For the past couple of weeks I have had the great pleasure finding community managers for an upcoming project. I started by putting up a post on Craigslist and within a few days I had hundreds of applicants. I then had the difficult task of deciding who was worthy and who was not worthy of moving on to the next stage of a phone interview. There were many different types of applicants – the funny applicant, the serious applicant and the I’m just going to tell you everything about myself applicant. I narrowed my list down to ten potential community managers in each city by resume, if they intrigued me in their application and their involvement in social networks.
Out of my list of ten from each city I narrowed it down to four from each city. I selected these four based on what they said in their paragraph of their application. If you can impress me in about five paragraphs then you are who I want to speak to. The phone interviews were even better then the written applications. There is nothing better than having an interesting chatty conversation leaving me going “Wow” after I have hung up from you. After choosing my community managers I think the top three traits that each of these people have are:
To put it simply, they are just interesting: I was intrigued from the paragraph they wrote in their application to the half hour phone interview we had. It can be hard impressing a stranger you have never met and the community managers I chose did this with no effort at all.
They are involved: Whether it is in their community or on social networks. They are out there interacting with others and who better to have as a community manager than someone to get the word out there to others.
They are enthused: The community managers I chose, each one whether it was during our phone call or sending me an email after all gave me great ideas of places to go or sites to visit to expand our network and each wanted to know when they could start. If you find community managers that are enthused about the project it makes everything run so much smoother.
By Brittani Jarvis
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