28 Questions to Ask When Hiring a Growth Marketer (2021 Edition)

I've been the head of growth for several startups.

I've even evangelized growth for a couple of the fastest growing SaaS companies.

If there's a role that's hard to fill, without question, it's the growth marketer, growth engineer, head of growth, growth lead, or whatever you call the open growth position at your company.

Sounds nice, right?

All companies need growth no matter what position they're in. But it's hard to hire for this role because it doesn't just take experience to fill it, it takes the right experience.

The balance of technical skills with a deep understanding of marketing psychology, branding, and statistics. The complete blend.

If one piece is missing, the equation is off. The marketing doesn't quite stick.

The traction doesn't quite hit.

After hiring over ten different growth hackers, lead growth strategists, and growth engineers, I've learned to ask these 28 questions in every interview. When a candidate has experience in each piece, the interview goes from phone to in-house to offer letter in a matter of days.

1. What Competitor Analysis Tools Have You Used?

This is one of the most basic marketing skills, but also one of the most overlooked.

You need to analyze paid marketing, backlinking, and team structure of your competitors.

Competitor analysis shows you where the low-hanging fruit is in any market. The real skill comes in interpreting the data. You can be looking at the best opportunity in the world, but without the right knowledge of the marketing ecosystem, the numbers are just numbers.

A few of the tools I expect the interviewee to know include SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, and Alexa.

Then I expect them to interpret the data by seeing opportunities that tell me they can picture the full funnel.

For example, if they see no traffic from Facebook, they may come to the conclusion that it's because it wasn't a profitable channel for them.

However, an experienced marketer might notice they ran poor Facebook ad campaigns because the copy and images had no focus on the benefits of the product.

Rather than an obstacle, they'll see an opportunity to take a startup from five figures in revenue to seven.

2. What's Your Experience in Paid Social?

If a candidate doesn't understand how to drive paid traffic to a landing page, then the chances of them discovering an opportunity from any analysis drops significantly. The two most important advertising avenues today are Facebook and Instagram.

A growth marketer with experience on other platforms is a plus, but because they're not as widely used, we don't place heavy consideration on them (e.g. Reddit, Pinterest, Quora).

But, this is still subject to your organization's individual needs.

On the surface level, I look for a marketer who uses formulas for ad copy and has databases they regularly pull images from.

On a deeper level, I look for a marketer who has experience with bidding strategies, device targeting, location targeting, naming campaigns, working with "Lookalike audiences", and custom audiences.

Then I ask about ad sequencing. This quickly separates the novices from the experts. I see whether they have knowledge about how to run video ad sequences and pure branding ads to generate a lower cost-per-lead.

But, that's not all.

A good sign is if they talk about remarketing videos after a percentage of watch time and using PR features to warm an audience before running conversion ads.

Now that I know whether they can run ads, I check their ability to discover a new profitable audience using social media advertising. I propose a hypothetical situation where they have a product but have no defined customer base.

Their job?

To find it with social media advertising without wasting a ton of money.

Here, I look for them to mention the use of Facebook Audience Insights, Google Analytics, Amazon search, YouTube search, and a competitor analysis tool to help them identify this audience.

If they bring up little-known resources like Quora questions or even the phrase "affinity score," they earn bonus points. But all the bonus points in the world doesn't mean anything if they don't have skills in attributing campaigns. That means using a URL builder tool to ensure all paid traffic is tracked in Google Analytics.

That way you can say, "This ad campaign led to this conversion".

Lastly, they should understand where to check for attribution in Google Analytics and how to adjust the conversion window that Facebook reports on.

3. Can You Run an Effective Google AdWords Campaign?

Google AdWords is the best friend of social media advertising.

It might be expensive, but it works.

Your campaigns on social often influence the hits on Google search. In other words, the more people hear about you on Facebook, the more likely they'll click your Google AdWords' ad.

One of the key attributes I look for in Google AdWords experience is the proper use of Ad Groups. Most often, you should only have one keyword per an Ad Group.

