Dear Liz, I’ve just accepted a new job and I’m excited about it. I’m going to be the HR Manager for a creative firm. I’ve been in HR for four years and I was a Team Leader in my last job, but this will be my first experience running my own HR department. I have already dealt quite a bit with recruitment, employee relations and benefits but I haven’t been involved in compensation planning.

On a Monday morning several months ago, R/GA relocated its entire 900-person New York headquarters into a state-of-the-art connected office without a glitch. The technology worked flawlessly and the organization felt immediately at home in its high tech, yet surprisingly relaxed new digs. And, it all came together in less than 18 months – though the move-in date seemed to arrive too quickly.

A few weeks back, I decided to highlight the top mistakes CMOs were making in our new world of collaboration and storytelling and I got a great response to the piece. Consequently, as the second quarter of 2016 unfolds, I felt it equally important to point out some of the most winning techniques and approaches top marketers are using to succeed and lead.

Slowly but surely Europe is gaining ground on the US through the efforts of its disruptive entrepreneurs, with many seeing Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as the region most likely to produce the next unicorn. Here, Poland is making its power play, with a rising tally of digital success stories, a well-developed startup infrastructure, and the new Google Campus in its capital Warsaw set to provide a catalyst for innovation throughout the CEE.

One might expect surgeons or religious leaders to attain the highest levels of job satisfaction in America, but it turns out that isn’t the case. The most satisfied workers in major U.S. cities are generally well-paid managers, according to data obtained by FORBES. Compensation database PayScale asked 192,000 survey respondents over the course of two years how they earned a living, and how satisfying they found their jobs.

Years ago, sales trainees learned all about Features and Benefits.  Let’s say that a sales trainee was learning how to sell office supplies to small businesses. Let’s say the salesperson was trying to sell a buyer a certain  kind of pen. The salesperson learned to talk about the features of the pen – for instance, its soft grip and its nice, even-flowing line of ink – and the benefits those features would provide the pen’s users.

You cannot open your mouth to say “It’s hard to find good employees” when your own recruiting process is broken. The problem of dysfunctional recruiting is widespread and most employers with a busted recruiting process don’t even know it. They defend their recruiting systems, no matter how wretched they are.

It’s technically possible to become an online marketing expert on your own. You can, through trial and error alone, start learning what’s good and what’s bad for your brand, and you might even be able to catch on to new strategies and technologies just by keeping an eye on how your competitors or users engage. It’s the path I took. But this path alone is inefficient; it’s better to augment your efforts by learning from expert external sources.

Every manager in a hiring capacity will make at least one bad hire over the course of a career, and some people make nothing but bad hires! What is a bad hire? It’s a mismatch between a person and a job. Managers who make bad hires often can be quick to say “What’s wrong with these job applicants?” There is nothing wrong with the so-called Talent Community. They are fine. It’s your hiring process that is broken.

It is freaking me out to realize that since I started interviewing people for jobs in 1980, I’ve been interviewing job-seekers for thirty-six years. Since I was twenty years old and a fledgling supervisor in a tiny company in 1980, I didn’t get any training before I was thrown into my first job interview. I just talked to the person in front of me the way I would talk to anyone. I asked them about their life so far (we were the same age) and they asked me about the job.