TARSH PARTNERSHIP

A Practical Guide to Interviewing MarketersThe best interview techniques to help you hire a marketing superstar

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Before the Interview 32

Interview Questions 53

Questions to Avoid 84

Preparing your ‘Sales Pitch’ 95

Example Evaluation Form 11

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Introduction 31

About The Tarsh Partnership 106

Example Interview Questions 12

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According to research from the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, an industry body for the recruitment profession, 85% of HR decision makers believe that their organisation has made a bad hire and hiring the wrong person can cost a business more than three times that employee’s annual salary. Interviewing is the most crucial part of the hiring process, but 39% think that their staff lack the necessary skills to conduct effective interviews.

Marketing professionals can be particularly difficult to interview effectively, especially by non-marketers, as their roles tend to comprise a mix of creative and analytical abilities and the skills required are evolving rapidly with the growth of new technologies. The Tarsh Partnership has put together this practical guide to interviewing marketers to help companies ask the right questions at interview to find the perfect match for their role and avoid the costs involved in a bad hire.

The Tarsh Partnership have been successfully placing marketing candidates in a wide variety of roles for over 12 years, and our consultants have backgrounds in the industry themselves. We know exactly how to assess marketing candidates for a role and how to motivate them to choose your organisation.

The key to interviewing successfully is to prepare before the interview itself. This is the only way to make sure you’re really asking the right questions to get to the bottom of whether a candidate will suceed in a role and to ensure that you’re comparing all the candidates fairly.

There are four stages you need to go through in laying the foundations before you start to interview:

1. Define Your Objectives

Presumably, you’ve spent time previously in defining the role’s responsibilities and the knowledge and skills required to do the job when you put together a job description and person specification, but it’s worth looking at it in a bit more detail prior to the interview.

Having a list of all the key duties involved in the role and the skills and experience someone would need to do them is necessary in order to choose the right interview questions. It’s also worth looking at how previous incumbents performed – what did they do that was good and what could have been better? How do the top performers in your organisation work – are there behaviours that you’d want to replicate in this job? It’s worth spending some time talking to line managers and peers to get an accurate picture of your ideal candidate.

introduction

Before the interview

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You also need to have a really good idea about what you expect a candidate to accomplish and what success would look like in this role. What are the key performance indicators and how will you measure them?

Finally, don’t automatically assume that a qualification is proof of ability. In the fast-changing world of marketing, real-world experience is often far more valuable than a theoretical education.

2. Choose Your Interview Questions

Once you know exactly what your ideal candidate looks like, you need to make sure you ask every interviewee the right questions to evaluate whether they are a good fit for the job.

Bias is a part of human nature – we automatically tend to prefer people like us, even if they’re not necessarily right for the role. Having a standard list of questions that you ask every candidate, and ideally a standard score card for their responses (you can see an example at the end of this document), will help you keep bias to a minimum (as well as protecting you from any legal challenges from unsuccessful candidates in the future).

Some people are also naturally more confident and better at interviewing than others, but again may not necessarily be exactly the right person for the role. Choosing your questions in advance can help you to drill down to whether an interviewee really knows their stuff or whether they are simply good at bluffing.

Selecting your interview questions in advance does not mean you have to stick to a rigid script, as this can make an interview feel very stilted and overly formal. It’s best to tailor an interview to each candidate, so you spend more or less time on certain questions getting more detail, depending on whether the interviewee is particularly weak or strong in that area.

3. Build a balanced interview team

It’s always a good idea to have more than one person interview candidates at the same time – it helps you to get a more balanced perspective and gives you a second opinion, which in turn creates a fairer hiring process. Line managers, HR representatives, senior managers and peers of the new hire will all have different perspectives and could all be included in the interview process, although you don’t want to have a huge panel of interviewers as this can be very intimidating. Having two or more members of staff speak to a candidate simultaneously is always better then holding sequential interviews, as it allows interviewers to compare notes and gives the candidate a better interview experience.

Don’t forget to send round the candidate’s CV in advance, so everyone involved can read it prior to the interview. As well as scheduling time for the interview itself, it’s also a good idea to keep some time free immediately afterwards to compare opinions while the interview is still fresh in everyone’s mind.

