28 Questions to Ask When Hiring a Growth Marketer (2021 Edition)

28 Questions to Ask When Hiring a Growth Marketer (2021 Edition)

written by Houston Golden
Founder & CEO, BAMF Media
January 5th, 2021
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I’ve been the head of growth for several startups.

I’ve even evangelized growth for a couple of the fastest growing SaaS companies.

If there’s a role that’s hard to fill, without question, it’s the growth marketer, growth engineer, head of growth, growth lead, or whatever you call the open growth position at your company.

Sounds nice, right?

All companies need growth no matter what position they’re in. But it’s hard to hire for this role because it doesn’t just take experience to fill it, it takes the right experience.

The balance of technical skills with a deep understanding of marketing psychology, branding, and statistics. The complete blend.

If one piece is missing, the equation is off. The marketing doesn’t quite stick.

The traction doesn’t quite hit.

After hiring over ten different growth hackers, lead growth strategists, and growth engineers, I’ve learned to ask these 28 questions in every interview. When a candidate has experience in each piece, the interview goes from phone to in-house to offer letter in a matter of days.

1. What Competitor Analysis Tools Have You Used?

This is one of the most basic marketing skills, but also one of the most overlooked.

You need to analyze paid marketing, backlinking, and team structure of your competitors.

Competitor analysis shows you where the low-hanging fruit is in any market. The real skill comes in interpreting the data. You can be looking at the best opportunity in the world, but without the right knowledge of the marketing ecosystem, the numbers are just numbers.

A few of the tools I expect the interviewee to know include SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, and Alexa.

growth hacking questions

Then I expect them to interpret the data by seeing opportunities that tell me they can picture the full funnel.

For example, if they see no traffic from Facebook, they may come to the conclusion that it’s because it wasn’t a profitable channel for them.

However, an experienced marketer might notice they ran poor Facebook ad campaigns because the copy and images had no focus on the benefits of the product.

Rather than an obstacle, they’ll see an opportunity to take a startup from five figures in revenue to seven.

2. What’s Your Experience in Paid Social?

If a candidate doesn’t understand how to drive paid traffic to a landing page, then the chances of them discovering an opportunity from any analysis drops significantly. The two most important advertising avenues today are Facebook and Instagram.

A growth marketer with experience on other platforms is a plus, but because they’re not as widely used, we don’t place heavy consideration on them (e.g. Reddit, Pinterest, Quora).

But, this is still subject to your organization’s individual needs.

On the surface level, I look for a marketer who uses formulas for ad copy and has databases they regularly pull images from.

On a deeper level, I look for a marketer who has experience with bidding strategies, device targeting, location targeting, naming campaigns, working with “Lookalike audiences“, and custom audiences.

Then I ask about ad sequencing. This quickly separates the novices from the experts. I see whether they have knowledge about how to run video ad sequences and pure branding ads to generate a lower cost-per-lead.

But, that’s not all.

A good sign is if they talk about remarketing videos after a percentage of watch time and using PR features to warm an audience before running conversion ads.

Now that I know whether they can run ads, I check their ability to discover a new profitable audience using social media advertising. I propose a hypothetical situation where they have a product but have no defined customer base.

Their job?

To find it with social media advertising without wasting a ton of money.

Here, I look for them to mention the use of Facebook Audience Insights, Google Analytics, Amazon search, YouTube search, and a competitor analysis tool to help them identify this audience.

define growth hacking

If they bring up little-known resources like Quora questions or even the phrase “affinity score,” they earn bonus points. But all the bonus points in the world doesn’t mean anything if they don’t have skills in attributing campaigns. That means using a URL builder tool to ensure all paid traffic is tracked in Google Analytics.

That way you can say, “This ad campaign led to this conversion”.

Lastly, they should understand where to check for attribution in Google Analytics and how to adjust the conversion window that Facebook reports on.

3. Can You Run an Effective Google AdWords Campaign?

Google AdWords is the best friend of social media advertising.

It might be expensive, but it works.

Your campaigns on social often influence the hits on Google search. In other words, the more people hear about you on Facebook, the more likely they’ll click your Google AdWords’ ad.

One of the key attributes I look for in Google AdWords experience is the proper use of Ad Groups. Most often, you should only have one keyword per an Ad Group.

If they don’t know this, it immediately throws up a red flag. I also ask about device targeting, location targeting, and bidding strategies.

Then I ask them about their philosophy on bidding on company names and branded terms via Google search. I go deeper by probing into what they consider great bidding opportunities.

