Let's not beat around the bush: Hiring a marketing team is hard.

While most roles can be filtered efficiently based on advanced degrees, knowledge about certain programming languages or theoretical concepts, or Github repositories, marketing roles don't have such clear signals or filters. Anyone from a scrappy high school dropout to an established marketing exec from a large company could be incredible or horrible on your team.

Additionally, each role on a marketing team is different. If you're growing your marketing team by 5 people, you're usually not hiring 5 people that have similar profiles, like you might for full-stack engineers or data scientists. (This may not apply to much larger marketing teams.) Instead, you're hiring a SEM (search engine marketing) manager, then a paid social manager, then a data analyst, a copywriter, a graphic designer, etc. Each role is unique and has to be designed from scratch.

But these challenges bring with them the joy and opportunity to craft every role on your team in a fresh way. To thrive in the noisy hiring environment, I recommend carefully curating your hiring and development funnel to attract and cultivate a diverse team.