1 in 3 candidates spend over 3 hours preparing for an interview but

70% of interviewers take less than 1 hour to prepare

- Totaljobs, October 2017

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4. Research a candidate’s online profile

While not everyone feels comfortable in combing through a candidate’s personal social media, it can be a good idea, particularly for marketing candidates. Spending some time searching for the candidate on Google and social media will give you a good idea of their personal brand, their familiarity with social networks and their personality and values.

A good marketer will recognise the power of personal branding and will have curated their online presence to support their professional profile. They should also recognise that personal opinions are best kept personal and have restricted access to any purely personal social networks. Typically, they will have public Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, but private Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat profiles.

This is particularly important if you’re hiring someone to be responsible for PR or to represent the company in a professional capacity. Recent press coverage has shown us that organisations can and will be judged should their employees share unpopular or insensitive opinions.

There are several different types of interview questions, which can be used to find out different kinds of information about a candidate. Following are some of the different categories of questions – you can see examples of individual questions at the end of this document.

1. Icebreakers

You’ll generally see the best side of an interviewee if they are at their ease in the interview. Keeping things very formal and proceeding straight to your pre-prepared questions can make a candidate nervous and defensive. Icebreaker questions are standard bits of social interaction that can help to build a rapport with a interviewee and make them feel more comfortable.

Asking candidates about their journey, how their day is going, if they’d like a cup of tea or a glass of water can help to get the candidate talking without them feeling they are being judged in any way. You can then move on to asking them to describe themselves and their career in an open-ended way to get the ball rolling.

interview questions

If a candidate is less stressed, you’ll have the opportunity to get to know the real person, not the tightly wound interview version of themselves. Additionally, by creating a welcoming environment you’ll probably have a better shot and getting them to accept an offer down the line.

- Tami Reiss, Product Management Leader and Consultant “

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2. Traditional Interview Questions

Once you’ve broken the ice, it’s usually a good idea to start off with a couple of general questions about a candidate’s skills and experience, based off of their CV. These are typical interview questions and are almost always asked, so a candidate should have prepared their answers to them. Again, this can help a candidate to feel at ease and can lead to more revealing responses when you move on to more detailed questioning.

Typically, this is where you would explore the specifics of a candidate’s previous roles and responsibilities, find out more about their motivations for choosing both marketing and your company and gather more information about their marketing skills. This is also a good time to delve into an interviewee’s understanding of the role, company and market.

You need to focus on the specific skills required for the role. So if a new employee is going to be setting up a social media strategy, explore how they have done that in the past, or if they will be writing content, ask them about a piece of content they have recently read that has impressed them.

It is also important to ask them about their goals and metrics. Although marketing is a creative profession, a good marketer also needs to be able to give quantifiable evidence of their success and should be clear about how they measure the effects of their marketing activity.

3. Situational Questions

Situational questions are used to find out what actions a candidate would take in a situation relevant to the role. A hypothetical set of circumstances is posed and the interviewee is asked to go through how they would handle the situation step by step.

These questions are based on both the normal processes involved in the role, such as conducting market research, launching a new product or creating a sales pipeline, as well as stressful situations that might arise, such as problems with customers or suppliers or an underperforming marketing campaign.

The interviewee’s replies will give you a good idea of whether they understand all of the steps involved in a piece of marketing activity and are able to think through them logically. These questions also give you some idea of how the candidate will react in a difficult situation and if they are able to calmly plan a solution. You’ll be looking for good decision-making, attention to detail and a competent grasp of processes from start to finish.

Often, I’ve asked marketers to explain an important topic or trend in their area of expertise. Their replies went from good to great if I then followed up by asking for an example or story. Our brains also tend to remember stories better than explication alone, so always look for opportunities to teach — or be taught — by a story when possible.

- Heike Young, Manager, Industry Strategy & Insights at Salesforce

“

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4. Behavioural Questions

Behaviour-based questions are similar to situational questions, but rather than focussing on hypothetical future situations, they ask candidates about specific examples from their past experience. The theory behind these questions is that past behaviour can help to predict future performance, so asking someone about how they handled previous situations can tell you about how well they will do so in the future.

