Ashley Hass has strong feelings about the marketing job postings she’s seeing coming out of higher education these days.
“A lot of job postings read like a wish list rather than a real assessment of what one person can do well,” said Hass, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Portland in Oregon. Strategist, writer, designer, videographer, CRM manager, SEO specialist, web developer, data analyst, and sometimes even event planner. Those are the requirements packed into many job descriptions, she said, stressing that the salary rarely reflects more than one of those specialties, let alone all of them.
The trend is immediately recognizable among higher education marketers, which raises the uncomfortable question of whether colleges and universities are expecting candidates to be marketing unicorns for entry-level pay at a time when the industry is already stretched thin.
Bloated by Design
The postings aren’t an accident, observed Maneesh Thakkar, chair and associate professor of marketing at the Davis College of Business and Economics at Radford University in Virginia. He pointed to budget constraints and shrinking departments as the driving force behind what he called “a kitchen-sink list of competencies” packed into single job descriptions.
“While it is true that modern marketers must be digitally literate and cross-functional, expecting deep domain expertise across all these technical verticals in one individual is a stretch,” Thakkar said. That mismatch, he observed, opens a gap between what employers expect and what any one candidate can realistically execute.
Leah Beth Hubbard, Assistant Vice President of Enrollment Strategies at The Parish Group, sees the same pattern but frames it less as a new problem than a defining trait of higher education work. Regional and mid-size private institutions in particular ask employees to take on more than their title suggests because resources are limited, she said. For early-career marketing professionals, that can cut both ways.
“This provides them with an opportunity to grow their portfolio,” Hubbard, who previously served as AVP of Admission at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, said, adding that management has a responsibility to keep those employees from being exploited or handed unrealistic expectations.
John James Nicoletti, Executive Director and Professor of Practice at The Cronkite Agency at Arizona State University, attributes the shift to how marketing itself has changed. Since the rise of social media, he noted, nearly every marketer can now see how their content performs. This is true of social media posts, online ads, and website content, allowing marketers to study audience engagement. With artificial intelligence being added to the mix, which enables the production of more content than ever before, Nicoletti said there’s a growing demand for a “marketing jack-of-all-trades” — an employee who can tell stories, as well as analyze their impact.
Institutional size and budgets factor into how that demand plays out, Nicoletti said. For example, small or niche institutions might be constrained to the point that they can only afford one employee to both create content and then monitor the analytics, increasing the likelihood of burnout.
Bigger institutions with a more sophisticated marketing operation are more likely to separate the work, with individual teams set up for content creation, as well as ad spending, engagement, SEO, and other analytics tools.
The strain is evident in the recruitment and retention activities at smaller, less-resourced institutions. Thakkar said demanding mastery across unrelated fields tends to produce one of two outcomes: a narrow pool of qualified applicants, or a plethora of candidates who list the skills but are unable to execute on them. Once hired, he said, those employees carry an unsustainable workload that drives up stress and turnover. Additionally, spreading one person across that many specialties “guarantees subpar execution” because a specialist will typically outperform a generalist doing the same task, he said.
Hass has studied the burnout question directly. Her research on social media marketers found role sprawl to be a major driver of exhaustion and turnover. When one person is expected to be strategist, designer, and analyst at once, something has to give. That thing is usually depth. The result is marketing that’s “technically present across every channel but not particularly effective in most of them,” she said. She stressed the human cost of that burnout deserves attention on its own, separate from any impact on marketing performance.
Hubbard put more of the responsibility on leadership than on the structure of the role itself. Some employees thrive on variety and are energized by jumping between projects, she said, while others need more routine to be successful. Despite the differences, she said leaders must set clear goals so overlapping projects don’t start to feel endless. They must also resist the urge to micromanage.
“Micromanagement does not work in this type of environment as it delays creative thinking, halts progress, and diverts people from using their full talent,” Hubbard said.
The Generalist-Specialist Trade-Off
The question of when a generalist stops being enough is a point of divergence among higher education marketing experts.
For Thakkar, the answer comes down to scale. Generalists are most valuable in smaller colleges or decentralized campus units, where agility and cross-departmental coordination matter more than polished technical output, he explained. However, once an institution is large enough that a fractional shift in conversion rates translates into millions of dollars in tuition revenue, he said, leaning on a generalist to manage technical performance marketing “is a strategic liability.”
