If you ever tried hiring an SEO professional, then you probably know that the real challenge is being able to evaluate the hands-on experience of this person, what did they do in their previous projects, the results, the good things, the bad things. Well, how can we do that successfully? We hope to answer this question today with our SVP of marketing Maxim Roslyakov, and I'll start immediately with Max. Let's evaluate, Max, your hands-on experience. How many SEOs have you ever hired in your career? Ah, well, I was hiring a head of SEO seven times throughout my professional career for four different companies: in e-commerce, in fintech, in software as a service, and actually the same approach can be used to evaluate agencies because agencies experience can be quite relevant to what you are doing and in some cases, you don't need to hire a head of SEO in-house. You can hire an agency with the same expertise. Absolutely, that's really really true, but what exactly are the first steps?
What do you do? First, so, the main challenge is to understand what was really done by this candidate, by this person, and normally you have kind of tens of people applying for this position and you want to prioritize your efforts in hiring and understand who you should speak first with, so yeah first thing to do is to build a pretty much simple spreadsheet (we can share our template in the description under this video) and then fill in the information from their LinkedIn profiles. So, what we will look at: we are interested in dates to understand which period of time this person was working in the exact company. I do really recommend considering only experience more than a year long because actually, SEO is kind of a slow thing, between doing something and getting results it's normally a few weeks or even months so you need somebody who has quite a long experience. Again you can apply it to your company in the future. So what we're doing next after getting the data from the LinkedIn profile, or this candidate CV, you're loading our Organic Research tool to check how the organic traffic for this website was growing during the same period of time. If it was kind of head of SEO you can assume that thanks to this person organic traffic was growing at healthy or not healthy levels, even if this candidate was just a team player they were at least working in a quite successful or unsuccessful company.
So, yeah, we are checking a period of time, then we're checking the organic traffic and trend of this traffic, how it was growing, and then we sort our candidates based on organic traffic increase during their career. First, to prioritize, and second to start your discussion with this candidate because actually it's kind of approximate data it's not 100 accurate and nobody has access to Google Analytics of this exact company but this is how, let's say, analytic tools see this website and experience of this exact person, so even if your candidate will tell you know what it's not actual numbers were better or worse or whatever, but it will anyway help you to start the discussion to to discuss reasons why it was high, why it was low, why performance went this way. So actually yeah two reasons: first is to prioritize your candidates list, and second is to start the discussion with each of them. Well, that seems definitely like the smartest thing to do, and just in case you're wondering, no this is not the last video we will do on the topic. We will do many more because Max has so much insights, he's done it so many times that he has a lot of very good info that he can share with us and, Max, do you want to maybe spoil a little what's coming next?
Two topics to cover to fully understand kind of the whole workflow: so, first probably even three topics, yeah, first of all it's a question of balance between hiring SEO agency or hiring in-house SEO professional, there are tips and tricks around it if you decided to hire an SEO/head of SEO in-house, and it actually should start with a good job description so we can speak about it, and after you made a decision to hire a person you should onboard them well so make sure they will bring the value to your business. Okay I'm gonna stop right there the interview because I don't want Max to spoil too much but, yes, you might have understood that some very huge topics about hiring SEO professionals and just in general managing SEO professionals inside and outside of a company (and also agencies, you know, the whole deal).
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