Mindy Gofton

Like Me? Follow Me.

I've been involved in a couple of conversations recently about how to attract good quality candidates into entry-level SEO and online marketing roles and how to ensure that applicants have the right skills and the right attitude to succeed. 

On the one side, employers from SEO companies debate the idea of certification and whether it's possible to teach something that is as constantly evolving as SEO and whether as an industry we could even oversee such certification when we can't control the quality of those claiming to offer SEO services. As employers, our needs are simply not being met by the graduate applicants we see because they are not being provided with the necessary practical skillsets or knowledge.

On the other, academic institutions at least locally in Manchester, have been asking for feedback and help from those of us in industry for years, with limited avail, but are also hamstrung by their own funding issues and internal politics. They deliver a range of practical training for students, but the students are, nonetheless, coming out with few skills and unrealistic expectations.

At the moment we tend to see three types of graduate applications:

  1. the technical SEO grad
  2. the marketing graduate 
  3. the English/Journalism graduate 

Our problem as employers

In this mix there's a lot of ambition, very little practical skill and few of these graduates have received any advice about how to sell themselves to businesses.  

The grads that have a more technical background tend to only have very basic front-end development skills, applicable only in a perfect environment. They aren't equipped to take a bad website and improve it. If we don't have a resource available to train them, their skills aren't useful. They may understand the theory behind how a website works, but they don't understand the needs of the businesses whose websites we market - so they don't understand how to choose keywords, they tend to overoptimise pages, they can't tell a good link from a bad one (most have the misunderstanding that links are good, not the knowledge that SOME links are good). None of these applicants can write. They have never been taught how to take an idea and apply it to a real world situation, or to think critically. Their problem-solving skills are minimal.

The marketing graduates have a lot of theoretical understanding of marketing but have never seen it applied to a real business. They expect big budgets, loads of time and the ability to work on wild viral campaigns. They know the difference between SEO, PPC and social media, but beyond having their own Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts or a blog, they have no idea how businesses use these tools to market themselves. They have never used even basic HTML and they cannot write. While many of them are bright, fast learners, if we don't have someone with time to train them, again, we can't hire them. They have never been taught how to take an idea and apply it to a real world situation, or to think critically. Their problem-solving skills are minimal.

The English/journalism graduates know nothing about business or marketing but they have developed analytical skills, they can absorb complex concepts and apply them to real world situations, and although they can't code, they can write. We can hire them, get them copywriting from day one and train them quickly. We hire a lot of English and journalism graduates. We could do with similar graduates with technical web development skills.

The problem with a university education

There's a massive disconnect between universities and business which is a fault on both sides. Our friends in academia are building courses to guide students into online marketing but don't necessarily have the practical experience to know what skills to teach. But whereas arts courses teach students to think critically and apply that knowledge, these online marketing courses are failing to help students learn how to apply what they've learned in any situation.

The SEO that is being taught is explaining what we do, but not why - and the why is the most important thing for students to learn.  The graduates we see can only work off a list of things that they call "SEO", without understanding how to analyse a website or build a campaign or even that the way in which we apply various SEO tasks will vary from site to site - they can't adjust their work to the situation at hand without a lot of help each time they are given even a basic task. Because they are not taught problem solving and critical thinking they fail to understand how to analyse various situations. Because they generally do not do placements, they never learn how SEO operates in real world situations. 

Now, I'm not saying that the students aren't encouraged to apply for placements; most of them simply don't listen. 

Furthermore, the nature of how British students are educated means that graduates are able to drop subjects from their education from early on which means they aren't very well-rounded. They do not learn to write even simple business letters, have no grasp of grammar or syntax, have poor maths skills (hint: if you're doing marketing, statistics is probably a useful pursuit) and will, as a result, take longer to understand the businesses of our clients because they have neither a broad-based education nor real world experience. They also expect to be spoon fed.

We have had issues time and time again with graduates not understanding the nature of hard work and how to succeed. Most of them wait to be taught, will not seek out answers on their own (perhaps because they do not know how) leave work unfinished because the clock strikes 5pm, and then get upset when at 6 months or a year do not get an expected promotion. We've heard the line "Well I get all my work done, of course I should be advancing by now" far too many times. They also have unreasonable salary expectations - we regularly have graduates ask for remuneration packages higher than what senior members of the team are on,  because "my tutor told me that's what I am worth." 

