Why Building Your Senior Marketing Talent Pipeline Might Be the Best Thing You Can Do This Year?

Successful marketing is critical to commercial success, which is why every company needs talented senior marketers to lead their team. However, finding the right individuals for your brand isn’t always straightforward. If you want to hire people that share your vision and will help you to realise your commercial objectives, you need to look beyond their qualifications or references and ensure that your new hires can deliver measurable value.

Similarly, waiting for a vacancy to arise often means that you’re hiring from a limited talent pool on a reactionary basis. By being proactive and nurturing a talent pipeline, you can ensure that you have a consistent stream of highly qualified candidates to work with. To learn more, take a look at these five reasons why building your senior marketing talent pipeline might be the best thing you can do this year:

1. Increased Demand for Top Leaders

Businesses require strong leadership, particularly during uncertain times. The ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic means that companies are reluctant to let valued leaders go, often enticing them to stay with promotion opportunities and more favourable recruitment packages. Equally, the changing business landscape means that some employees are hesitant about leaving a secure position for a new role.

This results in a reduced talent pool, which means you won’t have as much choice when it comes to selecting candidates for open roles. When demand for top senior marketers, such as CMOs, VP Digital, or Growth Marketing Directors, is at its highest, you don’t want to leave it until the last minute to start your search for a new candidate. With a talent pipeline to rely on, you can ensure that you’ll have access to high-calibre senior marketers when you need them. Furthermore, the mutual relationship that flourishes via the pipeline will ensure that candidates have trust in your brand and no qualms about leaving their current role to join your team.

2. Implement Early Engagement

Nurturing a talent pipeline gives you the opportunity to engage with candidates early and maintain communication over an extended period of time. As well as giving potential new hires the chance to familiarise themselves with your corporate culture, this gives you time to really get to know applicants and decide whether they’re the right addition to your team.

In 2020, we launched a dedicated forum for CMOs and Marketing Directors to interact with one another, share learnings and insights, and develop a new way of working. Now, more than 95 members from PE and VC-backed technology companies, such as HelloFresh, Popsa, MyTutor, Monzo, and allplants, are actively engaged via the forum.

3. Respond to Macro Changes

Macro environmental changes have a major impact on commercial organisations. From redefining your target audience to impacting sales volumes and disrupting supply changes, businesses need to be able to predict and respond to these challenges in order to overcome them. Of course, having talented leaders at the top will ensure that you’re able to navigate unpredictable waters.

However, macro changes can mean that you need different things from your senior leaders too. If your business is facing unprecedented challenges due to environmental factors outside of your control, for example, it might be time to expand your leadership team to implement effective solutions.

By having a talent pipeline to rely on, you’ll have access to a wide range of senior marketing professionals who can provide an extensive selection of skills. With each individual bringing something different and unique to the table, your pipeline ensures you can access the specific industry expertise required when macro changes alter your company’s needs.

4. Act Quickly, When You Need To

Reactionary recruitment techniques are used when you need to fill a position quickly, but they do have drawbacks. When you’re hiring senior staff, you don’t want to be forced to select a candidate simply because you’re desperate to replace a staff member who’s leaving. Conversely, you don’t want to ‘over-hire’ and have too many employees on your books.

A talent pipeline helps to strike a balance between the two and ensures that you have talented candidates to choose from, as and when you need them. Instead of starting your search with just weeks until you need to install a new senior marketer, you can identify and engage potential candidates for several months or even years before you invite them to join your team.

5. Access to Expanding Networks

When potential candidates are engaged correctly, it can lead to them sharing their own network, which provides you with additional access to talented professionals. At this point, you have the option to integrate these contacts into your existing talent pipelines and nurture your relationship with them.

As you can see, this ensures that you have a consistent source of talent to add to the pipeline and provides you with a constant flow of incoming candidates that can provide genuine value to your organisation. When you’re ready to hire someone new, you have already done the groundwork and will have a selection of candidates primed to get to work.

Creating a Talent Pipeline with Acquire

At Acquire, we offer a wide range of services to help companies build and maintain their talent pipelines. By mapping the market and gaining specific insights, we can help you to identify the candidates that you want to join your pipeline and keep them engaged over an extended period of time.

What’s more – we provide custom solutions that match your needs. Perhaps you want to use the information and insights we uncover to formulate your own pipeline? Or maybe you’d like us to use these findings as a basis for a full leadership search process? Whatever methodology is right for you, our talented team is here to provide the support and assistance you need.

To learn more about building your talent pipeline or to talk to us about your leadership search now, email Acquire at [email protected]