If you’re constantly fighting fires instead of making progress…If your company’s average employee tenure is <18 months…You need to read this.
This content was originally published in the No Best Practices newsletter on 02.11.2024.
I’m going to share everything I learned about hiring and talent management from working at one of the world’s most recognized, profitable fashion brands. (go check my LinkedIn to see who I’m talking about)
Much of what I observed at this global brand confused me at first, and then frustrated me when I understood the “first principles” behind it (might share more of that another time). But there was one thing the public company excelled at: organizational structure and talent management.
This made me realize that most smaller brands set themselves up to fail when they structure marketing teams and hire for those roles. So I’m going to share a better playbook with you here.
If it’s taking you 6-12 months to hire for open roles…If your team’s average tenure is under 18 months…If you feel like your brand is scrambling from one fire to the next and it’s impossible to get ahead…you need to read this.
Redefining “Jobs To Be Done”
How do you decide when it’s time to add a new member to the team? How do you decide what the various responsibilities of each team member should be?
For most growing or bootstrapped brands, the answer is: we open a new role when a specific task becomes too burdensome for the senior team member who is currently doing it. The job description (JD) is a list of the senior person’s duties re: that task.
If this is how you’re building the organization and hiring, best case is you’re leaving money on the table. Worst case is you’re throwing your team into operational chaos that is holding you back from pursuing real growth.
Instead, you need to break all the tasks of your eCommerce and marketing organization into four buckets:
Bucket 1: Business Critical AND Part Of Our Competitive Advantage: these are tasks that keep the train running (bring dollars through the door) and they are tasks where you can develop a unique advantage over the competition.
Bucket 2: Business Critical, NOT Part Of Our Competitive Advantage: these are tasks that keep the train running but do NOT contribute to your competitive advantage. A minimum viable approach would work just fine; you don’t want to over-invest here.
Bucket 3: NOT Business Critical BUT Part Of Our Competitive Advantage: these are typically the big swings and moonshots I talked about in the priority setting email. They are tasks that could become business-critical if successful. But they haven’t been validated yet, so they aren’t critical.
Bucket 4: NOT Business Critical, NOT Part Of Our Competitive Advantage: root this stuff out and eliminate it, because it is a complete waste of your time.
Something you may have noticed: categorizing tasks this way forces you to decide what your brand’s competitive advantage is w/r/t marketing. A brand where “everything” is our competitive advantage is a brand with no competitive advantage.
This is the reason why leadership’s inability to make decisions is the root of most organizational dysfunction.
Using “Jobs To Be Done” To Structure Your Team
First, You Must Choose Your Competitive Advantage: If you don’t pick a competitive advantage to focus on, the rest of the advice in this newsletter is useless. This is a decision that the business owner or executive team has to make. It’s hard for a “head of growth” to walk into a brand and decide “Meta ads are our competitive advantage”.
A competitive advantage is something you focus on to the exclusion of almost everything else. You do it better than the competition–ideally 10x better. You architect your organizational structure around it.
No competitive advantage lasts forever. But the more sacrifices you make to pursue it, the longer it will last.
“What is a competitive advantage & how do I pick one?” is wayyy too deep to cover adequately here. Let’s just assume you’ve picked something so we can move forward.
Bucket 1: Business Critical, Part Of Our Competitive Advantage:
These are the tasks you want to keep in-house. These are the roles where you want to hire the best and most committed talent. And these are the employees you want to invest in retaining, because they make a difference to your bottom line.
Try to offer a salary and compensation package that is at least in line with the market. If you can’t afford that, provide a clearly defined career path and, ideally, other perks like flexible work and autonomy.
Ideally, you want to bring on someone who is experienced in this role. But if you can’t pay a competitive salary, bring in someone who is smart, ambitious and looking to jump up a job title (ie. hire a really good senior manager for a director role).
You can build out an internal org structure around these roles, but you have to do it thoughtfully (see the next section). Senior employees with misaligned incentives tend to push for team expansion–not because it’s best for the company, but because it makes them a stronger candidate for more senior/better paying roles at other firms.
Bucket 2: Business Critical, NOT Part Of Our Competitive Advantage:
This is also known as “grunt work”–uploading products to Shopify. Coding marketing emails. Answering customer support tickets.
Turnover or poor quality work here can sink your business into operational chaos over time. But you don’t want to overpay for this work, because it doesn’t set you apart from the competition. That makes these roles challenging to staff well.
