Need a Guide to Source, Assess, and Hire Marketing Executives on LinkedIn? Look No Further!

Are you in search of a marketing executive to take your company's branding and outreach to the next level? Look no further than LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network. Studies show 52M people use LinkedIn every week to search for jobs

With millions of active users and a plethora of tools at your disposal, LinkedIn is the perfect platform to find your next marketing superstar. 

But with so much competition, how do you ensure that you attract the best talent and make the right hire? That's where we come in. In this comprehensive guide, we'll take you through the steps to source, assess, and hire top marketing executives on LinkedIn. 

From scouting for the best talent, to streamlining and speeding your hiring process, to accurate assessments, and optimizing your job posting to hiring, we'll equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to find the purple squirrel for your team. 

So, let's dive in and discover how you can leverage the power of LinkedIn to build your dream marketing team!

Why is Hiring Marketing Executives Challenging?

Marketing executives are essential for businesses of all sizes and industries. In today's hypercompetitive business environment, companies must work harder than ever to differentiate themselves from competitors and capture the attention of potential customers. 

Skilled marketing executives are adept at identifying and exploiting market opportunities, developing compelling brand messaging, and creating campaigns that resonate with target audiences. 

They can help businesses to build strong brands, establish a unique identity, and communicate their value proposition to customers effectively. 

Sourcing and hiring marketing executives can be challenging for several reasons. 

Firstly, there is high demand for skilled marketing professionals, particularly those with experience in digital marketing and data analytics. 

As the marketing landscape continues to evolve rapidly, businesses need marketing executives who can stay abreast of emerging trends and technologies and use data-driven insights to inform their decisions. 

Secondly, the skills required for marketing roles are diverse and can be difficult to evaluate. Effective marketing executives must possess a range of skills, including strategic thinking, creativity, analytical ability, and excellent communication skills. 

Identifying candidates who possess these skills and can apply them effectively in a business context can be challenging, particularly for businesses that lack expertise in marketing themselves.

Also, the competition for top marketing talent is intense, particularly on popular recruiting platforms like LinkedIn. Your team must be prepared to offer competitive salaries, benefits, and career development opportunities to attract the best candidates. 

Additionally, you should also be proactive in sourcing and engaging potential candidates, using targeted outreach strategies and effective messaging to capture their attention and interest.

It’s better to be safe and invest in a top-tier tool like EasySource, that eases your needle-in-a-haystack search on LinkedIn and extracts the best candidates and streamlines your entire hiring workflow. 

The Real Deal – What Should You Look for In a Class-A Marketer?

Did you know that 90 job applications are submitted on LinkedIn every second?

Amidst the maze of candidates, say, you’ve found a smooth talker who talks flamboyantly about their infamous ads, or creatives. Is it enough to assess capability? What do you look for, in a marketer who’s going to put your business on the map, or build a massive following for you, or get your cash register ringing like crazy?

Let’s get down to the basics. 

Do They Know Their Basics?

Functional characteristics are fundamental to their role, and they are expected to be great at these if they want to make the difference. Here’s the secret sauce to a great marketer.

Strategic thinking

 A great marketing executive must have the ability to develop long-term strategies that align with the company's goals and objectives. They must be able to think critically, analyze market trends, and identify opportunities for growth.

Analytical skills 

 Analytical skills are crucial in marketing, as executives must be able to interpret data and make informed decisions. They need to be able to identify trends and patterns that may impact the business.

Creative mindset

 Marketing executives must have a creative mindset to develop innovative marketing campaigns that capture the attention of potential customers.

Can They Interact Beyond Their Team?

Marketers, being the social ninjas they are, need to talk to a large number and types of people, given their interactions with the business, external contractors, legal, finance, leadership, design, product and a lot of other teams. Checking for cross functional skills is crucial when hiring them. 

Communication skills

 Communication is key in any role, but it's especially important in marketing. Marketing executives must be able to communicate effectively with internal teams, external partners, and customers.

