Hiring

Introduction
The tools
Experience
Hiring
Conclusion

Let's look at the real costs of building and maintaining a team in-house.

What is the real cost of hiring someone? Hiring search engine marketing talent is tougher than anyone expects. There are no colleges graduating search engine marketing talent. The majority of practitioners are born at search engine marketing firms. Consider all the costs while evaluating your options.

Belanger: Hiring, training, mentoring and keeping quality talent is unquestionably the biggest challenge that our industry faces. By deciding to run your search marketing in-house, you take on this incredible burden. If you choose to outsource, then it's your firm's job to find quality folks to work on your campaign, not yours. If your firm fails to find that team for your account, then you can fire them. While firing an agency is never fun, it's certainly easier than trying to replace your PPC expert if she up and leaves to take a juicier offer elsewhere (believe me, she is getting offers if she is any good).

Training and developing talent is a huge initiative for Yahoo Search Marketing. We are actively working on web-based training modules to enable our partners to train their own new hires on our new search platform. iProspect is clearly a leader in the field of developing home-grown talent. Frankly, I'd like to take iProspect's training and development program to the marketplace at large, though I think Fredrick may have something to say about that!

Marckini: I am amazed at how easily people forget the real costs of hiring someone. Consider the real costs of hiring, training and keeping your search marketer on top of his or her game:

• Job postings: To keep search marketing spots full and attract qualified candidates, vendors post on virtually every major job board available. This is an expensive and time consuming proposition.
• Telephone screening: We devote hours and hours to reviewing the hundreds of resumes that arrive from each posting. Dozens of phone interviews are conducted before selecting finalists who are invited in for face-to-face interviews.
• In-person interviews: We interview roughly five candidates for every one we hire-- and most of these candidates go through at least eight interviews. In-person interviewing alone requires an investment of dozens of hours. For every candidate who receives an offer, time is also spent interviewing each the candidates who were rejected.
• Training: We invest months training new hires through a search marketing-specific training regimen that we call "iProspect University." Again, hundreds of hours a year are invested on the part of our current staff to train and mentor their new colleagues.
• Conferences and recurrent training: Training doesn't end after iProspect University. We invest heavily in ongoing recurrent training, and we send staff to industry trade shows so they stay on the cutting edge. These conferences are not cheap. Budget as much as $3,000 to $4,000 per trade show (there are probably at least two and maybe three that should not be missed) when you include airfare, hotel, meals and conference passes.

All of this costs real money.

And, if your first search marketer doesn't work out or leaves the company, you start over. You may misfire in the hiring process a few times before getting someone who fits into your organization. Worse, the moment that person walks out the door, so does his or her experience with, and knowledge of, your campaign. These are all factors you need to consider when calculating if there is really a cost advantage to building your own team.

Next: Conclusion