How to Hire Marketers Who Actually Move the Numbers
Marketing hiring runs into a specific trap: portfolios and past campaign metrics are easy to present well and hard to verify. A candidate can walk you through a beautiful case study without you ever finding out how much of the result was their work versus their team's, their budget, or plain market timing.
The portfolio problem
Past results are shaped by context you usually can't see — budget size, existing brand strength, a market tailwind. A strong portfolio is a real signal, but on its own it doesn't tell you whether a candidate can execute well in your context, with your constraints, starting Monday.
What a skills-based approach adds
A structured marketing assessment tests the actual skills the role needs directly: writing ad copy against a brief, analyzing a campaign's underperformance and recommending a fix, prioritizing a channel mix under a fixed budget. You see how a candidate thinks and executes on a bounded problem, independent of whatever context produced their portfolio.
TheyTest's test library includes marketing-relevant scenarios, so this kind of screening can run before the interview stage rather than being inferred secondhand from past work.
What to test for
- Applied writing and messaging skill, scored against a brief — not just "send us a writing sample."
- Analytical reasoning: given a set of campaign numbers, can the candidate correctly diagnose what's working and what isn't.
- Prioritization under constraints, since most marketing roles are really about deciding what not to do with a limited budget and limited time.
Why this shortens the hiring cycle
When the core execution skill is verified early with an objective assessment, portfolio review and interviews can focus on strategic thinking, collaboration style, and culture fit — not re-litigating whether the candidate can actually do the work described in their portfolio.
TheyTest offers a 14-day free trial with full Pro features if you want to try this on your next marketing req.
