DTC Hiring 101: Identifying 10/10 Social Media Leads

To supercharge your marketing, don’t just look at your tooling stack. Instead, look at your hiring. Just ask Kendall Dickieson.

She’s built a multi-hyphenate career for herself in social marketing, leading campaigns for brands like Graza, Canopy, and immi, among others.

Every brand is looking to hire in-house social talent right now. But, identifying (and hiring) that talent is insanely hard.

That’s, in part, because the job niche is so specific. Many of the consultants out there are at capacity or have already moved into full-time jobs via roles that scaled well.

The good news is — if you’re hiring for the right traits, a consultant should get the job done just fine. You don’t have to force the hiring process to find someone in-house.

Kendall emphasizes looking for the following three qualities in candidates:

Self-awareness — Your social media hire must know their personal limits so they can give love to all of their clients while getting tasks done on time.
A touch of chaos — Organization is critical to executing and juggling jobs. But, when it comes to creativity, a bit of chaotic-ness can foster great ideas.
Experimentation — Social media consultants should always be testing new tools and ideas. These days, you just can’t afford to play things safe. Rather, they should be able to seize on some crazy idea at 3 AM and run with it.

“A good social lead is organized. But it’s also okay to be a bit disorganized because some really good ideas are born in the chaos.”

Beyond these traits, Kendall highlights that some of the onus is on you, as a brand, to trust your social lead. She constantly hears feedback from peers about how they’re basically treading water at their gigs because they’re not allowed to independently execute cool new ideas.

When that happens, the brand’s social presence stagnates right alongside them.

Onboarding Your New Social Lead

Whenever Kendall kicks off with a brand, she asks them for two things:

An example of something they hate on socials
An example of something they love on socials

For the first month, she runs everything by the founders. She needs feedback on how they’d switch certain elements or run certain processes.

After that, the trust component has to come in, because constantly asking for approvals is simply unsustainable and a waste of time.

Through both trust and feedback, she can optimize her thought process and get creative.

Another great resource is the brand guide. From there, social leads can riff, generate new ideas, and speak about the brand with the right keywords, taglines, language around value prop, etc.

Pro tip: She’ll always set up an internal DM on Instagram or Slack with everyone on the team. This allows folks to send and keep track of posts they love from other companies. As a result, the paid and organic social teams are on the same page about the vibe they’re working toward.

All in all, the role of Social Media lead is one of the most rapidly evolving in your marketing team - the skills that may have been listed on a job description three years ago are no longer accurate. So, more than anything, your Social Media lead needs to be a creative, experimental, fast learner who is thrilled by the prospect of change and adaptation.

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