mbfinotti/advertising-skillsContrôle réussi
SKILL DETAIL
advertising-hiring
mbfinotti/advertising-skills/advertising-hiring
Build the complete hiring packet for a paid-advertising role - the rung decision (media buyer vs performance marketer vs growth marketer; creative strategist is its own role), an outcome scorecard, a 2-3 round interview loop with a judgment-first question bank, a time-boxed in-interview work sample, and a 30-60-90 ramp with staged spend authority. For the marketing leader or founder recruiting. Use for "hire a media buyer", "interview questions for a performance marketer", "paid media work sample", "scorecard for our first ad hire", or "30-60-90 for a new paid media hire". Does not source candidates, post jobs, run applicant tracking, or write offers, and does not cover the candidate side - that is the sibling mbfinotti/advertising-skills@advertising-career.
Installations · 180Voir la source
Installation
npx skills add https://github.com/mbfinotti/advertising-skills --skill advertising-hiring
Fichiers du skill
SKILL.md
Dernière synchronisation · 24 sept. 2026
evals/evals.json›
{
"skill_name": "advertising-hiring",
"evals": [
{
"id": 1,
"prompt": "We're Maren & Oak, a DTC home-goods brand doing about $9M a year. I've been running our Meta and Google accounts myself at roughly $80k/month combined, and we want to launch TikTok next quarter. I'm ready to make our first dedicated ad hire and I think the obvious move is a really strong Meta media buyer, since Meta is 70% of spend. Can you scope the role and write the requirements? Conversion tracking is mostly right I think - we've never actually reconciled it against Shopify. Panel would be me (founder) and our head of ops, and we can realistically run two rounds. I need someone producing this quarter, and I want this to be an in-house capability we keep long term.",
"expected_output": "A role-scoping response that names the rung in writing, overrides the proposed single-channel specialist with the generalist performance-marketer default for a first hire, and delivers a scorecard-shaped role definition with mission, ranked dated outcomes, and competencies.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Names the rung as an explicit written decision before or at the head of the role definition",
"Recommends the performance-marketer generalist rung, overriding the user's proposed Meta-specialist media buyer",
"Grounds the override in the first-hire rule: the first dedicated hire owns measurement and channel choice, never a single channel",
"Uses the unreconciled Shopify tracking as evidence the seat must own measurement",
"States that a dedicated Meta buyer gets added alongside the generalist later once spend passes roughly $50k/month or three-plus channels run, rather than hired instead of the generalist now",
"Names the growth-marketer rung as the option the default ordering starves, with the condition that would promote it",
"States which condition moved the pick off the default rung, or states that nothing did",
"Writes a one-line mission for the role",
"Lists 3 to 6 ranked outcomes, each with a date",
"Includes a measurement-validation outcome such as platform-versus-backend reconciliation among the top outcomes",
"Lists 4 to 6 competencies",
"Separates must-haves (capped around 5 to 7) from nice-to-haves, with disqualifiers listed separately",
"Excludes platform certifications from the must-have bar and from competence scoring",
"Warns that a TikTok channel verdict needs 3 to 6 months, against the producing-this-quarter pressure",
"Fits the interview loop into the two rounds the panel can run"
]
},
{
"id": 2,
"prompt": "I run Brindle Analytics, a 4-person bootstrapped B2B SaaS at $21k MRR. We can put about $3,500/month into LinkedIn ads. Honestly our positioning is still in flux - we're rewriting the homepage for the third time and pricing changes almost monthly. I want to hire a part-time performance marketer in the next 3 weeks, and if the ads don't show pipeline within 6 weeks we'll shut the channel down and let them go. Build me the hiring packet: scorecard, interview loop, and a work sample.",
"expected_output": "A response that runs the hire-at-all gate, recommends against hiring now on three named gate failures, deletes the hire from the menu until fundamentals are fixed, and ranks agency, freelancer, and self-manage as the bridge instead of building the requested packet.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Applies a hire-at-all gate before building anything, instead of delivering the packet as asked",
"Recommends against making the hire now",
"Cites the monthly budget below the roughly $5,000 threshold as a gate failure",
"Cites missing marketing fundamentals (positioning and pricing in flux) as a gate failure",
"Cites the 6-week verdict window as a gate failure, since judging a channel takes 3 to 6 months",
"States the hire is deleted from the menu until the missing fundamentals are fixed, not merely deferred or ranked last",
"Ranks the alternatives in the order agency, then freelancer, then self-manage",
"States the ranking basis as channel coverage bought per hour of the founder's own time",
"Acknowledges the trade-off: the agency costs the most money and control while consuming the fewest founder hours",
"Flags the freelancer's worker-classification exposure as a compliance cost the agency route does not carry",
"Warns against comparing agency retainer fees to in-house salaries, directing the comparison to hours returned and channels covered",
"States the in-house hire remains the destination once the gate passes - the alternatives are a bridge, not a replacement",
"Does not proceed to build the requested scorecard, interview loop, and work sample for an immediate hire",
"Points out the 6-week judgment plan would fire any hire before a ramp or channel verdict could complete"
]
},
{
"id": 3,
"prompt": "We're Copperline, a B2B fintech, hiring a senior performance marketer. Here's my draft screen. Must-haves: has managed $250k+/month, Google Ads certified, Meta Blueprint certified. Interview questions: (1) What's the formula for CTR and for ROAS? (2) What's your favourite bid strategy? - I want to hear target ROAS. (3) How does Performance Max work under the hood? (4) Walk me through best practices for structuring an account. A candidate who answers with clean best practices gets top marks. Tighten this into a question bank and scorecard for me.",
"expected_output": "A rebuilt question bank that converts the spend figure into a paired filter, strips certifications from the bar, replaces recall questions with judgment probes including the two senior filters, and inverts the scoring so best-practices recitation fails.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Reclassifies spend-under-management as a filter, never a seniority level or bar",
"Pairs the $250k/month screen with a walk-me-through-a-campaign-you-killed probe",
"Pairs the spend screen with an incrementality-versus-attribution probe",
"Removes both certifications from must-haves and from competence scoring, treating them as a floor rather than a signal",
"Notes free certifications can be earned after hire in days, so a strong candidate is never rejected over a missing one",
"States that if partner compliance genuinely requires a certification, the req must say so explicitly so it is not read as a skill bar",
"Rejects the favourite-bid-strategy question as having one right answer - the strong answer is it-depends reasoning, not the target-ROAS reply the user wants to hear",
"Inverts the scoring rule: an answer citing best practices or default methods as its rationale fails rather than earning top marks",
"Replaces formula-recall questions with questions probing reasoning about relationships between metrics",
"Includes a ROAS-drop diagnostic filter expecting the fixed order: measurement first, then media, then creative, then post-click",
"Includes the backend discriminator: low ROAS with stable backend sales points to tracking or attribution gaps, not true underperformance",
"Includes the second senior filter: translating platform ROAS into break-even ROAS and MER, noting platform ROAS is biased upward because platforms double-claim conversions",
"Maps every question to exactly one competency",
"Includes at least one exaggerator probe, such as who they admire in the field, what publications they read, or claimed mastery of the newest automated campaign types as a lying signal",
"Weights commercial reasoning and communication over technical recall, with any numeric weighting labelled a house convention rather than a published standard"
]
},
{
"id": 4,
"prompt": "At Fernhollow, a DTC supplements brand spending about $60k/month, we're hiring a paid media manager. Our current final round is a take-home: candidates get logins to a copy of our ad account and 4 hours to build a full media plan and restructure proposal, unpaid, due within 3 days. Two finalists just withdrew this month. Finance has rejected any budget for paid candidate work. Our head of growth is a former agency buyer who is great at reading accounts live. Fix our work-sample stage.",
"expected_output": "A work-sample redesign that removes the unpaid take-home outright, installs a time-boxed live screen-share audit inside the interview, deletes the paid trial and job shadow by name for lack of budget, and bakes in rubric-first grading with deliberate ambiguity.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Removes the multi-hour unpaid take-home outright, rather than shortening it or making it optional",
"Attributes the two withdrawals to the format: senior candidates decline unpaid exercises, silently shrinking the funnel",
"Recommends the live screen-share account audit as the replacement, enabled by the panelist who can grade an audit in real time",
"Keeps the exercise inside the interview, time-boxed to 60 to 90 minutes",
"Deletes the paid trial from the menu by name because paid candidate work has no budget approval",
"Deletes the job shadow on the same no-budget constraint",
"Records the deleted formats by name in the packet so they cannot resurface as an unscoped round",
"Specifies synthetic or anonymized account data for the exercise",
"Requires the grading rubric to exist before the first candidate attempt",
"Builds deliberate ambiguity or insufficient data into the case and scores naming it as a top answer",
"Budgets explicit debrief time, treating reasoning walked aloud as more signal than the artifact",
"Names the paid trial as the option the ranking starves, with a condition that would promote it, such as a senior hands-on seat, an unverifiable portfolio, or a candidate already contracting elsewhere",
"Offers the data-table case as the near-equivalent in-interview alternative",
"Requires anonymization of former-employer account data, scored as part of the answer, wherever an own-work presentation is used as fallback",
"Notes the live format defeats third-party audit tooling and generated output"
]
},
{
"id": 5,
"prompt": "Halyard Media, a 30-person agency, is hiring two paid search managers for our bench. Current process: 5 rounds - recruiter screen, hiring manager chat, panel one, panel two covering the same competencies as panel one, and a culture dinner. After each round the panel hops on a call and agrees a 1-10 gut score together before anyone writes anything down. Candidates keep dropping out mid-process, and the panel always converges on the most polished talker. Overhaul our loop and our scoring.",
"expected_output": "A loop compressed to 2-3 rounds with each competency owned by exactly one stage, plus scoring discipline: behavioral anchors per point, evidence-cited scores submitted independently before debrief, and commercial reasoning weighted over recall.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Cuts the loop from 5 rounds to at most 3",
"Eliminates the duplicated panel by assigning each competency to exactly one stage",
"Produces a stage map naming which interviewer owns which competencies, one lane per panelist",
"Requires interviewers to submit scores independently before any group debrief",
"Diagnoses the convergence on the polished talker as the product of missing behavioral anchors plus shared scoring",
"Replaces bare numeric anchors with a role-specific behavioral description per anchor point",
"Requires every submitted score to cite a quote or concrete example",
"Directs debrief time to where scores diverge, with disqualifying signals recorded separately from scores",
"Weights commercial reasoning and communication over technical recall",
"Labels any numeric competency weighting as a house convention, not a published standard",
"Recommends standardized questions across candidates as the mechanism that lets the loop shrink without losing signal",
"Connects the mid-process drop-out to loop length and keeps any exercise inside a 60 to 90 minute session",
"Introduces no multi-hour unpaid take-home anywhere in the redesigned loop"
]
},
{
"id": 6,
"prompt": "Our new performance marketer starts Monday at Quillwater, a B2C mobile app spending about $120k/month. IT policy gives new hires ad account access at day 30 after security probation and analytics access at day 60. My COO wants them to commit to a CAC target in week 2, and to show a big win - scaling our best campaign 50% - inside the first month. Draft the 30-60-90.",
