#jobs
Thread
What’s Happening to Customer Marketing & Advocacy Job Openings?
I asked the crack data scientists on my team to analyze job openings from 8 and 4 months ago. The list is from two of Frank Advocacy’s weekly roundups of open roles. #AlexieGlover does a great job of identifying new openings.
8 months ago: 18 openings
• 9.5 filled (3 were internal hires)
• 8.5 not filled
4 months ago: 20 openings
• 9 filled (1 was an internal hire)
• 11 not filled
My Analysis
This is just a snapshot in two moments of time, but the trends are pretty clear. About half of the postings from these weeks were filled. Roles typically take about 2 months to fill and have been trending a little quicker recently.
What makes the analysis a bit challenging is titles can change from the JD to the actual job, and not everybody updates their status on LinkedIn.
I did see a few roles from 8 months ago reposted this week. When a job is not filled, was it due to the role being pulled or delayed, or were there no viable candidates due to skills required, location, or compensation offered?
Roles
The vast majority of titles were Customer Marketing (a catchall for advocacy and lifecycle), 5 were Advocacy, and 1 was Lifecycle. The levels were:
• Specialist 2
• Director 8
• Manager 28
This over-representation of Managers was expected as companies have downgraded titles over the past 1-2 years. What jumps out at me is that there are no VP-level roles. Do they not get listed, or are there none? I will dig into this question in the next post.
An average of 20 postings per week translates into 1,000 openings annually. If the 50% pattern holds, there are about 500 CMA practitioners landing a new job every year. How many of them are new positions is hard to assess. Is it 33%, 20%, 10%? My rough estimate is about 17% (85) of the 500 are new roles.
This just touches the surface of the question, and as always, I would love to hear from practitioners and vendors as to what data would be helpful.
Wow. Thanks for pulling this analysis together. Very interesting.
I’d love to compare this with how many are seeking new roles. Both currently employed, contracting, and unemployed.
Glad our job postings are helping!
Really interesting insight @Irwin Hipsman, thanks so much for sharing. And yes, huge +1 to @Alexie Glover for her postings, I know they are appreciated by so many 💙
The lack of Director and VP-level positions certainly posits a question to the overall long-term career growth within this discipline. Will be curious to learn from you when you dive into that question!
I have professional peers who have run into similar scenarios in other areas of marketing (e.g. content) and are navigating how to make the jump from leading a content function -> VP-level marketing role or higher
What sometimes isn't shared publicly is that many senior level roles never get posted officially and are run through a headhunter or until after they have a candidate they want shortlisted - then they open the role for a week or less just as a formality - this has happened to me personally.
The other side of it is some roles close and reopen based on how many candidates have applied and the length of time a role is open - the recruiting team doesnt want to show they have roles open indefinitely bc it hurts their metrics ironically.
Lastly while I understand everyone wants more senior level positions, a sr. manager at an ent org that's 5k employees or more carries more weight than a director at a 500 person company in the eyes of a recruiter and hiring manager.