4 secrets to making the perfect digital hire

Monday, April 27, 2009

Daniel Flamberg, http://www.imediaconnection.com, http://www.imediaconnection.com/profiles/iMedia_PC_Bio.aspx?ID=16873

The recession, combined with a growing acceptance and use of digital communications by marketers and traditional agencies, has sparked a frenzy of searching for players with digital chops. There are 500 or so all-stars, like Lars Bastholm, at the senior and middle-management levels who are available for poaching. But the bulk of the talent market is comprised of people with limited digital experience.

In this economy, you'd think that finding great digitally savvy players would be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. There are many good people out of work involuntarily and actively looking, especially in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. You can ping your LinkedIn or Facebook network and turn up six candidates in 24 hours, one better than the next, and all willing to work for the same or less than they were making. However, matching the right person to a given opening requires careful consideration of the position itself and how each candidate aligns with its responsibilities.

In some cases, employers are looking to trade up and capitalize on the cornucopia of talent that was previously unavailable. In other cases, clients and agencies are looking to get initiatives off the ground or find key people to help lean and mean teams get up to speed and become more productive faster. In others, they are looking for specialty talent -- people who understand databases, IT or creative staff who can make widgets, or strategists, publicists, and account reps with an endless appetite to seek out and engage bloggers.

Here's the thing: There is no common definition of a digital player, nor is there a baseline understanding of the skills or experiences that qualify one to claim digital chops. In fact, even the caricatures -- the tattooed nerdy chick and the bespectacled buzz-cut gear head -- have fallen away as more and more people with different psycho-demographics have embraced digital creative, media, CRM, production, and account management skills -- skills that were once the sole province of Generation Y.

Like any marketing task, when it comes to hiring, clear thinking and careful planning must precede campaign execution. Here are points you need to consider.

Let's start by defining the ideal digital marketer -- a model that should serve as a baseline for hiring in the interactive marketing industry.

The ideal digital player is grounded in classical marketing disciplines, has knowledge of several vertical industries, experience in offline media, common sense, and a keen interest in all things digital. You are looking for a person who knows what's possible -- a person who can visualize how a branded message is formed and communicated as the strands of a campaign come together. The ideal player can explain the branding rationale, the desired customer experience, and the operational steps to connect the two to an interested but ignorant client.

Comfortable with the technical requirements of HTML, Ajax, or Adobe Air, and conversant with ad serving, behavioral targeting, CAN-SPAM rules, and complex metrics, the ideal digital player can visualize and sell a path from what was to what will be in ways that make sense to front-line managers and measurably improve a client's business. You are not looking for an evangelist or a cheerleader. You must avoid people who spend all their time online but don't really know much about advertising or business.

You are seeking a hard-headed business person with enough vision and nerve to separate value from hype and to cherry pick the tactics that will make a difference in a distinct market and competitive arena. The number of Facebook friends they have or their facility with Flickr or Twitter is much less important than their ability to use evolving technology to solve business problems and deliver business results.

We live in a flat, collaborative world where everyone is expected to do more, think outside the box, and be available at all hours to advance the cause. And yet we still need a few chiefs and many Indians; in fact, our business models depend on it. We still need hierarchical decision-making to ensure that things get done and to guarantee that there's always someone to take the blame. Sometimes the hierarchy is based on merit, experience, performance, and insight. Often it's based on tenure, political savvy, nepotism, or equity.

No two organizations seek the same person, even when the job title or description is identical. To find the right player, the hiring manager has to be clear about the skills needed, and who might fit the role.

Don't delude yourself about the nature of your organization and the established centers of power and influence. Beyond the technical requirements of a job description is the stark reality of your firm. Too often this comes out in the interviewing process after you chew up and spit out a bunch of candidates and waste a lot of time. The 6-foot-5-inch Big 10 player with the big resume will intimidate Tim, the boss's son. The red-headed woman with the international experience is way too sophisticated to get along with your top leadership. Ask yourself how the skills and personality requirements play out in your particular environment.

If you factor this in at the outset, you dramatically improve the chances of finding the right person. If you pretend you're living in the model organization, you will fake yourself out and spin your wheels. And while the subtleties of this calculation might not show up in the written job description, if the HR staff and the person making the decision know this reality at the outset, it will make the process smoother and the search more direct.

A new hire is joining an organization in motion. The organization has a history, and most have a vision for the next step, if not the future. To find the best person for the job, you need a clear read on where the organization is and where it's going. This has to be done at the department or even the team level. The grand vision won't work for finding context because the grand vision rarely influences day-to-day operations.

Look carefully at the job itself. Finding somebody to be the first person to lead a digital transformation in a traditional agency or offline-oriented business requires much different skills and personality traits than simply refilling a leadership slot that's been well established. Successful hiring is matchmaking. Everything turns on who makes the decision. Hiring a direct subordinate requires a different calculus than hiring two or three steps down.