"expected_output": "A 30-60-90 that overturns staged access in favor of day-one access with staged spend authority, sets a written week-one spend threshold, gates full authority on a validated measurement audit, and replaces the scaling-win and early-CAC demands with a tracking-first ramp.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Overrides the IT policy: all tool access granted on day one, with delayed access named as an avoidable cause of a slow start",
"Distinguishes staged authority from staged access - access is full from day one while authority is staged",
"Sets an explicit spend-approval threshold in week one, written as a number rather than left as a vibe",
"Stages weeks 1-2 as shadow: observe, ask, audit, no changes",
"Stages weeks 3-6 as co-sign, or independent only under a small explicit cap",
"Grants independent authority within a written cap by day 60",
"Grants full authority by day 90",
"Makes full authority contingent on a validated measurement audit - no audit, no full authority",
"Rejects the week-2 CAC commitment: the measurement audit precedes any performance target",
"Rejects the month-one 50% scaling win: the first win is a tracking fix or contained optimization, never a scaling bet",
"Writes no day-30 milestone that requires a resolved experiment, on learning-phase and statistical-power grounds",
"Includes a day-one access checklist that covers the mobile measurement partner, since this is an app advertiser",
"Ends the ramp with watch areas as a section distinct from the goals",
"Labels the authority ladder and milestone skeleton as this plan's own synthesis rather than a published standard"
]
},
{
"id": 7,
"prompt": "Deckhouse Systems is B2B infrastructure software with a 6-month sales cycle, and we're hiring a senior paid media lead. Our best finalist spent six years scaling a DTC cosmetics brand from $2M to $40M - genuinely impressive. My VP of Sales says reject: ecommerce people don't get B2B. My CMO says take them: great media buying is great media buying, it all transfers. Who's right, and what do we do in the final round?",
"expected_output": "A verdict that rejects both the auto-reject and the it-all-transfers positions, prescribes a probe-and-weight final round testing pipeline-versus-first-order instincts, and sets segment-appropriate ramp expectations.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Rejects both positions: neither auto-reject nor assume-it-transfers",
"States that buying instincts do not transfer between segments by default",
"Recommends probing and weighting the segment gap in scoring rather than treating it as a disqualifier",
"Names the instinct set the DTC candidate brings: first-order economics such as ROAS against break-even, contribution margin, CAC, or creative-testing velocity",
"Names what the B2B seat must own instead: pipeline metrics, cost per qualified lead or cost per SQL over a long cycle",
"Notes B2B clicks cost several times more yet cost-per-SQL can still win",
"Identifies the documented mis-hire pattern: a DTC buyer optimizing toward first-order conversion on a six-month pipeline",
"Adds a final-round situational probe on lead quality or attribution over a long sales cycle",
"States the hiring process itself is identical across segments - only the owned instincts and metrics change",
"Sets a 3 to 6 month channel-verdict expectation for the ramp if the candidate is hired",
"Defines a watch area around optimizing toward cheap leads or first-order conversions instead of SQL quality",
"Includes the killed-campaign question or the incrementality-versus-attribution probe to test judgment beyond segment familiarity"
]
},
{
"id": 8,
"prompt": "I'm budgeting headcount at Lanternfish, a Series B, US-remote company. Two questions before I open the req for a performance marketer with about 7 years in paid media. One: what salary should I plan? A friend who runs an in-house team told me people with that experience clear $170k in-house, so I should just budget that. Two: what's the industry's turnover rate so I can model backfill risk? Just give me the numbers.",
"expected_output": "Comp guidance quoted with source and date and labelled directional, the $170k anchor challenged as an outlier-skewed sample, turnover quoted as an 18-45% range across named sources instead of a single rate, and an HR/legal flag on compensation terms.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Attaches a named source and a date to every salary figure quoted",
"Labels every salary figure directional rather than definitive",
"Quotes the US median for 6 to 9 years of experience at about $100,000",
"Challenges the $170,000 anchor: flags the in-house 6-9-year figure as a small, outlier-skewed sample never to be quoted unqualified",
"Notes in-house out-earns agency at comparable experience bands as a directional pattern",
"Flags the underlying salary survey as self-selected with a small or shrinking sample",
"Refuses to give a single industry turnover number",
"Quotes turnover as a range of roughly 18 to 45 percent depending on source, cohort, and year",
"Names at least two distinct sources behind different turnover figures",
"Notes early-tenure churn in the first 45 to 90 days points at onboarding and scoping, making part of the backfill risk controllable through the ramp",
"Flags compensation terms as needing HR or legal review",
"Frames the band as scoping input to pressure-test the funded level, not as an offer recommendation",
"Carries the leveling insight that top earners own business outcomes (revenue contribution, margin) rather than campaign operations, recommending the scorecard weight outcome ownership"
]
},
{
"id": 9,
"prompt": "We hired a paid media manager at Copperbeam Outdoor 9 weeks ago and my co-founder wants them gone. The facts: they didn't get Meta admin access until week 3 because the agency handover dragged, we never agreed what they could change without sign-off so they ping me for everything, and their two test campaigns came back inconclusive. They also spent their entire first month rebuilding our conversion tracking, which honestly feels like stalling - revenue is what matters. Help me build the case to let them go, or tell me I'm wrong.",
"expected_output": "A response that declines to build the termination case, attributes the early-tenure failure to onboarding and scoping defects, defends the tracking rebuild as the correct first win, and prescribes fixing the ramp with a later review point inside the 3-6 month window.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Tells the user they are wrong and does not build the termination case",
"Attributes struggle in the first 45 to 90 days to onboarding and scoping, not the candidate",
"Names the week-3 access delay as a known, avoidable onboarding failure",
"Names the missing spend-approval threshold as the cause of the constant sign-off pinging",
"Defends the tracking rebuild as the correct first win - a tracking fix, not stalling",
"States the measurement audit must precede any performance target or commitment",
"Explains the inconclusive tests via learning phases and statistical power, which cannot resolve inside 9 weeks",
"Cites the 3 to 6 month window before a channel verdict is possible",
"Prescribes the fix: set the written spend threshold now and restart the staged authority ladder (co-sign, then independent within a cap, then full)",
"Makes full spend authority contingent on the validated measurement audit",
"Recommends a contained optimization as the next win, never a scaling bet",
"Proposes a concrete later review point consistent with the 3 to 6 month window instead of an immediate decision"
]
},
{
"id": 10,
"prompt": "Sable & Fir is a DTC apparel brand spending $200k/month across Meta and TikTok. Our media buying is solid, but creative is the bottleneck: we ship 4 new concepts a month and win rate keeps falling. Plan A: promote our best media buyer to a senior-buyer-plus-creative-strategy hybrid with a $10k bump. Plan B: hire a mid-level creative person for about $75k and have them report to the buyer. Their portfolios all look amazing these days, so screening should be easy. Which plan do we run?",
"expected_output": "A response that rejects both plans, scopes creative strategist as its own senior req with directional sourced comp, treats portfolios as unreliable under generated work, and prescribes a paid work sample plus a wins-and-losses debrief.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Rejects the hybrid promotion: the creative strategist is a separate role bridging creative and buying, not a senior buyer with extra duties",
"Identifies the trigger condition: creative volume as the bottleneck opens a dedicated creative-strategist req",
"Describes the role as owning the strategy connecting research, creative direction, and performance data across designers and buyers",
"Rejects the cheap mid-level plan, warning that underpaying this seat is the fast way to burn the ad budget",
"Quotes the US creative-strategy compensation benchmark of $180,000 to $250,000-plus with source and date, labelled directional",
"Distinguishes the creative strategist (drives performance learning) from a creative director (drives brand leadership) as the commonly misdiagnosed bottleneck",
"Treats the polished portfolios as unreliable evidence, because generated portfolios have defeated portfolio screening for creative-strategy skill",
"Recommends a paid assignment or paid trial as the work sample for this seat, named as a deliberate promotion of a format the default ranking starves",
"Pairs the work sample with a debrief on past creative wins and losses",
"Keeps any real-work assignment paid, never an unpaid take-home brief",
"Defines the role's owned metrics around creative performance: hook rate, CTR by unit, or creative win rate",
"Notes the distinct senior creative-strategist seat is largely a DTC phenomenon, fitting this brand's segment"
]
},
{
"id": 11,
"prompt": "Quick one - I've got a final-round interview Friday for a growth marketer role at a fintech, $150k base, and they mentioned the loop includes a live account audit. Can you build me a prep plan and a scorecard of what they'll grade me on?",
"expected_output": "A response that recognizes the user is a candidate rather than a hiring manager and routes them to the candidate-side sibling skill instead of producing an employer-side hiring packet.",
"files": [],
"expectations": [
"Identifies the user as a candidate, not a hiring manager",
"Routes them to the candidate-side sibling skill (advertising-career) for interview prep and progression",
"Does not deliver an employer-side hiring packet (rung decision, req, candidate-evaluation scorecard, ramp) as the response",
"Frames any guidance offered from the candidate's side, such as what a live account audit round tests"
]
}
],
"trigger_queries": [
{ "query": "We're making our first paid media hire - where do I start?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Interview questions for a senior performance marketer", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Build a scorecard for our first ad hire", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Should our first ads hire be a media buyer or a growth marketer?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "30-60-90 plan for a new paid media manager", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Design a work sample for a PPC candidate that isn't an unpaid take-home", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "My candidate says they managed $2M a month in ad spend - how do I verify that's real seniority?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "What should we pay a performance marketer with 8 years of experience?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "We're a DTC brand spending $70k/month with no dedicated buyer - scope the role for us", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Job requirements for an in-house paid social manager", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "How many interview rounds should we run for a media buyer hire?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Our head of growth wants to give candidates a 4-hour take-home media plan - good idea?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Write interview questions that separate real media buyers from people who just talk well", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Is a Google Ads certification a reasonable must-have for our PPC hire?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Hiring a creative strategist - is that just a senior media buyer with taste?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Should we hire in-house or use an agency for our paid ads?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Our new ad hire starts Monday - what access and spend authority do they get?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "How do I interview someone for Meta ads when I don't know Meta ads myself?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Ramp plan with staged spend authority for a new media buyer", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Our budget is $4k/month - is it too early to hire someone for ads?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "The finalist for our B2B paid role comes from ecommerce - is that a dealbreaker?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "What outcomes should go in the job scorecard for a performance marketing manager?