Ready to find your social media specialist?

After reviewing thousands of open social media specialist roles, we’ve identified the most common responsibilities outlined in social media specialist job descriptions:

  • Manage and oversee social media content calendar across all platforms
  • Continuously improve campaigns by capturing and analyzing the appropriate social data/metrics, insights and best practices, and then acting on the information
  • Stay up to date with latest social media best practices and technologies
  • Collaborate with Marketing, Sales and Product Development teams
  • Generate, edit, publish and share daily content (text, video, images, etc.) that builds meaningful connections and encourages community members to take action
  • Monitor SEO and user engagement and suggest content optimization
  • Excellent writing, editing, presentation and communication skills

While these are specific responsibilities or requirements, what’s missing are the skills required to successfully execute them, which is especially important for entry-level hires who don’t have the professional track record and where GPA or major doesn’t demonstrate them. To help, we’ve worked with human capital leaders and marketing executives to map the underlying skills to the typical responsibilities below:

RESPONSIBILITY

SKILLS
Manage and oversee social media content calendar across all platforms Organization Initiative
Continuously improve campaigns by capturing and analyzing the appropriate social data/metrics, insights and best practices, and then acting on the information Grit/drive Analytical thinking
Collaborate with Marketing, Sales and Product Development teams Team player Networking
Generate, edit, publish and share daily content (text, video, images, etc.) that builds meaningful connections and encourages community members to take action Creativity Empathy
Monitor SEO and user engagement and suggest content optimization Problem solving Execution

Many of these skills can’t be measured from a GPA, aren’t captured on a college student or recent grad’s resume, and can’t be assessed through an interview process, especially those Core Skills that often make the difference. In reality, the only way to evaluate these skills is when you see these candidates in action. Micro-Internships are a perfect, easy, low-risk and low investment way for employers to see candidates demonstrate these skills first hand.

Building upon this, we have crafted and tested a handful of Micro-Internships that not only provide hiring manager with immediate value, but also will help you uncover these skills:

Sample Projects

We would like you to create a social media content calendar for our specific department with two posts per day for the next month. The posts should have a good mix of thought leadership, industry information, and promotional content (which we will provide). Please provide rationale behind your suggested posts and choice of social media platform. We will discuss the specific messaging that should be in your posts upon kickoff.

We would like you to identify 50 social media influencers on Instagram and Twitter in a specific space based upon their following and shared interests. Once you identify these influencers, craft ten potential posts/tweets we could make to engage with them and three campaign ideas to co-post with any one of the identified influencers.

We would like you to research ten key competitive products in a specific market and outline the social media efforts associated with each, including key messaging, features highlighted, pre-announcements, etc. In addition to the outbound efforts driven by the company, please capture the insights (positive and negative) provided by customers and highlight any key trends.

In order to help you pick the best candidate, you can also ask a question or two to screen the applicants - while not required, this is a great way to quickly learn about the candidates so you can select the best career launcher for your project. Here are the following we would recommend:

  • Why do you want to work on this project?
  • How would you approach this project?
  • What is your go to social media platform and why?
  • Are you available to accept an internship or full time role? Please only apply if you are interested in the full-time role or internship following this initial project.

While there may not be any “right” answer, these types of questions allow a Career Launcher to stand out by conveying an insightful perspective or passion for the role.

Assessing The Career Launcher

As highlighted above, these assignments are a great way for you to assess if a Career Launcher has the Core Skills that are required to be successful in this role. To help, we included a things to look for in what the Career Launcher provides. 

Download the full assessment here.

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Win. Win.

The benefits are invaluable. As a result of the Micro-internship you will get:

  • Completion of valuable work that wasn't the best of time for you or others at your company
  • Identify and connect with candidates to move through your interview process for an internship or full-time opportunity
  • Save time (and money) on wasted interviews of individuals who are not the right fit
  • Aid in working towards your company’s diversity and employee retention initiatives

Of course this is not just limited to marketing roles. You can see some additional examples tied to other roles or departments here.

Get Started!