23 questions and answers for interviewing a marketing candidate

Hiring a new employee can sometimes feel like a gamble. Assessing a candidate's soft skills during an interview can be challenging. However, evaluating professional expertise is more straightforward when you know the right questions to ask.

With eight years of experience in the IT industry, I've participated in approximately a hundred interviews — from being a job seeker to an interviewer. Let me share my insights on effectively assessing a candidate's hard skills in marketing.

A few general tips that apply to almost all jobs

Do not ask for terminology. Some job seekers may lean heavily on professional jargon, and there is a category of practitioners who won't define marketing according to Kotler, but will easily explain the essence in their own words.

Embrace diversity in mindsets when selecting team members. Rather than favoring those similar to you, opt for individuals with varying perspectives. This diversity offers multifaceted viewpoints, fostering innovative problem-solving approaches.

For critical candidates, involve an expert in the relevant field during the interview process. Alternatively, utilize the following questions: ??

Marketing

The questions you ask marketing job seekers should align with the specific functions the marketer will perform in your company — is he/she more of a strategist or an executor who mostly solves tasks on his/her own? So, the questions are arranged from more general, strategic to highly specialized, with possible answers below them.

1. "Imagine you started working for a company that doesn't have a portrait of its target audience. How will you create one?"

Data can be taken:

• from Google Analytics;
• from the statistics of the company's pages in social networks;
• from the CRM system;
• from sales managers;
• you can conduct a survey of existing customers (in your personal account, via SMS or Viber, in social networks, etc;)
• some data is freely available in various studies;
• you can conduct qualitative research (in-depth interviews), but it is expensive.

2. "What promotion channels will you offer for our company and why?"

It's hardly possible to give a balanced answer to such a question right away, unless the searcher has been preparing for it. However, they can suggest channels based on their own experience and logic. Alternatively, you can check where competitors advertise. A detailed analysis will take time, but there are things that can be checked in 1-2 minutes: contextual advertising (google or check here ), advertising in Meta (check through the advertising library ).

3. "Where do you get your knowledge from?"

A knowledgeable person will tell you whose blogs they read, lectures or courses they attend, what telegrams and YouTube channels they subscribe to, etc.

Clarifying question: "What interesting/important things have you learned about marketing recently?"

4. "How would you define our competitors?"

The job seeker can demonstrate this in practice right during the meeting or tell theoretical actions:

• We go to the employer's website and draw a conclusion about its main services or products. For example, it's a Viber mailing service.
• We Google phrases like "Viber mailing service" and "Viber mailings" and look at the Google results.
• We evaluate organic search results and advertising results separately. That is, there are competitors who are in the top purely because of advertising - we can move them down using the same tool and calculate the necessary budget. And there are competitors who are engaged in SEO-promotion of their websites, so they are in the TOP among organic results. You won't be able to move them up tomorrow. Moreover, it is impossible to calculate how much time and money it will take.

5. Open any landing page of your website (any of those where advertising traffic is pouring in, you can use the main page) and ask to evaluate it from the marketing point of view.

A pro will assess the basic requirements for a landing page at a glance: in a few seconds, looking at the first screen, it should be clear what the company does; the site should have simple, clear navigation and a pleasant design; there should be several ways to contact and call-to-action buttons; the information should be structured and easy to understand.

A clarifying question (unless the candidate says they would like to see the page analytics): "We think we need to redesign the architecture and design of the page. Would you support this idea?"

Before redesigning anything, you need to analyze what you have:

• Evaluate Google Analytics metrics (conversions, behavioral factors).
• Look at the records of visits to the site, as well as heatmaps - they show where users click more often and provide important insights. Hotjar or Clarity are usually used for this purpose.
• Consult a UX designer.
• Do A/B testing to check certain hypotheses.

6. "How do you estimate the demand for a particular product/service?"

You need to check the frequency of key phrases through SEO services (Serpstat, KeyCollector) or through a free Google tool called Keyword Planner, which is built into Google Ads. To use it, you should have been running ads for some time. You can't just register an account and check the semantics - the program will show too vague indicators.

Another option is Google Trends, but it provides very generalized information. To see data on it, you need to enter general words. For example, "chatbot", but not "chatbot development", "Viber", but not "Viber mailing". And these words must be really popular, otherwise the tool will not display any data.

7. "Do you work with GTM? How do you use it?

Setting goals and installing various services on the site is a minimum for any marketer.

If the candidate does not use GTM, it means that he will load your programmers with unnecessary work, setting them various technical tasks. Or your company should have someone who knows this tool.

8. "How can I track the goal for a form without the help of programmers if no event is transmitted to analytics and the thank you page does not exist?"

If a thank you window appears after submitting the form, you can set the goal to "element visibility". For Ajax forms, you can use a special script (you can Google it).

9. "What should I do if Google Analytics 4 doesn't show conversions even though they are set up correctly?"

If there are very few conversions, Google may hide them because it believes that companies are able to figure out who these customers are and obtain their personal data. There's nothing you can do about it.

You should try to change the analytics settings - choose a way to identify users by device.

Advertising (Paid traffic)

Google Ads

1. If the meeting is in the office, open your laptop and show the candidate one or more of your advertising campaigns (ACs). Say that you would like to reduce the cost per conversion and ask if the candidate can suggest ways to optimize.

If he is a practitioner, his actions will be confident. The essence of the express audit is to analyze general indicators - CTR (click-through rate), ad quality, conversion price - and find the "black sheep".

