Marketing interviews are unpredictable, and there’s no wonder. There are many different marketing roles and candidates with many backgrounds, skills, needs, and wants. Yet some questions get asked and answered repeatedly in interview rooms everywhere.
I’ve been to many marketing interviews. To some as an interviewee, to most of them as an interviewer. There are likely hundreds of different interview questions I asked or that employers asked me. But what are the most common ones, and what should you look for in an answer?
I skimmed through many other similar articles and wrote down questions that appeared multiple times to answer this question. No matter what marketing position you’re applying for, some of the following 21 questions will be a topic of conversation during the interview:
- Why are you pursuing a career in marketing?
- What makes you interested in this role?
- What are your responsibilities in your current role?
- Why are you looking to make a change?
- What’s your most significant career achievement?
- How do you work best?
- What are your strongest skills?
- What are your weaknesses?
- What resources do you use to develop your marketing skills?
- What marketing book have you read recently?
1. Why are you pursuing a career in marketing?
Often seen as an icebreaker, this question can reveal quite a bit about the candidate. Every employer wants to hire people with motivation other than “it pays a pretty penny.”
There are many reasons people are interested in working in the marketing field. It’s up to you to come up with an honest answer, but some of the reasons I’ve heard are:
Always learning new things
Interesting, non-monotonous work
A way to express creativity
Many career advancement opportunities and room for growth
The psychological aspect of better understanding human behavior
Great community
Suitable for remote work
Being the “good guy” in a field that’s often frowned upon by the general public
However, there’s nothing wrong with also mentioning the money. Some marketing roles can be very lucrative.
2. What makes you interested in this role?
If the candidate is not enthusiastic about the role, it’s a red flag for many hiring managers.
Let’s be honest. Many jobs aren’t that exciting. But there must be some reason you chose to apply. Maybe it looked like a suitable starting position for your career goals, or the company seemed a great place to work, or you like using the company’s products and want to be a part of spreading the word?
Being a massive fan of the company and its products was one of my biggest motivations to join Ahrefs back in 2019.
3. What are your responsibilities in your current role?
Unless you’re applying for your first job, be prepared to answer a few questions about your current and previous roles.
The only wrong way to answer this is to exaggerate or lie. It could backfire during follow-up questions or even when verifying the information by talking to your (former) colleagues.
4. Why are you looking to make a change?
You’ll likely get asked this if you’re looking for a new job while still working for someone else. This question is beneficial to both sides—the interviewer will learn more about your motivations, and you’ll learn whether the company seems like a good fit for you.
For example, you might not be content with your current work-life balance. If the new role requires you to often travel for business and work overtime, you might be better off looking elsewhere.
However, these reasons often revolve around stagnation and limited career or compensation growth. If this is the case for you, be honest. I often saw candidates being too shy to talk about wanting to earn more.
5. What’s your most significant career achievement?
If you’ve already got a few years of experience on your career record, be prepared to share your proudest achievements.
However, while it’s natural to think about all the marketing campaigns you were part of, the great ideas that led to massive wins, etc., don’t limit yourself to purely performance achievements.
For example, even before joining Ahrefs as an SEO Consultant & marketing educator, I’d say that my biggest achievement was contributing to other peoples’ growth as marketers. Nothing motivates me more than people reaching out to tell me how my lecture, workshop, presentation, or article helped them.
6. How do you work best?
Would you fit the team, the company’s culture, and their management style? This question isn’t explicitly related to marketing, but it’s crucial information for both parties.
Here are a few contrasts. Some people like having a list of tasks assigned to them; others prefer to create their own tasks. Some candidates perform best when they have flexible hours working from home; others like the “9 to 5” office life.
You should know what works best for you in terms of organizing your time, work-life balance, workspace, and collaboration.
7. What are your strongest skills?
You might also encounter this question masked as “what sets you apart from other candidates?”—which has a more competitive angle. This question is your chance to shamelessly pitch what you’re great at.
I recommend mentioning a mix of hard and soft skills. Hard skills are role-specific, so they could be anything from conducting great market research to writing great SEO content that ranks in search engines. Soft skills are desirable regardless of the role, like critical thinking, communication, or leadership. They make you a better human and team player.
A 2016 survey by Smart Insights revealed the following soft skills as top requirements:
Bar graphs showing top three requirements are problem-solving, elegant thought articulation, and analytical thinking
( Img Credit - Ahref Blog)
8. What are your weaknesses?
I hope this question is losing its popularity and will eventually fade away. Why?
From the interviewer’s point of view, the candidate probably won’t give a completely honest answer. No one will open up about snapping at colleagues or their tendency to procrastinate half of their working hours on YouTube. I’m exaggerating, but you get the gist.
You want to be prepared for this one. I recommend choosing a middle ground kind of answer. Don’t try to make some weakness look like a strength (I work too much). On the other hand, don’t disclose something that can jeopardize being hired.
For example, my answer here could be that I can’t stand being micromanaged and need my own space for autonomy. I can imagine that this would be a problem in larger organizations with many management levels.
9. What resources do you use to develop your marketing skills?
How and where you learn about marketing could be used as a proxy to assess your knowledge and skills.
The thing is that many of the most popular industry blogs, YouTube channels, or influencers don’t create great marketing content. It’s often their own marketing and sales skills that made them popular, not the depth of information and value they provide.
I know this from my own experience. When I started marketing, it was natural to follow the biggest accounts in our industry. But unfortunately, it takes a few years of consuming marketing information before you can easily separate the wheat from the chaff.
10. What marketing book have you read recently?
This question may initially seem like a more specific version of the previous one, but it’s the opposite because marketing books don’t need to be explicitly about marketing.
For example, among the best “marketing” books I’ve read were pieces from Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely, who are both key figures in behavioral psychology and economy. Dale Carnegie and Robert Cialdini are other examples of popular non-marketer authors who can teach you a lot about marketing.
But what if you don’t read marketing books? What if you don’t like reading books at all? In today’s world of online long-form content across all mediums, you can be a great marketer and a generally knowledgeable person without reading books. Just steer the conversation toward the other mediums.
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