A top Google AdWords strategist knows that the end goal is a quality conversion with a likely prospect, but that usually doesn’t happen right away.

Often AdWords campaigns are set to take prospects to the site and then Facebook retargeting is implemented to bring them to the ultimate conversion.

This knowledge matters because by knowing the ecosystem around the conversion process, an AdWords strategist can make more precise bids that drive revenue for the companies they work with.

4. What’s Your Experience With Google Analytics and Data Studio?

Most marketers will throw on their resume that they know Google Analytics, but it’s often far from true.

Google Analytics provides a wealth of knowledge for how your marketing campaigns work from paid to organic. It will even tell you how well your individual site pages are optimized for different traffic sources.

Look.

We’re not looking for basic skills here, they need those to begin with.

I look for significant data sets that come out of the box and conclusions derived from hard data.

Start with goals.

Do they know how to set conversion goals in analytics and implement Google Tag Manager? If they don’t know how to implement either one, then that’s a big, bad sign. That means any goals whether capturing leads or turning email subscribers into paying customers have never been properly tracked.

I step into the finer details by asking about excluding IP addresses, identifying bot traffic, and creating proper dashboards as in Google Data Studio below to keep an eye on their company’s most important KPIs. Google Data Studio is a free tool that streamlines reporting for website analytics to Facebook and AdWords campaign performance.

questions to ask when hiring a growth marketer, 28 Questions to Ask When Hiring a Growth Marketer (2021 Edition)

If they have experience with Google Data Studio, then that tells me they’ve probably used analytics with strong depth and have given company presentations on their findings. This is a big plus if the position requires them to be customer- or C-level executive facing.

5. Do You Have Badass Data Analysis Skills?

I didn’t understand how important data analysis skills were. Then my boss asked me to use SQL for better attribution. When I started with SQL, I noticed that the numbers Facebook and Google Analytics gave me weren’t the right ones.

I had no choice but to take it directly from the source- that is, dive into the back-end database with SQL queries.

This not only allowed me to get better attribution but to design more effective marketing experiments. For example, I used SQL queries to discover that our Facebook login underperformed the standard email capture on our landing page when measured down the funnel.

The reason? Facebook emails were old which led to a low open rate on nurture emails.

If the candidate doesn’t understand SQL, they should at least know Excel. With Excel or Google Sheet knowledge, they can clean data faster, perform pivot table analysis, and index-match function to help combine relevant data.

If the candidate doesn’t even have a high-level understanding of Excel or Google Sheets, then they won’t survive as a growth marketer.

6. Can You Run A/B and Multivariate Tests to Optimize Pages?

I don’t care how much traffic you can throw at a website. If traffic doesn’t convert – it doesn’t convert. That’s why you need testing tools like Omniconvert and Optimizely because rarely does traffic convert well on the first run. It often takes many iterations of a website before visitors engage. Then even more before they convert.

Iterations on landing pages mean changes in copy, images, and email capture pop-ups.

Knowing how to test is equally as important as what you test. For example, if you’re running a viral campaign while you’re conducting A/B tests on a landing page to get sign-ups for the campaign, you’ll get skewed results.

The reason is at any time in the campaign you may experience an unusual uptick whether an influencer sharing it or getting featured in a publication.

The best way to get reliable data when testing?

Paid traffic. 

This often means Google AdWords and Facebook ads. By focusing on segmenting traffic based on the source, it provides more reliable insights. This way you can make changes to your website with confidence.

7. How Do You Study a Visitor’s or User’s Interaction With Your Website?

Before you dive into A/B testing your website, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit to grab.

You can see these opportunities using heatmapping and tools that record visitor and user sessions. The growth marketer should mention tools like Hotjar, Crazy Egg, and Full Story to help them do this.

questions to ask when hiring a growth marketer, 28 Questions to Ask When Hiring a Growth Marketer (2021 Edition)

They should be familiar with a variety of tools that can help with scaling your company.

8. What Can You Do To Improve This Organization in the Next 5 Minutes?

This is a question that I like because it helps assess two distinct things:

  • The amount of research they’ve done about your organization
  • How they respond to quick fire questions

Let’s deal with the first  part.

Almost everyone does research about an organization that they want to get into – that’s if they really want the job – but asking a question that is linked with direct actions, tells you if they’re already actively thinking about their future role.

And, that’s not all.

It also shows you potential solutions they have to the current challenges – or opportunities – that you’re facing. This gives you a quick look into the way think and is an indicator of the way they’ll fit in your company culture.

The second is an examination into the way their mind works.

Now, there is no right or wrong way to answer this question, but their answer gives you a quick look into their personality.