For example, we saw that one of the ad groups had a significantly lower click-through rate. We go into it and see which keywords have such a low CTR. We check what queries users googled, whether they match the keyword or not. Perhaps the non-targeted queries are poorly separated? Perhaps the CPC is too low for the ad to appear in the top positions.

2. "If an advertising campaign has a very low CTR, while the quality of ads is average. What could be the problem?"

• The cost per click is too low, so the ad is mostly displayed at the bottom, below the search results.
• In the settings, the option to show in the GDN is selected — ads in the contextual display network are always less clickable.

3. "Give me an example of a sales funnel for the PPC channel (Google ads)."

It's important to check what the candidate understands by the term "sales funnel," because for many, it's just a buzzword. For example, the funnel can be as simple as possible:

• we advertise for commercial queries in Google Ads;
• users click and visit a website;
• users buy the product.

In businesses where the decision-making process is slow, you will have to warm up the audience first. The funnel can look like this:

• We write and optimize blog articles for information queries (both for SEO and Google advertising).
• We set up ads for information queries (i.e., targeted at those who are not yet ready to buy but are looking for various information about a product or service or a possible solution to their problem).
• We collect a remarketing audience (users who have visited our blog articles).
• We show them ads based on commercial requests.
• They go to the website.
• They buy the product.

4. "How do you evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns?"

You can use the formula:

ROMI = Profit (margin, markup) / expenses (advertising budget + agency commission, if any)*100%. If the ROMI is over 100, the advertising pays off. The higher the figure, the better.

For example: 50 products were bought thanks to advertising. The markup of each product is 2,000 UAH. So, the profit is 50*2000 = 100,000 UAH. Spent on advertising - 70 000 UAH. ROMI = 100 000/70 000*100% = 142.9%.

A specialist does not always have data on margin or product cost. In this case, they can ask what is the maximum allowable cost of customer acquisition.

5. "What was the highest CTR in your ad campaigns within a month? How did you achieve it?"

You should focus on a sample of 100 clicks or more. Search ads have an average CTR of 13-23%. If these are branded queries, the CTR will be much higher - 50-70%, if it is search remarketing for branded queries, the figure can reach 90%.

The indicator depends on:

• the quality and relevance of the ad (how accurately it matches the user's request);
• budget (if it is small, Google may show ads at the bottom of the page more often);
• the cost per click, if it is set manually (if it is not high enough, the ad will rarely be shown in the first positions).
• the number of competitors.

Facebook/Instagram

1. "How do you select your audience, how do you choose targeting criteria?"

It is logical to rely on a portrait of the target audience. However, in order for the campaign to learn faster, you need to give it a lot of data and a good budget. Therefore, if your product is one that is needed by almost everyone or a large category of the population (clothing, cosmetics, recreation), it is better not to narrow the audience with additional targeting parameters, but to set age, location, gender, and that's it. In a week or two, the system will optimize your ads in the best possible way.

For B2B, it is not so easy to hit the right audience. Therefore, there is a wide field for experiments.

2. "If our goal is to sell a service (for example, software or a service), what types of campaigns should we choose?"

You should test campaigns with traffic and lead generation goals. Regarding the latter, be sure to use at least one additional question in the lead generation form that the user will have to enter manually, otherwise Facebook will fill out the form automatically and you will get a lot of untargeted leads.

However, you can ignore this advice if you have the resources to process a large number of applications.

SEO-promotion

1. "Is it possible to promote a website today without buying links?"

There is no definite answer to this question. Such cases exist, but usually the company has a narrow niche or a strong brand. Otherwise, you can't do without links. You don't have to buy them on exchanges, post crowd links on forums, etc. Instead, you need to have "live" PR links, i.e., links that lead users to your website and they spend some time there studying the information.

What can be said for sure is that one live link is better than 20 purchased links that are just hanging around like dead weight.

2. "What strategies do you use for promotion?"

It depends on the initial data of the site. What should definitely be done:

• fix technical errors;
• make sure that the site loads quickly from both desktop and mobile (it is NOT necessary to reach the maximum performance according to PageSpeed Insights);
• check how the site is displayed on mobile devices;
• reject low-quality links, if any, and work on getting trust links;
• work on the value of the content - it should be unique in essence (valuable knowledge that competitors do not yet have) and trustworthy (you refer to primary sources, you show the authors of your articles or other materials).

Next, you can choose a strategy for expanding the structure of the site or rely on link building, or work on the content - add new formats, implement features, or choose a hybrid option.

3. "How do you work with pagination pages?"

Some people close them from indexing, but it's better to leave them open and uniqueize the meta tags.

4. "What are the ways to close a website page from indexing?"

• Write a meta tag in the code of the desired page;
• Сlose it using the robots.txt file through the Disallow directive;
• Through the meta tag in the sitemap.xml file;
• Through the configuration files .htaccess (for Apache) and nginx.conf (for Nginx);
• Through the use of HTTP headers;
• Through a special SEO plugin in the CMS.

A specialist may not know all the methods, but at least 3-4 of them should be known.

And the last question. It's not related to hard skills, but it's important. "What do you usually do if you can't solve a problem and it's due yesterday?"

Delaying some issues is sometimes costly. A specialist can afford to take a break for a few days and return to the task with renewed vigor if it does not affect your company's sales or reputation.

But if it's clear that you can't solve the problem with your own knowledge and efforts at this time, and googling hasn't helped, then you should obviously seek advice from someone who has practical experience.