The Mathematically-Inclined Strategist

So without further ado… let’s break down that mysterious intro paragraph into something more substantial.

Teams that you’ll be dealing with: Account Management, Strategy, Influencer Sourcing, and Sales.

Super Hero Skill: Math… mainly algebra… essentially solving for X. And then a bunch of statistics-type problems. And problem-solving in general. It’s a bit hard to summarize. I suppose we could go based on SAT scores hahaha… did you make a 650 or above? (Is that still something kids take? Is 650 even a good score for algebraic expertise?)

Actually, it’s not so much that the math is hard. But you need to have an excellent command of it. Most people know how to use cross multiplication to solve for X. But WHEN do you need to solve for X? How do you set up those equations? How do you add in percentages on top as bonuses? That kind of stuff. The base skills are easy. But having a very fundamental understanding of how numbers work together to get you to where you want to be is what we’re looking for.

What you’ll be doing with Account Management: We have 20+ Account Managers right now, and teaching each and every person how to figure out influencer rates is proving to be problematic. There’s a lot that goes into this: the size of the influencer, what we want them to do, the complexity of the campaign theme. You also have to consider… if there’s an agent involved, inflation over time (not kidding), platform, post types, vertical, engagement rate, quality of content, supply and demand, market rate. Literally, all of those things need to be taken into consideration.

Do we have an overly-complicated spreadsheet to help with the basic rates? Yes, but this, of course, doesn’t handle any of the above edge cases. So, we wind up offering rates that simply don’t make sense sometimes. I’ve seen us overpay people by thousands of dollars , and vice versa – we’ve had influencers get riled up about the rates that we suggest, which is never a good thing. So we’d be looking to you manage and monitor the small portion of our campaign process for all campaigns and be the final set of eyes over what we are sending out and who we hire.

What you’ll be doing with the Strategy Team: The work you’ll do with our strategy team is exactly on the flip side of the above. Huh? Yah. Rather than coming up with rates for individual influencers, you will be taking all of those learnings from your rates work and applying that to pre-sales to come up with breakdowns of what we propose to brands in terms of our deliverables to them.

Think in terms of budget points, and then map out how many influencers we’d hire, how many post types they’ll do, how many followers they have, etc. Essentially, you’ll work closely with our strategy team to execute the math part of these proposals. They’ll tell you what they need, and then it will be up to you to handle the math. This doesn’t require a PhD in math. But it will require you to be really sharp with problem-solving.

What You’ll be doing with Influencer Sourcing: You’ll be looped in when we’re dealing with celebrity outreach. This is less frequent than the above two parts and will require more explanation. But just assume they’ll be lots of – you guessed it – math.

What You’ll be doing with Sales: You will be keeping the sales team in the loop throughout the campaigns on ways that we can improve on the campaign PLUS additional options for us to pitch to the clients based on any observations you make during your work with the Account Management team + the Strategy Team.

To summarize… math. All day. Every day. It might get boring. But it’s an important role. And we’re willing to go above what you can typically make based on your experience level, salary-wise. So, if you’re down with math all day every day in exchange for better pay… get in touch!

So, as you know, you show up at multiple spots during the campaign planning and execution process.
🤝 Our sales team (AKA Brand Partnerships Managers) handles all first touchpoints with potential clients… they build a relationship, they suss out the client goals, they figure out targeting and demographics and product pushes… and then they hand all of this info over to the strategy team to basically chime in on which deliverables to offer during the strategy call.

🤸🏽‍♂️ The creative strategy team uses this info as a jumping-off point. Doing additional research, diving into their competitors… Really just inundating themselves with the client’s space and putting themselves in the mind of their customer.

🎨 Once the research is done stay close by. While creative strategy gets in there to dream up masterful campaign concepts based on the client’s goals, you really do need to be on-call to be that second set of eyes, re-run a few numbers and make sure we’re not setting ourselves up to overpromise then have to over-deliver on an overpromise (which we tend to do).

📅 Because next, the Strategy team will assemble and edit a bunch of “boilerplate” slides… things like calendars, capabilities, targeting, etc.

🧮 Then we need you and that calculator riiiiight HERE to finalize the metrics we’ll guarantee to the client.