You want someone that’s geared forward.

Someone that’s a go-getter.

That’s the essence of growth.

To continuously strive to put yourself in a better place, to constantly find ways to improve the organization.

9. Can You Throw Up a Minimum Viable Test?

A growth marketer should understand minimum viable testing to validate ideas. That means using landing page tools like Unbounce, Instapage, and LeadPages that enable you to throw up a page with a unique value proposition in minutes.

questions to ask when hiring a growth marketer, 28 Questions to Ask When Hiring a Growth Marketer (2021 Edition)

This skillset can save you thousands of dollars on paying a designer and coder to validate an idea by building a custom landing page. Plus, it gives you the ability to run campaigns at scale whether webinars or ebooks without having a lag time in development to push initiatives forward.

10. Can You Build an Automation Sequence That Converts and Retains?

There are two halves to the acquisition equation. First, you need their contact information, then you need to nurture them until they pay. That may come in the form of email content with relevant value, SMS texting to remind them to jump on an educational webinar, or auto-adding them to a Facebook custom audience so they get remarketed with testimonials.

If you want a high-converting system, then you need marketing automation. That means a growth marketer should understand how to use tools like Zapier, Autopilot, Twilio, and Drips.

questions to ask when hiring a growth marketer, 28 Questions to Ask When Hiring a Growth Marketer (2021 Edition)

Why do we need this?

Marketing automation sequences are also critical to increase retention. Once again, ideally you’re using an email sequence segmented by user type and SMS texting to ensure they attend webinars.

Without marketing automation, even the best funnel will remain a complete mess. Find the marketers who can lock it all together.

11. What Other Areas Can We Pivot To?

There are plenty of ways to phrase this question, but here’s the gist of it:

What else can we do with our business model?

Now this is a fairly new question on this list, but the reason we put it here is because of what happened in 2020.

Not only was it one of the worst years in existence, but it was also a time that many businesses faced the brink of collapse.

Many learned to pivot, and many faced the need to change quickly. Your growth marketer should have ideas on how to pivot a business should the worst arrive.

Now don’t get me wrong.

There isn’t a right or wrong answer here. It’s a question to check for creativity.

You could take this question to the next level and ask your growth marketer how they survived the pandemic. In this way, you get to know more about their background as well.

12. Can You Write Social Copy That Pops?

Here’s a rule we follow:

If a growth marketer can’t write engaging posts on social media, then there’s little hope they can do it via email, on landing pages, or even SMS.

If they can write long-form copy that pops, then they have potential to cultivate the necessary skills to build an audience.

What I’ve noticed – the best marketers write the best social post copy, too. It’s not a surprise because copywriting is involved in almost every piece of marketing material. If you can’t hone the skill? Then you might as well throw your funnel down the drain.

13. How Would You Pitch a Journalist?

It’s a rare skill to pitch journalists and generate positive responses.

Features from fan pages to publications to podcasts provide value for early-stage startups needing to establish credibility and get their first wave of traffic hitting their site.

The art of pitching a journalist relies on the relevancy of your message to the journalist’s past writing, timing with current events, credibility, value proposition and headline writing skills.

If a growth marketer can get you features on-demand with this skillset, then they’ve made themselves an invaluable asset.

But, here’s what.

Ask if they already have existing connections with journalists.

This is an accurate signal of their capability to pitch in the past. Alternatively, they can also bring these connections to the table.

14. Can You Guide a Customer to Their First Win?

If the customer doesn’t get their desired result from your product, they’ll leave.

It’s as simple as that.

So what is your prospective growth hacker going to do to help customers on their journey with your company.

Many products – no matter how great – aren’t intuitive.

They require a little hand-holding. Products like Hubspot even have their own academy to help train marketers on how to use their platform.

A growth marketer who has experience creating user tutorials and onboarding systems of flow using software like Appcues or even Loom can provide a ton of value on the retention side.

Keep in mind, a product with poor retention is often not a valuable product at all.

questions to ask when hiring a growth marketer, 28 Questions to Ask When Hiring a Growth Marketer (2021 Edition)
  • For B2B – how can you work with customer service and marketing to create bespoke and personalized experiences for your customers?
  • For B2C – how can you create omnichannel experiences using multiple touch points and up customer retention?

To that end, a growth marketer should have enough experience to guide a new customer to their aha moment with your product while setting the right expectations every step of the way.

15. Can You Build a Website or Chrome Extension?

Look, we don’t mean that you hire growth hackers we a full stack of developmental knowledge.

But, what they do need to have a fundamental understanding on how websites and Chrome extensions function.

