Hiring a social media manager
Two hundred and sixty applications leading with audience numbers — the one metric in this discipline that is both the easiest to quote and the least connected to whether someone can do the job.
Growing an account and inheriting one look the same on a CV. Follower count is a property of a brand, a budget and a moment far more than of a person. A candidate who inherited a large account and maintained it will state a bigger number than one who took a small business from nothing to a genuinely engaged audience, and the CV format rewards the first. Underneath that, the discipline has fractured: community management, paid social, content production and influencer work are separate skills that share a job title, and "social media manager" tells you which of them somebody wants to do rather than which they can. The genuinely hard signal — judgment about what to post when something has gone wrong — appears nowhere at all.
Whose account, and who makes the content
Selene works out whether this is a creator role or a strategist role, since one person rarely does both well and the title covers both.
Channels, production, and who approves
The decisive question is whether this person makes the content themselves. A social manager who briefs a designer and one who films and edits on their phone are different hires, and small businesses almost always need the second while writing an ad for the first.
One sentence changes the guide
It is a genuinely useful reframe because it points at the part of the job that is actually work. Posting is scheduled and can be batched; the comments arrive at nine on a Sunday evening when someone is unhappy in public, and how that is handled is the whole difference between an account that has an audience and one that has customers.
Exceptional, not just good —
“Someone who cares about the comments more than the follower count.”
→ Community interaction became a must-have; follower counts stopped being scored at all.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria, and the number that opens almost every application in this pile appears in none of them. That is the single most consequential decision on this page.
No gates, and the follower threshold is the wrong one
There is no fact to ask. The filter sometimes applied — a minimum audience on a personal account — is worse than useless: it selects for people who are good at building their own personal brand, which is a real skill and a different job from building someone else’s.
Scored on the comments, not the count
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
She reads for described interaction and judgment rather than reach figures, which are recorded as context about a previous employer rather than as evidence about the candidate.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Establishing whether this is a production role or a planning one
- Reading all 260 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist that is not ordered by follower count
- An interview brief that asks for the public complaint each CV skipped
Yours
- Getting candidates to apply — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or source candidates
- Watching the actual content; she reads what people wrote about their work, not their reels
- Any content test or shadow day, with her brief in hand
- The offer, and every call that matters
Nearby roles
A discipline where history is nearly irrelevant and the work speaks for itself.
Where the budget someone has actually managed changes everything, and never appears on the CV.
One title, five different skill mixes, and agency logos as the false positive.
Say who makes the content
Them or someone else — it is the fork most social media job ads never take.