Before you post a marketing job, finish this sentence: “The work stalls when ___, and we know because ___.” If the answer is “we need more growth,” start by identifying where progress stops.
Your marketing hiring brief should name the problem, the work someone can do about it, and the support you will provide. For an AI or SaaS startup, the assignment might be turning repeated buyer objections into sales materials, fixing unreliable reporting, or running a channel you already understand. Choose the title once that work is clear.
Describe the point where progress stops
Pick one part of the customer journey and inspect recent examples. Use a defined period, such as the last month, and keep the counts alongside your interpretation.
“Few qualified buyers request a demo” could reflect weak distribution, unclear positioning, or an offer that misses the buyer’s needs. You need more evidence before deciding which skills to hire.
Build a short evidence record:
- Where progress stops: the specific step or handoff.
- What you observed: counts, dates, customer wording, or unfinished work.
- Your current explanation: a hypothesis you can revise.
- Other possible causes: product limitations, pricing, missing data, or founder delays.
- What someone could investigate or change next.
Keep customer wording separate from your summary. A prospect asking about a missing integration is different from a founder concluding that the website needs better copy.
If the evidence is thin, make diagnosis the first assignment. For help organizing the observations, use the guide to finding where SaaS website visitors hesitate.
Turn the problem into work before choosing a title
List the tasks required to investigate and address the bottleneck. Then identify the skills those tasks require. This follows the logic of job analysis: examining tasks, required competencies, and their connection. OPM’s job-analysis guidance describes that process.
Understanding repeated sales objections, for example, may require interviewing buyers, reviewing calls, checking product claims, and writing a decision guide. Replace “excellent communicator” with a requirement candidates can demonstrate: “Can synthesize buyer interviews into accurate sales materials.”
Decide whether you lack expertise or capacity. If you know what works but cannot keep up, execution support may fit. If you cannot identify the problem, look for diagnostic experience and scope an initial investigation.
Consider how long the work will last and who must make decisions. A bounded deliverable may suit a specialist project. Recurring work with frequent internal decisions may justify an ongoing role. If you bring in a fractional leader, specify who will carry out the plan and what resources they will have. These are scoping choices, not worker-classification rules.
Ask for evidence of essential skills and name what you can teach. A requirement list covering strategy, design, paid acquisition, analytics, and daily publishing needs a priority order. Decide which work belongs in this assignment and which must wait or go to someone else.
Specify deliverables, dependencies, and decision rights
For each deliverable, write what “done” means and who accepts it. Replace “improve messaging” with something both sides can inspect: “Produce a buyer-objection guide with approved product answers and supporting evidence.”
Separate the work the person controls from the results they can influence and the support they need:
| Type | Example | What to put in the brief |
|---|---|---|
| Deliverable | A tested reporting process | Acceptance criteria and approver |
| Business outcome | More qualified buyers reaching the next sales stage | Baseline, observation period, and limits on interpretation |
| Dependency | Customer introductions or product answers | Owner and expected turnaround |
Include your own commitments. If every asset requires founder approval, state how much review time you will reserve and when decisions will arrive.
Define access by task. Someone reviewing performance may need reports; someone implementing changes may need editing permissions. In Google Analytics, Viewer can inspect settings and data and manage explorations they create. Editor can control property settings but cannot manage users. An account-level Editor role also applies to its properties, even if a user receives a narrower role directly on one property. Check effective access when assigning permissions. Google’s role documentation explains these distinctions.
For each system, record the account owner, required permission, approval boundary, and when access will be reviewed or removed. Use a prepared, sanitized packet for candidate exercises.
If unreliable measurement is the bottleneck, narrow the assignment with the guide to scoping a marketing analytics setup project.
Worked example: demos stall before a pilot
Imagine a two-founder AI software company selling a tool that drafts answers to security questionnaires. All figures and circumstances in this example are hypothetical.
Over six weeks, the founders complete 12 qualified demos. Three prospects begin a pilot. Notes from seven demos contain questions about source traceability, human review, or setup effort. The founders repeatedly assemble follow-up answers from scratch.
The notes give the team something to investigate. They do not establish why the other prospects have not started pilots or whether better materials would help. Some buyers may need capabilities the product lacks.
