What did marketing mean at your last company?

The word covers everything from writing product copy to running a nine-figure media budget. Getting their working definition first stops the rest of the conversation from being two people using the same words for different jobs.

Which channels have you run yourself, and which have you managed someone else running?

The distinction is the whole interview. People who have sat in the ad account themselves talk about bid strategies and creative fatigue. People who have only managed it talk about performance in the abstract. Both are useful, but you should know which you are hiring.

Walk me through the last campaign you took from idea to result.

Ask for one campaign end to end rather than highlights. Listen for whether they know the budget, the timeline, and the numbers without checking, since people describe their own work with specifics and other people's work with adjectives.

How did you know whether it worked?

The answer separates people who report activity from people who measure outcomes. Watch for whether they mention a baseline. Without a before number, any after number is a story, and this is the most common gap in a marketing resume.

What did you do when the numbers came back worse than expected?

Every marketer has had a launch land flat. What matters is whether they diagnosed it, killed it, or quietly changed the metric. Ask how long it took them to decide, because slow killing of bad spend is where most budgets are lost.

Professional & Academic

Questions to Ask Marketers

Questions for interviewing a marketer, briefing an agency, or working out whether the person in front of you has actually run anything, covering channels they have operated themselves, how they measure results, what they got wrong, and what they would do in their first ninety days.

20 questions, each with the reason to ask it · includes a conversation guide

Open any question to see why it works.

1
What did marketing mean at your last company?
The word covers everything from writing product copy to running a nine-figure media budget. Getting their working definition first stops the rest of the conversation from being two people using the same words for different jobs.
2
Which channels have you run yourself, and which have you managed someone else running?
The distinction is the whole interview. People who have sat in the ad account themselves talk about bid strategies and creative fatigue. People who have only managed it talk about performance in the abstract. Both are useful, but you should know which you are hiring.
3
Walk me through the last campaign you took from idea to result.
Ask for one campaign end to end rather than highlights. Listen for whether they know the budget, the timeline, and the numbers without checking, since people describe their own work with specifics and other people's work with adjectives.
4
How did you know whether it worked?
The answer separates people who report activity from people who measure outcomes. Watch for whether they mention a baseline. Without a before number, any after number is a story, and this is the most common gap in a marketing resume.
5
What did you do when the numbers came back worse than expected?
Every marketer has had a launch land flat. What matters is whether they diagnosed it, killed it, or quietly changed the metric. Ask how long it took them to decide, because slow killing of bad spend is where most budgets are lost.
6
How would you describe our product to someone who has never heard of it?
Positioning is the actual job and this is the fastest test of it. A good answer names the person it is for and the thing it replaces. A weak answer lists features or repeats your own website back to you.
7
What is your relationship with sales usually like?
In most companies this is the relationship that either works or poisons everything. Ask what they did about lead quality complaints specifically, since that argument happens everywhere and the way someone handled it is a reliable character reference.
8
How do you decide where next quarter's budget goes?
Look for a method rather than a preference: last quarter's efficiency, a testing allocation, a fixed share for brand. Someone who answers with a favourite channel is describing their comfort zone rather than a decision process.
9
How do you learn what customers actually think?
Ask when they last spoke to a customer directly and what they heard. Marketers who read sales call recordings and support tickets write differently from ones who work from personas, and the difference shows up in every line of copy.
10
Is our problem a brand problem or a demand problem, from what you can see?
You are asking them to make a diagnosis with incomplete information, which is the job. A thoughtful answer will say what evidence would settle it. An answer that jumps straight to a tactic tells you they solve every problem the same way.
11
What does your brief to a designer or writer look like?
Ask to see a real one if you can. Briefs reveal whether someone can define an audience and a single message, or whether they hand over a vague request and then rewrite the output themselves, which is how creative teams burn out.
12
What happens when a founder or a chief executive wants a channel you think is wrong?
This happens constantly and there is no perfect answer. Listen for whether they propose a small bounded test, which is how experienced marketers convert an argument into evidence rather than winning or losing it.
13
How much of your last role was tooling and operations?
A surprising share of modern marketing jobs is maintaining automation, tracking, and reporting plumbing. If that is most of the role you are hiring for and they have never done it, or the reverse, the mismatch surfaces here.
14
What attribution did you use, and what did it get wrong?
The second half is what matters. Everyone can name a model. Someone who can explain where it overcredited or undercredited a channel has actually argued with the numbers, which is a much rarer skill than configuring a dashboard.
15
What metric would you refuse to be measured on?
An unusual question that gets an honest answer. Refusing to own pipeline can be a warning sign. Refusing to own impressions or follower counts is a good sign. Either way, you learn what they think their job is.
16
What do you insist on doing in house, and what would you outsource?
The line someone draws reveals what they believe is core. Ask what went wrong the last time they outsourced something they should have kept, since almost everyone has one of those and the story is specific.
17
What is something about marketing you have changed your mind about?
Filters out people repeating whatever is currently fashionable. Good answers describe a belief, the evidence that broke it, and what they do now instead. No answer at all usually means limited exposure to results.
18
What would you actually do in your first ninety days here?
Ask for the first two weeks separately. Strong candidates start with talking to customers and sales and auditing what already exists. Candidates who open with a rebrand or a channel launch are proposing activity before diagnosis.
19
What would you need from me to do this well?
Turns the interview into a working conversation and surfaces expectations about budget, headcount, and access to leadership before they become resentments. Vague answers here often mean they have not had those things before and do not know to ask.
20
What would make you leave a job like this one?
More revealing than asking why they left the last one, because it is about the future and harder to have rehearsed. Common honest answers are being overruled without explanation, or having no budget to test anything.

