Your Marketing Team is an essential part of your organization. The interview process is your chance to learn more about the candidate and see if they’re the right fit. In our Marketing Hiring Guide we cover all steps in the hiring process, including more sample questions to ask candidates (WHO method, behavioral interview questions, and leadership questions).

General

General questions can help provide context for the interview and give the candidate an opportunity to share their background and experience. This can help you to get a better understanding of the candidate's qualifications and suitability for the role, and can also provide a basis for more specific questions later in the interview. These general questions can include questions like:

• What do you know about us and why are you interested in working here?

• Explain our product to me in layman’s terms.

• Why do you like marketing?

• Walk me through your career decisions / last few employers

• What are your strengths within marketing, and what do you struggle with more? 

Marketing Specific

• What marketing tools or systems do you use regularly? Rate your competency from 1-10.

• What is your marketing or leadership superpower?

• When marketing campaigns or projects fail, how do you respond?

• Which metrics do you consider most important for gauging success?

• Tell about the most successful campaign or project you ever worked on

• Can you tell us about your experience in developing marketing strategies?

• How do you stay up to date on the latest marketing trends and developments?

• How do you successfully measure the ROI of a marketing campaign?

• What do you think are the most important metrics to track for a successful marketing campaign?

• How do you go about identifying and targeting your ideal customer?

• How do you collaborate with other departments (such as sales or product) to ensure that marketing efforts are aligned with broader company goals?

• How do you determine which marketing tactics/channels will be most effective?

• Where are the gaps in your marketing toolbox?

• How do you use data to inform decision making?

• Tell me about a time when you were responsible for owning a budget, what strategies did you employ?

• Tell me about a time you were allowed to experiment.

• Who were you marketing to/who were your customers?

• Tell me about your marketing team (e.g. Were you the first marketing hire, only product marketer, part of a large team, etc. 

Product Marketing: 

• Tell me about a product or feature you helped launch. 

• How have you influenced the product roadmap?

• How many products are you responsible for?

• How do you keep things on-track when working cross-functionally?

• Is there any part of product marketing that you do not do? (e.g. messaging, positioning, competitive analysis, sales enablement, pricing, or packaging)

• What is your strength in product marketing?

• How do you perform market research and gather customer feedback to shape product development and marketing strategy?

• Can you describe your experience in developing product positioning and messaging. 

• Can you describe your experience for developing pricing strategies for new products?

Demand Gen: 

• Tell me about a growth/revenue target you were able to achieve.

• Describe a successful campaign you executed from start to finish.

• Tell me about a project that involved each part of the marketing funnel.

• Tell me about running growth experiments?

• How do you ensure alignment with the sales team?

• Tell me about an event or webinar you put on. How did you drive attendance?

• How do you measure success?

Content: 

• How have you used content to drive results, and what type of content?

• Tell me about a time when you managed an editorial calendar.

• How do you measure and analyze content performance?

• What content do you like producing? What do you like outsourcing?

• Do you manage agencies/contractors?

Digital:

• What digital channels do you have the most experience with? 

• What analytics tools do you use? 

• What free methods would you use to increase web traffic?

• How would you go about increasing conversion rates?

• Tell me about your experience with paid search, paid social, organic, email marketing, SEO, A/B testing, optimization of landing pages. 

• Is there anything you do not do? Outsource? 

Interviewing for marketing roles can vary by role. You can use these questions as a jumping off point to find out what you want to know about the candidate. Download our hiring guide to learn more about hiring for marketing talent, or contact us for help building out your marketing team.