If you've been following us lately, you might have seen that we have talked about how to hire
the head of an SEO team or just in general an SEO professional. We discussed how to evaluate
the qualities, the real-life qualities, of these candidates and today we're going to take a little
step back because we're going to talk about job description. How should you write the perfect
job description to hire the best SEO professional for your company? And today we're gonna talk about
it again with Max our SVP of marketing that has written this job description many many times for
many different companies, and today he will share with us the four steps to writing the perfect job
description to get you the candidate that you actually want. Hi, Max! Thanks for being with us
again. Hey! So, job description: what are your first thoughts? What should be the perfect job
description like? What are your suggestions? Yeah, so, often colleagues overcomplicate
the descriptions which they write, while actually while you are hiring an SEO professional there are
not many important details you need to share to get proper candidates. I mean, nothing guarantees
you good candidates, but at least you will have a better filter if your job description is right.
So first of all, it makes sense to describe the nature of your business. Answer a question: what
exactly are you selling? Because this will immediately help your candidates
to match their experience with the nature of your business.
The second thing to mention is the type of transaction:
how exactly you convert your traffic into sales because, let's say, in real estate
SEO specialists can work to drive you qualified leads, in e-commerce or in software as a service
it's online transactions, so you can actually measure
the outcome and it makes sense to share this in advance, or for example an offer in offline
retail it's foot traffic so you do expect your online marketing efforts to drive foot traffic
So next thing, which actually depends more on size of your company, it's a decision: do you need a
manager or do you need an individual contributor? For smaller businesses it's normally individual
contributor working with freelancers or with agencies if needed, for a bigger businesses it's
a head of SEO in-house, who will hire the team and external resources like agencies and freelancers.
Often great individual contributors who can give a lot of value to a business can
be terrible people managers and vice and vice versa, but ironically in the large businesses
if you are hiring a manager you don't need that much SEO experience actually, because any gaps
in their knowledge can be filled by hiring the right people in their team, while when you are
hiring an individual contributor it makes sense to think about their experience quite seriously
Last question to address in your job description is whether you are okay or not with
agency background, because from my experience most candidates applying for this position
have only agency background and they never worked in e-commerce or so, they never worked
on business side, which can be an issue in some cases. I would actually suggest to
a link to the article from Kevin Indig in the description of this video because I will not say
better than he wrote! He wrote about this topic, but in a few words, agency background
often is about serving many many companies at the same time on a not that very deep
level, and it's about planning and consulting more than about execution. While in-house SEO is
focused on one project, on one website but very very deeply with understanding of all nuances
of the business. This transition is possible, I mean, you can hire a person from the agency
and they will become a great head of SEO inside your company, but there is some risk that this
transition will not be that successful. So, anyway, it's the last but not least
top topic to mention in your job description. Absolutely, so just in case, yes, we will share
a template in the description of this video with our own job description for when we were looking
for our head of SEO (which we did successfully in case you're wondering), and the template is
right in the description you can download it, get inspiration from it, completely copy it,
I guess you can't because it describes Semrush but anyway. You can find it right in the description,
so we again will share all the steps that Max has described in the video. And thank you very much,
Max! What will be our next topics in the following videos, after we have described job description
and how to check the background of the candidates? Well, we probably should speak about onboarding to
get value from your candidate, and about why to hire them at all, how to make a decision between
the agency and an in-house specialist. That seems like a huge topic that we should definitely
talk about, I know that some people already asked us in the comments, so yes we'll touch
upon that. Well, thanks again, Max for being here and I'll catch you in the next video! Bye!
So, I guess that was it I really hope you found this interview with Max as helpful as possible
and you'll find everything we discussed right in the description, template and all the steps.
If you have any topics you would like to discuss with me, with Max
(you would like Max to respond, he's got way more experience than I do!)
please leave everything in the comments, we read each and every one of you! Thanks again
for following us and I'll catch you guys in the next video, remember to subscribe, ciao!