Factor in personality and power relationships. Can the current team leader work well with an equal or stronger talent or personality? Will they be challenged or threatened by different personalities with different work experiences? There are surprisingly good and affordable personality instruments available to determine a candidate's traits and the likelihood that they will mesh with a team. Unfortunately, very few companies use them. This is troubling since often what we say and what we really want are two entirely different things.

Don't ignore workflow. Look at dependencies and contingencies in the organizational design. For example, some creative directors own and lead UI and technical design functions. They are looking to build a well-oiled machine that can crank out work routinely. Others don't. They rely on allied experts who report up through different silos. In this case, you are looking to find people who can work well in temporary alliances and people who can serve two masters at once and not get crosswise with either. The structure of the team and the practical working arrangements usually dictate the personality and skills necessary to succeed in the job.

Every new opening is driven by a list of things that managers want to fix or change. An opening is the perfect launching point to make course corrections and adjustments. But in fixing the wrongs of the past, most of us create new wrongs and new waves in the fabric of the teams already in place. To overcompensate for a polarizing personality that split a unit apart, we often hire a wimp. To get added technical skills, we sometimes trade off common sense or broader business skills. Balancing what was with what should be is the challenge in finding the right context.

These days everyone claims to be a digital guru. And given the broad dislocations resulting from layoffs and reorganizations, anyone can claim almost any accomplishment without much fear of being contradicted by references or by people with whom you try to vet them. Candidates do not guild the lily anymore than they always have, but with a glut of talent on the market, the times require hiring managers to ask pointed questions, set up theoretical scenarios, and expose candidates to multiple interviews to establish exactly what they really know and can do. The extent of this vetting process depends on the importance, the level, and the expectations for the position.

Articulate your expectations about tenure. Are you looking for someone to make an impact on the account or the business in 120 days, or are you looking to build a cadre that will stay with you for years? In some agencies, if those responsible for hiring don't think you are sufficiently "strategic," you are dead -- no matter what level you're at. Ironically, they often sacrifice productivity and on-time or on-budget performance to the strategy gods.

Junior players. For junior players assigned to do well-defined tasks, it's relatively easy to ascertain whether they've really done it before and if they can truly do it for you. Reviewing a book, discussing a campaign, looking at websites, emails, or simply discussing the nuts and bolts of who did what and when will reveal genuine knowledge and skills quickly, assuming the questioner has these skills. It gets trickier as you move up the food chain where loftier skills -- like leadership, vision, diplomacy, and salesmanship -- are desired.

Middle managers. Management supervisors, account directors, senior managers, and directors are especially tricky to find because they determine how the rubber really meets the road. The best ones are coddled and hidden, sometimes even from their own top management. Tasked with day-to-day project management and delivery, they must have current technical skills and leadership capabilities in a space where most learn to lead by negative example. Multi-tasking is imperative as they manage their own team and orchestrate day-to-day client interactions and expectations. Key skills required are listening, empathy, and problem-solving, as they have to be part plumber, part shrink, part accountant, and part gunnery sergeant.

Hypothetical scenarios often reveal how these guys think and are somewhat predictive of behavior. Challenging them with broad controversial statements is a good way to watch their mental gears grind and measure their verbal diplomatic skills. Ask former subordinates about their management style and ask them to solve hypothetical personnel or personality conflict problems to expose their sensibilities and egos.

Senior executives. Classically, the operative assumptions in assessing the skills of senior executives are that previous success is a good indicator of future success, and those who look the part probably can do the part. And while most of us still believe this, most of us have been burned at least once by the empty suit, the one-trick wonder, or the promise of a robust network. The two critical skills are handling clients and managing resources to yield profits. Both can be tested with hypothetical problems and by deeply diving into the details of cases drawn from candidate resumes. But these could be beside the point.

At the leadership level, the game changes. The personalities of the entrenched hierarchy determine who really fits much more than any other factor. The big guys decide who they want to play with usually on their own unarticulated terms. It's the ultimate test of chemistry, often fueled by credentials, but decided by the unique complexion of each leadership team. For both candidates and hiring managers, it's a crapshoot at this level no matter what the HR people or head hunters say.

Conclusion
The pendulum is swinging toward digital channels for branding, lead generation, and customer service and retention. The race is on to find the players that can apply the new technologies seamlessly and effectively for market leaders, insurgent brands, and start-ups. The process for finding and landing these players is not set in stone or even particularly well established. But by being honest with yourself and looking for people within striking distance of the ideal, agencies and marketers can find the right people even during the recession.

Daniel Flamberg is managing partner at
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