First marketing hire: generalist or specialist?

Hire a generalist, unless one channel already brings in most of your customers and you know which one it is. That's the whole decision, but the test underneath it is uncomfortable: if you can't say where your last twenty customers came from, you aren't ready to hire a specialist, because you'd be guessing which specialism to buy.

The expensive version of this mistake is hiring a specialist in the channel you find most interesting, rather than the one your business actually runs on.

What each one actually is

A generalist can do a bit of everything competently and nothing at expert level: run the website, write the emails, keep the listings right, brief a designer, and read the numbers and tell you what they mean. In a first hire, that breadth is the point, because the job in year one is finding out what works, not optimising it.

A specialist goes deep in one thing, such as paid search, SEO, lifecycle email or content. In that channel they're worth more than a generalist, outside it they're no use at all, and they'll expect the rest of the machine to exist around them.

When a specialist is right

You want all three of these to be true:

One channel already carries the business, and you can show it in the numbers rather than simply assert it.
There's enough work in that channel to fill a week, every week, not just in campaign season.
Somebody else can do the other things, whether that's you, an agency or a freelancer. A specialist with nobody around them spends half their time on work they're overqualified for, and resents it.

If one of those is missing, you're hiring a generalist and calling it something else.

What it costs, honestly

The Office for National Statistics' Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings puts the median full-time salary for marketing associate professionals at £33,412 in 2025, and for marketing and commercial managers at £53,703. On top of that, an employer pays National Insurance at 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year and a workplace pension of at least 3% on earnings between £6,240 and £50,270, and what marketing costs in the UK does the arithmetic for you.

Two things usually get missed when people compare a salary with an agency's fee. A hire is a fixed cost for at least a year, and an agency or freelancer isn't. And a first hire costs you more than their salary in your own time: somebody has to decide what they work on, and if nobody does, you've bought capacity rather than progress.

The hire that goes wrong most often

A junior marketer is hired cheaply, with nobody senior to point them in a direction. They're given the whole function, no plan, and a stream of requests from everyone in the building. Six months later they've produced a lot of social posts and left, and the company concludes that marketing doesn't work.

That isn't a hiring failure but a direction failure, and it's the single most common pattern we see. The fix isn't a more expensive person. It's deciding what the marketing is for before anybody starts, which our one-page marketing plan does in short form, and making sure somebody is responsible for keeping it pointed the right way.

The order that usually works

No marketing and no plan: decide what you want marketing to do first. A hire made without that is a guess with a salary attached.
A plan, but nobody to run it: a generalist, with senior help a few days a month if nobody inside the business can give direction.
A generalist who's now stretched, and one channel clearly earning: your first specialist, in that channel.
Several specialists and nobody coordinating them: that's when you need a lead, not another doer.

Before you write the advert

Answer these in writing, because the answers become the job description. One written without them attracts applications from people who can't tell whether the job is for them.

What are the three things this person is accountable for in their first year?
What will they not be responsible for, and who does that instead?
Who do they go to for a decision?
What does good look like at six months?

Writing a marketing job description that attracts the right person turns those answers into the advert, and a marketer's first thirty days picks up once they've accepted.

And if the honest answer is that nobody inside the business can give a first hire the direction they need, that's what our fractional and part-time marketing leadership is for: a few days a month, priced by the day.