Marijuana Business Magazine - May-June 2018

as well as science and technology. Wells has posted job ads on the online job site Indeed and the Denver- focused site Andrew Hudson’s Jobs List. She’s also used a local recruiting agency to find marketing help. Viridian’s Bradford recommends attending marijuana industry con- ferences and those put on by the American Marketing Association to find potential candidates. AMA has local chapters that hold their own conferences and member job boards that you can post on. “That’s a great place to look,” Brad- ford said. She added that posting online via Craigslist or Monster, unless you have a really strong employer brand, might not attract the right type of candidates. At Acreage Holdings, Damashek likes social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn to find good candidates. He also taps his personal networks. “Some of my best leads have come from my network and people that I feel most comfortable with,” he said. HOW TO TRAIN Wells recently hired a new sales and marketing specialist. The woman shadowed Wells for a couple of days. She then went through a traditional training, receiving a presentation on the company, the technology, benefits and products. The training process lasted about a week. “It’s pretty informal,” Wells said. Bradford recommends that market- ing professionals who need advanced courses try Coursera, the online plat- form that provides skills classes. Some of Coursera’s classes, for example, cover digital, viral and con- tent marketing. Bradford would also send the can- didate to cannabis-specific confer- ences and have that person attend marketing sessions. WHAT TOWATCH OUT FOR W hen you interview someone for a marketing position, watch out for: • Unprepared candidates who don’t bring along a resume. • Interviewees who can’t prove past results with quantifiable metrics. • Presumptuous attitudes that suggest the interviewee knows more than the interviewer. Kate Wells, chief marketing officer at NanoSphere Health Sciences, a Denver biotech company that manufactures nano-sized infused medical cannabis products, said it starts with the basics. “We’ve had a couple of instances where the candidate didn’t have a resume ready,” she said. “Be pre- pared. Have your resume ready. The fundamentals.” Kara Bradford, co-founder and chief talent officer for Viridian Staffing, a Seattle recruiting and HR consulting agency for canna- bis businesses, considers it a deal breaker if a candidate hasn’t ever performed a SWOT analysis. Such an exercise is intended to spell out a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – hence the acronym SWOT. “It’s marketing fundamentals 101,” Bradford said. “Before you launch into designing any kind of marketing plan, you want to know and understand what the environment looks like, both internally and externally.” A candidate also won’t make the cut if he or she can’t provide quantitative metrics, such as sales data, about a previous marketing campaign’s performance. “I need to knowwhat they’ve accomplished,” Bradford said. “Even if that accomplishment wasn’t super great, as long as they are articu- lating what their numbers are. Tell me what you learned from that.” Harris Damashek, chief marketing officer of New York-based Acre- age Holdings, which operates medical and recreational cannabis businesses in several states, including Maine, New York and Maryland, avoids someone who acts like a know-it-all. “Anybody who comes in and says they know everything … I’m imme- diately suspect of that,” he said. “Things won’t go very far from there.” – Bart Schaneman Kara Bradford is the co-founder and chief talent officer at Viridian Staffing. Photo courtesy of Viridian Staffing 128 • Marijuana Business Magazine • May-June 2018