The concept of hiring a marketing team to take your startup to the next level may seem simple enough, but in reality, your first marketing hires hold the potential to lay down a marker for the path your company takes long into the future. It's for this reason that all entrepreneurs should adopt a measured approach when it comes to onboarding their team.

If you're looking to take on the perfect marketing team for your startup, you'll need to first identify the sort of candidates you're looking for, discover the right places to look for them, and create a plan for how you can onboard them effectively.

But how can this be achieved successfully? And how is it possible for a startup to compete with their rivals to entice candidates with the right skill sets?

 As the chart above shows, there are many significant challenges that marketing teams face, and they can play a pivotal role in getting your products or services noticed on a national and international scale. Notably, the chart also highlights 'hiring top talent' and training alongside other key hurdles to overcome.

With the importance of hiring the right talent signified, let's take a look at how you can go about recruiting the right marketing team for your startup. With this in mind, let's take a look at seven key considerations to make:

#1. Get to Grips with your Recruitment Process 

Before embarking on recruiting your team, it's important to dedicate some time towards grasping the status of your prospective marketing team and how they'll fit into your company.

To action this, it's worth asking yourself some essential questions, which can help to provide a solid idea of what you're looking for. Questions that can help to provide clarity include:

• What positions will your marketing team be comprised of?
• Where should your candidates' experience stem from?
• Which marketing channels do you want to embrace?
• What tools and technologies will they be expected to use?

In addition to this, it's important to have an understanding of where your own business is in terms of its development. Whether your level of maturity equates to momentum, acceleration, or transformation, it will likely involve hiring a different team of marketing experts in order to deliver as much success as possible. 

#2. Managing your Job Descriptions 

One of the first things that you'll need to do is create a suitable job description to help the hiring process. Naturally, it's a good idea to have a customized description on file for all positions–which can subsequently be edited and used accordingly.

For the benefit of SEO, it's worth using keywords and phrases that prospective marketing talent can discover via search engines. They should clearly denote how to attract the most effective candidates without resorting to too much industry jargon along the way.

When writing a high-quality job description for a marketing position, consider factors such as:

• Highlighting key company-wide requirements
• Including essential minimum marketing skills, qualifications, and experience
• Studying how your rivals are listing their job descriptions
• Exploring the type of personality you want to onboard
• How you want customers to view your business

There are also many job description templates that are accessible online which can help to provide you with a specialist marketing backdrop to build on. 

#3. Make Sure you Look in All the Right Places 

Traditional job boards are unlikely to cut it when it comes to finding and recruiting your dream marketing team. Whilst there are many marketers in the world, not all of them will be a suitable fit to take your startup to the next level.

With this in mind, it's worth broadening your search to include more online social and freelance platforms where talented individuals can share more about themselves and their expertise:

Upwork is a great example of a freelance platform where startups can go into direct contact with many strong freelance marketers. Crucially, the website's reviews system means that you can see how other companies have rated their recruit's output–a vital consideration during your startup's delicate formative months and years.

Freelancer.com is another example of a strong website for hiring candidates in a more cost-effective manner than other rival recruitment platforms. For instance, you can place a job advert on Freelancer.com and candidates can bid on the lowest price they're willing to work for you for. This means that you can immediately take cost into account as well as skill.

#4. Don't Neglect Job Ad Campaigns 

At this stage, it's worth remembering that traditional job ads still very much work online. Using sponsored posts on Facebook can instantly put you in touch with a huge network of users with the right characteristics that you're looking for in a skilled marketer.

Furthermore, Workable Campaigns utilize AI to identify candidates that it deems are a strong fit for your job description and even share your ads to social networks like Facebook and Instagram.

It's also possible to build your own external job board to link your campaigns to.

#5. Keep Future Targets in Mind 

It's also imperative that you recruit your marketing team with the next six months in mind. By establishing targets for the mid-term future, you can quickly set the tone for your expectations throughout your recruitment process.

Create a list of attainable targets that are easy to track prior to beginning your recruitment drive. This can be used as a great means of understanding instantly whether your candidates are capable of delivering what you want from them even whilst undergoing the onboarding process. 

#6. Create a Blueprint for your Marketing Team's Structure 

There's little point in hiring four marketers if you're unsure of how they're actually going to work together. Even if you hire the four most talented marketers you can find, there's very little that you can expect to accomplish if their areas of expertise are identical and they keep treading on each other's toes.

With this in mind, it's essential that you build a blueprint for your marketing team's structure. All businesses can operate in different ways, but for a digital startup marketing can loosely bring together three concentrations in content creation and promotion, performance tracking and lead generation, and lead management and support.

Building a blueprint that focuses on these areas and supporting a team that can maximize the potential of each concentration can be an excellent way of ensuring future growth and better cohesion throughout the recruitment process. 

#7. Continually Review your Processes 

As a startup owner, it's likely that you know better than most that things can change quickly and unexpectedly. This can also apply to your recruitment process. With this in mind, be sure to review your strategy on a weekly or fortnightly basis for inconsistencies or anything that could impact the flow of suitable candidates.

Although the task of recruiting a marketing team for your startup is likely to be a pivotal step in the development of your business, it doesn't have to be a daunting challenge for entrepreneurs who plan in advance and use the right tools at their disposal.

By taking a measured and patient approach, your first marketing hires can pave the way for long term success and sustained growth without the need for replacements, strategy rethinks, or tearing up your blueprint altogether.