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One of the coolest CMO jobs around!
HARRY’S COMMENTS: We’re looking for a proven CMO for one of the fastest-growing recruitment and career platforms in the US market. With more than 16 million users, our client has significant operations in both the United States and Europe.
IMPORTANT: Final interviews for this CMO job will take place at the client’s headquarters in Europe. Also, please note that this role is in-office, and unless you live within driving distance of the client’s US headquarters, you’ll need to relocate. This is a MUST — as is EXTENSIVE experience running a SaaS P&L.
(Relocation assistance is provided.)
The client’s product represents the future of career development: Job search that puts job seekers first while reducing the time and cost of talent acquisition. We’ve all heard this before, but this is the closest I have seen any company come to that reality.
Using machine learning, the firm instantly matches job seekers with positions that fit their skills, career goals, and personalities. This results in the placement of candidates in the best possible positions for them.
We all knew this day would come, and now it’s here.
With highly experienced teams in several U.S. locations, plus a world-class team of developers, product managers, and data scientists in Europe, the firm’s platform allows jobseekers to upload their resumes and additional information to see much more relevant job listings.
In my three hours of interviews with this hiring committee, I learned a TON about how job boards and career platforms work. As the client’s new CMO, your job is to grow the business in a reality-based, brand-accretive way that connects the dots between 1/ what the business is ABOUT and 2/ how the firm actually MAKES MONEY.
Most airy-fairy brand markers can’t do that.
To win in this role, you’ll need to satisfy the needs of multiple types of stakeholders, each of which benefits from a different value proposition. Meaning, the firm is different things to different stakeholders.
From a marketing standpoint, this is not uncommon.
Each day, consumers everywhere encounter companies with multiple lines of business operating in more than one industry, often with multiple value props. Google, Amazon, and Apple spring to mind — though there are thousands of examples.
In the 1990s, I worked for a privately held food trading company that acted like a bank in Russia, a 3PL in South America, a CPG brand in Southeast Asia, and a commodity trading firm in the middle east. One brand, many value props.
Marketing such a business takes a keen sense of planning, forecasting, and intuition — knowing right when to step on the gas or tap the breaks, depending on what’s happening in the market. The trick is knowing how to position and grow each business so they provide strategic lift to each other so “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
About the Role
As our client’s new CMO, you will be responsible for planning, developing, and leading the firm’s marketing vision and strategy to grow the firm’s customer base, sales, and profits. Again: Many stakeholders, multiple value props, and ONE brand.
The firm’s primary stakeholders include:
I. Major job posting aggregators, like Indeed and Monster. This business is built on click arbitrage-type model, where my client will take an XML feed of Indeed’s postings and re-market them online in the hopes of attracting better candidates more cheaply. Those candidate applications will be resold to Indeed for higher money.
For example, Indeed might remit $.50 for a Java developer application that my client attracts for $.27. This is 70% of my client’s business, and it runs on a cost-per-click basis, and real-time bidding is involved. The client’s bidding skills and technology are world-class.
II. Direct employers, which the client refers to as its retail business. These are firms like Walmart, Microsoft, Home Depot, Boeing, and Disney that run thousands of postings annually, often through Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and Monster. This is a new business for the client, and there are hundreds of thousands of suspects that could be developed into prospects, and thereafter be nurtured into first-time clients.
The firm has a database of 16 million registered candidates to whom its retail clients can promote their jobs via email, SMS, and site search. Additionally, any job posted through the client’s site will be syndicated through 30+ job boards and through dozens of partners (including Google for Jobs).
III. Job seekers: Recognizing that job search remains VERY broken, the firm offers a free suite of tools and services that help job seekers target, apply, and land jobs that speak to each candidate’s personal needs and values. This free suite includes job search and career pathing tools, news and information, and professional resources.
IV. Advertisers: Ads are a growing part of the firm’s business model that allow it to keep its services free. Such ads are personalized by third-party ad providers based on the candidates’ anonymized data.
Roughly 10% of the firm’s revenue comes from display advertising, primarily Google. Another 15% comes through email co-registration: When job seekers register on the firm’s career site, they also can optionally choose to join other career sites and job boards to assist in expanding the job seeker’s exposure to an active hiring audience.
Your job is to profitably manage the interests of each of these stakeholders in a way that’s pie-enlarging (as opposed to pie-rearranging). You’ll have the resources and authority — which means the accountability will fall to you as well.
The buck stops with YOU.
Scaling this business will be like scaling any online marketplace, like Linkedin, AirBnB, Ebay, or Tinder: The more people use it, the more utility it will drive, and the more people will use it.
The buy-side, sell-side, and partners/service providers are equally important, and it will take compelling reasons to appeal to each. You will need to make it easy for those people to …
- Google their need
- Recognize your solution
- Engage with the site, and
… make sure there’s an emotional payoff for them very quickly when they use your platform.
BOTTOM LINE: We are looking for a proven, versatile, process-driven, business-oriented SaaS CMO who: 1/ understands how to tease out the logical and emotional needs and decision-making biases of each stakeholder cohort, and 2/ can drive an increasing amount of value for them each time they touch the firm’s brand.