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Red flags to watch for when interviewing paid media candidates", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Help me decide between two finalists for our paid search manager role", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Our first marketing hire will mostly run ads - how do I scope the seat?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "How long before I can judge whether my new media buyer is any good?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Our paid media hire has been here two months with nothing to show - should we fire them?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Define must-haves versus nice-to-haves for a growth marketer req", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "What's a fair work sample for a senior paid media candidate who refuses homework?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "The panel keeps picking the smoothest talker - fix our ad-hire interviews", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Interview loop design for a paid media team lead", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Questions to ask a performance marketer about attribution in an interview", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "When does it make sense to add a dedicated media buyer to the team?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "We spend $300k/month across four channels and one generalist can't keep up - who do we hire next?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Spec out the role definition for our first performance marketer", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "How much spend authority should a brand-new media buyer get in month one?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "What does a good day-90 milestone look like for a paid media hire?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Screening questions to filter out people who exaggerate their ad experience", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Hiring for paid: how do I test judgment instead of tool knowledge?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Our agency wants to hire two more buyers for the bench - build the interview loop", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Turnover rate for paid media people - what should I budget for backfill?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Should I make the candidate audit our actual ad account live in the interview?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Can I ask a candidate to present campaigns from their last job? Any risk in that?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "What's the difference between hiring a performance marketer and a growth marketer?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "My cofounder wants five interview rounds for our ads hire - talk me down or back him up", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "New paid media hire: what should their first win be?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "We got burned by our last media buyer hire - what did we probably do wrong?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Checklist before the final round for our paid media manager hire", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "How do I know if we need a creative strategist or just better media buying?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "A candidate with only agency experience is applying for our in-house paid role - what should I probe?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Evaluate this idea: we pay candidates to run our ad account for a week as the final test", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "What competencies matter when hiring a B2B demand gen paid specialist?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "I'm the founder and I'll interview every candidate myself - structure the process for our ads role", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Make me a rubric for grading candidate answers on a ROAS-drop scenario", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Do certifications actually matter when hiring PPC people?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Our first ad hire ran one channel well but tracking never got built - what went wrong and how do we rehire?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "need to hire someone to run our ads, no clue where to start", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Please draft an evaluation framework and structured interview guide for a Senior Paid Media Manager requisition.", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "We're interviewing someone Thursday who'll manage a $150k monthly budget across Google and Meta - what should we ask?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "How much of our ad budget should the new hire be allowed to touch in their first month?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "What does a hiring scorecard look like for a performance role that owns CAC?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Two candidates: one ran $1M/month at an agency, one ran $80k/month in-house - who's more senior?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Design a data case exercise for paid media candidates that we can grade in an hour", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Our recruiter drafted a JD for a digital marketing ninja - rewrite it into something real for paid media", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "When hiring for ads, how do I check they understand incrementality and not just platform dashboards?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Is it a mistake to hire a TikTok specialist as our first marketing hire?", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "Onboarding plan for a performance marketer joining a team with messy tracking", "should_trigger": true },
{ "query": "How do I break into media buying with no experience?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Prep me for my performance marketer interview next week", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Review my PPC resume", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "What should I ask for in salary negotiation for the media buyer offer I just got?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Portfolio ideas to land a creative strategist job", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "I'm a media buyer - how do I get promoted to performance marketer?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "What certifications should I get to become a PPC specialist?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "How do I answer the walk-me-through-a-campaign-you-killed question as a candidate?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Career switch from SEO into paid media - what's the roadmap?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "I have a live account audit in my final round - how do I practice for it?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Our ROAS dropped 40% last week - diagnose the account", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Why did our CPA double after the iOS update?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Meta says 500 purchases and Shopify says 320 - reconcile the gap", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Audit our conversion tracking before Friday's launch", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Our pixel is double-firing - fix the deduplication", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Set up server-side tracking for our ads", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Split $100k a month across Google, Meta, and TikTok", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Set a maximum allowable CAC policy for the company", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Is a 3.2 ROAS good for DTC skincare?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Our campaign is pacing 40% over budget mid-month - what do I do?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "When is our winning campaign ready to scale from $2k to $10k a day?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Build kill-switch thresholds for our ad spend", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Write a creative brief for our new UGC campaign", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Score these five video hooks and tell me which deserve test budget", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Is this ad fatigued or is it the auction? CTR is down 30%", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Generate ad copy variants for our SaaS free trial", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Write UGC scripts for a fitness app", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Design a creative testing plan with proper sample sizes", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Build a swipe file from our competitors' ads", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Which platforms should a B2B startup advertise on?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Build a lookalike seed list from our customer data", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Design our retargeting funnel with exclusion logic", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Map the buying committee for our enterprise offer and how to target each role", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Layer our prospecting audiences for Meta", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Build a negative keyword list from this search terms report", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Should we consolidate our 40 campaigns into 5?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Choose a bidding strategy for our lead gen campaigns", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Audit the landing page our ads send traffic to", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Promote our CEO's LinkedIn posts as paid ads", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Adapt our ad copy for AI chat surfaces", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "What paid media newsletters and podcasts should I follow?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Interview questions for a backend engineer", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Build a scorecard for hiring our first sales rep", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "30-60-90 for a new SDR", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Hiring a content marketer - scope the role", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Structure the interview loop for a product designer", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Work sample ideas for a data analyst candidate", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Should our first marketing hire be a brand marketer or a content lead?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Compensation benchmarks for software engineers in Austin", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "How do I hire a social media manager for organic content?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Scorecard for an SEO manager hire", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Interview questions for a lifecycle and email marketer", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "We're hiring a marketing ops person - what should the loop look like?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Write the offer letter for our new media buyer", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Where do I post the job to reach good media buyers?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Best applicant tracking system for a small marketing team?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Source candidates for our paid media role on LinkedIn", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Draft the employment contract for a freelance media buyer", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Set up recruiting pipeline stages in our ATS for the ads role", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Negotiate the salary with the media buyer candidate we chose", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Run Meta ads to attract applicants for our warehouse jobs", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Set up a LinkedIn recruitment ad campaign for engineering roles", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Plan an employer-branding ad campaign to improve our hiring funnel", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Our ad agency is underperforming - how do I run the QBR and renegotiate the retainer?", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Write the RFP to select a new media agency", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "Kickoff checklist for onboarding our new ad agency", "should_trigger": false },
{ "query": "How do I offboard our freelance media buyer and transition the accounts?", "should_trigger": false }
]
}
references/question-bank-and-scorecard.md›
# Question Bank and Scorecard
## Loop shape
Real loops in this field are short. Duane Brown (Take Some Risk), from the PPCChat "Hiring & Getting Hired in PPC" roundup (hosted by Julie Bacchini, April 19, 2022): "We redid our whole process in the summer 2020. Went from 3-4 interviews down to 2 interviews. Standardized all questions AND ASKED BETTER QUESTIONS."
