Being a versatile and skillful recruiter relies on teaching yourself new roles. Since I started in the industry 15 years ago, brand new jobs have emerged, from Content Strategist to Social Media Analyst, and it has become critical for me to move beyond job descriptions and understand what skills to screen for and how to evaluate expertise.
Passing along one such deep dive to you. In this case, I wanted to understand the nuances between marketing analysts working in ad agencies vs. PR firms. I came across this excellent article describing the different tracking metrics.
https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/define-measure-paid-owned-earned-media/
Over the 15 years I’ve spent recruiting, I learned I could be just as effective at screening candidates for roles I didn’t initially understand versus skill sets I was deeply familiar with.
While it’s deeply helpful to speak the same language, the liability was that I sometimes enabled candidates, assuming they had certain knowledge/skills rather than testing them on it.
Conversely, when forced to recruit for new disciplines — whether CTO, UX Strategist or Social Media Analyst — I found myself asking/relying on candidates’ expertise. My questions were more open-ended, essay types vs. multiple choice. I wasn’t shy asking them about the essnetial functions of their job, or testing depths of management experience of software skills. And I do a ton of research: https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/define-measure-paid-owned-earned-media/