It could be Shopify stores, WordPress themes or Chrome extensions.

They should have deep enough knowledge to throw something up in a day and start selling.

If they can’t build it themselves, they should be able to outsource the project and have it built to their specifications. This means being able to check if the project was done timely aend using the right ools.

For example, I outsource Chrome extensions when I need something done.

If they don’t understand how to build or even outsource the construction of a platform, then they’ll have a lot of trouble understanding how to market it.

16. Have You Built a Strong Presence on a Social Channel From Scratch?

Those who’ve never built a strong social presence on a channel from scratch, don’t understand how much effort it takes. You’re often talking about hundreds and even thousands of hours of producing and distributing content to grow your presence.

Having a growth marketer on board who understands the level of work required to have social influence will enable you to set proper expectations, then exceed them.

But, more importantly, it is an indicator of a growth hacker’s tenacity.

You need someone on your team that can stay with you till the end of the project.

That’s commitment.

17. Have You Come Up With Original Marketing Tactics?

If you’re going to hire a growth marketer, they need to be a problem solver. The best problem solvers can create original solutions whether that’s a new way to clean a data set, scrape data, or run ads to custom audiences created from little-known locations.

Remember, they don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Sometimes it’s just about adding their own flair to an existing solution.

If the growth marketer can’t point to an original solution they’ve created, then I wouldn’t rely on them to solve your more difficult problems.

18.

19. What’s One Growth Framework You’ve Used?

There are many growth frameworks. 

Most include some variation of “cost, investment, expect results.”

A more advanced one would look like the following:

Objective — what is the purpose of the experiment?

Hypothesis — what is the key hypothesis of a successful experiment?

Experiment design — what steps do you envision the experiment going through?

Expected cost — monetary, marketing hours, product hours (important to determine whether you need to take time from developers and/or designers)

Expected results — your hypothesis on relevant metrics

Gut feeling score — on a 1 to 5 scale (with 5 being best), how much do you believe in this?

Results — actual results on relevant metrics

Insights — key insights in bullet points. Be specific.

Next steps — what new activities does the experiences lead to?

If a growth marketer has never used a growth framework, then you can’t expect them to prioritize their testing correctly. A growth framework should underlie everything a marketer does from start to finish.

20. Can You Design a Facebook Ad, Board Presentation, and Landing Page?

One of my pet peeves is a growth marketer who always needs to rely on a designer before they push marketing material live.

You don’t need a design by a world-renowned artist before you publish a Facebook ad or a landing page.

The reason is the best design doesn’t always lead to the lowest cost-per-conversion.

questions to ask when hiring a growth marketer, 28 Questions to Ask When Hiring a Growth Marketer (2021 Edition)

Sometimes the worst designs lead to better conversion costs – surprising, right? Knowing that fact and how to whip an MVP design is key for any marketer to survive in a world with constant A/B and multivariate testing.

Simple design skills should also be present, they don’t have to know how to use Photoshop, but knowing their way around Canva can make a big difference.

questions to ask when hiring a growth marketer, 28 Questions to Ask When Hiring a Growth Marketer (2021 Edition)

For presentations, here’s an excellent example that a candidate submitted to us during her interview process. If a growth marketer can bypass a designer, then you’ll run more experiments which ideally equates to more traction.

21. What is Growth Hacking (To You)?

Say what now?

There are no two people with the same version of growth hacking in their heads. By asking this question, you don’t just deal with the definition of growth hacking, but you check to see if your expectations of each other are aligned.

We’re not talking about specific expectations here, but the overall vision that they have about what they do. Growth hacking is not just a series of steps to follow or a list of procedures; it’s a lifestyle that consumes you.

Alignment is absolutely important in an organization.

22. What’s an Example of a Time You Broke a Rule and Achieved a Positive Result?

Clients set high expectations and sometimes they set rules that have to be broken in order to achieve results. And the end may or may not always justify the means.

So why ask this?

This is a question where you can gauge how powerful their moral standards are. And you can see how confident they are in their abilities by simply asking how far they’ve gone before.

23. What’s Your Super Power?

What ordinary thing do they do so well sets them apart from the rest? This is a question to stir creativity.

Asking for their super power is thought-provoking and it allows you to assess how they package themselves.

This is a question that tells you how they turn normal tasks in extraordinary ones, and why this is something that you need in your organization.

24. Where Do You Want To Be In 3 Years?

It’s a standard HR question, but it’s a great one for many reasons.