Collaboration

 Marketing executives must be able to work effectively with other teams and departments to achieve common goals. They must be able to build relationships and influence others to achieve results.

Leadership skills

 A great marketing executive must be able to lead and inspire a team. They must be able to set clear goals, provide direction, and motivate team members to achieve success.

What Defines Them As a Person?

Do they have strong individual qualities that can help them achieve the target even when the chips are down? What motivates them? Are they easily flustered? You need to evaluate all that. 

Adaptability

The world of marketing is constantly evolving, so a great marketing executive must be adaptable and open to change. They must be able to pivot quickly in response to changing market conditions.

Resilience

 The best marketing executives are resilient and can handle setbacks and failures. They must be able to bounce back quickly and learn from their mistakes.

Passion

 Marketing is a dynamic and exciting field, and the best marketing executives are passionate about what they do. They must be driven by a desire to succeed and make an impact.

Why Should You Care About Their Skills?

These characteristics are important because they impact the business in several ways. A marketing executive with strong strategic thinking skills can help the company stay ahead of the competition and identify new opportunities for growth. 

Analytical skills can help executives make data-driven decisions that improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. 

Communication skills are crucial in building relationships with customers and partners, while collaboration and leadership skills can help executives build a high-performing marketing team.

Ask for references and speak to their former colleagues or managers to get a better sense of their leadership and collaboration skills. Look for candidates who are adaptable and resilient, and who demonstrate a passion for connecting your brand to the wider audience.

Catching the Big Fish – Sourcing on LinkedIn

While LinkedIn offers unparalleled access to a vast pool of talented professionals, sourcing candidates on the platform can be challenging for recruiters and HR managers like you.

Many companies struggle to effectively target their job postings to the right audience. With such a large pool of users, it can be difficult to ensure that your job posting is reaching the right people. Without a targeted approach, companies risk attracting candidates who are not a good fit for the position or their company culture.

Despite these challenges, LinkedIn remains the top choice for top marketing talent. In fact, recent data shows that 97% of recruiters use LinkedIn to source candidates. This is due in large part to the platform's ability to offer access to a vast pool of talent, as well as its powerful search and filtering tools.

In addition, LinkedIn offers a range of features that make it easy for candidates to showcase their skills and experience. From the ability to upload a resume and cover letter to the ability to add multimedia content to their profile, LinkedIn allows candidates to present a complete picture of their professional persona. 

This makes it easier for you to identify top talent and reach out to potential candidates directly.

To effectively source candidates on LinkedIn, it's important to have a targeted approach. This involves optimizing your job posting to attract the right candidates and using LinkedIn's search and filtering tools to identify top talent.

First, when creating your job posting, be sure to include a detailed description of the position and the skills and experience required. Use keywords and phrases that are specific to the position to ensure that your posting is being targeted to the right audience. 

You should also include information about your company culture and values to attract candidates who align with your organization's mission.

Next, use LinkedIn's search and filtering tools to identify potential candidates. Start by conducting a keyword search for the skills and experience you're looking for. 

You can also use filters such as location, industry, and years of experience to narrow down your results. Once you've identified potential candidates, reach out to them directly to gauge their interest in the position and schedule an interview.

But, if you want to bid goodbye to long laborious searches and get the cream layer of candidates hand picked for you, you’re just a chrome extension away. 

That’s right. Hire Quotient’s free chrome extension – EasySource– is a tool that, when enabled on your LinkedIn page, opens up a select few fields you need to fill. Feed your project title, expected qualification, experience range, skills you’re searching for and if you need the candidates to have US work authorization.

That’s all it takes. 

Sit back and watch EasySource bring you a cream layer of candidates matching your criteria, from the nook and corner of LinkedIn – global talent hand-picked and served on a silver platter. 

Can your sourcing get better than this? 