Most recently, the esteemed David Edmundson-Bird, from MMU, advised that we should advertise "graduate" jobs, not "junior" roles because it puts students off applying.

DEB_junior_roles.jpg

Except the jobs we advertise aren't strictly "graduate" jobs - they're entry level positions and if you can show me you can do the job, I'll hire you with or without a degree. We also wouldn't want to exclude anyone older, looking to change career.

The job title should not matter; the right job description in the right company and the right attitude towards that job should matter very much. If universities are telling students anything different to that then they need to rethink their advice immediately.  It's a tough job market out there for graduates so a sense of entitlement is not doing graduates any favours.

What businesses are getting wrong

Now I'm not trying to place the blame entirely on universities. Most of them have the right goals in mind, are doing their best to educate students who may not want to learn and are encouraging those students to build relationships with potential employers. They do ask for our feedback as businesses - we just don't pay very much attention to them, although we probably should. I'm also not entirely convinced that when we're asked for our feedback by universities it's the right feedback to ask for - or that the input we're asked to provide is always the right input. If you ask the wrong questions, for whatever reason, you don't get the answers you need. I doubt anyone in industry has ever pointed this out, either.

Surely if we're getting graduate applicants with the wrong skillsets it is as much our fault for not offering placements, apprenticeships, internships and shouting louder about what we need to the universities?  We want a lot of things from graduates - namely because we have little time to train people who may offer us little return for weeks or months - but we aren't doing a lot to ensure that we get what we need.

How we can help

Perhaps rather than the online marketing industry talking about 'certification' in a vaccuum away from universities and the universities building courses without the right type of input from industry we should be building courses together that require a placement? Businesses should be willing to offer time and resources to help train the students as we need them to be taught and universities need to be more flexible in the types of courses they build. I don't think it's an easy solution - most agencies are already overworked and have little time to offer mentoring - but I think it will vastly help our pool of talent. I think it will also help graduates develop realistic expectations about the industry and their careers.

Finally, our advice to graduates, as employers

The onus here shouldn't be entirely on the teachers or the employers however. I've said it before and I'll say it again - graduates need to demonstrate usefulness and willingness from day one. 

However, that in and of itself isn't all it takes. SEO is a job that requires analytical skills, the ability to understand complicated technical ideas and communicate them in a simple way, good problem solving and constant pursuit of knowledge and new ideas. It also requires hard work and often long hours. Graduates who want a good job title, a big salary and 9-5 hours have no place with us. Graduates who are willing to work hard, actively pursue knowledge and growth will advance very quickly. 

Mainly, though, to get your foot in the door, you need to start by learning as much as you can while still in education and follow this up by writing a CV that's tailored for the job you want - I don't care what instruments you play, what sports you like and what you did in your gap year. I care about your transferable skills. If you can show me that you can apply what you've learned to what I need you to do then you're the right candidate for me.

Tags: Online Marketing, SEO Jobs, SEO Manchester

Discussion

Posted by Harriet on May 16th, 2012
Shocking, what a narrow minded and judgemental view of graduates today! It is unsupportive, snotty attitudes like this that put people off applying for jobs which they may be perfectly well suited for and could excel in. 'Lower their expectations' - patronising at best.

It is really dissapointing to see this sort of criticism in such an exciting industry.
Posted by Neal Wallace on May 16th, 2012
Business is fostering an unhealthy culture of becoming desensitised to graduates, forgetting that people go to university to learn more than just the things they're taught on their course. I think it's a shame that firms seem to compromise the essence of a university education (critical thought, autonomy, independence) to create a wave of Replicant drones, pre-packed to slot into their firm.

You say you don't care what instruments you play etc, which is where the inherent problem lies. A person's grades represent some some of evidence as to how well they can pass exams, write essays. Does their willingness to learn an instrument to a high standard, to play sport at a high level not evidence a desire to succeed, to achieve more than is expected of them? It's so easy to get lost in the banality of pseudo-business patois and marketing rhetoric (transferable skills etc). Do you really not care about any of their extra curricular activities? You have to work with them, after all. And is it not individuals that make up an organisation?

