BSMS 87 - Job Descriptions in the Age of AI

Brian Graf: Hi there and welcome to B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. I'm Brian Graf, CEO of clingy, and I'm here again with Stijn Hendrikse. He's co-founder and a seasoned SAS marketing executive and ex Microsoft product marketing leader. In this episode, we explore how AI is transforming the modern marketers job description, not just in tools and output, but in expectations and impact.

If you're hiring marketers or even just knowledge workers in 2025, or thinking about your own role, this is one you don't want to miss. We dig into how the definition of quality is changed, what skills are newly essential, and how performance is being judged in a world where anyone can do more with less. We also unpack the idea that every hire today is essentially a team of one backed by powerful AI, and why that means outcomes and ownership matter more than ever.

Let's get into it. Welcome back to you to B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. Thank you again for joining me, Stijn. I know we've had a bit of a hiatus, but it's great to have you back. We have a really good topic today. 

It's basically to answer the question, how does the impact of AI change really the job description for a marketer. But really also the expectations of the role. You can think about we've talked about how AI has impacted what you can do as a marketer, and the amount of output that you can have and, and everything like that. But we've never really thought about the expectations of a role, for a marketer with this new world.

So I think it's a really interesting question. I yeah, I'd love to just get your opening thoughts on it. Stijn. Like, how do you view, give us a little history on like how you've looked at job descriptions in the past and how it's starting to change for you?

Stijn Hendrikse: We see AI’s impact now on organizations. Cutting, parts of their teams, right. They can do more with less. And that's, of course, a function of AI, but probably a couple of other things, too economic realities, etc.. But when you kind of want to get in front of that, you have to think about what is the real job to be done by a modern marketer in 2025, and how is that changed with all these new tools that are now at our disposal that dramatically changed our ability to get work done in more than I think anything else in the last 15, 20 years .

Before that, we got the revolution of the PC, of course, things like work processes and all those things. But everything after that is what you can do with LLM and many other tools that are also touching all the other types for content, channels, etc.. 

By the way, this topic came from me into full, kind of full, in focus the last couple of weeks, Brian, as I had to rewrite and coach a couple people on job descriptions from both marketing and sales personnel and leaders, both leaders and frontline team members. 

I didn't really feel good about so many templates and so many inputs that I've used over the years, and I didn't feel good about any of them. Because when I look at, for example, the evolution of OKRs, the last couple of quarters, right, as kind of tools allow us to do more, they've definitely changed, you know, the bar of what good looks like for a marketer. And the job descriptions that didn't reflect that. So that's how I of think about this.

Brian Graf: I think it is really interesting looking at your standard job description, I want to say that a lot of the even just looking at the responsibilities section of a job description, I feel like it's very easy to, in the previous life to put a lot of activity based, items in there, right, like, you know, publish X amount of content like run X campaigns across, you know, whatever channels.

And I feel like with this new landscape that we're working in, that's almost not valuable anymore. Right? It's not really that relevant. 

I think it does need to be much more about what do you need to be fully responsible for? What do you need to own? What outcomes do you need to own? What do you need to drive for the business? And, and pushing, you know, leaving the the tactics and the, the activities. Much more to, to the person and the tools that they use.

The way that I look at it, especially with, with this new landscape is that almost if you're going to hire somebody who's who's capable and not maybe an intern, but maybe also an intern, you almost need to look at them like you're hiring a small team.

You know, you're not really hiring one person anymore. You're hiring one person backed by this magic tool, right? That can do five x, ten x, what somebody in the same position used to be able to do. And so it's almost it to me, it doubles down. What outcome do you need to drive. What result do you need to drive.

Stijn Hendrikse: So you just basically said two aspects. One is what are the new competencies, the new capabilities that you expect modern marketers to have so that they can use these tools to the fullest advantage.

You need to be good at prompt engineering, you need to understand how to coach it. And by the way why Antoine and I, I assume I think in June this will be final, launching Level up the book that is partly going by what's kind of this intersection overlap between how we manage and enable and empower people to reach their potential.

And also, how we love those things translate in how to reach a re mastering use AI tools and get them to reach their full potential. You know, going back to the job description. So a couple of new competencies that you would add to a job description, right. Your ability to manage and master AI tools, your ability to provide what I like to call great signal noise ratio.

If you think of how do you get the most out of these tools, often it is about the quality of the big M marketing input. The quality of your personas, the quality of your strategy, the quality of your campaign, the kind of creativity that will define and the quality of how you've customized your and them to have the right voice less will define what the quality of those outputs will be.

If it's going at all of the bold and bulleted and look like it's a ChatGPT  campaign for a really a very interesting, great creative piece of marketing work that was just enabled and maybe was done at a higher speed because you were able to use all these tools.

So those are skill sets. So that's what they call signal noise ratio, where you as a marketer has to be able to provide a very high signal strength to whatever your brands are asking for that the files that you feed into these, these tools. And then the other part is that we're tied to the outcomes.

