There is a problem in marketing recruitment that I keep seeing play out across businesses of all sizes.
A business decides it needs marketing support. Leads may have slowed down. The website might not be converting. Sales might be questioning the quality of enquiries. The board might want more visibility. The brand may feel tired, the CRM may be unreliable, or there may simply be a sense that marketing is busy without anyone being completely sure whether it is working.
So the business decides to hire a marketer.
On the surface, that sounds sensible. In many cases, it is. The problem is that too many businesses begin the recruitment process before they really understand what they are hiring for.
They know they need marketing, but they do not always know whether they need strategy, execution, leadership, digital capability, CRM, data, brand, content, performance marketing, customer insight, sales enablement or a complete rebuild of the marketing function.
That uncertainty then gets baked into the job description, the job title, the salary, the interview process and the expectations placed on the successful candidate.
Six months later, everyone wonders why marketing has not suddenly transformed the business.
I have seen this happen from inside marketing teams, from board level and now as a Fractional CMO. The frustrating thing is that most of it is avoidable.
Marketing is still misunderstood
Let’s be honest. Marketing is still misunderstood in a lot of businesses.
There are still people who see marketing as the colouring-in department. The creative ones. The people who make things look nice. The people who can help pull together a birthday invite for someone’s four-year-old during lunch.
You know the score.
It sounds like a throwaway joke, but that perception causes real commercial damage. When marketing is treated as a service desk for design, social posts and last-minute requests, the business rarely builds the structure needed for marketing to work properly.
Modern marketing is a commercial function. Done well, it connects customer insight, positioning, demand generation, brand, digital performance, CRM, content, data, automation, sales enablement and growth. It should help a business understand where revenue is coming from, where demand is being created, where trust is being won or lost, and where the customer journey is leaking.
That does not mean senior marketers should sit in strategy meetings all day while refusing to get involved in delivery. I have never believed that. A good senior marketer should understand the work, know the tools, challenge agencies properly, mentor the team and step in when needed.
There is, however, a big difference between being a practical senior marketer and being hired into a senior role where most of the week is spent building email campaigns, updating the website and writing social posts because the business has never properly resourced marketing.
One is leadership with practical experience. The other is a one-person marketing department wearing a senior job title.
The job title sets the expectation
A lot of the confusion starts with the job title.
Businesses sometimes choose a bigger title because they think it will attract better candidates. I understand the logic, but it can create problems before the candidate has even opened the job description.
A Head of Marketing role can mean very different things depending on the business. In one company, it might mean leading a proper department with marketing managers, executives, designers, developers, agencies, budget responsibility and board level accountability. In another, it might mean you, one junior marketer and a managing director who wants more LinkedIn posts.
Those are not the same role.
The same applies to Marketing Director, Growth Lead, Digital Marketing Manager and CMO. Titles vary between sectors and business sizes, but they still create expectations around seniority, salary, authority, team structure and commercial responsibility.
This is why the title has to be treated carefully. If the role is mainly executional, describe it that way. If the business needs strategic leadership, the authority, budget and salary need to match. And where the real requirement is someone to come in, diagnose what is wrong and build the function properly, that should be made clear from the start.
Experienced marketers are not usually put off by honesty. They are put off by roles that pretend to be one thing, then turn out to be something completely different.
The job description often gives the game away
The job description is usually where the real issue becomes obvious.
A business says it wants a strategic marketing leader, but the responsibilities read like a list of every marketing task anyone in the company has ever heard of. Social media, email campaigns, website updates, blogs, SEO, PPC, design, events, reporting, CRM, agencies, lead generation, sales support, brand, conversion, strategy and revenue growth all get rolled into one role.
The individual tasks may all matter. The problem is that they sit at different levels of seniority and require different skills. A senior marketing leader can oversee those areas, prioritise the work, build the right structure and connect activity to commercial outcomes. That is very different from expecting one person to personally deliver every task because the marketing function does not really exist yet.
There is nothing wrong with needing a hands-on marketer. Many growing businesses do. I have rolled up my sleeves throughout my career and still believe that practical knowledge is one of the things that separates good marketing leaders from people who only know how to talk about marketing.
The issue comes when the title, salary and expectations do not match the reality.
If you hire a Head of Marketing and expect them to spend most of their time acting as a designer, copywriter, email executive, PPC specialist, CRM administrator, content manager and social media executive, you have not really hired a Head of Marketing. You have hired someone to cover the absence of a properly structured marketing function.
That may be necessary for a period of time, but the business needs to understand what it is asking for.
