Mix It Up

One of the most simple steps you can take is to mix up the people who will be conducting the interview. This is particularly important when interviewing marketing personnel, but it can also bring a fresh perspective to any role you are trying to fill. Many of the folks who came in to interview last week met with a variety of people outside of the marketing department, including our CTO. Obviously everyone in the company has a stake in who gets hired, no matter the position, but I often get the best opinions on a candidate from those outside of the marketing realm. These people know what is needed, but they can also remove any potential bias they may have about marketing talents and really cut to the core of the candidate as an overall talent. Just last week my CTO provided me with some terrific interview questions based on his conversations with a candidate. Make sure you include people outside of your own department in the interview process, it will open up your eyes to the strengths and weaknesses of a candidate.

Go Back For More

Traditionally people usually have one or two rounds of interviews and then make a decision. That seems a bit brash for someone that you’ll be spending 50-60 hours with a week, don’t you think? Would you get engaged after the second date? Don’t be afraid of having an extended interview process that could be 3-5 rounds. They don’t have to be all marathon-day sessions with multiple people, but it is good to get in front of a person several times to get a sense of when they are being a “job candidate” and when they are being themselves. Set up an initial phone screen, follow it up with an interview session with the marketing team, bring them back in for the interviews with folks outside of your team and then maybe close it up with a one-on-one session. Over time you will get a good handle on the different “flavors” of the candidate, their ability to schedule time into their calendar, attention to detail on how they remember items over a period of time and more opportunities to get to know this person you are about to spend so much time with over the coming months.

Spice Up The Locale

OK, I’m taking the “work relationship” metaphor too far, but what I mean is that you should interview the person at least once outside of your own offices. Personally I like to use the coffee shop across the street, especially for the first interview. There are many reasons for this including:

• Introduction–Did they do their homework and connect with me on LinkedIn, hence they know what my ugly mug looks like?
• Manners–How do they treat the folks working at the coffee shop?
• Personality–Out of the office, but still in a business-like setting, can they relax a bit and let out their personality?

I posed this question on Twitter and Jim Storer had an interesting suggestion, get the candidate on the golf course and you’ll learn a bunch of things:

Certainly a bit more intense than the coffee shop, but I think Jim would agree that one of the reasons the golf course works is because it is outside of the office space. Our friend Natayna Anderson had a good point of course, not everyone plays golf, but again I do think one could find a setting that would truly place a candidate out of their element and provide you with a much deeper understanding of their skill set.

Be Consistent

Asking the same exact question every single time is not only boring, but will also not give you a fair representation of different people. However, it is important to have some benchmark questions to ask each candidate, even if you tailor them to their personality or the flow of the conversation. The reason is obvious, you need to have easy ways to compare and contrast candidates. This becomes even more important when comparing two very strong candidates, providing you with a potentially tie-breaking formula.

Put Them To The Test

Some people are just really, really good at interviewing. You know who I’m talking about. Perhaps you are one of those people. But guess what those people can’t do, handle a challenging test. Don’t feel like you can’t tax your candidate with homework. A few suggestions, again from the marketing world:

• Rewrite the company boilerplate using all the information at your disposal.
• Provide a 90-day demand generation plan.
• Write a post for the company blog.
• Detail the five things you believe our competitors do better than us.

The ultimate lesson in interviewing is to be hard on the candidate, because their job is going to be hard.

Mix it up with the people interviewing, because they will have to have relationships with multitudes of co-workers.

Take them out of their element, it will provide a small light into their personality.

And don’t be afraid to ask for more, because the person who goes above and beyond is the person you’ll want to keep.

Kyle Flaherty on ROI from Tippingpoint Labs on Vimeo.

Spending the past week at MarketingProfs B2B Forum it was evident that the transformation is already happening, albeit slowly. This show focused on marketing best practices with a sprinkling of social media and left behind the short-lived legacy of social media focused shows. The latter had promoted personality and ego, which is not sustainable. The former is all about substance and education, which brings people back for more. During MarketingProfs I sat in six sessions and in all but one of them social media was an after thought or simply a part of a larger process. Even during the Boston Social Media Breakfast there was much more focus on practical communication and marketing methods than talk of “using Twitter for lead generation”.

