Planning and Recruitment for Digital Teams

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Digital team considerations

High-performing digital teams don’t come together by chance. They’re assembled carefully and have a defined structure and purpose. Before you start building a digital team, it’s important to consider a few factors.

Size of team

The first factor to think about is the size of the team you need. This is usually based on the size of the organization you work for and the objectives you’re trying to achieve. You may find that you can meet your goals with a small, dedicated team. If your goals are more complex, you may need a larger team around you.

Available skills

Next, you need to consider the skills you want your team to possess. Are these skills already available in-house or will you need to recruit from outside to get them?

To help figure this out, you can create a skills matrix. This is a visual map of the skills that your current employees possess. This should help you get an overall view of the skills that are available to you and can help you decide how to utilize existing employees.

Desired skills

After that, make a list of all the skills you believe you require on your team and compare your skills matrix to your list of desired skills. You should be able to identify any skill gaps quickly. You can use this information to determine which roles you need to recruit and how you should structure your team to maximize efficiency and results and best manage external suppliers and vendors.

The final factor to consider is the amount of time and effort you can invest in building your team. For example, do you have time to train and coach a new team, or do you require them to get results immediately? The answer to this question can help you plan and structure your team effectively.

Identifying essential tasks

As you consider your team’s structure and composition, it’s important to identify your team’s essential tasks. These are the core tasks that team members need to perform to deliver on the team’s goals and objectives.

Essential tasks might include:

• Delivering a superior user experience on your website
• Creating dazzling visuals
• Generating data-driven analytics reports.

When you know exactly what your team needs to do to meet business objectives, it’s easier to identify the people who can execute these tasks to a high standard. Identifying and managing team tasks is one of the most important responsibilities of any manager.

Skill stacking

As you build your digital team, consider engaging in skill stacking, so you have a variety of different skill sets on the team. To do this, encourage existing employees to embrace a growth mindset by continuously cultivating new skills.

When recruiting new employees, look for candidates who have more than just the core competencies needed to do their jobs. A team that contains a variety of complementary skill sets and talents is usually more valuable, productive, and successful. With still stacking, it also becomes easier to fill skill gaps on your team when they arise.

Outsourcing

While you’ll probably be able to cover many skills in-house by training existing staff or recruiting new employees, you might need to outsource certain tasks. For example, you might decide to outsource the technical SEO component of your activities, or your website design and maintenance.

Before you make the decision to outsource, weigh up the cost – in time and money – of training or recruiting staff to undertake these activities in-house and the cost of hiring a third-party vendor to execute them. Urgent, high-impact tasks that require significant technical expertise or a long period of training to perform effectively might be better outsourced.

Hiring personnel

When it comes to hiring personnel for your team, you should ask yourself two questions:

• Are the kind of skilled personnel I need readily available in the market?
• Are the skills I need currently in demand?

If employees with your desired skill set are highly sought after, it can be more expensive to recruit and hire them – and they’re usually more difficult to find. This situation can strengthen the business case for investing in the training or upskilling of existing staff or of outsourcing these roles.

Personnel planning

As you build your team, it’s important to engage in both short-term and long-term personnel planning.

Short-term personnel planning:

• Clarifies immediate personnel requirements
• Identifies immediate skills gaps that might be suitable for outsourcing
• Helps you make provisional budget plans

Long-term personnel planning:

• Clarifies the long-term personnel requirements of your team
• Allows you plan the recruitment process more efficiently
• Identifies long-term skills gaps that can be met by investing in staff training
• Helps you make long-term budget plans

Long-term planning helps ensure that employees are a good fit for their assigned roles on the team and that they’re ultimately successful. It also helps you avoid future manpower shortages or surpluses.

An effective long-term human resources plan has four core elements:

• It defines the future structure of a team.
• It defines the future size of the team.
• It estimates the amount of work that will be assigned to freelancers, partner companies, or agencies.
• It sets out a succession plan by identifying high-performing employees who can fill key roles in the future.

Team action plans

You can build an action plan to help you develop and grow your digital team. This can serve as a roadmap or guide to all your team-building activities.

An action plan should cover:

• The team’s essential tasks
• The team’s existing skills
• Any skill gaps you identify – and how you plan to fill them

Your action plan should include the business impact and cost implication for each item listed in the plan. This information can help you justify your decisions and requests to the senior management team and make a business case for your digital team. Remember, facts and hard data are likely to encourage stakeholders to buy-in to your plans.