Did you know that the cost of mis-hiring a mid-management professional is around £132,000? That’s a lot of money to waste! This figure factors in lost productivity, training, and recruitment. Of course, it can differ based on the person’s salary and role, but there’s no denying that a sizable chunk of money is lost on bad hires.
However, with around 75% of UK workers job hunting at the start of 2023, and many businesses trying to fill vacancies, it’s not always easy to secure the perfect person, let alone build an entire team.
Don’t panic, though, as we’re here to help. In this blog post, we’ll reveal everything you need to know about building a fantastic marketing and design team in 2023.
How does design and marketing work together?
Designers and marketers often work very closely on projects. Marketing professionals will spin up a project, craft a strategy, write content, and then hand this off to the design team. Design experts will shape the content into something that resonates with your business’s target audience and engages them effectively.
How do you build an incredible marketing and design team?
Building a fantastic marketing and design team doesn’t happen by chance. You need to refine your recruitment process. Here are some of the steps we recommend:
1.Use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
There’s only one place to begin, and this is by installing an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). This makes the hiring process a lot more efficient and effective.
An ATS is a type of software that enables you to customize and structure your hiring process so you can attract, source, assess, and hire candidates quicker and better. You can read Recruitee’s ATS guide for a thorough understanding of Applicant Tracking Systems, how they work, and how to choose one.
The reason why this type of tool is recommended over the other options that are available is because it covers the entire recruitment process. This includes all of the following:
- Recruitment process optimization
- Sourcing candidates
- Employee onboarding
- Candidate management
- Extending job offers
- Pre-screening candidates
- Screening candidates
This functionality enables you to unlock numerous benefits when putting together an effective marketing and design team, including:
- Enhance recruitment efficiency – ATS enables collaborative hiring, stores all current and past candidates, automated vital recruitment processes, tracks and reports on key recruitment metrics, and provides insights into your processes and how effective they are.
- Deliver a better experience for candidates – By streamlining your recruitment, you’ll deliver a better experience for your candidates. They’ll enjoy improved clarity, quicker screening, and seamless communication. They’ll also feel assured that your hiring process is fair.
- Reduce your workload – There are many ways you can lower your workload during the recruitment process. This includes automating the collection, storage, and aggregation of candidate data, as well as recording interviews, scheduling interviews, and keyword-based parsing of cover letters and resumes.
- Better hiring results – Ultimately, using an ATS solution means you’re going to have a better chance of hiring the right graphic designers and marketers. You can use a whole host of tools to your advantage to improve the quality of your hires, from performance reviews to collaborative hiring. You’ll also reduce time-to-hire while improving cost-per-hire. Isn’t this what all businesses want?
2. Ask the right questions during the marketing or graphic design interview
If you don’t ask the right questions, how are you going to be able to determine whether the person in front of you is right for your team?
It’s a good idea to spend some time researching marketing and graphic design interview questions and answers to get a good idea of the best questions to ask.
You’ll want to find out a number of different things about your candidate, i.e. how they react in certain situations, if they work well as a team, whether they’ll fit into your work culture, and so on. The only way to figure all of this out is to choose your questions wisely.
Always ask open-ended questions. Don’t ask a question that can be answered with a simple ‘no’ or ‘yes.’ Instead, you need to pose open-ended questions that prompt the person to explain.
We’d also recommend throwing in a few light-hearted questions as well. Interviews can be very intense and the candidate can feel like they have the weight of the world on their shoulders. When hard-hitting questions are being thrown from every direction, it can be hard to perform to your best. By adding in a light-hearted question here and there, it allows the candidate to relax and take a minute to breathe. This will enable you to truly get the best out of your candidate, and you’ll have a much better chance of seeing the authentic personality in front of you.
Ultimately, in order to construct effective interview questions, you always need to start by outlining what you want from a candidate. What’s important to you? What sort of person are you looking for? Instead of simply printing off some generic graphic design and marketing questions, make sure you incorporate questions that give you the answers you’re really looking for.
3.Utilise a skills matrix
The best way of making sure that your team is diverse enough from a creative perspective is by developing a skills matrix. This will ensure your team is versatile enough to cope with any sort of project.
A skills matrix ultimately assists you in identifying whether there are any skills gaps you need to fill during your next hiring wave.
- Along the X axis, list all of your current employees’ names.
- Along the Y axis, list all of the skills you require in your creative team, for example, video editing, UX, content writing, CSS, HTML, and so on.
You can then put a tick underneath the employees’ names based on the skills they have.
If there is a row that doesn’t have any ticks in it, you know that you need to prioritise these skills when looking for the next member of your team.
This will help to lower staff redundancy and ensure you have the strongest possible team. You’ll be confident knowing your design and marketing team can handle any task and you’ll have no need to outsource.
4. Use tests
The best way of verifying whether a candidate has the skills you require is to test them. Unfortunately, people do embellish the truth on their CVs and job applications. Rather than simply hoping that the person you select has the skills they claim to, put them to the test to make sure.
Depending on the laws your business is required to adhere to, you can either ask the candidate to do the test as an unpaid part of the interview or you can pay the candidate for the time they spend on the project.
A lot of business owners do prefer to pay candidates for their time, regardless of the regulations in place, because they feel that it’s a fair way of treating candidates. Of course, the choice is yours.
For graphic designs, you can ask them to create something based on your instructions. This will give you a great way of determining whether their design aesthetic is the right fit for you and how effectively they’re able to follow direction.
For marketing professionals, you can ask them to put together a marketing strategy or outline a marketing campaign idea for a specific product or to overcome a certain problem you’re experiencing.
5. Don’t forget about soft skills
Last but not least, while technical skills are imperative, soft skills are also critical. Your potential hire may have all of the technical skills needed for the job, but what if he or she doesn’t take direction, aren’t coachable, and refuse to be flexible? Hiring someone like this could cause more damage to your team than good.
So, when you assess a candidate, it’s vital to discover how they communicate with others, accept feedback, and react to change. Make sure you’re crafting interview questions that unearth the person’s soft skills.
Put together a killer marketing and design team to beat the competition in 2023
So there you have it: our top tips when it comes to putting together a fantastic marketing and design team.
Now is certainly the time to refine your recruitment process if you’re looking to take on new workers in 2023. If you don’t, not only will you put your business at a significant disadvantage when competing with rival firms, but you’ll lose a lot of money in the process too.
Author bio
Kerry Leigh Harrison has over 11+ years of experience as a content writer. She graduated from university with a First Class Hons Degree in Multimedia Journalism. In her spare time, she enjoys attending sports and music events.
