Marketing Hiring: What Most Job Specs Get Completely Wrong

Marketing hiring is one of the most consequential decisions a business makes, and most companies handle it badly. They write job specs that describe an ideal candidate who does not exist, interview for the wrong things, and then wonder why the new hire underperforms within six months.

The problem is not a talent shortage. There is plenty of marketing talent in the market. The problem is that most hiring processes are designed to fill a role rather than solve a business problem, and those two things produce very different outcomes.

I have hired a lot of marketers across a lot of contexts: agencies scaling fast, brands rebuilding from scratch, performance teams that needed to double output without doubling headcount. I have also made expensive mistakes. What follows is what I have learned, mostly the hard way.

Why Do So Many Marketing Hires Fail?

The failure rate on marketing hires is quietly high, and most businesses absorb the cost without ever diagnosing the cause. They assume the person was not good enough. Occasionally that is true. More often, the hire was set up to fail from the moment the job spec was written.

There are a few patterns I see repeatedly. The first is role confusion: the business needed someone to build a function from nothing, but hired someone who had only ever operated within an established one. Those are completely different skill sets, and the gap does not show up in an interview. The second is scope mismatch: the job spec promised strategic ownership but the reality was execution support, and the candidate figured that out on day thirty. The third is expectation misalignment: the business wanted results in ninety days from a hire that needed six months of groundwork before anything could move.

When I was growing an agency from around twenty people to over a hundred, we hired fast because we had to. Some of those hires were excellent. Some were not. The ones that did not work out almost always came back to one of those three patterns, and in almost every case, the fault was in the hiring process, not the candidate.

If you are thinking about how hiring fits into your broader marketing operations, the Marketing Operations hub covers the full picture, from team structure and budget allocation through to measurement and process design.

What Should a Marketing Job Spec Actually Say?

Most marketing job specs are a list of skills someone would like a candidate to have, dressed up as a role description. They read like a procurement exercise rather than a commercial brief. The candidate is supposed to infer what success looks like from a list of responsibilities, which is a poor basis for making a major hiring decision on either side of the table.

A better approach is to start with the business problem. What is the specific commercial challenge this hire is meant to address? Is it that you have no pipeline generation capability? That your brand is invisible in a market you need to enter? That your current team can execute but cannot think strategically? Write that down first, in plain language, before you touch the job spec template.

From there, work backwards. What does a good outcome look like in twelve months? What would that person need to have done to get there? What skills, experience, and working style does that require? Now you have a job spec with a spine. It tells candidates what they are actually being hired to do, which attracts different people than a generic wish list does.

The way you structure a marketing team should directly inform how you write roles within it. A hire that makes sense in one structure is redundant or misaligned in another. Most businesses skip this step entirely.

One thing worth being explicit about in a job spec: what the role is not. If the head of marketing will not have budget authority, say so. If the role is primarily execution rather than strategy, say so. Candidates who discover this after starting do not stay, and the cost of that churn is significant.

Generalist or Specialist: Are You Asking the Right Question?

The generalist versus specialist debate comes up in almost every marketing hiring conversation I have been part of, and I think it is usually the wrong framing. The more useful question is: what phase is your marketing function in right now?

If you are building from scratch, you need someone who can do multiple things adequately while you figure out where to specialise. Hiring a deep specialist into an undefined function is a common and expensive mistake. They will be excellent at one thing and frustrated by everything else the role demands.

If you have an established function and a clear performance gap in a specific channel or capability, then a specialist hire makes sense. But you need to be honest about whether that gap is a hiring problem or a strategy problem. I have seen businesses hire paid search specialists when the real issue was that they had no clear value proposition to advertise. The specialist cannot fix that.

There is a useful analogy in how agencies grow. The way Unbounce built their marketing team from one person to over thirty illustrates how the mix of generalist and specialist capability has to evolve as the function matures. Early hires carry broad remits. Later hires go deep. Getting the sequencing wrong costs you in both directions.

The honest version of this question is: do you need someone to build, someone to run, or someone to grow? Build requires entrepreneurial instinct and tolerance for ambiguity. Run requires operational discipline and consistency. Grow requires commercial creativity and the ability to identify leverage. These are different profiles, and the same person rarely excels at all three.

What Do Most Interview Processes Get Wrong?

Marketing interview processes tend to optimise for likability and cultural fit, which are not irrelevant but should not be the primary filter. The result is that businesses hire people they enjoy talking to, rather than people who can solve the commercial problem the role was created to address.

The best interview question I have used consistently is also the simplest: walk me through a piece of marketing work you are proud of, tell me what problem it was solving, how you approached it, what happened, and what you would do differently. That single question tells you more about commercial thinking, self-awareness, and actual capability than a two-hour competency-based interview.

What you are listening for is whether the candidate connects their work to a business outcome. Weak candidates describe activity. They tell you about the campaign they ran, the content they produced, the channels they used. Strong candidates describe outcomes. They tell you what changed as a result, what they measured, and what the business gained. That distinction is not about seniority. I have interviewed CMOs who could not answer in outcomes and junior candidates who naturally spoke that language.

For roles with a significant data or analytics component, it is worth testing how candidates actually think about data, not just whether they can name the right tools. Understanding how marketers use behavioural and analytics data in practice is very different from knowing the vocabulary. Ask them to interpret a real data set, or describe a time when the data told them something unexpected and what they did with it.

One thing I stopped doing early in my career was hiring primarily on raw intelligence and potential. Potential is real, but it is also a hedge. When you are running a commercial operation with targets to hit, you need people who can perform now, not just people who might perform eventually. That does not mean ignoring growth potential. It means being honest about how much runway you actually have to develop someone.

