Recruiting a Marketing Manager

Recruiting a Marketing Manager

Recruiting a Marketing Mgr

Marketing needs of Pleasant Manor

Pleasant manor as a nursing and rehabilitation facility requires a marketing strategy to attract the elderly or their caregivers to seek the services of the facility. The facility boasts of physical and occupational therapy facilities including speech-language pathology, which are important for the elderly. With the new and improved list of programs and services that Pleasant Manor offers, the facility needs to improve the awareness of the community about the availability of these services to increase their usage.

Pleasant manor also needs to increase their market share of the skilled nursing programs and services by ensuring that target consumers of these programs and services understand the quality, value, price, and convenience that Pleasant Manor offers. Through their marketing plan, Pleasant Manor hopes to display to consumers their program and services differentiation. Value from Pleasant Manor's services stems from their pricing and wide range of programs available. This means that the facility can offer better prices for those purchasing two or more programs or services. Convenience in the case of Pleasant Manor stems from the company being close to a midsized community that offers a huge consumer base for the facility to target.

Overview of the marketing manager position

The marketing manager position to be filled involves several different roles. First is that the marketing manager will be responsible for the development and implementation of marketing strategies for Pleasant Manor in order for the facility to meet its set goal and objectives. The marketing manager must also evaluate market conditions, success of the marketing plan, competitors, and consumer needs regularly to advise the owners and overall general manager regarding proposed changes to operations or the marketing plan to meet consumer needs and gain market share (Barksdale, Goldstucker & DeLaune, 1995). All marketing, promotional, or advertising activities should be supervised and run by the marketing manager to ensure standardizing of these activities and that they aim at achieving the facility's goals and objectives.

In order to be successful in fulfilling these roles, the marketing manager should have a wide knowledge of running skilled nursing facilities, adult day care centers, or nursing homes. These facilities share target markets and challenges, therefore, the reason why managers with experience from these three types of facilities are preferred. Pressure is a part of the marketing manager's job. Therefore, the prospective candidate must be able to work well under pressure (Bennett, 2007). The ability to think creatively is also of utmost importance since the individual will be required to develop marketing strategies that respond to dynamic market conditions, consumer needs, and competitors (Roberts, 1997). Since Pleasant Manor's new strategy involves strict monitoring of patient satisfaction, it will be important for the marketing manager to analyze this information regularly to find out if the marketing strategy chosen meets consumer needs. The ability to think creatively and be proactive rather than reactive will be important for developing marketing strategies that competitors will be forced to react to and not Pleasant Manor responding to competitor strategies.

Approach to recruiting top quality talent

For this position, several recruitment strategies need to be evaluated to find the best suitable to fill this position. Despite the strategy chosen, the recruitment process uses these steps: sourcing of candidates, selection, and on boarding of the chosen candidate. The strategies available differ in the sourcing and selection processes.

One recruitment strategy is to use referrals. Referrals by employees are a fast way of attracting quality client. Using this strategy, the company simply asks employees to refer persons they think have the potential to fit the position of marketing strategy. It is often cheaper and often the individual chosen is motivated to work for the company. A second strategy is using a hiring team. In this strategy, the Pleasant Manor management would need to put together a team to hire the marketing manager. This team needs to be knowledgeable of the requirements of the position and best recruiting practices. The team will be involved with sourcing and selection of the candidates.

The company could also decide to go with headhunting as a recruitment strategy. Using this strategy, the company would use a person, possible the chief executive officer, as the chief recruiter. This person in consultation with industry experts would identify suitable persons for the position and use his networking skills to contact and attract the person. This is the best strategy for Pleasant Manor for several reasons. First is that it is cheap in terms of costs and also uses previous successes of potential candidates as their selling points for hiring.