Marketing leaders, let’s be honest, you’ve realized that you need to hire a marketing operations professional (from here on: MOPS) but you kinda dread the idea of going through that process.
Sure, getting the right people on your team is awesome and fun and exciting. But knowing how to find and choose the right person out of the increasingly large crowd? Ugh. Exhausting and confusing. Trust me, I feel your pain on this one, I’ve hired dozens of MOPS professionals.
So, in an effort to give you some hope and the start of a path forward, here are three skills/traits that stand out to me as critical for your next MOPS hire:
- Business acumen. “What? Why does that matter?” I’ll tell you why: Having that fundamental understanding of how businesses work, how they make money, revenue vs profit, the importance of cash flow, etc… gives operators a way to tie back their daily activities to the most important needs of the company.
It helps them be more self-sufficient because they can make informed decisions without you and be more proactive. And who doesn’t want a good-decision-making, proactive teammate? - Being really good at logic puzzles. I’ve considered how to incorporate fun logic puzzles into the hiring process (I’ll let you know when I get it right) because the ability for a MOPS professional to logically tear through a problem is GOLD. I’ve personally racked my brain on many operations/tech problems that felt a lot like a big complex Sudoku puzzle.
- The ability to listen and ask good questions. (Oh sure, go with the easy answer, Mike) OK smarty pants, here’s why this matters: In MOPS, you’re constantly being asked to “do things” or "fix things." The problem is, many times the thing you’re being asked to do isn’t the right thing to do. Or is maybe a superficial fix to a deeper issue. A great MOPS professional will know how to listen, ask probing questions, and continue to stay in the “problem space” for longer than most people. This allows them to make impactful changes and updates where it’s needed.
There's obviously a lot more to consider (how much experience should the person have on a specific software vs only having experience in that "category" of software?), but these three areas are some of the fundamental intangibles that I've seen lead to success in MOPS roles. And then there’s the issue of how broken the hiring process is ... but that's a conversation for a different day.