Digital marketing recruitment has a tell. The brief lists channels. The agency returns people whose LinkedIn headlines list the same channels. Nobody has asked whether the person can open a Google Ads account, read it, and say what is true. PPC recruitment in the UK is full of that substitution: a stack of CVs for a job that needed one adult in the room.
Viktorija Sherriff does not run a volume desk. VS Recruitment is a boutique headhunting practice. She starts a search for a £450 engagement fee and works her network — including performance marketers she actually knows, not profiles scraped from a job board. If you need a media buyer who can live in an account, that is a search. It is not a broadcast.
PPC recruitment is a craft hire, not a channel hire
Paid search still pays the bills in a lot of UK businesses. It is also easy to hire badly. “PPC executive” can mean a person who has changed bids on a brand campaign, or a person who has rebuilt a structure, argued with a conversion action in GA4, and told a director that the last quarter’s “scale” was branded traffic wearing a costume. Those are not the same hire. A CV that says Google Ads, Meta and GA4 in a skills block does not tell you which one you are looking at.
The hiring pain is rarely “we cannot find CVs”. It is that the CVs all look plausible. Digital marketing recruitment rewards people who write tidy headlines. The work rewards people who can sit in an account on a bad Tuesday and not panic. A specialist UK headhunter is useful here because the good people are usually already in a seat, protecting a number, and they will not apply to a vague advert. They will take a call from someone who can describe the brief without wasting their time.
What she actually vets
Viktorija is not a media auditor. She will not pretend to certify a Google Ads exam. What she will do, because she has hired in this market, is refuse to treat a tool list as evidence. For a PPC or performance brief she wants to know whether someone has owned structure and bidding, not only reported a ROAS number they did not define. For Meta, whether they have actually spent and learned, or inherited a catalogue campaign. For GA4, whether they can tell an event from a conversion and a dashboard from a decision.
That is the same instinct she brings to built sector recruitment: credentials that matter in the work, not badges collected for a CV. Construction has CSCS and SMSTS. Digital has fewer clean tickets and more theatre. The way through is conversation, not a filter.
Performance roles go wrong in public
A weak site manager is a problem on a site. A weak Head of Performance is a problem in the board pack. Digital marketing recruitment that sprays CVs tends to optimise for interview fluency. People who can talk about incrementality, full funnel, and “the algorithm” will beat people who can show you the change they made last month and why. If your business lives on Google Ads and Meta, that inversion is expensive.
There is also the hybrid brief: someone who can do paid search and still talk to a GA4 implementation without hiding. Those people exist. They are not numerous. They are almost never sitting on a job board with a keyword-stuffed summary. A network-only search is how you reach them without advertising that you are desperate, which in this market is its own kind of signal.
How a £450 search is supposed to feel
You send a plain brief. Sector: digital. Role: the actual job, not a fantasy. Constraints: salary band, whether this is an in-house seat or an agency, whether the search is confidential. If it is a fit, you pay £450 and the search opens. Viktorija works people she can already reach. She does not scrape. She does not email fifty lookalikes. You meet a shortlist that can survive a look at the account.
If the brief is not a fit — you want a junior volume hire, or you want a hundred CVs by Friday — she will say no. That is the point of a boutique practice. Digital marketing recruitment is not improved by pretending every vacancy is the same.
UK employers still have ordinary duties while they hire. Right to work checks are on GOV.UK. Equality law still applies to how you describe a role and how you decide; the Equality Act 2010 is on legislation.gov.uk. None of that is exotic. A careful search just does not skip it in the rush to fill a media seat.
If you need PPC recruitment done as a search rather than a spray — Google Ads, Meta, GA4, a Head of Performance who can read the work — start a search. A short note is enough. VS Recruitment is not a job board. It is one headhunter, working a network, for people who still have to hit a number next month.