The problem isn't that energy companies are bad at recruiting. It's that they're recruiting to a brief that hasn't been updated in fifteen years.
The template most energy leaders use when hiring marketing leaders is still roughly FMCG: big campaigns, clever creative, short-term volume. That model evolved in categories with high switching, emotional brands, and simple products. Energy is the opposite on every basis, and yet the hiring brief looks the same.
I see this pattern repeatedly. Organisations in this sector are surprised when brand awareness goes up but program uptake stays flat, or when digital investment doesn't translate into self-service adoption. They're not surprised because the strategy failed. They're surprised because they hired people who were very good at measuring the wrong things.
The category punishes the wrong skills
Three things make energy different from most categories where senior marketing talent gets built.
- Low switching and high regulation mean the primary value lever isn't acquisition. It's trust, literacy, and long-term participation. You're not trying to win a moment of impulse. You're trying to get someone to change their tariff, install something on their property, or shift their load at 5pm. That's a different problem entirely.
- The product is a continuous invisible service with a handful of brutal visibility moments (outages, bill shock, failed installations). Service design, journey orchestration, and proactive communication matter more than slogans. The marketing that actually moves outcomes is often the stuff customers don't notice: the right bill message at the right time, a well-designed onboarding flow, a clear join process that doesn't make people give up halfway through.
- Customers and businesses are making genuinely complex decisions about decarbonisation, electrification, EVs, solar, storage, and demand response. They need decision support (calculators, scenarios, advisory content, consultative sales tools) not just awareness. Most job descriptions I see don't come close to capturing this.
The hiring brief is the problem
Most energy company job specs read like this: strong campaign background, 10+ years in brand or sponsorships, ideally with energy sector experience. That filters for people who understand why things can't be done and have spent their careers working within legacy campaign cycles. It filters out people from high-velocity, test-and-learn environments who might actually be better at re-architecting journeys and propositions.
Digital gets framed as social, search, and email, as channels, rather than as an end-to-end, data-driven operating model. The result is tactical layering: ad campaigns that push customers into broken portals, clunky signup flows, and opaque bills. The campaigns perform. The journeys don't.
Behavioural science barely appears in role specs, even though the actual work of getting customers to participate in demand response, adopt new tariffs, or complete an application is fundamentally a behaviour change problem. Without those capabilities, you default to awareness campaigns that shift recall metrics while kilowatt hours saved and peak demand shaved stay exactly where they were.
The marketer the category actually needs
If you reverse-engineer from what actually works in energy, a different profile emerges. It looks less like head of campaigns and more like a hybrid of product manager, service designer, and commercial strategist.
This person maps full journeys across billing, outages, programs, field services, and digital properties, then identifies the few interventions that move NPS, adoption, and lifetime value. They use segmentation, experimentation, and cohort analysis as standard tools, not special projects. They can turn consumption data, tariff structures, and propensity models into tailored outreach, especially in B2B where loads and economics vary across customers.
They apply behavioural science to drive participation. They design communication sequences that support decision stages, not one-off blasts. They can connect decarbonisation strategy and grid logic to concrete customer-level value propositions, and translate that for boards, regulators, and customers alike.
They also understand enough about CDPs, marketing automation, IoT, and AI personalisation to co-design use cases with data and tech teams. Not to build them personally, but to challenge vendors intelligently and not get sold solutions looking for a problem.
This person does not have an impressive portfolio of integrated campaigns. They have a track record of moving hard metrics in complex, constrained environments. Standard HR templates keep missing them because the job ad doesn't describe what the job actually is.
What to do about it
Start upstream. Most of the mis-hiring is baked in before the first CV is reviewed.
Rewrite roles around outcomes, not activities. Specify the levers that actually matter: program uptake, digital self-service adoption, cost-to-serve reduction, decarbonisation product revenue, trust scores. Recruit for people who can show they've moved similar levers in complex service environments (banking, insurance, fintech, health) not just people who've worked in energy before.
Change how you assess. Ask for a walk-through of a complex problem solved end-to-end: insight, hypothesis, design, test, scale, iteration. Ask what didn't work. Ask what the data actually showed. Ask how they handled organisational resistance. Use exercises that require mapping a customer journey, say, a small business installing rooftop solar with a dynamic tariff, and look for their ability to integrate product design, pricing, sales enablement, content, onboarding, and support into one coherent picture. The right marketer for this category is asking "what's behind that peak?" as often as they're asking "what's the open rate?"
Rearchitect the team structure alongside the talent strategy. Hiring one good person into a broken structure just accelerates their exit. Organise around journeys rather than channels. Give marketing shared accountability for call volume reduction, digital containment, and program completion. That forces systems thinking, not just message resonance.
And stop treating outside-industry experience as a risk. In a market moving this fast, with distributed generation, AI, prosumer models, and dynamic pricing all landing at once, the bigger risk is hiring more of the same.
If you took your current head of marketing role description and rewrote it entirely from the perspective of your hardest growth problem, say, getting medium sized businesses to adopt demand response programmes at scale, how different would it look?
Worth doing that exercise. The gap between those two documents is your talent problem.