Market research is vital to building a great business. Through research and insights, market researchers can help shape public conversations, empower brands to connect with their audience and use data to tell their stories, and optimise products and services.
With a great market research team, there are vast opportunities to harness insights to grow your brand and deliver better services, especially as market research continues its rapid shift from traditional research to digital analytics and machine learning, not to mention the proliferation of programming languages such as Python and R. The capabilities are endless, but it requires investment in a great team and that means knowing how to attract the right talent in order to build out a superb market research function.
And the best way to attract and retain great talent is to give them what they want. We’ve spoken to hundreds of market researchers across mid-to-senior levels and discovered a few key things that they are looking for in their job…
Development and progression
This should be obvious, but the fact that it comes up in so many conversations with candidates means that many businesses are still not prioritising development and progression opportunities for their market researchers. Continuous development from an established team is important to candidates. They want to join a strong team and work at a company that understands the value of insights and research. Providing the right training and development, particularly in new technologies, innovative research methods and programming languages, will keep your team at the top of their game; they will be satisfied with their development, and you’ll have a team growing from strength to strength.
Our candidates also regularly mention the importance of clear progression opportunities and fair pay. Currently, there are huge discrepancies in salaries across agencies. The best talent will eventually move on to those agencies or businesses where they can see themselves rising through the ranks and being well compensated for their work.
Variety in their role
We’re hearing candidates talk about the importance of having more variety in their projects and roles. Market researchers enjoy designing research strategies, digging into the data and drawing out insights. However, many are keen for some client-facing opportunities, especially as they progress in their career. Our candidates tell us that they are looking for more 360 roles where they can actually see the results and implementation of their research and recommendations in addition to the technical research work.
Flexibility and a good work-life balance
Flexibility and a good work-life balance is a top priority for nearly all of our candidates, market researchers not excluded. Often, we hear from our market research candidates that they work long hours to complete large projects which are usually under-resourced. This type of working pattern inevitably leads to frustration and burnout and potentially loss of great talent.
Covid forced employers to embrace remote and flexible working and we’ve seen how well it can work. If you put trust into your employees and allow them the space to have some flexibility in their working schedule as well as healthy boundaries between their work and life, they will repay you with loyalty and efficiency.
Hiring versus growing your own team
One final note, if you’re hiring market researchers, be prepared that candidates with that rare combination of technical research skills and client-facing skills will command a higher salary, especially given the current market where there is a scarcity of candidates.
However, remember that it’s an investment in talent and in your business. You will build a more efficient team by bringing in talent with this more rounded and expert skillset (in combination with upskilling your existing team). This will set you up for success in the long-run.
