How To Interview For A Marketing Role

Marketing is a craft role, and craft roles are the easiest to get wrong in an interview, because talking about marketing and doing marketing are different skills.

Plenty of people interview beautifully and cannot write a caption. A few interview badly and are excellent.

Decide what you are hiring for first

Not a title. A list of outputs.

What will this person produce in their first 90 days, and how will you know it is good. If you cannot answer that, the interview will drift into culture fit and you will hire whoever you liked most.

Write the three outcomes down before the first conversation and assess every candidate against those three rather than against each other.

Stage one: a short call

Twenty minutes, and it is a filter rather than an interview.

Three things to establish: do they understand the work, is the salary and the arrangement a fit, and can they explain something clearly. The third one matters more than people think, because explaining clearly is most of the job.

Then stop. Long first interviews are where time disappears.

Stage two: the work

The single highest signal step, and the one most processes skip.

Give them a real task, small, scoped to roughly an hour, with a proper brief. Something you would actually ask for in the role.

For a content role: three captions and a hook list from footage or photos you supply. For a copywriting role: rewrite one page of an existing site and say why in three lines. For a paid role: critique a live campaign structure and name the first two things they would change. For an organic role: a week of posts for one real client, with the reasoning. For an editing role: one cut from footage you provide.

Pay for it if it is substantial. Give everybody the same brief so you are comparing like with like, and write the brief properly, per what a good brief looks like.

What you are reading: did they follow the brief, did they ask a clarifying question before starting, is the work specific rather than generic, and did they deliver on time. The last one predicts more than the work quality does.

Stage three: the conversation that matters

Now you have something real to talk about, so the interview is about their work rather than about their philosophy.

"Walk me through why you made this choice." The whole interview in one question. You find out whether there was reasoning or instinct dressed as reasoning.

"What would you do differently with another day." Tests self assessment, which is the trait that decides whether somebody improves.

"Show me something you made that did not work, and tell me why." Anybody can present a win. The ones worth hiring have diagnosed a loss.

"What was actually yours in this piece of work?" Portfolios are team outputs. Find the line.

"What do you read, watch or follow?" Tells you whether they are in the craft or in the job.

"What would you need from me to do this well?" The answer tells you how they work and whether you can provide it.

What not to weight

Years of experience, which correlates with very little in this field.

Agency names, which tell you where somebody sat, not what they did.

Tool lists. Tools take a week to learn.

Confidence in the room. The most overweighted signal in every hiring process ever run.

Check the references properly

Two questions, asked of somebody who managed them rather than somebody who worked beside them.

"What did they own, specifically?" and "would you hire them again, and for what?" The hesitation on the second one is the answer.

Then set them up properly

The hire is the start of the risk, not the end of it. Most bad hires are bad onboarding, and the first week sets the pattern, which is the same mechanism as the first week of onboarding sets everything applied internally.

Which means the first 90 days have the three outcomes you wrote down at the start, written down and reviewed. And the process they are stepping into exists on paper rather than in your head, per how to document a process so someone else can run it.

What this unlocks: hires assessed on work rather than on conversation, which is the difference between a team that produces and a team that discusses.