This is one of the areas where a Fractional CMO can add value before recruitment begins. Sometimes a business needs a senior marketing leader. Sometimes it needs a strong Marketing Manager. Sometimes it needs to fix the CRM, reporting, website and sales process first. Sometimes it needs specialist support. Sometimes an outsourced CMO can help build the foundations before the business commits to a permanent hire.
The important thing is knowing which problem you are actually trying to solve.
Salary sends a signal
Salary is not just a number at the bottom of the advert. It tells candidates how the business sees the role.
If a company advertises a CMO level remit at £50,000 per year, experienced candidates will spot the mismatch immediately. Some may still have a conversation, especially if the business is interesting or the timing works for them, but the strongest candidates will want to understand whether the expectations are realistic.
Good marketers understand their value. They also understand the difference between a Marketing Executive, Marketing Manager, Head of Marketing, Marketing Director and CMO.
A business does not have to offer the highest salary in the market, but the package needs to make sense for the responsibility, risk and expected impact. If the salary is too low for the remit, good candidates will either walk away or challenge it.
And quite often, the candidate who challenges it is the one who understands the role best.
The interview brief is where it often falls apart
The early screening stage is usually straightforward. A recruiter or hiring manager has a twenty to thirty minute conversation, checks experience, availability, salary expectations and whether the person feels like a credible fit. That part is rarely the issue.
The real problem often appears when the interview brief lands.
This is the point where an experienced marketer can usually tell whether the business understands what it is asking for.
I have seen businesses ask candidates to prepare detailed marketing plans, thirty day and ninety day strategies, campaign recommendations, channel reviews and budget plans with almost no meaningful information.
No proper customer insight. No channel performance. No campaign structure. No attribution model. No funnel data. No customer acquisition cost. No lifetime value. No conversion data. No CRM analysis. No explanation of what has already been tried. No real clarity on what success looks like.
Yet the candidate is expected to turn up with confident answers.
I had a recent interview process where I was asked to prepare recommendations based on very limited information. The only paid media information provided was spend and revenue. During the interview, one of the directors said he had expected more detail on paid Meta.
I explained that I had not been given enough information to do that properly.
I could have created a polished presentation full of confident recommendations. I could have talked about campaign structure, audience segmentation, creative testing, budget allocation and return on ad spend. It might have sounded impressive in the room.
It would also have been mostly fiction.
Without knowing the campaign structure, audience strategy, attribution model, creative performance, landing page performance, funnel stage, conversion rate, budget split and wider customer journey, any detailed paid media plan would have been built on assumptions.
So I focused on what I could actually observe.
I positioned conversion rate optimisation as the first priority, with one important caveat. Before optimising the funnel, I would repair the trust issues I had found along the customer journey, because those issues could put people off before they had even entered a funnel where optimisation would make any difference.
That was the honest answer.
It was also probably less exciting than a shiny paid media plan full of made-up certainty.
And that is part of the problem.
Bad briefs reward the wrong behaviour
A poorly written interview brief can make a very good marketer sound cautious.
That does not mean they lack ideas. It usually means they know enough not to pretend. Any marketer worth their salt should challenge a brief if the brief does not make sense. They should be able to say where assumptions are being made, what can be observed from the outside and what would need to be investigated once they are inside the business.
The difficulty is that this does not always win interviews.
A candidate who tells the truth can sound less impressive than a candidate who gives the hiring team exactly what they wanted to hear. That creates a strange incentive. Do you produce a plan you can genuinely stand behind once you are in the business, or do you produce a polished plan that looks great in an interview but falls apart the moment you get access to the real data?
Too often, the fictional plan wins.
Then the person starts the job, sees the reality and has to change direction. The business then wonders why the plan they presented at interview is not being delivered exactly as shown.
The interview task should not become the actual plan
A thirty day or ninety day interview task can be useful, but only if everyone understands its purpose.
It should show how someone thinks. It can reveal whether they understand commercial priorities, customer journeys, risk, data and the relationship between marketing activity and revenue. It can also show whether they ask better questions than the other candidates.
It should not be treated as the actual plan for the first three or six months.
Once a marketer joins a business, they will learn more in the first few weeks than they ever could from the outside. They will see the real numbers. They will understand the politics. They will review the CRM. They will speak to sales. They will see what agencies are doing. They will look at historic performance. They will find the gaps that were not visible during the interview process.
Their plan should evolve as they learn more. I would be more concerned if it did not.
A good marketer adapts when better information becomes available. That is not inconsistency.
