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A community manager is the person you hire to speak to your leads or customers. They are likely to spend MORE time talking to you than you. 😧

Which means … that's an important attitude. You need someone with a proven track record as an excellent community manager to know that your leads and customers are in safe hands.

This may sound scary at first, but once you've found the perfect community manager for your business, you're so thankful that you've outsourced community management to someone who is passionate about making your community the best place, where she can be.

But who is this person?

Here are the 6 things you should look out for when hiring a community manager.

# 1: Someone who knows from the start how important filtering is

Your community manager is responsible for making your community an entertaining place. Online communities can either be great places to hang out … or a black hole of self-promotion and spam that makes your community one of the least enjoyable places on the Internet.

Obviously we are aiming for the former. That means you need a community manager who knows from the start how important it is to filter your community. You will understand that 100,000 members mean nothing if half of these people just try to advertise their own offers without adding value to the group.

Ask your Community Manager candidates: How do you review new requests to make sure they match our group and are a valuable part of our community?

# 2: Someone who has experience creating community policies and guidelines

When creating a high quality group, your community manager will compile your community’s policies and guidelines. You want someone who has experience in creating guidelines that will ensure that your group is a positive and safe place for your members and has clear rules about what is allowed by members and what is not.

Here is an example of how our guidelines for that DigitalMarketer Engage Group::

Ask your Community Manager candidates: Do you have any examples of policies and guidelines that you have created for previously managed communities?

# 3: Someone who has experience with YOUR top channels that you use

Community channels are not created right away – a community manager who has managed to manage a community on Reddit may not be able to do this on Facebook. While this is not always the case, you want to know the specific channel experience of your community manager.

Here are some different channels that you may see on a candidate's resume:

• Reddit
• Facebook
• Relaxed
• Community on a website

Ask your Community Manager candidates: Which channels do you have the most experience with?

# 4: Someone who understands your brand voice

This is a crucial part of your hiring decision for your new community manager. You need someone who creates a consistent brand experience with your members. If you have a specific brand voice, your leads and customers will feel less trustworthy of your brand if they read a completely different brand voice in your community.

To ensure that your community manager hits your brand vote, give them access to your brand guidelines so they know exactly what they're aiming for.

Here is an example from our Community Manager Michelle Dalton, who absolutely hits the voice of the DigitalMarketer brand:

Ask your Community Manager candidates: Do you have examples of posts that you wrote with a brand voice similar to ours, or are you willing to give us 1–2 examples of posts that you would write in our community based on our brand voice?

# 5: Someone who can point to branded mature responses to difficult posts from unhappy community members

One of the most difficult aspects of a community manager is dealing with unhappy community members. Talking to unhappy people is difficult, and your community manager must be willing to have difficult conversations to protect your community and create a positive experience for your members.

You want to make sure that your community manager has experience with these difficult conversations and can maintain your brand voice while speaking to them. If your brand voice is fun and playful, you don't have to stick to this script. However, when they become fully corporate, your other members will feel like they don't know you as well as they thought.

Ask your Community Manager candidates: Do you have any examples of difficult conversations with unfortunate community members?

# 6: Someone who has ideas about growth

Since your community manager speaks to your leads and customers every day, you want to hire someone who is opportunistic in these conversations. Ideally, your community manager will come to you with new ideas for content or offers based on the conversations that took place in your community during the week.

Additional bonus points if you previously ran a community growth campaign – but that's just a cherry.

Ask your Community Manager candidates: Can you give us new content and offer ideas based on the conversations you have in the group?

Your community manager is such an important employee – he will represent your company in front of a group of your leads or customers every day. Finding the right community manager can seem scary, but only when you know what questions to ask will you show their expertise and ability to absolutely smash their role.

Ask your community manager candidate these 6 questions to make sure you're hiring the perfect manager for your community.