I just feel like we expect far too much of graduates, maybe because they are so numerous. Think back to if and when you graduated, how much you'd done, and how much you actually knew.
Posted by Mindy on May 16th, 2012
Hi Harriet and Neal. Thanks both for your responses. You seem to have missed my point which is that what we see from graduate applicants at the moment is a sense of entitlement and a demand to be spoon fed. What we want are graduates who can and will apply what they've learned to the new situations they face in employment. If you, as a graduate, care more about a job title (and a starting salary) than what you'll be doing in that job and what you'll learn and how it will set you up for a future career then you have your priorities extremely wrong.

Much of the point I'm making lies in my own experience both in academia (I spent 12 years there) and in hiring and training graduates that traditional arts courses are preparing their students far better because they come out of university with analytical skills, writing skills, the ability to solve problems and apply ideas to many different scenarios, etc., than the degrees supposedly aimed at preparing students for careers in online marketing - because the more vocational/practical degree courses aren't teaching critical thinking.

Furthermore, I really don't care that you play an instrument - not when I'm trying to determine whether it's worth interviewing you. I want to know how years of study of that instrument prepared you in some way for a career in SEO. There's a difference. What graduates are not getting from careers centers is the advice on how to tailor the experience they have had to convince potential employers they can do the jobs for which they're applying.

Yes, in the interview we want to know whether you're an interesting person and will fit into the team - but none of that matters if your CV doesn't indicate you can do the job.
Posted by Neal Wallace on May 18th, 2012
I understand your point, but I think you're a little myopic in your view of graduates. Given then current jobs market, the vast majority of graduates who are taken on are grateful to be in gainful employment, regardless of the remuneration package. In particular, I thought your comments regarding the work attitudes of graduates was representative of a minority. I don't know where you're finding all these feckless students.

Also, surely 'Piano - Grade 8' says 'I have gained my grade 8 piano, which demonstrates a willingness to learn an instrument to the highest standard, an attitude I can transfer to skills outside of music' in fewer words? Is it not your job, as someone reading a CV, to extrapolate that information? Or does everything on a CV need to be explicitly tailored to your business? People go to university to learn, not to learn how to work for you.

I think maybe it's not graduates who need to lower their expectations...

(I should add that I'm not a student looking for work, I've been in a job for a few years now. Just thought I should redress the balance.)
Posted by mindy on May 18th, 2012
Oh Neal, we can extrapolate many things - we want to know our applicants can as well.

If I have 10 CVs for a graduate position, I'm not going to interview all 10. How do I decide when they all have similar qualifications, grades, prior jobs, etc.? I'm not going to speak to the guy who has a Grade 8 Piano qualification; I'm going to speak to the guy who can tell me how that has helped teach him something he can bring across to a job. I am going to interview the person who writes a bespoke cover letter explaining why they want a job in SEO with I-COM and how their crappy bar jobs, year out and experience coaching kids' football has given them some really useful life skills they thinks will help them become really good at SEO - even if they have no actual SEO experience.

As far as being down on grads - that comes from experience of grads expecting to be given knowledge, and no desire to pursue it. It's not everyone, and I apologise to the grads who are better than this - we've hired some really great graduates who are going to have amazing careers; but there seems to be a general attitude that it's the employer's job to provide everything and not the graduates' job to learn.

Just to give you some personal background to help explain in my first SEO job (with no experience of online marketing at all), when I was given basic SEO tasks such as a month solid of keyword research, my first reaction was to go out and find out WHY I was being asked to do it and to learn how the work I did would benefit the website - so I read the Google patent, the Yahoo patent and I read about the HITS algorithm. I started reading SEO forums, and sought out detail on how the data for the tools I was using had been gathered.

This research enabled me to start spotting SEO opportunities on the site - which I mentioned to my employers. Within a couple of months I was participating in the strategy about optimising the site, rather than just doing menial bits of tagging.

If I'd just sat back and did my work and waited to be told everything, I'd probably still be doing basic linkbuilding and shoving keywords into product descriptions rather than leading what I consider to be the best team of SEO consultants in Manchester (granted, I'm biased).

