I hope this question is losing its popularity and will eventually fade away. Why?

From the interviewer’s point of view, the candidate probably won’t give a completely honest answer. No one will open up about snapping at colleagues or their tendency to procrastinate half of their working hours on YouTube. I’m exaggerating, but you get the gist.

You want to be prepared for this one. I recommend choosing a middle ground kind of answer. Don’t try to make some weakness look like a strength (I work too much). On the other hand, don’t disclose something that can jeopardize being hired.

For example, my answer here could be that I can’t stand being micromanaged and need my own space for autonomy. I can imagine that this would be a problem in larger organizations with many management levels.

How and where you learn about marketing could be used as a proxy to assess your knowledge and skills.

The thing is that many of the most popular industry blogs, YouTube channels, or influencers don’t create great marketing content. It’s often their own marketing and sales skills that made them popular, not the depth of information and value they provide.

I know this from my own experience. When I started in marketing, it was natural to follow the biggest accounts in our industry. But unfortunately, it takes a few years of consuming marketing information before you can easily separate the wheat from the chaff.

To some degree, this is also a subjective topic. If you want some inspiration, I wrote a short Twitter thread about stellar marketing resources:

I skim through tons of marketing content as a part of my job.

Want to learn from the best?

Here are 7 stellar learning resources in various formats to become a better marketer (regardless of seniority):

— Michal Pecánek (@michalpecanek) January 10, 2022

This question may initially seem like a more specific version of the previous one, but it’s the opposite because marketing books don’t need to be explicitly about marketing.

For example, among the best “marketing” books I’ve read were pieces from Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely, who are both key figures in behavioral psychology and economy. Dale Carnegie and Robert Cialdini are other examples of popular non-marketer authors who can teach you a lot about marketing.

But what if you don’t read marketing books? What if you don’t like reading books at all? In today’s world of online long-form content across all mediums, you can be a great marketer and a generally knowledgeable person without reading books. Just steer the conversation towards the other mediums.

You don’t even have to be a marketer to answer this question. We’re all bombarded by marketing communications every day. But as marketers, we can likely appreciate the campaigns more, analyze them, and use them as inspiration.

There’s no right or wrong campaign to choose. You can only get bonus points by expanding on why you like it. The most recent campaign that stood out to me was Coinbase’s ad during the 2022 Super Bowl:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIUD_NE1BDo

I’m sure many other marketers would pick this one too right now, but here are some reasons why I like it:

• It instantly makes viewers wonder what’s going on. There’s no branding, so the only way to find out more is to scan the QR code.
• It’s a stellar example of how creativity can beat all marketing and branding best practices.
• The creative is as low cost as possible. Other companies spend millions on creating Super Bowl ads, whereas Coinbase used that money to buy twice the standard 30s airtime.
• The outage of their website after scanning the QR code might as well have been an additional PR stunt. This only amplified their coverage in the media, which could be more valuable than making the website load for everyone.

No matter what marketing position you’re applying for, you need to know the basics of some marketing tools. And since a lot of marketing revolves around data, I would even consider spreadsheets as marketing tools.

The knowledge of specific tools often gets mentioned in the job description. For example, we require a good understanding of our SEO platform for all marketing positions.

Are you going to do something on a laptop during the interview? Probably not. But it’s pretty easy to test this knowledge even without having the candidate use the tools. I often tested candidates who supposedly had a good grasp of Google Analytics by asking about specific metrics or how they read and interpreted sample reports.

This question is one of those “how do you work under pressure?” questions. No one can assess your ability in these situations until they see you in one. But the interviewer can undoubtedly learn a thing or two about your problem-solving skills.

Many of us encounter difficult problems regularly. You have a chance to describe a challenging situation, but you managed to resolve it very well. Of course, the more impactful the decisions were, the better. Just make sure they were based on something better than a “gut feeling” that we marketers sometimes like to trust.

Things can’t always go as planned, so it’s only natural that some of our marketing campaigns fail. It can feel unpleasant at the time, but these happenings provide the best learning opportunities. You just have to leverage it—and that’s where this question is pointing.

For example, I failed at creating a Wikipedia page for Ahrefs. It’s a lot of work that involves many tasks, so we might as well call it a campaign. However, I used that experience to write one of the most in-depth and actionable articles on how to create a Wiki page. Those ~4,000 words already went through thorough revisions and editing, so I’m sure you can talk about your experience for a minute or two.

This question is obviously similar to the previous ones, but it’s focused more on planning, running, and evaluating a marketing campaign and your role in it.

If you’re thinking about many campaigns, choose one where you played a significant role. It wouldn’t sound good to dive into an impactful campaign before telling the interviewer you were more of a bystander.

According to this research by AMA, nearly 50% of marketing leaders reported a lack of people who can link marketing analytics to practice. If the position requires analyzing and interpreting data (most marketing jobs do), be prepared to be asked about marketing data, analytics, or even some basic statistics.

The best short answer here is “it depends,” but it’s evident that the interviewer wants to hear you describe a few marketing KPIs and possibly even some proxy metrics related to those KPIs.

For example, suppose you’re asked or want to talk about an SEO campaign. In that case, you could say that a universal SEO KPI is search visibility (also known as organic share of voice) and that contributing indicators are relevant organic traffic and keyword rankings.

There’s likely no better question to test whether a candidate did their homework and checked the company’s website and products. In the case of some companies, they provide the answers right on the homepage: