Find out more about the jobs market for content strategy as we release the first set of results from our hiring trends survey. We’ll be publishing more findings, including pay rates and most desirable skills, in future posts.
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Firehead’s Content Strategy Recruitment Trends Survey* was conducted from March to August 2012 through a mix of online tools and by phone or email contact with Firehead clients and other potential hirers.
We’ll be adding our own experience into the analysis, with comment from CJ Walker, who runs Firehead and recruits for content strategy roles in the UK and Europe and North America. But this is very much a community exercise so please do add your experiences here, too.
67% of respondents said they hired, or are intending to hire, content strategists in their organisation with 74% planning to hire content strategy roles in the next 12 months.
Another 7% are seeking budget for content strategy, 4% are considering the need and 7% are looking at grooming someone from their in-house team.
While these are high percentages, and good news for the jobs market, they also reflect that survey respondents are more likely to be already engaged with content strategy or have needs in this area.
But there is no doubt that content strategy has been growing as a field and the content strategy community has been very successful in getting the word out though content strategy conferences, books, webinars, blogging, online networks and meet-up groups.
CJ Walker says:
“I have seen consistently increasing requirements for content strategists in Europe this year. I think it’s taken more time to catch on in Europe than the US, but the requirements are increasing as clients see how effective the results are for their organisations.
“It’s about more than the huge savings on the bottom line that a proper CS can bring to their organisation. It’s also about the indirect benefits – such as visibility to their target audience – which bring high-quality customers to them. This is getting into content marketing territory, but they’re cousins and, again, it’s all about content.”
The majority of our content strategy hirers were digital communications agencies and B2B businesses.
Content strategy has a natural home in medium-large businesses – who have sufficient need and budget for content strategy work – or digital marketing and publishing agencies serving the content needs of brands.
‘Other’ types of hiring organisations listed by respondents included government agency, content strategy consultancy and technical documentation services provider.
“This is not a big surprise,” says CJ, “because these are the people who are the most concerned about content strategy right now and understand that content is an asset to be used strategically for branding, usability, corporate communications, marketing, customer service, and so on. They have a reason to care, one that may directly or indirectly affect their bottom line.
“Sometimes, I think the word ‘strategy’ scares some clients away, especially smaller businesses who are conditioned to fear the price tag and free reign for running up the bill that are associated with it. Although I firmly believe that what we are doing is strategising content at the same level that the technical and other established elements are doing, I worry about this silly little word’s impact on how clients perceive our services. (As a side point, this is exactly why we set up Content Strategy Bitesize – to take that fear away and to offer a budget option or an assessment for buy-in.)
Content strategy hotspots – still the US, increasingly the UK.
It will surprise no one that the United States, which has established a significant content strategy community that has been pushing the field since 2008/09, is where most of our hiring respondents are located.
But the UK was also well represented with 22% of respondents from here. This may be due to the cluster of digital agencies in London, in particular, and the spread of content strategy as a field through dedicated conferences and meetups.
Although our survey respondents reflect our reach as a digital communications recruiter, there is evidence to suggest that the figures do also reflect the market and the uptake of ‘content strategist’ as a dedicated job title in the US and UK – as seen in our research last summer into 30 content strategy job adverts.
Still, our experience is that content strategy in the UK and mainland Europe is more likely to be included as a task within other job titles, or is a role that comes with a lot of additional responsibilities.
“At Firehead, we’re seeing more and more recognition of content strategy as a role, but not necessarily as a job title with an agreed set of tasks and responsibilities,” says CJ. “As a respondent to our survey from the UK pointed out, in their team ‘all members of the web team are expected to contribute to content strategy. We will not hire anyone to just do content strategy’. This seems to be a trend in both agency and in-house hiring.
“The location of hirers is also interesting because it has an impact on salaries and freelance rates, as we’ll see in later posts, which also cover the specific skills that bump up the pay rates.”
Employers missing out on temp-to-perm advantages.
