Hiring a great marketer is more difficult than hiring a great engineer or a great salesperson.
Preparing yourself for a marketing interview requires a bit more work than most other positions. Millennials have found themselves emerged with the digital marketing world, so any job involving marketing requires some tenacity to stand out from the competition. Here are some tips to use when you’re preparing for your next marketing interview to help you land the job.
When hiring engineers, the college and work experience of the candidate usually applies directly to the job at hand. For example, if a candidate has a 3.9 GPA, an EE degree from Stanford, and has worked for 3 years at Microsoft, you pretty much know exactly who you’re hiring and why.
Hiring salespeople is more difficult, as I pointed out in my previous post, “How to Hire a Great Salesperson.” However, while there are different types of selling, there’s general agreement on the definition of “selling.” Nobody would confuse “selling,” for example, with “accounting” or “manufacturing.”
Here are three important questions for marketing jobs:-
- What is the difference between marketing and selling?
Both large and small companies experience internal conflicts between the sales group and marketing group stemming from differing opinions about the role of marketing vs. the role of sales. Marketing groups tend to see sales groups as a delivery mechanism at the end of a marketing process. Sales groups tend to see marketing groups as providing a service that helps sales groups to sell more easily.
- How would you contribute if you were temporarily assigned to our sales group?
Many companies do this type of cross-assignment as a way to build bonds between their sales and marketing groups. However, even if you’re not planning such an assignment, you should still ask this question because it takes the theoretical situation in the first question into the practical realm of the candidate’s career.
The worst possible answer is something like, “I’m sure I’d be good at selling, but such an assignment would not be the best use of my talents.” A response like this suggests that the candidate, if hired, will have difficulty creating marketing programs and deliverables that are useful to the sales team.
- Tell me about your personal brand?
This is a bit of a trick question. On the surface, it provides an opening for the candidate to talk about his or her experience and identity and how they appear to the outside world.
However, you’re actually probing for something deeper: whether this candidate’s priority is 1) helping your marketing team build a stronger corporate brand or 2) building a personal brand to advance the candidate’s own career.
Ideally, you want a candidate who defines his or her personal brand in terms of service, working with a team, and helping a company be successful. A candidate who articulates a personal brand that’s independent of any corporate brand is problematic.
- Tell me about a time when you owned the process of an email campaign from beginning to end.?
Look for an understanding of key email marketing concepts from subject line to creative to CTA’s to A/B testing to list management.
“Which tools do you use to report on the success of your email campaigns?”
Interview Questions for a Lead/Demand Generation Marketing Role
I always think of these nurture marketing and lead marketing roles as the test-takers of the team. They need to be able to change strategies on a dime, identify important metrics, and be on top of their game when measuring quality vs. quantity.
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