Senior Digital Account Manager

The Assignment

The client was an exciting and aggressively expanding multi-channel marketing agency with a strong digital bias. Their problem was simple – how does an emerging business compete with such well established employers with excellent reputations and still attract the cream of the industry?

They sought a top end, enthusiastic, innovative, project relevant and highly technical Digital Account Manager with a passion for technology and the drive to define and manage the processes required in project management to make great technology a reality for their flagship client.

This person would be expected to visualise and push forward innovation in business and consumer technological change to ensure the client remained cutting edge – no pressure!

 The Challenges 

• The Senior Digital Account Manager role was a new position in the business and so would be the first person to be 100% digitally focused working away from traditional print models and technologies. This meant that the client had little experience with recruiting this type of individual. The client initially was unable to quickly visualize Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) which were required to filter the right candidate.
• Prior to our consulting period it was difficult to get a ‘big picture’ view of the business and in particular quantitative stats for digital marketing, campaign results, sales performance and service resolutions.
• The traits required to be successful are rare as most Account Managers are not technically strong enough to understand the full commercial impact and benefits that technologies might bring to a company, even if they are technically minded.
• Pressure was high because the account was losing money every day this position wasn’t filled.

At the start is was very clear that the hiring manager wasn’t using a proven, structured process to help manage both the assignment in hand or any future assignments which was seriously hindering the project resulting in:

• Inaccurate sales opportunity forecasts and project timeline forecasts.
• An inability to identify stuck or lagging opportunities.
• Excessive and inaccurate CV’s from other recruiters who were not given the consistent information
• Missed or inaccurate communications

 The Solution

We listened; we took the time to truly understand our client, their client, the relationships and obstacles. We identified what the goals were and spoke with the relevant individuals to see what and how the actual daily tasks were completed to get a real idea of what the job would truly entail.

Based on this analysis we were able to accurately create a fresh job description highlighting the required criteria in a way that would help the Hiring Manger properly assess a candidate’s relevance in a consistent manner. In turn, this enabled us to properly benchmark the market for relevant candidates and produced reports to help the Hiring Manager prove to their Managers that the salary was an issue and needed to be higher to secure the services of the right person.

Our investigations identified areas where the client’s recruitment processes could be changed to enhance their chances of success with this assignment and beyond.

 The Result

In short, we sourced and successfully secured the services of the perfect candidate. The client was left very happy and certainly felt they received outstanding value for money:

• A successful placement
• Improved recruitment processes
• In depth assignment analysis
• Market benchmarking
• No nonsense communication
• A happy hiring manager
• We identified cross selling opportunities for our client resulting in new revenue streams for them

The outcome for ASG has been great. We presently enjoy a strong partner relationship and are now a preferred supplier often used exclusively on vacancies prior to the release of roles to the wider PSL.  The client involves us early in their recruitment decision making enabling us to plan and forecast thereby putting us in a strong and very trusted position helping them to project manage each assignment from square one.

We thoroughly enjoy working with this client.

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