How to Hire Advertising Staff

How do you hire skilled advertising staff? How do you make interviews quick and effective? How can an interview accurately assess a candidate's professional skills?

These questions concern many businesses, and Optimus has spent years trying to address them.

After years of testing, Optimus now has a fairly effective recruitment process. This post covers key points in Optimus's approach that you can consider and adapt to your business.

Interview structure

Optimus currently uses this structure:

Content	Time	Note
General questions	5 minutes	Experience, direction, career goals
Skills test	30 minutes
Test discussion	15 minutes
Other topics	10 minutes	Work environment, benefits, answers to candidates' questions

In Optimus's experience, a test closely matching the candidate's actual work is the best way to assess ability, far better than theoretical questions or questions such as ‘What are your strengths and weaknesses?’ Optimus therefore spends ¾ of the interview on the test and related discussion.

Interview question set

A standard question set helps:

• Ensure objectivity and limit off-topic questions during candidate interviews

• Make interviews more effective, professional and time-efficient

• You can also delegate all or part of the candidate questioning to someone else.

Optimus has created a question library for each position. Whenever we interview for a position, we simply filter the questions for that role.

Questions are specific to each company, industry and position, so Optimus will not go into more detail here.

Interview test

The test should require candidates to apply knowledge, experience and skills closely matching the actual work to solve it.

For example, for a Performance Marketing position, you could provide a hypothetical brief and ask candidates to plan a budget allocation for each channel and ad format.

To complete this test, you need to:

• Read and understand the brief

• Understand the characteristics of the channels and ad formats

• Know how well each channel and ad format suits the product being marketed

• Allocate the budget

• Use Excel at a basic level

• Ask questions about the brief if needed and explain your budget allocation

This type of test has no single correct answer. Candidates solve it to the best of their ability, and Optimus assesses their approach to solving the problem rather than the final result.

That is just one example. You can create many different tests depending on which criteria matter most for the position.

Discussing the test

After candidates finish, ask further questions about their work, such as:

• What difficulties did you encounter during this test?

• Why did you do it this way rather than that way?

• How would you handle a different situation?

• If the customer approved this plan, how would you implement it?

• …

These questions explore candidates' knowledge, thinking, problem-solving and ability to adapt to different situations. All of this discussion is based on a very specific, practical situation, so it gives a fairly accurate assessment of their actual professional skills.

Automating recruitment

Repeating all these steps for dozens of candidates, along with screening applications and communicating with candidates, takes considerable time and effort. Automate as much of recruitment as possible. Optimus has automated recruitment steps such as managing candidate information and sending interview invitations, results and job offers using very simple tools. You can refer to this and apply automation to your own recruitment process.

Conclusion

These are some insights from Optimus's recruitment experience. This approach has been used quite successfully to hire advertising staff and fill other roles. I hope this post offers another perspective to help you keep improving your business's recruitment process.

If your business needs to outsource, consider Optimus's services for marketing. Optimus has an experienced team with many years working in marketing and e-commerce.