That means talking the way they talk, about their job search or talent acquisition issues, in ways and in media that help them understand (and WANT) your solution. It also means working internally to constantly improve your platform. You will be in the emotional bond business!
About the Market
As you may know, online recruitment sites primarily charge employers to list job openings, though they may also earn revenue via ad placement on job listings. Operators also design and maintain databases of resumes and candidate profiles for use by employers and other recruitment agencies.
Enterprises in this industry are based entirely online; therefore, traditional recruiting agencies and staffing companies are not included. The primary activities of this industry are …
- Posting online job openings on behalf of employers
- Aggregating job postings from various sources into a single, searchable database
- Maintaining a database of resumes or candidate profiles
- Maintaining a professional networking platform primarily for employee-placement purposes
The Recruitment Advertising industry is surprisingly massive, estimated to be valued at over $14B. This industry generally consists of job boards, programmatic job management platforms, AI-based matching tools, career pathing technology and applicant tracking systems.
These websites, platforms and technologies are primarily responsible for top-of the funnel candidate attraction and acquisition. Typically, players earn revenue by charging employers fees to list job openings, though operators also earn revenue through various other avenues, such as ad placement on job listings.
Over the past decade, a steady increase in the number of broadband connections encouraged more businesses and laborers to adopt online recruitment sites as a primary means of connecting rather than traditional print formats, such as local newspapers.
In addition, improving business sentiment motivated an increase in hiring activity, measured by rising total nonfarm payroll. A greater proportion of these new hires stemmed from online job postings, since the cost of searching for work and recruiting employees is much lower compared with traditional recruiting methods.
While these trends contributed to the industry’s considerable growth, operators encountered a significant deceleration in 2020 as global economic activity halted and businesses shed large portions of workforces to thwart the spread of COVID-19 (coronavirus) while also protecting corporate viability.
Nevertheless, businesses and laborers have become increasingly reliant on technology to stay connected during the pandemic and online recruitment sites are expected to be the primary medium of finding job opportunities and qualified employees as the economy recovers.
Overall, revenue has grown an annualized 17.9% to $13.1 billion over the five years to 2021, including an increase of 12.7% in 2021 alone. Revenue is forecast to rise an annualized 9.1% to $20.3 billion over the five years to 2026, as improved labor markets create new job openings, particularly among small- and medium-sized businesses.
You won’t believe how much we know about this search …
I spent a ton of time on the phone with the client teasing out exactly what you’ll need to KNOW and DO to hit the ground running in this role. Some of the things I can share with highly qualified candidates include …
- The “real” background requirements for this position, along with the top five things all resumes MUST have to be considered for the role.
- The top five problems that exist due to this CMO job being open. These are the little brush fires you will be expected to put out during your first month on the job. Every CMO job has these — and this one’s no different.
- What your average day/week will look like in this role. There’s what you read in the standard CMO job posting … then there’s reality. We’ve got the reality.
- The leading and lagging KPIs that will determine your success in this role. In a nutshell: How you’ll keep score.
- The major projects you’ll need to complete by Day 100 to be considered a home-run in this position. We’ve got the lowdown on how you can plug-and-play and drive REAL value in this CMO job.
I have a massive amount of proprietary intel to share with qualified candidates. My industry research for this assignment exceeds 100 pages! Be sure to TEXT me, Harry Joiner, at (404) 281-2025 for this info. Or simply use the email link when you apply for the role below.
View Harry Joiner’s profile
Responsibilities:
- Define marketing strategy, goals, and objectives to support the company’s overall strategies and objectives, and contribute to the overall growth of the company
- Develop a feasible marketing plan, oversee its implementation and manage marketing strategy, set the budget for marketing activities, and keep it in check.
- Determine and prioritize KPIs for the marketing department, track KPIs on a regular basis, and present reports
- Work closely with different departments, like sales, product, finance, customer success… to meet market demands effectively
- Use data and reports to make evidence-based decisions
- “Listen” to the trends of the market and direct the market research efforts of the company
- Plan and organize marketing functions and operations (Paid traffic acquisition (B2C), Lead generation (B2B), SEO, Content & PR, branding, communications, etc.), and ensure they project the company’s unique “voice”
- Design and coordinate promotional campaigns, PR, and other marketing efforts across channels (digital, press, etc.)
- Build a highly efficient team of marketing professionals
- Create a solid network of strategic partnerships
Requirements
- 10 years’ experience in marketplace marketing (B2B + B2C), proven experience in a strategic management role in this field
- Demonstrable experience in developing efficient strategies and business plans for all marketing aspects (branding, product promotion etc.)
- Proven experience in driving SEO growth results
- Being customer-centric
- Hands-on experience with CRM and SEO tools like Google Analytics, Google Adwords, HubSpot, WebTrends, SalesForce, etc.
- In-depth knowledge of big data analysis
- Excellent organizational and time and people management skills
- Good communication and interpersonal skills
- Excellent presentation skills
- Additional marketing certifications are a plus
- Background in a complex, multidimensional e-commerce industry like travel or real estate
- Solid understanding of market research and data analysis methods
- Understanding of different business disciplines (IT, finance etc.)
- A leader with both creative and analytical capabilities
- BSc/BA in business administration, marketing, communications or relevant field; MSc/MA will be a plus