Give candidates something useful to work with
If a business wants strategic thinking, it needs to give candidates enough information to think strategically.
I don’t mean handing sensitive commercial data to every applicant; I mean designing the recruitment process properly. A useful marketing interview brief should explain the business context, current team structure, budget range, commercial objectives, channels being used, known challenges and what has already been tried.
It should also be honest about what is missing.
If reporting is weak, say so. If the CRM is unreliable, say so. If attribution is unclear, say so. If the website is underperforming and nobody knows why, say so.
Those things are not embarrassing. They are useful. They help the right candidate show how they would diagnose the problem, prioritise the work and build the right structure.
A strong marketer does not need the business to pretend everything is tidy. They need enough truth to work with.
Start with the problem, not the job advert
Before writing a job description, businesses should take a step back and ask a more useful question.
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
That question sounds simple, but it changes the whole recruitment process. It helps separate strategy from execution, leadership from delivery, and marketing activity from marketing effectiveness.
A business might need someone to create strategy. It might need someone to execute. It might need a leader to build a team, a technical marketer to fix the data, a brand specialist to reposition the business, a CRM specialist to repair the customer journey, or a performance marketer to improve demand generation.
It might not need a permanent hire at all.
This is where a Fractional CMO can make a real difference. A Fractional CMO can review the current marketing function before the business commits to a hire. They can look at the structure, data, team, suppliers, website, CRM, reporting, campaigns and commercial objectives, then advise what level of marketing leadership is actually needed.
That might lead to a permanent Head of Marketing hire. It might lead to a Marketing Manager. It might lead to a specialist CRM role. It might lead to agency changes. It might lead to a short term outsourced CMO arrangement while the foundations are rebuilt.
It might also lead to the uncomfortable but useful conclusion that the business is not ready for the senior hire it thought it needed.
That is still a good outcome.
It is far better than hiring the wrong person, losing six months and deciding marketing has failed again.
Good marketing recruitment protects everyone
Good marketing recruitment protects the business, the candidate and the future performance of the function.
The business gets clarity on what it actually needs. The candidate understands the reality of the role. The title, salary, remit and authority line up properly. The interview process tests how someone thinks, not just how confidently they can present a half-informed plan.
That last point matters.
The best marketer in the process is not always the one with the prettiest presentation. It is often the one who asks the best questions, spots the gaps, challenges the brief and can explain what needs to happen first.
Marketing is not magic. It is a commercial discipline that needs data, judgement, positioning, customer understanding, technical capability and trust.
When recruitment is built around that reality, the business is far more likely to hire the right person.
The cost of getting this wrong
Hiring the wrong marketer is expensive.
The salary is only part of the cost. The bigger cost is time.
You lose months while the wrong person tries to make sense of a badly defined role. You lose momentum while activity happens without proper direction. You lose internal confidence when the board does not see progress. You lose good candidates when the process feels confused. You lose trust between sales, marketing and leadership because everyone expected something different.
Eventually, someone says, “marketing is not working.”
Sometimes that is true.
Often, the issue started much earlier. The role was wrong. The brief was wrong. The salary was wrong. The expectations were wrong. The person may even have been good, just hired for the wrong problem.
That is avoidable.
Marketing recruitment needs more honesty
The businesses that get marketing recruitment right are not always the ones with the biggest budgets. They are usually the ones honest enough to define the problem properly.
They know whether they need a thinker, a builder, a fixer, a leader or a doer. They understand that one person cannot be an entire marketing department forever. They make sure the job title, salary, remit and authority all point in the same direction.
They also understand that good marketing needs foundations. Data, infrastructure, customer insight, clear objectives, commercial context and trust all matter.
So if your business is about to hire a marketer, do not start with the job advert. Start with the problem.
If you are not sure what the problem is, bring in someone who can help diagnose it before you hire. That might be a Fractional CMO, an outsourced CMO, a marketing director for hire or a strategic marketing consultant. The title matters less than the value they bring.
The aim is simply to hire the right person for the right problem at the right time. When you get that wrong, you do not just waste recruitment spend; you waste momentum. Momentum is much harder to get back.
Need help defining the marketing role your business actually needs?
Before hiring a senior marketer, it is worth understanding whether you need a Marketing Manager, Head of Marketing, Marketing Director, Fractional CMO or specialist support.
Through Hiddn Marketing, I help businesses review their marketing function, identify gaps in strategy, structure, data and delivery, and define the right marketing leadership model before they commit to a hire.
If you are planning to hire a marketer and want to avoid an expensive mistake, I can help you sense check the role, the brief and the structure before you go to market.