Mind on My Money: Working, Recruiting, and Managing Talent in the Cannabis Industry

By Matthew Kosinski, managing editor of Recruiter.com

The cannabis industry offers an interesting case study for entrepreneurs, executives, HR pros, recruiters, and, really, anyone involved in talent acquisition and talent management.

As a brand new industry is built virtually from scratch before our very eyes, we get to see how a particular segment of the workforce comes together around a certain economic sector.

Who are the workers who have turned cannabis from an illicit substance to a multibillion-dollar industry in just a few short years? One thing is for sure: They're not who you think.

"Cannabis evokes this idea of the lazy stoner who doesn't have good attention to detail or doesn't know how to add two plus two," says Andrew Duffy, CEO and cofounder of Best in Grow, a dispensary management software.

Pop culture is rife with such depictions. Think: Harold and Kumar craving White Castle, or the feckless protagonists of any pre-2010 Seth Rogen flick.

This common stereotype might make for good comedy, but it fails to capture the truth about the passionate professionals who are driving cannabis's success.

When it comes to role models, cannabis pros could do much worse than Snoop Dogg

Perhaps the better representation of today's cannabis pros would be Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr., — a.k.a., Snoop Dogg.

Sure, Snoop may play up his public persona as a laid-back stoner living the good life, but he's also worth $124 million. He didn’t amass such a fortune by accident.

No, Snoop is a hardworking, talented musician and a canny businessman who built an entertainment empire spanning television shows, branded merch, and an unlikely friendship with Martha Stewart. When it comes to a role model, cannabis pros could do worse.

Duffy has been working in cannabis since 2017, building his own company and watching other entrepreneurs build theirs. Along the way, he has seen just how dedicated, resourceful, and talented the cannabis workforce really is.

"Cannabis is not only a really important product for people's livelihoods and the quality of their lives, but it's also a respectable business that is not populated exclusively by people whom you can stereotype," Duffy says. "People who are cannabis users have been able to band together and create this massive industry that so many people want in on."

Prospective cannabis professionals — and organizations in need of those professionals — take note: In this industry, success is contingent on more than a penchant for pot.

From Budtenders to Food Scientists, Cannabis Pros Are a Talented Bunch

As cannabis comes into its own as a legitimate industry, companies in the space need a wide range of talented candidates to fill roles at every stage of the game. There is a lot of opportunity for interested talent, and a lot of different roles for talent acquisition and talent management pros to get familiar with.

"You're starting from zero, actually growing the plant and producing it, and then you're going all the way to selling the plant and creating technologies to help you more effectively sell the plant," Duffy says. "It is an extremely diverse industry in terms of what types of jobs you can fill."

In general, cannabis jobs fall into one of three domains:

1. Retail

Cannabis reaches consumers through dispensaries, which need smart, adaptable, and detail-oriented staff members to keep customers happy — and the dispensary running on the right side of the law. Two kinds of professionals are particularly important: budtenders and compliance officers.

On a very basic level, a budtender is a cannabis salesperson, but that barely scratches the surface of what they really do. Ninety-two percent of consumers who walk into a dispensary purchase whatever the budtender recommends, according to Duffy. That makes budtenders the heart and soul of the industry in many ways.

"The budtender is this sort of really powerful point-of-sale employee who has to be very adaptable and quick to learn all the different challengesof compliance and other regulatory barriers while also having great attention to detail and a lot of product knowledge," Duffy says.

As for compliance officers, you could say they're the brains of the operation. They make sure their dispensaries don't run afoul of the complicated laws governing the cannabis business. Everything from how trash is disposed of to how the doors are locked at night is tightly circumscribed by regulation in the cannabis industry.

"The degree to which cannabis is so highly regulated is really unique, and as such, there are people whose entire job it is to manage the checklists of what they have to do on a day-to-day basis to make sure the store doesn't get shut down, or their owners don't get arrested, or a massive fine doesn't get levied," Duffy says.

2. Branding/Production

Before a budtender ever sells a strain of cannabis, someone needs to produce that strain. For cannabis brands, the creation and marketing of new products is a complicated and high-stakes affair.

Cannabis brands need highly educated, strategically minded staff members who stay cool under pressure and deliver great products to consumers.

"The potential effect range of cannabis is massive," Duffy says. "It can make you lazy, it can make you euphoric and feel like you want to go for a mile run, it can make you extremely happy and relaxed, or it can make you extremely anxious and uncomfortable."