Governance patterns from the same roundup:
- "I have a team that does the screening, and I get the final say" (Jon Kagan).
- "At all levels, we create a hiring committee (including seniors)" (Pauline Jakober, Group Twenty Seven).
Navah Hopkins (Search Engine Journal, September 4, 2025) frames evaluation as three buckets rather than named stages: paid search, paid social, and general marketing plus culture fit. Practical shape: 2-3 stages - screen, time-boxed technical/case, peer or founder round.
## Reasoning over recall
The core scoring principle: reasoning over recall.
- Navah Hopkins: "You might be asked, 'Why would you structure a campaign/account this way?' Never cite 'best practices' or default methods as your rationale. Interviewers want reasoning rooted in context, goals, and a test-and-learn approach."
- Kasim Aslam (Solutions 8) builds the trap into the question itself: "What's your favourite bid strategy? It's a trick question, it depends on the situation."
- Marc Barraza frames what to reward: "I care less about someone knowing the formula for CTR and more about how they think about the relationship between CTR and other metrics."
The strong answer is "it depends, here is my reasoning"; the weak answer is best-practice recitation.
## Spending the interview minutes
Order the bank by judgment revealed per minute asked: `two senior filters > exaggerator probes > killed-campaign and incrementality probes > named situational questions > commitment screen`. The senior filters lead because they decide the hire, not because they are cheap - they are the most expensive questions here to ask and to grade. The axes disagree:
- value (separates a senior operator from a merely fluent one): `two senior filters > killed-campaign and incrementality probes > named situational questions > exaggerator probes > commitment screen`
- effort (minutes asked, plus the interviewer expertise needed to grade the answer): `two senior filters > killed-campaign and incrementality probes > named situational questions > commitment screen > exaggerator probes`
A default, not a law - re-rank it against the pool and the panel you actually have:
- An unvetted inbound pool promotes the exaggerator probes into the screen; a referral, or a bench left over from a previous search, demotes them.
- A panel with nobody able to grade a ROAS-drop answer moves the senior filters into the work sample rather than the interview.
- A seat that will not touch measurement for six months drops the MER filter below the situationals.
Structure per competency: 2-3 behavioral questions, 1-2 situational, plus follow-up probes ("What was the outcome?", "What was your specific role?", "What would you do differently?"). Add candidate-specific questions generated from each resume's gaps.
## 1. The two senior filters
**Diagnosing a ROAS drop.** Expect the fixed diagnostic order:
1. Measurement: pixel/server-event deduplication, platform-versus-backend revenue gap.
2. Media: CPM, frequency, audience saturation.
3. Creative fatigue: hook rate, hold rate, CTR by unit.
4. Post-click: landing page, conversion rate.
The discriminator (Bigeye Agency): "Low ROAS with flat backend sales points to true underperformance. Low ROAS with stable backend sales points to tracking or attribution gaps." Jordan Glickman assigns the audit across roles with a "within 24 hours of a ROAS alert" completion target - useful for probing how a senior candidate coordinates, not just diagnoses.
**MER versus ROAS.** The strong answer translates platform ROAS into business reality:
- Break-even ROAS: the per-channel minimum.
- MER (total revenue over total marketing spend): the business-level truth.
- Acquisition MER (new-customer revenue over total spend): the senior nuance.
The weak answer cites platform-reported ROAS uncritically, missing that platform ROAS is structurally biased upward because every platform claims credit for the same conversions.
## 2. Exaggerator-catching probes
A minute each, gradeable by anyone on the panel, and they eliminate a whole failure class - which is why they sit this high despite being the weakest signal on the list about a genuine candidate.
- Andrew McGarry (beyondcontent): "Killer question is always 'who do you admire or look up to in PPC and why?' It tends to reveal who is exaggerating their experience."
- Melissa Mackey (beyondthepaid): "I always ask 'What industry publications do you read?' in every interview at every level."
- Jon Kagan: "If they tell me they understand [the newest automated campaign types], I know they are lying." Claimed mastery of things nobody fully understands is itself the signal.
## 3. Killed-campaign and incrementality probes
The pairing that makes a spend-under-management screen mean something (Constant Hire): walk me through a campaign you killed and why, and how you separate incremental revenue from attribution-modeling noise. Never ask the spend question without these.
## 4. Named situational questions
Each is the named practitioner's stated go-to (PPC Live UK collection and the PPCChat roundup):
- Fraser Andrews (HDY Agency): "What is your current understanding of attribution and how it has changed over the last 3 years?" and "How would you go about structuring an account?"
- Menachem Ani (JXT Group): "How would you improve lead/call quality on a lead-gen campaign?"
- Glenn Schmelzle: "What's your approach to analyzing multi-touch attribution as a means of evaluating your media budget allocation across 2 or more channels?"
- Akvile DeFazio (AKvertise): "What metrics do you track on a regular basis and how/when do you inform your team of results and next steps?"
- Navah Hopkins, behavioral-strategic: "How would you prove that your campaign delivered results if the client questions the attribution?"
## 5. Commitment screen
Kasim Aslam: "Flash me forward 5 years, and the world is perfect. Where are you?... there are a lot of 'tourists'." Last on the order because it predicts tenure, not performance - cut it first when the loop is short.
## Scoring rules and rubric weighting
The published rubric to anchor against is vendor content. Pare (George Reid, October 22, 2025) uses a 1-5 scale ("1-2 superficial or incorrect; 3 core concept understood; 4-5 deep, structured, commercially aware") weighted Technical 40 / Communication 30 / Commercial insight 30, in a 45-60 minute structured interview plus a 15-minute sample-account audit. Label it as one vendor's internal process, not surveyed employer practice, and note that it puts 60% of the weight on non-technical judgment.
Rules that hold regardless of scale chosen:
- Write a role-specific behavioral description for every anchor point; a bare number or a generic label collapses into gut-feel scoring.
- Every score cites evidence - a quote or a concrete example. No evidence, no score.
- Interviewers submit scores before the debrief; debrief time goes where scores diverge; disqualifying signals are recorded separately from the score.
- Weight commercial reasoning and communication over technical recall.
- Any numeric weighting emitted is a house convention, not a published rubric; say so in the packet.
## Certifications: floor, not signal
Platform certifications - Google Ads (Skillshop), Meta Blueprint, and peers - clear applicant-tracking screens and roll up into agency partner-program status; they do not predict competence. Certifications expire and need annual renewal.
The Google Partners requirements explain the contradiction between job listings demanding certifications and practitioners dismissing them - an agency operational requirement, not a quality bar:
- Keep at least 50% of designated account strategists certified in Google Ads, with at least one certification per product area.
- Spend $10,000 across managed accounts in 90 days.
- Hold a 70% optimization score.
Justin Brooke (AdSkills) names the incentive problem: "Google teaches you how to use Google. Meta teaches you how to use Meta... this teaches you how Meta wants you to use the platform. And Meta's interests don't always align with yours as an advertiser."
For the hirer:
- Never weight certifications in competence scoring.
- Never reject a strong candidate over a missing one - the free ones can be earned after hire in days.
- If partner compliance genuinely requires certification, state that reason explicitly in the req so it is not mistaken for a skill bar.
references/ramp-and-spend-authority.md›
# Ramp and Spend-Authority Staging
Build the ramp with all access on day one, an explicit spend-approval threshold in week one, and a staged authority ladder. The two anchor rules below come from a named source; the spend-authority ladder and the milestone skeleton are a synthesis drawn from general 30-60-90 frameworks and paid-media onboarding guidance, not a named source. Label the ladder and milestones as synthesis in every deliverable produced.
## The two rules with a named source
eCommerce Placement is the most concrete published source on paid-media onboarding:
- **Access on day one, not on request.** "Give access to every tool on day one, not on request. Delayed access is one of the most common, and most avoidable, causes of a slow start."
