Brilliance is overrated

One of the most valuable, yet underrated skills in technical marketers is their ability to relate complex ideas to non-technical audiences. It’s nice to design a brilliant lead nurture program, but you also must:

a. Document it in a way that your work can be maintained and built on once you’re gone (or get hit by a bus)

b. Educate the rest of the organization on the material value of your work (in efficiency, revenue, etc.)

If you skip these two steps, you might as well have not bothered building anything at all.

Clear, and thorough documentation is not most people’s idea of a raucous good time, but building systems where you’re the single point of failure is just irresponsible, and should be a red flag for any hiring manager. Increasingly I ask to see candidates’ examples of documentation to test for this. How they explain themselves on paper says a lot about their thought process and ability to articulate ideas clearly.

To test for a candidate’s ability to educate, I ask for them to give a presentation on a topic they’re familiar with. Explain why you made the decisions you did. What were the outcomes? How did you know what you did worked?

Interviews only show one dimension. You’ve got to test for the rest.