---
title: "Stop Hiring One Person To Be A Marketing Department"
url: "https://chrodaily.com/insight/stop-hiring-one-person-to-be-a-marketing-department/"
author: "Lilach Bullock"
published: "2026-09-25"
updated: "2026-09-25"
---

# Stop Hiring One Person To Be A Marketing Department

### **The hiring pattern I keep watching repeat**

I manage the marketing team for a US non-profit as their fractional CMO, and when I took that role I restructured it from a set of overlapping responsibilities into people who each own one thing. Before that I'd already watched the same mistake happen outside my own team. I've watched three separate small businesses hire one marketing person and expect a full department from them, and between the three of them they burned through two hires in fourteen months. The job posting always reads the same way, something like manage social, run email, write blog content, handle SEO, maybe touch paid ads if there's budget left. It never says which of those jobs matters most, so the new hire tries to do all of them at once instead of one of them well.

### **Why one hire almost never survives past a year**

Marketing is roughly five or six separate disciplines stitched together under one job title, and most people are strong at two of them. Hire a writer and you get good copy and thin paid ads. Hire a paid media person and the blog goes quiet. That's a structural problem with the job description, and no amount of hiring harder fixes it. The usual response is to load more onto the same person rather than change the description, and that's the point where the good hires start looking for the exit.

### **What changed when I stopped assuming people would self-teach new tools**

On one eleven-person marketing team I advised, there was a fully built AI content workflow, but usage logs showed exactly two people opening it more than once a week after three months. Everyone else had tried it once, hit a wall, and gone back to the old way. The fix wasn't more training material; it was assigning one first user per content type for fourteen days and having each person show their messy output to the rest of the team, errors, half-working prompts, all of it, so people saw what learning the tool looked like before they had to try it themselves. Adoption went from two regular users to nine within a month.

### **The hidden cost nobody budgets for**

Somebody always ends up as the informal help desk, and it's usually your best person, which is exactly backwards. On one client rollout I advised on, one account manager fielded 23 Slack questions in a single week, most of them some version of how do I phrase this prompt. She'd answered the first few questions and become the default answer machine by accident, and nobody had given her that job or noticed her own workload slipping while she did it. The team capped informal support and routed everything into a shared FAQ doc instead, and repeat questions dropped by roughly 60 percent over the following two weeks.

### **A rule for rolling out new responsibilities without burning out your best person**

Every new tool or task now gets one named owner for a fixed window, usually two weeks, before it goes to the whole team. I also put a hard cap on informal support from day one, so questions go to a shared doc rather than to whoever answers fastest in Slack that week. Both rules came out of watching the same pattern twice, a capable employee absorbing everyone else's learning curve on top of her own job until she either burned out or stopped trying to help at all.

### **What I now tell clients before they post the job ad**

At the non-profit, I report to a COO and a board, and I manage the marketing team alongside a handful of agencies and contractors. When roles overlapped, I didn't add another generalist to cover the gaps; I gave the work to a named owner and hired freelancers for the two or three skills nobody on the core team had. That's what I tell clients now before they write the job ad: decide which one or two disciplines matter this year, hire for those, and budget for freelancers to cover the rest instead of hoping one person will grow into all of it.

---

[Lilach Bullock](https://www.lilachbullock.com) is an AI implementation consultant and fractional CMO with 21 years in marketing. She helps business owners put AI to work across content, SEO, social media, email marketing, automation and lead generation. Her work has been featured in Forbes, the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, WIRED, HuffPost and the Content Marketing Institute, and she has worked with Twitter, IBM, Dropbox, monday.com, Hootsuite and Greenpeace. Forbes named her a Top 20 Social Media Power Influencer worldwide. Based in Israel, she works with US, UK and international clients.