How to Hire your Next Community Lead
Design your role, source candidates, and run interviews with this comprehensive guide
Hiring for community is *extremely* hard to get right.
Why?
Three main reasons:
You may not have professional community experience and won’t know what to look for
It’s hard to find the perfect balance of passion for the topic and experience running communities
Even experienced community professionals don’t always know what success looks like, the industry is still figuring itself out
Well, have no fear, Spinks (and friends) are here. Today we’re going to address these challenges and much more.
I’ve hired a number of community professionals in my day. I’ve made hires that didn’t work out and I’ve made hires that took our community to the moon. I’ve also helped dozens of companies hire for community through my Talent Collective where I match up companies who are hiring with candidates who are looking. I’ve learned a lot along the way.
For this guide, I’ve also pulled in a few experts who have deep experience hiring for community:
Jamie Johnston, Community Program Manager at Spotify
Morgan Brady, Director of Community at Inc. and Fast Company
Alan Aisbitt, Director of Community at Splunk
Phoebe Venkat, Senior Consulting at Feverbee
Izzy Neis, Head of Digital at ModSquad
I hope this helps you avoid some of the usual landmines, and gives you the confidence to land someone that will take your community to great heights.
This guide is broken down into three sections:
Part 1: Designing Your Community Role
Part 2: Sourcing Community Candidates
Part 3: Interviewing Community Candidates
One note before we dive in: I’m going to avoid generic hiring advice here. There are a lot of great resources on topics like inclusive hiring, creating a hiring rubric, general interview tips, etc. This guide will focus on best practices only if they’re specific to hiring for community.
Cool? Cool. Let’s do this…
Part 1: Designing Your Community Role
You’d be surprised how many companies I speak to get tripped up at this early stage, rushing out a job description before they’ve figured out what they want this person to accomplish.
Here’s what you should do instead…
1. Make it clear what business goal this person will be accountable to
Community means a lot of different things to different people. You want to overcommunicate here and make it really clear what community means to your company.
“Remove that line about the candidate being able to ‘thrive in ambiguity’ from the job description”, says Alan Aisbitt, who recently hired a Senior Community Marketing Manager at Splunk. “Invest more time up-front and know what it is you’re looking to achieve with this person.”
“Build community” isn’t a business goal. You need to know what this person will be building community to achieve. Are they focused on customer support and success? Will they be accountable to marketing goals? You can use the SPACES model as a guide for communicating the business goals that this person will be responsible for:
Support - reduce support costs
Product - get feedback and insights to improve your product
Acquisition - get new customers / users
Contribution - populate a platform or marketplace with content, goods or services
Engagement - deepen customer retention and loyalty
Success - help customers become more successful at using your product
2. Be specific in how they will be involved in the community
Are they expected to be showing up in the community every day, posting, commenting, and engaging? Or are they going to be more of an operator, working behind the scenes? As Izzy Neis from ModSquad puts it, “Is this person a ‘content creator’ or is this person a ‘community facilitator’? There's a pretty solid split right now with rising talent, but every now and then I find a unicorn who ROCKS at both.”
There are many different kinds of community programs that they could own, for example:
Interest-based forums, message boards, or chat groups
Conferences, meetups, and events (online and offline)
Ambassador programs
Support forums
Chapter-based event programs
Small-group-discussions and pods
Mentor programs
Power-user groups
Moderator programs
Community content programs
You may not know which kinds of programs they’ll be responsible for yet. Maybe you’re hoping they’ll figure out what to build. That’s okay! Just be clear about what you know and what you don’t know.
Warning: Most community professionals do not own social media. It’s a common mistake that businesses make, conflating community management with social media marketing. They’re different roles with different goals that require different skills. If you’re a small company then you may need this person to do both. That’s okay. They’ll appreciate it if you acknowledge that they’re different roles.
3. Find the right balance of experience and passion
The difference between a community builder and a community professional is that a professional can build a community for any topic.
