Marketing is the most difficult business discipline to hire for. It’s more difficult than Finance, Accounting, HR, Operations, or even IT. In-house recruiters are never, ever qualified to hire marketing leaders, and most external recruiters are not much better. Hiring marketing leaders is the solely the responsibility of the CEO – if the CEO is smart.
What makes it difficult is the lack of standardization, the ultrawide breadth of the field, and the qualitative nature of it, compared to the other business disciplines.
By lack of standardization, I’m talking about degrees, certifications, and standards. For example, in accounting, if you need an Accounts Receivable Manager, you make sure they have an accounting degree, preferably have a Certified Managerial Accountant (CMA) certification, and have a strong understanding of GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) rules. It’s pretty simple and straightforward.
Marketing is different. Yes, you can look for an marketing degree, but there are some decent marketers out there that don’t have one (although I’d typically avoid these people). I look for someone who has both a marketing degree and solid experience. Someone without a marketing degree probably lacks fundamental knowledge, and doesn’t know what they don’t know. A degree gives them basic knowledge in a wide variety of marketing topics. Experience is different – it often gives you deep knowledge in a very narrow area, like TV advertising, or product pricing. Having both sides gives you a “T-shaped” marketer – someone with breadth of knowledge, and depth of knowledge in one or two areas. Having an MBA is not important – most MBAs have taken only two marketing classes. I’d rather have the person with an undergraduate degree in marketing, because they’ve taken 10 marketing classes, or a Master’s in Marketing, where they’ve taken 10 marketing classes with an emphasis on the quantitative aspects of marketing.
Most importantly, the field of marketing does not have equivalents to GAAP or FASB. There are no “Generally Accepted Marketing Rules”, and the AMA (American Marketing Association does not serve the same function as the FASB. Marketing has no formal standards.
In accounting, you have CPAs, CMAs, CIAs, CFAs, and a few other major certifications. Being a much broader field than accounting, there are hundreds of marketing certifications available – some of which are really valuable, and others, not so much. This makes hiring more complicated, but it also makes hiring the pieces of a team more complicated – they need to fit together and complement each other’s’ skills.
Another thing that separates this field is creativity. A good marketer has a strong creative side and understands human behavior; a great marketer also has a strong analytical side and great quantitative skills to analyze their efforts. Finance, Accounting, IT…none of these require much creativity, just the understanding of best practices and processes.
If you’re a startup or a small business, it becomes even harder to hire marketing talent because most entrepreneurs lack any real marketing training or experience. Most CEOs don’t understand marketing at all and have unrealistic expectations, in terms of time and results. They don’t trust marketing or marketers – so they go through marketing leaders faster than the other functional area leaders.
If I could give one bit of advice to these CEOs, I’d simply say, “if your marketing is broken, don’t think that someone can come in and fix it in 30 days”. Just like the other disciplines – Operations, IT, Finance, etc. – if your marketing is broken, it will take time to thoroughly understand the business, the customers, the broken processes, people, and tools, before you can even think about formulating a strategy to fix it all. If you’re looking for any results at all before 90 days is up, you’re living in La La Land.
If you’re one of those CEOs, it’s important to recognize and acknowledge your own limitations, and to let the expert be the expert, but it’s also important to talk – a lot. That means, listening and supporting, and asking a lot of questions.
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