Take the Risk Out of Critical Hires

By Susan Bash with Matt Gill and Meredith Elkins  

Marketing ecosystems are in transition.  Leadership roles are evolving. CMOs are firmly grounded in strategy, orchestrating a cadre of other leaders and outsourced talent. Refreshed titles are emerging like Chief AI Revenue Officer, Marketing Automation Director, Growth Marketing Manager, and Chief Storyteller.

The skill sets required are hybrids of past roles with a greater emphasis on specialization around brand and revenue optimization and ability to work seamlessly across systems to secure and retain customer loyalty.  The competition is intense and the stakes are high. 

The evolving landscape requires leaders to hire the best of breed marketing executives, those who adapt quickly and lead others successfully through innovation and change.  There is little room for error.  Bad hires can set an organization back months behind competition and they are expensive. The cost of a failed senior marketing executive earning between $150K and $500K typically ranges from $300K to more than $2.5M. These factors include compensation during underperformance, severance and many others such as:

• lost productivity, delayed growth initiatives and launches

• wasted marketing spend

• burnout, low morale and team turnover

• conflict with sales, product and tech teams

• loss of market share and revenue, missed targets

The market is soft right now with an oversupply of candidates.  For this reason, many companies decide to go it alone to recruit their key hires. This requires a strong end-to-end recruiting system with alignment between all key stakeholders including C-suite, marketing and HR on what the future leaders looks like, what talent is required to support it, how to evaluate the evolved required skills and profiles.  Job descriptions need to be precise and screening (technical and human) needs to be fine-tuned to find needles in haystacks.  Through it all, communication needs to be seamless. 

If your company has made a bad hire or isn't fully prepared to find the best of the market, we can help. 

MICA takes the risk out of the recruiting and hiring processes.  As your strategic partner for high-stakes leadership roles, we help you assess your hiring needs and structure the right approach before you take the job description out to the market.  All projects are led and executed by MICA partners who have a deep bench of marketing experience themselves and are effective in supporting you especially in moments of transformation, growth or change. We use technology for speed but obtain superior results with a curated network of proven leaders from competitive markets. 

What’s more – we guarantee the outcome. 

As a trusted advisor to CEOs, Boards, and PE-backed companies, we are known for our gold standard service and high-retention placements across marketing, communications, sales and HR.   To learn more, reach out to a MICA partner today to start a confidential search conversation.