There's no question that unless you're able to do it twice, three times, four times as much, of certain things as before, not of everything. You're doing your role.

But there are certain things that you can have exponential more output, more impact with just because you have these tools at your disposal right now.

I wrote a couple of books in the last couple of weeks. For some of my, the companies I'm involved with, leadership, that are based, and I don't think they're bad because they were written partly with AI, but it's partly because I spent a lot of time on it. 

But I could never have done it so fast without the AI taking care of the grammar right and the spelling and helping me with some of the research. All of those things that really are better done by, you know, and learning how to combine those in a way that expands your ability to deliver results is the other aspect of job structure that will help you change.

What can you expect from a content manager in 2025 is very different from what we could expect two years ago.

Brian Graf: Yeah, 100%. And I think, well, in terms of the content marketer. The output is so much higher. But I think to your point, it's all about quality, right? It just the, the number of things that you do matters less and less. Because you can do so much more. And it's so easy to do a lot poorly with AI. 

I think it's so much more important to get the real results and to get the real learnings from the marketer to run the right tests. It's particularly from the content side. 

How do you think about, with this, you know, particularly with within the lens of the job description, how do you think about looking for industry and career experience versus maybe, you know, high technical expertise on AI? I'm sure it depends on the role, but has your thinking around that consideration changed with this evolution?

Stijn Hendrikse:  Yeah, absolutely. When I interviewed candidates, I used to be really all about getting things done right. I was brought up in the Microsoft culture. I spent the first half of my career and getting things done was one of the most important skills you could have as a professional. Which led me to have an attitude.

This my 90% theory, it's better to do ten things at a 90% quality level than do 1 or 2 that are perfect. And I think that is how a lot of business success was achieved in the last 20, 30 or 40 years by people in knowledge worker, environments. Right? Not get distracted by perfection and make sure you get things that are really good but not necessarily perfect.

That bar has of course been raised right because now everybody without a lot of effort can probably get things to be a B plus or an A minus, right. So if you want to stand out, you've got to go for the A+. You have got to score 100%. And so when I'm interviewing people now and also when I'm thinking of what the job description, having people who are wired to and are willing to strive for a higher level of performance, for perfection, even sometimes it's, I think, important.

There's a question that you and I learned to use in Kalungi, was having a valued and skilled leveling up or leveling up together. And a question that we always used, and I still use this is when someone does work, you ask them, do you think you can make this any better?

And if the answer is yes, then the next question would be why didn't you do that? And that question was not always appropriate because the speed of the getting to work done, completion was also really important. There was always this trade off. The same as the Project Triangle, right? Between the quality, cost, and speed. 

The triangle has actually changed. The, the ability to do things fastest probably has gone up. Quality has actually gone up when it comes to things like grammar and spelling. I think that's where people get a lot of help from these tools. But so quality now will be defined in a new way.

And cost has gone down, of course, because now you can make it with one versus the three. So in the project triangle, the quality leg of the triangle is extremely critical, because that's the only way for you to differentiate, because everybody else will get the same speed and cost advantages by using AI tools as you do as a knowledge worker.

It's work because I think this goes beyond market. Examples we use are about marketers. 

So the quality leg of the triangle has gone up in a way that is different from spelling and grammar. That's absolutely in the table. Right. So now quality means is your blog article actually interesting? Is it answering a question that people actually have, answering a question nobody else has answered yet?

And if you as a marketing professional are now gaining a lot of efficiency and time back because you can have the AI LLM of them do research for you and draft articles and get you 20 different subject lines for an email campaign or prep for the marketing team meeting with the great agenda. Now you need to use that time that you have to make that agenda actually the most meaningful agenda it could be, right? 

Are we actually talking about the right things in this marketing meeting? Are the right people going to be there? Did I give them the right preparation to have an and very effective meeting? Because it will draft the agenda for you. It will take the notes. But now it's up to you as a leader to level up and say, what do I actually do out of notes?. How do I hold people accountable for their action items?

All those things that may have been less, then that's where maybe a B-plus would have been. Hey, I actually have good notes for my meeting. Now you have to go to a minus or a plus level performance as the leader of the meeting, or to basically ask a team to spend an hour of their time with you and maybe that's a plus, is that actually everybody knows for their action items, that they actually do something.

And then the same for a writer for content like the A+ would be the that document or the stuff that gets written is really not recognizable as being done by AI, and it has all your brightest ideas in it from a creativity perspective. Another thing that humans are still uniquely positioned to is to collaborate, right?

A little AI tools will help with things like communication. That of course helps with collaboration. But it’s up to humans to interact. And brainstorming together and creative processes. Humans shine at that. So if you, you, you gain time by using the LLM for maybe some of the preparation for the meeting, you now put that into what can I do to make the team more effective.

