How to Screen Marketing Managers: 9 Questions and What to Listen For Screening Interview Template

Pick the campaign or program you personally owned in the last two years. What was the goal number, what did it actually do, and which parts were yours versus your team's or an agency's?

What this assesses: Listen for the boundary between what the company ran and what this person built. Strong answers name a goal that existed before the campaign started, give the result against it including the miss, and are precise about ownership: they wrote the brief and the emails, the agency ran paid, a contractor built the landing page. Weak answers stay in we, lead with impressions or reach, and describe a campaign with no target attached. A goal invented after the fact is easy to spot, because it always matches the result exactly.

What marketing budget did you control last year, in dollars, and how was it split across channels? If it were cut by thirty percent tomorrow, what would you cut first and why?

What this assesses: The cut question does the work. Strong answers give a real annual number, a rough split across paid, content, events, tools and agency fees, then cut something specific with a reason attached: the trade show that produced eight leads at four thousand dollars each, the retargeting spend that was mostly reaching people who had already converted. Weak answers cannot state a dollar figure, or protect every line equally. A candidate who has never had to defend a line item has never really owned a budget, whatever the title said.

How do you attribute pipeline or revenue to marketing today? What model do you use, and where does it lie to you?

What this assesses: The second half separates operators from people who have read about attribution. Strong answers name what they actually use, whether that is first touch, last touch, a multi-touch model in the CRM, or a self-reported source field on the form, and then say where it breaks: brand search credited as organic, dark social landing in direct, a sales team that overwrites lead source on every record. Weak answers describe a perfect closed loop, which does not exist, or say attribution is impossible and move on. Both mean nobody has ever made them defend the spend.

Tell me about a channel that was working and then stopped. How did you notice, and what did you do about it?

What this assesses: Anyone who has run a channel for more than a year has this story. People who have only launched things do not. Strong answers say what the metric was, how fast it moved, and how they found out, which is usually a weekly number they were already watching rather than a quarterly review. Then they diagnose before rebuilding: creative fatigue checked first, audience saturation second, a landing page change or a platform shift third. Weak answers blame the algorithm and move budget somewhere else without ever establishing what actually changed.

Walk me through how a lead gets from first touch to a sales conversation where you work now. Who owns each step, and where does it break down?

What this assesses: This tells you whether the candidate has looked past their own dashboard. Strong answers trace the whole path with specifics: the form, what fires in the CRM, the routing rule, how long before someone calls, what share of leads sales actually works. They name the break honestly, and it is almost always response time or a definition of qualified that nobody agreed on. Weak answers stop at we pass leads to sales. Someone who does not know what happens after the handoff will generate volume you cannot use and report it as a win.

Tell me about a campaign that underperformed. What was the target, how far off were you, and what did you do in the next thirty days?

What this assesses: Ask for the number, not the lesson. Strong answers give both figures without flinching, name a real cause such as the wrong audience, an offer nobody wanted, or a page that converted at half the rate they modeled, and then describe what changed immediately. Weak answers pick a campaign that turned out fine anyway, hand the failure entirely to product or sales, or land on a tidy takeaway about testing more. A marketer who cannot name a real miss has either not run enough or is not telling you about the ones they ran.

Between demand generation and brand or content, where are you genuinely strong, and where would you need help from an agency or a specialist?

What this assesses: Calibration matters more than range here, especially if this is your only marketing hire. Strong answers claim one side clearly, name the boundary of it, and are direct about the gap: comfortable running paid search and lifecycle email, has written a lot of content but never owned an SEO strategy, has never run an event. Weak answers claim full-funnel expertise at the same level across every channel. Nobody is that person on one team's budget, and candidates who say it usually turn out to have been the coordinator sitting next to all of it.

How do you use AI tools in your work day to day, and tell me about something one produced that you threw out.

What this assesses: This is a judgment question, not a loyalty test. Strong answers are specific about where the tools help, usually first drafts, ad variants, research summaries, and turning one asset into five, then name a concrete override: a statistic that did not exist, a subject line that read like every other subject line in the inbox, an outline that missed what the buyer actually cares about. The signal is that they read the output and knew enough to reject it. Weak answers refuse the tools on principle without a reason, or describe a workflow where generated copy ships unedited.

What is in your stack today, and which parts are you hands-on with versus which do you hand to someone else? What would you need to ramp up on here?

What this assesses: Hands-on is the operative phrase. Strong answers separate the two cleanly: builds and sends in HubSpot themselves, sets up ad campaigns directly in the platform, can pull a standard report but asks an analyst for anything complicated, has never touched the CMS. They also name what they would have to learn on your stack instead of claiming they pick things up fast. Weak answers list fourteen platforms at one level of confidence. If this is your only marketing hire, someone who has always briefed a specialist to execute will be slower than the title suggests. See [asynchronous screening](/glossary/asynchronous-screening) for running this as a written first round instead of a week of scheduling calls.