hiring marketing team: flags that actually matter

24fire

I've hired a fair few people for marketing teams over the years, and I've made the same mistake more times than I'd like to admit: rushing because the workload is crushing, and misreading creative energy for self-discipline. The result? Someone who produces pretty nothingness but vanishes when it's time to learn or grind.

This time I'm after two things above all: a proactive mindset and a solid moral compass. Skills in social media, events, and a real appetite to grow can be taught. Character can't. I've learned that the hard way.

As for assignments - I've more or less given up on them. In the current climate, most candidates pump the prompt into an LLM, edit for five minutes, and hand it in. You're essentially judging their ability to sound plausible, not their actual process. I'd rather spend the interview digging into real problems they've solved, especially ones that required cross-channel thinking. Agency experience, for example, often forces people to be self-directing and scrappy - a green flag I now prioritise.

Setting the salary and title honestly filters out a lot of the noise. Then I just look for someone who can describe a mess they untangled, step by step, without glossing over the ugly bits.

prpro

honestly, my biggest green flag has always been whether i actually enjoy the conversation during the interview. not in a forced, "let's be mates" way, but that easy, natural back-and-forth where you can chit-chat, have a laugh or two, and the silence doesn't feel awkward.

to me, that's a signal that they'll slot into the team without a lot of friction. people are far more willing to invest time getting a new colleague up to speed when they genuinely like them. it's like a brand positioning: if the fit feels effortless early on, the onboarding becomes a lot more graceful

miaaffiliate

Red flag for me: anyone who blindly pushes "performance marketing" like it's a cure-all. Seen too many people burn through budget because they think CPA optimization fixes broken funnels.

Green flag: actual problem-solving skills. Everything else-tactics, tools, platforms-can be picked up. But if they can't diagnose why a campaign is bleeding money or how to reroute traffic when an offer gets flagged, you're dead in the water.

metricsmadness

I've come to view assignments the same way. These days, most people just feed the prompt into a language model, tweak it for five minutes, and call it done. So you're not really testing capability-you're testing how willing someone is to cheat.

Red flags for me are narrow job descriptions. If you need someone to juggle multiple channels-say, social alongside events-hiring a coordinator who's only ever owned one feed is a recipe for endless hand-holding. They've never had to prioritise across mediums, so they'll freeze when things overlap.

Green flags often come from agency experience, regardless of shop size. Agencies move fast, force you to learn a dozen different skills, and leave you no choice but to be self-starting. That pressure cooks a certain resourcefulness you don't get in-house.

Honestly, a lot of this filters itself if you price the role properly and title it honestly. Then in the interview, drill down into specific work they've done that's directly relevant to the scope you actually need-not the one you wish you had.

adcraft

Red flag: Very negative attitude. The person kept complaining the whole interview. That negativity would affect my whole team.

Green flag: Matching the position (marketing jobs can vary a lot, matching different people) with strong recommendation from someone I trust in my network (so I should have better information about how the person really works if hired)..

But the main issue is not red flags. It's looking generic, similar to tons of other applicants, so there is nothing to make them stand out in the crowd.

I don't do assignments, but that would vary a lot depending on the position. If I'm hiring a marketing analyst, a few questions should be enough. If I'm hiring a content creator, the portfolio should tell me a lot. If I'm hiring an event marketer or a trade marketer, it's hard to think of an assignment that is so practical for hiring.

nightowl

Forget the standard test. Best move i ever made was handing someone an actual campaign that had flopped-no context, just the numbers. Told them: "Here's your budget, here's the result. what happened?" Paid them for an hour to take it seriously. the candidates who impressed me didn't blurt out an answer. they sat there, thought, then asked three sharp questions-about the audience, the creative, the timing. That's the green flag. Lazy ones give you the generic Amazon best practice bullshit. The good ones treat it like a real problem. Curiosity costs nothing but saves weeks of wasted work. Someone who treats an interview like a diagnosis will do the same when your ACOS blows up.

localpack

Oh man, this is such a solid tip. 👌

Instead of some generic take-home assignment, i always ask candidates to walk me through a campaign they actually ran and were proud of. not hypothetical, not "what would you do" - real results they owned.

For me, I usually get them to break down a Facebook ads funnel from start to finish. The good ones can instantly show you their thinking: why they picked that audience, how they structured the creative testing, what metrics they actually cared about. You see their strategic depth in minutes.

