Marketing Hiring: Why the Job Description Is Usually the Problem

When a marketing hire does not work out, the post-mortem tends to focus on the interview process: the wrong questions, poor reference checks, a skills assessment that missed the point. Sometimes that is true. But more often, the problem was established before the first candidate applied.

Job descriptions are the first filter in a hiring process, and most marketing job descriptions are doing a poor job. They attract candidates who are good at reading job descriptions, not necessarily candidates who are good at the job. And because the description shapes every subsequent decision in the process, a weak one creates compounding problems throughout.

The most common job description failures

Listing tasks instead of outcomes. "Manage social media accounts, write content, coordinate with design" tells a candidate what they will be doing all day. It does not tell them what they are accountable for, what good looks like, or why the role exists. The best candidates want to know what they are responsible for achieving, not just what is on their to-do list.

Requirements that reflect past hires, not current needs. Many marketing role specs are copied from the last time the role was filled, often years ago. The platform landscape has changed. The team structure has changed. The business priorities have changed. But the "5 years of experience in digital marketing" requirement remains, unchanged and unexamined.

Overly broad scope without prioritisation. "You will own SEO, paid media, content, email, social, and contribute to brand strategy" is a list, not a job. It attracts generalists who are comfortable with scope overload and repels specialists who know that doing six things poorly is worse than doing two things well. Before writing the spec, decide which two or three things matter most in the first year.

Culture language that means nothing. "Fast-paced environment," "self-starter," "team player." These phrases appear in every job description and communicate nothing specific. They function as noise that candidates have learned to read past, and they do nothing to help the right person recognise that this role is for them.

What a good marketing job description does instead

A job description that attracts the right candidates answers four questions clearly: What does this role own? What does success look like in year one? Why does this role matter to the business right now? And what kind of person will genuinely thrive here (not the idealised version, but the real one)?

The "what does success look like" section is the most important and most frequently omitted. If you can write three specific things you would want to be able to say about this person twelve months from now, you have the foundation of a usable job description. If you cannot write those three things, you are not ready to hire yet.

The discipline of choosing one profile

One of the most common reasons marketing hiring fails is that the organisation has not decided what it actually needs. It wants brand experience but also performance marketing. It wants someone senior enough to lead strategy but junior enough to execute tactically. It wants a specialist in one channel but "flexibility across the full marketing mix."

These are not requirements; they are a failure to choose. The job description that tries to attract all of these profiles ends up attracting none of them well, because the people who are strong in each area can tell immediately that the role has been poorly defined.

Before writing a word of the spec, agree internally on one primary profile. What is the one thing this person needs to be excellent at? Build the description around that, and you will attract better candidates, run a more focused process, and make a cleaner decision at the end of it.