How I Ensure My SEO, PPC and Online Marketing Teams are Staffed Only By The Best.
A great process, but it can feel like another job on a growing list. It is, however, one of the most fundamental and important jobs that a manager can have.
If you have bad bums in your seats, you will have:
• Poor Quality of Work
• Bad Results
• Unhappy Clients
If you have good bums in your seats, you will achieve:
• Great Quality Work
• Great Work
• Happy Clients
• Greatness!
It really is that fundamental you get the right team (companies foundations). If you don't, how can you expect to build anything further? My clients only expect the best so I can only employ the best.
Currently jobs are really in demand. Getting candidates for the role should not be difficult, but there is still the process of sorting the weak from the strong. This is how I go about it.
Phase 1. CV
1. Keep It Short
If you are writing a CV for one of my roles, please understand that I am a very busy person. Your long list of hobbies are not of interest to me. If it is longer than 2 A4 pages, in font 10, you are in danger of me losing interest.
2. Tailor It To The Job Specification
I have to spend a lot of time specifying the type of person I am looking for. You need to tailor your experiences, qualifications and everything around the points I have told you I want. If you don’t have all the experience don’t lie, I will find out in the interview.
3. Talk To Me With Numbers
I have spent the last 10 years of my life working with Excel and looking at data. In your CV give me numbers about changes your direct influence has made. Make sure these numbers are correct because if you get an interview I will quiz you on them.
4. Don’t Get Too Personal
Im not interested in your age, sex, sexuality, colour, or anything else for that matter. I am only interested in how good you will be at your job and how well you will fit in with my existing team. I will not take anything else into consideration.
Phase 2. 1st Interview
Great! You have secured yourself an interview with us. I like what I have read and I want to know more about you. Generally we split this section of the interview into 3 sections. We will talk about:
1. The Company And The Role
I can’t stress this enough, do some research… Who are we? Who are our clients? Have an answer about why you want to work for us. If you don’t it will make you look like this is just another job interview and you are not really interested in the position. At this stage of the interview we will be looking to see if you have the right personality to sit in our team and would we like you to talk to your clients?
2. Testing Your Technical Knowledge
This is going to be a technical role so I will be asking you questions to test your SEO and PPC knowledge. I will be asking a range of questions from the fundamentals, to questions that are maybe beyond your knowledge (a lot can be revealed about a person when they can’t answer a question under pressure). I will also be asking questions on recent news to see how up to date you are. These questions will be the same for each applicant.
This section is designed to really test how good you are. In this industry we require someone who can walk the walk not just talk the talk.
3. Ask Us Questions
There must be things you want to know about us. Even if we tell you everything you need to know, you need to ask us some questions. Feel free to test me, ask me what your future in the company holds, how can your career grow?
Phase 3. 2nd Interview
The final stage! At this stage you have proved to me that you know your stuff and I think you will be a good fit for our team. At this stage we will test some slightly different skills:
1. Presentation
It is important that you have great presentation skills. We use presentations as a way of pitching and communicating with our client base. I am very picky about how people present to me. The top tips I can give you are:
- Don’t read off the slides
- Professionally design your slides
- Don’t over rely on your presentation. 95% of the content should come from you and 5% of the data should be shone onto the wall.
2. Working Under Pressure
Part of working in such an environment is to work well under pressure. In this section we are going to review how good you are under pressure with a little challenge. Don’t worry, if you are as good as we think you are, you will do fine.
3. Last Chance To Ask Us Questions
This is the last chance to show us how keen you are with some great questions. Leave a good final impression.
...Oh and one last thing. This blog post shows up on page 1 of a blog for the keyword “Martin McAndrew”. With a little bit of research on Linkedin it is quite obvious it will be me interviewing you...
For extra brownie points if you have read this before coming to my interview let me know. It shows me you have fairly good online research skills!
Written by Martin McAndrew
Twitter: @MartinMcAndrew
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