Working out whether a marketer is any good

Practical guidance for the conversation itself.

Adjust for who you are asking

Hiring for a role

Weight the questions about channels run personally, the last campaign end to end, and the first ninety days. Ask for numbers and then ask how those numbers were calculated, because the second answer is where exaggeration becomes visible.

Choosing an agency

Ask who will actually work on the account rather than who is in the room, and ask the same questions of that person. Add the brief question, since agency output quality depends more on the brief than on the talent.

Learning from someone senior

Skip the evaluative questions and lead with what they changed their mind about, what they refuse to be measured on, and the worst campaign they ever ran. Practitioners are far more candid about failures than about wins.

What good answers sound like

Numbers with context: a baseline, a period, and a budget, rather than a single percentage improvement.
Willingness to name what did not work, without blaming a previous employer for all of it.
Talking about customers in their own words, quoted from somewhere real, rather than as segments.
Distinguishing between what they decided and what they executed on someone else's decision.
Asking you questions about the business before proposing anything. Diagnosis before prescription is the whole difference.

Answers worth probing further

Attribution of a large revenue result to one campaign with no mention of anything else happening that quarter.
A channel recommendation offered before they have asked who the customer is.
Vagueness about budget size, which usually means they influenced rather than controlled it.
Heavy vocabulary about frameworks with no example of one being applied to a specific decision.
Describing every past employer's leadership as the reason results were limited.

The questions

What did marketing mean at your last company?

Which channels have you run yourself, and which have you managed someone else running?

Walk me through the last campaign you took from idea to result.

How did you know whether it worked?

What did you do when the numbers came back worse than expected?

How would you describe our product to someone who has never heard of it?

What is your relationship with sales usually like?

How do you decide where next quarter's budget goes?

How do you learn what customers actually think?

Is our problem a brand problem or a demand problem, from what you can see?

What does your brief to a designer or writer look like?

What happens when a founder or a chief executive wants a channel you think is wrong?

How much of your last role was tooling and operations?

What attribution did you use, and what did it get wrong?

What metric would you refuse to be measured on?

What do you insist on doing in house, and what would you outsource?

What is something about marketing you have changed your mind about?

What would you actually do in your first ninety days here?

What would you need from me to do this well?

What would make you leave a job like this one?