An ideal answer from an interviewee to a behavioural question should be in the form of a SAR response, or Situation, Action and Result. The candidate should describe exactly what happened, what they did to handle the situation and the result of their actions. If they skip any of these elements, they should be prompted for the missing information. It can be very revealing to see what a candidate considers important enough to include.

5. Cultural Fit Questions

Your organisation’s culture is made up of the values, beliefs and attitudes that characterise a company and its employees and guide their behaviour. It is essentially what makes a business unique. There’s no right or wrong corporate culture, but hiring new employees who fit well with your current way of working tends to result in better productivity, engagement and retention rates. However, hiring for cultural fit does not involve hiring people you like or who have a similar background to your current employees; it simply means recruiting people who will work well in your environment, without being discriminatory.

Cultural fit questions are designed to assess a candidate’s values, working practices and character, to see if they are likely to be motivated by and suited to your working environment. You need to ask questions about how they like working, how they work with others, what motivates them to do a good job and how they like to be managed.

The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable ‘meta’ information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.

- Laszlo Bock, Former SVP of People Operations at Google

“• 67% of employers think cultural fit is very important• 76% say it helps improve staff retention• 70% say it boosts job satisfaction• 64% say it makes work more fun• 60% say it increases productivity

- Using company culture to hire the right talent, Totaljobs, September 2017

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6. Quirky Interview Questions

Many companies like to end interviews with a ‘wild card’ question; something completely unexpected that makes the candidate think on their feet and can give a bit more of an insight into their character.

There are typically no ‘correct’ answers to these type of questions, it’s more about whether a candidate can come up with an interesting or logical answer and then explain their reasoning.

When interviewing, there are some questions that you need to avoid, or you risk making your company a target for charges of discrimination.

Under the 2010 Equality Act, there are nine protected characteristics that you cannot use to discriminate against candidates. These are:

• age• disability• gender reassignment• marriage or civil partnership• pregnancy and maternity• race• religion or belief• sex• sexual orientation

You should steer clear of any questions that touch on these areas. It sounds obvious, but it can be easy to stray into grey areas when you’re trying to make conversation or find out more about a candidate’s ability to work.

Here are a few examples of questions to avoid, and what to ask instead:

Don’t ask: How much longer do you plan to work before you retire?Do ask: What are your long term career goals?

I had a job interview at an insurance company once and the lady said ‘Where do you see yourself in 5 years?’ and I said ‘Celebrating the fifth year anniversary of you asking me this question.’

- Mitch Hedberg“questions to avoid

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Don’t ask: How many children do you have? Do you have childcare arrangements in place if we need you to work out of hours?Do ask: This job may require some overtime work on short notice. Is this a problem for you? What days/hours are you available to work?

Don’t ask: What country are you from? Where were you born?Do ask: Are you eligible to work in the UK?

Don’t ask: How do you feel about managing men/women?Do ask: Tell me about your previous experience of managing staff.

Competition can be fierce for the very best marketing candidates, so it’s important to not just assume anyone who attends an interview will automatically accept the job if offered. Spending a short period of time in an interview to ‘sell’ your organisation to the candidate can help get them excited about the role and more likely to accept an offer.

You obviously need to cover the benefits your company offers its employees, but also any aspects of the company culture that are particularly attractive. If the company is growing or has a bold strategy, that is appealing to ambitious marketers. Regular social events, a formal appraisal system, a strong brand and a great location or office environment can all be powerful motivators.

According to the 2018 Career and Salary Survey from Marketing Week , the most attractive motivator for marketers is the option for flexible working. 87% say this is important to them, but only 43% have the opportunity to work flexibly, and only 34% have actually used the option in the past year. It can be tricky to manage flexible working, particularly in more traditional working environments, but if you can offer some options it can really make you stand out from the competition for the best candidates.

