Creating the right marketing team

Marketing, as all readers will surely agree, is one of the critical business functions. Its success or failure is integrally linked to the success or failure of the organisation as a whole, and therefore it is essential that a company can call upon the best possible resources with which to conduct marketing responsibilities. But in this context, ‘resources’ does not just mean money or data; it also means people. If companies want to get the best out of their marketing, either on a tactical or strategic level, they must ensure that they have the brightest and the best marketing personnel at their disposal.

Herein lies the problem for B2B companies: the traditional and most visible marketing recruitment medium of advertising in weekly trade press is expensive, often unresponsive and heavily biased towards consumer marketers. Whilst in the immediate term this may be annoying for B2B marketers, its potential ultimate consequences are far more serious and worrying: the best candidates are siphoned off by consumer brands, and B2B is starved of marketing talent. This would have massive repercussions for the B2B sector, and would only serve to deepen disparity between B2B and B2C. It would also cement B2B’s place as the poor relation of marketing.

However, B2B companies of all sizes and specialisms – and both clients and agencies – have dealt with this challenge in a typically resourceful and pragmatic way. As a result, they have come to rely on a variety of different routes to find suitable marketing candidates.

 

Weekly marketing magazines are the most obvious place to find details of jobs in marketing, and this form of advertising is both the main revenue generator for the magazines and the main attraction for the free controlled circulation subscriptions base. But whilst the medium purports to serve the whole industry, in reality it is far from balanced.

“Traditionally the weekly marketing press has been full of ads for consumer marketing jobs,” observes Anna Chapman, marketing manager – London Portfolio, at property developer Land Securities. She adds that not only are B2B jobs limited in number, the presentation of those jobs that are advertised through this medium leaves much to be desired. “The B2B stuff that has been included alongside them is often very dull.”

The most obvious explanation for this apparent bias is a combination of the hefty £5500 page rate for advertising in this medium, which is often out of reach of the more limited budgets available to B2B brands. As always B2B organisations have to make their money go further wherever possible, and full pages of expensive recruitment advertising do not constitute responsible spending.

The result is that, apart from the biggest brands, the weeklies simply aren’t an effective medium to recruit B2B marketing staff. For smaller companies or niche, it is not viable. As Heather Westgate, MD of marketing communications agency TDA, observes, “recruitment advertising in magazines just doesn’t work for us. It’s not about costs, its about quality. It doesn’t generate the quality of candidates we require, either at a senior or junior level.”

 

The biggest B2B companies have a different perspective on advertising, because they have broader objectives.

Briege Kearney, director of marketing and business development at Deloitte, says her company does do some recruitment advertising, although this is with one eye on promoting the organisation to the wider marketing community, as well as on filling individual positions.

This ties in with Deloitte’s strategic aim of growing its marketing function, she explains, and promoting itself and its own staff and practitioners as marketing-focused. In effect, this might seem to be more about brand-building than meeting a specific business objective of filling key positions.

Another proponent of recruitment advertising, although not in the marketing press and with an entirely different size of company to Deloitte, is Mark Moloney, MD of 35-strong exhibition organiser and publisher Trades Exhibitions. “We always advertise in The Guardian for marketing people, as it generates the best response. We used to use The Times, but the quality of the responses has declined.” Significantly, the advantage of the national papers over the weekly marketing magazines is the ability to run classified-style recruitment ads, at a substantially lower cost than the page or half-page rate. This puts this medium within the reach, of smaller organisations, and ahead of the more specific weekly titles.

 

After print advertising, the next most obvious and best established medium is recruitment consultants. Mark Moloney’s stance on this option is typical of those in smaller businesses, with cost being the number one concern. Essentially, recruitment consultants are used as a fall-back option, if advertising fails to generate the required response. “Agencies are very expensive. We try to negotiate, but they know what people will pay. Our current marketing manager came through an agency that had seen the ad we placed in The Guardian. We did a lot of interviews and she was the best candidate, so in the end we were happy to pay the fee.” By contrast, he always uses recruitment agencies when recruiting sales staff, which he regards as a much more difficult job.

Heather Westgate of TDA has a similar take on recruitment consultants. “I abhor the costs involved,” she says, pointing out that at the same time the quality of service is quite variable. “There are some good ones out there, but too many don’t filter their candidates properly. We employ someone to do that internally.”

