The smart way to look for a new role in marketing!

Our Marketing Recruitment Consultant, Leif Radford, talks us through the steps needed to make your job hunt as smooth as possible!

When you make the decision to begin looking for a new role, especially in marketing, it can often seem quite a daunting task. You start by covering all the usual channels; job boards, posts on LinkedIn, asking friends and colleagues if they’ve heard of anything, etc.

Then you actually start applying for the roles that catch you eye, and despite submitting CV’s, cover letters and questionnaires, you never seem to hear nothing back. So, what are you doing wrong?

Often, we find that candidates who come to us with these problems don’t have terrible CV’s or lack any solid experience, they just haven’t thought about their search thoroughly enough. To get you off on the right foot, we’ve compiled some of the factors you should definitely consider before starting but probably haven’t.

What is motivating you to look for a new role?

Before you start looking for a new role, the very first thing you need to think about is why. Why are you looking for a new role? Is it money? Title? Are you simply looking for the next step after reaching the ceiling in your current role?

Often there will be more than one motivator in your decision, so it’s pivotal you figure out a hierarchy of how important each of these are to you. For example, if you’re looking for a role with a better office culture, why are you only looking at adverts with a £10k pay rise associated? If culture-fit really is the key thing for you, make sure this is the thing you pay most attention to when looking at potential opportunities.

Not only will an awareness of your motivators help you be more efficient in finding a new role, it will also mean that you are more likely to be happy in the new role once you start. Often, we have candidates come to us as they’ve found themselves a new position, but are equally as unsatisfied in their current role as they were before. Focus on what you want, and go find it.

Do you know what the current climate in the marketing sector is?

The single most important step you can take when looking for a new role in Marketing is to gather market insight. The more informed you about the marketing landscape, both in Manchester and across the North West, the more efficient your job search will be. So, how do you go about getting yourself informed?

Subscribe to publications such as Prolific North and Manchester Digital. These are fantastic sources for gleaming little gems of information that could help you find a job you’d be a great fit for, often before it’s even advertised. Find out who’s hiring, who’s firing, which departments are being expanded and why.

Gathering knowledge like this allows you to make a targeted and specific job search. You can reach out to businesses where you know a similar candidate to yourself has just left, or see if an expanding Social Media team is looking for candidates like you.

Where do your specific skills and experience fit in to the wider spectrum of marketing?

If you’re a Senior Marketing Executive from a business with a B2B lead-generation focused marketing plan, you’re likely to have some fantastic experience under your belt. However, you wouldn’t necessarily be a great fit for a Marketing Manager position at a B2C ecommerce business.

Whilst the title would be a natural progression for you career wise, it would be difficult to take a step up in terms of responsibility if you would be working in an entirely new marketing function. Don’t see this as limiting the amount of opportunities available to you, use this awareness to your advantage. Think about what you can bring to the table and who could make best use of this.

You stand a much better chance of securing an interview for a job the is relevant to your marketing background than one that matches your current title. Ultimately, it’s about avoiding the “spray and pray” approach to applying for jobs. The investment of taking the time to find and apply for three highly relevant opportunities is likely to reap larger rewards than applying for twenty kind-of-relevant positions.

Slowly, Slowly Catch Your Monkey...

Taking a few days to do your research in the areas above really can make all the difference. You’ll be well equipped with relevant information and a strong awareness of your motivators, making your search a lot more effective. As with most things, the age-old cliché applies here too:

“Fail to prepare? Prepare to fail!”

Alternatively, if you’d prefer to have an informal chat with someone whose job it is to know the marketing jobs landscape like the back of their hands, why not pick up the phone and give us a call?

To read more of our latest blogs click here. 

Check out our latest marketing jobs here.

Read our top CV tips here. 

Read our Digital Marketing Recruitment Guide here.