How organisations can turn their tech stack into a hiring magnet

​Imagine you’re a digital marketer considering two near-identical job offers from competing organisations. The working conditions are similar and the salary is the same, but there’s one key difference: company A uses a spreadsheet-based approach to marketing analytics, while company B employs the latest integrated analytics software.

Obviously, you would choose the organisation with the cutting-edge tech stack. A data analytics task might take hours of manual work at company A, but can be completed at the touch of a button at company B.

Put simply, up-to-date technology means your job will be easier and frees up more time for higher-value, meaningful tasks.  

The trend of candidates seeking to work at companies with sophisticated tech stacks first emerged in the software development industry. A massive survey of 90,000 developers by stackoverflow found that “languages, frameworks, and other technologies I’d be working with” was the top-rated job priority, with 54% of respondents placing this in their three most important factors. In this survey, technology is a higher-rated factor than many of the traditional EVP features including company culture, flexible schedule, opportunities for professional development, and remote working.

At Six Degrees, we have observed this trend emerging in the digital marketing space. In practice, this means candidates are researching or asking questions about the technology they will potentially be working with, while employers are increasingly promoting their #MarTech (marketing technology) stacks as a way to attract and interest digital talent.

Here are some tips on using a tech stack to attract digital marketing talent.

Why do digital marketing candidates value cutting-edge tech?  

We know that MarTech is a productivity booster. 57% of digital marketers use technology to improve marketing efficiency, while 65% use MarTech to improve ROI and consider it a business priority. 63% of marketers plan to increase their marketing automation budget.  

The list of potential MarTech applications is prodigious and growing every day. Automation use-cases include email marketing, lead management, social media posting and more.

A Forbes exploration of this topic highlighted MarTech’s transformative potential in the following areas:

• Automating team collaborations

• Setting up automated nurturing

• Using email sequencing for follow-up

• Automating list segmentation, and

• Automating analytics.

Digital marketers not only value the time-savings enabled by sophisticated MarTech, but are aware that it helps them look great at their job. MarTech enables employees to work faster, scale up their activities with ease, and leverage valuable data insights that would be difficult to extract manually. And with ever-improving UX, many modern MarTech solutions are genuinely a pleasure to work with.

Marketing your marketing technology

The challenge is for employers to broadcast their MarTech stacks to help attract digital talent. Some methods for doing so include:

1. Adding a “Technology” section to your Careers page and ensuring this information is easy for candidates to discover online.

2. Creating and promoting recruitment-focused content including blogs and videos describing the technology used.

3. Including a description of your marketing technology in job ads.

4. (Further down the recruitment pipeline) ensuring technology is discussed during the job interview.

5. Make sure hiring managers are well-versed in the topic and can confidently discuss the technology involved in the role.

6. Optimising and modernising your hiring process to ensure it aligns with your brand persona as a tech-savvy company.

A cutting-edge MarTech stack can be a powerful argument when attempting to entice a passive candidate away from their current role. Have a conversation about the incumbent’s current frustrations (such as manual or time-consuming tasks), and show them how the technology at the hiring organisation would make their job easier.

Incorporate MarTech into your EVP 

Don’t rely on the strength of your MarTech alone to attract top digital candidates. Packaging this benefit along with the other factors in your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) such as salary, career progression, annual leave, flexible hours, remote work, team culture, and values.

Learn more in Six Degrees Executive and Arktic Fox latest Digital & Marketing In Focus Study Report. ​