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Udayan Bose is the founder and CEO of Ann Arbor based Paid Search Advertising Performance Management & Optimization firm, NetElixir Inc. He has been involved in active research and hands-on campaign management & optimization work for clients with budgets ranging from a few thousand dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars per month. You can view his "ideas and opinions weblog" at http://netelixir.typepad.com

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The Hiring Woes of an SEM Firm

Written on
Jan 19, 2006 
Author
Udayan Bose  |
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The Hiring Woes of an SEM Firm

Paid search advertising revenues for 2005 should be in the range of $6 billion up from $972 million in 2002. Not many industries can boast such an explosive growth rate. The complexity inherent to the PPC campaign management and optimization process meant that external expert help had become a necessity by 2004. This is one of the reasons that SEM firms like us grew at a phenomenal pace. However, what initially looked like “easily manageable” business for small SEMs (1-20 people) soon became “not necessarily easily manageable”.

The reasons for this were primarily threefold:
a) The dynamic nature of this space which was in a stage of rapid evolution

b) The lack of systems and operational standards —how do you build systems effectively for an ever-changing business space

c) The difficulty of hiring and retaining talented people

I would like to go further into the third point of this issue — hiring and retention of talent in an SEM.

The newness of the industry, the complexity of “desired skill set versus skills available” and the lack of standardization make the hiring process extremely difficult and filled with ambiguity. It’s almost impossible to say that a certain profile and experience (albeit, the assumption here is that the candidate is from an unrelated industry) is a perfect match with the requirements a job like that of an SEM expert demand. And to amplify the agony, the talent pool of “good SEM experts” is extremely limited (and the firms that have these “good SEM experts” in their team guard them like crown jewels… after all, their future depends on them).

The best option in these circumstances is to develop effective systems and keep enhancing these continually, to develop a solid training program for the company personnel (induction training, continuous training, knowledge sharing sessions, etc.) and to set standards within the organization that work as an “employee stickiness enhancer”.

Systems: Ours is an industry that lacks systems. Either most SEMs did not bother to develop them or they did not get enough time to develop systems because of the industry’s constant and rapid growth. However, in the long term only the companies with established systems will win.





Reader Comments.

Nicely written. The problem is further compounded by the demographics. There are few people so there are fewer still in this exciting niche. A wel crafted classified gets more eyeballs when it specifiies what is in it foe the candidate. i.e. How nmuch of a sign-up bonus will you offer? Get speciific and detail your bous structure and benefits and you receive more qualified responses. Ignore the $ and responses can reasonably be expected to remain flat.

Posted by Arthur | 3:23 pm on January 27, 2006.

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