Actionable Tips for Sourcing, Qualifying, and Onboarding Your Agency New Hires

A collection of thoughts to help you find remarkable talent and shorten the learning curve for new hires.

Agency growth is an interesting thing.

On one hand, more customers means higher revenue and (ideally) increased gross profit. However, customer acquisition and increased retainers will also reduce team capacity and tighten bandwidths. If you don’t properly plan ahead, this growth can hurt your customer service, support channels, response times, and the quality of your deliverables.

Compare your growth plans to your team’s utilization rates, and if employees are overworked, then it may be time to make an addition to the team. Also take a look at the hours and accounts a (potential) new employee would take on. If it looks close to your other full-time employees’ capacity, then it’s time to add to the team.

When you’ve decided the moment is right, reference the action points below to source a robust pool of candidates, qualify candidates on required skill, and shorten the learning curve for your new hires in onboarding.

STEP 1: NAILING THE JOB DESCRIPTION

When posting a job opening online for your agency, there are a ton of things you’re juggling at once. Your top priority — understandably — is to drive qualified candidates into your database to vet and find an elite contributor.

But it doesn’t just happen.

Where do you post the opening? How do you promote it? Once applicants come in, how do you qualify each individual? How do you handle interviews? What’s your follow-up process?

And nevermind all of the tasks leading up to the hiring decision. What sort of gross profits did you have to achieve and how much new business did you have to close to even justify the hiring decision?

As you can see: there’s a lot to consider. And within this whole process, a critical step often forgotten about is the job description itself. Here are a few tips to improve the way you communicate open roles and responsibilities at your agency and their impact.

Set crystal clear expectations.

An opening has been posted and your application pipeline isn’t an issue. However, the quality of candidates keeps missing the mark. Sound familiar? The number one reason why unqualified candidates continue to apply for agency openings is because they don’t know for certain what will be asked of them.

Within your job description, use the right language to remove any confusion around what exactly will be asked of a person in this role. For example, key phrases to lean on would be:

• “You have a track record of…”
• “You will be responsible for…”
• “You will be accountable for…”

By being upfront about track records, this sets strong expectations for the interview process. Candidates will now be prepared to discuss their history in delivering the tasks required. By communicating what they’ll be responsible and accountable for, confident candidates will begin appearing as applicants.

Real world example: “You have a track record of innovation and marketing experimentation, with clear examples of ways you’ve successfully driven demand that were different from the status quo.”

Communicate both hard-skill and soft-skill requirements.

Poor performing job descriptions tend to lean only the literal tasks being asked of a new hire. Yes, it’s important to be clear about what someone will be expected to do in a new role, but the other half of that coin is for language around the soft-skills needed to succeed.

Unsure about soft-skills? Consider the personal attributes of your highest performing talent. What people or social skills, character traits and personal attributes translate into success for your agency? Maybe more important: what skills are needed to elevate your agency?

Make sure your job descriptions contain items for both sets of skills. Your agency should be looking for a person that checks off the right boxes for experience around designing, building, reporting, analyzing and other action-oriented responsibilities. You should also be listing the importance of a creative, data-driven, entrepreneurial, or communicative candidate.

Real world example: If you are an innovative, analytical marketer who is excited to bring new ideas to the table and implement change, this role is for you.

Be ambitious about the end result.

As the infamous saying goes: hire for culture add, not culture fit.

To stack on the tips above, agencies shouldn’t just be setting the right expectations and communicating the right skills for the role as it exists right now. Wrap up your job posting with a description of where you want the role to go and what this candidate can grow into.

You may be hiring for an account manager to help with a group of new accounts, but what can they improve organizationally? Could this new hire potentially help improve your entire client onboarding process?

By including ambition in your job description, you’re attracting ambitious talent. They’ll look beyond the roles and responsibilities of the opening and gravitate towards what it could become.

Real world example: You will be in charge of attracting site traffic, converting that traffic into new leads for the business, and nurturing those leads to close into customers for our clients. The ideal candidate will also help refine our reporting process to present more impactful reporting to clients.

By actioning the tips above, you’ll be setting your agency’s recruiting efforts up for success. The agency will be setting clear expectations up front with any interested parties, qualifying the talent before their name even gets to your team. In the long-run, high-quality job descriptions will help ensure each new hire for your agency improves upon the status quo and delivers top notch services for your clients.

