How to hire a community manager at every stage of growth
Your community is growing and the notifications never stop. You know it’s time to get some help, but figuring out how to hire a community manager can be overwhelming. What role do you actually need? And how do you avoid hiring the wrong fit?
In a recent Expert Session inside the Circle customer community, community strategist Bri Leever broke down community manager hiring after supporting 40+ communities (and navigating it herself for her agency). This playbook builds on Bri’s session, along with industry research and compensation benchmarks, to give you a grounded, stage-based approach to hiring.
You’ll learn when to hire, what level of support fits your current phase, where to find great candidates, how to evaluate them, and how to support their success.
The 3 reasons community hiring goes wrong
Most hiring challenges come down to three simple gaps: alignment, clarity, and support. When those pieces are missing, even the best candidates struggle. The good news is that each gap is fixable, and once you understand where they show up, you can hire with much more confidence.
Misaligned expectations
Community manager responsibilities include:
- Member experience
- Programming
- Engagement rhythms
- Day-to-day operations
But when a job posting goes live, founders often see applications from people with very different backgrounds.
This mismatch leads to a bigger issue: expecting one hire to do work that isn’t actually community work. Tasks like sales, product-market fit, or social media management fall outside the CM role. When those expectations sneak in, the job becomes impossible to succeed in.
Murky roles and goals
If you can’t articulate the goal of your community, you can’t define the community roles and responsibilities that support it.
Vague job descriptions complicate everything. Without a solid purpose, a community manager ends up guessing what “success” looks like, which is a recipe for frustration.
💡Pro tip: If you need some help figuring out your community’s goal, check out our Community Launch Guide.
We’re bad managers (but getting better)
Many founders are used to moving fast, making every decision, and keeping the whole community in their heads. Delegating any part of that feels uncomfortable.
“Bringing on a team member means slowing down a little, which is painful, but it’s ultimately so you can go farther together,” explains Bri.
📖 Related: Bonnie Christine resisted hiring for years. When she finally brought on her first assistant, it changed everything—and helped her scale to 7 figures. See how she did it →
Should you hire? A readiness checklist
The question every community builder eventually faces is, “When should I hire a community manager?” The answer isn’t always obvious. Some days you’re overwhelmed, and other days you think you can still manage it all.
This readiness checklist helps you see where you stand. If you can check most of these boxes, you're ready. If not, you'll save yourself time, money, and stress by choosing a different kind of support.
✅ You know why your community exists
Get clear on how your community supports your business. As Bri says, "Your company's mission might only happen when you have a team."
A fitness creator might build a community to keep members accountable between workouts and reduce churn. A B2B software company might use the community to accelerate onboarding and reduce support tickets. When you can define your community's purpose this clearly, you can define the role that supports it.
✅ You have budget and tools ready
A community manager can only succeed with proper support. Budget, tools, and systems shape what's realistic.
According to the 2026 Community Trends Report, over 26% of community leaders say finances are directly influencing how they run their communities. At the same time, 27% of teams are juggling six or more tools, creating manual overhead that slows execution and increases burnout. Before hiring, get clear on what tools will support them, what can be automated, and how much budget you can allocate for programming and member support.
✅ You know where community sits in your org
Where the community lives influences your strategy, metrics, and the type of hire you need. According to the 2025 CMX Community Industry Report, most teams sit under marketing (31%), but Customer Success is growing fast at 19%. Fewer teams operate as standalone departments. Know your reporting structure before you write the job description.
✅ You know if you need an executor or a partner
Some founders need an executor who can run events, manage posts, handle onboarding, and keep daily community operations moving. Others require a partner who can think with them, not just work for them. Getting honest about which category you’re in helps you avoid hiring the wrong level of community leadership.
✅ You have a realistic timeline
According to industry reports, the global median “time to hire” is 38 days, and hiring for mid-level, senior, or specialized roles—which many community manager hires realistically are—often stretches beyond that window.If you need someone next week, you're not ready to hire well.
Meet the 3 personas (and how each should hire)
Hiring isn’t one-size-fits-all. The right community support depends on where you are in your business and what you actually need day to day.
These personas will help you understand your stage and the type of hire that will make the biggest impact.
Persona 1: Jess the Founder
Jess is a thriving entrepreneur with over 500 students in her in-person art classes and 80 paying members in her new online community. She’s creative, driven, and curious about online community building. But she’s also early-stage, new to community work, and working with a limited budget.
