Marketing job adverts are full of familiar language. Businesses want creative thinkers, strategic minds, people who challenge convention, see what others miss and are comfortable questioning established thinking.
Then the interview starts.
The candidate is expected to build rapport quickly with a room full of strangers, interpret questions they have never seen before, think immediately, sell themselves confidently and deliver polished answers while being judged on everything from their experience to the way they communicate it.
For senior roles, there is often another stage. The candidate receives a limited brief, disappears for a few days and returns with a presentation explaining what is wrong with the company’s marketing and what they would do about it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with interviewing people or asking them to complete an assessment. A well designed interview can be a very useful way of evaluating a candidate. The problem begins when the business assumes that because the process feels difficult, it must therefore be measuring the capabilities that matter.
I have written previously about why businesses keep hiring the wrong marketer and why good marketing recruitment needs to begin by understanding the problem the new person is being hired to solve.
There is another question once the role itself is right.
Is the recruitment process actually capable of recognising the marketer who can solve it?
A marketing interview is an assessment, not a performance
There is good evidence that interviews can work well when they are properly structured. Research into personnel selection has found structured interviews to be materially more predictive of subsequent performance than unstructured conversations, particularly when the questions and scoring criteria are connected to the work somebody will actually be expected to do.
That is very different from simply assembling a panel and asking a collection of questions.
Every part of a recruitment process should exist for a reason. If the business asks a candidate to prepare a presentation, somebody should be able to explain what capability that presentation is intended to reveal. If the panel asks for an immediate answer to a difficult scenario, it should know why speed of response is relevant to the role.
This becomes particularly important in senior marketing because the profession covers an unusually wide range of cognitive tasks. A Marketing Director may spend part of a morning analysing performance data, then move into a discussion about commercial priorities, review a creative proposition, challenge an agency recommendation, examine a CRM problem and eventually explain a difficult decision to the board.
Good marketing therefore involves much more than being persuasive in a meeting. It requires the ability to move between analysis, strategy, commercial judgement, creativity, customer behaviour, systems thinking and execution.
A candidate can be extremely good at some of those things without being exceptional at performing an interview.
What exactly are you testing?
Consider the familiar final stage marketing presentation.
A candidate is told to prepare a twenty minute presentation explaining their marketing strategy for the business and what they would prioritise during their first ninety days.
It sounds like a demanding assessment, and it certainly requires effort from the candidate. What it measures depends entirely on how it has been designed.
It may reveal some strategic thinking, but it can also reward presentation confidence, verbal fluency, slide design, preparation speed, comfort speaking to strangers and the ability to produce convincing assumptions about a business the candidate barely knows.
Those abilities can all have value. The problem comes when they are treated as substitutes for the capability the business actually wants to assess.
A confident presenter may also be an exceptional strategist. They may equally be an exceptional presenter who has become very good at producing plausible answers from incomplete information.
At the other end of the process, somebody whose real strength is absorbing large amounts of information, finding patterns, questioning assumptions and reaching unusually strong conclusions may not produce their best work from a two page brief received forty eight hours before the interview.
If the role genuinely requires somebody to make major marketing decisions with virtually no information and deliver them immediately to an unfamiliar audience, then that is a perfectly reasonable capability to test.
Most senior marketing roles are more complicated than that.
Marketing needs people who think differently
This is where the research into neurodiversity becomes particularly interesting.
I would not argue that neurodivergent people inherently make better marketers. There is no sensible basis for turning one group of people into another marketing stereotype, and neurodivergent people clearly differ from one another just as everybody else does.
There are, however, cognitive characteristics reported by some neurodivergent people that overlap noticeably with qualities organisations regularly say they want from marketers. Research cited in the material behind this article includes pattern recognition, attention to detail, systematic thinking, intense focus, creativity, novel problem solving and the ability to approach problems from unusual perspectives.
One study examining divergent thinking and autistic traits produced an especially interesting result. Participants with higher autistic traits generated fewer ideas on average, but the ideas they produced were more unusual.
That has an obvious relevance to marketing.
The most valuable person in a strategy meeting is not always the person who produces twenty variations of the same answer. Sometimes it is the person who questions the assumption everybody else accepted at the beginning.
Marketing frequently needs that person.
We say we want cognitive difference, then assess behavioural conformity
A 2025 study conducted with people working across advertising, marketing, public relations and media found a substantial proportion of its sample identified as having some degree of neurodivergence. The precise figure should be treated carefully because the definition included formal diagnosis, self diagnosis and self perception, but the research provides useful evidence that neurodiversity is not a peripheral consideration for marketing and creative employers.
The recruitment problem appears when cognitive difference is valuable to the job but conventional behaviour becomes an unofficial requirement for reaching it.
