5 Reasons Hiring a Social Media Manager in Oregon Is Harder Than You Think

Hiring a social media manager is one of those things that sounds straightforward until you actually try to do it. Over the course of my career I've hired for this role four times, all here in Oregon. Three of those searches were in the agency space and one was in-house at a tech company in Eugene. 

Hiring a social media manager for the first time

My first time hiring a social media manager was in 2020, which in hindsight was one of the most unusual moments in the history of social media marketing to be opening a role like this. We were in the middle of COVID, TikTok was just starting to gain real traction in the US, and the entire industry was in the middle of a shift that nobody had a roadmap for.

Before 2020, social media marketing looked a lot different. It was high-quality photography, graphics, and carousels. Video existed, but it wasn't yet the engine driving new eyeballs and attention the way it is today. The skill set the industry needed was changing faster than the talent pool could keep up with.

When applications started coming in, I quickly noticed that most of them looked similar to one another and fell into about four distinct types of candidates. But the candidate I was really hoping to find, someone with genuine social media experience, novice video skills, and a portfolio that reflected both, was almost nowhere to be found.

Here are the five reasons why I think this was. Maybe you can relate.

1. The local talent pool is smaller and more skeptical than you'd expect

The Eugene, Oregon market presents a unique challenge because the local talent pool simply doesn't have a large concentration of professionals who are both passionate about social media and building a career in it.

Part of the problem is cultural. In a small market like Eugene, social media has historically been treated as an add-on responsibility to an existing role rather than a standalone role. It gets bundled under a broader marketing title and handed to whoever has the bandwidth, or more accurately, whoever can't say no. And when social media is just one item on a long list of marketing responsibilities, it is almost always the first thing to fall off the plate. People run out of ideas, posting becomes inconsistent, and the channel quietly gets deprioritized in favor of everything else that feels more urgent.

That pattern has shaped how a lot of local marketing professionals think about social media. Not as a craft or a career path, but as a chore. Something that has to be done rather than something worth building a skill set around. So when you post a role specifically for a social media manager, you are fishing in a pool where a meaningful portion of the market has already decided they want nothing to do with it.

I remember attending a Business After Hours event through the Eugene Chamber and mentioning to someone there that I was hiring for a social media manager. Her immediate response was, "Good luck, I hate social media!" And while I knew she wasn't my candidate, that moment stuck with me. It captured something real about the Eugene market: there's a genuine skepticism about social media management here that you might not encounter as frequently in larger metros. That skepticism makes the talent pool smaller than it already is.

2. The role is broad by nature and the local market struggles to match it

Every role I hired for followed a similar structure. Owning the end-to-end social media process: strategy and research, ideation, content capture, video editing and light graphic design, publishing, comment and DM management, and active participation in online communities. It's a broad role by nature, and the job description reflected that.

There is a narrative that gets thrown around constantly on LinkedIn that hiring a social media manager is really hiring five different roles (broadly: brand strategist, photographer, videographer, social media strategist, and online community manager). I think that's bogus. The role is the role. Yes, it requires a wide range of skill sets. Yes, it demands someone who can move fluidly between strategy and execution, between creative and analytical, between planning and real-time response. But that is the nature of social media marketing. It is its own specific lane of marketing with many different competencies baked into it, and the right person can do all of it.

The challenge is that not everyone is scrappy enough to operate that way. A lot of candidates are comfortable in one lane and struggle the moment you ask them to step outside of it. That is not a problem with the role. That is a problem with the candidate. Looking back, I don't think the job description was ever the problem. The scope was accurate. The challenge was finding someone in the local market who could genuinely rise to meet it. And, it wasn’t impossible, I always found someone. But here was a lot of coaching moments.

3. Remote candidates sound like a solution but the role requires someone on the ground

Rarely would I consider candidates outside of Oregon. The nature of the role made it difficult. Most of these positions required someone on site to capture content, whether that was video or photography, as part of the end-to-end process. And most budgets didn't have room to also bring in a separate videographer or photographer to fill that gap. The content capture piece was part of the job, which meant the person doing it needed to be local.

4. The left brain, right brain problem is real and almost impossible to screen for

The clearest window I've ever had into why hiring a social media manager is so difficult came not from the hiring process itself, but from teaching.

For a period of time I worked as a freelance mentor through a digital marketing certification program, working with small business owners and early-career marketers who were looking to build their skills. Over the course of that experience I worked with well over a hundred students, and I started to notice a very consistent pattern.

The analytical thinkers gravitated toward SEO, conversion rate optimization, and paid media. The creative thinkers gravitated toward social media content creation and email marketing. And rarely, if ever, did someone sit comfortably in both camps.

Organic social media marketing requires both. You need the creative instinct to produce content that stops the scroll, and you need the analytical mindset to understand why it worked, what the data is telling you, and how to adjust. Finding someone who genuinely operates on both sides of that line is the core challenge of hiring a social media manager, and it's something that no job description can fully solve for.

5. The traits that matter most are the hardest ones to interview for

Regardless of background or archetype, there were a few things that separated the candidates worth pursuing from the ones who weren't ready for the role.

The first was a genuine motivation to keep learning. Social media moves fast and the people who thrive in it are the ones who are curious by default, not the ones who have to be pushed to stay current.

The second was scrappiness. A willingness to figure things out, try things that might not work, and move quickly without waiting for perfect conditions.

The third was the ability to thrive in chaos while staying organized and clear on the goals. Social media management is a role with a lot of moving pieces, loose guidelines, shifting priorities, and real-time demands. The people who do it well have somehow figured out how to hold all of that without losing sight of what they are actually trying to achieve.

Those traits are hard to screen for in an interview. But they are the ones that matter most once someone is in the seat.

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If there is one thing I want you to take away from all of this, it is that hiring a social media manager is not a decision to rush. The wrong hire will cost you more time in the long run than the search itself ever would. Training someone who isn't the right fit, managing content that isn't moving the needle, and eventually starting the process over again adds up fast, both in time and in money.

If you are in a position where you need social media support now but recognize it’s going to take time to find the right candidate, I’d encourage you to consider bringing on a contractor with proven experience in the interim. Someone who can keep things moving while you take the time to find the right person. A good social media contractor can hold down the strategy, the content, and the execution while you run a search the right way. And given that finding the right candidate can easily take six months or more in a market like Eugene, that runway matters.

The permanent hire is worth waiting for. Just make sure your social media doesn't have to wait with it.