Hiring your first marketing employee is a difficult task. It’s hard to evaluate a potential marketer’s knowledge when you don’t have a current marketing strategy or direction. Also, if you don’t have a lot of awareness about today’s marketing space or trends, then you won’t know which skills and experience are essential to a successful hire.
Using a specialized marketing recruitment firm can help you more clearly define the role, create a competitive compensation plan, and find top-performing marketing candidates in a tight labor market.
Below is a case study from one of our valued, repeat clients, Forensic Risk Alliance. They needed assistance in hiring their first U.S. marketing employee. Not only was this role difficult to fill because it was a marketing leadership position, but they also had specific hiring challenges to overcome related to location, industry, and compensation.
Keep reading to find out how Naviga Recruiting & Executive Search helped FRA first find a Marketing Manager and then a Senior Marketing Associate in Washington DC.
COMPANY BACKGROUND
Forensic Risk Alliance is a global market leader working with clients to mitigate the risks associated with international compliance, litigation, and investigations.
With 11 global offices, they’re able to offer extensive multi-jurisdictional data privacy, transfer, and protection expertise to clients in over 75 different countries.
Over the years, Forensic Risk Alliance, or FRA, was able to grow its U.S. offices through high-quality work and exceptional results. Recently, however, the company decided they wanted to expand its U.S. presence by optimizing their marketing efforts in its DC office.
HIRING CHALLENGES
Since FRA didn’t have a long term marketing strategy or team in the United States, Nicholas Halar, Senior HR Associate at FRA, knew they needed to hire their first strategic marketing professional on US soil.
They began searching on their own by working with multiple recruiting firms to identify candidates and even tried recruiting themselves, but soon encountered specific hiring challenges, including;
- Candidates that lacked experience in the professional services industry
- Candidates who were not willing to commute to their DC office
- Marketing candidates with too narrow of a focus
“It was like trying to find candidates who had the right mix of industry and marketing experience. A lot of the candidates in the DC market were government contractors or worked in the public sector,” said Halar.
“But finding someone who was either from a law firm or an accounting firm or really just in the professional services industry was proving to be very challenging in DC. We had a lot of candidates who came to us with a very narrow focus when it came to marketing experiences and we needed a pretty well-rounded person.”
After identifying these challenges, Halar knew he needed to reach out to a specialized recruitment firm to help him find a senior marketing professional with the right marketing skills and industry experience for the job.
FINDING A SPECIALIZED RECRUITING PARTNER
“Given that we’re a very specialized, niche market, looking for professional services and just really wanting to find the right candidate, we decided to look for a recruiting agency that specializes in marketing that we would be able to utilize for these roles,” Halar said.
Halar found a few firms he was potentially interested in and reached out to all of them. He spoke to one firm and wasn’t impressed with their overall customer service and another recruiting firm never returned his call.
When he came across Naviga Recruiting & Executive Search, he was initially impressed with what their clients had to say about them and the work they had done. On top of that, Naviga got back to him right away and arranged for a more detailed call to learn more about their needs the very next day.
BENEFITS OF USING NAVIGA
Soon after the initial call, a video calibration call was scheduled between FRA and Naviga to really learn what type of candidate FRA was looking to hire and to understand the specific hiring challenges they had been facing.
Naviga team members were on this video conference and had the goal to get to know one another and ask critical questions that define the profile of the position.
“Naviga really listened to what we were looking for, listened to our pain points and understood our global strategy,” said Halar.
Halar was also impressed with the quality of candidates that Naviga found right from the beginning.
“Once they started recruiting for us, Naviga was able to provide us with some really high-quality candidates and ones that we had not spoken to in the past. Even the first candidates Naviga sent over were right in line with what our needs were. Normally, I expect the first couple of candidates are not going to be exactly what I’m looking for because they’re still trying to get to know what we are looking for in a candidate. But that was not the case for the candidates Naviga sent to us,” Halar said.
Naviga’s consultative advice regarding compensation helped FRA find the right salary range for their opening by factoring in the level of the position, industry, and location.
Initially, FRA performed its own compensation research but believed the numbers they found were too high and went with a lower compensation plan instead. However, after meeting with Naviga’s compensation experts, they realized the higher salary range was really what the market was bearing and gave them the confidence they needed to offer a higher salary.
“The numbers were higher than what we originally wanted to offer, but for the right candidate and for the specific skill set, we found that it was right in line with where we need to be,” explained Halar.
And finally, FRA learned that Naviga was more than just a typical recruiting firm.
RESULTS OF PARTNERING WITH NAVIGA
At the end of the recruitment process, FRA hired a full-time Marketing Manager, their first marketing hire in the U.S. Their new hire was able to provide a wealth of experience and knowledge from their former company and was able to set the strategic direction for FRA going into 2020.
Once they hired their first marketing person, FRA wanted to bring in a second person to support the new marketing initiatives and goals of the company. Halar had no hesitation about who to use to help recruit for this role.
“We had such a challenge with the first hire, and Naviga did such a great job, I just went straight with Naviga to help us find a Senior Marketing Associate,” said Halar.
He believes that the combination of having both a Marketing Manager and Senior Marketing Associate will help FRA continue to push forward on their strategic marketing objectives while not getting bogged down with the day-to-day.
“I think it’s just going to be a really good addition to the team and broaden out the marketing footprint,” Halar said about their Senior Marketing Associate hire.
Looking to the future, Naviga will continue to be a top recruitment partner for FRA.
“Overall, working with Naviga has been a really good experience. We don’t have any current marketing roles right now but if that does change, we will be sure to keep Naviga on our list as our resource and our go-to,” Halar said.
