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5 Critical Hiring Characteristics for Community Management Roles

February 18, 2022 By Jim Storer

Looking at community job descriptions, it’s clear there are some characteristics that are prized by hiring managers.

While empathy, communication skills, and collaboration have always been a component of a community professional’s responsibilities, the growing recognition of the need for negotiation and strategic skills is newer. As community roles become more common, and as they continue to diversify into more specific areas (like community operations, technical community management, etc.) there will continue to be a core set of characteristics that are critical for successful community management.

We’ve found these five characteristics to be key when evaluating community talent. This is obviously not a complete list – thinking about your unique needs as a community program and an organization will always be important when thinking about the right fit for your community team.

5 Critical Hiring Characteristics for Community Management Roles

1 – Empathy.  Many community management job descriptions share a key requirement: empathy. The ability to understand and share the feelings of another is quickly becoming a critical part of effective community management. Emotional intelligence is a key attribute.

2- Strong communication and negotiating skills. Community professionals interact with a wide range of people and have to gracefully navigate differences of opinion and perspective. That requires sophisticated communication and negotiation skills – no wonder these skills are becoming more common on job descriptions.

 3 – Ability to collaborate across the business. Community professionals are being asked to partner with teams across organizations. This requires leading discussions and training on community topics, as well as implementing projects that generate shared value. The ability to listen, translate concepts across different groups, and collaborate is essential.

4 – Strategic planning. In an environment where you rarely can tell people what to do, staying aligned around a strategic vision is key to a successful community program. This strategic vision informs planning, governance, and tactical programming in ways all community professionals need to understand.

5 – Ability to thrive remotely. We admit, this one is new and we aren’t seeing it on too many job descriptions yet, but just wait. As the world becomes more comfortable with employees working remotely the ability to thrive both working remotely, and also connecting people who are working remotely will become a sought-after skill.

If you want a primer on 50 common community management skills our Community Skills Framework™ includes five skill families with ten skills in each family, prioritized based on what we learned from our extensive community management research. You can use the Community Skills Framework™ as you craft your community job descriptions to ensure you are using industry-standard terms and including the skills critical to your particular community needs.
Learn more about the Community Skills Framework™ here.

If you want to browse community management job descriptions and get more advice on smart hiring for online community management roles you can download our community job index here.

Critical Hiring Characteristics for Online Community Roles

June 4, 2021 By Jim Storer

Looking at community job descriptions (download our CCC 2020 report for 30+ online community management job descriptions), it’s clear there are some characteristics that are prized by hiring managers. While empathy, communication skills, and collaboration have always been a component of a community professional’s responsibilities, the growing recognition of the need for negotiation and strategic skills is newer.

Empathy

Many community management job descriptions share a key requirement: empathy. The ability to understand and share the feelings of another is quickly becoming a critical part of effective community management. Emotional intelligence is a key attribute.

Strong communication and negotiating skills

Community professionals interact with a wide range of people and have to gracefully navigate differences of opinion and perspective. That requires sophisticated communication and negotiation skills – no wonder these skills are becoming more common on job descriptions.

Ability to collaborate across the business

Community professionals are being asked to partner with teams across organizations. This requires leading discussions and training on community topics, as well as implementing projects that generate shared value. The ability to listen, translate concepts across different groups, and collaborate is essential.

Strategic planning

In an environment where you rarely can tell people what to do, staying aligned around a strategic vision is key to a successful community program. This strategic vision informs planning, governance, and tactical programming in ways all community professionals need to understand.

Learn more and browse 30+ community management job descriptions in our Community Careers and Compensation report – now available for free download.

Community Role Profile: Community Strategist

May 17, 2021 By Jim Storer

OVERVIEW OF ROLE

The community strategist role is an expert role dedicated to what the title implies – community strategy. Typically, strategists are individuals with community management experience who have particularly strong strategic skills; analysis, community architecture, business models, and the ability to understand the interdependencies between different parts of a community ecosystem.

RESPONSIBILITIES
Community strategists are most likely to work in professional service firms or as part of a centralized community program office that provides internal community consulting to business units and other groups within large organizations. They are more likely to be individual contributors, and they act as subject matter experts within their ecosystem supporting and auditing a portfolio of communities.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN THE COMMUNITY

Strategists have a special knack for understanding community performance and the levers that impact it. Successful strategists work with community managers to ensure their strategies and approaches will yield successful shared value and keep the communities productive.

To learn more about the Community Strategist Role, and view Community Strategist Job Descriptions download our Community Careers and Compensation report – now available for free download.

Jennifer Erzen on the (Not So) Secret Powers of Community

May 12, 2020 By Jim Storer

Join the community experts at The Community Roundtable as they chat about online community management best practices with a wide range of global community professionals. Topics include increasing online audience engagement, finding and leveraging executive stakeholders, defining and calculating online community ROI and more.