STEP 2: USING INTERVIEW ACTIVITIES TO BETTER QUALIFY YOUR CANDIDATES

After days (or weeks) of back-and-forth, you finally have a new hire candidate coming into the office for a round of interviews. The schedule? Round robin meetings with a few managers and team members over a two hour block. Maybe you have questions prepared — but maybe you don’t. Maybe you assigned out particular questions for each person — but maybe you didn’t. Maybe there’s a sheet for each interviewer to fill out — but maybe there isn’t.

And you are supposed to then qualify the candidate and determine if she or he will be a fit for the open role? From two hours of questioning, you are supposed to decide whether or not this person is worth the investment? That can be a tough spot to be in.

Sound familiar?

Sourcing, interviewing, and hiring talent can be one of the difficult aspects of scaling an agency. One way to upgrade your interview process is to include activities — tasks the candidate must do that correlate directly to the role in which they’re striving for. By incorporating activities, you are able to:

• Polish up your process beyond just a question-and-answer format.
• Improve the interviewee’s experience.
• Increase your visibility into the candidate’s ability to perform in the open role.

Consider using the following set of activities in your process to help test your candidates’ analytical skills, creativity, and problem-solving abilities as it relates to the opening at your agency.

Have candidates provide a writing sample.

This should be considered a must for any roles that require copywriting or content curation. For example, website copywriters, blog writers, technical writers, public relations, or marketing generalists.

Writing samples can be obtained through a number of different means. For one, you can just request a blog sample or writing sample on the application itself. This lets the candidate provide you with what they consider their strongest work.

Another approach you can take would be to provide a writing prompt for the candidate to then complete. Maybe it’s a topic that aligns with your agency’s service offerings or a hypothetical customer that is your primary buyer persona.

To take it one step further, if there’s an SEO component to the role, have your candidate also provide the keywords they’d be optimizing around. Have them mark up the writing sample with what they’d mark as the H1, how’d they write the title tag, what they’d include as a meta description, etc.

Problem solve through a case study.

As marketers, your team is probably also viewed as problem-solvers. Often times, clients require strategies and tactics that resolve a root problem they’re facing — whether it’s website traffic, lead generation, closing more deals, or increasing revenue.

To ensure your candidate has the right frame of mind and problem-solving ability, present them with a case study that introduces a standard challenge your customers face. An example may be a huge contact list and the customer doesn’t know where to start. Or maybe a customer wants to see a 2x increase in lead generation from their website.

The candidate’s answer doesn’t have to be perfect, but it’ll be important to review their approach, their ability to critically think through the situation, and their ability to solve for the customer’s need.

Quiz them on pre-requisite readings.

As part of your communication with the candidate, prior to them coming into the office, you should provide them with readings and articles to review. This could be a copy of your agency’s culture code, a case study or two reviewing successful campaigns, or a link to your blog.

When they come into the office, quiz them on the content provided. What was their favorite section of your culture code? What about the case study resonated with them? Is there anything on your blog that they’d add or remove?

Use their ability to complete “homework” as a gauge on their ability to prepare and manage their time. This also helps ensure they are serious about the role and are committed to the process.

Have your team take an informal lunch with the candidate.

For candidates further down your pipeline and/or for candidates being hired for mission critical roles, consider having them sit down with the team for a “non-interview” lunch. Coordinate a lunch with your team and the candidate to have a more casual meeting and conversation.

Have the team ask them about their current role and their interest in the agency. Talk about personal goals, and core principles.

After lunch, have your team debrief you on how it went. Was there a culture fit? Was there a human fit? In this stage of the process, we’re seeing if the candidate’s values will unite with your agency’s and to ensure all vectors are aligned to move your agency forward.

So if your team either dreads interviews or if you find low-quality results from your interview questions, think about introducing an activity (or activities) to your process to improve it across the board.

