Max Brun discusses when to hire for SEO roles. Growth generalists who can scale editorial teams often outperform expensive specialists, and can be trained in six months to match traditional SEO hires. Define your strategy first.
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You know, when it comes to hiring for SEO, you know, I guess like what stage do you think it makes sense for, you know, founders to hire and, you know, what should they look for when they're hiring for SEO?
I think you first need to figure out what your strategy is gonna be and hire for that. And usually your strategy's not gonna be super technical. So, and the technical SEO people are the, there's the fewest of them, they're the most expensive. And you frequently don't need them. So for MasterClass, for example, no one had any SEO experience and, but they were generally really good growth people who measured things and whatever we needed to build, they could build it. Like they could scale an article editorial team really well. That's what, that's the kind of person I would hire over the traditional SEO person. If you are building Zillow competitor, like maybe you do need a an act— a person with domain expertise. But a lot of times just getting a really good growth person who maybe they're good at paid marketing or maybe they're just a good growth generalist will actually probably outperform the traditional SEO person depending on what your strategy is. And especially if your strategy is heavy on the content side and light on the, you know, programmatic side, you do not need a programmatic technical SEO person. So And, you know, we're actually like when we hire people, we've sort of run out of people with a lot of domain expertise and we're trying to create SEO people. And so the way that we're doing that is to hire really smart generalist marketing people or people with, you know, like some of our best people have done a little bit of SEO, but they've worked in multiple marketing functions. And they're good managers and they're good at building things. And then we give them our playbooks. It takes them 6 months or so to learn those playbooks, and now they outperform most SEO people. So that's the background I would look for.
