The Difficulty of Hiring Good SEO/SEM Staff

Why it’s tough to hire SEO staff

-Good SEO’s know with affiliate marketing makes it easy to make more

-freelance web design and development makes one man project management a reality

-it’s cheaper offshore (making profitability and scalability tough)

-billable hours are no fun, and employees know the value of their work
-working for someone else is no fun – good people like their independence

-it’s expensive to be wrong

-Requires a diverse skillset
-It’s a seller’s market

• SEM recruiting resources from Lee
• Discussion at SEW
• Hiring SEO professionals – WMW
• The Challenge in hiring SEMers – SEW
• Meta-webmastering – skills needed by SEO’s
• Rob Murray talks about the difficulty of hiring SEM staff
• 8 essential skills to a search engine marketer.
• Best use of time affiliate vs. consulting
• Recruiters are desperate enough to send out uninformed requests like link requests.

Core Skills to SEO
An Understanding of:

-Business (Marketing, Management, Accounting)

-Art (Design, Development, Usability)

-Science (Economics, Statistics, Psychology)

Someone smart enough to know these things is smart enough to figure out what they can makein the open market. Your most likely not going to convince them to work for long at less than they are “worth”. I’m sure there will be an overabundance of psychology, design, and information management graduates flooding the marketplace in the next few year though to help create less of a demand for fresh meat (similar to what happend with web design).