STEP 3: BUILDING A REMARKABLE ONBOARDING PROGRAM

As agencies, your ability to scale is directly correlated with your ability to hire and develop talent. But once a candidate is hired, how do you have them assume their full potential as quick as possible? The faster they are ramped up to their role, the quicker they can actually contribute, right? The answer lies in your onboarding process, or your process for acclimating and educating new hires to the principles, processes, and performance standards of your agency

But keep in mind that onboarding comes at a cost. For new hires, every minute in “onboarding” is a minute not pushing towards goals or adding pertinent projects to their plate. Because of this delicate balance, agencies must nail it.

Let’s review a few key items to include in your onboarding process:

Document said process.

Your onboarding program won’t exist as a scalable, repeatable process until it has been written down and officially documented. Start with an outline of what will be covered, how it will be covered, when it will be covered, and by whom. Having your full program documented will ensure that all new hires across the agency will have a consistent learning experience.

Within this document, you’ll also want to cover the background and mission. What are the agency’s top level goals? How do you summarize your purpose? What are your core principles. Communicate these right up front to have all employees aligned and moving towards the same, shared goals.

The largest component of your onboarding document should be a review of the critical tasks, responsibilities and workflows all employees should be able to accomplish in their new role(s). Make it incredibly clear of what all new hires must be able to do. You’ll also want to pinpoint the timeline for these key milestones.. Are your Account Managers required to complete the Inbound Certification? Show them where to go, what it covers, and by what date they must pass by.

Sweat the small stuff.

A common misconception is that new hire onboarding begins on Day 1. The best onboarding programs begin at “Day Zero” — or before your new employee even steps into the building.

New hires are a nervous bunch. They tend to be tentative, mistake-prone and unsure. They don’t have any relationships yet and may be afraid to speak up and ask “dumb” questions. Not only do they need to learn about the new job and what it entails, but where do they park? Where do they sit? Should they buy coffee before work? Or is it available in the office?

The best practice here it to not only be in communication before Day 1, but over-communicate before Day 1. Provide directions to the office and the recommended parking lot. Remind them of what paperwork should be completed and brought in. Share the Day 1 (or Week 1) agenda ahead of time for clarification.

Once they arrive, carve time out for the general employee setup tasks: technology (laptops, phones), their desk (office supplies, monitors, laptop stands), and any security measures (key cards or keyfobs).

And then at some point in their first couple of days, have them meet the team. Grab lunch or a few drinks after work to make it an informal and loose session. Have the team introduce themselves with core responsibilities, how the new hire should look to collaborate with them, and then who the “go-to” resources are amongst the team.

When you focus on the “small stuff”, you enable new hires to jump right into the job at hand.

Tailor-fit the new hire.

No matter who at your agency is in charge of onboarding new employees, it’s important to remain present. Or at least have their direct manager be present. The relationship is obviously brand new, and now is the time to lay in the foundation for a positive working relationship.

Be polite and courteous and make yourself available to answer any questions about their learnings thus far. You can also use this as an opportunity to learn more about their learning style or how the operate best.

Many new managers lay off on immediate feedback during onboarding, but the new employee could make a case for actionable feedback; she says it helps her learn new tasks and strengthen skills faster.

Stay weird.

At the end of the day, your primary goal is to reduce your new employees’ learning curve and turn them into effective contributors as soon as possible. However, this is also your chance to enrich and augment your agency’s culture.

Company culture happens whether it was planned or not, so it’s important to use onboarding as an opportunity to instill the culture you want to have. Justify your new hires’ decision to work at the agency — after all, they chose you for a reason.

You could start with a welcome kit, or a collection of “goodies” for all new hires. Maybe it’s a branded coffee mug or notebook. Or maybe it’s a t-shirt or a hoodie. Or maybe it’s just a handwritten note from the team welcoming the new hire to the agency.

But culture goes beyond branded gear and coffee. Your onboarding program should highlight the employee perks that make you you. Explain what they are and why they are important to you. Are you relaxed on employees working remote? Do you have a phenomenal parental leave policy? No matter what you have: communicate why it’s important to you.

Agencies move fast which makes the onboarding process for many agencies move at a frenetic pace. Deadlines to hit. Content to create. Contracts to renew. Customers to delight. I’m going to guess that your new hire was — well, hired — because they were critically needed. So make them feel like it.

Investing in your talent from Day 0 ensures your staff achieves peak productivity, produces the desired results, and ultimately sticks around long-term.

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