I get a lot of email messages from recruiters who find my profile on LinkedIn. I’m not looking for a job myself, but I often peruse the job descriptions to see if I know anyone to recommend. And sometimes I read these job descriptions and wonder if the client realizes that they are literally looking for “Wonder Woman” — although I’m not even sure Wonder Woman could do everything in this particular job description well.

When this particular company started emailing me, they stated their area of expertise as IT — and it was clear that in their mind, email marketing was an IT position.

Those of us working in email marketing know that while it’s helpful to have some IT expertise, email marketing does not belong in the IT department. It’s definitely a marketing discipline. So it’s nice to see, I guess, that this recruiter has broadened their stated area of expertise.

There are 2 titles given for this position: Email Marketing Specialist and Email Marketing Manager. But the skills they are looking for are beyond either of them.

On the one hand, they are looking for someone to take responsibility for the email marketing strategy and results:

• Manage all email marketing initiatives to drive company growth and retention
• Work closely with Creative, Marketing Marketers (yes, it says that, second bullet point), Sales and Corporate Marketing to build campaign strategy and execute sends.

Execute sends? Are they looking for someone to actually log-in, create the messages and drive the platform? Oh my gosh, they are:

• Setup and deploy complex programs within our marketing automation platform (automated and single-batch) to engage new prospects and existing customers
• Build and actively manage email send lists
• Ensure emails are optimized for both web and mobile
• [Be] familiar with Emma, Mailchimp, ConstantContact or other platforms

In addition to strategy and execution the candidate will also be handling project management

• Manage email calendar, roadmap and optimizing user experience

Optimizing user experience? Oh yes, this position will also be responsible for:

• Continuously conduct A/B split tests and analyze results to garner insights and optimize future email campaigns

There’s also an element of process management:

• Improve structures and process to help scale email marketing

And documentation:

• Maintain and update email standards documentation
• Monitor email trends and make recommendations for keeping emails in alignment with best practices.

And did you notice at the beginning of the job description that this person is responsible for “the email campaigns created at our client’s corporate office for all divisions.” So you’re doing all these tasks for multiple business units. Whew!

In my experience, it will be difficult to find someone who has the expertise, patience and time to handle all of this.

Anyone who is well-versed in the higher level aspects of this job will likely balk at logging in and handling sends. And very few people who have the skills and desire to drive the platform will be up to the ‘heavy lifting’ aspects of this job.

What you really need is a small team of internal email marketers along with an outside consultant or two to handle the strategy and other higher level tasks. The fact that this company — and these recruiters — don’t understand that is one more reason why some email marketing doesn’t live up to its potential.