There are long-term goals and there are short-term goals, but 3 years seems to be a good midpoint for most people. What’s great about this question is that you can assess their focus; if their answer revolves around their specialization then you can see their passion for their craft.

You know that they’re striving to be better at what they’re doing.

However, it’s also a good show of ambition. You want ambitious people in your team, people who want to grow as much as they want to hack growth. These are people who want to be on the next level. Passion without goal setting has no direction; you want someone who has a clear cut set of goals.

You know that they will be motivated even if you don’t motivate them.

25. How Would You Define Growth Hacking To Your Grandma?

This is one of my favorite questions because it just works. 

You’ll find that a lot of people overthink this or fumble for an answer or get it wrong altogether. Sometimes, even if the response is great, it won’t be enough. This is because all you’re looking for is how they relate to someone who knows nothing about growth hacking.

You can’t expect your grandma to know about digital marketing. Neither is the position “growth hacker” going to ring any bells, but if you can’t explain it to them simply enough, then chances are, you haven’t really understood it well, either.

Growth hacking is a mindset. It’s about being relatable enough to any market that you’re set to go after in order to bring in results. If they aren’t relatable to your own grandma, then you’ve got a problem.

26. Tell Me About Yourself

Here’s a good one and a great video from the Harvard Business Review if you’re interested.

Why do we like this question in particular?

Well, for starters, it catches people off guard if they’re not used to it.

It’s funny how some people react to this, but if they answer it confidently it tells you a lot about how prepared an applicant is.

Believe it or not, there is a right way to approach this question – and answer it for that matter.

On the plus side, it also helps to know a little bit more about prospective growth marketers.

27. What’s Your Favorite Growth Hack?

This is a personal question that tells me a lot about a candidate. Whatever profession you’re in, there’s something that you like doing more than the rest of the standard procedures.

Here’s what.

You can tell a lot about a person by knowing what their favorite things are. Knowing what they like most about what we do will tell me a lot about them as a person.

28. What Would You Tell Your Client If You Weren’t Hitting Your KPIs?

This is an important question to ask because it determines what kind of person you’ll be hiring. Anyone can pull an excuse and try to appease a client – aren’t we all salesmen? – but what matters is that you can be honest with your client from the get-go.

But, there’s more.

This is also a question that will test the prospective candidate’s negotiation skills. After the client finds out that KPIs weren’t hit, they still need to provide a solution to these problems.

What’s The Most Important Part?

All the questions and skills in the world are great to implement, but honesty and willingness to learn matter more when looking for someone who has the potential to be a great growth hacker.

If they can’t be honest with you, then you can’t grow with them nor them with you. And if that’s the case, how can they drive growth?[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column]

About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
Connect with MeJoin the Facebook GroupFollow Me On Instagram

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10 comments

  • Avatar for Houston

    I am currently hiring a growth marketer for my IT staffing company ( https://echoua.com/ ) and your questions are very helpful. Thanks for sharing, Houston!

  • Avatar for Houston

    Holy Sh*t BAMF! Your dedication to 0% fluff continues to amaze me. THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING YOU DO FOR THIS COMMUNITY ????

  • Avatar for Houston

    Hey Houston, that’s a awesome guide, also from the perspective where to fill in gaps in skills within existing teams!

  • Avatar for Houston

    This is insanely helpful. Thanks Houston!

  • Avatar for Houston

    That’s a awesome guide, also from the perspective where to fill in gaps in skills within existing teams!

  • Avatar for Houston

    Holy Sh*t! Your dedication to 0% fluff continues to amaze me. THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING YOU DO FOR THIS COMMUNITY ????

  • Avatar for Houston

    This could also be read from this perspective…”If you can answer these 17 questions, you will be an in-demand growth-hacker.” or “If you are an up and coming growth-hacker, learn the skills required to answer these 17 questions and you will beat your competition – Every time!!!”

  • Avatar for Houston

    Practicing growth hacking by helping 3 friends/family at no cost. Looking forward to see what I can learn from running this list 4 or 5 times.

    Thank you for this article ????????☝????️????????‍♂️

    http://www.slckstck.com <— work in progress

  • Avatar for Houston

    This could also be read from this perspective…”If you can answer these 17 questions, you will be an in-demand growth-hacker.” or “If you are an up and coming growth-hacker, learn the skills required to answer these 17 questions and you will beat your competition – Every time!!!”

  • Avatar for Houston

    Practicing growth hacking by helping 3 friends/family at no cost. Looking forward to see what I can learn from running this list 4 or 5 times.

    Thank you for this article ????????☝????️????????‍♂️

    http://www.slckstck.com <— work in progress

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