If they don't know this, it immediately throws up a red flag. I also ask about device targeting, location targeting, and bidding strategies.

Then I ask them about their philosophy on bidding on company names and branded terms via Google search. I go deeper by probing into what they consider great bidding opportunities.

A top Google AdWords strategist knows that the end goal is a quality conversion with a likely prospect, but that usually doesn't happen right away.

Often AdWords campaigns are set to take prospects to the site and then Facebook retargeting is implemented to bring them to the ultimate conversion.

This knowledge matters because by knowing the ecosystem around the conversion process, an AdWords strategist can make more precise bids that drive revenue for the companies they work with.

4. What's Your Experience With Google Analytics and Data Studio?

Most marketers will throw on their resume that they know Google Analytics, but it's often far from true.

Google Analytics provides a wealth of knowledge for how your marketing campaigns work from paid to organic. It will even tell you how well your individual site pages are optimized for different traffic sources.

Look.

We're not looking for basic skills here, they need those to begin with.

I look for significant data sets that come out of the box and conclusions derived from hard data.

Start with goals.

Do they know how to set conversion goals in analytics and implement Google Tag Manager? If they don't know how to implement either one, then that's a big, bad sign. That means any goals whether capturing leads or turning email subscribers into paying customers have never been properly tracked.

I step into the finer details by asking about excluding IP addresses, identifying bot traffic, and creating proper dashboards as in Google Data Studio below to keep an eye on their company's most important KPIs. Google Data Studio is a free tool that streamlines reporting for website analytics to Facebook and AdWords campaign performance.

If they have experience with Google Data Studio, then that tells me they've probably used analytics with strong depth and have given company presentations on their findings. This is a big plus if the position requires them to be customer- or C-level executive facing.

5. Do You Have Badass Data Analysis Skills?

I didn't understand how important data analysis skills were. Then my boss asked me to use SQL for better attribution. When I started with SQL, I noticed that the numbers Facebook and Google Analytics gave me weren't the right ones.

I had no choice but to take it directly from the source- that is, dive into the back-end database with SQL queries.

This not only allowed me to get better attribution but to design more effective marketing experiments. For example, I used SQL queries to discover that our Facebook login underperformed the standard email capture on our landing page when measured down the funnel.

The reason? Facebook emails were old which led to a low open rate on nurture emails.

If the candidate doesn't understand SQL, they should at least know Excel. With Excel or Google Sheet knowledge, they can clean data faster, perform pivot table analysis, and index-match function to help combine relevant data.

If the candidate doesn't even have a high-level understanding of Excel or Google Sheets, then they won't survive as a growth marketer.

6. Can You Run A/B and Multivariate Tests to Optimize Pages?

I don't care how much traffic you can throw at a website. If traffic doesn't convert - it doesn't convert. That's why you need testing tools like Omniconvert and Optimizely because rarely does traffic convert well on the first run. It often takes many iterations of a website before visitors engage. Then even more before they convert.

Iterations on landing pages mean changes in copy, images, and email capture pop-ups.

Knowing how to test is equally as important as what you test. For example, if you're running a viral campaign while you're conducting A/B tests on a landing page to get sign-ups for the campaign, you'll get skewed results.

The reason is at any time in the campaign you may experience an unusual uptick whether an influencer sharing it or getting featured in a publication.

The best way to get reliable data when testing?

Paid traffic.

This often means Google AdWords and Facebook ads. By focusing on segmenting traffic based on the source, it provides more reliable insights. This way you can make changes to your website with confidence.

7. How Do You Study a Visitor's or User's Interaction With Your Website?

Before you dive into A/B testing your website, there's a lot of low hanging fruit to grab.

You can see these opportunities using heatmapping and tools that record visitor and user sessions. The growth marketer should mention tools like Hotjar, Crazy Egg, and Full Story to help them do this.

They should be familiar with a variety of tools that can help with scaling your company.

8. What can you do to impr…

To check out the rest of the 21 questions, read more here!