Hiring your first performance marketer is one of the riskiest hires a growing business makes. You're handing someone your ad budget, often in an area you don't fully understand yourself. Get it right and they pay for themselves many times over. Get it wrong and you can lose months and a lot of money before you notice.

Here's how to do it well.

Write the scorecard before the job ad

Most bad hires start with a vague job description: "manage our social media and ads, grow our online presence." Before you write anything public, answer three questions:

1. What will this person own? Which channels, which budget, which results.
2. What does success look like in 90 days? Tracking fixed, campaigns restructured, cost per lead down, a first monthly report you understand.
3. What must they already be able to do on day one, and what can they learn on the job?

That becomes your scorecard. Every CV, interview and task gets judged against it, not against how confident someone sounds.

A practical task that reveals real skill

Interviews reward people who talk well. Paid media rewards people who think clearly about numbers. So give every shortlisted candidate a short, paid, realistic task:

• Share a simplified version of real campaign data (remove anything sensitive) and ask: "What's working, what isn't, and what would you change first? Why?"
• Or ask them to plan how they'd spend a test budget on one product: channel, structure, audiences, ads and how they'd measure it.

You're not looking for the "right" answer. You're looking at how they reason. Do they ask about tracking and what counts as a conversion? Do they question the data before trusting it? Do they prioritise, or list twenty ideas with no order?

Questions that expose shallow experience

• "Walk me through a campaign that failed. What happened and what did you change?" Strong candidates have clear, specific answers. Weak ones only have success stories.
• "How did you know your tracking was accurate?" Anyone who has managed real budgets has fought with tracking.
• "Cost per lead doubled last week. What do you check first?" Listen for a calm, logical order, not a guess.
• "How do you use AI in your work, and where don't you trust it?" You want someone who uses it for speed but still owns the decisions.

Red flags in a CV that looks great

• Big numbers with no context: "generated 10,000 leads" with no mention of budget, cost or quality.
• A long list of every platform and tool, but no clear story of what they owned.
• Only agency job titles, with no evidence of hands-on account work.
• Certificates in place of results. Certifications show someone studied, not that they've done it.

Your first 30 days together

• Give them full access to ad accounts, analytics and your CRM in week one.
• Ask for an audit first, not new campaigns. What's set up, what's broken, what they'd fix and in what order.
• Agree three numbers you'll both watch every month, and how they'll report them.
• Meet weekly for the first month, then fortnightly once you trust the rhythm.

Don't want to do this alone?

Signal & Skill helps companies hire marketers the right way: we define the role, source candidates, test them on real tasks and help you onboard them. And if you already have a marketer who needs to level up, we train them on your own accounts.