How to Hire a Growth Marketer?

January 19, 2023

The searches for growth marketing managers have grown by 360% in the last year as per Google Trends. It’s the era of fast-paced growth for startups and Growth Marketers are leading the transformation toward modern and disruptive ways of marketing for organizations.

With more new businesses opening up than ever before, technology innovations being brought up every single day, and consumer demand changing directions rapidly – standing out among the noisy landscape has become tricky.

Enter growth marketing, which has now become an integral part of scaling up businesses. Gone are the days when acquiring customers was almost guaranteed with paid ads and inorganic marketing. Modern businesses need a strategic combination of virality, word of mouth, and organic growth.

It's evident you need to hire top Growth Marketers to accelerate your customer acquisition and drive business growth. But what should you look out for in growth marketing candidates? How can you hire an ideal Growth Marketer? What are the steps you would need to

We find answers to all of these, and more in this blog. Stick around for a deep insightful discussion about how to hire a Growth Marketer for your company.

What is The Role of a Growth Marketer?

You will find different organizations having their own versions of the role of a Growth Marketer. While it tells you how versatile the role is, you also need to deeply understand the various role and responsibilities of a Growth Marketing candidate.

Unlike traditional marketers who primarily work on the top of the funnel, Growth Marketers hold the stakes for the entire customer acquisition funnel. In other words, a Growth Marketer acts as a marketing manager who drives revenue and not just leads.

To understand how significantly the role differs from that of a marketer, let’s take a look at the sales funnel, which typically looks like:

Awareness
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Referral
Revenue

Traditional marketing covers only the top two stages, i.e. awareness and acquisition of the sales funnel. Growth Marketing, on the other hand, covers the entire funnel from awareness to revenue.

Now as Growth Marketers work in each stage of the funnel, their roles are multifaceted at the ground level. Growth Marketers are responsible for the entire customer base, growing the base, retaining more customers, and building a prolific brand in the middle of all revenue-oriented practices.

To sum it up, the goal of Growth Marketers is to capitalize on all the growth opportunities (and even create some) for your business. To fulfill an organization’s growth objectives, a Growth Marketer should be well versed in the following:

Search engine optimization
Content marketing
Paid search / Search engine marketing (SEM)
Paid social
Email marketing
Acquisition marketing
Conversion-rate optimization
Well versed with Marketing, CRM, and Analytics tools like Google Analytics, Hubspot, GetReponse, ActiveCampaign, Userpilot and more

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For all the chores, Growth Marketers follow the same workflow:

Ideate→ Experiment → Analyze → Release

A typical day for a Growth Marketer consists of the following responsibilities

Building and executing growth plan in association with the senior executive team
Ideating, creating, and updating marketing content
Strategically planning, measuring, analyzing, and scaling paid campaigns
Managing and continuously monitoring social acquisition channels
A/B testing campaigns
Brainstorming and implementing creative email campaigns
Initiating effective and engaging referral programs
Using data-backed decisions for launching marketing campaigns and optimizing engagement and conversions

Extracting key analytics data to create reports for stakeholders
Keeping a close track of opportunities, challenges, and trends in markets and acting accordingly
Working closely with data, sales, and product teams

How to Hire a Growth Marketer: Step-By-Step?

A Growth Marketer plays a huge role in driving business growth both as a marketing leader and a part of the growth team. By studying the latest trends, ideating creative campaigns, executing them constantly, and analyzing the results – Growth Marketers focus on creating data-driven strategies that improve key performance metrics.

Throughout the sales funnel – from awareness to revenue, a Growth Marketer is responsible for proactively experimenting with marketing tactics and optimizing the key metrics.

While the skills required for a full-stack Growth Marketer are way too many, you should primarily check for management capabilities in your target candidates. Additionally, how hands-on a candidate is with data-driven experiments and rapid adaptations, defines how good a marketer they can be.