This shift makes obvious sense and it will take a few more years for social media to exit the hype cycle, but doesn’t is seem like we’ve been here before? Remember eMarketing? Email marketing? Direct marketing? Eventually they move from being a short-lived yet enthusiastic fad and into a function of a greater practice. In this instance, marketing.  Social media, although extraordinarily useful outside of marketing, has now rightfully started to move from fad into fade.

Thou Protest Too Much

Now don’t fret, this is a really great sign for those of us who believe that social media is a good marketing technique (hand raised emphatically). During the MarketingProfs conference I listened to people give me terrific pointers on better trade show marketing, building communities online and offline, creating brand advocacy and building better content. Not once did I have to suffer through another “social media case study” or a set of slides pontificating the “confusion prism“. We have begun the move towards making social media a more respected function of business, rather than a set of caricatures trying a little too hard to defend the practice.

Te people I talked with during the panels, in the hallway and at the functions had also been making the shift — or perhaps they had never bought into the fad. They provided me with amazing ideas and refreshed my thinking, but also surprised me with their titles. Hardly anyone introduced themselves as a social media consultant, expert, guru or some other nonsense. Instead I was talking with directors and vice presidents of marketing, heads of agencies and business development, small companies and large. Twice I even spoke with people who had removed social media from their titles during the past three months. They were searching for answers, not rhetoric. They were teaching, not preaching.

It’s about time.

Mark Amtower, the author, is a B2G marketing consultant and his resolution for 2010 was to be connected to at least one person, preferably three, at each of the top companies listed by Washington Technology by the end of March. Aggressive, most certainly. But Mark is a smart man obviously because he understands how to harness the interconnectedness of social media. Just head to the end of the article and presto, a hyperlink to Mark’s LinkedIn profile.

Nothing amazing at this point though, right? The magic actually didn’t happen until I connected with Mark on LinkedIn, that is when the addition of resourceful content, as usual, made it’s mark.

Within minutes of connecting with Mark there was a personalized response to me in my inbox. How do I know it was personal and not a really great form response? Pam had connected with Mark about an hour before and the emails were completely different. Nice touch. But here comes the move that I found to be brilliant; two invites to join groups that Mark had set up on LinkedIn, both extremely focused and full of resources.

Mark had gone from a random contact to a source of information in minutes and someone I was really looking forward to talking with and probably talking with about his services. Ultimately that was his goal through his resolution and he is making it happen by using some of the social media principles we have discussed here on the blog. But let’s rehash:

1. Be Accessible–Include links to where people can find you.
2. Integrate Social Media–Make sure you are integrating social into your byline articles, events, emails, etc.
3. Be Personable–There is a strong connection built quickly with personal communication.
4. Provide Resources, Not Promotions–Mark didn’t push me to a website that touted his skills, he introduced me to groups that can help me with my job.

Content is king and social media is the way to spread the word. Let’s all use Mark’s example as a social media best practice, whether for B2C, B2B or B2G.

Oh, and you can connect with me on LinkedIn too.

The essence of Movember is for gents to grow a mustache during the month of November for the purpose of raising money and increasing awareness in the name of “Changing the Face of Men’s Health.” The 30 second video below gives a good description…

OK, thanks Aaron, now we are back. I’m really excited about this opportunity since I’ve written in the past about my own family history with Cancer and most importantly raising money to fight Cancer. Could there be anything better than raising money for a worthy cause and having an excuse to grow a mustache? The answer is yes actually. Doing it as part of Team Austin and facing off against many of our old pals, many of them area actually old, in Boston.

Now you are saying to yourself, “Kyle is so amazing and really, really handsome with a mustache, plus, I hate Cancer too! How can I help?”

Great thoughts reader, and I appreciate the compliment. There are a few ways to help out:

1. Join our team and help us raise money.
2. Donate to our team (we’ll take any amount – $1 up to whatever you feel comfortable with, our end goal is $20,000!).
3. Pass the good word along about what we’re doing via tweets, Facebook updates and blog posts.