, Toptal, and the dedicated Marketing School job board (marketingschool.io/jobs), which is free to post on at the time of recording. 6. Understanding realistic outreach metrics – acknowledging typical response rates and the volume of contacts needed to fill roles. The hosts stress that a combination of these methods, tailored to a company’s size and culture, yields the best results for hiring high‑performing marketers.
Chapters
Today, we're going to talk about where to hire the best marketers for the rest of 2021. So we've talked about the subject, but things change, right? Sometimes there's new solutions. Sometimes there's new tactics that we found, but nothing has changed in— from the overall, the overarching theme here is that it comes down to the people at the end of the day. So Neil and I, I think as we get older, it's the understanding that we're not trying to be exactly the best marketers in the world, but we're trying to learn from the best marketers in the world. And we're trying to hire the best marketers. In the world. So I'll start first. After this, I'm actually going to hop on LinkedIn myself and go source people. I find that recruiters are great. I find referral recruiting is great as well. Nothing really replaces someone that understands how to connect the dots. Because even if I set a criteria for someone else, hey, we should go look for these people, sometimes it's just not quite there. So I'd rather spend the hour or 2 hours a day either scouring LinkedIn or talking to other people. But I'm going to start with LinkedIn first, sending them a message like, hey, Hey Neil, we're looking for a paid media manager. Do you know of anyone else that might be a fit? Right? Or do you know of anyone that might be a fit? And then maybe you give like a one-liner on what you do. You don't want to give too many details, just keep it short to the point. And then they either respond or they don't. And I find that my response rate on these, I was just sending out the other day, my response rate's about 20%, which is pretty damn good.
That's really good. And a strategy that I love using to really find the best marketers is I go look at who's doing really well in my space. So you can use SEMrush, you can use Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, whatever you want to use. Go see who's doing really well. So like for me, I may type in some of my competitor URLs like Moz or whoever, maybe in Ubersuggest, see who's doing really well. I compare them to my traffic stats, see who's climbing the fastest. And then I go look to see who's doing their marketing, whether it's on LinkedIn or it's doing some Google searches. And then I'll actually start going and approaching some of their employees and go and try to hire them. That's my strategy. And that works quite well.
The other thing I'll say is referral recruiting. I just mentioned that earlier. So basically let's say Neil's on my team. So I'll look at 5 to 10 people on his LinkedIn or maybe his Twitter as well. And for whatever role we're looking to recruit, let's say it's an SEO or let's say it's a social media creator. And I'll be like, hey Neil, maybe during a one-on-one session, And you should be having one-on-ones with your direct reports. Hey Neil, I looked at these 5 people. Who do you think I should be talking to? Or these 10 people, who should I be talking to? Because we're looking to recruit these people. There's nothing better than that. Or there are some things better than that, but that's a pretty good way because once your company starts to grow, let's say you have 5 people, you have 10 people, 15 people or so. Well, all of a sudden, if you go 15 times 5, then that's 75 people that you could be talking to and you're bound to find someone. And the other thing is it's a referral. So you're actually likelier to get that. Because you have someone that's speaking very highly of working for your company.
Yeah. The other thing I found too is with internal, a lot of people are like, oh, if you refer someone, I'll give you money. I found that it doesn't work too well. And what you'll find is internally, if you already have employees, they'll naturally recommend good ones for you, to you without charging you anything or you having to offer them a referral fee. Just asking is enough. What Eric's mentioning, other than LinkedIn, other than looking up to see what your competition's doing and who's in charge of their marketing, just when you're looking for these people, make sure they continually got promoted within that organization, because it shows that someone else saw that they were valuable and they liked the quality of their work, which means they're probably more likely to do a better job at your organization because they did a good job at the previous one.
The other thing I'll say is you can find some really good marketers. So some people poo-poo on Upwork, right? Or even Fiverr. You can actually find some pretty good people on, on these boards and even Toptal as well. Actually for, for Marketing School, we actually just created a board. If you go to marketingschool.io/jobs, that's J-O-B-S, you can post your jobs, or you can go look for a job there. So we noticed that there aren't really any marketing jobs there. So we wanted to create one to be helpful. So you can go post for free as of this recording. We don't know if it's gonna change later, but as of right now it's free. So go check that out. And Neil, do you wanna add anything?
Make sure you also check out marketingschool.io/live.
