I’m Stas Slota, founder and CEO of LeaderPrivate, a marketing agency that manages more than $1 million in monthly ad spend across TikTok, Meta, and MGID.
Over the past 10 years in media buying, I’ve gone from working as a freelancer to leading a remote team of 30 people. During that time, I’ve worked across different areas – from traffic arbitrage and the dating vertical to lead generation and native advertising.
Over the years, I’ve had to constantly adapt to market changes, work with different traffic sources, and find solutions in difficult situations. One of those situations was moving away from traditional hiring.
For the last three years, hiring in media buying has felt like going in circles: recruiters keep coming back with the same candidates. Back in 2020-2022, we could get around five strong applications a day for a media buyer role. Today, getting one truly relevant candidate per week already feels like a win.
The issue is not that there are no people on the market – the issue is that there are not enough of the right people. There are plenty of candidates with general marketing knowledge: people who have launched ads, created creatives, or worked with campaigns at a basic level. But today, being a generalist is no longer enough. You need real expertise in a specific niche.
Where the Problem Comes From
A few years ago, it was possible to launch a creative, find a working setup, and get results fairly quickly. The industry was growing fast and attracting a lot of people. Because of that, many believed that you could enter media buying without specialized experience and learn the basics pretty quickly.
That reputation still exists, but the industry has changed a lot. Today, every niche has its own rules and requires specific expertise. You have to go much deeper: test more hypotheses, work with funnels, creatives, analytics, and adapt faster to constant changes.
Where Did All the Specialists Go?
Finding senior – or even middle-level – specialists for these roles is extremely difficult. They rarely look for jobs through regular job postings. If someone is happy with their compensation, the product they work on, and their growth opportunities, they can stay with the same company for years. And even when a candidate with the right experience appears on the market, dozens of teams compete for them at the same time. Hiring that person feels like winning the lottery – everything has to line up: your budget, their expectations, their skills, and the role itself.
Junior candidates are given a separate lottery ticket. There are plenty of marketing courses and educational programs out there, but they do not train narrow specialists for specific niches. There is no strong media buying school that prepares people for this kind of work. As a result, junior candidates often lack real practical experience, and companies have to spend a lot of time and money onboarding them, with no guarantee that the person will actually be a good fit.
We’ve had situations where we had to let people go after just two or three months. On paper, they looked like solid specialists. But once they started working on real tasks in our niche, it became clear that the role was not right for them. A hiring mistake like that could cost us anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 per month. And that is not just salary – it also includes infrastructure, the team’s time, mentorship, and ad budgets.
When the Market Can’t Provide the Right People
At some point, we realized that we could keep playing this lottery forever and wait for the right candidate to appear, but that would not solve the problem. At the time, we needed a person for a very specific vertical: search arbitrage. We also needed a way to see candidates in action, not just during interviews. So we decided to take a different path and create our own entry point into the profession. We launched an internal two-week course for candidates who lacked relevant experience but showed potential to work in our niche.
How It Works
In practice, we designed this course as a two-week recruiting process for specific open roles. The logic was simple: people can learn theory anywhere – from courses, videos, books, or articles. What we wanted to understand was how they apply that information in practice.
We find people through the same job platforms, but in our job posts, we clearly explain that this is a free course with the possibility of employment afterward. Not everyone gets in. First, we select around 20 people through a quick HR screening. Then we give them a test task and filter out about half of the candidates. In the end, we usually have 5 to 10 people who join the course.
Every day, an experienced media buyer from our team leads a 2-3 hour session, where they walk candidates through real processes and real tasks from our niche. The main focus is practice. At first, participants learn how to create and launch TikTok campaigns, evaluate their performance, prepare reports, and build and test hypotheses. During the second week, they begin working directly with advertising.
For us, the most valuable part of this process is getting to see what is impossible to see in a regular interview. During the course, you interact with the person every day and see their real approach to work: how they react to feedback, whether they ask the right questions, whether they can find solutions on their own when something does not work, and whether they finish tasks properly. In two weeks, we learn far more about a candidate than we would through several stages of a traditional recruiting process – which, by the way, would take about the same amount of time.
The final decision is made by the people who would work with this candidate every day: the buyer who led the course and the team lead. Usually, we look at whether the person stands out in terms of motivation, responsibility, meeting deadlines, quality of answers, and overall performance. After that, the candidate joins an internship and can later grow within the company.
From our first group, we hired one person. He has been working with us for several years now. He grew into a middle-level specialist and later even moved into a different niche.
Where Traditional Recruiting Falls Short
For the company, the course required a serious investment of time and resources, especially the first time we ran it. But it paid off fairly quickly. Specialists who come through the course start showing results from their first month of work. The costs of paying the instructor and running the course are usually recovered in about eight weeks.
This kind of approach works especially well when you need niche specialists. In these cases, traditional recruiting does not always deliver results – and maybe that is not really a problem. Maybe it is simply how the market works now. It pushes companies to look for new hiring models that can bring in real specialists – people who can create clear and measurable value.
