Image by Jhonatan_Perez from Pixabay

There are several ways that you can recruit PPC management talent for your organization. However, is any of them as useful as seeing how they would manage a campaign? By viewing their work in an organized, collaborative, and shareable platform, you have everything you need to bring in the best of the best before your competition nabs them.

Your first strategy might be to go for the most experienced person you can afford. However, Neil Patel, author, entrepreneur, marketer, and blogger who co-founded Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics says hiring a great resume is not always an excellent fit for the team. It would be best if you had someone that can assimilate to your company culture. Instead, Patel recommends hiring people based on the following criteria:

1. Someone who works well with your team. Disruptors have their place, but on your team is not one of them.
2. Someone who can get results—and can tell you about it in the interview. Have candidates detail for you how they improved sales, produced results, and what the ROI was on some of their campaigns. 
3. Someone who can strike a balance between strategy and tactics. It would help if you had someone who can adapt to the changing digital marketing world, which requires some skill with short-term tactics and long-term strategy. 
4. Someone hungry to learn more. The changing market requires someone who can learn and grow without too much friction. 

To read Patel’s full article of suggestions for talent recruitment, please click here.

Yeah, But Are They Any Good At It?

You can screen potential employees in many ways, and Patel makes many excellent points about what you are hoping to find. However, when it comes to PPC management talent, little is more crucial than seeing how the candidate works. Search Engine Land suggests a few different ways you can test your talent, which include:

• Using a fake report. You ask the interviewee to assess a mocked-up data report and give you their recommendations. You can get an idea of how the candidate works based on the questions they ask about the report and the decisions they make after reading it. Search Engine Land also suggests throwing in a mistake to see if they catch it.

• Request a competitive analysis. Checking out the competition is a skill that always helps in advertising. There are different skills for different platforms, so choose the one that best suits the daily work that your candidate might be doing if hired. For example, Search Engine Land uses AdWords as an example. It suggests having candidates evaluate the search landscape to give you estimated CPCs, the top keywords, and ad extensions your competitors use. Then, ask them for what they see as opportunities and recommendations. 

• Have them budget plan. This test requires you to share some numbers with them, but Search Engine Land says to have the candidate sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Then, you can give them read-only access to Google Analytics and have them give you their recommendations with an AdWords budget template. 

To read the full article on what Search Engine Land suggests to test PPC talent, please click here.

But What About a Campaign?

All of these qualities and skills are excellent. However, if they are terrible with campaigns, then what? We suggest you test their campaign skills, too. In the past, you might have asked for an PPC excel template or ad campaign spreadsheet with various tabs that address how they might approach a campaign. However, if you subscribe to our platform, you can have them mockup a campaign instead.

For example, let’s say you have a candidate that nailed the initial interview and sailed through the second round. You think you have the right fit, but you still do not have a great idea of how they work. You want to see how the candidate would structure the campaign using ad groups and potential keywords, write copy and landing page URL and path slugs, as well as any extensions they might use. Furthermore, you’d love to see how they test results and which key performance indicators they might use to measure results. 

PPCADE allows you to have your candidate set up a campaign for Google Ads by creating a Google Ad example. The PPCADE platform can let the candidate demonstrate how they would prepare a Google Ads campaign that includes the strategy, ad copy, and keywords they would use. This approach gives you three main benefits:

1. You can see their work in an organized campaign.  No more clicking around on spreadsheets or looking for tabs with the relevant information. You get a mockup that looks just like the Google Ad preview tool. 
2. You can give the candidate instant feedback. Using the collaboration tools built into our platform, you can provide edits with direction and see how the candidate responds. 
3. You can share it with the team. If you have a hiring committee, you can share the Google Ads mockup with all the members to weigh in on the candidate’s viability based on merit. 

Recruiting the best possible talent is essential for your organization. Whether you are facing a market of way too many candidates or not nearly enough, finding the best of the best is vital to keeping your company in the black, and not seeing red at the competition’s success. 

Sources:

Patel, Neil. “How to Hire Your Digital Marketing Dream Team (Without a Big Brand Budget).” I’m Kind of a Big Deal, LLC. Web. 3 June 2020. < https://neilpatel.com/blog/hire-top-digital-marketing-talents/>.

Middleton, Brett. “Evaluating PPC talent, part 2: The test.” Searchengineland.com. 31 August 2017. Web. 3 June 2020. < https://searchengineland.com/evaluating-ppc-talent-part-2-test-280779>.