Episode #71 features Jennifer Erzen.

In this episode of the podcast, Jennifer shares her journey through community roles in IT, HR, and Communications, and offers ideas for not just making do with the changes using online collaboration tools force, but leveraging them for increased efficiency and productivity. She also shares her secret community management weapon: the telephone.

Listen Now:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Listen to more episodes of Conversations with Community Managers.

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Online Community Professionals Emerge as Transformational Leaders

January 23, 2020 By Jim Storer

As organizations evolve, community managers provide leadership and engagement models to suit a new era of work.

January 23, 2020

Boston, MA: The recently released Community Careers and Compensation 2020 report from The Community Roundtable reveals that online community professionals are uniquely situated to lead their organizations into the future of work. According to the research, 63% of community professionals were promoted in their roles in the last year, suggesting they will have an outsized impact on the organization’s success in the coming years.

The Community Careers and Compensation 2020 report explores how online community roles are evolving to meet the needs of an evolving workplace. Based on a survey of 325 global community management professionals, the report provides a research-backed snapshot of trends in community roles, responsibilities, team structures, and compensation, and includes a comprehensive index of community job descriptions.

Individuals that participated in the research represent a diverse set of employee and customer community programs that span industries, organizational size, and use cases. These community programs range in age from pre-launch to a handful that have been operating for over 20 years.

“Over the last decade we’ve seen the career path for online community professionals grow, and we’ve now reached the point where organizations realize how critical the role is to overall organizational success,” said Jim Storer, Principal at The Community Roundtable. “Still, only 19% of organizations with communities have a defined career path and only 17% have an approved and resourced community roadmap. Now that communities are poised to provide immense ROI for their organizations, it’s time for HR departments to focus on how to best recruit and retain seasoned community talent.”

The Community Careers and Compensation 2020 report is designed to help community professionals, and those that hire and manage them, get a better understanding of emerging trends and develop a strategy to ensure community teams are properly resourced to maximize organizational value.

About The Community Roundtable: The Community Roundtable is the leading, global resource for the community management industry. The Community Roundtable helps organizations from Fortune 500s to start-ups and associations recognize, define, and leverage the power of their communities. Through the industry’s only comprehensive community management research, The Community Roundtable provides training, events, and consulting to help companies recognize real ROI from their community programs. TheCR Network – the world’s premier resource for community professionals, connects hundreds of community practitioners worldwide for networking, professional development, and support. Learn more at communityroundtable.com

What is the most important trait when hiring a community manager?

July 16, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

To celebrate the launch of our first ever community manager salary survey we’re going to spend July and August focused on community management as a career. Whether you are just getting starting in the community management field or have been actively practicing community management for years we have something for you.

Recently we’ve been thinking more about what it takes to be a great community manager. Certainly you have to love people – but what else makes or breaks a successful community professional? In the SOCM 2014 we highlighted the many (MANY) roles and responsibilities that a typical community manger is tasked with. With everything from creating content and monitoring community activity to managing and recommending technology there is a wide array of skills that a community manager needs to have, but is there one special trait that a hiring manager looks for when filling a community role?

I threw the question out to TheCR team, TheCR Network and to our Twitter friends and wanted to share their responses with you.

First I asked the other members of TheCR team to weigh in. We’re a small but diverse group, some are currently community managers, or were in a past life. Other have participated in the hiring of community professionals. Here’s what they had to say:

Jillian Bejtlich: The ability to communicate in a variety of scenarios and tones. The same person needs to have the ability to be awesome, humorous, authoritative, potentially harsh, and empathetic.

Maggie Tunning: I have a few in mind but going to go with empathy – to be able to understand, respond to, delight, etc members. Not sure if it always plays out this way, but empathy may also help them be adaptable/flexible.

Rachel Happe: Diplomacy (and the even temper that goes with it). If you over-react, under-react or get into fights it’s just going to be a disaster.

Next, I opened up the question to TheCR Network. Two long-term community professionals weighed in with different, but excellent responses. The first shared this list of skills – it’s hard to narrow it down to just one!

Teaching , especially online
Writing or general communication
Business strategist — big picture
Event organization
Collaborative
Creative
Inclusive
People-oriented
Ability to manage up and down the organization

And the second provided this great insight:

“As I am developing various skills the one I find hardest to share with others as the roles grow and expand is finding the voice we want to present to our community. So finding that ability in someone to be the voice or continue as the voice would be an asset.”

Finally, I asked our Twitter friends and received many awesome responses. Here are some of my favorites:

Do you hire community managers? Is there a special skill or trait that we missed? Are you a community manager and want to weigh in? We’d love to hear from you!

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