Why a Digital Marketing Recruitment Agency had to exist: Most recruiters hire badly!

This business had to exist, because the way employment agencies hire for digital marketing is broken — and the people usually paid to fix it are often the ones breaking it.

That is not a swipe at individual recruiters — although it could be. It is a structural problem. If you cannot assess the work, you cannot assess the person doing it. Most recruiters have never run a paid search account, never had to explain a falling click-through rate to a client, and never hired a developer to fix a tracking tag.

So when they are asked to find a digital marketer, or someone who knows SEO, they do the only thing the model allows: match keywords on a CV, and then ask questions they do not understand well enough to evaluate the answers. They cannot tell a good answer from a confident one, so they fall back on the safest-looking signal they have — a degree. Which proves somebody studied something, often a decade ago, and tells you nothing about what they can do now.

Digital marketing needs skills, technical know-how and current knowledge across a wide range of subjects. The most important thing about that knowledge is that it has to be current and relevant. A ten-year-old qualification is neither.

So they send the shortlist, overlook real talent, and hope.

What bad hiring actually looks like from the inside

If you have hired marketing people before, you will recognise all of this:

Forty CVs arrive, with no order to them and no reasoning behind the ranking

The same fifteen candidates circulate through every agency in the market

The shortlist is five people who all look identical on paper, so the decision comes down to who interviewed better

The interview tests how articulate someone is, not how they think

The hire looks right for ninety days, then quietly does not work out

You start again, having lost a quarter

None of that is a candidate problem. It is a process problem, and it is expensive.

Why CV keyword matching fails in marketing

A CV is a claim. An interview is a performance. Neither is evidence.

The things that actually decide whether a marketing hire works are almost never on the CV. Can they look at a campaign that is underperforming and form a correct hypothesis about why? Do they know when a number is lying to them? Can they hold a budget without being told to? Do they work unsupervised and still keep everyone informed?

That last one matters more than most employers realise, and it is rarely tested. Someone who works well alone but goes quiet for a week is not the independent operator you thought you hired.

You only find that out by asking them to work through a real problem, in front of you, with their reasoning visible.

What a bad hire actually costs

Most employers count the salary. The real number is larger and less visible:

The salary during the months they were not effective

Your time spent managing and then replacing them

The campaigns they ran badly, and the budget that went with them

The team members who left because of it

The opportunity cost of a quarter where the marketing did not move

If you want the arithmetic on your own vacancy, we built a calculator for it: what a digital marketing role costs you to fill in-house, with the assumptions listed so you can argue with them.

What we do instead

We are recruiters who understand the work, which changes what screening looks like.

We hire by capability, not by title. We take the brief as a description of work rather than a job title, because the title is the least useful part of it. We test beyond the polished answer: each discipline gets its own exercise, because you cannot assess a PPC specialist with a question about SEO.

And we keep looking after we find the first good candidate. A shortlist of one is not a shortlist. You are hiring what someone can do next, not what they did before, so the question we are answering is not "where have they worked" but "what can they take on."

That is the whole method, and if you want it in more detail rather than as a pitch, it is written out in our interview process and in the roles we recruit for.

For employers

Register the vacancy and describe the work. If the brief is vague, we will help shape it before anyone goes to market, because a badly defined role attracts badly matched candidates and wastes a month.

Digital marketing is a small market and it moves fast. The people who can genuinely run a function are usually employed, not applying, and they need a reason to take your call.

For candidates

If you are a digital marketer rather than someone with a marketing degree and no portfolio, send us something that shows what you can actually do. We are more interested in your reasoning than your employer list.