More than 40 per cent of British women have been asked ‘inappropriate’ questions during a job interview compared to only 12 per cent of men

- Debut app, January 2016

Preparing your ‘sales pitch’

We delude ourselves that we’re hiring for talent when we allow our interviews to focus on the question ‘Are you, Job-Seeker, good enough for us?’ without bothering to answer the question ‘Is our company and our job opportunity worth your valuable time?’

- Liz Ryan, Glassdoor “

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The Tarsh Partnership is a specialist marketing recruitment consultancy focused on delivering the most effective, efficient and professional service to both candidates and clients.

We take a grown-up approach to recruitment and are rigorous, diligent and responsive; ruthlessly honest and frank about our ability to assist you in your search. We are the choice of many top companies and brands looking to find the very best marketing talent in a quick, precise and cost-effective way.

With particular strengths in FMCG, retail & consumer marketing, we specialise in placing exceptional candidates in a wide range of roles including:

• Brand Management• Retail Marketing• Consumer, Market & Shopper Insight• Category, Shopper & Customer Marketing• Marketing Communications & PR• Digital Marketing• Brand & Marketing Consultancy

What makes us different

A deep understanding of the sectorWhether you’re hiring or searching for a job, our recruitment team is made up of people like you. Our consultants have worked in a variety of brand management and marketing roles in FMCG, retail and financial services organisations. We know exactly what it’s like to work in the sector and what makes up a dream marketing role.

A comprehensive network of clients and candidatesWe have worked hard to build long-term relationships with a huge network of candidates, from Marketing Assistant through to Marketing Director, across the UK to the EU and beyond, with experience in all areas of the marketing function. We’ve successfully placed candidates in household names across the UK.

An honest approach to recruitmentWe aim to give all our candidates and clients an open and honest recruitment experience. We take the time to get to know their requirements and will be completely frank about our ability to help. We don’t send over every CV we find, but will only put forward candidates who we feel are right for the role.

About The Tarsh Partnership

Get in touch

If you are a client seeking high-calibre candidates or a candidate seeking advice, guidance and job opportunities, talk to a member of the team today.

office: 020 7849 6875web: www.tarshpartnership.co.ukemail: mail@tarshpartnership.co.uk

Example Candidate Evaluation FormCandidate name:

Position:

Date:

Interviewer(s):

Rating

5Exceptional

4Exceeds

requirements

3Satisfactory

2Unsatisfactory

1Not observed

or n/aCompetency 1 (eg familiarity with brand and market) Question 1 (eg What do you know about our company?) Question 2 (eg What competitor activity do you most admire?) Question 3 (eg What do you think is most important to our audience?) Competency 2Question 1 Question 2 Question 3

Comments and summaryWhat do you feel are the candidate’s strengths and are there any areas of concern?

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Example Interview QuestionsIcebreakers

• Did you have any trouble finding our office?• How was your journey?• Would you like a cup of coffee or tea or a glass of water?• How was your weekend?• Have you had a good day today?• Tell me about yourself.• Talk me through your CV.

Traditional Interview Questions

• What are your greatest strengths?• What is your experience with [competency, skill, function, etc.]?• Tell me about your career up to this point.• What is your largest responsibility in your current/last role?• How has your current role evolved since you started?• Why are you looking to make a change?• Why do you love marketing?• Why do you want to work for us?• Which aspects of our business are you passionate about?• What do you know about this role?• What made you apply to work here?• What techniques do you use the measure the quality of your work?• What steps do you take to ensure the desired quality is achieved?• What are the most important skills you have learned that you would utilize in this position?• What recently-developed marketing strategy, technique or tool interests you the most right

now?• How would you describe your own personal brand?• In as much detail as you can, describe a well-marketed product. What’s working well for this

product?• What are some of your favourite marketing campaigns?• How do you stay updated on the latest tools and trends?• What do you think of our current social media presence? What would you improve?• What is a recent piece of content that has stood out to you?• Name an insight or trend that you see happening in our industry right now?• Talk about the importance of brand management. Why does it matter?• What kinds of clients have you worked with?

Situational Questions

• How would you deal with an irate customer?• If we were to hire you, what is the first thing you would do?• How do you deal with stress on the job?• If I gave you X amount of money right now, what would you do?• How would you manage a new product launch?