This is one of the biggest challenges when hiring for community. You want someone with real experience leading a community operation, but you also want someone who has skin in the game with your community. Someone with a genuine curiosity for the topic or, ideally, real experience with it.
In my personal experience, you want to lean a bit more heavily on community experience over passion. The difference between a community builder and a community professional is that a professional can build a community for any topic. A professional doesn’t necessarily need to be a member of the community themselves. They’ll know how to empower others to lead and contribute to the community. They’ll know how to build the community operation.
If you can find someone to run your fishing community who has traversed the seven seas AND has project managed an enterprise community migration, then you have yourself a unicorn (or maybe a loch ness monster). But most companies will have to settle for either passion or community experience.
4. Stay open to outsiders
You may have a better chance finding that person if you’re open to industry outsiders.
Create a path for candidates who don’t have “pure” community experience or community titles, but who can still execute at a high level in a community role.
To do this, “focus on transferable experience”, says Phoebe Venkat from Feverbee. “I've built high-performing community teams made up of people from wildly different professional backgrounds - social media, translation, operations, etc. Understand if they have relevant and transferable experience - and if they can articulate that to you with specific examples.”
They often come from other fields like education and non-profits. Others may have had a marketing or operational title in the past but if you dig deeper, you’ll realize a lot of their work was actually community building.
A benefit of staying open to people outside the community industry is you can include more people of color in the candidate pool. While the community industry is majority female, it’s also majority white. If you only source candidates from within the community industry it’s unlikely to be a diverse pool.
5. Focus your job description on the info community professionals are curious about
Let your voice shine through in your job description. Community professionals, the empathetic humans that we are, connect with authenticity.
Beyond the obvious (skills, responsibilities, experience, etc.) here’s a checklist of what to include in your job description:
Definition of community: What does community mean to your business? How would you describe it?
Business goals: What is the business goal of the community and what success looks like for this candidate?
Member identity: Who are the members that the community focus on? Customers? Sellers? Moms? Gamers? Paint a picture.
Community programs: What kinds of community programs are they expected to run? Online or offline? Forums? Events? Slack groups? Conferences?
Community involvement: Will this candidate be expected to actively engage the community themself, operate the community from behind the scenes, or both?
Community goals: what kind of community engagement or growth goals will they be accountable for?
Reporting structure: What department does community live under? Who will this person report to?
Team structure: What does the rest of the community team look like? Who else will they work with from outside the community team?
Culture: What is your community culture like? What are your values? (This stuff is really important to community pros)
Compensation: Sometimes community roles are way underpaid, so make it clear upfront that you pay well
Additional resources:
To better understand levels of seniority and competency in community, use the Community Career Map.
Look through examples of community job descriptions on my job board for inspiration.
Still feeling unsure? Go to the CMX Slack community and ask for feedback. Community pros are generally very happy to give feedback on job postings.
Part 2: Sourcing Community Candidates
Once you have a clear idea of who you want to hire, it’s time to start sourcing candidates.
Here’s what that will look like…
1. Get ready for the firehose
I’m going to warn you right now… if you post your job on LinkedIn and other large hiring platforms you’re going to get *a lot* of applications.
Jamie Johnston who hired a mid-level Community Project Manager for Spotify, recalled, “We got hundreds of applicants. Too many too quickly - virtually all were low quality, cut-and-paste, not tailored.”
Community is one of those roles that everyone thinks they can do, and most don’t understand. It’s easier than ever to apply for jobs today with a click. Quality becomes a big issue. It can take days to sort through all the inbound applications you’ll get. Adrian Speyer recently shared what it looks like from the hiring manager’s perspective when sourcing candidates on LinkedIn.
If you have a great system (and team) for filtering through inbound applications, then you can find great people that way. There are a ton of high-quality candidates out there looking for community work right now. A lot more candidates than jobs. Bad for candidates but good for you. It’s a hirer’s market.
The truth is a lot of the teams I speak to get overwhelmed with the inbound and give up. “We closed submissions to clear the backlog - then reopened, with specific outreach to specific personal network”, said Johnston.
