The 5HITS

As I work in an SEO agency we are constantly recruiting SEO staff. The challenges we have include:

• Recruiters do NOT understand our business, no matter how much they say they do
• People overstate their own capabilities

I always joke and say when I see a resume, the person looks so good I feel I should report to them. When you interview, you get about half of what the resume said, thanks to the resume writers and online resume tools. Then what you end up hiring is about half of what was represented in the interview. So 25% of the initial resume. The other side of this I accept is that with all the resumes this way, we take the best looking ones, which may be a somewhat flawed approach, but it is hard selecting from multiple applications.

Don’t get me wrong we have great staff, who are loyal and who field calls from recruiters at least once per week. Keeping up with rising salaries is also a challenge. Nobody calls me though, cannot understand why. Put it this way, we hire people with little or some experience, train them heavily, pay them increasing market related rates, and give them a performance based bonus, and all this time adding serious value to them, through skills, experience and education. Should they not be paying us for the opportunity? I ask myself everyday? Just kidding.

On average what we consider to be a senior SEO person for hiring is not what gets presented as a senior SEO person. In fact most of the so called 1-2 years experience people we hire are good as analysts and where he have hired managers this has ended in tears.

The impact on our industry is as follows:

• Agencies hiring in, to fill a competency, often do not know the ins and outs of SEO and are reliant on this person to deliver
• Companies hiring SEO’s are buying their past experience which is often small websites and expecting them to pull top rankings out of the hat for large dynamic websites
• There are few very experienced SEO people out there who have worked on and succeeded with large dynamic websites. I can probably name around 15, but hey maybe my SEO circle is small.

In many cases this ends up giving the industry a bad name. Some clients in frustration have given up recruiting and are now taking our people on secondment.  Agencies find their client relationships being affected because the SEO part of their service is not working, and companies put themselves at risk of losing rankings or penalties or just continuing the status quo with under skilled people in a market short on resources. Very often I have to explain my way around this with new clients who have been burnt. SEO is getting highly competitive, the rules are changing, the costs of paid search are making the rewards greater. Its complex and to get results is getting harder.

Unfortunately there is no standard training or skill and the skill is specialist, so expecting a marketing manager to be across all areas is a big ask, and yet this is an area which can bring in the highest ROI for the business. if you are online, you need to be doing or considering SEO seriously. Helping a client who is recruiting,we gave them the following checklist/ advice for recruiting:

• Do not try to assess their level of SEO knowledge unless you have an SEO specialist in the room
• Ask for a list of every site they have worked on, look for sites with at least in excess of 1,000 pages indexed, which are similar to yours
• Find out the role they played on each of the sites they mention, i.e. copy, linking, technical etc.
• Ask for references from the sites mentioned, not who is provided, or approach the sites direct for feedback
• Ask them what the 10 things are they would do on starting. If they cannot answer, ask them to respond to the question to you by email
• Ask them to talk through the SEO strategy on a recent site, how they approached, implemented etc.
• Ask them what training they have done, how they keep up to date and check these are relevant and credible afterward
• Ask them what results they believe you could expect from having them on board
• Google them and the competitive keywords around the sites they have worked on
• If you can, ask your agency to review them from a technical perspective
• Move quickly and offer slightly above market, if they are good, they will pay for themselves

In the last 2 weeks we have made two offers to individuals who we thought had some very basic SEO skills, but with the 3 day Bruce Clay SEO training coming up that would be a good start and then followed by in-house training, they would be good. Both of them accepted higher offers with other agencies for manager type positions. These are people who did not know who Matt Cutts is and whose top priorities for ranking a website was “more copy” and “buying links”.

So that’s my rant for Saturday. We are still recruiting analysts if anyone is interested, we offer the opportunity to learn and do in depth SEO.