🔎 After that… thorough proofreading. This is critical! You’d be surprised at how turned-off a client will get when seeing their brand’s name spelled wrong. (Obviously, I’m kidding… of course they’d be bent out of shape. But on a less frivolous note, this has happened twice. 🙀)

📣 You’ll be in charge of briefing the salesperson on how to pitch your big, beautiful deck.

🦸🏼 Sometimes, you might be looped into these calls (and expected to talk a little), just an FYI, and if the Strategy team needs to do revisions, be ready for that after this soon-to-be-client provides feedback.

👩🏽‍💻 Next is Influencer Sourcing – we only need you here when we’re dealing with the celebs of the world to make sure the numbers still make sense.

👌And you’ll be the final set of eyes for the Account Management team as they are conducting outreach and making their influencer selections

🎉 When the deck closes, we all celebrate big time (over Slack mostly, but with tons of congratulatory gifs)!

🎀 But you’re not done yet, maestro. You’ll also keep an eye on the campaigns for patterns to help you create a kind of catalog of add-ons and optimizations you see frequently showing up in similar types of campaigns. Our goal is to always get better and better outcomes, and you’ll be instrumental in making sure that happens. NOW, you can tie a big, pretty bow on it and ship the results off to the client. You’re done.

Here is a fun visual breakdown of the qualities and characteristics (related to this role) that we find important when hiring. (There are more qualities listed below that we feel are more global… these are specific to the Strategist role.)

• We provide the usual benefits: 👩🏽‍⚕️ Medical, 🦷 Dental, and 👁 Vision. (The medical insurance is through Aetna, which is really pretty good.)
• We just started doing 401K’s (with a pretty sweet match, too)! Yay!
• We are all remote now, thanks to COVID-19… so that might be a perk if you hate commuting.
• If we ever decide to have an office again, you can be darn sure it’ll be super cool-looking and dog-friendly! 🐶
• We’re a small company without the typical corporate hoops… People who perform well end up advancing quickly.

• We’re a team of 50.
• We’re growing.
• We’re about as scattered as a team can be… East Coast, West Coast, the middle of the country… a bunch of us are in Canada, 1 in Ukraine, 1 in Russia… we like to keep our options open in terms of company retreat locations.
• About half of us are really funny.
• We’re currently working with some pretty amazing brands: Famous Footwear, Zenni Optical, KISS, Lenox, a big chain of malls (I don’t think I’m allowed to say who), a big toilet brand (again… I don’t think I’m allowed to say who, but you probably sit on this brand every morning), Honest Co., Hershey, Yelp… just to name a few.

We’re a pretty down-to-earth bunch, so if you’re interested in applying, in lieu of an elaborate cover letter, you can email me at atul@theshelf.com, and include bullet points with the info requested in the next section…

• The job you are applying for.
• A link to your Linkedin profile.
• What job site sent you our way.
• Your location.
• Your phone number.
• A rundown on how experienced you are with the influencer marketing space… Have you worked with them? Have you done client work in the influencer space? Stuff like that.
• A summary of why you feel like you’d be good for this role.
• A note about your agency experience, if you have any (and why #agencylife is for you). Or, if you don’t have agency experience, why you thrive in this sort of fast-paced environment.
• Please let me know what sort of salary you have in mind. I’d hate to waste your time if you’re wanting a salary that’s beyond the realm of possibility for us.
• Not required, but would be super helpful: Include a deck or proposal you’ve worked on which demonstrates your style of strategic, outside-the-box thinking. This would actually be pretty great to see before we talk with you. If you do decide to include a sample deck, you can obviously delete sections and/or brand names that are confidential. (Honestly, I wouldn’t waste time with this if the role doesn’t sound like it’s right up your alley.)

Tips on how to get your application noticed (assuming that’s what you’re shooting for):

• Applications that are submitted using a job site (instead of being emailed to the above email address) will not be considered.
• Please don’t have typos. (#FunLittleTip: Install Grammarly. It’s a game-changer.)
• It would be great if you could try to sound cool. We write in a colloquial, one-with-the-people-while-still-being-basically-grammatically-correct style. And while this style of writing is not a requirement, keep in mind that we receive a decent number of applicants every day, and 90% of those applications are boring AF. The ones that have a fun “voice” and quirky writing style immediately stand out. In a good way.
• Lastly, put yourself in the shoes of the person in charge of interviewing… What do you think that person would want to hear? Talk about that stuff and leave off anything that isn’t super relevant.

