How Can Marketers Keep Moving Forward When Key Team Members Resign?
Throughout 2022 many organizations faced (and continue to face) the challenges of its staff moving on and taking their careers elsewhere. In the majority of cases, the remaining staff found themselves filling gaps and determining who was responsible for what, at least in the short term.
Such is the nature of The Great Resignation.
While organizations pivoted and recovered quite handily, the experience reinforced how crucial each team member is, from top to bottom.
Fully-functioning marketing departments are akin to Jenga towers. You take out one block and are suddenly lacking a stable foundation.
It’s then worth asking: how do digital marketers push their company forward, hire more people, and introduce more roles while needing to replace multiple talented team members?
Let’s explore these talking points further:
Filling Day-To-Day Gaps
We’ve worked with clients who’ve seen one day-to-day tech marketer leave their company. Then, that exit leads to standard marketing tasks like newsletter deliveries and cross-sells falling by the wayside.
The above instance deals with a pre-Great Resignation scenario. Those companies would stall out briefly but could recover with relative promptness. Now, there are more roles and knowledge gaps to fill.
On top of that, the senior personnel don’t necessarily know the skills needed to fill those day-to-day roles since they evolve so fluidly, making it harder to find a replacement.
How Must Companies Approach Recruiting?
The increase in competitiveness to land talented people–who can close marketing gaps quickly–has skyrocketed. Sought-after marketing professionals enjoy leverage, and employers must sell them on factors such as:
- Story you sell
- Work environment
- Autonomy/responsibility
- The industry you sell to
- Compensation
Moreover, a hiring process that used to take 12 weeks often takes 2 weeks now, end-to-end, from application to offer.
As opposed to recruiting, the more time-intensive part of the onboarding process in 2022 is getting this talented new hire up to speed.
Considerations For Attracting And Retaining Talented Marketers
Talented marketers will generally look for greener pastures and move on to the next company when their current situation doesn’t feel right.
Thus, companies must ensure that each marketer has specific fundamental knowledge of the value of the service, solution, product, etc., to the target customer. These are the building blocks to story-telling and compelling ad copy that drive conversions and a successful value proposition.
Learning these core fundamentals around the nuances of the industry and specific customers can take up to a year to fully grasp..
Organizations must ask themselves if the new marketer can get a handle on their market space. Also, companies must determine if they have the time and patience to ramp up their new team member and if the surrounding team is strong enough to lend the necessary support.
Provided your company doesn’t offer that support, top talents have more options than ever to move on elsewhere.
The Problems With Promotions
Promotions show loyal, talented people how much you value them, contributing enormously to employee retention. Yet, you still leave a hole because now the promoted employee’s previous position must be filled.
You aren’t just replacing a body–you’re replacing their marketing expertise, which takes a lot of time, as we’ve discussed in the previous sections.
Conversely, many companies don’t have room to promote. In which case, a team is clicking over a couple years, and you can’t reward your top performers with promotions and raises.
In these situations, be mindful that people want to get more strategic in two to three years, and you must ask how to harness that desire.
Does your company have gaps to fill? If so, working with an agency like Goose Digital can help keep your company growing even when a key team member resigns. Contact us today to find out more.