When we get graduates complaining they aren't advancing - it's generally because they aren't trying to progress, they're just waiting to be given things. That just doesn't fly - the person who puts in the effort, speaks up and actively adds value to the company is the person who gets ahead. I came out of university knowing this - what's gone wrong that such a high percentage of the grads we see don't know it?

Food for thought there.
Posted by Neal on May 18th, 2012
So what you're saying is you should tailor your cover letter to employers, demonstrating how the skills on your CV can be transferred to your business, and what the skills, listed on your CV, show you can bring to the company? Well, gosh, if I'd known that...

As I said, I have absolutely no idea where you are finding these graduates? There is certainly no dearth of talent; there's a surplus, if anything. I think the inherent problem lies in sheer numbers. Do you honestly believe that the so-called 'standard' of graduates is slipping? We graduates really better when you came out of university?

I agree there's a general disillusionment among graduates, but that's really down a statistical disparity - too many graduates for too few jobs. You're told from day one to work hard in school and you'll get into a good uni, get a good degree and you're set. Obviously that's not the case. But I wholly disagree at this sense of entitlement you're professing. There are always going to be people who expect to cruise through life, that's been the case forever and will never change. But anyone with a scintilla of nous knows that you've gotta put some graft in if you're going to get anywhere. Which brings me nicely round to pianogate. It can surely be inferred, if someone has some kind of unrelated high achievement on their CV, that, maybe, they're willing to work hard.

I suppose it's a two-way relationship. You may expect more from graduates, but they're entitled to expect a little from you. You're safe in the knowledge that for every job you advertise you'll get inundated with applications (especially as you are the self-proclaimed best SEO consultants in Manchester), of which there'll be some dross. What I refuse to accept is that so few graduates are privy to the knowledge you have to work hard after you've got your degree.

At the risk of politicising this debate, the problem possibly lies in the late 90s, early 00s encouragement that everyone should get a university education. Some people aren't cut out for it. It's not that (and you make some wild brush strokes) lots of graduates are feckless, lazy and entitled. More simply, it's that there are lots of graduates. Take a bit of pleasure in finding the good ones and stop expecting so much.
Posted by Ben on May 18th, 2012
@ Neal Wallace

"Or does everything on a CV need to be explicitly tailored to your business? "

Yes. If you want to get the job then it does need to be tailored to my business.

If you don't think about me when you're writing your CV then how do I know you're going to be thinking about the customer when you're working on my site. This is a marketing role we're talking about after all.

"Is it not your job, as someone reading a CV, to extrapolate that information?"

No. It's your job to tell me.

This might be more of a stylistic point of contention. Artistically you can justify not spelling out the benefits of a Level 8 in Piano but you're making an assumption that the person reading your CV reads it in a certain way. To you Level 8 Piano might speak of dedication and a desire to improve however to me it means absolutely nothing because I don't know which are the top grades.

Again it's treating your CV as a piece of marketing material.
Posted by Mindy on May 18th, 2012
@Neil - what Ben said...

I think you may have a point about there being so many graduates that the volume kind of hides the quality of some. As I said, we've taken on a few really bright graduates over the last few years - but the poor, CVs-by-the-numbers outweigh the good ones. In fact, 80% of the CVs we see appear to be done from a template.

Your CV and cover letter are your 1st point of contact with an employer and they need to sell you as a person. Most don't.

There's also an issue with how expectations are being set for graduates. They come to us with them set way too high and no concept of how to achieve their goals - and many of them struggle to readjust those expectations and work ethic even when confronted with the reality.

Bear in mind that my education primarily took place in the U.S. where the education system and university system are massively different. As an arts graduate (I have a history degree, not a marketing degree) I was told throughout my student years that although I should expect to start at the bottom - admin or mailroom type level - at a lower salary, that over my career I could expect to out-earn people with other qualifications. That is because the nature of what an arts degree teaches you - it's less directly applicable, but the skills you acquire help you throughout your career. This was a pretty spot-on assessment of what I experienced, and the same applies to other other arts grads I know.

I also know, from time at both US and UK universities that American universities provide skillsets and have degree requirements that aren't present in UK universities - simple things like having to pass a basic writing course - which would make so many more graduates immediately useful. Why am I, as an employer, having to teach people basic English grammar and how to put together any basic written document to make it coherent? Americans learn that in SCHOOL.

