Hiring the Right Marketing Professionals: How to Make Your Interviews Count

Marketing professionals are essential to business because they help connect your products or service to potential customers. When hiring for these marketing positions, you need to ensure the candidate selected has the right knowledge and experience required. That means anyone responsible for hiring these candidates needs to know what they’re looking for.

Companies looking for marketers want those who are proficient and confident in marketing. With digital marketing being a particular interest for businesses to utilise, 40% of digital marketing roles are filled by those with at least 4-10 years of experience.

What should you be looking for in marketing professional candidates? How do you conduct interviews correctly in order to secure the best talent in marketing for your business? 

This guide will share all you need to know when it comes to the importance of hiring for your company and how to attract the right candidates for this role. By the end, you should have all the guidance you need to hire the top performers within the marketing world.

The importance of detail when hiring

When it comes to hiring any role, the eye is in the detail. Haphazardly organising a recruitment drive isn’t going to end up with quality candidates coming through your doors. For any marketing role, it’s important to understand what you’re after as a company. What marketing skills are you lacking within your current team?

The job advertisement needs to be accurate and it needs to be advertised on the right platforms. For marketing jobs, there are popular job platforms like AMA that are specialised in marketing roles. Advertising on platforms like this one is a lot better than opening it out to a broader market like Indeed for example. 

If you’re a small company that hasn’t conducted too many hires in its time, then it’s important to provide plenty of detail. Make sure all of the essentials are on there when it comes to the job advertisement itself. Such details include:

• Job title
• Salary expectations
• Brief description of the company
• Information on the job itself
• Desired skills and experience

By including everything, you avoid the costly mistake of having to redo the process all over again. 

The more accuracy there is, the higher quality of candidates you’ll have applying that are qualified for the job. Surprisingly, more than three in four professionals would apply for a job, even if they weren’t qualified for it. At least with detail in your job advertisements, you minimise the number of unqualified candidates coming through.

What to look for in marketing professionals

There are certain skills, experience, and qualities that a marketer should have and that you should be looking out for when perusing through candidates. Depending on the role in question, these attributes may vary slightly. 

Marketers are creatives and that means they’re likely to be creative with their copy. Take a look at resumes closely, as well as the cover letters. A quick skim of these documents will help you indicate whether they’re truly a creative individual or not.

They need to be able to sell themselves so this is something you’d be able to spot quite easily within the interview room. Good communication is important, as it is with business in general and they need to be analytical.



All of these are core attributes that you or the recruiter should be aware of when reviewing resumes and interviewing candidates. The use of tests and scenarios will be useful in helping test those analytical skills.

Aside from all this, they should also be personable. They need to fit in with the dynamic of the company and the team they’re going to be working closely with. It’s not just about the skills and experience, but whether they’re a good fit for your business. 

This also goes both ways though - are you the right fit for them?

6 tips for conducting interviews for marketing roles

Now that you know what you’re looking for, how do you make those interviews count? How do you nail the right candidate for the role you’re recruiting for? 



You don’t want to end up in a situation where you’re picking out of a bad bunch, so who you choose to interview is important. How you conduct the interviews is also extremely crucial to both the company’s experience of recruiting and the recruitees.

With that being said, here are half a dozen tips for conducting interviews for your marketing roles.

1. Keep up communications with Levity AI for automating emails.

The experience that candidates have when it comes to interviewing with your company is important to make positive. According to a global talent report by LinkedIn, they found 83% of candidates said a negative interview experience would change their minds about a role or company they once liked.

That’s not an outcome any business wants, in particular those who are still building their company’s brand.

Communication should be at the forefront of the recruitment process. Keep in touch with your candidates from the beginning so that they feel informed on how they’re doing within the process itself. It’s worthwhile to use Levity AI for automating emails so that you ensure every candidate receives the relevant emails when necessary.

Having this automation in place enables the recruiter(s) to let that tick on in the background while they deal with more pressing priorities. 



2. Prepare tests with the best HackerRank alternatives.

Screening your candidates through test platforms helps them gain a more detailed and truthful insight into what they’ve claimed in their application. Not only that but it sifts out the liars from the truthtellers. 

To test the skills and experience noted down on the candidate’s resume, or mentioned in their cover letter, screening your candidates with the best HackerRank alternatives is used by many recruiters.

This could be a market analysis test. A test like this challenges the candidate on their ability to understand and interpret data that is then used for optimising marketing and making business decisions. It’s highly effective in showing proof of their talents to those recruiting for the role.

3. Be vigilant with your questioning.

When it comes to questioning your interviewees, you want to ensure all of your questions have been answered. There’s nothing more frustrating than coming away from the interview process with a sense of uncertainty.

It’s good to get all of the relevant marketing-related questions in there but don’t forget the personal ones too. Remember, you’re hiring the person not just for the role but for the company too. Have a number of ice-breaker questions that are personable for the interviewee. It’s a great way of helping to relax them into the interview.

While you don’t want the interview to be too long, you do want every question to be answered and that goes for all candidates.

4. Avoid too many follow-up interview stages.

While it’s good to be thorough in your recruitment, you don’t want to scare off the marketing talent who are being interviewed. Even creatives will be exhausted by too many interview stages and it’s been found the number of interview rounds does impact the process.

On average, there should be between one to three interview rounds before a job is offered. Of course, it’s up to your recruiters on how many are appropriate but has this in mind before putting your candidates through half a dozen stages.

With too many interview rounds, you do risk your candidates getting cold feet or being offered a role elsewhere.

5. Test their creativity further in the final interview.

As part of their final interview, it’s worth testing their creativity further. This may be optional depending on what you’ve done prior with screening candidates but may be of interest.

You may find it beneficial to set up a test scenario where the candidate has to create a brief marketing campaign for a new product launch. This not only tests their creativity but it also shows just how quick they are when it comes to thinking up ideas on the spot.



It might also be useful to conduct a paid trial day with the chosen candidate for the job. This could be helpful in cementing your confirmation that they’re the right choice and it’s an opportunity to start onboarding early.

Ultimately, this last interview should be validating your belief that the candidate or one of the remaining candidates is fit for the job. If you’re lucky, you’ll be in a position where you’re having to pick between two options.

Create a fool-proof interview process that works every time

Whether it’s filling the position of a marketing manager or a receptionist, your interview process should be fool-proof in its success. With that being said, make sure that you’ve noted all of the above guidance and advice to help recruit the best marketing talent out there right now in 2023.