Pain points:
- Unclear expectations about what community roles and responsibilities should look like
- Unsure where her own strengths end and where she needs help
- Limited capacity to train or manage someone
- Unsure how community growth fits into her long-term business goals
What they need:
Founders like Jess need education, templates, and guided learning, not a hire. This stage is about understanding the craft of community building and observing what works.
Useful starting points include:
- Circle Academy
- The Circle Community
- Community builder communities (e.g., The Community Community, Candid Collective)
- One-on-one conversations with other founders
- Joining other communities to observe structure and member experience
- Podcasts about community building like Dear Bri
Hiring recommendation:
🚫 Don’t hire a community manager—at least not right now. Early-stage builders like Jess need to invest in their own skills first. To start:
- Offload non-community tasks (e.g, admin work, scheduling), so you have more time to focus on your community.
- Learn foundational skills like welcoming new members, writing updates, running simple events, and gathering feedback.
- Understand your community's needs. Do you need to improve onboarding? Offer more consistent programming? Strengthen member relationships?
Persona 2: Bri the Strategist
Bri represents the creator who has a strong community strategy and a strong point of view, but no capacity to stay in the weeds. She knows what to build. She just needs help running it.
Pain points:
- Too much time going to community operations instead of leadership work
- Strong vision, limited bandwidth
- Clear processes, but no one to own them
- Wanting someone who might grow into a strategy role, but unsure if that’s realistic
What they need:
Strategists like Bree need operational support, not another strategist. Helpful support often includes:
- A content and community coordinator
- A virtual assistant with a community focus
- Someone who can run day-to-day programming, handle logistics, and maintain engagement rhythms
Before hiring, Bree had to ask:
- Are my processes easy enough to follow and hand off?
- Am I patient enough to train someone?
- Do I want them to grow into strategy, or do I need great operations?
Hiring recommendation:
💻 Hire an operational community manager or VA with community expertise. Someone who can execute consistently and, if it makes sense, grow into a higher-level strategy role over time.
Persona 3: Charisse the CEO
Charisse is running a mature, high-demand business. She has established programs and systems, plus a long waitlist of clients eager to work with her team. She’s had an active community for two years and offers scalable support to her clients. But as the CEO: “She doesn’t need to be in the weeds of her community. She doesn’t need to be deep in the strategy either,” Bri explains.
Pain points:
- The community needs someone who can own and scale it
- Minimal capacity for training or hands-on oversight
- Needs community leadership she can trust
- Vulnerability in hiring someone with skills she doesn’t personally have
What they need:
CEOs like Charisse need a fractional community manager or a full-time strategic CM, depending on budget. This person must be able to:
✅ Hire an experienced community manager who can own operations and strategy. If a full-time hire isn’t feasible, start with a fractional community manager (more on this in the next section).
Fractional vs. full-time: What’s right for you?
You might not need to jump straight to a full-time hire. Fractional support is a powerful path for people who need someone to own key pieces of the work, with less commitment.
A fractional community manager typically works 5–10 hours per week. They handle:
- Essential community operations (welcoming new members, approving posts, moderating threads, sending weekly updates or reminders)
- Light programming (running simple recurring events like coworking or office hours, posting weekly prompts or discussion starters, supporting existing programs)
- Engagement (checking in with members, replying to questions, encouraging participation, surfacing insights or feedback to the founder)
They’re ideal when your community is growing but not yet large enough to justify a full-time salary. Fractional roles often evolve over time. Founders can gradually increase hours and retainers as the community scales.
A full-time community manager (30–40 hours per week) makes sense when you have:
- Mature programs that require daily leadership (e.g., weekly or multi-weekly events, multi-step learning tracks or cohorts, ongoing accountability groups or peer circles)
- Large and highly active member base with frequent daily posts, comments, questions, etc.
- Need consistent strategy, operations, and reporting support
- Want someone to fully own community development
An operations-focused CM sits in the middle, usually 10–20 hours per week, and works best for founders with a focused strategy who simply need execution.
How to write an effective community manager job description
A strong job description is an essential step in learning how to hire a community manager. It should give candidates a full picture of what they will own, how you measure success, and where they fit in your business.
To get there, build your JD around a few key sections:
Role overview. Describe the purpose of the role and the goals this person will help you reach. Include who your community serves, how it supports (e.g., learning, networking, customer support, coaching, etc.), and its maturity (age and size).