The brief could read:
Assignment: Investigate barriers between a qualified demo and a pilot, then create a reusable follow-up package for barriers our current product can address.
Initial scope: A four-week specialist project with a $6,000 spending cap, including candidate exercise payments. This is an illustrative planning constraint, not a market-rate estimate. Ask candidates to identify what the budget cannot cover.
Deliverables: An objection map drawn from the 12 demo records and four buyer interviews; a pilot guide checked by the product owner; a follow-up email sequence; and a handoff explaining when to use each asset. Interview completion depends on founder introductions and buyer availability. If interviews cannot be scheduled, agree on a revised scope or deadline before treating that work as overdue.
Acceptance criteria: Each objection links to its source. Every capability claim has product-owner approval. The pilot guide states setup requirements and human review responsibilities. Emails give the buyer one clear next action. The designated founder accepts the completed package.
Access and support: Sanitized demo notes, a product sandbox, relevant CRM reports, and buyer introductions. One founder reserves two hours each week for questions and review. The founder approves sends and product claims.
Required skills: Buyer interviewing, synthesis of sales objections, and accurate writing about technical software. Experience with the company’s exact CRM is teachable.
Out of scope: Paid acquisition, a website redesign, and responsibility for closing deals.
Review: Assess deliverable quality at the end of week four. Track subsequent qualified demos and pilot starts separately, noting which materials were used and how long each prospect has had to decide. Small counts, different follow-up periods, and changes in prospect mix limit comparisons with the initial 12 demos.
The project may reveal that a missing product capability is the main obstacle. A finding supported by buyer evidence is useful even when the next action belongs to engineering.
Evaluate candidates on a small version of the work
Choose a task that resembles the assignment and tests skills candidates need on entry. OPM describes work samples as exercises that mirror job tasks and cautions against using them to assess activities you intend to teach after hiring. OPM’s work-sample guidance supports those principles; the exercise below is a proposed application.
For the hypothetical project, give finalists the same fictional product sheet, three fictional buyer notes, and a sample funnel. Ask for a one-page diagnosis and one follow-up email. Set a 60-minute effort limit, disclose a fixed payment in advance, and allow a reasonable submission window. These are suggested terms, not industry standards.
Explain which tools candidates may use, including AI assistance, and ask how they checked their work. Provide a way to request an accessible format or an adjusted assessment arrangement. Do not use submissions as live campaign assets without a separate agreement.
Share the scoring criteria before the exercise:
| Criterion | Evidence to look for |
|---|---|
| Diagnosis | Separates observations from assumptions |
| Prioritization | Chooses a feasible next step |
| Accuracy | Avoids unsupported product claims |
| Measurement | Defines what would inform the next decision |
| Communication | Gives the buyer a clear, relevant action |
Score each criterion from 0 to 2: absent, partly demonstrated, or clearly demonstrated. Record a specific example behind each score. For accuracy, for instance, a response that promises an integration absent from the product sheet fails to demonstrate the criterion; a response that checks the stated capabilities and flags an unanswered question demonstrates it. This proposed rubric helps organize comparisons. It has not been validated as a predictor of job performance.
Follow with predetermined interview questions asked in the same order, using the same rating standards for each candidate. That structure follows OPM’s structured-interview guidance. Questions could include what evidence would change the candidate’s diagnosis and how they would proceed if founder approvals were delayed. Consider their reasoning alongside relevant prior work.
Copy this brief before opening the role
Complete these fields in a shared document:
- Business context and intended customer:
- Observed bottleneck, period, and supporting evidence:
- Working explanation and unresolved questions:
- Assignment and expected duration:
- Deliverables, acceptance criteria, and approver:
- Required skills and teachable skills:
- Budget or compensation range and available resources:
- Systems, permissions, and approval boundaries:
- Founder commitments, other dependencies, and turnaround times:
- Outcomes to monitor, baseline, observation period, and review date:
- Work excluded from this assignment:
- Candidate exercise, payment, tool rules, and scoring criteria:
Start with one bottleneck and complete the brief around it. Then ask someone who knows the business to name the first task they would perform. If they cannot, revise the assignment. If you cannot supply the evidence or access it requires, resolve that dependency or make the initial scope explicitly diagnostic.
