How to Hire the Right Marketing Director: A Guide to Securing Top Talent

Hiring a Marketing Director is one of the most critical decisions your business can make. This senior leadership role goes beyond managing marketing strategies. The right Marketing Director will align your brand vision with your business objectives, drive growth, and inspire employees to deliver exceptional results by articulating the mission and vision of the company. 

Today’s senior marketing professionals need to have the experience and strategic intelligence to make the most of new and emerging technologies whilst also delivering on marketing and business objectives. In order to prepare for future challenges, your business must focus on securing the right boardroom-level hires to propel your marketing – and overall business – strategies forward.

What makes a great Marketing Director?

A Marketing Director is a senior leader with the ability to:

• Drive strategic communications: Craft and oversee the direction of all marketing communications to align with business objectives.
• Lead with vision: Articulate the company’s mission to internal teams and customers, inspiring confidence and loyalty.
• Deliver results: Be commercially minded, manage large budgets effectively, boost sales, and ensure marketing efforts deliver measurable ROI.
• Collaborate across teams: Work closely with the C-suite and other teams across the business.
• Identify opportunities: Understand your customers, dial up your strengths and spot your weaknesses, while uncovering opportunities for growth.

 A bad recruitment decision at Marketing Director level can see you lose resources in terms of recruitment spend and time. It can also threaten sales, affect your business growth in competitive markets and disrupt customer relationships.

Take a look at our top tips on hiring the right senior marketing member the first time around.

Steps to hiring the right Marketing Director

1. Define your hiring needs

Before you start your executive search, identify whether you need a Marketing Director or a Head of Marketing. The distinction between these two roles often comes down to budget, scope of resposibilities and key objectives:

• Marketing Director: Best for businesses seeking a strategic leader to influence the entire company and drive long-term growth.
• Head of Marketing: Ideal for companies with smaller budgets or teams, focusing on hands-on execution.

Your marketing budget is a key factor in determining the level of expertise you need on your team. Assess what your budget is currently - and what it could be - what proportion of your overall spend this comprises and what message that sends to senior marketing candidates. Organisations with extremely restricted budgets may struggle to compete to secure the best marketing talent.

The size of your team, and the long-term potential for high-level, strategic work will also impact a Marketing Director’s decision to join your business. If you can’t offer a sustainable pipeline of engaging work for a permanent team member, it may be better to engage senior and strategic marketing professionals on a contract basis. An alternative option is to hire someone at a less senior level than a Marketing Director in order to manage expectations and maintain interest, like a Head of Marketing.

For more clarity on the level of hire you need, why not talk to one of our executive search recruitment experts. You can use their expert insights and industry knowledge to define your needs and build a recruitment strategy that will result in the right hire.

2. Write a compelling marketing director job description

Agree upon the parameters of the role with your internal stakeholders and ensure these are well-defined in the marketing director job description.

Considerations include base level of experience – including experience relevant to your specific industry, proficiency with marketing tools and technologies, management skills and results in previous roles. 

A Marketing Director will want to know what their core responsibilities will be, how their performance will be measured, how much interaction they will have with your C-suite and therefore how much potential they have to impact and influence your overall business.

3. Partner with an executive search firm to recruit your marketing director

How are you going to source your Marketing Director? You will likely require additional assistance to recruit the best talent.

A marketing exectuive search consultancy can ease the pressure of attracting and securing market-leading candidates, particularly those industry professionals who aren’t actively looking for new roles.

Passive candidates – who can be swayed to take up new career opportunities if incentivised - make up 70% of the global workforce. A recruitment agency like EMR is uniquely positioned to find these candidates, using our database, social channels and connections, to compile a list of people best suited to the job. Not only does it save you time, it also means you can reach more people.

4. Focus on marketing director skills such as leadership and collaboration

Liaising with key stakeholders is an essential part of any Marketing Director’s job. As such, any candidate you consider needs to have demonstrable leadership and communication skills, as well as a fundamental understanding of core business objectives and how their department can influence these.

Indeed, our interview with Paul Skinner discusses the importance of Collaborative Advantage for marketing leaders today.A good Marketing Director can build strong relationships that propel the business and the marketing department forward, helping to mitigate risk and align business goals within the C-suite. Yet while 85% of HR and business leaders say a team-based, cross-disciplinary work approach across the C-suite is important or very important, 73% say their executives do not regularly collaborate.

A recruitment professional can help to establish a candidate’s personality, cultural fit and ability to work collaboratively at all business levels, getting to know potential hires before providing a list of best-fit candidates for your role.

5. Be realistic and decisive when hiring a marketing director

Recruitment for high-level positions presents a myriad of difficulties, with organisations understandably wanting to take their time to find the right candidate for the job. However, lengthy, over-thorough recruitment approaches can do more harm than good, with applicants likely to look elsewhere if they are left waiting too long.

The average time-to-hire in the UK is 4.9 weeks, meaning that the majority of vacancies are un unfilled after 30 days. Such lengthy recruitment processes not only cost your business valuable resources, but also the market’s top talent, who are in high demand by employers. If your role seems impossible to recruit for, review your hiring criteria and consider relaxing your essential requirements to avoid missing out on strong candidates.

Successfully hire your next marketing director with EMR

At EMR, we’re proud to match the best opportunities with the top marketing candidates. With over 30 years’ industry experience, we’ve developed lasting relationships with many of the UK’s leading brands. Browse our 2024 Salary and Market Report for more industry insights.

Find out more about marketing executive search services, or submit a vacancy brief and one of our executive search consultants will be in touch.