Consumers need to know exactly how a particular product is going to affect them before they take it. However, throughout the previous 80+ years of cannabis prohibition, research into the various compounds that make cannabis function was tightly restricted. Brands have a lot of catching up to do, and many need full-time researchers to study how cannabis works and how they can make products that do exactly what they want them to.

"Ultimately, you need PhDs in food science and organic chemistry, people who understand to a very deep degree the way that these molecules will actually be effectively put into a product and how they can be effectively consumed to make sure the effect of the product is exactly as they intend," Duffy says.

Supporting these product researchers and developers is an infrastructure of marketers who have to sell the resulting products to consumers. That can be harder than it sounds.

It's a tricky dance, one that only a keen marketer can nail: Cannabis businesses must learn the ins and outs of, and pay their respects to, the cannabis culture that built up during the prohibition era while still bringing the more sophisticated methodologies of traditional consumer-packaged goods to the industry.

3. Support Structures

Before cannabis brands can engineer their products, someone needs to grow some actual cannabis. Strict laws govern the transport of cannabis across state lines, which means most brands have to depend on cannabis grown in their states of operation. However, not every state’s climate is friendly to the plant.

"You have to build out these massive feats of engineering for air management and temperature management and water management, and you have to maximize the value of every single plant you can get into a square foot of grow space,” Duffy says. To accomplish this, the cannabis industry needs plenty of innovative engineers and agriculturalists.

Of course, the industry also needs a whole host of other support professionals, from technologists who can build the software tools dispensaries, brands, and growers need to cannabis-specific recruitment firms that know how to source and attract the right people for the business.

"That same ecosystem that exists around all other verticals of business across the US is starting to pop up around cannabis," Duffy says. "We're building those specific knowledge bases that are necessary to help the industry grow."

How to Make It in Cannabis

There are plenty of cannabis roles, and plenty of people interested in those roles. If you want to jump into the industry — either as a direct employee or as a recruiter who specializes in cannabis — you need to know what makes for the best cannabis professionals. In Duffy's opinion, the two most important characteristics of a successful cannabis pro are adaptability and humility.

"There are a lot of people who come in from traditional corporate environments thinking, 'Oh, I worked at McKinsey — I will dominate all of these dumb stoners,'" Duffy says. "That is perhaps the worst attitude you can possibly come into the space with."

Cannabis is a young industry. A lot of the people joining it don't have much experience in the field. Every new cannabis professional, regardless of their role, needs to realize that building a new industry is a team effort. Newcomers need to engage with and learn from the people who have been in the trenches a little while longer. Otherwise, they'll only set themselves up to fail.

"When you run into your first regulatory hurdle or some vendor doesn't fulfill its promise to you because it's a new industry and they actually went under last month, you'll realize you have to be extremely adaptable and resourceful," Duffy says. "You can't just rely on the corporate bona fides that you built up over time. You have to really be a doer."

Following close behind adaptability and humility is attention to detail. As much as cannabis requires rolling with the punches, the industry also needs people who can build and execute effective plans.

"It's obviously a challenge to make sure you can be both structured and flexible, but the ability to hold those two things at the same time is extremely important," Duffy says. "There is very little room for error in cannabis. You have to be right on regulations, and you have to be documenting that really effectively. If you don't have the proper attention to detail, you are ultimately not going to be able to exist in what is fundamentally a very burdensomely regulated industry."

Finally, as in all industries, it helps to have a passion for what you're doing.

"I don't mean you have to be a cannabis consumer," Duffy says. "What you have to care about is the fact that you are building a totally new industry pretty much from the ground up — although obviously we have to pay a lot of respect to the people who carried it through prohibition and then through the gray market and were able to make it the legal product it is today."

Cannabis is unique not only in that it is such a new industry, but also because of its history. It's a complicated field, and those people who can find something to care about will outlast those who are only in it for a quick buck.

"You have to understand that you are a part of the journey," Duffy says. "You're bringing this product to people for whom it could be medically necessary. You are helping to create a new economy that will help bring people out of poverty, or you are helping to get rid of the stigma associated with cannabis that has kept so many people in jail and taken so many people away from their families. You have to find something in cannabis that you are really passionate about and support it."

"Otherwise, you will become extremely frustrated by the degree to which this industry can be so volatile and can be so difficult to manage," he adds.