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• A customer has just posted a negative review to the company’s Facebook page and you’re in charge of responding. How do you handle it?

• An SEO technique you’ve used successfully in the past has just been devalued by Google. What do you do next?

• You’ve been tasked with redesigning the company’s brand strategy from the ground up. Walk me through your process.

• You’ve been put in charge of planning the company’s nationwide conference. Where do you begin?

• One of your employees has just accidentally posted a personal tweet to the company’s account. How do you handle the situation?

• What do you do to stay up to date with new marketing techniques?• What would you do to learn about a new brand during your first week at work?• If you were targeting another segment of customers — a different culture, perhaps, or a

younger audience — what would you do?• Your team doesn’t agree with your direction. How do you handle it?• What would you do if your most important client hated your work?

Behavioural Questions

• Tell me about a crisis you could have prevented. Did you do anything differently after the crisis had passed?

• Tell me how you resolve crises by deploying your team members. Give me a specific example.• Crises usually require us to act quickly. In retrospect, how would you have handled a recent

crisis differently, if you had been given more time to think before acting?• What has been your most significant career achievement to date?• What about your greatest accomplishment outside of work?• What is your greatest personal struggle or limitation in supervising others? Can you give me

an example of a time when you overcame one of your limitations and resolved a problem?• Tell me about how you handled a situation where you had to work with a difficult colleague.• Describe a time where you made a major mistake and had to think on your feet to come up

with a solution.• Tell me about a past situation where you had to juggle multiple projects with competing

deadlines.• Tell me about a time where you had to put in significant effort up front and then wait a long

time for success.• Describe a situation at a past job where you had to take initiative.• Tell me about a time when you received criticism and how you reacted to it.• Share with me a past situation where you had to work with colleagues or team members who

were very different from you.• Tell me about the project you’re most proud of from your past work history.• In as much detail as possible, describe a go-to-market strategy that you recently worked on.• How do you know when to change a product’s pricing?• How do you know when a branding strategy isn’t working?• What metrics are important to you as a brand manager? How did your previous team handle

reporting?

Cultural Fit Questions

• What gave you the greatest feeling of achievement in your last job? Why was this so satisfying?• Why did you choose this type of work?• What motivates you to work hard? Give me some examples.• What’s your ideal work environment?• What are your hobbies?• If something doesn’t go according to plan, what do you do?• What do you read, and how do you consume information?• Describe a time you gave a colleague constructive criticism.• How do you keep your team motivated in the face of tight deadlines?• Describe the work environment or culture in which you are most productive and happy.• What are the characteristics exhibited by the best boss you have ever had—or wish that you

have had?• What management style will bring forth your best work and efforts?• What are the positive aspects of your current job and work environment, or the last position

you held before coming to this interview?• What is the single most important factor that must be present in your work environment for

you to be successfully and happily employed?• What is your preferred work style? Do you prefer working alone or as part of a team? What

percentage of your time would you allocate to each, given the choice?• How would your coworkers describe your work style and contributions in your former job?• What are the three to five expectations that you have of senior leaders in an organisation?• Tell us about an occasion when you believe that you delighted a customer.• When you work with a team, describe the role that you are most likely to play on the team.• How would reporting staff members describe their relationship with you? What would they

like to see you do more of, less of, start, and stop?

Quirky Interview Questions

• What were you like at school?• How many 20p pieces would fit into this room?• Teach me something I don’t know in the next five minutes.• Are you more of a hunter or a gatherer?• If you could be any animal in the world, what animal would you be and why? • What would be the name of your debut album?• If a genie granted you three wishes, what would you choose?• If you could throw a parade of any kind through the office, what type would it be?• How lucky are you and why?• If you were on an island and could only bring three things, what would you bring?• If you were a box of cereal, what would you be and why?• Why is a tennis ball fuzzy?• What is your least favourite thing about humanity?• How honest are you?• Can you explain how to make something in less than 5 minutes?• If you were 80 years old, what would you tell your children?• If there was a movie produced about your life, who would play you and why?

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