- **Spend-approval threshold in week one.** "Set a clear ad spend approval threshold in week one so the new hire isn't guessing what they can act on independently."
And the constraint governing the whole first month: "Don't ask a new growth leader to commit to a CAC or LTV target before they've validated your attribution setup... Budget real time in the first 30 days for a measurement audit before promising performance improvements you can't yet verify."
## Week-one access checklist
Grant every one of these on day one, tracked as a table (tool / access level / granted):
- Every ad platform account the company runs.
- The web-analytics property.
- The tag manager.
- The commerce or CRM backend.
- The BI/reporting layer.
- For app advertisers, the mobile measurement partner.
## The spend-authority ladder
- **Weeks 1-2 - shadow.** Observe, ask, audit; no changes. The general 30-60-90 framing: "shadowing, asking questions... not trying to fix things yet."
- **Weeks 3-6 - co-sign.** Changes go live with a second signature, or independently under a small explicit cap.
- **By day 60 - independent within a cap.** The cap is a number written in the packet, not a vibe.
- **By day 90 - full authority**, contingent on a validated measurement audit. No audit, no full authority.
The realistic first win is a tracking fix or a contained optimization, never a scaling bet - attribution validation must precede any performance commitment.
## Milestones per rung
| Rung | Day 30 | Day 60 | Day 90 |
| -------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Media buyer | Account audit delivered, first co-signed optimizations live | Owns pacing and optimization within cap | Full channel ownership with a weekly reporting cadence the team trusts |
| Performance marketer | Measurement audit complete, platform-versus-backend reconciliation documented | Creative-testing cadence running, first contained wins shipped | Owns blended targets against validated numbers |
| Creative strategist | Creative performance audit and first brief batch | Testing pipeline live with win/loss documentation | Owns creative win-rate reporting and the brief backlog |
End every ramp with watch areas - the early signals this specific hire is struggling - as a distinct section from the goals.
## Two domain constraints that bound any milestone
- Channel verdicts take time: run "at least 3-6 months before concluding whether or not [a channel] is for you" (AJ Wilcox). An organization unwilling to wait that long will also fire the hire before the ramp completes - surface this at scoping time.
- Platform learning phases and statistical power mean a new hire's first tests often cannot resolve inside 30 days regardless of skill. Do not write a day-30 milestone that requires a resolved experiment.
## Churn: the numbers and the attribution rule
Quote turnover as a range with named sources, never as a single industry rate.
Primary figures:
- Media-only agency client-relationship tenure averages 3.7 years, versus 7.3 years for integrated full-service agencies (ANA/4As AOR tenure study, released April 30, 2025).
- UK member-agency staff turnover: 26.8% (IPA, 2021).
- Sampled-agency average: 18-20% (Campaign US Agency Performance Review, 2025).
- Industry average around 30% (ANA, via Adweek).
Secondary aggregations, labelled as secondary:
- "22% of new agency hires leave within the first 45 days," and junior agency turnover "nearly 45% in their first two years" (The Trust Agency).
- Replacement cost "up to four times the position's salary" (SHRM figure via NetSuite).
The honest statement: turnover runs 18-45% depending on source, cohort, and year.
The attribution rule: when early-tenure churn appears in the first 45-90 days, the evidence points at scoping and onboarding - access delays and unclear spend thresholds - not at the candidate. Fix the ramp before blaming the hire.
references/role-ladder-and-leveling.md›
# Role Ladder and Leveling
## The functional ladder
Titles are inconsistent; the ladder underneath them is not. Name the rung in writing before drafting anything else.
| Rung | Core scope | Owns |
| ---------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------- |
| Media buyer / PPC specialist | Channel execution: setup, bids, placements, pacing, optimization | Channel KPIs (ROAS, CPA, CPC) |
| Paid media manager | Cross-channel budget allocation, reporting, sometimes team lead | Blended channel performance |
| Performance marketer | Adds funnel strategy, creative testing, measurement, business outcome | CAC, MER, contribution margin |
| Creative strategist | Turns research and performance data into ad concepts and briefs | Hook rate, CTR, creative win rate |
| Growth marketer | Whole system: acquisition, conversion, lifecycle | System-level growth, LTV:CAC |
Darkroom draws the sharpest boundary: "Performance marketing measures channels. Growth marketing measures the system." Performance marketing "ends at the channel boundary. It optimizes what happens inside [each ad platform]. It does not optimize what happens between those channels. It does not optimize the conversion experience. It does not optimize the post-purchase lifecycle." Its operational test: a media buyer plus an account manager is performance marketing; a strategist, media team, CRO resource, lifecycle marketer, and analyst working in coordination is growth marketing.
The table defines the rungs; it does not order them for a hiring decision. For a first dedicated hire, order by business outcome owned per week of ramp - `performance marketer > media buyer > creative strategist > growth marketer` - and make the generalist operator the default. Value and effort both disagree with that order, which is exactly 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`
The default moves on a named condition, never on preference:
- A working funnel needing depth in one channel moves it down to a media buyer.
- ~$50k/month of spend, or 3+ channels, adds a buyer alongside the generalist.
- Creative volume as the bottleneck opens a separate creative-strategist req.
- Conversion and lifecycle already in scope moves it up to a growth marketer.
Re-rank against the company's own assets too - an existing analyst or CRO resource makes the growth-marketer rung cheaper to fill and to ramp than this default assumes.
Remoby sets the honest ceiling on the bottom rung: "buyers optimize what exists; they do not rescue a broken product, rebuild messaging, or invent positioning from scratch." In small teams one person is all three rungs; titles blur most in mid-sized companies, and both Daphne Tideman and Talentfoot warn that companies "want to hire a growth marketer when that might not be what the company actually needs."
## Creative strategist: separate role, separate req
Constant Hire: the role sits "at the intersection of research, creative direction, and performance," preventing the failure of "designers producing assets, media buyers spending budgets, and no one owning the strategy tying it all together." The adjacent confusion, same source: "Creative Strategists drive performance learning; Creative Directors drive brand leadership. Most hiring mistakes come from misdiagnosing the bottleneck."
Foxwell Digital on skimping: "Your creative strategist is the person steering the ship. If you go cheap, you're basically handing the wheel to someone who just got their learner's permit" - "the fastest way to light your ad budget on fire." US creative strategy directors run $180,000-$250,000+ plus bonuses (Foxwell Digital, 2026, directional).
Foxwell also argues - recorded as a paraphrase, not a verbatim quote - that agency experience beats brand-side experience for strategist hires, on broader exposure and adaptability.
## Breakpoints and the hire-at-all gate
- **~$50k/month spend** - "a common breakpoint where a dedicated buyer starts paying for themselves" (Remoby).
- **3+ paid channels** - "once a team runs three or more paid channels... a generalist starts dropping balls" (Remoby).
- **$1M-$5M annual revenue, DTC** - "a single paid media specialist or small agency handling one or two channels is often sufficient" (Darkroom).
- **Don't hire outside help at all** (AJ Wilcox; scoped to one B2B social channel but the logic generalizes):
- Monthly channel budget under $5,000.
- Product LTV under $10,000.
- Marketing fundamentals missing (audience, positioning, pricing, working site).
- Wanting a hands-off vendor rather than a partner.
- Unwillingness to commit 3-6 months before judging channel fit - this last condition doubles as a hiring warning: an organization unwilling to wait that long will fire the hire before the ramp completes.
## When the gate fails: the alternatives, ranked
Ranked by channel coverage bought per hour of the founder's or marketing leader's own time - `agency > freelancer > self-manage`, with `wait` reserved for the case where the missing fundamental is the actual blocker. Lead with the agency because it returns the most coverage for the fewest of your hours, not because it is the cheapest line item; it is not.
| Option | What it buys | What it costs you |
| ----------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Agency | Several channels, creative bandwidth, and cover when one person is out. SotaMedia, without talent snobbery: "The two models do not differ in talent... Agency wins on data velocity, because it runs many accounts in parallel" | A briefing cadence measured in hours a month, contract and account-access review, and the most control given up |
| Freelancer | One or two channels run competently, reversible in a notice period | Day-to-day direction from you, a single point of failure, narrow scope |
| Self-manage | Full control and every learning stays in the building | A standing job for someone who already has one; the expertise has to exist or be built |
| Wait | Nothing, on purpose - the right call while positioning, pricing, or a working site is the real constraint | The channel stays unrun for as long as the fundamental is missing |
- value (channels covered, creative bandwidth, absence cover): `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, contractor classification): `freelancer > agency > self-manage` - not a tie: both third parties need the same contract and the same account access, but only the individual engagement raises a worker-classification question, and only that one is awkward to unwind once the work has been done.
The order is a default, not a law. `Wait` is the case where the whole menu is deleted rather than reordered - say the hire is off the table until the missing fundamental is fixed, because a bottom-ranked hire is one budget meeting away from happening anyway.
Re-rank the rest against what the company already has:
- An in-house marketer with real channel hours moves self-manage up.
- An agency already retained on another workstream collapses the agency's setup effort to near-zero.
- A founder who has run the accounts personally makes self-manage the cheapest bridge rather than the most expensive.
