Essential Skills Every Recruiter Must Look for in a Newbie Digital Marketing Specialist

In hiring a potential digital marketing specialist, how do you separate the potential rockstar from the dud who’s wheeling in Trojan horse credentials? 

Now more than ever, the demand for skilled digital marketing specialists is on the rise. When the Covid-19 pandemic engrossed the world for years, tons of businesses shifted their marketing efforts online. For those who had managed to stay afloat, the next challenge revolves around acquiring and retaining digital marketing talents in-house. 

For small businesses with far less sophisticated needs, hiring a newbie digital marketing specialist with the right skills can be crucial for your growth. Hark, recruiters! Here are the top skills you must look for to ensure you’re only attracting top talent within your awesome SEO team: 

1. ANALYTICAL SKILLS 

Digital marketing is data-driven, and recruiters should prioritise candidates with strong analytical skills. These specialists should be able to interpret data from various sources, such as Google Analytics, social media insights, and email marketing platforms, to make informed decisions and optimise campaigns. For recruiters, you can gauge an applicant’s analytical skills through the following questions and interview prompts:

• Walk me through your own problem-solving process? 
• Tell me about a problem at school that was hard to solve. How were you able to arrive at a solution?

2. PROJECT MANAGEMENT 

Managing digital marketing campaigns often involves juggling multiple tasks and deadlines. And candidates with project management skills can help ensure that campaigns run smoothly. Even if you’re not hiring project managers, you want to assess if a staff is able to manage the pressure of following deadlines, operating on strict timelines, and overseeing quality on his deliverables. Poor project performance can be attributed to many things, but irresponsible and disorganised team members can surely magnify the chaos from inefficient processes, poor planning, and shoddy quality control mechanisms. 

If you want to know if your applicant has mad PM skills, you can ask the following: 

• Were you ever assigned to a project at school or in your previous company? What was your project management methodology and what were the outcomes? 
• What will you do in your first 3 months in this company? 

3. CREATIVITY & DIVERGENT THINKING

Because digital marketing is an ever-evolving field, recruiters understand the importance of creativity, design thinking, and speed of innovation in order to provide value to your customers. Whether you’re using digital or traditional means in promoting your brand, you need creativity for you to get noticed and be worthy of conversation, consideration, and conversion! Creativity is an attribute that is hard to measure, but you can get some sense of it in the applicant when you ask questions like:

• Looking at our website, can you give us some design suggestions? What would you do differently? 
• What if you are given only XYZ amount of budget to start an awareness campaign for a new product, how will you spend it? 
• Describe the time when you were praised for your out-of-the box thinking. 

4. SOCIAL MEDIA SAVVY

Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, X (formerly Twitter) and a smorgasbord of others… Social media is one component you should not neglect when you craft a digital marketing strategy. The GenZs who have begun entering the workforce are particularly savvy and well-versed in social media marketing strategies. On top of that, you can rely on them to adeptly do community engagement activities, schedule content, and detect trends.

 

Some interview questions to ask are the following:

• What are the steps in creating a social media calendar? 
• You are about to open a small business. In which social media platforms will you promote it and how will your strategy differ from one platform to the next? 
• Have a look at our Facebook or Instagram. What can you suggest we do to increase engagement? 

5. CONTENT CREATION & SEO

If you’re looking to fill a digital marketing specialist vacancy, you can take two approaches in your recruitment process. One, if it’s a non-technical role, consider an applicant with strong content creation skills: these are people who have a background in communication, design, and multimedia arts. Spot certain skills like knowing how to write compelling copy, edit photos and videos, organise content calendars, etc. 

Two, if it’s a technical role, take note of a candidate that possesses a fundamental understanding of SEO principles. Better yet, look for someone who has a strong familiarity with keyword research, link-building, on-page and off-page optimisation, as well as experience in using tools like Google Search Console, analytics, CMS, CRM, and other marketing technology software. 

Even if you’re hiring a newbie digital marketing specialist, you can spot those that show a lot of promise when they’re able to showcase the above skills. After all, hiring the right people for your team is essential to your organisation’s digital marketing success. Good luck in building a winning digital marketing team!