For some reason, in the UK, particularly on marketing and media studies courses, the expectation is being set very badly and the graduates, even when confronted with the reality, don't adjust those expectations. In part I do think it's a bit of hubris from the graduates because nobody wants to believe their hard-earned degree isn't as useful as they were told it would be from the off, but possibly the universities are also at fault for trying to justify the cost of a degree these days (although the cost of a degree here is massively lower than what U.S. students pay).

Whatever the reasons, we get applicants with raised expectations and no idea how to apply skills or make use of what they've learned.
Posted by Jessica on May 18th, 2012
As a relatively recent graduate, i can see both sides to this. When i graduated, i knew i had to work hard, but i had no idea of what to expect in terms of salary, job role or career progression.

There was just such a wide range of job specs out there - some graduate training programmes we're offering salaries that i now see as astronomical!

I don't blame graduates for wanting a job that justifies the hard work they put into their degree and i think most of the realistic/ intelligent ones learn pretty fast that it takes a lot of hard work.

I would hate for a good graduate to read this and become disheartened. I know how it feels and writing a CV that pleases every type of person is hard. No one knows what personal preferences an interviewer will have or what sort of character they are. In fact, I think about my graduate CV and i cringe about how i may have come across.

I think it's been mentioned before, but businesses and universities need to develop better relationships to bridge this gap in expectations. If we're serious about giving talented young people a good future, then i think a helping hand, rather than criticism, is the way to go.
Posted by Neal on May 18th, 2012
I've not really much more to add to this. We seem to have both come around to the fact that the disconnect between business and education, along with, as you put it, a hubris from graduates that stems from misleading messages regarding what their degree is worth are the key issues here.

Jessica and I were saying (on Twitter, cos we're, like, social media types) that the entitlement thing could also be a class-related. I guess that is a whole other debate. Where I went to uni (Edinburgh) there was a huge expectation of entitlement from large swathes of silver-spoon-students (which, depressingly, often materialised for them), but not from lowly comp-education northerners like me.

I also agree with the point regarding grammar and syntax. It's a genuine problem. I'm staggered by some of the emails I receive. But, alas, this stems from way before university.

I should also add that I'm an arts graduate (undergrad English, MA journalism). You could never tell from my verbosity, could you?
Posted by Laila on May 21st, 2012
Well as a recent graduate working at I-COM, I would agree with Mindy about Graduates do need to lower their expectations, in a time when it is so competitive and hard to get a job you have got to go the extra mile to stand out from other applicants if you really want to be employed.

Before I started as an employee at I-COM, I was pretty equipped with the skills required for this job; credit goes to my University for that who prepared me by allowing us to work on a real life projects each year as well as that there were few modules in my Business Information Systems degree such as SEO, web development, project management which were perfect for an SEO role but perhaps not for those who did not have an interest in this career. After my second year I did a summer placement at I-COM for 2 months and then as my interest grew stronger for this career and I wanted to improve my skills and had the urge to be better at it, I decided to take on a Search and Social Media Marketing Course during my final year of University while still working part time at I-COM. I had a clear vision of what I wanted to do when I leave University and was preparing myself for it before I had even graduated. If it wasn’t for all the extra things I was doing to prepare myself for a SEO career then I wouldn’t even had 3 jobs offers before I graduated. My CV and cover letter clearly illustrated that I have the skills required for this jobs thus I was lucky enough to be offered a full time job.

But surely this is not the case with most graduates, a year on and most people I graduated with are still applying for a graduate job day in and day out. As far as I know only 25% of them have graduate jobs. However it is really difficult to get into a job after a degree when the employers have high expectations and do not provide enough training to the new graduates. Universities does not prepare you well enough so it is up to the each individual to make them self stand out and have the commitment to learn and prepare them self, there are enough resources online e.g. if you have a keen interest in SEO or web development then you would perhaps setup a blog and tweet or enhance your web development skills too by creating the website yourself and coding it or do it for a friend, these are the things which will differentiate you.
Leave a Reply



(Your email will not be publicly displayed.)