In-house wins on product knowledge and is the destination once the gate passes - these are the bridge to it, not a replacement.
The most-cited founder error when weighing them (SotaMedia) is "comparing the wrong numbers: agency retainer fees against in-house salaries. That comparison tells you almost nothing about ROI." Compare hours returned and channels covered instead.
## First hire versus specialist, and other context splits
Demand Curve: "The mistake companies make is hiring a marketer without first having an intuition around how their company is going to grow. Marketers vary drastically in their... skill sets."
| Context | What the hire must do differently | Common mis-hire |
| ----------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| First ad hire (no team) | Stand up tracking and attribution, choose channels, own the full funnel | A narrow single-channel specialist who cannot build from scratch |
| Adding a specialist to a team | Go deep in one channel, plug into existing measurement | Another generalist when depth was needed |
| Agency to in-house | Own one brand deeply, work without a pod, absorb product context | Agency multitasker who cannot go deep or misses pod support |
| B2C/DTC to B2B | Optimize to pipeline and SQLs over long cycles | DTC buyer optimizing to first-order profitability on a long sales cycle |
| B2B to DTC | Creative-testing velocity, contribution-margin math, fast data reads | B2B/brand buyer slow on creative iteration and margin discipline |
## Spend under management: filter, not level
Job postings do anchor level to spend - one senior media buyer posting reads "You will be managing upwards of $50,000 - $75,000 a day" (Client Accelerators), and "Managing six- or seven-figure ad budgets? That's another pay booster" (MarketerHire). Practitioners treat the number as directional only, because running a large automated budget is not the same as producing incremental profit.
The counterweight screen (Constant Hire): "Ask them to walk through a campaign they killed and why... how they separate incremental revenue from attribution modeling noise. Answers that stay at the level of platform features tell you they have executed someone else's media strategy rather than set their own." Unpaired, the spend number is meaningless.
## Salary bands - directional, quote with source and date
Best practitioner source: the Duane Brown / Take Some Risk anonymous PPC salary survey, 2026 edition, 445 responses across 50+ countries, reported in Search Engine Land ("PPC salaries are splitting," Benjamin Wenner, April 13, 2026).
US medians by experience:
- 3-5 years: $87,500.
- 6-9 years: $100,000.
- 10-15 years: $135,000.
- 15+ years: $150,000.
In-house out-earns agency at every band (10-15 years: $140,000 versus $123,545); the 6-9 year in-house figure ($170,000) is flagged by the same report as a small, outlier-skewed sample, so never quote it unqualified. Freelance median at 10-15 years is $202,895, "a $79,000 premium for going independent."
Non-US, same survey: UK 10-15 years £50,000, down from £60,000; EU 10-15 years €65,625. 3Search's 2025 Performance Marketing Salary Guide (1,300+ responses) puts UK PPC managers at £50,000-£70,000, up about 7.7% over 12 months.
A full-time in-house paid-social hire runs "$70,000-$90,000 annually, depending on experience" (MarketerHire, circa 2026). Aggregators disagree by tens of thousands depending on role label, and the survey is self-selected with a shrinking sample (445 in 2026, down from 715 in 2022). Every figure is directional; always attach source and date.
The leveling insight behind the bands (Search Engine Land, same report): the earners pulling away "have repositioned from campaign operators to business outcome owners... Speak in revenue contribution and margin impact, not ROAS and CTR" - the middle of the market is "being squeezed from below by automation absorbing execution work." Weight the scorecard toward outcome ownership accordingly.
## The unresolved generalist-versus-specialist split
This one is deliberately left unranked, and that is the answer, not an omission. The sources agree an undifferentiated generalist is bad, but the fix genuinely differs:
- One hiring guide argues for category-specific full-stack operators who own both strategy and execution.
- Another argues a single person cannot run paid social alone, and recommends splitting into manager, creative, and analyst roles as budget allows.
Ordering the two would be false precision: they are not two routes to one outcome, they are two different bets on how the team grows, and the published evidence does not favour either. Present both to the user and let the first-hire-versus-specialist test, plus the breakpoints above, settle it.
references/work-sample-design.md›
# Work Sample Design
The richest first-hand source is the PPCChat "Hiring & Getting Hired in PPC" roundup (April 19, 2022), which devoted a full question to test projects. Its verdict is unusually one-sided.
## Unpaid take-homes actively damage the funnel
Anu Adegbola's summary of the community position: "test projects during the interviews are mostly hated by the community."
- Sarah Stemen: "At this point in my career I have a NO HOMEWORK policy."
- Julia Vyse (senior media buyer): "I hate this. It's straight-up time-wasting, unpaid labor... it should not have a role in hiring."
- Melissa Mackey: "doing free work for someone who may or may not hire me? No thanks. And frankly, they're not great from the employer side either, too hard to proctor."
- Robert Brady (Righteous Marketing): "The 'findings' from a project should be discoverable in an interview (or two). If not, you need to improve the interview process."
- Julie Bacchini (Neptune Moon): "If you are asking someone to do work on an account... you should compensate them for their time."
This matters commercially, not just ethically: senior practitioners decline unpaid exercises, so issuing one silently shrinks the funnel to candidates with uncommitted hours.
## The formats, ranked
Pick by signal returned per candidate-hour, net of who declines rather than comply: `live screen-share audit > data-table case > own-work presentation > paid trial > job shadow`. The multi-hour unpaid take-home is not on this list at any position - it is the one format whose funnel cost exceeds its signal.
| Format | What it returns | What it costs |
| --------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Live screen-share account audit | Method exposed in real time, immune to audit tooling and generated output | An hour of the interview plus a panelist able to grade an audit live |
| Data-table case (Marc Barraza's variant) | Reasoning about metric relationships, gradeable by anyone with the answer key | An hour, and a table built in advance |
| Own-work presentation (Tim Jensen) | Depth on work they actually did, no scheduling friction, near-zero drop-off | Their framing, their choice of case - you see the wins, not the misses |
| Paid trial or paid consulting engagement (Andrew McGarry) | The strongest signal available: real work, real constraints | A week of calendar, a budget approval, pay terms, and account access |
| Job shadow day, "no teacher/student dynamic" (Mike Ryan, Smarter Ecommerce) | Working style and how they ask questions | A day of a team member's time for a diffuse read |
- value (how much of their actual method you see): `paid trial > live screen-share audit > data-table case > own-work presentation > job shadow`
- effort (scheduling, panel hours, prep, budget approval, calendar drag): `paid trial > job shadow > live screen-share audit == data-table case > own-work presentation`
- candidate drop-off (seniors who decline rather than comply): `unpaid take-home > paid trial > job shadow > live screen-share audit == data-table case > own-work presentation`
- compliance cost (pay terms and worker classification for real work; access to live accounts and customer data): `paid trial > job shadow > live screen-share audit > own-work presentation > data-table case`
The two ties are structural, not undecided: the audit and the data-table case both consume one hour of an already-scheduled interview plus one prepared thing, and neither asks for an hour outside the loop, which is the only thing that drives drop-off. They separate on compliance, so that axis breaks them - an own-work presentation invites a former employer's account data into your room, which a synthetic table never does.
What this order starves is the paid trial: first on value and first on effort, so a ratio ranks it last forever while the in-interview audit wins on being cheap to run. Promote it on purpose for a senior hands-on seat, for a creative strategist whose portfolio cannot be verified as their own, or when a candidate already contracting elsewhere makes a week of their time cheap to buy.
This ordering is a default, not a law, and it moves with who is running the loop.
Delete rather than demote what your constraints rule out, and name the deletion:
- No panelist who can grade an audit live removes the top row.
- Accounts that cannot be exposed to an outsider remove it too.
- No budget or approval for paid work removes the paid trial and the job shadow outright.
Promotions work the same way in reverse - an existing anonymized dataset from a previous search collapses the data-table case's prep to near-zero.
Whichever row wins, keep it time-boxed and inside the interview:
- Duane Brown: "Testing within the 60-minute interview is fine. We do it. I wouldn't ask someone to take stuff home or do a 4-hour media plan for me."
- DigitalSamIAm (agency owner): "We have a test exercise, takes 90 minutes. I'm happy to pay for someone's dinner or whatever during it... Gives us a chance to evaluate how candidates think + handle challenges within a fixed time period."
- Ekta: "The sweet spot is to have a small test project with more of scenario-type problems instead of 'run 5 ads for me' type projects."
- Jon Kagan: take-homes "only for mid to senior level roles."
## The live screen-share account audit
Jason Parks (The Media Captain; published June 28, 2020, updated November 2023) describes the highest-signal exercise found: "I recommend asking the person you're interviewing to do a screen share with you where they audit your [ad] account... It's easy to send off a generic audit generated by third-party software. It's a vote of confidence to see someone confidently dissecting your [ad] account."
The live format is the whole point: it defeats both third-party audit tooling and AI-generated output. This is also why Foxwell Digital recommends paid real-world assignment tests for creative strategists, since AI-generated portfolios have made portfolio screening unreliable for judging creative-strategy skill.
