A truly great staff is made up of different types of people, placed in the positions they’re best at. Building your content marketing team is no different; you must select the best combination of players with different core strengths. 
For example, your content marketing team will need a big-picture strategist, a writer to create content, and a designer to give everything the right look.
At SoftwareAdvice, we decided to find out what makes the highest-performing members of our marketing team so great–so we hired a workforce psychologist to help us better understand them. The result?
He helped us identify three distinct personality types, who fill the most important roles on any content marketing “Dream Team”: the Giver, the Savant, and the MatrixThinker. (tweet this)
Now, I’ll tell you how to you identify and hire these types of people so that you can build a Dream Team of your own.
Digital Marketing Strategy: The Giver
Givers are true to their name: they like to give to other people, and they always put the company and their colleagues ahead of themselves. They are the first to arrive at work and the last to leave, and are loyal followers of the rules. While Givers’ dedication is part of what makes them great, it can also result in them giving so much they burn out. Since they are so eager to please, Givers are often very averse to conflict. This can lead to problems not being resolved or to them behaving passive-aggressively. A more mature Giver, however, can overcome these challenges.
Givers believe strongly in the business and its leadership. They internalize the company mission, making them excellent Marketing Strategists. They also focus on long-term goals over personal or short-term gains. This makes them good leaders, but Givers prefer to serve as mid-level managers or to support a C-suite executive, as opposed to a being one themselves.
Here’s a look at how Givers perform in key roles:
| What They’re Good At | What They’re Not So Good At |
| Digital Marketing Strategy | Sales |
| Software Development | CEO |
| Administrative | COO |
| Executive Support | Creative |
| Customer Service | Engineering |
When conducting interviews for your content marketing team, there are several tactics you can use to assess whether a candidate is a Giver:
- Start the interview in a warm, relaxed manner. A Giver will respond well to this, as they tend not to prefer taking charge of conversations.
- Use behavioral interviewing techniques, asking for examples of characteristics such as being hardworking, caring or dedicated in their personal and professional life.
- Ask about how they handled past conflicts; a mature Giver will have learned to overcome their natural aversion to such situations.
- Finally, during the reference check, ask for examples in prior positions of the candidate going above and beyond, working extra hours or otherwise sacrificing to help the team.
Click here to read the in-depth profile of the Giver.
Content Creation: The Savant
Savants have become extraordinarily talented in a single, specialized field. They are intelligent, creative, and love to learn. They often have a penchant for literature and are commonly brilliant writers. Savants are habit-oriented and need to follow a particular routine–but when free to do so, they can work with laser-like focus on projects, and usually turn them around quickly. Savants take great pride in what they do, but this perfectionism can be a double-edged sword. They are often overly critical of themselves and are prone to depression. They also struggle with interpersonal interactions and tend towards social anxiety (though mature Savants can overcome this).
Savants can quickly produce a lot of great writing for your content marketing team. Their mastery of the written word combined with their innate motivation and creative streak, makes them ideal content creators. They are also detail-oriented and perceptive, and can be excellent editors and researchers.
Here are some workplace roles Savants are most (and least) suited for:
| What They’re Good At | What They’re Not So Good At |
| Research & Analysis | Sales |
| Engineering | Management |
| Creative | Customer Service |
| Writing & Editing | Executive Support |
| Marketing Support | CEO / COO |
During the interview process, here are some steps you can follow to identify Savants for your content marketing team:
- Make them feel comfortable and lead into difficult questions gently. Savants’ self-criticism and social anxiety makes an interview a very challenging situation for them.
- Ask specific questions that lead directly to the information you need to know. Savants don’t like to toot their own horns, and will rarely volunteer information about accomplishments or advancement.
- If you’re hiring for a content creator, administer a writing test. The high-quality work of a Savant speaks for itself.
- Don’t be deterred by job-hopping. If past positions were unrelated to their talent, Savants will commonly jump from job to job until they find a place where they can apply their skill.
Click here to read the full profile of the Savant.
Creative Direction and Design: The Matrix Thinker
Matrix Thinkers are artistically expressive and creative individuals. They are constantly absorbing information from everything around them and have a strong ability to think in the abstract. Combined with their ability to connect the dots between seemingly-random ideas, this makes them excellent problem-solvers who can conceptualize new products and processes. Sometimes, however, their outside-the-box thinking just confuses everyone. They can easily become bored or distracted; at their worst, they are chaotic, impulsive, and abrasive. Mature Matrix Thinkers have learned to overcome these tendencies, though.
Matrix Thinkers’ imaginative drive, artistic eye, and exceptional creativity make them optimal designers. Add their capacity for revolutionary ideas, and you’ll find that they are some of the best Creative Directors. Given the freedom to pursue their vision, they can take your content marketing team in extraordinary new directions.
Here’s a snapshot of roles that Matrix Thinkers are best at, and those they struggle with:
| What They’re Good At | What They’re Not So Good At |
| Design/Graphic Arts | Customer Service |
| Creative Direction | Administrative |
| CEO | COO |
| Digital Marketing Strategy | Sales |
| Software Development | Executive Support |
When looking to hire artistic types for your content marketing team, here are some guidelines you can follow to identify Matrix Thinkers:
- Pose open-ended questions that allow the candidate to expand upon things like goals and accomplishments. Matrix Thinkers like to provide more than “yes” or “no” answers.
- Ask them about creative work. Get them to talk about ways they’ve expressed themselves artistically, design projects they’ve led, or unique solutions to problems.
- Gauge how they deal with conflict, which can also speak to the candidate’s maturity. While Matrix Thinkers can be cantankerous and prone to challenge authority, if they’re mature, they’ll have learned to be diplomatic in the workplace.
- Look for career advancement, if they’ve been employed in relevant positions. Matrix Thinkers are driven to achieve, but if they’re placed in boring roles, they’ll quickly move on to something more exciting.
Click here for the in-depth profile of the Matrix Thinker.
By knowing what motivates these personality types and how to identify them, you, too, can recruit a content marketing Dream Team. When you hire all-star players and place them in their best positions, there’s no telling what your company can achieve.