Digital marketing is one of the newest, but fastest growing industries in the world. Businesses of any size use the internet as a primary marketing medium and this greatly contributes to the growth of digital agencies all over the world. However, as the demand for services grows, so does the need of employing qualified professionals and pose difficult challenges to your human resource team. Here are some of the most common HR obstacles your digital agency needs to overcome:
How to Find Qualified Candidates?
As the digital marketing industry is relatively new, universities and colleges started just recently to offer practical courses in the field. This creates probably the biggest HR challenge in the digital marketing industry – there are only few qualified candidates, while the demand for professionals is rapidly growing on yearly basis.
Probably the best solution of that problem is to educate the candidates within your digital agency or hire the services of professional employment agency, specialized in finding talented professionals in the digital marketing field. When evaluating candidates at a job interview, you should look for eager fast learners, who are looking for a long term commitment within your digital agency.
Should You Hire Freelancers?
Many of the HR specialists struggle to determine whether to hire a freelancer or local contractor for completing particular project or task. Hiring freelancers is flexible, effective and most importantly inexpensive way to get certain projects or tasks completed within the necessary time frame. However, sometimes you may not be able to hire the same professional to complete some extra work and this pose serious threat to the quality of services you provide.
What’s the Average Salary and Compensations?
Being relatively new field, there aren’t any standards when it comes to determining the salary for a digital marketing professional and this creates certain challenge for smaller digital agencies, as they need to offer salaries competitive to the larger ones. To avoid that, the HR team needs to develop creative employee compensation and retainment strategy.
Many HR experts in digital agencies advise that the salary and the compensations provided to an employer must match the skills and experience of the candidate. This is especially useful for smaller digital marketing agencies, where less experienced candidates can be educated in-house and be hired on a smaller salary until they reach certain level of experience.
How to set Working Hours?
Unlike other fields, many of the tasks performed in the digital marketing can be completed outside of the office. This is why, many digital agencies allow their employees to spend most of the working flexible hours at home. However, quite often managers fail to track the efficiency and performance of employees working remotely, so in the end the quality of the services hits the bottom.
To avoid that HR professionals need to develop a way to measure the working hours and efficiency of employees working remotely, as well as help foster team environment and take accountability measures such as office check-ins and remote usage tracking of the employee’s computers.