Hiring for SEO: How to find and hire a person with little or no experience
If you want to expand your in-house team or build a team of digital marketers, it is always best to hire people who have no experience in the field of digital marketing but a whole lot of potential and train them. However, this doesn't mean that just anyone can fit into an SEO role. There are certain unique skills and personality traits that can significantly contribute to success in digital marketing.
If you are an SEO agency, here are a few things that you need to look for in a potential candidate:
- To be successful in SEO, the prospective candidate should devote a considerable amount of time on continued learning such as attending conferences, reading blogs, and discussing and testing new methods and strategies. The ideal candidate should be someone who is an aggressive, independent learner. Ask the candidate about how they picked up a new skill and how far did they succeed in it. You can also ask him/her about the interview preparation as it shows if they're really keen about the job.
- If your SEO outsourcing company has decided on hiring a candidate, there is a crucial factor that needs to be given due consideration - The candidate should have a fundamental knowledge of what SEO is. Go for people who have a clear and precise idea of how the Internet could be used as a tool to connect businesses with their customers. Empathy with the client, his fears or concerns, and his goals is yet another factor that needs to be taken into account.
- The potential candidate should be someone who can write well and should have attention to detail. He/she should be adept in communicating ideas.
- Although the prospective candidate may not have any experience with analytics tools like Google Analytics and can build those skills through continuous learning, he/she must have the ability to think critically and to make use of the data to drive decisions.
- A fresh employee might find it easier to learn SEO if he/she is net savvy. If the candidate has an active web presence, through social media networks, blogging etc, it basically suggests a general interest in the Internet. This is extremely important when it comes to learning SEO.
- An ideal applicant for SEO should be someone who has experience in one or more of these areas - Marketing, Advertising, Public relations, APIs, Web development and design or copywriting. Hire for a smart, ambitious person who wants to pursue digital marketing as a career opportunity, rather than a route to make money.
- Hiring inexperienced people is full of risks. The problem is that the person you hire may not turn out to be competent at SEO or may not be a fast learner or they may not want to take up SEO as a long-term career. Therefore, hiring and training a person who fits the organizational culture and who is enthusiastic about learning is much better than hiring someone with experience who does not sync well with the team. Moreover, you are giving a person the fascinating opportunity for a whole new career and moulding them into a world-class marketer—and that's a truly wonderful feeling.
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