My POV: you should be hiring offshore labor for these roles so you can get a higher caliber of talent for the money. If you’re small or very large, you should use a staffing firm, because they will handle training and turnover mitigation for you.
At Big Public Company, all of our product data management and web development/coding were handled by an offshoring/BPO firm.
Bucket 3: NOT Business Critical, Part Of Our Competitive Advantage:
These programs should be validated by external experts. If they’re deemed successful, you can start building an in-house team around them. More on how/when/why to do this here.
For most orgs, you do not want internal employees piloting Bucket 3 initiatives, because they don’t have the knowledge/experience to set the program up for success. Imagine trying to launch Meta ads with the wrong campaign objective and account structure, and expecting it to work–that’s usually what happens when internal teams try to launch “big swings”.
If the initiative has never been tried before–there are no external experts to hire–the brand can consider using its own team, so long as that team is smart and talented.
Bucket 4: NOT Business Critical, NOT Part Of Our Competitive Advantage:
This work should not exist, because it provides no benefit to you. Root it out of existing employees’ job descriptions. A great place to start: processes that have been designed by junior employees and software that drives operational complexity.
In both my small(er) company roles, I was trained to run dozens of reports that were time intensive to compile and never used to make decisions. I eliminated or simplified them within 6 months.
At one brand, I simplified processes/reporting/software so much that we were actually able to shrink the team by one person. We didn’t fire anyone–just didn’t rehire a role when the person left.
Again–you want to set up incentives for your Bucket 1 employees that encourage them to think like this. I actually didn’t have those incentives. I do this sh*t because being an inauthentic weasel hurts my soul. But I did leave within a few months for more money at Big Public Company so…
What About Junior Employees?
When should you hire internally for “grunt work”, and when should you outsource? That depends on the size of your brand, and the potential benefit of building a talent pipeline.
Rule of thumb: you should only hire junior employees in-house if you can demonstrate a clear career path from the jump. That path might be a rotational program with a 3 year tenure, or it might be “up or out”. But turnover should be predictable because for good employees making less than six figures, it is inevitable.
Here are the harsh truths re: hiring US-based junior employees:
- Talent follows money, and tech, finance and consulting set the standards re: what is truly a “top of market” salary.
- With entry level/junior talent you are really hiring for three things: work ethic, intelligence and good instincts/common sense. Tech, finance and consulting siphon up a lot of the best talent; if you disagree, you haven’t worked with many high caliber people.
- That doesn’t mean you won’t find a “diamond in the rough”; I’ve worked with a ton of talented folks from non-traditional backgrounds.
- That said 50-70% of resumes that look acceptable will turn out to be dead wood once you hit the interview stage.
- If your role doesn’t pay enough to enable a sub-30 minute commute without roommates, you are nothing but a stepping stone. Turnover in <12 months is almost inevitable.
This creates a situation where you’re forced to hire “the best of a bad lot” because grunt work roles turn over so often and the org will run off the rails without a body in the seat.
Sometimes you’ll find a gem. But more often you’ll find a blockhead who takes six months to train and never really becomes independent in the role. And in these roles, the great candidates are much more likely to leave than the bad ones.
The onus of managing this dysfunctional mess is handed off to Bucket 1 employees. This burns them out, further exacerbating the turnover problem. Soon, your org gets a reputation for high turnover, making it even harder to attract qualified people.
Two methods for avoiding the pitfalls of hiring junior team members:
The Banking/Consulting Approach:
Consider an “eCom 101” rotational program that cross-trains new grads in key “grunt work” skills over the course of 18-36 months. This allows you to control and prepare for turnover.
You do not guarantee continued employment at the end of the rotational program, but you do promise to help the candidate build their network throughout the program. And you can find a place for really exceptional employees, who have been vetted by the program.
The Big Public Company Approach:
You don’t have to design an “up or out” program if you create junior roles that are minimally disruptive to the brand’s operational flow. Outsource “grunt work” to agencies, then hire juniors to help senior employees manage the agencies.
This way, when turnover happens, it doesn’t derail you from building and solidifying your competitive advantage. Of course, this requires you to pay for seniors, juniors and an agency. Compared to a rotational program, it costs more in dollars but less in time.
All this said, you can scale pretty far without hiring junior employees and there are other ways to build your talent pipeline. If your brand is new/growing, juniors might not be worth the headache.