How Do You Assess Commercial Thinking in a Marketing Candidate?

Commercial thinking is the most underrated quality in marketing, and also one of the hardest to assess in an interview. It is not the same as analytical ability or strategic thinking, though it overlaps with both. Commercial thinking means understanding how marketing connects to revenue, margin, and business value, and making decisions with that connection in mind.

One way to test for it is to give candidates a budget scenario. Tell them they have a fixed marketing budget, a revenue target, and three possible channels to invest in. Ask them how they would think about the allocation and what they would need to know before deciding. You are not looking for the right answer. You are looking for the quality of the thinking: whether they ask about margin, customer lifetime value, existing performance data, sales cycle length. Candidates who jump straight to channel tactics without asking business questions are telling you something important.

Another useful signal is how candidates talk about failure. Marketing involves a lot of things not working, and the candidates who have genuinely learned from that experience talk about it differently than those who have not. They are specific about what went wrong, honest about their own contribution to it, and clear about what they changed as a result. Candidates who cannot name a meaningful failure, or who frame every failure as someone else’s problem, tend to be difficult to work with and slow to improve.

Budget awareness matters too. Marketing budgets are under consistent pressure, and candidates who have never had to defend a budget, make trade-offs, or justify spend to a CFO are often underprepared for the commercial realities of senior roles. It is worth asking directly: have you ever had to cut your marketing budget mid-year, and how did you handle it?

What Does Good Onboarding Look Like for a Marketing Hire?

Onboarding is where most marketing hires succeed or fail, and most businesses treat it as an administrative exercise rather than a strategic one. The new hire gets a laptop, a few introductory meetings, and access to the shared drive. Then they are expected to perform.

The first ninety days of a marketing hire should be structured around three things: understanding the business, understanding the customer, and understanding what has already been tried. A marketer who skips any of those and goes straight to execution is a liability, not an asset. They will produce activity without context, which is the most expensive kind of marketing.

I have seen this go wrong in both directions. Businesses that give new marketing hires no structure and expect immediate output get shallow work built on assumptions. Businesses that give new hires so much structure that they cannot make any decisions in the first three months lose momentum and often lose the hire. The balance is a clear ninety-day plan with defined milestones, genuine access to the people and data the hire needs, and explicit permission to ask uncomfortable questions.

One thing I always did when onboarding senior marketing hires was give them a specific diagnostic task in the first thirty days: review our current marketing activity and tell me what you would stop, what you would change, and what is missing. Not to act on it immediately, but to understand how they think and what they are seeing that we might have stopped seeing. Fresh eyes are a genuine asset if you create the conditions to use them.

Data access is often an underestimated onboarding issue. A new marketing hire who cannot get into the analytics platform, the CRM, or the media accounts for their first three weeks is not going to be effective. An integrated data strategy across a marketing organisation matters from day one for any hire expected to make evidence-based decisions. Sort the access before the person starts, not after.

When Should You Hire an Agency Instead of a Full-Time Marketer?

This is a question I have a particular perspective on, having spent most of my career on the agency side. The honest answer is that the choice between hiring internally and using an agency is not really about cost or quality. It is about what you actually need.

Agencies are good at delivering defined outputs at scale, bringing specialist capability you cannot justify hiring full-time, and providing external perspective. They are not good at owning a strategy, building institutional knowledge, or being accountable for business outcomes in the way an internal hire is. Businesses that use agencies as a substitute for strategic marketing leadership consistently underperform those that use agencies to extend an internal capability.

The model that works best, in my experience, is a small, commercially sharp internal team that owns strategy and performance accountability, supported by specialist agency resource where the volume or technical complexity justifies it. That might be one strong internal marketer and two or three agency partners. It might be a team of ten with one specialist agency for a specific channel. The structure is less important than the clarity of who owns what.

Where businesses go wrong is hiring an agency before they have internal clarity on what they want to achieve. An agency cannot define your marketing strategy for you. They can help you execute one, refine one, or challenge one. But if you do not have a view on what success looks like, you will spend a lot of money producing a lot of activity that does not connect to anything.

If you want to go deeper on how hiring decisions sit within broader marketing operations thinking, the Marketing Operations section of The Marketing Juice covers team design, budget frameworks, and how to build a function that actually performs.

How Do You Retain Good Marketing Talent Once You Have Hired It?

Retention is a hiring problem that most businesses treat as an HR problem. If you are losing good marketers regularly, the issue is almost never compensation alone. It is usually one of three things: lack of autonomy, lack of visibility into impact, or lack of development opportunity. All three are within a business’s control to fix.

Autonomy does not mean absence of direction. It means the marketer has genuine ownership of a problem and the authority to make decisions about how to solve it. Marketers who are constantly waiting for approval, constantly having their work second-guessed, or constantly being redirected by stakeholders who have not read the brief will leave. Not immediately, but within eighteen months, reliably.

Visibility into impact is underestimated. Marketers who cannot see the connection between their work and a business outcome become disengaged. This is partly a measurement problem, but it is also a cultural one. If marketing results are never discussed in business reviews, if the team never sees the sales data, if no one ever connects a campaign to a pipeline number, the work starts to feel like activity for its own sake. That is a retention risk.

The best marketing environments I have worked in and built were ones where the team understood the commercial context of what they were doing. Not because I gave them a lecture about business outcomes, but because the information was available, the conversations were honest, and the wins were shared. That is not complicated to create. It just requires a deliberate choice to include the marketing team in the commercial reality of the business.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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