Step 1: Study Top Competitors and Create a Candidate Persona

Growth Marketing is not a role that has been there for long. It’s a fairly new role, and even the most expert recruiters fail to differentiate it from marketing and end up hiring the wrong candidates.

So prior to planning and sourcing talent for filling the role of Growth Marketer, find out how does an ideal candidate looks like.

Begin with competitor analysis of candidates hired for a similar role. Find out the professional backgrounds, experience, and more common aspects of Growth Marketers working with successful brands.

Analytical skills, creativity, data-driven actions, decision-making, adaptability, and core marketing expertise are the primary skills you should be looking for in a Growth Marketer.

But skill requirements are not always enough. Fill up the following criteria for creating an ideal Growth Marketer candidate persona:

Educational qualification
Certification (if any required)
Work experience - years and roles
Similar industry experience
Hands-on experience with growth marketing tools
Personality traits for culture-fit
Career and life goals

Step 2: Analyze Company-Specific Role Requirements

Now you know how to spot an ideal Growth Marketer. But how would you know if the candidate you pick would serve your company well?

Growth Marketing is a wide spectrum of skills and responsibilities, and one persona cannot do it all – especially while scaling up. You need people specialized in SEO, content marketing, paid ads, media buying, and more verticals covered under growth.

So the next step is analyzing your company’s unique talent requirements, and business goals, and documenting the right expectations with the filling of this role.

Suppose you have a small growth team with members who are well-versed in SEO, SEM, and paid social. In that case, you need an expert in content marketing or social media growth.

The idea is to compliment your existing team’s skillset and yet bring quality talent who enable rapid growth.

Step 3: Prepare an Appealing Job Description

The first thing candidates check out before applying to your job or replying to your outreach, is the job description. So your JD should be significantly appealing and persuasive in order to get top talent to apply to your recruitment.

Ensure including the following in your job descriptions:

Specific Job Title: Mention the exact job title clearly. For ex: Growth Marketing Associate, Growth Marketing Executive, etc.

Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities needed to accomplish your organization’s growth marketing goals.

Roles and Responsibilities: What will the candidate own and what will be all the potential roles and responsibilities of the growth team?

Perks and Benefits: What does your organization offer to its employees?

About the Company: Highlight the company’s legacy and growth so far.

Talent Acquisition Specialist Job Description Template

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Role
Growth Marketers are essential to a company's ability to market to customers and sell the items. They are responsible for managing the marketing department's workforce and budget, as well as forecasting and optimizing our marketing initiatives.

Responsibilities

Creating strategic marketing initiatives to aid in achieving company objectives
Collaborating with the sales, financial, public relations, and production departments to coordinate marketing plans
Deploying effective marketing initiatives and take full responsibility for their execution from conception to completion
Supporting integrated marketing and communications using a range of platforms and tools, including internal and external channels, PR, digital, social, and the web, among others
Making a judicious allocation of finances and preparing and overseeing the marketing budget on a quarterly and annual basis
Keeping research database current by locating and compiling marketing data
Staying informed about industry trends and competitor’s marketing strategies

Requirements

Proven experience as a Growth Marketer or similar position
Familiarity with marketing analytics tools such as Google Analytics, NetInsight, Omniture, WebTrends, Hubspot, Userpilot, Ahrefs, and more tools
Experience in using electronic marketing automation tools including HubSpot Marketing, Bitrix24
Extensive knowledge of various aspects of marketing, including brand marketing, PR, content management, digital marketing & performance marketing

Soft Skills

Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Good presentation and public speaking skills
Good leadership and collaboration skills
An analytical mind

Step 4: Source Growth Marketing Candidates

Active Candidate Sourcing: Prepare captivating job posts highlighting the excitement this role brings in for the ideal growth marketing candidates. Post the job across multiple job boards and portals including but not limited to:

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LinkedIn
Indeed
Instahyre
ZipRecruiter
Monster
GlassDoor
CareerBuilder
Mayple
MarketHire
HireDigital

Also Read: LinkedIn Sourcing techniques to Find Ideal Candidates

Passive Candidate Sourcing: Around three-fourths of the overall workforce consists of passive candidates. They wouldn’t apply to your jobs themselves. The road to redemption? Reach out to these candidates on LinkedIn, Twitter, emails, and more platforms. Use persuasive messaging to trigger a response and engage with passive candidates continuously.

