An Honest Conversation About the B2B Talent Market

Human Connection in an Increasingly Automated Market

At the Business Marketing Club's April 2026 meetup, BMC Co-Chair Louise Searley chaired a frank conversation with two specialists who know the B2B talent market very well: Mark Harris, Director of Marketing, Business Development & Comms at Carter Murray, and Naomi Hamilton, Associate Director & Head of Interim Talent at TML Partners. What emerged was a nuanced, sometimes uncomfortable portrait of a sector that hasn't quite figured out how to hire for the future it purports to want.  

Making marketing tangible and commercial

The clearest theme to emerge was the growing expectation that marketers demonstrate commercial impact, not just marketing activity. "The professional services market has not changed for 30 years," said Mark, "but everything we're seeing now is more of a focus on ‘what is marketing bringing?’ What money can you bring in, what can it save us, where can it save us time?" Naomi agreed but pointed to the structural problem underneath. The relationship between marketing and sales still often fails to make that commercial case stick: "The number of instances where marketing and sales aren't working in a cohesive way is striking," she said. "Individuals that have pushed that relationship forward are the ones in high demand. It's about how you make marketing tangible to a non-marketer, and often that comes down to how individual marketers attach their efforts to the revenue of the business." Mark added: "We had a client this year that could link 92% of the revenue they'd brought in over the last five years as originating from marketing, in one way or form."  

A thousand CVs, five candidates

The hiring process itself is in a curious state. Volume is high. Painfully so. "I'm recruiting for a Head of Marketing role at the moment," said Mark. "I've had nearly a thousand applicants in the last two weeks alone. Of those thousand, I'd be lucky if five can do the role." Naomi identified a separate but related pressure on the employer side. "I do question, if a business is hiring directly, how many of those CVs are actually viewed by someone who can genuinely understand the commercial impact that an individual has had," she said. "Talent teams in large businesses are fantastic, but they might recruit a marketing role once every six months, once a year, sometimes once every five years. They’re not marketing recruitment specialists." The result, both panellists agreed, is that many firms default to hiring what they already know. "There's a bit of fear in the market," said Naomi. "When there's caution, businesses stick with what they've hired before - someone who's been at one of their competitors. I personally think it's quite a dangerous way of hiring, because you then lack a difference of thought. You miss the chance to bring in someone from an industry that is further ahead in, say, martech, simply because you're only looking at law firms because you are a law firm." The practical upshot for candidates is to treat your LinkedIn profile with the same logic you'd apply to SEO. If you used Pardot five years ago and the platform has since rebranded, update your profile to reflect the current name. If there's a skill you're building towards, mention it. You'll be found for roles you might not otherwise have considered.  

The rise of fractional and interim

One trend both panellists were keen to highlight was the rise of fractional and interim working, and not as a stopgap. "Fractional is having its moment within B2B marketing," said Naomi. "Businesses are drawing on a lower-commitment workforce to deliver on specific challenges much more regularly than they were three to five years ago, when interim had a bit of a negative perception in the market." She was also clear that the best fractional workers have learned to project long-term intent even when an engagement is short-term. "Really successful fractional individuals make a CEO feel as though they're there to impact the longer-term vision of that business, even though they're there for a brief time." Team sizes are shifting too, in ways that don't always show up in headline hiring numbers. Post-pandemic over-hiring has left many organisations cautious. As Naomi put it: "You're going into a role in which you're already fighting to prove yourself before you've even said hello to the CFO."  

The interview goes both ways

One of the more significant shifts the panel observed is in the dynamic of the interview process itself. Candidates, particularly strong ones, are no longer simply auditioning. "The client has to sell as much to the candidate as vice versa," said Mark. "It's often not even about skill set. The main thing is a connection between the hiring manager and the person taking the job." That puts emotional intelligence firmly on the agenda, for candidates reading a room and for leaders managing increasingly diverse teams. Naomi pointed to research suggesting up to six generations can now be present in a single workplace, each with different expectations around communication and ways of working. "The emotional awareness that comes with marketing leadership," she said, "is the ability to recognise the different stakeholders you'll be navigating, whether that's a young founder who's built a great business very quickly, or someone who's in their fourth CEO role."  

Networking still beats LinkedIn

For candidates in the room, the message on job-hunting was pointed. LinkedIn is not enough, and possibly not even the main game. "A lot of individuals are finding roles through their network," said Naomi, "whether that's through a recruitment consultant, or someone they've worked with before referring them to a team that's now hiring. A job search can be very thankless. Actually, doing things like [attending events like the Business Marketing Club Meet Ups], proper in-person networking, is still the best way to find opportunities that aren't even being advertised." Mark explained that the majority of roles are filled through relationships, referrals and events. "Everyone wants to help people out," he said. "When we've got a job on, I'll phone people in that sector and say, do you know anyone and I’ll always get recommendations of who to talk to?"  

Where does that leave us?

Strip away the specifics and a clear picture emerges from this conversation. The B2B marketing talent market is under pressure from multiple directions at once. Budgets are tighter, headcount is harder to justify, and the bar for proving commercial value has never been higher. At the same time, the way people want to work is shifting, the tools are changing rapidly, and the old playbook for both hiring and job-hunting is producing diminishing returns. What the panel kept coming back to, from different angles, was the importance of human connection in a market that increasingly tries to automate it away. Whether that's a marketer building a genuine relationship with the sales team, a candidate picking up the phone rather than clicking apply, or a hiring manager recognising that the best person for a role might not look exactly like the last person who did it, the thread running through all of it is the same. The firms and individuals who will fare best in this market are the ones willing to think a little differently about how they show up. For marketers, that means owning the commercial conversation rather than waiting to be invited into it. For employers, it means resisting the gravitational pull of the safe hire. And for both sides, it means accepting that the relationship matters as much as the role itself.