90% of Digital Recruitment Based on Guesswork
Since publishing The 7 Deadly Sins of Digital Recruitment blog post last week, I’ve come across a couple of other prime examples of inaccurate and vague job specifications for Head of Digital Marketing roles at well-known brands. Recruitment facilitation would have been valuable in both cases.
Rather than highlight the two examples directly, I thought it would be interesting to talk instead about some brief research into the scale of the problem.
Running searches on Google.co.uk for ‘Head of Digital Marketing’, ‘Digital Marketing Manager’ and ‘Head of Ecommerce’, filtering results to only show pages from the UK in the past month, the first 10 vacancies related to each search were investigated. I looked very simply at whether or not the advertised job descriptions were a) accurate and meaningful in their use of terminology; and b) specific in their definition of the job requirements.
The vacancies were for jobs in locations all over the UK, with an unsurprising concentration in London and the South East. Salaries ranged from £25k to £120k. Some of the job specifications were certainly better than others, but overall the results were damning:
27 out of 30 vacancies (90%) were being advertised with inaccurate, vague and poorly defined job specifications.
Of the three roles examined, 40% of the ‘Head of Digital Marketing’ vacancies were well-defined, compared to only 10% for ‘Head of Ecommerce’ and 0% for ‘DIgital Marketing Manager’.
30 is a very small sample size of course and the method of evaluation was far from scientific. However, even though the survey was relatively cursory, it effectively covered the majority of currently advertised vacancies for the selected roles in the UK.
The problem boils down to lack of digital expertise among senior management and an unnecessary reliance on guesswork when it comes to job specification and candidate evaluation.
Here are a few extracts from one of the more entertaining examples I found during the research. Never has ‘a little knowledge’ been such a dangerous thing…
Are you a PPC and Google Algorithms genius…?
…increase lead generation by 600% over the next 12 months.
…create and deliver a new PPC strategy…
…responsibility for reducing CPC increasing quality score and decreasing CPA whilst maintaining quality control…
Your budget will … break down between content network, search and direct digital advertising.
If you understand algorithms in detail and have the ability to use this knowledge to greatly improve PPC then you are the type of candidate we are looking for…
You can use this example as a barometer of your own digital savvy. Taken in isolation, some of the terminology is used correctly and in context. As a whole, however, there are at least five things that should jump out at you as illustrating lack of real experience.
If you’re not completely sure you understand what’s wrong with the example, you probably need recruitment facilitation to help you specify your requirements and evaluate candidate expertise.
Great post Iain, this is very interesting to see and yet not surprising at all. 90% is a very high number!
It is clear that a lot of companies who are advertising for specific digital roles don’t understand what they require and what that candidate should be specialising in.
From my experience I’ve turned up to interviews with a clear job spec in mind and the company has change the role completely during the interview process. This was not due to a lack understanding, rather they didn’t know what they actually needed or how they were going to integrate the new role into their current business structure.
The majority of the roles and job titles are also far too generalised, there is far greater need for digital specialists in a particular area or field to come in and cover a core level of service e.g. PPC or SEO to the highest level. Once the idea of a ‘full service’ model employed by agencies and clients begins to disappear, I’m confident we will see a increased requirement for specialisms in digital recruitment.