Advertising Hiring

Advertising Hiring

Build the packet a marketing leader needs to recruit a paid-advertising hire: role scoping, interview loop and scorecard, work sample, and a ramp plan with staged spend authority. Scoping comes first: the field's own hiring managers trace mis-hires to it, not to interviewing technique - Duane Brown (Take Some Risk): "Bad hires are the results of bad job descriptions or interviews"; Constant Hire: "a mis-hire is usually a scoping [error]."

Titles blur, but a real functional ladder sits underneath them, each rung adding scope over the one below:

• Media buyer: channel execution.
• Performance marketer: adds funnel strategy, creative testing, measurement, business outcome.
• Growth marketer: the whole system, including conversion and lifecycle.
• Creative strategist: a separate role bridging creative and buying, not a senior buyer.

The frame borrows the scorecard tradition popularized by Geoff Smart and Randy Street's _Who_: mission, ranked outcomes, then competencies, all defined before anyone is evaluated.

This is the hirer's side only: it does not source candidates, post jobs, run applicant tracking, or write offer letters, and anything touching compensation terms, contracts, or employment law needs HR/legal review. It quotes published salary bands with source and date as scoping input, always labelled directional. The candidate side - breaking into and progressing in paid media - is the mirror-image sibling mbfinotti/advertising-skills@advertising-career; if the person you are talking to turns out to be a candidate, route them there.

Interview

Ask before designing. One question per message; offer multiple-choice answers where possible. Skip anything already answered.

• What stage and size is the company? (a) under 15 people / pre-launch, (b) 15-150, (c) 150+, (d) an agency hiring for its own bench.
• Is this the first dedicated paid-media hire, or an addition to an existing team? If existing: who is on it and which channels do they own?
• Which paid channels are live or planned? (a) one, (b) two, (c) three or more, (d) none live yet.
• What monthly ad budget will this hire manage - now and in 12 months? (a) under $10k, (b) $10-50k, (c) $50-250k, (d) $250k+.
• What segment? (a) B2C / DTC ecommerce, (b) B2B, (c) app or marketplace, (d) mixed.
• Is this an in-house brand-side hire or an agency-side one - and does your candidate pool skew agency-trained or brand-trained?
• How trustworthy is measurement today - conversion tracking validated, platform numbers reconciled against backend revenue? (a) yes, (b) partly, (c) no, (d) unknown.
• Who is on the interview panel, and how many rounds can you realistically run?
• By what date must this seat be producing? (a) inside a month, (b) this quarter, (c) no fixed date. A hard date promotes the options that cover the channels this week - a retained agency or a freelancer bridging while you hire - and demotes anything that adds an interview round.
• Do you want a one-off fix for the spend running today, or a capability that compounds? A one-off answer promotes outside help and a contract; a compounding answer promotes the in-house hire, the higher rung, and the full ramp.
• What is your effort ceiling - manager and interviewer hours per candidate, panel size, and how reversible the decision must stay (contract versus permanent headcount)? A low ceiling promotes the two-round loop and the own-work presentation; a high ceiling unlocks the live audit and the paid trial. No budget or approval for paid candidate work deletes the paid trial from the menu instead of ranking it last - say it is deleted, so it cannot resurface later as an unfunded round.

Workflow

Every ordering below is a default, not a law: it shifts with the company's context and with who actually executes the loop. Re-rank it against what you already know, since each of these collapses the effort of one option and moves it up:

• A bench of candidates from a previous search.
• An in-house recruiter.
• An agency already retained.
• A founder who will personally sit every round.

1. Run the Interview; collect every answer before designing anything.
2. Gate whether to hire at all. AJ Wilcox's published don't-hire conditions (scoped to one B2B social channel, but they generalize) are the clearest gate: monthly budget under about $5,000, marketing fundamentals not in place (audience, positioning, pricing, working site), or unwillingness to commit 3-6 months before judging a channel. When the gate fails, rank the alternatives by channel coverage bought per hour of your own time: agency > freelancer > self-manage, and wait only while the missing fundamental is what blocks. The axes disagree - the agency costs the most control and the least of your hours:

• value (channels covered, creative bandwidth, cover for absence): agency > freelancer > self-manage
• effort (your hours briefing, reviewing, coordinating): self-manage > freelancer > agency
• compliance cost (contract review, third-party access to ad accounts and customer data): freelancer > agency > self-manage - the freelancer is not tied with the agency here: both need the same contract and the same account access, but only the individual engagement raises a worker-classification question, and only that one is hard to unwind after the fact. Full breakdown in references/role-ladder-and-leveling.md. When the gate fails on a missing fundamental, wait is not a rung on this list - the hire is deleted from the menu until positioning, pricing, or the site is fixed, and saying so stops it reappearing next month as an unscoped req.

1. Name the rung in writing before anything else, using the ladder in the same reference. Default rung for a first dedicated hire: the generalist operator (performance-marketer profile) who owns measurement and channel choice - never a single-channel specialist. Ordered by business outcome owned per week of ramp: performance marketer > media buyer > creative strategist > growth marketer. Value and effort disagree with that, which is the point - the default is neither the broadest seat nor the fastest one to fill:

• value (breadth the seat can own): growth marketer > performance marketer > creative strategist > media buyer
• effort (time-to-fill, ramp length, panel time, comp pressure): growth marketer > creative strategist > performance marketer > media buyer Conditions that move the default:
• A working funnel that needs depth in one channel moves it down to a media buyer.
• Spend past the ~$50k/month breakpoint, or 3+ paid channels, adds a dedicated buyer alongside rather than instead ("a generalist starts dropping balls", both Remoby).
• Creative volume as the bottleneck opens a creative strategist as a separate req.
• Conversion and lifecycle already in scope moves it up to a growth marketer.

What this order starves: the growth marketer, top of the value order and top of the effort order at once, so a ratio ranks it last however wide the seat is. Promote it deliberately - not by waiting for the ratio to pick it - when conversion and lifecycle are already the constraint, when the seat is meant to outlast two or three channel cycles, or when the panel and the comp band can absorb a longer search. The same trap runs one rung down: the specialist buyer loses to the generalist on efficiency at every spend level, and only the breakpoint condition above ever promotes it. A funded headcount the comp band cannot reach is deleted from the menu, not ranked last - re-scope the req to a rung you can actually fill and say which rung you removed.