Essential Marketing Job Questions to Ask Potential Candidates

Author: Tim Donnelly

Marketing, at its core, is about conveying information about your company’s products and services to a target audience that is likely to use them. A company can be successful only if it has quality products that it can market in the right way to capture the audience’s interest. Since this is the aim of almost all companies, marketing is a very competitive field. To continue to be effective, marketers must be creative, innovative, and daring. They must be able to withstand pressure and stress and be able to bounce back from setbacks. When you interview candidates for a marketing position in your company, these are the traits you must look for.

The marketing job interview questions you ask will vary depending on whether you are interviewing beginners or experienced professionals. You will also need to adjust the questions according to the marketing position the candidate is interviewing for. Be prepared to receive and evaluate vastly different answers for some of the same questions. This is the tricky issue with marketing. There is no one size fits all in this profession. You will have to consider job candidates on a very individual level and decide if they will fare well with your company.

Here are some of the top marketing job interview questions to ask candidates:

  • What made you decide on a marketing career?
  • What made you apply for a marketing position in our company?
  • Do you have previous marketing experience? In what capacity?
  • Do you know what the basics of marketing are? Can you elaborate on those?
  • Tell us what you know about the different types of digital marketing.
  • What are the things you must consider when marketing locally and when marketing internationally?
  • What is the difference between the potential market and the available market?
  • What is the difference between the business market and the consumer market?
  • What do you know about service marketing?
  • What is the difference between permission and interruption marketing?
  • What is the difference between traditional and digital marketing?
  • What is the difference between brand marketing and direct marketing?
  • What are the main benefits of online marketing?
  • What do you do to increase traffic to your website?
  • What steps do you take to carry out consumer research?
  • How do you analyze data from your market research?
  • What are some of the skills you’ve picked up while working as a marketer?
  • How do you utilize content in your marketing?
  • How do you plan and carry out an effective email campaign?
  • How do you plan a marketing budget?
  • What are the marketing channels that you have found to be most effective in your work?
  • What analytical platforms do you prefer to use?
  • Have you ever had a conflict with a co-worker or a manager? How did you handle it?

In addition to marketing knowledge, you want candidates to demonstrate familiarity with your company and your products. If they want to work for you, they ought to have done the basic research before the interview. It shows they have a well-prepared, methodical mindset.

Vitamin T, one of the best creative recruitment and staffing agencies helping design-minded companies and digital creatives including UI/UX graphic designers and web developers, copywriters, presentation developers, digital marketing managers and analysts, print and production designers in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, and beyond. For more information, visit Vitamintalent/What-we-do.