Recruiting and Retaining Talent in a Rapidly Growing Industry

Finding and then keeping the right people is complicated in all industries, and I would argue it’s even more complex in a rapidly growing and young industry like ours. Here are my thoughts on how to do it.

SEO is a young industry that has basically only existed since the turn of the millennium. It’s natural that marketers at university still don’t learn about SEO. It’s also a very fast-changing environment — what was good search engine optimization three years ago might not make any sense today. This makes it even harder for universities to quickly deliver young recruits to companies in the industry, if that desire even exists.

Very limited educational paths in the industry

The result of this is that, with the exception of those of us who entered the industry at its start, everyone is trained at one of the companies that work with SEO in Sweden — with a few exceptions who’ve made the same journey abroad. That in itself isn’t a major problem. Sweden is far ahead in terms of SEO quality, and competition in the Swedish search results is fierce. The training that young SEOs in the country get is therefore relatively good — but of course, unlike a university education, it’s very narrow.

Many of those who’ve worked for a long time at an SEO agency, or in-house somewhere, may therefore have very limited SEO knowledge — even if they appear to be fully-fledged consultants. This makes recruitment extremely difficult. It’s a bit like needing a lathe to manufacture a lathe — you need an SEO to assess an SEO. It can turn out that your “senior” SEO has only ever emailed people to buy links, or written content for sites with the intention of linking from them. That’s certainly useful to know, but it’s not comprehensive SEO expertise.

20–30 seniors in the industry

The SEO industry is small and brand new. The number of specialists in the industry who’ve worked for 8–10 years is extremely small. My estimate — and I have pretty good insight into my colleagues in the industry — is that there are around 20–30 employable senior consultants in all of Sweden. From our own investigations, we think there are maybe 5–10 people we would consider hiring as seniors.

Some of the other agencies in the industry have chosen a different path than we have, and opt to let younger people become seniors more quickly. Of course, it’s not necessarily about how long you’ve worked, but I believe you need to have seen enough projects for me to have confidence. That makes things a little trickier, because a proper SEO project should run for several years before you’ve seen all aspects. What’s good at the start of a project isn’t always good at the end. You might have been building links for years and then suddenly crossed a line — a senior should know where that line is.

Retaining expertise

If, like me, you refuse to call a junior a senior, you end up in a situation where it’s crucial that these key players remain with the company. This is difficult. We have our own model for how we do this — others have their own models, of course. A colleague recently left for a competitor, maybe for a higher salary, a fancier office, or something else, and that really made us start thinking hard about who we are and what we do.

I’m convinced that you can’t retain these people with salary alone — at least not long-term. Since there are only a handful of people we’d even consider hiring, we need to offer something that makes them want to stay with us. It has to be about what we ARE, not what we GIVE. People need to be proud of the work they do — that’s one of the core premises in our thinking here. It turned out the other agency wasn’t the right fit, and our colleague came back soon after (yes, that’s a jab at them — but also a lesson for us all). It’s not enough to recruit the right people; you also have to keep them.

How have we done it?

Next weekend, actually, the whole company will sit down and talk about these things again. We already place a big focus on this, and I’ll share some of the things we do.

6-hour workdays

Few have missed our shorter workdays. What’s important to understand here is that it’s not the shorter hours that are the big deal — it’s that they are a solution to a problem. The problem is that far too many simply don’t have enough time. There are kids to drop off and pick up, groceries to shop, meals to cook, exercise to fit in, home decor to manage, and so on. All of this is part of life, and we understand that — which is why we shortened the workday.

Personal care

Sometimes people run into trouble for one reason or another. It doesn’t have to be anything dramatic — it can be anything from financial stress to family issues. Of course, we can’t go into details, but both Maria and I believe the company should be supportive in these situations when possible. Caring about your employees requires something of the leadership — it’s something you need to understand, and I believe that empathy needs to live in the hearts of the people in leadership. Otherwise, it probably won’t work.

Pride in the work

In our most recent employee survey, the average response to the question “I’m proud of the work I do” was 4.64 out of 5.

Many SEO and SEM consultants out there are pressured to manage more clients in less time. A large part of the work becomes meetings and creating PowerPoints or reports. Reporting on the delivery becomes the delivery. Our specialists know that we deliver much more than just reports and meetings — and many have experience from the other type of consulting. They’re proud that we deliver the results we do.

That comes from a sincere desire to be good. We in the leadership team don’t accept mediocre results — we always want to deliver better. There is constant pressure on all of us, across the company, to improve. If you improve, you become proud — and I believe this is one of the things that makes us stronger than our competitors. We actively work on being proud.

Summary – recruiting SEO and SEM

We haven’t talked much about recruiting and retaining younger talents — that’s a chapter in itself — but I think you can take a lot from what’s been written here about seniors. I firmly believe it’s extremely important to have the right people at the company, and to make that possible, you have to BE the right company. If you can offer something other than foosball, high salaries, or after-work drinks (nothing wrong with those, but that’s not company culture — it just looks like it), then you have a good chance of attracting the right people.

This post has been more of a reflective piece than we usually publish on this blog — SEO is a simpler topic than personnel. If you liked it, feel free to leave feedback — maybe there will be more like it.

If you’re even more curious about what it’s like to work with us, maybe you should consider applying 😉