Step 5: Conduct Interviews/Assessments

Once you have sourced enough active and passive candidates, begin your recruitment process. Start evaluating candidates with assessment or direct interviews based on the seniority level you are hiring for.

If you’re building up your growth team and hiring entry-level employees, an assignment can be good to kickstart your recruitment. On the other hand, senior candidates can be ideally evaluated with interviews.

Regardless of whether you are evaluating a growth marketing candidate sourced via active or passive sourcing, here are the four parameters you should always be covering:

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Analytical skills
Creative thinking
Management and leadership capabilities
Outstanding communication skills

Step 6: Extend Offers and Onboard Candidates

Reach out to shortlisted candidates and inform them or negotiate the payroll. Once the candidates accept your offer verbally, finish up the documentation formalities quickly and share the offer letter.

Onboard your candidates when they sign and accept the offer letter. Also, do not forget to update the other candidates who were not shortlisted, with feedback.

Top Qualities of Successful Growth Marketers

A unique combination of design thinking and analytical ability make a Growth Marketer stand out in their job. Here are the top 5 qualities you should be seeking in your target Growth Marketer while hiring:

They build up on creativity
They trust data and not intuitions for marketing decisions
For them - channel is secondary, strategy is the primary goal
They focus on the entire funnel as a customer journey
They are innovative and adapt to changes faster

Supercharge Your Hiring for Growth Marketer with Nurturebox

Growth is one of the most critical departments of fast-growth companies today. While hiring Growth Marketers might sound easy in the first place, the supply of quality talent is much smaller when compared to demand.

The most optimal way you can find great growth marketing talent as per your requirements and preferences is by accelerating your passive candidate sourcing and engagement.

Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement automation platform. Let’s check out how you can capitalize on outbound recruiting of Growth Marketers using Nurturebox in a jiffy:

Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
On your LinkedIn profile, begin searching for Growth Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria.
Add qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click.
Automate candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp, and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.

Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.

Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.

Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.

From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:

Build positive brand awareness
Make your audience stick around for longer
Get better traction on social media
Gain more trust of your audience than ever
Generate qualified leads
Improve conversion rates
Boost business visibility with SEO
Position your brand as an authority
Cultivate loyal brand fans

While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.

What is The Role of a Content Marketer?

A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.

As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.

To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.

Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:

Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly. ‍
Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
Types of content to be created
Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.‍
Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.‍
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.

While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with

Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide
Continous publishing and distributing content
Measuring and analyzing performance

How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?

Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.

Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.

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Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona

Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:

What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
Where do they look for a new job?
What are their career and life goals?

Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.

Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process

Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?

You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.

Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.

Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.

As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.

Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description

Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.

Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:

Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.

Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.

Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.

Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.

About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?

Content Marketer Job Description Template

Role

The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.

Responsibilities

Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
Include and optimize all content for SEO
Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence

Requirements

Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
Fluency in English or any other required language

Soft Skills

Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Excellent writing and editing skills
The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables

Step 4: Source Candidates

Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.

Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
Why should candidates apply for the position?
Highlight the growth opportunities
State the company vision and mission
Briefly describe the recruitment process

Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:

LinkedIn
Indeed
Instahyre
ZipRecruiter
Monster
GlassDoor
CareerBuilder

Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.

Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones

Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.

Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.

Step 5: Make the Hire

Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.

Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.

Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.

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Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.

Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox

Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?

Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.

Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:

Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.