Digital Marketing Recruiters in Madrid and Barcelona: PayPerTalent’s DNA

 

Since its inception, PayPerTalent has been striving to become a reference in the Spanish Digital Marketing recruitment landscape.

Whether you’re a Digital Marketer looking for a job in Spain, or a client looking for Digital talent, you know how difficult it can be to go through a successfull recruitment process. And you probably know how recruitment agencies don’t always deliver the results expected…

Madrid and Barcelona are two major cities in the European tech scene that already count with a significant amount of recruiting agencies. This blog post focuses on the reasons that led us to do things differently at PayPerTalent.

 

Digital Marketers turned recruiters

 

Our company was set up by people who are passionate about Digital Marketing.

Why does this matter you may wonder?

In the recruitment industry, people typically come from sales or HR backgrounds. In other words, your average recruiter is normally an HR or business person who has started to gear his or her career towards a specific industry, which could be Marketing, Sales, IT, health, etc.

At PayPerTalent, we knew from the very beginning that we wanted to do things differently.

All of us had gone to job interviews while developing our career as Digital Marketers in Madrid and Barcelona, and we felt that the companies intervewing us were having a hard time finding valuable talent through recruitment agencies. To the extent that it was quite common to hear a hiring manager interviewing us saying something around the lines of: “Finally agency X is sending us someone who really understands Digital Marketing!”

That’s when we came to realise that something in the recruitment industry was amiss.

We basically understood that most recruiters don’t have a very deep knowledge of Digital Marketing, and therefore can’t really spot genuine SEO, SEM, Social Media or RTB talent.

So instead of following the mainstream industry pattern and train HR or sales experts on how to recruit Digital Marketers, we went the other way round. We looked for people who were really good at Digital Marketing, and then taught them how to become great recruiters.

 

A proven recruitment methodology

 

A problem we soon came across is the fact that the candidates we interviewed were not always genuinely interested in the position they were applying for. It’s quite common to see people who are just curious about a job or company, who end up going to job interviews just to see if they can pull it off, but with no real intention of ultimately taking the job.

Another issue that came about quite frequently was to start interviewing candidates whose CVs painted them as Digital Marketing gurus, who then ended up getting fired by the client during the first months at the company because they actually didn’t master half of the skills outlined in their CV.

It thus became clear to us that we needed a solid methodology to make sure our clients would only interview with candidates who:

 

- Are really interested in the job

- Really understand Digital Marketing

 

How were with going to achieve that?

We soon came to realise that the only way you can really be sure that a candidate is not only genuinely interested in the role, but also has what it takes to perfom once hired by a company, was to develop a thorough skill testing methodology.

The reason a skill test proves that your candidate is really interested in the job is straightforward: there is no way on earth someone will take a 2 hours long test unless they are really interested in the outcome. Period. Time wasters are OK with wasting everyone else’s time but theirs. Hit them where it hurts and they’ll stop wasting your time and you client’s time.

Asking a candidate to answer very specific questions on SEO, SEM, RTB and whatever other area of Digital Marketing your client is looking for is the best way to make sure you are dealing with people who really know their stuff. On their CVs, people will often state anything they deem useful to help them get the job, but the truth is a lot of them don't actually master the sills they claim to have.

Obviously, creating exhaustive tests on an online plaftofm with a timer (so candidates don’t have much time to look up the answers), case studies and Excel tests takes time, and required a great deal of effort from our team. But the results could be seen right away, as we suddenly started to recruit candidates who were really motivated and who had enough knowledge of Digital Marketing to delight their bosses once hired.

 

Madrid and Barcelona need recruiters who speak English

 

Key to our success has also been the fact that we soon realised there’s a considerable amount of international companies who are interested in tapping into the Spanish market, but who often don’t have any Spanish speakers in their HR department. This is often a bigger problem than expected for companies, as many recruitment agencies in Madrid and Barcelona don’t speak good enough English to really deliver the level of service expected by HR departments.

Hence our decision to only collaborate with people who speak English at a high level to help us source Digital Marketing talent, as this is a core requirement for a lot of international companies when dealing with recruiters.

 

 

 

A successfull recipe for launching a long lasting business requires a lot of different ingredients and fair amounts of trial and error, until a company eventually gets it right. At PayPerTalent, we come from a long way from the time we were a bunch of Digital Marketing enthusiasts looking for jobs in Madrid and Barcelona. Tackling industry pain points such as the ones we explained in this article is crucial to any business venture (and certainly was to us), as remind us all the clients who have trusted us so far to expand their operations in Spain.

 

Are you looking to hire Digital Marketing profiles for your business in Spain?

Just send us a message through our contact form to find out how we can help you recruit great Digital Talent...