Similarly, Alan Aisbitt at Splunk shared that they received 300 applications in the first 48 hours. “We interviewed 10 people. The person we ended up hiring was someone we reached out to through David’s Talent Collective.”
My advice is to post your jobs to more targeted job boards and communities rather than on the larger job sites. The big platforms are really bad at understanding community (just try searching for community jobs… 90% of the results will be for apartment building managers).
Just keep in mind that if you rely on going outbound to your existing network, and your network isn’t diverse, to have to be extra proactive about reaching out to other networks that include candidates from underrepresented groups. Otherwise, your candidate pool will look just like your network: white and privileged.
2. Source from companies who “get” community
Find companies that have communities that you admire, and reach out directly to people who work (or worked) there.
There have been a lot of layoffs. That means that there are a lot of highly talented community professionals looking for jobs right now.
When Morgan Brady was hiring a Community Operations Manager for Inc. and Fast Company she specifically targeted talent who was let go from On Deck. “I had gone through multiple On Deck programs myself and was impressed by their growth, member onboarding, and communications and knew there would be talent with an inclination for systems that helped scale membership communities.”
Find a company with a community program that you really respect, and see if they’ve had layoffs recently. Your next community lead might be there.
3. Be cautious when hiring from within the community
A lot of companies turn to their community members when hiring for community. If someone has been super active in your community, they’re a natural fit to lead your community team, right?
Often, no.
I hike in the woods every day but you shouldn’t hire me to lead the region’s reforestation efforts. There’s a canyon-sized difference between participating in a community and running a community: setting up and tracking analytics, integrating technology systems, developing leadership programs and playbooks, managing people, creating moderating systems, managing conflict, running events… you get it.
If there’s someone in your community who has experience leading teams and operations in some capacity, they could be a good fit. Remember to stay open to outsiders! But don’t hire someone just because they’re active in your community. Make sure they have the right skills and experience.
4. Find great writers
One of the most overlooked skills when hiring for community is writing ability.
Building virtual communities is like 90% writing: posting in the community, commenting, writing rules and guidelines, writing playbooks for ambassadors, writing copy for event landing pages, writing emails and newsletters, etc.
If the community is primarily online, and you expect this person to actively engage the community, look for candidates who are incredible writers.
It’s usually easy to tell. Just look at their social media content, blogs, and newsletters and you’ll be able to tell pretty quickly who has a knack for the written word.
Part 3: Interviewing Community Candidates
You’ve got your job description looking all pretty and you’ve sourced some talented candidates… you’re ready to get to talk’n.
Here are some things that you should dig into in your interviews…
1. Suss out the type of community experience they have
Izzy Neis has interviewed hundreds of community managers and moderators for ModSquad. The biggest hiring lesson she’s experienced is, “assuming established community managers had inherent hustle, organization skills, or professional tone and ability just because they had experience.”
They may have community experience, but do they have the right experience for your community? Do they have the right mentality? Are they up on the newest community trends? And as we discussed in Part 1, there are many different kinds of community programs. Can they run the kinds of programs you need?
Also, be mindful of the stage of community they have experience with. For example, if you’re hiring someone to build a community from scratch, a candidate who has only worked on managing existing communities will have a learning curve. And on the other side, someone who has built a community from scratch may not have the experience of operating a large community at scale.
Interview questions you can steal:
To understand if they’ve kept up with trends: What do you think has changed about building communities in the last three years?
To see if they still have “the fire”: Tell me about a time you got your hands dirty to solve a problem in your last role.
To understand the “community stage” they have experience with: Tell me about a community program you built from scratch. Tell me about a community program you operated at large scale.
2. Uncover the stories behind the stats
Candidates will often have a lot of stats in their resumes and portfolios. The interview is where you get the context behind those results.
At Spotify, Johnston would encourage interviewers and interviewees to focus on stories. “Too often I see outputs listed on resumes like ‘I improved sales by 10%.’ In the interview, it has to be about how the candidate took part in that specific metric. What did they do themselves, and what did they do as part of a team?” he explains.
