Recruiting and hiring great marketing talent — Robert Glazer // Acceleration Partners

Quotes

• “There are things I’ve learned through trial and error and the first is that anyone hiring should get the book WHO by Geoff Smart, Geoff is the world’s expert on hiring and there is a science behind it.” -Robert “One of the biggest things I see people struggle with is some sort of voodoo aspect of their hiring, having some question that they believe is the all-telling question with no scientific validity at all.” -Robert “People really focus on a specific thing rather than the totality of the whole process. There is a lot of human error in interviewingso you need a system to get better results.” -Robert “We are making it objective every way we can. When you talk about the scorecard, it is the qualities that will make the person successful at the objective of the job.” -Robert “You interview against them, and then you should put numerical answers in each and then come back in the group and you should look at how everyone thought that person did against the question that they were given for the specific qualities.” -Robert“You have to balance the empirical data with a little bit of judgment.” -Ben “We believe that it’s important to understand if they’re fit for the value and for the client service and what we do.” -Robert“Getting it right the first time is important but not everybody is going to be perfect. I think that there is something to be said for, ‘I want to take another stab at it to make sure I get it right’ attitude and that’s something you have to figure out and balance to where your organizational values are.” -Ben “It’s not about being right but having good judgment in a client-service environment is paramount.” -Robert“I think this is the winning combination [for a marketing team] these days. Innovative and creative but also knows how to incorporate data and logic to their decision-making.” -Robert “We have decided that if someone doesn’t have the industry knowledge, we can teach that but teaching the core values will be a lot harder.” -Robert “We invest a lot in our people in terms of leadership training so that’s a big thing that we talk about too, the types of training that they are going to get and how we’ve had 42 promotions this year and 76 last year so they see that this is a learning and growing organization.” -Robert “If they are hung on the title or the feeling of ‘I am worth this and that’, we really don’t adjust our process to that.” -Robert“I think there’s rules and principles when you’re setting up your organizational structures. Going through your hiring process is the same. You need to have your values and guidelines, knowing what is out of balance for you and stick to that through the entire process.” -Ben