Why every company needs a community manager (and how to hire one)

The community manager is a dynamic “jack-of-all-trades” role, typically overseeing the community’s engagement, content, and overall health. At a high level, they provide the framework for a valuable experience for community users and are responsible for the strategy, evolution, and success of the community and its initiatives.

As the primary point of contact for all things community, this role is the intermediary between the business and your audience. They are both the face of the company and the voice of the community within the business.

It’s important to note that the title “community manager” can encompass varying levels of seniority and expertise, depending on the organization’s needs. This role may sometimes align with titles like head of community, director of community, or VP of community, reflecting greater experience and broader responsibilities. These senior-level roles often include managing the community budget, ROI, processes, and staffing. In many organizations, these roles are filled by key business stakeholders, such as leaders in customer support, marketing, or product teams. In contrast, the community manager often has a more hands-on, tactical role and is a common new hire for growing teams.

For this blog, we’ll focus on the community manager position and its essential responsibilities.

Key responsibilities of a community manager:

• Define and implement the community strategy

• Measure and analyze performance

• Identify and respond to trending issues

• Direct and manage moderators

• Manage functional points within the organization

• Platform configuration (Defining community roles and responsibilities, designing and configuring the community structure, coordinating with platform vendor, etc.)

According to community expert Brian Oblinger, whose extensive experience in the field has shaped his insights, having a dedicated full-time community professional is the strongest predictor of a successful community program. A full-time community role proves a company's commitment to the initiative and ensures the community is set up for long-term success. In contrast, tasking a part-time employee with community management often leads to underwhelming results. This critical function requires full-time focus, strategy, and expertise to meet the demands of a thriving community.

Beyond managing day-to-day engagement, a full-time community manager is uniquely positioned to drive business value across multiple departments. Their work extends far beyond the community itself, generating strategic benefits such as:

• Decreased operational costs: A well-run community fosters peer-to-peer support, reducing reliance on customer service teams and lowering overall support costs.

• Improved product development: Community managers serve as a direct bridge between customers and product teams, surfacing valuable feedback, trends, and pain points to inform innovation.

• Greater marketing ROI: Active communities drive organic advocacy, SEO, user-generated content, and word-of-mouth referrals—boosting brand awareness while reducing reliance on paid marketing efforts.

• Stronger customer retention: Engaged community members develop deeper brand loyalty, leading to higher retention rates and increased lifetime customer value.

Investing in a community manager isn't just about maintaining an online space—it’s about enabling a company-wide strategy that fuels sustainable growth. A full-time professional ensures that community insights and benefits are leveraged across teams, turning engagement into measurable business outcomes. Companies prioritizing this role position themselves to build stronger relationships, reduce costs, and drive meaningful impact across the organization.

Community management is a relatively new and inherently cross-functional field, so there isn’t a single, predefined path into the role. Community managers often come from diverse academic and professional backgrounds, and it’s common for candidates to have limited direct community management experience on their resumes.

According to the 2020 Community Careers and Compensation Report by The Community Roundtable, the average community professional has over 15 years of overall work experience, with six years specifically in community management. Many of these professionals have backgrounds in marketing, customer support, IT, learning and development (L&D), and other related disciplines.

The diversity in background highlights the importance of transferable skills for this role in particular. This person should be strategic and a strong problem solver, but more importantly, adept at communicating and collaborating with teams across the business, as that is crucial to the success of this role and the community at large.

Key skills for a community manager:

• Communication: Strong written skills to convey messages, maintain brand tone, and set expectations in planned and spontaneous interactions.

• Empathy: Understanding and relating to community members’ needs and motivations to foster engagement and support.

• Collaboration: Works effectively across departments to integrate the community throughout the user journey and drive business success.

• Adaptability: Comfortable with change, able to pivot quickly in response to evolving community dynamics and business needs.

• Analytical thinking: Skilled in interpreting data, identifying issues, and solving problems to improve community experiences.

• Conflict resolution: Manages disputes or challenges with professionalism and tact.

• Problem-solving: Proactively addresses challenges and creates solutions that benefit the community and the business.

In addition to the above, reviewing other community job postings in similar industries, talking to seasoned community professionals, and attending community-focused events can also help you get a clear idea of the overall demands of the community manager role and ensure you’re focused on the right mix of skills and qualifications.

When hiring a community manager, Brian emphasizes the importance of crafting clear and transparent job descriptions. Clearly outline where the role fits within your organizational structure, how it aligns with business objectives, and its level of seniority. A well-defined description sets the stage for finding the right candidate while ensuring alignment with your company’s unique needs.

Here are additional tips for creating an effective community manager job description:

• Avoid generic templates: Resist the urge to copy-paste from other companies. Many job descriptions lack specificity and fail to address unique organizational needs.

• Don’t combine multiple roles: Overloading the role with too many responsibilities can discourage qualified candidates and set them up for failure.

• Set realistic experience requirements: As mentioned, research shows most senior community professionals have around six years of direct experience, not ten. Adjust expectations accordingly.

• Be flexible with qualifications: Community management doesn’t follow a standard educational path, and while certifications exist, none are universally recognized. Look for candidates with diverse backgrounds and transferable skills.

• Focus on core responsibilities: Use frameworks like the MoSCoW method to prioritize critical tasks, avoiding overwhelming candidates with an exhaustive list of duties.

• Manage expectations: Break down responsibilities into actionable short- and long-term goals (e.g., 30-day, 60-day, 90-day plans) to create a clear and achievable roadmap.

• Prioritize mindset over tools: Seek candidates with curiosity and a growth mindset rather than focusing solely on platform or tool expertise, as these can be learned on the job.