Also include practical details like:
- Location: in-person, fully remote, or hybrid (and what hybrid actually means)
- Employment type: fractional contractor, part-time, or full-time
- Hours per week: (e.g., 10–20 hours for fractional)
- Compensation: salary or retainer range
- Start date: when you want someone to begin
- Reporting structure: who they’ll work with and report to
- Perks and benefits: anything meaningful beyond pay
- Travel commitments: (e.g., events, retreats, in-person sessions)
Company overview. Two to four sentences about your business and why your community exists to help candidates understand your mission and how the community supports it.
Experience. Spell out the level and type of experience needed. Also note platform fluency or sector-specific expertise. Experience requirements help filter candidates who may confuse community roles with adjacent support or communications positions.
Tasks & Responsibilities. Break work into categories:
- Operations: platform management, onboarding, moderation
- Engagement: prompts, check-ins, member support
- Programming: events, workflows, content scheduling
- Reporting: insights, retention signals, KPIs
Skills & competencies. The Community Careers and Compensation 2024 report highlights four core skills shared by high-performing community professionals: empathy, strong communication, attention to detail, and confident decision-making.
Many organizations also confuse community roles with support or communications roles. Your job description should make the distinction clear, so candidates understand the true scope of community leadership.
KPIs. Share the metrics that matter (e.g., onboarding quality, engagement health, retention patterns, satisfaction signals)
💡Want to fast-track your job description? Download Bri’s sample fractional community manager JD template to get started.
Where to find great community talent (and how to evaluate them)
Finding great community talent can feel like a scavenger hunt. The strongest candidates often aren’t on typical job boards. They’re active inside other communities, learning, experimenting, and supporting peers.
Here’s where to look and how to quickly spot the people who know how to run a community.
How to evaluate candidates
Once you know how to hire a community manager, the next challenge is where to find the right people. Great community talent doesn’t always show up on traditional job boards.
As Bri explains, many community roles “sit in a hybrid space. A virtual assistant or digital marketing assistant with a community spin.” That means you’ll often find the best candidates inside specialized communities, peer networks, or referral-driven groups.
Here are reliable places to start:
Community-specific spaces: Great for roles that require previous community management experience:
Hybrid or operations-focused talent pools: Ideal for fractional, part-time, or operations-heavy roles:
- Emily Reagan’s Unicorn Digital Marketing Assistant group — Where Bri found her own coordinator
- Virtual assistant communities
Referral-driven groups: Helpful when you want vetted recommendations:
- Old Girls Club — Bri’s go-to for female founders
- Fractional community manager networks
Should you use a recruiter, a marketplace, or hire directly?
There’s no single “best” hiring path. The right option depends on your budget, timeline, and the level of experience your community needs. Here’s how the main sourcing channels compare, along with what to watch for, especially around platform fluency and tool stack experience.
| Sourcing channel | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Agencies / specialized recruiters | They pre-vet candidates and understand community roles. Often screen for platform fluency (Circle, Discord, Discourse) and tool stack skills. Faster access to experienced community talent. | Highest cost (recruiting fees or percentage of salary). Less control over the initial talent pool. Not always ideal for fractional/part-time roles. |
| Marketplaces (Upwork, Braintrust, similar) | Large pool of contractors with flexible hourly or project rates. Useful for fractional community managers or ops support. Fast posting and high applicant volume. | Quality varies widely; requires careful evaluation. Harder to verify actual community experience vs. adjacent roles. Limited insight into candidates’ ability to lead or scale a community. |
| Direct hires from your own audience | Candidates already understand your mission, voice, and culture. Often faster onboarding since they’re familiar with your programs. Strong alignment with member experience. | May lack formal community management training. Smaller talent pool. Risk of blurring lines between “member” and “team.” |
Why platform and tech stack fluency matters
Community experience isn’t universal. Someone who ran a lively Facebook Group may struggle with a Circle community with more robust spaces, events, workflows, and analytics. Ensuring platform fluency saves months of onboarding and prevents avoidable mistakes.
💡Quick way to check platform fluency. Ask candidates to complete a simple scenario, like setting up an event in Circle, and explain their approach. A short screenshare of a community they’ve managed works well too.
How much should you pay a community manager? (Rates, salary, and fair compensation)
Community roles span from entry-level coordination to senior strategy, making compensation tricky. This section breaks down typical salary and retainer ranges so you can set a fair budget and attract the right level of talent.
How are community managers paid?
You can pay community managers in several ways: full-time salaries, monthly retainers for contractors, hourly project work, and fractional community manager retainers.
CMX’s 2025 report shows the field is becoming more flexible. Full-time roles have dropped to 59%, while freelance and consulting roles have tripled since 2022. In general, compensation aligns with scope: operational roles cost less, while strategic leadership commands higher rates.
