In the marketing world, agility is everything. Teams are expected to pivot at the speed of a trend and optimize their campaigns in reaction to real-time data. It’s a high-stakes, high-visibility part of any business. It also, new data suggests, has a complicated relationship with culture fit.
Earlier this year, TestGorilla conducted research on the challenges facing hiring teams when it comes to sourcing top talent. It found that, although 77% say active sourcing is crucial for their overall talent acquisition strategy, less than half of new hires are actively sourced.
It also uncovered an interesting anomaly within the marketing sector: Sourcing teams in marketing identify culture fit as a top sourcing challenge more than any other sector.
Why does culture fit matter so much to marketers? And what can we do to ensure the search for culture fit doesn’t hinder our chances of building diverse and inclusive teams?
The culture fit dilemma in numbers
The report, which is based on survey responses from hundreds of sourcing and recruitment professionals across industries, found that 44% of marketing recruiters and hiring managers are finding it difficult to source qualified candidates for their open roles. This is 10 percentage points less than the industry-wide average of 54%.
Marketing talent, it seems, is out there – and is relatively accessible to the majority of those who are looking, at least compared to other sectors. But despite this advantage, marketers are more challenged by one metric than any other group that was surveyed. And that metric is, you guessed it: Culture fit.
A full 56% of marketing professionals identify culture fit as a top sourcing challenge, compared to an industry-wide average of 47%. In the same dataset, most of these teams name diversity of candidate pipeline as a measure of success for their sourcing efforts (53% vs. 36% industry-wide).
Herein lies the paradox: “cultural fit” and “pipeline diversity” can act, if we’re not careful, as opposing forces. An obsessive pursuit of the former can become a barrier to achieving the latter. So why is marketing more interested in culture than other sectors? And how can teams and recruiters approach the search for culturally-aligned candidates without hiring more of the same person and hindering their chances of achieving meaningful diversity?
Why is marketing uniquely fixated on culture?
The answer may lie in the very nature of the job. Marketers are the guardians of the brand. They are responsible for its voice, its image, and its “vibe.” A logical (but flawed) assumption follows: to effectively communicate the brand, one must be the brand.
This can create a self-reinforcing bias. Hiring managers might, without even realizing, look for candidates who “feel” right for the brand – which, in many cases, means candidates who feel, think, and look just like them. If you find yourself looking for a certain kind of LinkedIn profile when you’re sourcing for marketing candidates, this might be you.
Cultural fit is a tricky term at the best of times. Too often it becomes a proxy for questions like – “Will I find this person easy to manage?” “Do they share my communication style?” or, dangerously, “Would I want to have a beer with them?”
This is not to dismiss the importance of hiring people who ‘get’ the brand. As brand guardians, it’s important for marketers to deeply understand and respond to the brand – it’s part of the job, after all. It’s just to say that filtering for fit can be a risk. If you’re judging an applicant’s culture fit based on a resume or a LinkedIn profile alone, you could be missing out.
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Marketers most likely to invest in new sourcing tech
It’s a weird time to be in marketing. Marketing sourcing teams are most likely to anticipate disruption from economic volatility and budget constraints (40% vs. 28% industry average), for example. According to other industry data, 70% of marketers expect AI to play a bigger role in their work, and 48% say that increasing AI adoption is a top goal. Marketers are under more pressure than ever to streamline operations and use AI to reduce spend.
Yet they’re also more likely than any other industry to plan new sourcing tech investment – 75% of those we surveyed are planning to invest, vs. just 61% across all industries. If anything, the drive to use AI for efficiency makes sourcing the best talent an even more pressing issue, as teams need collaborative problem-solvers who understand how to use new tech effectively.
It’s promising to see this investment mindset in the sector. But, given marketing’s culture fit dilemma, it’s imperative that teams invest in the right tools. Marketing recruiters don’t need another overpriced subscription to a resume database that carts over more of the same candidates, with very little information about who these people actually are. They need new ways to validate skills and cultural alignment fairly, and as early as possible.
By seeking ways to do this, they can make diverse candidate pipelines a reality. Maybe validating, rather than assuming, culture fit has been the best way to secure it all along.
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