Generally speaking, a lot of you will probably find this job post in line with your skill set, and I bet a lot of you probably have the skills necessary to perform the requirements of this role. But… the characteristics that define what it’s like to actually work with you are also very important to us. Think of these requirements more in terms of culture-fit requirements:

🕺 Our company has a very fast-paced environment. It might feel disorganized from time to time because we’re also a small company. We need each employee to be the type of person who can go with the flow. Who can adjust quickly. Who is able to embrace chaos with open arms when it decides to waltz through the door.

🏎 Due to the aforementioned fast-paced environment, you should be the type of person who is able to execute quickly… within time constraints. WHILE still maintaining quality. We don’t ask for the impossible. But what we don’t want to see are projects that are slapped together and riddled with issues when we’re in a time crunch. Instead, we’d like to see people make adjustments and figure out how to make it work. We’re looking for resourceful people who approach projects with that there’s-more-than-one-way-to-skin-a-cat attitude.

📈 I’ve never interviewed anyone who has said that they have bad work ethic… but there’s a big difference between people who show up and do what gets assigned to them, and those who take initiative… Those people who take pride in their projects and who go above and beyond because they have that drive for personal achievement and growth. We don’t want to micro-manage. We want to work with self-motivated people who are neurotic about quality.

✅ People who don’t proofread drive me nuts!

👿 While I feel like I shouldn’t have to mention this, we’ve worked with people in the past who ran around like a bunch of crazed loose cannons… yelling at coworkers, constantly complaining, deploying the cold-shoulder on a regular basis… passive aggressive. So if you’re not a nice person… that won’t really work for us. We really need everyone to exude positivity.

👂 You need to be receptive to feedback. This is a quality that we find candidates have trouble self-assessing. But try hard, because we give feedback when needed. We’re too small of a company to just let people do whatever they want to do. (Side-note… no one loves feedback. That’s fine. I don’t either really. But will you take it nicely? Will you incorporate it? Are you going to be passive aggressive while doing it? Have you ever been told not to “cut off your nose to spite your face”? These are questions you should ask yourself).

😺 Influencer marketing is constantly changing, so we’re looking for people who are curious and eager to learn. Let’s say, for example, a client mentions in passing how they’re doing whitelisting on Instagram (and we’ll assume you don’t know what that means). Are you going to just nod your head and say you understand it when you don’t? Or, are you going to jot down a note, do some research, and become a whitelisting expert for the next client conversation? Because we need the latter.

👩🏽‍💻 If you’re working remotely, you need to actually be working. No one likes a freeloader.

👆🏾 Are you ambitious? It’s not a requirement, but if you are… there’s lots of room for career growth. Plus, we like to hire our managers from within the team, so there is a very clear path to the next level (if that’s of interest to you).

Here at The Shelf, we truly believe it’s our differences that have allowed us to come together and form such a cohesive and all-encompassing whole. Our mission as a company is to help our clients stand out amongst the crowd… to be different and impactful. And since we’re a team made up of diverse people with all different backgrounds and experiences, we’re able to do this naturally. 🙋🏽‍♂️🙋🙋🏾‍♀️🙋🏼‍♂️🙋🏼‍♀️🙋🏾‍♂️🙋🏽‍♀️🙋🏾

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.

I could honestly go on and on (because I’m long-winded, in case you couldn’t tell that by now), but I’m going to stop here. The point is, you gotta have the chops AND play well with others. And if you’re giddy already, feeling like this job description is just so dead-on-b*lls accurate for you, perfect! We can’t wait to hear from you.

If you’re lacking a skill or two but still feel pumped, feel free to mention it in your cover letter. We’re a small company that’s big into personal growth and supporting up-and-coming go-getters!

It’s also worth noting right here that we have our hands full running campaigns, guys. So, we will only contact those candidates who are most likely to be a good fit for the role. We’ll respond quickly when that’s the case. But if you don’t hear from us, please don’t feel slighted. Rally on – there’s a role out there that’s probably a better fit for your awesome skillset.

Oh, and one last thing… Please add the word Toggle to your subject line when applying so that I know you read this entire post.