“Reflect for me what they learned and observed. I want to hear how they approached a difficult conversation, or how they planned for a long-term deliverable. The final metric doesn't matter as much as what role they played, and how they grew from the experience.”
Tell your candidates upfront what questions you’re going to ask, and what you look for in great answers, so they can communicate their stories clearly. You’re not testing if they’re a good interviewer, you’re testing if they’re the right person to lead your community team. Take the “interview” out of it so that their experience and personality can shine through.
I try to find a candidate’s “zone of genius”. I want to know what kind of work gets them “in flow” and what kind of work feels like a slog through the mud.
I also want to determine what their “spikey points of view” are, as Wes Kao likes to call them. I like candidates who have a strong opinion about how to build community, especially ones that feel a little counterculture. It means they’ll be decisive and build something different.
Interview questions you can steal:
To understand what matters to them at work: What did you love about your last community job? What was most frustrating?
To understand their contributions: Tell me what your role was in achieving [goal] and what other members of the team were responsible for.
To understand their point of view: What mistakes did you make when working on [program] and what would you do differently next time? What do you think most community builders do wrong?
3. Look for genuine excitement
For Neis at ModSquad, the “it factor” for ideal candidates is “when they fall into memories about events, activities, or communities… like they step through time and proudly discuss the experience.”
I love hiring community nerds (like me). The people who suddenly wake up at night because they thought of a good icebreaker or an idea for how to optimize their member onboarding. They should look at community like a creative journey, a constant experiment, something they’re constantly trying to get better at.
Venkat has a similar view. “Find lifelong learners, people with beginner's mindset. Ask about the different ways they're learning - podcasts, books, articles, videos, etc. Are they absorbing learning outside of professional/business content?”
You can tell when someone is going through the motions and when someone is truly excited. Throughout the interview, pay attention to points where their eyes light up. Where the geek comes out to play.
If they seem bored talking about community, it’s going to be a no for me dog.
Interview questions you can steal:
To determine if they’re a community nerd: Walk me through a small change you made to your community that you’re really proud of. How do you go about experimenting with new community tactics? Where do you go to learn about community?
To understand what work they naturally gravitate toward: What aspects of community building bring you the most joy? Which aspects feel the most painful?
To get a feel for the kinds of communities they love: What kinds of communities have you had in your life that you love? Can you give me 1-2 examples of the shenanigans or events that created lore and loyalty for you? (this one is from Izzy Neis)
4. Learn their systems
Sometimes community professionals are compared to a party host: schmoozing with guests, shaking hands, making introductions. That’s part of the role, but behind the scenes they’re also the planner who spent months organizing the event and coordinating a thousand moving pieces to make sure everything runs smoothly.
To be a great community professional you need to have great systems.
There’s a good chance you’re hiring someone because you know where you want to go with your community, but you don’t have the systems in place to get you there.
This is what Brady found when hiring for Inc and Fast Company. “I know all of the things that need to be done to create a successful membership experience but the tedium nature of creating systems and workflows physically pains me. I needed someone that could help take my big picture vision and put it into action.”
Your goal when interviewing should be to suss out what systems the candidate has developed and how effective they are at implementing them.
An experienced community professional should have processes they’ve used in the past for things like goal setting, content calendars, analytics dashboards, communications processes, moderation policies, etc.
Interview questions you can steal:
To understand their systems and operations: Walk me through your process for how you measured and reported on [stat from their resume] / moderated your community / launched [community program]
To understand how they problem solve: What would your process look like if a community’s engagement has plateaued / a community has become toxic?
To learn about their habits: What things do you think are important to do every day?
5. Use take-home projects sparingly
There are three common mistakes companies make when assigning take-home projects to community candidates:
They create projects to discover things that could have been covered in interview questions
They drastically underestimate how much time it will take to complete a project (and don’t pay the candidate for their time)
They ask for work that the candidate has already done in the past and can share
It’s exhausting for candidates who put in hours of work completing projects just to be declined for the role, or worse, not hear back at all. Candidates who can’t afford to do all the work unpaid will just drop out of the process, leaving you with a less diverse pool.
