If there’s one type of role that can be particularly interesting to hire for through an online recruitment process, it is surely a digital marketing one. After all, in the grand scheme of business history, digital marketing has only arisen as a discipline relatively recently. Your hiring staff may not therefore have much experience of recruiting people in this field.
That, by the way, can be a big problem. You won’t want to end up hiring someone who simply knew how to impress your HR team by throwing around all manner of digital marketing buzzwords, but who represents a poor fit for your company’s needs.
So, here are some of the questions you can ask that’ll help you to separate the most suitable from the least suitable digital marketing talent.
Questions relating to work history
It’s one thing to pick out a digital marketing candidate for interview on the basis of a promising CV, and quite another thing to delve deeper, making the most of the initial information that their CV gives you.
After all, you need to know more than simply where this person has worked – you have to tease out what they learned during their time there. This may mean asking such questions as “What was your first big project?” and “Can you tell me about when you used this area of expertise to solve a problem or gain vital insight? If the latter, how did you then use that insight?”
Quiz candidates specifically about the role
Naturally, with digital marketing vacancies tending to be highly specialised ones, it makes sense to be very specific about some of the questions you ask for the role for which you’re hiring.
If it’s a social media expert that you’re seeking, for instance, you might enquire about the accounts that they’ve managed. Alternatively, you may be on the lookout for an email marketing professional, so questions focusing on subject line A/B testing and CTAs may be especially suitable.
Be creative and open-ended with what you ask
Digital marketing staff don’t merely need to be technically adept – they must also apply creativity when it comes to various aspects of their roles. Befittingly creative and open-ended questions can therefore be helpful in your efforts to determine whether a candidate is an appropriate fit for the culture of your organisation.
You could, for example, ask the candidate how they would react in the case of a particular social media, SEO or other digital marketing quandary for which they would need to quickly devise a solution ‘on the spot’.
Then, there are the various more general questions that you could ask, such as the ever-powerful “Tell me about yourself” – as we have previously written about here at Webrecruit.
Don’t run the risk of the wrong digital marketing hire setting back your company in terms of morale, productivity and revenue alike. Instead, take the hiring of staff for such specialised roles seriously, considering how the online recruitment know-how of an agency like Webrecruit could be invaluable for improving your business’s results.
