Read This Before You Hire a Community Manager

Four steps to hiring the best community manager ever

The modern community industry is in its infancy. It’s just learning how to speak, how to walk, and how to play well with everyone on the playground. While online communities have been around for decades, the rise of the creator industry has ignited a new demand for gathering folks digitally and corporately. In the big beautiful family of corporate America, community is the first grandchild. It represents a new generation in terms of how businesses operate in relation to their customers and so while beloved by all they are also understood by none. And just like every grandmother wants a grandchild, so we find now that every company wants a community manager. 

So how do you hire for a role that is so relatively new that the promotion ladder is just a Google doc with the shrug emoji 🤷🏻‍♀️? Having spoken to others in the community industry, experienced my fair share of LinkedIn cold DMs, and been on the hiring team for several community managers at Squarespace, I’ve gotten a good sense of what, at a minimum, you need to have sorted before starting to hire a community manager. I’ve broken these key elements down below. It’s important to have this all figured out before starting your hiring process for two reasons:

1. You’ll get a stronger group of applicants. Having a clear job description and strategy for finding talent means you will naturally be able to recruit folks who are a better fit for the kind of role you are hiring for.

2. Whoever you hire will be able to hit the ground running. There’s no reason that your onboarding time should be drawn out due to a lack of clarity on your team about where this person should sit in the org or what kind of resources will be available to them.

You don’t have to have everything figured out, no family ever does, but making definitive decisions on the following will set you up for significantly greater success:

Know why you are hiring a community manager

“Community is really hot right now” is both true and a terrible reason to hire a community manager. If your company doesn’t have a user group that you are bringing this person on to manage, you might not actually need a community manager. Ask yourself “Who makes up our community?” or even “Who are we hoping to attract to our product that would benefit from community?” 

Simultaneously, try to figure out what the main functions of this person will be. Is it growing the community? Nurturing an existing one? Connecting customers to the product teams? Increasing usage of your product? These are all super valid reasons to hire a community manager, but you gotta pick (at least) one. And if you pick all of them, you should be hiring more than one community manager. We’re super good at our jobs, but we aren’t superhuman.

Put them on the right team

There’s a big difference between putting your community manager on the product team and putting them in marketing. If I had been raised in New York City instead of DC, I’d probably have a very different sense of fashion and a very specific disdain for New Jersey. The environment you are raised in dictates a lot about your priorities and the resources you have access to. Understanding the strategy behind why you are hiring a community manager will help you to understand where in your org they should go. If it’s vital they connect the dots between your customers and your product strategy, put them in product. If they are going to be responsible for marketing your product, put them on marketing. This is all caveated with an assumption that you aren’t starting a community department. If you are, I’m so proud of you and you can ignore this guidance but please don’t forget to give them a real budget!! Community teams are always under-resourced, but that’s a newsletter for another time.

Write a clear job description

To the recruiters who have reached out to me with a very! exciting! opportunity! and no job description: I love you but you’re literally the wizard from Oz. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen folks bamboozled by companies hiring for a “community manager” who ended up wanting that person to also run social media and their organic content strategy because it wasn’t clear from the outset what the job responsibilities were. If you’ve already taken the time to build out a strategy and you know where this person is going to sit, you are already halfway there. Just pop that text into bullets and you’re basically ready to roll baby. Specifically, you want to include:

1. What team is this role sitting on

2. What are their key job functions

3. What teams will they work most closely with

4. Any key projects or areas of the business they will touch
   

Share the salary

Living in New York is the coolest for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest is that all companies here are required to list salary ranges on job postings. Sharing job salaries is vital for attracting the right audience for your role and increases the likelihood that if someone is offered a job, they won’t turn it down over pay. It’s still pretty unclear how community professionals should be paid, but I highly recommend this guide from CMX that details how community managers with a variety of years of experience at different levels should be compensated. And if you need an extra push to share this information, this is a reminder that salary range transparency reduces the gender wage gap! Be the solution friends!!

Okay I know we said at the beginning that the community industry was this vast, confusing space, but I think you and me, we’re gonna be okay. Strategy? ✅ Org Chart Plan ✅ Job Description ✅ Salary Range ✅

Ready to hire for your next community role? Check out David Spinks’ job board, the Community Club jobs page, Jenny’s community job board roundup article, and send me your role and I’ll share it with my network!

Thank you to community experts Jenny Weigle and Max Pete for your feedback on this newsletter!