CIPD guidance warns that traditional interviews can sometimes become more of a test of social competence than somebody’s ability to perform the actual work. It recommends greater care around things such as eye contact, ambiguous questions, time pressure and other behaviours that may have little relationship with job performance. Practical assessments, clearer questions and better preparation can give employers more useful evidence.
The UK Government’s Buckland Review of Autism Employment has raised similar concerns around conventional recruitment structures for autistic candidates, including unfamiliar interview environments, unseen questions and the expectation that somebody should respond in a particular way under pressure.
This creates a strange contradiction for marketing employers.
We advertise for people who see things differently, question assumptions and bring perspectives other people may have missed. Then we can assess them through a process that rewards rapid social performance, conventional communication and the ability to look comfortable while doing it.
The candidate who behaves most like our mental picture of a senior marketer is not automatically the person with the strongest marketing brain.
Better recruitment does not mean lowering the standard
I think this is where discussions about inclusive recruitment can sometimes lose commercially minded leaders.
Improving the interview process is not about giving somebody an easier route into the job. It is about making the assessment more accurate.
If a clearer question allows a candidate to provide better evidence of their ability, that improves the assessment. If advance information reduces irrelevant uncertainty and allows stronger strategic thinking to emerge, the business learns more about the candidate rather than less.
Research comparing autistic and non autistic candidates answering employment interview questions has found that making the required information more explicit can improve responses, with clearer questions also benefiting non autistic candidates.
That is a useful way to think about inclusive recruitment generally.
Clear instructions, sensible preparation time, relevant questions, transparent assessment criteria and appropriate ways to demonstrate capability do not reduce standards. They reduce the amount of irrelevant noise sitting between the employer and the thing it is actually trying to measure.
A more inclusive interview can therefore be a more rigorous interview.
A good strategist should not be rewarded for inventing data
One area where I think senior marketing assessment regularly goes wrong is the case study itself.
The candidate is given the company’s website and a short description of the business, then asked to develop a marketing strategy.
To provide a complete answer, they need to fill in enormous gaps.
They do not know the real customer economics. They have not seen the CRM. They do not understand channel performance. They have no reliable sales conversion data. They probably do not know retention, margin, attribution, available capability or what the board has already tried.
Yet the format encourages them to make recommendations anyway.
Eventually the candidate presents target audiences they inferred, commercial priorities they guessed, conversion problems they imagined and channel recommendations based on data they have never seen.
Once enough assumptions have been introduced, they might as well be reading Hansel and Gretel to the panel.
The business has not necessarily tested strategy. It may have tested how confidently somebody can create business fiction.
A stronger assessment gives the candidate enough evidence to demonstrate how they actually think.
That does not require sharing confidential business information. Data can be anonymised or indexed. The purpose is to provide enough reality for the candidate to identify patterns, question assumptions and make meaningful decisions.
For a senior marketing appointment, I would rather see somebody work through a sensible evidence pack and explain what they believe is happening, what they cannot yet know, what they would investigate next and where they would focus first.
That is much closer to the work they will eventually be paid to do.
Good judgement sometimes sounds like “I don't know yet”
There is another problem with asking candidates to solve an unfamiliar business in an interview.
The format can punish uncertainty.
A candidate feels pressure to answer every question because saying “I don’t know” sounds weak. They therefore make an assumption, build another assumption on top of it and eventually produce a confident recommendation.
In the actual job, I would often want the opposite behaviour.
A senior marketer should be able to recognise when the available evidence does not support a conclusion. They should know when another piece of information is required before committing budget or changing direction.
Someone saying, “I cannot answer that properly from what I have seen, but these are the three things I would examine before deciding,” may be demonstrating substantially better judgement than somebody who answers immediately.
Recruitment needs to create space for that kind of thinking.
Confidence is valuable. False certainty is not.
Score the reasoning, not the polish
If a business knows what it wants to assess, the scoring process becomes much more useful.
A task designed to test strategic diagnosis should examine whether the candidate can separate symptoms from underlying problems. If analytical ability matters, the assessment should show whether they can interrogate evidence and recognise weak data. If commercial judgement is important, the panel should look at how marketing decisions are connected to revenue, margin, customer economics and business priorities.
Creativity can also be assessed more intelligently. The question is not simply whether somebody produces the most ideas. It is whether they can produce useful alternatives that other people may not have considered and explain why those alternatives deserve attention.
The panel should agree those criteria before meeting the candidates.
Otherwise, the assessment can quickly become retrospective. Interviewers meet somebody, develop an impression and then use the formal scorecard to rationalise it afterwards.
Structured recruitment works better when the criteria are predetermined, candidates face reasonably consistent questions and interviewers record their views before the group begins influencing one another. The research underpinning this article supports exactly that kind of approach.
It does not remove judgement from recruitment. It gives judgement a better foundation.
“I just liked them” is not enough
There is nothing wrong with liking a candidate. Senior marketers need to work with people, build trust and influence colleagues, so interpersonal capability clearly has value.
