FatJoe - Head of Marketing

FatJoe is a brand that we've known almost since its inception. When we were digital agency-side ourselves, we were one of their early clients, working with them to build external links for our SEO clients.

Since those early days, they've expanded their offer considerably, but run their operations lean with a team of 20 based in Cannock in the Midlands.

When you run lean, every hire you bring in has to be not just a high performer, but a cultural fit.

So when FatJoe were looking for a new Head of Marketing to join them, they knew that the search had to be based not just on background and ability, but on how that person would integrate into the business and drive FatJoe's own marketing forward.

Running lean also means that the hiring process is lean, with candidates required to submit a video before being invited to an interview, and then being given a task as the final stage.

Our challenge was to build a strong shortlist of candidates for interview who would show the appreciation for FatJoe's model and the entrepreneurial get-up-and-go required to make the newly created role a success.

We knew that we had to do the following:

• Go for the very best on the market - i.e. the top of the range, and preferably not on the market right now
• Find those who knew who FatJoe were - which meant those with agency experience, preferably SEO experience in an agency setting
• Find people who shared FatJoe's vision, and who already 'spoke their language', without being prompted
• Spread our net wider - look for people further afield who were willing to go into Cannock once or twice a month

We knew that other recruiters were using job ads, with relatively little success in finding such a specialised profile.

Our methodology was as follows:

• Widen the geographical scope to locations that were within a two-hour commute of Cannock
• Shorten the scope of profile to potential candidates who have both brand and agency-side experience
• Shorten it further to those with SEO and leadership experience
• Define multiple outreach methodologies (InMail, Email, LinkedIn Connection Requests) to capture as many of the available market
• Schedule 30-minute interviews with a long-list of 20 candidates

With an attractive role and a healthy salary, the role was easy to promote to the whole market, not just the active market, and we achieved a 72% response rate from our initial long list of candidates to approach.

We devised a semi-structured interview that would allow us to dig into the candidates' experience but also probe their values and their entrepreneurial background, and we used Metaview to collect transcripts and develop a standardised set of AI notes, scoring the candidates in real time.

Finally, we made our final selection for the client with just five candidates making it through to presentation, and all five were invited to the initial video interview.

We had a hunch (many recruiters do) that FatJoe would choose the first candidate we pitched, and this is indeed what happened after a process that took little more than four weeks end-to-end.

"The Head of Marketing role was a difficult one for us as it was one of the first Senior positions we'd looked to recruit for. Prior to this our employees had naturally grown with the business. We have a close-knit team and our CEO has a background in marketing so we were fussy, to say the least. We had a few recruitment companies work with us over a period of a year and whilst there were some great candidates, none felt quite right. Gareth understood our business and sent us some amazing candidates pretty quickly. As Gareth said, unicorns do exist, I just needed him to find them. It was a pleasure working with Example and we would without hesitation again."

Emily Bradley, Head of Business Operations, FatJoe