A few years back, the founder of a marketing agency told me about his hiring process. It was clear that this process would massively reduce the amount of time we had to spend identifying great marketing candidates.
We’ve now used this process for years and are pretty much ecstatic with the results. The process…

• Surfaces the best candidates with very little effort on our part
• Allows us to “see” each good candidate far more clearly than their resume or cover letter ever could. We can take a great cut at separating the great from the merely good before we’ve spoken to even one candidate
• Has enabled us to be much more objective rather than subjective
• Has eliminated the horrific process of manually reading hundreds of resumes and cover letters (which overwhelmed us and caused us to lose perspective anyway)
• Has cut the amount of time we spend screening candidates by at least 70%
• Works for non-marketing positions as well

We’re a marketing automation platform company called Net-Results, where I’m founder & CEO. We compete directly with Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot, etc. and win a bit more than our fair share.

Being a marketing technology company, we are inundated with resumes whenever we post an open marketing position. It’s common to receive at least 300 applications, sometimes more. We used to <attempt to> read through these resumes, doing our best to identify 8 – 12 of them that we’d like to phone interview. This process was awful.

• We struggled to sort through >300 resumes without losing perspective due to simple weariness
  
• We found that our judgement would shift as time passed: we judged early resumes differently than later resumes
  
• It’s really tough to “see” someone through their resume – I’m not great at it anyway. We’d often get on a phone interview and quickly realize a candidate that looked good on paper wasn’t actually a fit, wasting more of our time
  

So…What’s this Magic Process for Hiring Digital Marketers?

To get the word out and attract candidates, we normally post our open jobs on LinkedIn. We also use Indeed sometimes. We generally get plenty of candidates from these sources. For both LinkedIn and Indeed we allocate some money for them to “promote” our job. This gets it in front of more people and generates more resumes. This is a good thing.

This process is one where you want a boat load of applicants. The more the better. We will spend little to no time on the majority of those candidates.

• As applications/resumes come in, we send each of them a single email inviting them to “take the next step in our process” (a copy of the email we send is included below).
  • We normally don’t even look at the candidate. We do not read the resume. We just send the email. The point is to spend the smallest amount of time possible at this stage.
  • It would be nice to automate the sending of this email but we’ve not taken the time to do that yet
• The email asks them to fill out a Google Form. This is the first step in saving us tons of time and identifying the best candidates. In our experience, about 45% of the people who apply will complete the Google Form. This eliminates a bunch of people, as it should.
  • Starting with 300 applicants, we’re now down to 135. That’s the first cut.
  • What’s a Google Form? Google Forms are free to use. It’s easy to put together a form that asks questions that are multiple choice, choose all that apply, simple text fields, and long form answers.
• When an applicant submits the Google Form they are automatically added as a new row in Google Sheet (a spreadsheet). This is beautiful…
• Here’s the key: In your Google Form you should ask 2 or 3 questions where the candidate must rate themselves on a 1-10 scale. Have them rate themselves in areas that are key to success in the position you’re hiring for.
• Apply a “filter” to your spreadsheet that hides every person who rated themselves a 7 or lower on any of your “1-10” self-rating questions.
  • This is a judgement call. We choose to judge it like this: If they are not confident (8 or higher, maybe 7) on things that are important to us, we’re willing to let them go without another look.
  • We know there may be some gems that get excluded this way, but we’re busy people, and this is the choice we make to hire great candidates quickly.
  • We started with 300 applicants. Of the ~135 that submitted our Google Form, we normally find that maybe 15 – 30 of them will have rated themselves an 7, 8 or higher on each of our “rate yourself” questions. This is the 2nd cut.
• In addition the “rate yourself on a 1-10 scale” questions, you should also ask some “long form” questions where your candidates must write free form responses
• For the candidates that remain in your spreadsheet after filtering on your 1-10 questions, you go ahead and dig in. Read all of their long form other answers on your Google Form. Some will be immediately eliminated based on their answers (Great! You didn’t waste much time finding that out). Others will shine and stand out.
  • Long form answers to the open ended questions you asked in your Google Form are very revealing. You get a sense of how a candidate thinks. You get a good preliminary view of their actual communication style and writing skills. This is the 3rd cut.
• Hopefully you have at least 5 stand-out candidates. Obviously more is better. These are the only ones you spend real time on. Check out their resumes, LinkedIn, etc. Arrange phone interviews with the ones that look great.
• Finally, we only do in-person interviews with those who do well in phone interviews.

The Email We Send Looks Like This:

What Questions Do We Ask Digital Marketers on Our Google Form?

We start out with the basics like full name and the URL of their LinkedIn profile. Yes, I know their resume likely contains their LinkedIn profile link, but we want it right there in our spreadsheet so we don’t have to collate sources later on. We can simply click the link and go.
We also like to ask what their desired salary is as it helps us understand the range of market expectations and how those correlate back to qualifications 🙂
As for the real questions, the ones that help us identify great candidates, we always think in terms of skills and characteristics. We put together 10 or 12 questions in the Google Form – a mixture of “rate yourself”, multiple choice, and free-form text answers designed to surface candidates that match those required skills and characteristics. We try to focus on what our ideal candidate looks like.
Be patient. Compromising here is the most costly thing you can do. Your ideal candidate will deliver results that blow away 2nd tier candidates that you accept because this is hard and takes time. Recruiting the right team members is the most effective thing you can do to generate results with digital marketing.

As for the actual questions we ask? I’ll be happy to email them to you 🙂

Fill out the form below and we’ll send you all the questions we recently used to screen and hire a great digital marketer.