But likeability needs to remain one piece of evidence rather than becoming the assessment itself.
The same applies to executive presence, confidence, energy and charisma. Those attributes may be relevant to a particular role, but they should not automatically receive greater weight simply because they are easier to observe during an interview.
Some of the most commercially useful marketing capabilities are much less visible in a sixty minute conversation.
Curiosity takes time to demonstrate. Pattern recognition requires information. Strategic judgement needs a real problem. Systems thinking becomes apparent when somebody can see how several apparently separate issues connect.
If those are the qualities the business genuinely needs, the process has to give candidates an opportunity to show them.
When nobody is good enough, examine the interview
There is another lesson marketing itself should teach us.
Marketers are accustomed to looking at conversion funnels. If large numbers of people reach the same point and repeatedly fail to progress, we investigate what is happening at that stage.
Recruitment should receive the same scrutiny.
If a business repeatedly attracts credible senior candidates and almost all of them fail the same assessment, it is possible that the market is simply weak. It is also possible that the assessment is producing the result.
If ten candidates are rejected for lacking strategic thinking, I would want to understand how strategic thinking was defined and how it was tested. If strong candidates continually withdraw after one particular stage, I would want to know why. If different directors consistently reach opposite conclusions about the same candidates, I would examine whether they ever agreed what good looked like in the first place.
Repeated recruitment failure is data.
The business should use it.
That does not mean changing the standard until somebody passes. It means checking whether the assessment is producing useful evidence about the standard the business actually needs.
Marketers would never run the same failing campaign indefinitely while insisting the audience was the problem. Recruitment deserves the same intellectual curiosity.
A better marketing interview starts with the capability
The answer is not to remove structure from interviews. In many cases, I would add more of it.
If the business needs strategic diagnosis, give candidates a realistic problem and sufficient evidence to assess it.
If it needs analytical ability, let them analyse something.
If creativity genuinely matters, create an environment where original thinking can emerge rather than assuming creativity will reveal itself through confident conversation.
If stakeholder management is critical, test the ability to explain disagreement and influence a decision.
If presentation under pressure genuinely forms an important part of the role, assess it deliberately rather than allowing every interview to become an accidental presentation test.
The method should follow the capability.
That sounds incredibly obvious when written down, but many recruitment processes have evolved in the opposite direction. The business begins with the interview format it has always used and then tries to fit the role into it.
I think senior marketing recruitment deserves more thought than that.
The best marketer may not be the best interviewee
Marketing is unusual because businesses often want people who notice what others have missed.
They want people prepared to question the brief, challenge an assumption, recognise a pattern, connect several unrelated issues and sometimes tell senior leadership that the problem is not where everybody thought it was.
Those characteristics are not always accompanied by perfect interview performance.
The most polished candidate may genuinely be the strongest person for the role. The point is not to distrust confidence or communication.
The point is to make sure the recruitment process can recognise somebody whose value appears in a different way.
Neurodiversity makes that problem particularly visible, but the principle applies much more widely. Introverted candidates, reflective thinkers, people from different professional backgrounds and candidates who simply refuse to invent answers they cannot support can all be disadvantaged by an assessment that mistakes immediate performance for capability.
The business should be asking whether its recruitment process is broad enough to identify excellent marketing thinking even when it does not arrive in the package the interview panel expected.
Marketing recruitment should be designed to produce evidence
My Marketing Recruitment Advisory work starts before candidate sourcing because the role and the assessment need to connect.
I want to understand what the business needs the appointment to change, which capabilities are required and how the recruitment process can generate evidence about those capabilities.
That might involve designing a better interview structure, creating a realistic candidate exercise, deciding what information candidates need, agreeing the scoring criteria with the leadership team or helping the panel separate genuinely relevant behaviours from things that simply feel familiar.
It is not about replacing recruitment agencies. A strong recruiter becomes considerably more effective when the brief is clear and the client knows what it needs to assess.
The recruitment adviser and recruiter are solving different parts of the problem.
The recruiter’s job is to find strong candidates.
My job is to help make sure the business has built a process capable of recognising the right one when they arrive.
Before you reject the candidate, make sure the test works
Marketing businesses spend enormous amounts of time trying to understand audiences, eliminate friction, design better customer experiences and measure whether their processes are working.
It seems strange not to bring some of that thinking into recruitment.
If you want somebody who thinks differently, make sure the interview does not quietly reward conformity. If you need strategic judgement, do not substitute presentation confidence for strategy. If you want evidence based thinking, give the candidate enough evidence to think with.
A good recruitment process should make it easier to identify the capabilities that matter and harder for irrelevant factors to distort the decision.
That is not a softer approach to marketing recruitment.
It is a more demanding one.
Before deciding the candidate is not good enough, make sure the interview is good enough to tell.