Hiring SEO Talent in the AI Era: What Actually Predicts Fit (SEO Recruitment Data)

Speaker: Josh Peacock, Founder, Search for Hire. Lightly edited for clarity and accuracy.

[0:00] If you’re in search marketing and you’re scared of what AI is doing to this industry, this might be one of the most important videos you can watch right now. I’m coming with not just my opinion — we’ve actually got the data. With salaryguide.com, we researched 1,500 search jobs, so we have concrete data on what’s standing out and what’s completely wrong in a lot of the industry conversation.

[0:30] Moz did a piece taking our data from Salary Guide, with expert commentary from myself and a senior recruiter at Search for Hire, my company — on what we’re seeing from companies and clients coming to us, what they’re hiring for, and what they’re actually looking for when they ask about AI.

[0:52] Kevin Indig, who writes Growth Memo — which goes out to around 50,000 people and gets syndicated on Search Engine Land — did the exact same thing with our data, with his own take on it. So this is a really hot topic. I’m going to break down everything we’re seeing from our client pain points, to give you the artillery to reverse engineer this and stand out in today’s market.

[1:22] So what did we do? We analysed 1,500 SEO jobs from salaryguide.com. The first myth: only 2.6% of listings mentioned prompt engineering. I was just at an event in Barcelona and a lot of people were talking about prompt engineering. It’s not that important — 2.6%.

[1:46] So what is really important? In our vetting process, two things weight the scores. The first is what we call the Behaviour Fit Engine, and it accounts for 60% of the weighting.

[2:15] The first component is value articulation. How well can you show the value of the work you’re doing to a stakeholder, another team, or your line manager? A good story on this: we signed quite a big law agency from the US two weeks ago. They had four account managers. One of them they loved — great culture fit, great at his campaigns — but he kept getting himself in trouble with clients because he couldn’t show that the work he was doing was valuable. They had to let him go. It shows how important value articulation is.

[3:11] The next one is ownership and reliability. I’d put this down as one of the most important. Internally, when I’m hiring, I want people who can just own things — take responsibility if they were wrong. If any of my team are watching this, they know that if they make a mistake, it’s fine as long as they don’t do it again. I’m big on being solution-oriented: if somebody’s got a problem, come to me with three solutions rather than just showing me the problem. Even better, I love people who don’t have to show me the three solutions — they know how to own it and know exactly what to do.

[4:04] The next one is commercial awareness. How much can you tie what you’re doing to business outcomes? When I started the company five years ago this was equally important, and I don’t think it will ever go out of importance.

[4:31] We have an SEO who works with me at Search for Hire called Harrison, and the reason I rate him so highly is his commercial awareness. He worked at a big agency before, with a plethora of clients from massive brands to startups, and really got to know each one. I watch a lot of content about AI and LLMs, I see all these quick wins, and he’s my soundboard. I’ll send something over and ask, “Should we incorporate this?” — and he’ll slow it down: does it fit the outcomes we actually want? Is there any proof this gets results? Unfortunately, a lot of the time there isn’t — it just looks cool, and I get excited easily.

[5:44] Another component is curiosity — to me, one of the biggest things when it comes to AI right now. How curious are you? How much are you actually looking into this? We have a whole section on curiosity when we’re vetting search marketers.

[6:06] Diving back into the Behaviour Fit Engine — one thing that’s really interesting to talk about: last week we signed a client who is the biggest AI search company in the UK. I’m not going to name names. When we sign a client, we do an onboarding call and go over our outcome-focused scorecard. We’re trying to get outcomes we can measure against success, so we can build a 90-day success roadmap when we place the candidate. The biggest reason we do this is so we can run a custom vetting process for each client, because each client has different pain points and different measurements.

[6:54] One question we asked: what is a core value of your company that is often tested, and how would a B-player fail that test? Their answer: ownership over delegation. A B-player identifies a gap but writes a brief for someone else to solve it. An A-player identifies the gap, builds the solution, presents it, then asks for feedback — which goes back to the ownership and reliability in the Behaviour Fit Engine.

[7:19] The second was intellectual honesty. A B-player presents a recommendation they’re not fully confident in rather than admit uncertainty. An A-player says, “I don’t know yet,” and comes back with research.

[7:32] The third was pace with precision. A B-player conflates speed with cutting corners. An A-player moves fast and still delivers work that can go in front of a FTSE 100 CMO. That’s what somebody at the top of their game is looking for in terms of culture. You can take this and reverse engineer it — spend the next six months learning and testing those skills.

[8:08] The other thing we do is go over red flags. That might sound obvious, but too many times I’ve seen hiring managers go into interviews without writing down their concrete red flags, then meet somebody they really like and forget them. It’s really important to write them down. This client wrote down three.

[8:38] The first was a strategy-only mindset: talks exclusively about high-level frameworks but can’t demonstrate recent hands-on execution. This role requires craft, not just oversight.

[8:52] The second was traditional SEO tunnel vision: defines success purely in terms of rankings, traffic, and backlinks, with no genuine curiosity or point of view on AI-driven search, LLMs, or how discovery is evolving.