Warm Up, or Go Cold – LinkedIn’s Cold Outreach and Warm Engagement Game

Marketing executives are in high demand, which means they are often inundated with messages from recruiters and HR managers. They can be tough nuts to crack, sometimes. 

Once you have identified potential candidates, it's important to tailor your messaging to each individual. 

This means demonstrating a deep understanding of their skills, experience, and interests and explaining why your opportunity is relevant to them. Personalization is key to making a strong impression and building a relationship with potential candidates.

In addition to personalized outreach, recruiters and HR managers should also leverage LinkedIn's candidate engagement tools to track a candidate's activity on the platform. 

Hand to your heart, tell us if you have the time and bandwidth to personalize messages for each and every candidate. Of course not. On the other hand, top-notch candidates invariably ignore templated messages, or auto-generated ones with no element of personalization or proof that the recruiter knows them. 

What do you do then? You enable EasySource, create a hassle-free workflow for your outreach (initial reach-out email, a gap of a few days, follow-up email, schedule connection requests, etc), furnish the stages with semi-personalized messages according to your hiring needs, and set the rule to run. 

You can create multiple workflows for different positions/projects and bring in your own templates to interact with candidates. 

If one or many teammates are working on the same project as yours, you may have a hard time filling up spreadsheets or with progress. What if you could have multiple team members collaborate on a common dashboard, with special rights and privileges to each member based on their role? 

Wouldn’t it massively reduce chaos in your hiring ? Yes, that’s what happens when you use EasySource. 

This can help you streamline recruitment operations, understand candidate interests, personalize messages, and engage with them.

Spot the Good, Better & Best – Assessing Your Marketing Executives

When hiring marketing executives, there are several areas where you can go wrong, leading to the wrong person being hired for the job. One area is the lack of clarity in defining the job requirements. 

Another area where you can go wrong is the assessments. If you have a loose assessment structure with improper marking, ranking, or system to get you results, you’re on track to hire a misfit. 

Using high-quality, AI-powered, foolproof assessments is an essential part of identifying top-notch marketing executives. Assessments can help you evaluate candidates objectively, and identify specific skills and personality traits that are crucial for success in the role. 

Choose Hire Quotient’s array of assessments tailor-made to suit varying designations and roles in different industries, and domains and with an ocean of skills to choose from. An inbuilt customization option, the tool will evaluate all essential qualities you’re looking for and bring you the best of the best, ranked, with laser-sharp insights on their credentials. 

Now, that’s the level of precision you need, to shorten your hiring cycle. 

Find the Missing Piece – Hiring the Marketing Executive  Who Can Change Your Growth Trajectory

Now that you have a shortlist of top marketing executive candidates, you need a sure yardstick to hire your unicorn. Putting the candidates in an exact replica of a real-life job environment can tell you if they are a good fit or not.

Some examples of job simulation exercises for marketing executives may include creating a marketing plan for a new product, presenting a marketing strategy to a hypothetical client, or analyzing data to identify opportunities for growth.

When it comes to hiring a marketing executive, technical skills and experience are important, but they aren't everything. 

It's important to consider "extra special" qualities as well. Extra special qualities are unique attributes that set a candidate apart from the rest. 

For example, a candidate may have exceptional communication skills, a proven ability to work well under pressure, or a knack for thinking outside the box. 

These qualities can make a candidate an invaluable asset to your team.

Wrapping Up

Data should always play a role in your hiring decisions. Utilizing data can help you identify the most qualified candidates and make more informed hiring decisions. 

For example, you may want to analyze data on a candidate's past performance, such as their ability to meet sales goals or their success in launching new products. 

You can also analyze data on the candidate's engagement with your company, such as how they interacted with your LinkedIn posts or if they attended any company events.

Find yourself an all-in-all tool like Hire Quotient that can help you capitalize on a talent marketplace like LinkedIn, ease your operations, source from a global talent pool, offer high-end assessments, and furnish all the data you need to bring home the marketing executive who’s going to scale your brand. 

Get in touch with us right now. Let’s up your hiring game.