DTC Briefing: How job expectations have changed as the e-commerce industry has taken a hit

Most people interviewed were senior-level talent, with anywhere from eight to 25 years of experience. They’ve held a variety of roles from director to CMO, and have worked for brands ranging from eight-figure startups to publicly traded companies. The big theme that kept coming up in conversations with job seekers is that companies are cautious about hiring right now. 

As one recruiter put it to me: More companies are banking everything on one or two key hires. As a result, more companies are spending months going back and forth, waffling over whether they want to hire, say, a vp or a CMO. Senior-level marketing talent is increasingly being asked to both manage a team and get more in-the-weeds about strategy or be good at both brand and performance marketing. And, candidates may put through multiple rounds of interviews only to be told by a recruiter, ‘Actually, we’re going to keep looking until we find the perfect candidate.’

In this edition of the DTC Briefing, I’m doing a deep dive into some of the other topics that came up during my interviews, such as how compensation levels have changed, what companies expect out of a modern CMO and horror stories from LinkedIn. 

Compensation calculations
Across the board, most people I spoke with estimated that salary ranges were down 20% compared to, say, three years ago. But how much they were down varied both on the role and the size of the company.

Here are the estimates I’ve got from some of my sources, whose names have been changed:

• Brittney, who is looking for a VP-level role at a $10 million to $50 million DTC brand, said that she came across one job opening for a head of DTC that listed the salary range as being between $225,000 to $275,000. Three years ago, she said, when that same job was open at the same company, the salary range was from $250,000 to $300,000. She said she also heard from some recruiters at these size companies, “Oh, we can’t make $200,000 work.”
• Laura, who is looking at vp and CMO jobs at $100 million-plus companies, estimated that three years ago, the base comp for these types of roles was the low- to mid-$300,000 range. Now, “they’re squarely in the mid-twos.” 
• Liam, who is considering CMO or vp-level roles at smaller companies, or director-level roles, said he was seeing a similar compensation range as Laura. He also recalled meeting recently with a former colleague, who used to be a director at a nine-figure DTC startup where Liam previously worked. Four years ago, this former colleague was making around $175,000 as a director at this startup. Now, four years later, Liam’s former colleague said the comp for director-level jobs is still commonly stuck at around $175,000. 
• Nate, who had just started his job search earlier this summer, was seeing slightly better salary ranges. He estimated that for brands doing around $25 million to $50 million, director-level roles might pay anywhere from $180,000 to $240,000. 

All of this also depends upon how many employees a person might be expected to manage, whether that’s five or 15. 

Now, just because a company advertises for a role at a lower salary range doesn’t mean that they are always successful in the hiring process. That was what Anish Shah, an executive recruiter and founder of the firm Ruckus, stressed to me. “We do have a lot of clients who ask for the salaries to be really low versus market rate. And we’ve taken on a few of those searches, and frankly, it has not yielded them these magical, phenomenal candidates,” he said.

David, who does fractional consulting work and also helps startups with hiring, had more blunt feedback on the salary component. He thinks that the ZIRP era — when interest rates were low, allowing companies to more easily take on debt — skewed people’s understanding of what a marketing team should be and how much a director, VP, CMO, etc. should be paid. Those numbers, he added, “never made sense,” and that “I think just not many people are worth their salary.”

But, he added that for those select brands that are still growing 150% or 200% year over year — compensation rates haven’t dropped at all. 

Bonuses and equity are the other components to factor in when calculating a vp or CMO’s compensation. Eric, who spent the last year interviewing for executive-level jobs, said that bonuses that are contingent upon hitting certain metrics seem to be making up a bigger and bigger chunk of compensation for these senior-level roles. 

Most of these job seekers have also soured on equity in startups as an incentive. Only one job seeker I spoke with was disappointed that fewer and fewer companies seem to be offering equity for senior-level talent. Most of them have wisened up to the fact that many e-commerce startups have not lived up to their valuations. 

What should the role of a CMO be?
One of the biggest frustrations I heard from job seekers is that companies seemingly want marketing talent who can do it all: Someone who is both good at brand and performance marketing; Someone who can be both very in-the-weeds about marketing strategy, and execute components of it themselves, while also managing a team. 

Laura, who has been interviewing for vp and CMO roles, said, “At this level, what you need to be able to do is create strategies and lead a team to do the work.” Her strategy in job interviews has always been being very upfront about her strengths and the areas she doesn’t have as much expertise in — and how she hires a team to support those areas. But, seemingly, that hasn’t been enough so far in the eight months she’s been looking for a job. 

Shah, the recruiter, said that in ZIRP times, “a CMO previously could expect to hire and manage a large team, plus they [had] a lot of agency resources, while they mostly manage up and down.”

That’s not the case anymore, he said. In fact, he said his firm is “getting a lot of calls to replace CMOs. And the main reason is they don’t have a deep understanding of what’s happening below them.” 

He gave the example of a boss who says something along the lines of “you know, we should really focus on being more profitable while also growing faster.” These obvious insights, he said, are regurgitated far too often by candidates who mainly manage and delegate and don’t have a technical enough understanding of what modern marketing levels to pull. 

“The alpha in marketing efforts these days comes from the small, often technical details and optimizations versus the broad strategies,” he said. 

On the flip side, he said that the biggest friction point in almost all of his firm’s searches comes when companies reject more junior candidates for not being strategic enough while also rejecting more experienced candidates for not being in the weeds enough. 

But, in a difficult operating environment, companies continue to obsess over finding the perfect candidate who can do it all. 

The pressure to build a personal brand
In a tough market, much of the advice on how to get a job boils down to obvious tactics. (Network more! Consult to get your foot in the door!) These are the things that most of the people I spoke with — who, again, have held multiple senior-level roles and have a lot of connections in the industry — are already doing. 

One topic that frequently came up in conversations, however, is the pressure to build a personal brand. It feels harder to stand out in an age where seemingly every other marketer has a newsletter, and job seekers are being bombarded with posts on LinkedIn about their peers appearing on some new podcast or taking the stage for a panel at a retail conference. And, when everyone wants to constantly be seen as the brains behind a hot company’s marketing strategy. 

“Linkedin, I find personally depressing now,” Liam said. “I see tons of people posting — they call it humblebragging and it’s just bullshit.” He added that if you tallied up all the humblebragging people do about, say, how they boosted a company’s ROAS or AOV, “all the companies would be growing 150% a year, right?”

In the most egregious example, Liam said he saw someone he used to work with at a previous company promoting the work he did as their own on their LinkedIn.

Still, while most everyone said they felt pressure to build their personal brand, there was an acknowledgment that there is no one exact way to do it. Brittney, for example, said that she is trying to be more active in groups for freelance and fractional talent as she considers whether or not she can make freelancing work full-time. 

“I don’t necessarily want to be [like] I need to be posting every day on LinkedIn,” Brittney said. The reality is, “not everyone finds people through LinkedIn.” 

What I’m reading

• Vestaire Collective bets on an ‘Emily in Paris’ cameo to boost its U.S. business. 
• AdExchanger has a piece on why winning in retail can sometimes be a losing bet for DTC startups. 
• Chamberlain Coffee announced that its founder, influencer Emma Chamberlain, is now also becoming the brand’s co-CEO alongside current CEO Chris Gallant.

What we’ve covered

• How Cakes Body, Duolingo, and Zenni Optical use TikTok in different ways. 
• Why Pinterest is taking off with a new audience: Gen Z.
• How brands like BelliWelli and Olipop stand out in a sea of gut health products.