Hiring freelancers is easy, but hiring qualified marketing experts who can actually make an impact on your business? That’s a much more challenging task.
Why?
Because everyone and anyone can and does call themselves a freelancer these days, no matter what kind of experience or qualifications they have.
For the average business owner, it can be really hard to recognize the good marketers from the bad. And you can spend A LOT of time reading through a resume, checking LinkedIn, and interviewing a candidate only to end up back at the beginning of the process.
At GrowTal, we’re not in the business of finding freelancers. We’re on a mission to connect businesses with the best, most qualified marketing experts available to hire.
How do we do it?
It all comes down to how we source and pre-vet talent.
There are two main ways we source:
The first way is through traditional job boards and job postings.
The second way is more unique to us—we find talent through our own network. Our team is well-connected in the marketing industry, and we’ve worked with and for a lot of talented people in past jobs. We regularly ask industry friends, former coworkers, and past employers to introduce us to the best freelancers they’ve worked with.
This puts us in a unique position to quickly connect businesses in need with people we personally know and trust.
The ease of our model also allows us to bring highly experienced professionals into our network who are working full-time jobs and might otherwise never think to take on contract work. Getting access to these types of marketers is incredibly difficult without a partner like GrowTal.
Being able to source marketing talent is important, but knowing how to vet them is crucial.
We take every person we meet through a rigorous pre-vetting process before deciding whether or not to add them to our network and make them available to clients.
Here’s how the vetting process works when we’re evaluating people with expertise in technical roles, like paid advertising or SEO:
Step 1: Reputation & Resume Evaluation
We start by evaluating the known reputation of the person being considered. If it was a referral, we’ll gather information from the person who referred the individual to us. From there, we look at the individual’s LinkedIn profile and resume to better understand their experience and background.
Step 2: Initial Gut Check Conversation
Next, we set up an initial discovery call to hear more from the freelancer we’re considering adding to our network. We can usually tell within a few minutes if they are a good fit for the type of work and quality we and our clients expect. If we have a good gut feeling about them, we’ll continue the interview and begin asking more in-depth questions to evaluate their knowledge and expertise.
Step 3: Deeper Experience-Based Interview
In this portion of the interview, we take candidates through a dozen deeper-level questions to gauge their understanding of their role. For example, if we’re evaluating a paid advertising freelance marketer, we’ll present them with a scenario and ask them how they’d approach it.
Here’s a question we might ask:
“Let's say a client comes to you and they're a T-shirt company, and they have $30,000 a month to spend. They've been sort of spending here and there...they are doing paid social, Google, and maybe some traditional marketing as well, but they want you to tell them where they should be spending their money, what the breakdown should be, etc. What are the sorts of questions you would ask this client to figure out how best to optimize their spend?”
When we’re evaluating the responses candidates give, we’re not just listening for the right answers—we’re also taking the opportunity to evaluate their ability to communicate, their level of confidence, their professionalism, their knowledge and use of role-specific terminology, their real-time thought process, and the strategy they would use to solve the problem.
This exercise also allows us to understand whether or not they are familiar with the tools we’d expect them to know how to use when working in the specific area they specialize in.
Step 4: Final Evaluation by an Industry Expert
After the interview is complete, we gather our notes, meet as a team, and leave it up to one of our subject matter experts to decide if the candidate is a good fit for the GrowTal network.
For people working in more strategic or creative capacities, we take them through a slightly different process:
It can be difficult to vet roles that are more qualitative in nature. We still focus on more general vetting type questions (strategy, capabilities, client experience, etc), but will spend more time evaluating their portfolios and past bodies of work.
For C-suite level people who have mainly been in strategy and managerial positions, we're looking for high-impact, multi-channel, strategic capabilities and previous experience.
Oftentimes we'll be looking at who can be leveraged more generally vs. someone who has a great deal of experience in a niche like travel or healthcare.
Finding the right person to help with marketing takes a lot of work. We’ve perfected the process. Let us help you find the right person to take your business to the next level. When you’re ready, reach out to us. We’ll set up time to learn more about your business and goals, send you a few qualified candidates to choose from, and even help you make the final decision.
Fill out this simple questionnaire to get the process started.