To illustrate an ideal job posting, Brian has provided an example of a community manager job description below.

Here are some recommended platforms for finding top community management talent:

• Community Club: This nonprofit offers an excellent resource for connecting with experienced community managers.

• The Community Roundtable: Besides their peer-to-peer network dedicated to connecting and empowering community managers, The Community Roundtable hosts many in-person and virtual events that provide optimal opportunities for connecting with qualified, experienced community professionals who may be looking for a job change.

• CMX Hub: The CMX community includes over 15,000 community professionals who connect, learn together, and grow the community industry. The CMX website has a job board where you can post and search for community management positions. CMX also hosts a yearly event to connect and learn from other community professionals.

• Community Consultants Collective: This organization represents over 100 independent community consultants with various implementation skills, platform expertise, and specializations who can be hired as contractors, consultants, or fractional leaders of your community. Search the growing directory.

• Led by Community: The hosts of the recent and successful Community-led World Summit, held online and in London. Led by Community is a popular new gathering place for community professionals. The platform also includes a job board.

• LinkedIn: Through LinkedIn, you can explore potential community managers' profiles, experiences, and endorsements. You can also post your job openings and join groups dedicated to community management.

By thoughtfully defining the skills and qualifications for the role, crafting a compelling job posting, and using targeted platforms to reach qualified community manager candidates, you can build a robust and capable community team ready to drive meaningful engagement and growth.

The role of a community manager is often regarded as one of the most demanding jobs, largely due to its “jack-of-all-trades” nature. As a community grows, the responsibilities and workload can quickly become too diverse, complex, and overwhelming for a single person to handle. This can lead to burnout and potentially stall the community’s growth without proper support.

To scale effectively and safeguard the well-being of your community manager, it’s important to introduce additional roles that address the community’s evolving needs. For example, community moderators can focus on enforcing guidelines, content creators can manage knowledge bases or blogs, and administrators can oversee the technical environment. By distributing these responsibilities, the community manager is free to focus on strategic initiatives and drive long-term growth.

Additionally, leveraging cross-departmental resources can help shoulder the growing demands of community management. Many teams collaborate with a marketing department’s content specialist to create and curate valuable community content or an analyst from another department to track and report on engagement metrics, providing actionable insights to refine strategy.

Investing in consultants or part-time roles for specialized tasks as the community team expands can also improve operations. For example, hiring a consultant or part-time professional for accessibility compliance ensures that community platforms, content, programs, and events are inclusive and adhere to high accessibility standards.

By thoughtfully defining roles and leveraging cross-departmental resources, organizations can scale their community efforts effectively while fostering sustainable growth and meaningful engagement.

Here are some other community roles to consider when building out your community team:

• Moderators: Responsible for creating a successful experience for all community participants daily. Enforce community guidelines, monitor discussions, address member concerns, and escalate issues as necessary.

• Community events manager: Oversees the planning and execution of community events.

• Accessibility specialist: Responsible for ensuring the community is diverse and inclusive. A part-time role or an occasional consulting expert typically fills them.

Community roles/responsibilities typically borrowed from other departments:

• IT admin: IT specialist who supports the upkeep, configuration, and integration of the technology that supports the community environment. This role manages outages, does technical development work in staging, pushes updates to production, files tickets with the provider when something isn’t working, strengthens the configuration to fight spam, etc. Typically, a resource is borrowed from IT, although more mature communities often have a dedicated part-time or full-time resource.

• Community UX designer: Design and optimize the community platform's user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) to ensure it is engaging, accessible, and easy to navigate. Typically this is a borrowed resource from another internal team.

• Customer support agents: Provide assistance and address inquiries raised in the community that require insider knowledge and the brand's systems to solve.

• Content manager: This position is responsible for community content and knowledge planning. The content manager creates, writes, and manages content to meet the needs of the end-users and be a voice for the company. This is likely a borrowed resource from marketing.

• Analytics specialist: Typically, this is a cross-functional role from another department. They analyze community data and metrics to track performance, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions. More mature communities may have a dedicated part-time or full-time resource.

Cross-departmental roles crucial for scaling and supporting the community:

• Executive sponsor: Responsible for advocating for the community’s value across the organization, facilitating cross-departmental collaboration, and securing budget and personnel as the community scales.

• Internal subject matter experts:

  • Internal Brand Experts: Employees with subject matter expertise who offer their ideas and opinions in your public communities, sometimes leading webinars or hosting podcasts to encourage customer engagement and loyalty.

  • Product Support Manager: Leveraging expertise in the business's product offerings to respond to inquiries and create technical articles.

  • Education Specialists: Create and maintain learning paths or an “academy” with text and videos.

• Marketing manager: Promotes community internally and enacts paid strategy to drive more traffic to the community.

• SEO manager/strategist: Develops tagging strategy to optimize search results for the community.

Technical engineer: Supports integrations, APIs, SSO, and other technical needs to bring in customer data, share content external to the community, manage and create support tickets, and personalize the community experience.

A community manager is more than just a moderator or social media manager. They are the driving force behind engagement, retention, and strategic growth within your community. By investing in a dedicated professional, organizations can strengthen customer relationships, reduce support costs, and generate valuable business insights that fuel innovation.

As your community grows, specialized roles and cross-functional collaboration will be needed to sustain engagement and scale effectively. Whether hiring your first community manager or expanding your team, prioritizing the right skills and resources will set your community—and your business—up for long-term success. Check out our Guide to Staffing an Online Community Team for a deeper dive into building a well-rounded community team.