Hiring the right SEO team is tough for even the most experienced SEO’s. You’ve had a lot of success getting high rankings, growing your traffic and nurturing the bottom line, but when it comes to growing your own SEO team, do you have an expert’s toolkit?
SEO is attitude and aptitude over experience
That statement might not be true if you’re looking out for a big hitting SEO Manager to drive your strategy forward, but it definitely applies when you’re recruiting your “front line†team. Link builders, researchers, analysts and content authors can all be trained provided that you’re prepared to put in the time to sort out their all important skills and knowledge. Let’s imagine you’re bringing in a few new recruits, and you’re happy to start from a reasonably basic level to get them up to speed. What characteristics are you looking out for, and how can you make finding the right people a more productive experience?
The group interview
One of the most time consuming problems with team selection is the primary interview stage. Each candidate gets an hour of your time, and you could need to speak to as many as 8 to 10 people to find 2 or 3 great people. How do you feel about freeing up 25% of your available working week? Consider running a group interview to free up your diary. While you’re designing your group interview, set group tasks appropriately to identify the character profiles and team interactivity you need. Setting group tasks and presentations in this environment can really help your best potential people shine, in a way a one to one interview rarely does.
Filter those CV’s
What are you looking out for? Work through all of your CV’s and find the top 8. In your hunt, you don’t always need to see a direct background in SEO. Instead, look out for exposure to the digital environment, an analytical / statistical maths qualification, a strong sporting or musical qualification background or anything that screams commitment, competitiveness, perseverance and intelligence. You could find skills that can lead to your next great SEO, say, in a writer with a blog who casually mentions they’ve built their Wordpress layout and own CSS during the interview.
Selection
After you’ve run your group interviews, continue to the usual second stage full interviews knowing that you’ve already got a list of candidates with the right qualities and skills needed to learn SEO. Following the simple rule of attitude and aptitude over experience can really streamline your selection process and will always end with a brighter, keener SEO team.
Photo credit: Lukaskula
Richard Baxter is Founder and Director at SEOgadget.co.uk - a UK SEO blog written with a passion for helping people and organisations to succeed in search.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Nice information shared on how to hire the SEO people, as an seo itself i even don’t think about such selection of SEO guys.
More comments from tag44Thanks… some good advice here and I particularly liked the ‘attitude and aptitude over experience’ bit… effective SEO is all about continual learning and constantly keeping up with the current trends and changes to the way search engines work. Best practice can come from both experience and can be learnt by new recruits but certainly a hunger for knowledge and improvement will keep your SEO strategies fresh and effective.
Joe
Richard great blog, I have been reading your posts about SEO Management, very insighful, thanks. I got to your blog from seomoz article: 10 Professional Development Tips to Boost Your SEO Career written by Tom.
Might wanna fix your php so that:
Hiring the right SEO team is tough for even the most experienced SEO’s. You’ve
Aint happening all over the place!
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