How to hire a marketer.

Screening marketers means tracing claims to mechanisms. A real operator can tell you which specific pages, campaigns, or experiments produced a result, what failed on the way, and what the result cost — in money and in time.

What to test — and what proof looks like

Decide these before you read a single application. Each requirement below pairs with the evidence that would actually convince you — screening becomes checking claims against a list instead of comparing vibes.

• Channel experience that matches your motion. If you need SEO and content, proof of pages that rank and convert; if you need paid, proof of spend managed profitably. "Full-stack marketer" claims need one channel verified deeply.
• Owns numbers, not dashboards. They know their targets, what they actually hit, and how it was measured — and they volunteer conversion or revenue impact, not just traffic.
• Has operated at your resource level. Growing a brand with a team and budget is a different job from being marketer #1. Look for claims about what they did alone with little money.
• Writes clearly. Most early-stage marketing is writing. Their CV, their answers, and any samples should be evidence in themselves.

Interview questions that test claims

Generic questions get rehearsed answers. These are anchored in the claims candidates in this role typically make — easy to answer if the claim is true, awkward if it isn't. (The method is covered in our interview questions guide.)

1. You grew organic traffic — which three pages drove most of it, and why did those work?
2. What did you try in that period that failed, and how long did you let it run before killing it?
3. How much of that traffic converted, to what, and how did you track it?
4. If you had our product and $1,000 a month, where does the first dollar go and what do you expect back?

Red flags

• Growth claims with no baseline, budget, or timeframe attached.
• Credits themselves for results during a period when the whole market or company was growing.
• Cannot name a failed experiment — real marketers run many.

Running this at 200-applicant scale

This process works manually for a dozen applicants. At real posting volume, the testing is the bottleneck — which is the part BestHire automates. Publish your role through a JD built as a filter, and every fit applicant takes a 5-minute AI interview probing the claims on their own CV. You get a ranked shortlist where every verdict cites the CV line and the interview quote — you read the evidence and decide. See how it works.

Run this role free

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