So there's all these things that now back to your question. In a job interview and in the job description that I would start emphasizing more that I have emphasized more, than were you able to produce a bunch of content, get published.

Brian Graf: Yeah, yeah. Particularly on the quality element. I think it's definitely not like you can use AI and condense all your work into a third or whatever at the time it was, and then go fishing for the other two thirds.

Stijn Hendrikse:  You can. But then those are people going to get let go, right?

Brian Graf:Yeah. It'll be a nice there'll be a nice 2 to 3 months and then it'll catch up with you. But I think that really, to your point on the quality piece, it's all about having that critical eye and being diligent. 

Diligent, knowing exactly what you want. And always asking yourself that question of how can I make this better, more valuable, more relevant? And putting yourself and your tools through the paces to make sure that you get there.

I feel like in the past it was more about, I guess brute force was respected more, if that makes sense of like, hey, this person stayed up until 3 a.m. doing this presentation or something. They should be commended for that. And that almost gets taken off the table because of, because of AI. So it is all about quality and I think less about effort.

Stijn Hendrikse:  And then the other aspect to that, but one of the things we, we spend time on other podcast episodes, Brian, is that all we have is professional, this knowledge worker, which is our reputation.

If you think of our professional equity in the value of our how you measure the value of kind of what you bring to the workplace, your career.

The brand equity of you as an individual contributor. It's your reputation. And so now that everybody is able to write correct English and do it as a relative good piece and then be able to brainstorm about a lot of, you know, interesting ideas. You have to stand apart in new ways and your reputation at stake.

Brian Graf: So maybe we can usema content marketing job description as an example. Like what would be the specific additions or edits that you would make to our roles and responsibilities or even an experience to kind of modernize that?

Stijn Hendrikse: So first, on the outcomes side, I would make it very clear that's what used to be great. There's now maybe mediocre right where it goes to the impact on the manager and the impact on content, leadership. 

The impact of having a brand presence. Which you do with your social media channel that channels how much video is part of your strategy, because all of those things are not so easy to produce.

But for us, I guess, quantity and quality, both along the lines of how do you use the all these new tools in a way that this kind of improve the level of quality and our reputation? But also their ability to, basically, use all the time one to, to get to a plus level performance. So things like showing up high in the LLM search results or being able to get a bunch of subscribers to a podcast.

Those outcomes, I think the bar can be raised significantly because I can now expect someone to deliver a weekly podcast episode that has a lot more content and creativity behind it and interesting things than I could maybe a year ago. 

I could actually expect someone to publish a 300 page book every month if I ever thought that would be the right tactic for a company.

Because it's very doable, you know, and getting it live on Amazon, etc. and of course, the book would have to have good quality, but not have to be just an AI-generated set of pages. So in the job description, I will mention those examples.

Brian Graf: I think that I would just add one thing to that is that I would want them to be focused. Just to use content marketing as an example, to be focused so much more than maybe I would have in the past on testing, getting feedback from the market, and things like that, that maybe I would have been more tolerant of it being less of a priority because of the amount of time that kind of.

Stijn Hendrikse: If you do email nurturing, or unbundled email campaigns, it's no longer acceptable for an accomplished marketing team member, a BDR for instance not sending a multiple email variations, have them in AB test mode all the time, testing a lot of different subject lines, testing a little different length because LLM made that so easy.

It's not about auto generating every email. You write emails that have all of your intellect behind them. What are the things these people that I'm trying to reach out to actually interested in? What do they care about? How do I put myself into this? How do I put effort into creating a really good lead magnet for all the things you need to do? It's really easy to have five different versions of that email that you wrote with all your own personal ideas, and so that's no longer optional.

Brian Graf: Yeah. I do think that this, this perspective on hiring and job descriptions in general is a must, right now for where we are. You can't expect you can't put the same expectations that we had 3 to 5 years ago on, on your marketing hires and expect them to be successful, or you to be successful. I think we have to evolve with the times. And this is definitely the way to do it.

Stijn Hendrikse:  I think there are a couple things you expect every knowledge worker, every for productivity worker to do. Making sure emails with the right amount I help are just perfect. There's no reason for emails not to be really good anymore, right? The same for content that you create or meeting notes that you take from meetings that you prepare.

If you don't have those things buttoned up and done, really well, you're going to basically fail at your job, right? And then on top of that, you build all these things that with a little bit of extra creativity, with the extra time that you can put into human relationships and strategic ideation, you can absolutely level up the all up performance of you together with all the AI tools around you.

Brian Graf: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's about as good of place to stop as any. Any final thoughts from you, Stijn?

Stijn Hendrikse:  Whenever you find yourself using AI tools, ask yourself this question can I make this any better? Right before you attempted to publish the blog, to send out the email. So anyway I can make this better by just using the time that I just gained by using the LLM, to just put my own best, energy and effort into making this as good as I can.