She explains that recruitment is a major focus for TDA, and that the agency is constantly on the lookout for quality staff. “We get our best results through word-of-mouth, networking and recommendation. We get a lot of CVs submitted speculatively, and are constantly putting out feelers and encouraging people who have relations in the trade to get in contact. It’s always best to take on a good person whilst they are there, even if you don’t necessarily have a vacancy for them right there and then. You have to take a long-term view on recruitment.” But whilst this may work for a marketing agency, with a less varied portfolio of vacancies, it might not be so practical for client-side marketers.

Deloitte also takes marketing recruitment very seriously, and has a permanent team tasked with this responsibility, as Briege Kearney explains. However, unlike TDA, this team works very closely with recruitment consultants. “Our marketing team is 163 people strong. We are so big that it makes sense to do this. There are a few agencies which we work with on a regular basis – Michael Page, Marketing Resources and Witton Jardine for example.”

Anna Chapman says Land Securities also has a preferred agency through which it sources its marketing personnel, although this is done through the human resources department, rather than internally by marketing.

But although there would appear to be a clear split along size grounds regarding the use of recruitment agencies, Niall Hadden, who is HR consultant for marketing communications agency Loewy Group, says outsourcing does have its benefits, and that smaller companies should not dismiss it out of hand. “Subject to available resources, it can be more effective to use an external consultant in terms of managing your time.” And given that time is money for small businesses, this may be a compelling argument.

 

The final option for companies seeking to recruit B2B marketing personnel is the web, and the various online job boards, including Totaljobs and Monster. Most of these are not-specific to marketing. None are dedicated to B2B.

Attitudes to the effectiveness and appropriateness of these sites varied between ignorance and active distrust, amongst those interviewed. Anna Chapman began her role at Land Securities in summer 2005, therefore has recent experience of these services as a job seeker. “I hate the job boards I’ve tried,” she says. “If I’ve ever posted my CV on there, I’ve only got really inappropriate stuff back. But I still used to look at them every once in a while.”

Mark Moloney at Trades Exhibitions says that to date he has never used an online job board, but that he would consider using one if it was well targeted and could deliver quality candidates.

The most passionate proponents of the online jobs boards are the recruitment consultancies themselves. Wendy Gray, associate director at Hudsons, comments, “We have access to most of the recruitment websites. We don’t spend much money off-line. The only time we advertise in trade magazines is when we’re doing so on behalf of our client. We would rather spend our money getting to the top on a targeted web search.”

 

Whilst the choice of medium may differ, most observers agree that the supply of suitable candidates is generally good. This is good news, and suggests that B2B companies are succeeding in negating the failure of the traditional media to meet their objectives.

“The quality of candidates goes up and down depending on the state of the economy, but in general it is reasonably good,” says Mark Moloney. “It is certainly a lot easier to employ marketing people than sales people.”

In terms of the characteristics and skills required to constitute a “good” candidate, he places experience over formal marketing qualifications, which he regards as often too theoretical. “I look for people with a reasonable degree of experience, but not necessarily from exhibitions or publishing. I don’t like people who have jumped around a lot in their careers. Typically I want someone who has ability and is capable of original thinking. And because we are a small company, I like someone who I think will pull their weight.”

Meanwhile, Briege Kearney says the variety of different roles which constitute the Deloitte marketing department makes identifying universal characteristics difficult. She adds that the communication skills required in professional services might not be of a similar priority in other B2B markets, and requirements are likely to differ. However, she is able to pinpoint two main requirements of new marketing recruits. “The first is to be degree-level educated with a first class marketing skill set,” she explains. The second is the ability to adapt their personal approach, to accommodate the consultancy-style role which Deloitte’s marketing department plays within the organisation. “For example, marketing people might have to deal with a senior company figure, and effectively treat them as if they were a client.”

Moloney and Kearney disagree on formal marketing qualifications (such as the IDM or CIM) with the former shunning them in favour of experience and the latter regarding them as essential. Niall Hadden of Loewy says that it something that firms of all sizes should consider. “I’m a fan of candidates having evidence of qualifications,” he explains. “There is a need for professionalism in marketing, as it underpins our value to the organisation. As an agency, staff must have a professional edge to justify our charge-out rate. Therefore we must put an emphasis on qualifications to help achieve this.”

 

So it seems that recruitment is alive and well in business-to-business marketing, and thriving through a pragmatic approach despite the failure of the principal medium to cater for its needs. In this respect, perhaps recruitment can be seen as a microcosm of the whole B2B sector.

As ever though, there is room for improvement, and business brands will certainly benefit from new, dedicated B2B recruitment services in the future. Any medium that allows B2B marketers to access a more comprehensive view of available job opportunities, and B2B companies to get access to the best quality candidates, without being overshadowed by the B2C world, will surely be of enormous benefit.

 

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