We asked those with specific hiring needs in the next 12 months how many content strategists they were looking to hire and how these would be employed in order to see a breakdown of the types of contract on offer.
There was a definite trend towards employing either contract/freelance staff or permanent employees. Between half and two-thirds of respondents were hiring content strategists in this way. Temp-to-perm contracts were far less common, however (only 22% were looking to hire this type of worker).
“This is surprising,” says CJ. “In an economy like this, you would think that companies would want to hire people they had tried and tested first. So why is temp-to-perm less popular?
“I see it like this: content strategy is still in its very early states as a field. Hirers are more inclined to include them in discrete projects than to take someone on board full-time for what they see as project-oriented work. Either they have an ongoing need – and the budget – in which case, they hire for salaried positions and have them work on many ‘related’ requirements to content strategy – as we noted in our survey of 30 content strategy job ads last year.
“Or they use a contracted content strategy service for a defined amount of time and budget to get the project done. After the initial strategic stages, governance and maintenance come in, which, while a very important part of an ongoing strategy, can usually be done by lower cost resources.”
41% of hiring respondents required content workers to be on-site; only 22% allowed home working; 37% were open to a mix of the two.
“Much to the dismay of many digital workers I’m sure, there hasn’t been an overwhelming requirement or enthusiasm for complete teleworking – only 22%,” says CJ.
“I know, this is the digital age but hirers are people too and they like to work with people they know. Face-to-face still counts for a lot. Remember, we were asking hirers what they want.
“The compromise option – a mix of working partly in the office and partly off-site or from home – came in at a healthy 37%, which shows there is room for negotiation. In my experience, it works best when the worker is already established and well known in the office from full-time work. Then, the project managers know the person they’re talking to on the phone or online. It makes all the difference.
“The one danger here is the technical incompatibility issue. Something always comes up –different browsers, different software, email incompatibilities, etc – and if it slows down or complicates the project, well…
“What did surprise me was that 41% of our survey respondents said they require content workers to be on site the whole time. This could be a residual culture of office working, or maybe because the less digital roles still have to work on site. It could come down to good old-fashioned wanting to have your physical presence in the team, or maybe that we received so many responses from agencies. But there are many aspects of content strategy that can easily be done externally, from the content inventory work to writing up the report.”
In future survey posts, we’ll be looking in more detail about what issues hirers want content strategy workers to address and the level of experience required.
In summary
“While the importance of content is definitely becoming clearer to the wider web and publishing world (and we’re all publishers now, you know), the way it’s applied in hiring is not so neatly defined across territories – yet.
“Much of this comes down to job titles, not actual roles. In the US, where content strategy as a discipline originally caught on, there are far more jobs advertised for content strategists than here in Europe, for example, where the roles still tend to be embedded in the larger organisation/project.
“This means for web content strategy especially, that you could easily find yourself doing bits of IA, usability, copywriting, web analytics, CMS work, project management… lots of things that are organically part of a digital project but not really specifically defined as content strategy. Of course, content strategists will tell you that they have to work with and understand the principles of those other roles in order to do their own job well. Nothing about content lives in a vacuum.
“So it’s partly a question (or a big debate!) of job titles. But also how to help a wider set of employers and hirers understand what a content strategist does – and how hiring one can improve their bottom line. How much the content strategy community continues to evolve, clarify, develop and promote the field beyond its established US following, will help further uptake elsewhere. We’re optimistic that this will help with selling it in to hirers in the UK and mainland Europe over the next few years.”
Stay tuned for more survey results in the next few weeks.
* Our online survey questionnaire was disseminated via the Firehead blog and social networks inviting anyone in a position to hire in content strategy work, from HR managers to department heads. The survey remained open from 1 March to 1 August 2012. We also contacted a number of recruiters on Firehead’s client list as part of the exercise. The 30 respondent hirers came from a range of countries and backgrounds. Further results will be shared here on the Firehead blog. Firehead is a leading recruiter in digital communications and is based in Europe.
Further reading from Firehead blog
