When Hiring Marketing Applicants, Don’t Forget to Ask These Two Questions

When you’re interviewing new marketing professionals, make sure they have these skill sets.

Growing your marketing team is an exciting time. It’s an opportunity to bring on people with new ideas, skills, and opinions on the best ways to market your company’s products or services. But choosing the right people is anything but easy. With all of the new marketing strategies popping up, different candidates will have different ideas about what’s most important to focus on and will probably have different backgrounds. Depending on the candidates’ ages, levels of schooling, or personalities, they may not even have the same definition of marketing.

Here are two questions you absolutely can’t forget to ask while interviewing new candidates for your open marketing job positions:

1. What channel of marketing do you think is the most effective? This is going to tell you a ton about the interviewee’s views on marketing. Someone who says billboards is going to have very different marketing ideas than someone who says e-mail lists or someone who says Snapchat or someone who says radio ads. Also, note how they define effective—marketing needs to lead to sales. If someone thinks a certain avenue will get you the most media attention, but that attention doesn’t necessarily lead to sales, that avenue isn’t as effective as one that does.
2. Why? What is it they like about that channel? Is it the direct connection to the people viewing it? Is it the ability to edit it and make it perfect before they launch it out to the world? Is it what they’ve seen to be the most effective in a previous position in terms of key performance indicators? Finding out why someone likes a particular avenue of marketing is even more important than what avenue it is. It will help you understand how he or she believes a sale is made and what he or she knows about branding.

Something that’s important to note: If an interview candidate says a channel of marketing that your company doesn’t currently use, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it may be the best thing. This candidate might be bringing an entirely new avenue to the table that you had never thought of—an avenue in which he or she is an expert.

Anyone can learn about analytics, visuals, or best practices. But which avenue of marketing he or she thinks leads to the most sales is something that’s pretty ingrained and hard to change. That’s why it’s so essential to make sure you choose a candidate whose vision of marketing is aligned with your company’s.