And here's the kicker - since it's their best work, you're comparing apples to apples. Everyone's bringing their A-game. Much better than some half-baked case study they cobbled together overnight.

i hired a media buyer last year purely based on how they walked me through a skincare brand launch. The framework they used was so clean I basically stole it for our own process.

maya-b2b

Hired a talented writer based on her personal blog - this was before ChatGPT, back when that kind of raw voice felt like gold. What I didn't screen for was drive. She had zero professional ambition, no appetite to sharpen her craft. My team was full of high-output, creative people who genuinely wanted to grow, and that mismatch ate away at morale fast. Morale is everything in a team - it affects every piece of work. Eventually had to let her go. Right decision, but painfully my fault for the hiring mistake.

Now I look for hunger just as deliberately as talent. No formal assignments - that's exploitative nonsense. Please stop that. Instead, I toss out a small, real problem we're actually dealing with, right in the conversation: "Here's something we're wrestling with - what's your instinct?" Drive shows up in how someone leans into a real challenge versus a hypothetical one. You're not judging the answer. You're watching the appetite.

pixelperfect

I've interviewed a fair few marketers and honestly, one of the biggest red flags is when someone can't articulate why they chose this field. It's not about having a poetic answer - but if they give me a vague "I just fell into it" or can't name a campaign they actually loved, that's a warning.

Seems harsh, but the people who genuinely care about marketing will light up when you ask what they find challenging about it. They'll have examples, not just textbook answers. If you're not sure how to gauge that, a paid test assignment works wonders. It separates the ones who talk from the ones who actually deliver.

And I've seen the other side too - the people who are just coasting because they don't know what else to do. It's sad for everyone involved. Better to spot it early.

weekendhustle

It takes two to tango, doesn't it? 😊

Have you set clear KPIs for the role? Be honest with yourself-are you a micromanager with a fixed mindset? Delegating is an art, and it's worth mastering.

When I hand off a task, I always spell out the desired outcome, the resources available, and a firm deadline. If it's a complex process, I'll share a simple SOP that gives enough guidance to meet-or exceed-expectations. The real trick is making sure you and your new hire are aligned on what success looks like and when it's due.

Then I ask them: "Are you ready to own this, and if anything gets in the way, will you let me know straight away?" That shared understanding of responsibility makes all the difference.

So, what's your current framework for delegating tasks? Would love to hear how you approach it 🌟

ranktracker

Hiring in marketing is a minefield, especially from the SEO side. Here's my take.

first, any decent technical SEO isn't going to do a take-home assignment for you. The people i know who are actually good at this don't hurt for work - they're already booked with clients or freelancing on the side. Asking them to spend hours on a made-up task for a job they might not even get? You're basically filtering for the desperate, not the best. That's a yellow flag from me.

on personality traits: if you're going to use phrases like "good moral compass" in your hiring criteria, you need to define what that actually means. I once worked for someone who threw that around a lot. Turned out it meant "agrees with my personal biases" - not exactly a robust or legal screening metric. without a clear definition, you can't interview for it consistently, and you'll just end up hiring people who happen to mirror your own quirks.

I've found green flags easier to spot than red flags in interviews. Red flags tend to be intangible - you sense something's off but can't pin it down. Green flags are patterns you can actively look for. One i rely on is how someone thinks in real time. I'll throw in a slightly absurd question - like "How would you explain canonical tags to a ten-year-old?" - and I'm not testing their canonical knowledge. I'm watching how they structure their answer, whether they recover from the curveball, and whether they can communicate a complex idea simply. if they freeze completely, that's a sign they'll need a lot of hand-holding later on tricky SEO issues. Works brilliantly for senior roles, probably overkill for juniors.

Also, if you're hiring for a function you're not fully confident assessing yourself - like technical SEO when you're a generalist - bring in someone whose judgement you trust. I've been on the other side of that table a handful of times, dragged in as a favour for a mate. they usually buy me a beer for my time. I'm not pulling any punches because it's not my job to lose - I'm just giving an honest read on their technical depth. that outsider perspective catches things you'd miss when you're rushing to fill the seat.

bouncekiller

Oh, I've seen this play out way too many times. Green flag for me is when a candidate gives you a concrete example of something they actually turned around - metrics, timeline, their role in the mess. Red flag? Blaming the last agency, the shitty brief, or "the client didn't understand." Immediate no.

For assignments, keep them short and about how they think, not how pretty the deck looks. Fancy slides with zero substance? Easy to spot. Someone who can articulate why they made a call? That's the keeper.

dusting

For me, green flags are always ownership and genuine curiosity-you can't teach that. Red flags? Vague answers and any sign of a fixed mindset. i skip the unpaid tasks altogether and instead run a quick live test during the interview. You learn far more about someone in ten minutes of real work than from a portfolio full of generic case studies.