The Best Marketing Hire – A Newly Minted Liberal Arts Graduate

Traveling in circles with parents of college aged kids and recent graduates, there is inevitably discussion about the majors their children selected and how will it lead to gainful employment.  For those who remember Mrs. Robinson – Dustin Hoffman was let in on the secret that the hot field was “Plastics”.  For those who loved the movie here is the clip .

I am here to tell you, especially those that are worried about their children who elected to be a liberal arts major, that those young adults are being well trained for one of the fastest growing fields – “Content”.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMO’s), who have seen the success of Inbound Marketing, following Ardath Albee, David Meerman Scott and our friends at Hubspot, know the need for contagious content is unending.  Let me make the case for hiring these wonderfully talented people, who will super charge your content machine.

Here are three skills that are required to be a great creator of engaging, thoughtful content and my ideas as to why liberal arts grads skills are dead on.

1. Write Well: For four years liberal arts students crank out paper after paper and are constantly being pushed to improve the way they communicate. They are trained by the world’s best writers and read all forms of great writing. Who better to do your company’s writing?
2. Think fast, keep it brief: If you have ever sat in on a liberal arts seminar you know that class discussions involve taking hundreds of pages of reading and transforming them into a pithy, economic, and insightful comment on a professors command.
3. Make connections to the things you see around you: Liberal Arts students are constantly forced to apply academic theories to the problems around them. They are bred as critical thinkers who connect government theory to problems in the Obama Administration and are always looking for ways to apply their knowledge to the outside world.
4. Comfortable with using all media – text, pictures, sound and video – to communicate a message.

As an added bonus, being of the Facebook generation these young grads are also natural communicators. They are used to being transparent and are able to handle tons of incoming and outgoing information with ease. All of which will clearly serve them well as content creators.

David Meerman Scott suggests we all hire journalists and I suggest every marketing department hires a liberal arts graduate to be one of the workhorses at the center of the content creation revolution.

Have you hired a recent college graduate to create content?  Are you a recent graduate who joined a marketing department and are doing content?  Share your story and thoughts with us.