[9:05] The last one was passivity, or over-reliance on process: they wait for briefs, they ask for playbooks, they need constant direction. This is an early-stage team — the right person creates structure, they don’t depend on it. And to put this in context, this is a six-figure role in the UK, offering equity. This is what somebody at the top of the game is looking for.

[9:40] So that 60% is the Behaviour Fit Engine. The other 40% is tech and domain. That’s the real strategy side — whether it’s SEO, paid media, whatever your specialism is. Your hardcore skill.

[10:23] And being AI native — which is funny, because I actually think AI native plays a massive part in the behavioural side too. What we want here is that you cannot answer with “I use ChatGPT, I use Claude.” You need to show real-life cases. You need to light up when somebody asks how AI has improved the way you’ve worked over the last 18 months. If you can’t reel off a whole list, this person is onto the next candidate.

[11:05] One story I find really interesting: a good friend of mine is a very skilled search marketer, very good with AI, looking at a $200k salary. An old client of ours — very well known in the space, big on AI, putting up YouTube videos all the time, has ABM software — my friend ethically hacked into it, then sent a message showing: this is how I did it, I’m inside, and this is what I would do to stop me getting inside. He landed an interview with the founder off the back of it. He didn’t end up taking the job — the offer came in close to, but below, the $200k he wanted. But the idea stands: you can use AI to get ahead and get interviews. I’m not saying everybody has to hack into software, but it’s food for thought.

[12:12] Another thing I’d love to talk about: we had a discovery call last week. We haven’t signed them as a client yet — I’m confident we will — but they’re another big AI search company. In my HubSpot booking link I ask what they want to get out of the call and whether there’s anything else I should know. They gave me a whole paragraph, and the biggest thing I found so interesting: SEO knowledge is not the constraint. Pace, ownership, and reliability are. TL;DR — culture fit is our biggest challenge.

[12:49] What that says to me is that AI tools — everything you think is the most important thing out there — it comes back to basics. Can you move at pace? Can you own what you do? Are you reliable? Those are the three things they really wanted. Whether through training or simply writing them down and working on them deliberately, those are the things to build.

[13:26] The other thing I thought was super interesting: out of the 1,500 SEO jobs we took from salaryguide.com, 79% referenced measurement. It might sound simple, but: are you able to measure the work you’re doing? It’s one of the strongest signals in the whole dataset.

[13:58] With AI specifically, it’s really hard to measure revenue — it’s more about efficiencies. But step away from AI and it applies to your actual work. I’ve been to so many events in the last two years. There was an event in London last summer where I was hosting the panel, with some of the smartest search marketers from massive corporations in the room. Every question people asked came back to the measurement of revenue. That was the biggest thing everybody was saying: if you cannot measure revenue with it, stop building it. The stakeholders don’t want to know — and they’re probably the ones funding the SEO team.

[14:54] So what does all of this mean? You need to build a proof case. We do this at salaryguide.com — I think there’s a free trial — where you build out your wins and your value grid. What this does is take that 60% Behaviour Fit Engine and turn it into actual proof, so you can show an employer, a salary negotiation, or a performance review what you’ve actually done.

[15:37] What you want to do is log every measurable outcome you’ve driven across your career, and tie it together. That becomes your value grid.

[15:56] I have a good friend I sat down with on this. With AI you can build a website in a few minutes, so we built out all the outcomes he’s measured over the past decade of working — all the actual wins he’s led in terms of business outcomes, focused on that behavioural 60% — and created a beautifully laid-out portfolio website. It’s a super easy way to stand out against the mass of AI-generated CVs and cover letters.

[16:38] And just to make sure on this bit: it has to be measurable. Instead of “we increased organic traffic by some amount,” it’s “we increased organic traffic by 38%, which then led to X signups, or X more users, or X more purchases.” Whatever it is, it needs to be articulated in actual measurement.

[17:07] So here’s why everything we’ve just said matters. Out of those 1,500 SEO jobs — I feel like I know these numbers off the back of my hand now — 54% had AI in the job description as a requirement. Only 11% had AI in the title.

[17:48] We’ve done the research and we understand why. Roles with AI in the job title carry a 25–33% salary increase on average. Companies know that if they put AI in the title, they’re going to pay a 25–33% salary premium — so they bury it in the description instead.

[18:21] To me, this is so exciting. It shows that if you get really good at this — which should be everybody’s goal — that premium is available. What we actually found is that our highest salary was $431k for an AI SEO title. For my UK audience, that’s roughly £400k equivalent — which is absolutely wild for a search role.

[19:01] Over the next 12 months, the ones who win aren’t the ones who just know how to use AI. They’re the ones who can turn everything we’ve just said into value and actually build on it. Three things you need to do: build your wins profile and build out that value grid; show what you can actually measure, not just what you did; and stop using tools and start building with them.

[19:29] So that’s the video today. Chima from Moz did a beautiful article using Salary Guide’s data with a few commentary bits from myself and Daris, one of my senior recruiters, on how you can stand out in the age of AI. It was a fantastic article — I’ll link it down below. If you enjoyed this, please hit the subscribe button and I’ll see you in the next one.