Parks pairs the audit with a diagnostic prompt: "A month into our campaign, what results would raise a red flag?" - and expects a specific number (for example, ecommerce ROAS below 2:1), not a vague answer.
## Ambiguity detection is the signal, not a nuisance
Steve Gibson (PPCChat), from the candidate side of an ambiguous data case: "I... pointed out why the data wasn't conclusive enough to answer their 'What would you do...?' questions. I passed with flying colours. (They hadn't realized this, nor had any of the other candidates.)" Design cases with genuine ambiguity or insufficient data on purpose, and score naming it as a top answer. A candidate who confidently answers an underpowered question is showing the exact failure mode the job punishes.
A lighter-weight variant of the same idea is Marc Barraza's data-table exercise: present a realistic performance data table and have the candidate talk through optimization recommendations, scoring reasoning about metric relationships over rote definitions.
## Design rules
- Use synthetic or anonymized data. A take-home on a real client account leaks data and asks for free work; if real account work is unavoidable, pay for it.
- Write the rubric before the first submission, weighted toward commercial reasoning over technical recall.
- The debrief carries more signal than the artifact - reasoning walked aloud exposes method a polished deliverable hides. Budget debrief time explicitly.
- Match the format to the rung: live audit or data-table case for buyers and performance marketers; a paid concept-brief assignment plus a debrief on past creative wins and losses for creative strategists.
- Any numeric point values or time caps beyond the 60-90 minute consensus are this skill's own convention rather than a published standard - say so in the packet.
references/worked-examples.md›
# Worked Examples
Both examples are this skill's own illustrative constructions, grounded in the sourced patterns; the companies are fictional.
## Positive: first dedicated hire at a DTC brand
Context from the Interview:
- DTC skincare brand, $110k/month across two paid channels currently run by the founder.
- Measurement "partly" trusted.
- B2C.
- Panel of founder plus head of brand, two rounds possible.
- **Rung decision:** performance marketer. First dedicated hire, measurement not validated, spend past the ~$50k/month dedicated-hire breakpoint, a third channel planned. Not a media buyer - nobody owns measurement yet; not a growth marketer - the mandate stops at paid plus measurement, not lifecycle.
- **Outcomes (ranked, dated):**
1. Conversion tracking validated with platform-versus-backend reconciliation documented, by day 45.
2. Creative-testing cadence live with win/loss documentation, by day 60.
3. Blended MER held above the agreed break-even floor while spend scales 30%, by day 120 - deliberately outside the first 90 days, because learning phases and attribution validation cannot resolve faster.
- **Loop (2 rounds):**
- Screen (30 minutes): context-fit questions, the kill-decision question, the resume's "$400k/month managed" spend claim paired with an incrementality-versus-attribution probe.
- Case round (90 minutes): a 60-minute live screen-share audit of a sanitized account copy, followed by a ROAS-drop scenario whose dataset is deliberately inconclusive - naming the ambiguity scores top marks. The founder joins the last 30 minutes for the five-year question and the metrics-cadence question.
- **Scorecard:**
- Five competencies, each with behavioral anchors written before the first interview.
- Scores cite evidence.
- Weights labelled as this skill's convention.
- **Ramp:**
- All access granted day one.
- A $500/day self-serve change threshold set in week one.
- Co-sign through week 6.
- Independent within $3k/day by day 60.
- Full authority at day 90, after the measurement audit passes.
First win targeted: the tracking reconciliation, not a scaling bet. Watch areas:
- Retreating into the ad platforms instead of finishing the measurement audit.
- Creative briefs stalling because no one owns the designer relationship.
## Negative: the scoping mis-hire, with its cost
Context: B2B SaaS, no channels live, no tracking, six-month sales cycle. The company hires an ex-DTC media buyer whose resume leads with "$1M/month managed," after one 45-minute interview of platform-features questions and no work sample.
What went wrong, mapped to the evidence:
- The spend screen was unpaired - no kill-decision or incrementality probe - so nobody learned the $1M was the execution of someone else's strategy (the platform-operator-without-judgment pattern).
- A first-hire generalist brief went to a channel specialist who had never stood up measurement from zero.
- DTC instincts optimized toward first-order conversion on a six-month pipeline - the documented non-transferable-instincts failure, in the exact direction the sources warn about.
- No spend threshold was set and access trickled in over two weeks, so the ramp stalled exactly the way the onboarding evidence predicts.
- The hire was let go at month three - inside the 3-6 month window in which a channel verdict is not yet possible, and inside the ramp window where churn points at scoping and onboarding, not the candidate.
Cost: a year of salary-equivalent spend between hiring, severance, and re-hiring - plus damage that outlives the person, because "your account history makes recovery harder even after you fix the problem" (The Media Captain). Every failure above was visible at scoping time; none required a better candidate.
SKILL.md›
---
name: advertising-hiring
description: Build the complete hiring packet for a paid-advertising role - the rung decision (media buyer vs performance marketer vs growth marketer; creative strategist is its own role), an outcome scorecard, a 2-3 round interview loop with a judgment-first question bank, a time-boxed in-interview work sample, and a 30-60-90 ramp with staged spend authority. For the marketing leader or founder recruiting. Use for "hire a media buyer", "interview questions for a performance marketer", "paid media work sample", "scorecard for our first ad hire", or "30-60-90 for a new paid media hire". Does not source candidates, post jobs, run applicant tracking, or write offers, and does not cover the candidate side - that is the sibling mbfinotti/advertising-skills@advertising-career.
license: MIT
metadata:
author: Maya-Beth Finotti
version: "1.4.9"
---
# 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](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.
3. 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.
4. Write the role definition as a scorecard: one-line mission, 3-6 ranked measurable outcomes with dates, then 4-6 competencies. Use spend-under-management as a filter, never a level - pair any "manages $X/month" screen with "walk me through a campaign you killed and why" and an incrementality-versus-attribution probe (Constant Hire). Pressure-test the funded level against the published bands in the reference; quote every figure with source and date, labelled directional.
5. Build the question bank from [references/question-bank-and-scorecard.md](references/question-bank-and-scorecard.md): judgment over recall - "Never cite 'best practices' or default methods as your rationale" (Navah Hopkins). Spend the interview minutes in this order, by judgment revealed per minute asked: `two senior filters > exaggerator probes > killed-campaign and incrementality probes > named situational questions > commitment screen`. Effort and value disagree, because the cheapest questions are not the deciding ones:
- value (separates a senior operator from a fluent one): `two senior filters > killed-campaign and incrementality probes > named situational questions > exaggerator probes > commitment screen`
- effort (minutes asked, plus the interviewer expertise needed to grade the answer): `two senior filters > killed-campaign and incrementality probes > named situational questions > commitment screen > exaggerator probes`
The two senior filters are diagnosing a ROAS drop in the fixed order (measurement, then media, then creative, then post-click) and translating platform ROAS into MER and break-even reality. Promote the exaggerator probes to the screen when the pool is unvetted; demote them when a trusted referral or a past-search bench already covers provenance.
6. Map the loop: 2-3 rounds maximum (screen, time-boxed technical/case round, peer or founder round). Duane Brown cut his agency's loop from 3-4 interviews to 2 with standardized questions and reports better hires for it.
Each competency is owned by exactly one stage, and each panelist has a lane.
Say where this loop shape comes from: the published evidence behind it is search-heavy small and mid-sized agencies. Enterprise in-house and DTC paid-social loops are far less documented, so treat the round structure as transferable and the round _content_ as needing a local check.
7. Fix scoring discipline before anyone interviews:
- A role-specific behavioral description per anchor point - a bare number is banned.
- Every score cites a quote or concrete example.
- Interviewers submit scores independently before any debrief.
Weight commercial reasoning and communication over technical recall; the only published rubric (Pare - vendor content, label it as such) weights Technical 40 / Communication 30 / Commercial insight 30.
8. Design the work sample from [references/work-sample-design.md](references/work-sample-design.md), picking the format by signal returned per candidate-hour, net of who drops out rather than do it: `live screen-share audit > data-table case > own-work presentation > paid trial > job shadow`. The multi-hour unpaid take-home is off the list entirely - it is the one format whose funnel cost exceeds its signal. The axes disagree, so the strongest format is not the cheapest one:
- value (how much of the candidate's actual method you see): `paid trial > live screen-share audit > data-table case > own-work presentation > job shadow`
- effort (scheduling, panel hours, prep, budget approval, calendar drag): `paid trial > job shadow > live screen-share audit == data-table case > own-work presentation`
- candidate drop-off (seniors who decline rather than comply): `unpaid take-home > paid trial > job shadow > live screen-share audit == data-table case > own-work presentation`
- compliance cost (pay terms and worker classification for real work; access to live accounts and customer data): `paid trial > job shadow > live screen-share audit > own-work presentation > data-table case`
The audit and the data-table case tie twice for the same structural reason, not for want of a decision: both consume one hour of an already-scheduled interview and one prepared thing (a panelist who can grade live, or a table built in advance), and neither asks the candidate for an hour outside the loop, which is what drives drop-off. They do not tie on compliance, so that line breaks them: an own-work presentation invites a candidate to walk you through a former employer's account, which is a real exposure that a synthetic table never carries - ask for it anonymized, and score the anonymizing.