It’s a mistake I’ve made in the past. Now I avoid using projects if I can. There’s almost always an alternative way to get the insight you need. For example, instead of making them write something new, I’ll ask them for writing samples from their past work.
Instead of asking them to create a 90-day plan, I’ll tell them ahead of an interview that I’m going to ask them what they’ll do in the first 90 days so they can prepare a brief answer and share it live.
Instead of asking them to write hypothetical posts to engage the community or manage conflict, I’ll ask them to show me some of their past community content and communications if they’re able to. I can also learn a lot about how engaging their community content will be by looking at their social media feeds.
It’s also becoming more common for community professionals to have a portfolio, like a designer. This can give you a much better idea of their work than you’ll find in a resume and cover letter.
If you can’t find any of their past work, and they don’t have anything to show you, then you might want to ask them to complete a project. You might ask them to create a portfolio of their work because at least if it doesn’t work out with you, they can use that in their other interviews.
If you create a custom project, complete it yourself first so you have an idea of how long it takes, and keep it to a minimum.
If you decide to do a project, here are a few ideas you can steal:
To test for communication abilities: Give them a hypothetical email you received from an angry community member and ask them to type a response.
To test for taste: Ask them to share three ideas for speakers or experts they’d invite to the community to do an interview, and why they think the community would be really excited to learn from them.
To test for community engagement abilities: Ask them to share three pieces of content they’ve created for a community in the past that worked well, and explain why it worked.
That’s a wrap!
Did you have fun? I know I did.
Here’s what we covered today:
Part 1: Designing your community role:
Make it clear what business goal this person will be accountable to
Be specific in how they will be involved in the community
Find the right balance of experience and passion
Stay open to outsiders
Focus your job description on the info community professionals are curious about
Part 2: Sourcing community candidates:
Get ready for the firehose
Source from companies who “get” community
Be cautious when hiring from within the community
Find great writers
Part 3: Interviewing community candidates:
Unpack their experience
Uncover the stories behind the stats
Look for genuine excitement
Learn their systems
Use take-home projects sparingly
I hope this helps you land an incredible community lead for your team. Your community matters, and it deserves to have someone incredible steering the ship.
Once you hire someone you can help them get up to speed with my 90-day plan for their first few months in the job.
One last thing…
I can help you hire your next community manager / director!
My Talent Collective has 200+ hand-picked candidates, all with legitimate experience building community and developer relationships programs at companies like Asana, Stripe, Calm, NYT, TED, Canva, Microsoft, Twitter, Airbnb, Intuit, Dell, EA, Meta, Yelp, Google, OnDeck, Shopify, Rally, CourseHero, and more.
My team and I also offer recruiting services so if you want us to do the heavy lifting of sourcing and screening candidates for you, get in touch. There’s a fee if you hire them, but no upfront cost.
Have any questions about this article or anything else related to hiring for community? Drop a comment or hit reply. I’m here to help.
Looking for a community job? Stay tuned! I’ll be sharing a full “how-to guide” for finding your dream community job soon. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!
That’s all for today!
I’m up too late finishing this post after a wonderful few days in the Bay Area. I had a speaking gig in San Diego and my family tagged along so we could see our old friends and neighborhoods in SF. Yesterday was a perfect day at Rodeo Beach:
This was our first time flying with both kids! We prepared for the worst but it went smooth as butter. They were both champs. Lucca (2.5 years) straight chilled and Ophelia (4 months) was doling out smiles to everyone around us. The lady across the aisle offered to hold her while we ate. More people like that on planes, please.
Ok off to bed for me. Until next week!
Thanks for building community.
-David
Thanks for sharing this comprehensive guide! I just landed a new role and I see a lot of what I experienced firsthand as a candidate here. 🙌🏽
Boy is this great!