Head of Organic Search

How this role differs

You become accountable for a capability rather than a collection of accounts. What the function is good at today, and what it needs to be good at in two years, is now your problem to solve.

Both roles own the offer agency-wide. The Head of owns it including resourcing across both disciplines. The Associate Director, Organic Search owns it through expertise, standards and external standing, carrying a commercial number without owning the teams.

Roles and responsibilities

• Own the Organic Search offer and its commercial performance: margin, utilisation and growth.
• Own resourcing across both disciplines, including where capability gaps sit and who is being built into them.
• Be accountable for the discipline's full client portfolio through the teams that manage it, rather than holding accounts yourself.
• Hold managers accountable for team performance, delivery quality and client outcomes, while developing their leadership and commercial judgement.
• Own the commercial case for selling one service rather than two, and how it is scoped and priced.
• Set the integrated methodology agency-wide, including what gets retired from either discipline.
• Support new business where integration is the differentiator.
• Own the headcount plan: the shape of the team as well as its size, and the case for every addition.
• Define the development pathway for the discipline: what good looks like at each level, and how people are trained towards it.
• Represent the function to clients in pitches and senior conversations, and externally in the industry.
• Build the leadership bench beneath you so that the function is not dependent on you being in the room.
• Work across functions on integrated work, and resolve the trade-offs where disciplines compete for the same people or the same client budget.
• Lead senior recruitment for the function, including roles that do not exist yet.
• Plan capability against where organic search is going twelve months out.

Immediate growth path