How much does a community manager charge or earn?
Compensation varies by region, experience, and role level, but industry benchmarks provide a helpful range:
Community Roundtable’s 2024 Community Careers & Compensation Report:
- Community Specialist: $76,250 avg
- Community Manager: $95,866 avg
- Community Strategist: $107,237 avg
- Community Executive: $141,607 avg
- Average Online Community Manager salary: $80,123/year
- Most roles fall between $62,500–$111,500/year
- Top earners reach $128,000/year
Regional data (Community Roundtable):
- U.S.: $109,177 avg
- Canada: $97,794 avg
- EU & UK: $71,684 avg
- APAC: $81,250 avg
What is a fair wage for a community manager?
A fair wage aligns with the role’s impact, level of responsibility, and market benchmarks.
Fair pay also accounts for the value the role drives. CMX’s 2025 Trends Report found that 85% of teams say community directly advances company goals, and nearly a quarter can now quantify over $1M in business impact.
To determine a fair wage, consider:
- Seniority: operational vs. strategic leadership.
- Business impact: retention, satisfaction, upsell, LTV.
- Scope: daily execution vs. full program ownership.
- Region: salaries vary significantly by geography.
- Equity: Community Roundtable data highlights gender pay gaps at the Specialist and Strategist levels. Review your ranges through an equity lens.
How to onboard and set your community manager up for success
Onboarding is where your new community manager learns how your world works. This is where you show them the systems, decisions, and expectations that shape the community day to day.
To support their success:
- Start with a 90-day plan outlining priorities and what success should look like at 30, 60, and 90 days.
- Give them access to context—your goals, constraints, values, documentation, workflows, member insights, decision-making logic, and SOPs (if any)—so they aren’t guessing.
Bri notes that when you hire someone with expertise you don’t have, micromanagement can creep in. To avoid this, make sure you:
- Define desired outcomes, not just tasks, so they understand the results you expect.
- Schedule regular check-ins for alignment.
- Give them room to recommend solutions and make decisions in their zone of expertise, not just execute your ideas.
- Encourage them to join communities of practice for additional guidance and peer support.
Ready to hire? Here’s what comes next
Hiring your first community manager is a huge step. When you’ve been doing everything yourself, it can be nerve-racking to hand over pieces of something you’ve poured your energy into. But it’s also a sign you’ve built something worth supporting.
Now that you understand how to hire a community manager, choose the path that fits your stage and take the next step with confidence. If you want support along the way, join the Circle Community or explore Circle Academy to learn with other builders who are growing right alongside you.
FAQs about hiring community managers
What should a community manager be responsible for?
A community manager leads the day-to-day health, operations, and engagement of your community. Their responsibilities typically include running events, managing onboarding, supporting members, moderating posts, organizing content, tracking engagement data, and sharing insights with the team. Depending on your stage, they may also handle programming, retention strategy, and member leadership development.
How much does a community manager cost?
Costs vary by experience, region, and scope. Industry benchmarks (Community Roundtable, ZipRecruiter) show U.S. community managers earning $62k–$111k, with averages around $80k–$95k. Fractional or part-time support is typically offered through monthly retainers, starting lower for operational roles and increasing for strategic leadership. Senior community strategists and executives command higher compensation.
How are community managers paid?
Community managers can be full-time employees, contractors on a monthly retainer, hourly freelancers, or fractional community managers working 5–15 hours a week. Compensation usually tracks with scope. Operational roles are more affordable; strategic roles require a higher investment.
What skills should I look for when hiring?
Look for strong communication, empathy, attention to detail, and confident decision-making. Platform fluency matters too. Experience with tools like Circle, Zoom, email automation, analytics, and project management software is an asset. Great candidates can facilitate conversations, energize members, organize systems, and turn qualitative and quantitative insights into actionable recommendations.
When should I hire a community manager?
You should hire a community manager when:
- Your community’s needs exceed your capacity
- You have a strong purpose and programs to sustain
- Bringing someone in helps you focus on the work only you can do.
If you’re hoping a hire will “fix” a vague strategy, lagging engagement, or an undefined purpose, you may not be ready yet. Early-stage builders often start with DIY support, growing communities benefit from fractional or operational hires, and mature communities typically need more strategic leadership.
What’s the difference between a social media manager and a community manager?
A social media manager creates content, manages brand channels, and focuses on reach, visibility, and audience growth.
A community manager builds belonging. They run programs, support members, facilitate conversations, gather insights, and strengthen relationships inside a private or hosted community.
