Using structured interviews and work sample questions
It’s time to turn your interviews into a measurable science…
The research is clear: traditional interviews are prone to unconscious (and often conscious) bias and they’re pretty lousy at predicting someone’s real ability.
The digital marketing interview questions below are based on a structured, work sample-based interview process.
are when all candidates are asked the same pre-set questions in the same order. This removes bias and ensures candidates are being tested on what matters (their ability to do the job).
are highly predictive, job-specific questions designed to simulate parts of a job. They’re like a ‘tell me a time when’ question, expect they pose questions hypothetically, shifting the focus from experience to potential.
Work samples are at their most effective when tailored to the job and company you’re hiring for – we’ve share some of the interview questions we’ve used to build our Marketing Team here at Applied, which can be adapted to your own role.
To create your own work samples, you simply decide on the skills you want to test, think of real-life scenarios that would test one or two of these skills and then ask candidates how they’d approach that scenario.
Digital marketing interview questions
Question: In your own words, can you explain how you understand the term ‘inbound marketing’?
Skills tested: Inbound Marketing
Website experimentation & A/B testing
Question: Imagine you were to start this role tomorrow and you were given the objective of increasing the number of people requesting a demo on our website. Can you talk us through what your first experiment would be? Why? What additional data would you need?
Skills tested: Web Development, Experimentation
Question: Customers can use our website to request a demo or start a free trial of our product.
You look at this month’s Google Analytics data; web traffic is growing but the free trial request conversion rates are decreasing. In particular, you can see that large numbers of users are viewing the form page but very few of them are actually filling it in and going through the trial.
What could be the possible reasons for this? Describe an A/B website test that you would run to test your hypothesis.
Skills tested: Web Development, Experimentation, Data Analysis
Growth tactics
Question: Given the information you have about Company X so far, from a digital marketing perspective, can you talk to us through 3 growth actions/tactics you would implement or look at straight away and why?
Skills learned: Inbound marketing, Web development, PPC, SEM, Data analysis
Question: You are running a PPC campaign, the CPC for the best performing ad keeps going up in price, why could this be happening? What would you do?
Skills tested: PPC, Experimentation
Question: Create a simple Google Adwords PPC advert that aims to test to see if we can entice companies of a certain size to consider our product/service.
Could you tell us:
1) The keywords you would use
2) A rough idea for the copy of the ad
3) How you would measure the success of this ad.
Skills tested: PPC, Data Analysis
Question: Take a look at our website and give your impressions of what our brand is. Do you think this is the right approach, and if not how would you improve it?
Skills tested: Creativity, Branding
Case study – Analysing website data
Question: Below is some fake data to discuss.
To meet our commercial targets we think we need to increase our demo requests from 90/month to 150/month. Below are some fake funnel metrics and website GA data.
With a view to meeting this objective, talk through the above data and what it might mean.
Skills tested: Data analysis
Follow-up 1: What additional data would you need to work out how to meet the objective?
Skills tested: Data analysis
Follow-up 2: Given the objective, where would you concentrate your marketing efforts? Is there anything that you would do immediately? Where is the worst place to spend your time, given what you see in the data?
Skills tested: Web Development, Experimentation
Case study – Community building
Question: Given what you know about Company X, which community do you think would work best for what we are trying to achieve?
Skills tested: Strategic thinking
Follow-up 1: What 2 online tactics (social media, webinars etc.) would you recommend to build this community and why?
Skills tested: Strategic Thinking
Follow-up 2: Describe the first community event (online or offline) that would be held. Who would the intended audience be and what would the objective of the event be?
Skills tested: Strategic Thinking, Creativity
Applied is the essential platform for debiased hiring. Purpose-built to make hiring empirical and ethical, our platform uses anonymised applications and skill-based assessments to identify talent that would otherwise have been overlooked.
Push back against conventional hiring wisdom with a smarter solution:
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