How to Find a New Marketing Leader During a Talent Shortage
Filling your marketing shoes with the right person is a surefire way to grow your brand in the midst of a crisis, and an ongoing talent shortage shouldn’t stand in your way.
Executive search takes a special approach—one that usually includes more hair pulling, heads against the wall, and attention to detail than your average hire. But when you’re on the hunt for your next Chief Marketing Officer or another high-level marketing professional, the recruiting stakes are even higher.
If sales is the lifeblood of your organization, then marketing should be considered its beating heart. Marketing allows sales to happen by connecting your brand and messaging with the people most likely to buy from you. It’s the way you stand out in the market, stay one step ahead of your competitors, and help people get to know and love your company just as much as you do.
The ongoing talent shortage spurred by the pandemic has turned an already-lofty task into a Herculean one. Competition across the board remains fierce. Any talent-sourcing issues quickly become critical business issues, which can grow in complexity the longer you wait to address them. But by the same token, you don’t want to settle for seat warmers, either. Turning your talent search into a race against time can often mean settling for a candidate instead of waiting for the right candidate.
How can you strike a balance between speed and quality and find your next executive marketer? The simple answer: use an executive search firm like Chameleon Collective.
Executive Search Firms Expand Your Talent Reach
Good talent is everywhere. But not all organizations are confident in trying to reach the talent on the high shelf; instead, they focus on the more accessible, “eye-level” candidates. The truth is you’re not limited to the candidates that have tossed their names into the recruiting hat. Marketing search firms bring a ready-made database to the process, along with talented headhunters that can tickle the brains of “off the market” candidates and get them excited about a potential new job offer.
What’s more, executive search firms do so in a way that remains confidential and earns the candidate’s trust. This is a big deal since many candidates being scouted can’t or don’t want to let their employer catch wind they might jump ship.
Gain Access to Deep Industry Expertise
No one knows your company like you do. No one knows your industry like people who are also in your industry. That’s why many companies feel they can also be hiring wizards.
But unless you have a crystal ball and a magic wand, this isn’t always true. You can, however, come close to creating hiring magic by pairing with a marketing search firm that has the same deep industry expertise that you do. Industry-specific firms take recruiting to the next level because you don’t spend time training them on what your marketing roles entail and what makes a successful candidate. More of your time and money investment goes toward talent sourcing when you can lean on your search firm’s industry expertise.
Bring Credibility to the Table
World-class brands like Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook need no introduction when it comes to talent sourcing. But not all companies are gifted with this level of recognition. When a talent recruiter approaches candidates, an unknown company name could throw them off or otherwise not connect on their radar.
Using a marketing search firm can create instant credibility for your company (poof!). Firms like Chameleon Collective are skilled in representing other companies at the executive level and can help you make a strong impression with the right candidates from the very start.
Executive search services also add credibility to your recruitment process. Using the wider, deeper reach of an executive search firm ensures you’ve thoroughly explored the market and earned interest from a variety of candidates.
Leverage an Objective Third-Party View
Objectivity is an essential asset in any hiring process, and using a third party allows companies to obtain a high level of objectivity from the very start. It leaves less room for discrimination and bias. An executive firm’s role in recruiting and hiring is to support your company’s success by choosing best-fit candidates for the job, not just seat fillers and titleholders. When the firm works on a retainer search like we do here at Chameleon Collective, it accepts the full responsibility of finding the perfect match—it’s the only path forward in filling a certain role.
To find candidates that fit the profile quickly, efficiently, and accurately, recruiters must be able to look past any emotional ties to the brand or external noise that could get in the way of hiring. They look at each marketing candidate fairly, letting their skills, experience, successes, and demonstrated histories do the talking. Emotional decisions are cast aside so that companies can make hiring decisions on the things that matter most.
Reduce the Risk of Making the Wrong Hire
The bottom-line reason for getting help with any type of hiring is to lower your chances of making the wrong hire. Bad hires are expensive—but they’re even more costly for a Chief Marketing Officer. A bad hire here could lower your brand value, trust, and market presence. You’ll be seeing dollar signs, but not in a good way.
Maintaining objectivity, establishing credibility upfront, expanding your recruiting reach, and using deep-level industry expertise alongside your own allows you to improve your recruiting efforts at scale. Finding the best new Chief Marketer Officer is treated like a priority, not an extra task on a to-do list. Hiring with confidence is a very good thing indeed.
Empowering Your Executive Search with Chameleon Collective
The term “executive search” isn’t just a marketing buzzword. It’s a value-add to organizations looking to gain a competitive edge with their brand and revenue by hiring the best-fit marketing leader.
As a retainer search firm, Chameleon Collective provides you with a group of deeply networked executives who understand where to find the right match and the right fit for your marketing leadership executive search. This way, you’re not spending precious time educating the firm on what the actual role is.
Our goal is to consult with you, understand the exact need to fill, and confidentially conduct a search to help you locate a best-in-class candidate. We recognize it’s a very difficult market to find candidates, which is why our dedication and understanding of where to locate the right candidates makes our success in finding someone much easier.
Call or email us today to onboard us as your new marketing search firm and start growing your brand and revenue in the right direction.