Often in small engineering companies, the marketing responsibilities are shared among a few technical staff.
For instance, an R&D engineer may also be the IT guy who updates the website or writes code and content. Maybe a technical sales person is responsible for creating materials for a trade show in between customer visits and writing proposals.
If your company is growing and marketing is not keeping up, it may be time to consider hiring a dedicated technical marketing manager.
Hiring a strong technical marketing manager has the potential to propel your marketing efforts forward and allows your engineering company to gain a team member who will add value to the organization.
Before you begin the hiring process, you need to know what to look for in a technical marketing manager, how to rank your potential candidates, and how to handle the interview process.
First, focus on talent, then assess a candidate’s ability to fit within your company culture and their relevant experience. This is how we hire at TREW, and how we’ve had collective success hiring in the technical B2B space on behalf of our technical clients.
For engineering companies, it is often challenging to find a marketing manager candidate who is specifically familiar with your technology. But, if a candidate is talented and embodies the values you hold for your company, they’ll be quick to learn the in's and out of your technology and customers.
The following criteria that will help you know what to look for in a technical marketing manager.
Focusing on talent first captures candidates’ ability to learn, grow, and propel your company forward. A talented person can do much more than recreate a past experience – they can adapt to new ideas and understand what marketing efforts will serve your company best.
A talented person likely embodies these characteristics:
Your company will become what your employees embody. You can influence what your company becomes by hiring a marketing manager that embodies the qualities and values that you hold high. Employees that bring distrust, melodrama, volatility, inaction, or arrogance to your workplace fuel a poor company culture. Design your company culture, teach it, reward it, and hire to fit it. A candidate that is a good “culture fit” will work alongside your existing employees collaboratively and add value as they move forward.
Each company culture is different, but here is a list of pervasive culture attributes that we value here at TREW:
If your candidate has proficient experience along with the talent and culture attributes you seek, they’ll be a rockstar in your company. However, if they have the talent and culture attributes but lack a bit of experience, they will need to be taught along the way. You can still hire this person, but consider them an apprentice to the person(s) currently running the marketing strategy or activities for a few months while they get a handle of your technology or a specific media area or partner relationship.
For a marketing manager, good marks of experience include:
To keep track of your candidates’ talent, culture, and experience, create a scorecard where you (and any others you have interview your candidates) rate the candidates 1-5 in each category. A scorecard will give you a rubric to systematically rank your candidates, taking the pressure off of your recollection of conversation, and ensuring that you don’t put too much weight on a few characteristics and become enamored by someone who lacks a lot of important attributes, or dismayed by someone with a fault in one area but a breadth of great qualities.
Here's a scorecard to help you select the right candidate.
This scorecard uses the Talent, Culture, and Experience markers listed above, where talent makes up 40% of the candidate’s overall score, and culture and experience each make up 30%. Depending on the position and the attributes important in your company, you can modify the criteria to make it work best for you.
Once you’ve begun promoting your position and receiving applications – from sites such as Indeed.com or through recruiters, social media, and your internal team – it will come time to start the interview process. The recommended approach detailed below is the process we follow at TREW, and is based on many years of hiring for a variety of marketing positions. It is proven, efficient, and requires an investment of time; but, when followed thoroughly, we believe it gives you the highest chance of finding the absolute best candidate for your technical marketing position.
From early screening to your final decision, it is efficient in the early stages so that when it comes time to conduct in-person interviews, you have narrowed down to three or four qualified candidates you can spend more time getting to know. Here are the steps for the interview process, with a short explanation of each:
Develop a list of 8-10 qualifiers and screen resumes to see if they have those qualifiers. Typical qualifiers include:
Your candidates may not possess all of these attributes, but screening based on specific criteria will help you filter out the candidates who aren’t a well-rounded fit for your company.
Send initial questions to candidates that passed the screening via email. You’ll use the candidates’ responses to get a better understanding of who they are, what talents they have, and what they’re looking for in a career trajectory.
Use phone interviews to get more information about each candidate’s personality and past experience. You’ll base your questions on what you received via email to gain further insight or information.
Note: Have your candidates follow up after the interview by sending samples of technical white papers or data sheets they’ve created, examples of project timelines and results, and any other writing samples, along with three professional references.
Invite your final candidates to your office for an interview. Because you’ve evaluated your candidates’ past experience well in steps 1-3, you now get the chance to dive more deeply into the way they would think and behave. Take this time to understand how your candidates solve problems and adapt to new challenges by asking them situational questions and giving them real scenarios that will arise within your team, company, and industry. Using these situational questions allows you to evaluate whether the candidate would have a good technical, creative, and analytical approach to solving problems for your organization.
In addition, bring in other members of your team and conduct up to three interview sessions with 1-2 people each. Use your team’s feedback to better understand if this person has the correct talents, “culture fit”, and experience to work well with your organization.
Note: we will not cover this here in detail, but you may also want to consider having your final two candidates prepare a presentation to give to the interviewing panel at your company. The presentations can be focused on topics such as their analysis of your current company’s marketing, or a specific challenge you give them.
Now that you understand the steps in the interviewing process, let’s dive in and look at a sampling of the questions to ask at each point. Throughout the process, we recommend asking both behavioral and situational questions, such as those included in the list below:
Understanding how to thoughtfully evaluate, carefully screen, and effectively interview candidates will help you find the best technical marketing manager for your company.
Like any process, hiring takes time and effort, but we believe following the guidance outlined will result in efficient and effective hiring. However, the decision to add to your team should be part of a larger marketing strategy.
Learn how to set your business up for marketing success with An Engineer's Guide to Marketing Planning, a detailed guide tailored to technical B2B business and marketing leaders.
TREW is a marketing agency dedicated to reaching engineering and technical audiences through a range of marketing initiatives. Contact us today to learn more about the services we offer.
