Hiring for Tactical Social Media Roles

Social media-related tactical roles tend to encompass roles that are primarily customer-facing or directly in contact with the public through social media. These are your digital customer service representatives, community managers, consumer insights managers, bloggers, content creators, and channel monitoring specialists. These roles tend to be highly specialized and are typically characterized by a specific and narrow focus: listening to customers, creating content, monitoring activity, answering questions.

It stands to reason then, that when hiring for a social media role whose focus is specific, a recruiting manager would have to begin the process of evaluating candidates by looking not for broad social media experience, but rather for as narrow and relevant a field of expertise as possible. What you want in this type of role is depth before breadth: From an operational standpoint, experience in the job function being adapted to social media trumps experience in the use of media channels. If the role you are hiring for focuses on digital customer service, the candidate’s skill as a customer service professional is far more important than her skill at using social media. The latter is secondary to the first and can be learned more easily with adequate support from the organization. The same principle applies to most tactical roles, from market research to crisis management.