Recruitment Overview

There is a lot of churn within the e-commerce team in a multi channel retailer’s business.

This is partly driven by supply not meeting demand and the lure of headhunters waiving large salary increases in the face of the incumbents.

But an increasing challenge is knowing when someone has a suitable level of technical experience to do the job. Retailer’s are focussing far more closely on e-commerce due the recognition that this will be the channel that drives the growth in their business for many years to come. And therefore they are keener than ever to recruit people who are at the top of their game. But how can they judge this when they are not entirely clear what skills it is the candidates should have?
The challenge with headhunters and traditional recruiters is that whilst many of them have become very active in the e-commerce space, they have not done the job themselves. So while they can find people who are a good cultural fit with the client, and they know all of the high - level buzzwords in this space, they couldn’t drill down into the relevance of the candidates technical skills nor whether or not they really can do the job as well as they say they can.

How many headhunters do you know who can tell you whether or not a marketing candidate has the skills to maximise the ROI from search engine marketing or understands the nuances and drivers of behavioural targeting? Or if their skills lend themselves more to customer acquisition or retention?
And how many can tell you whether or not a head of e-commerce can make an impact across the full e-commerce value chain from the platform and the technology through marketing, content, customer service, supply chain and logistics?

If you haven’t done the job, you can’t answer these questions, you can only take the candidates word for it and benchmark them against what you think represents best practice.

So who better to engage than people like us who have done the job? We are Practicologists. We’ve all worked at the coal face. So we are in the perfect place to evaluate the technical skills of a candidate for your e-commerce team whatever the role is you’re recruiting for.

We’re also well placed to advise you on how to remunerate candidates in this space and develop their careers in order to gain their loyalty.