What this order starves: the paid trial, first on value and first on effort, so it can never win a ratio - and the in-interview audit takes the top slot every time despite showing less of the candidate's real method. Promote the paid trial explicitly for a senior hands-on seat, for a creative strategist whose portfolio cannot be trusted to be their own work, or when a candidate already contracting elsewhere makes a week of their time cheap to buy.
Delete rather than demote everywhere your constraints bind:
- No budget or approval for paid work removes the paid trial and the job shadow from the menu.
- No panelist able to grade an audit in real time removes the live audit.
- Accounts that cannot be exposed to an outsider remove it too.
Record each removal in the packet by name - a format left ranked last comes back as a round nobody scoped. Pay for any real account work, use synthetic or anonymized data everywhere else, and build in deliberate ambiguity scored as a top answer whichever format survives.
9. Build the ramp from [references/ramp-and-spend-authority.md](references/ramp-and-spend-authority.md): all access on day one, and an explicit spend-approval threshold in week one. Stage the authority ladder:
- Shadow, weeks 1-2.
- Co-sign within caps, weeks 3-6.
- Independent within a cap, by day 60.
- Full authority, by day 90, contingent on a validated measurement audit.
The first win is a tracking fix or a contained optimization, never a scaling bet. Label the 30-60-90 milestones as this skill's own synthesis rather than a published standard.
10. Emit the packet (next section) section by section for user validation, grounding each section in [references/worked-examples.md](references/worked-examples.md).
11. Iterate until every item in Pass Threshold holds.
12. If your harness has persistent memory, memorize the approved packet - rung, level, competencies, stage map, spend ladder - so screening runs and the eventual ramp start from it instead of re-interviewing. Without memory, tell the user to keep the packet document as the standing input for future runs.
## The Hiring Packet
Deliver every engagement as this artifact. Fully worked versions live in [references/worked-examples.md](references/worked-examples.md).
```
HIRING PACKET - <company>, <role>, <date>, v<n>
Rung decision : ladder rung + why | first-hire vs specialist | segment + context fit
Role definition: mission | 3-6 ranked outcomes with dates | 4-6 competencies
Requirements : must-haves (5-7 max) | nice-to-haves | disqualifiers separate |
spend screen paired with kill-decision + incrementality probes
Comp input : published band quoted with source + date, directional | flag: HR/legal
Stage map : 2-3 rounds | stage -> interviewer -> competencies (one owner each)
Question bank : per competency - behavioral + situational + probes | the two senior filters
Scorecard : behavioral anchors | cited evidence per score | weights labelled sourced or
own convention
Work sample : format picked off the step-8 order, with the reason it moved | 60-90 min in
interview, or paid if real account work | deliberate ambiguity |
rubric written first | debrief agenda
Ramp plan : day-one access list | week-one spend threshold | shadow -> co-sign ->
independent-within-cap -> full authority | measurement audit before targets |
watch areas
```
## B2B and B2C
The hiring process itself is identical across segments - scorecard, loop, work sample, staged ramp - and say so when asked. What changes is which instincts and metrics the role must own, and those instincts do not transfer by default.
Constant Hire, a DTC recruiter, refuses B2B searches outright: "A buyer who has run paid search and lead generation for a SaaS company optimizes toward pipeline, not first-order profitability. Those instincts do not transfer well." The Remote Reps states the mirror: a buyer from B2B or brand work "will face a steep learning curve" in a DTC account, where campaigns "live and die on creative performance, audience segmentation, and the ability to read data quickly and act on it."
- B2C/DTC: the role owns first-order economics - ROAS against break-even, contribution margin, CAC, creative-testing velocity. The creative strategist as a distinct, senior, expensive role is largely a DTC phenomenon (US creative strategy directors run $180,000-$250,000+; Foxwell Digital, 2026, directional).
- B2B: the role owns pipeline - cost per qualified lead and cost per sales-qualified lead over long cycles, where clicks cost several times more but cost-per-SQL can still win. Budget floors are higher and channel verdicts take 3-6 months (AJ Wilcox).
Treat a segment-crossing candidate as a probe-and-weight case, never an automatic rejection.
## Pass Threshold
Iterate until every item holds. Each item states whether it rests on sourced practitioner guidance or on this skill's own convention.
- The rung is named in writing, with the first-hire-versus-specialist call, before the role definition is drafted (sourced: every practitioner verdict on mis-hires traces to scoping).
- Every ranked order - the rung, the work-sample format, and the hire-at-all alternative - follows these rules (this skill's rule; the orders are defaults, and an unexplained pick is indistinguishable from taste):
- The option picked records which condition moved it off the default, or states that nothing did.
- Every option your constraints rule out is written down as deleted by name, rather than left ranked last.
- The high-value, high-effort option each order starves - the growth-marketer rung, the paid trial - is named with the condition that would promote it.
- Spend-under-management appears only as a filter, and every spend screen is paired with a kill-decision question and an incrementality-versus-attribution probe (sourced: Constant Hire).
- The loop runs at most 3 rounds (sourced: Duane Brown, DigitalSamIAm, and the documented community consensus):
- Any exercise fits inside a 60-90 minute session, or is paid.
- No multi-hour unpaid take-home anywhere.
- Every question maps to exactly one competency and probes reasoning, not recall - a "best practices" model answer fails the bank (sourced: Navah Hopkins, Kasim Aslam).
- Every anchor point carries a role-specific behavioral description and every submitted score cites evidence; the numeric weights are labelled as this skill's own convention rather than a published standard (see the scorecard reference).
- The work sample uses synthetic or anonymized data, its rubric exists before the first submission, and it contains deliberate ambiguity scored as signal (sourced: Jason Parks, Steve Gibson; the rubric-first rule is general work-sample guidance).
- Certifications appear nowhere in competence scoring; if partner compliance requires them, the req says so explicitly so it is not mistaken for a skill bar (sourced: uniform practitioner testimony).
- The ramp grants all access on day one, sets the spend threshold in week one, stages authority shadow -> co-sign -> independent-within-cap -> full, and schedules the measurement audit before any performance target (sourced: eCommerce Placement for the two rules; the ladder itself is this skill's synthesis, labelled as such).
- Every salary figure carries its source and date and is labelled directional; turnover is quoted as the 18-45% range with named sources, never as a single industry rate (this skill's rule, from the documented spread).
- A segment-crossing candidate (DTC-to-B2B or the reverse) gets the instincts-transfer probe - weighted, not auto-rejected (sourced: Constant Hire, The Remote Reps).
## Common Failure Modes
| Symptom | Root cause | Fix |
| -------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Fluent in the tools, lost when performance drops | Platform operator without judgment - the dominant documented mis-hire | Kill-decision, incrementality, and ROAS-drop questions; score reasoning, not recall |
| First hire runs one channel well but tracking never gets built | Channel specialist hired for a first-hire generalist brief | Rerun the rung decision; the first hire owns measurement and channel choice |
| Depth was needed, another generalist arrived | Team addition scoped as if it were a first hire | Scope the req to the specific channel gap on the existing team |
| DTC star underperforms on a B2B account (or the reverse) | Buying instincts do not transfer between segments | Probe pipeline-vs-first-order instincts; weight, don't auto-reject |
| Agency-trained hire flounders in-house | Used to pod support and many shallow accounts | Probe single-brand depth; plan for the missing pod in the ramp |
| Strong candidate rejected over a missing certification | Certification treated as a skill bar | Certs are a floor; the free ones can be earned after hire in days |
| Best candidates decline the exercise | Multi-hour unpaid take-home - the highest drop-off format on the list | Drop to the ranked order in step 8: live audit or data-table case inside the interview first, own-work presentation when live scheduling fails |
| Panel converges on the polished talker | No anchors; scores shared before written | Behavioral anchors, cited evidence, independent pre-scores |
| New hire idle in week one, gone by month two | Access delays and an unset spend threshold | Day-one access, week-one threshold; churn in the first 45-90 days points at onboarding, not the candidate |
| Good hire pushed out at month three for no results | Platform learning phases and attribution validation cannot resolve that fast | Set the 3-6 month channel-judgment window up front; first win is a tracking fix |
## Invocation Examples
- "We're a DTC brand spending $80k/month on two channels with no dedicated buyer - scope the role and build the interview loop."
- "I need interview questions and a scorecard for a senior performance marketer joining our B2B growth team."
- "Design a work sample for a media buyer that doesn't require an unpaid take-home."
- "Our new paid media manager starts Monday - write the 30-60-90 with spend-authority staging."
## Reference
- See `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@advertising-career` for the mirror-image candidate side - breaking into and progressing in paid media.
- See `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-account-diagnostic` and `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-attribution-gap` for the domain depth behind the two senior filters - the ROAS-drop tree and the attribution probes.
- See `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@cac-roas-benchmark` and `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-spend-guardrails` for the MER, CAC, and break-even math candidates are tested on.
- See `mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-conversion-tracking` for the measurement audit the ramp gates full spend authority on.