To stay competitive, you need employees with the right skills. But what sets them apart from others in their talent pool? And what skills do e-commerce and IT professionals need to stay cutting edge?
Ten key skills for top e-commerce talent
The success of your e-commerce business rests heavily with the skills and qualifications of your staff. Consider potential candidates with any of the following:
- Software development expertise. Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify… these are all names you’re familiar with when it comes to your online storefront. You’ve likely shopped around (no pun intended) for the platform that best meets your needs—and you’re well aware that to take full advantage of a platform’s capabilities, you need e-commerce professionals with intricate working knowledge of the platform. Those with software development skills will allow you to implement a wide range of offerings included in platform solutions, such as automation, marketing functions, CRM, customer service and much more. The more skilled your developers, the more competitive your storefront in meeting the needs of current and potential customers.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) know-how. Getting hits to your site rests largely with your use of SEO—it helps drive up your page ranking in Google searches, and gain potential customers, as well as increase conversions. When you hire e-commerce professionals familiar with SEO, it can help get your storefront in front of even more shoppers through skills such as copywriting, keyword use and content marketing.
- Pay-per-Click (PPC) understanding. PPC is a popular way to gain increased traffic to your website by paying each time an ad for your product or service is clicked. These ads popularly appear in the side bars of search engines, and they’re a potential way to increase site traffic. The key here is creating content so tempting, consumers will want to click—and you can imagine it takes some PPC experience to be able to create content of this caliber. This skill is very helpful in top e-commerce talent.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. The robots aren’t yet taking over, but candidates with AI experience just might! This up-and-coming trend is due to disrupt many industries, including e-commerce. Technology such as chatbots may replace some industry roles, but professionals with knowledge of how to maximize the use of AI are just as valuable to help you make the best use of it in your up-and-coming online business.
- Data analytics. Big data is all the buzz—how do you collect information and make use of it to your business’s benefit? That’s where data analytics comes in. Candidates with this skillset are valuable to provide insight into the performance of your business, helping you understand what to change and what to keep in place. Your short- and long-term success hinges on the ability of your company to understand what consumers need and provide it to them—starting with data analysis.
- HTML and CSS experience. In other words, coding. Top e-commerce professionals, depending on their role, have an understanding of coding and the ability to make content look nice. Since a big part of e-commerce marketing is online content, marketing emails and blog posts, this is important.
- Video production. Incorporating video into your website is popular with consumers, especially when it helps them understand more about your products and your mission. Embedded video also helps to increase your Google ranking. Video, when done right, can help to boost your storefront, so it can help to hire candidates who have this skill in their wheelhouse.
- Communication. You may have employees who work remotely and won’t have the opportunity for face-to-face interactions with you and other team members. Therefore, good communication is the key to the success of these (and all) workers.
- Project management. To keep your teams on track with meeting all deadlines, project management is a must. You may consider bringing on full-time dedicated project managers, or tasking employees who have project management experience with the role of keeping everyone focused.
- Ability to work in a team. Let’s face it—some of us prefer to work as independent contributors. But because e-commerce sites require a wide range of talent to function properly, a candidate’s ability to work well as part of a collaborative team can make or break their success with your company.
Work with your recruiter
As a valuable resource, you can lean on your recruiter to find the talent your e-commerce business needs to be a forerunner in your industry. Work with your recruiter to highlight all the qualifications candidates need to mesh with your company—and then put this job in the hands of the experts. Working with a recruiter saves you time and money, allowing you to find candidates faster and easier than searching on your own.
Check out Jarvis Cole
With extensive experience in the e-commerce industry, our staffing professionals understand what makes a good candidate great. To learn more about us and the services we offer to help our clients reach short- and long-term goals, contact Jarvis Cole today!