It’s at that point, he said, that enterprise CRM systems, complex paid media buys, and advanced technical SEO demand dedicated specialists.
Hass ties the same trade-off to an institution’s stage of growth rather than its size. Generalists earn their keep early, she said, while an institution is still building its digital presence or figuring out which channels reach its audience. Specialization pays off once that groundwork is in place, she said, pointing to CRM as an example. A system run by someone who understands segmentation and lifecycle marketing performs differently than one managed as a side task, she said.
Hubbard views the question through the lens of funding and culture. Where money isn’t the constraint and collaboration is built into how an institution operates, specialists working together are likely to produce the strongest results, she said. However, such a model is costly and requires someone dedicated coordinating the specialists. If that’s not the case, she said, “generalists with a specialty are often seen as more valuable because they understand how the other areas function, work, and put the pieces together more quickly.”
New technology has further complicated the question. Thakkar said artificial intelligence absolutely can raise productivity, but the benefits have yet to be fully realized. AI-generated work still requires human review to the point that some efficiency gains are being shaved off by the verification process, he added.
Hubbard has a more skeptical view. It’s true that technology can support the people doing the work and reduce busy work, she said, but added that it can’t replace the kind of judgement and empathy needed to ensure an institution’s story lands with prospective students. So much as a single word change in AI-generated content can change the tone of the message in ways that will feel off-brand, she said, stressing that a person still needs to be responsible for final review and approval.
Nicoletti sees the same tension differently. New technologies give professionals the opportunity to build a broader set of skills and sometimes accomplish more, he said. However, they also make it more difficult for any one person to become an expert in every facet of marketing and communications. For example, strategic communications, SEO, generative engine optimization, content creation, podcasting, and video editing each still take real time and effort to learn, he explained, even with better tools. When too much is expected of one person, he said, that person often gets pulled onto a new project before they’ve had a chance to master the last one. While institutions grapple with the continued pressure to make more happen with less, Nicoletti said it’s safe to assume that the trend of asking individual employees to be responsible for more marketing and communications functions instead of less will continue.
What it Means for Hiring Managers — and Job Seekers
For institutions writing the next round of job postings, the advice is to be specific and honest.
Thakkar’s recommendation is to separate core competencies from nice-to-have skills, decide up front whether a role is primarily built around writing, design or data, and describe what a typical workday actually looks like. Vague postings, he said, attract the wrong candidates and lead to lower job satisfaction and higher turnover once the mismatch surfaces.
Hass said postings should be written around the outcomes a role needs to be responsible for, not a list of every tool the department has ever utilized. “A realistic posting attracts someone who will stay and be happy,” she said. “An unrealistic one attracts someone who will burn out in a year, and then you’re hiring again anyway.”
Hubbard’s advice looks further out. Institutions tend to write postings for the moment a position opens rather than for what the office will need three months later, she said, and reposting an empty role is easier than reassessing what the team could really benefit from. As an institution’s priorities change over time, she said, the structure of who does what should shift with it. This is true, she stressed, even when the employees stay the same.
Nicoletti said the responsibility starts even earlier, before a posting is drafted at all. Hiring managers should have a clear understanding of a role’s expectations, he said, specifically which skill set will benefit the team and create the greatest impact on the organization. Without that clarity, he advised, it becomes more difficult to find the right fit. His advice is for hiring managers to ask marketing and communications leaders the tough questions at the start of the hiring cycle so that they can pin down exactly what skill sets would increase the resiliency of the team.
With that clarity, he said, job postings become more effective, ultimately helping institutions hire the best person for the role.
For job seekers, the takeaway cuts the other way. A posting that reads like a wish list is worth a direct conversation about what skills are truly essential to the role and which were added because no one else was available to do the work before accepting the job. Those more likely to succeed in these multifaceted positions, according to Hubbard, are the candidates who know themselves well enough to be honest about whether they’ll flourish in a role that’s built for constant variety or will burn out trying to be a half-dozen or more job titles at once.
The unicorn, in other words, doesn’t exist — not because the skills can’t coexist in one person, but because no higher ed salary is built to support them all at once. The institutions getting this right aren’t finding better marketers; They’re writing better job descriptions.
