This guide is for in-house recruiters, talent partners and hiring managers filling a performance marketing manager role, the person who owns paid media spend and the results it has to deliver. Follow the steps in order and you'll finish with a scoped role, a shortlist that has been tested properly, and an offer that holds up in a market where good candidates field several at once.
The short version: define the budget and channels before you write the advert, test candidates on a paid media task instead of trusting their CV numbers, and check three things before you make an offer. I'm writing this as someone who hires engineers, not marketers, but the mechanics of a good hiring process travel well. I've sat through enough half-defined briefs to know the failure modes, and a performance marketing hire fails in much the same ways a backend hire does: vague scope, untested claims, slow offers.
Step 1: Define the role before you write the job description
Most marketing manager job descriptions are a list of every channel the company has ever heard of. Paid search, paid social, programmatic, affiliates, CRO, email, analytics. Nobody is good at all of it, and candidates know that, so the ones who are good at one thing quietly self-select out.
Before you open a template, answer four questions with the head of marketing or whoever owns the budget:
- What's the monthly paid media spend this person will control? A manager running £15k a month and one running £400k need different instincts.
- Which two or three channels carry that spend? Be specific. Google Ads and Meta is a different hire from LinkedIn Ads plus Google.
- What does success look like in numbers: CPA, ROAS, pipeline, payback period? If the business can't say, that's your first problem and it isn't one a hire fixes.
- Who sits around them? An in-house analyst, an agency, a freelance creative, nobody?
The last one gets overlooked constantly. A manager who has to build the reporting, brief the creative and run the accounts is a different job from one who inherits a working setup.
How to tell it's worked: you can write the role's first-90-days goal in one sentence without using the word "strategy". If you can't, go back to the budget owner.
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Step 2: Write the marketing manager job description around outcomes
A good marketing manager job description for this role names the channels, the spend range, the tools and the reporting line. Salary goes in the advert. In my experience the roles that publish a range get better applicant quality than those that don't, and candidates in this market simply skip the ones that hide it.
From what I'm seeing, UK salaries for the manager level sit roughly between £45,000 and £65,000 outside London, with London roles running higher, and anything with serious budget responsibility or a team can go beyond that. Treat that as my market observation, not survey data, and sense-check it against live adverts for your city before you commit.
Name the tools as they're actually used. Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Google Analytics 4, Looker Studio, a CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce, maybe a tag manager. Candidates scan for these. Leave them out and you look like you don't know what the job involves.
How to tell it's worked: a current performance marketer reading the advert can tell within thirty seconds which channels they'd be running and roughly what budget they'd touch.
Step 3: Source where paid media people actually are
Performance marketers rarely wait around on generic job boards. They're in agencies, in-house teams at e-commerce and SaaS firms, and in freelance circles. Referrals from your existing marketing team will outperform most of what you can buy, and LinkedIn outreach works if the message names the budget and channels up front rather than opening with "exciting opportunity".
If you want a wider net, a platform such as The Opportunity Hub lets you post roles with video-first applications, which helps here because you hear how someone talks about their own accounts before you've booked a call. There's a separate piece on platforms for hiring campaign managers and marketing experts if you're comparing options.
Agency-side candidates deserve a look even though they sometimes lack the commercial context of an in-house role. They've usually managed more accounts across more verticals in less time, and that breadth shows.
How to tell it's worked: your first batch of applicants includes people who name the specific channels in their covering message, not people who list "digital marketing" as a skill.
Step 4: Screen for real channel expertise
This is where most processes go soft. CVs are full of "increased ROAS by X%" claims, and you can't verify them. A screening call of twenty minutes can separate people who ran accounts from people who sat near them.
Paid media interview questions that work are specific and slightly awkward:
- "Walk me through the last account you inherited. What did you check first?" A real operator talks about conversion tracking, account structure and wasted spend before they talk about new campaigns.
- "What did you do when CPA doubled in a week?" You want a diagnostic sequence: tracking broken, auction change, creative fatigue, landing page, seasonality. In that kind of order, give or take.
- "How do you decide when to stop a test?" Vague answers about gut feel are a flag. So is dogma.
- "What was your biggest budget and what did it teach you?" Scale matters, and so does honesty about what they didn't control.
Listen for ownership language. "I" versus "we" matters here, and so does whether they can describe what the platform did versus what they did. A candidate who says automated bidding "just worked" hasn't looked under it.
How to tell it's worked: after the call you can state which channels each candidate is strong in, and which they've only touched.
Step 5: Structure a paid media task that respects their time
A paid media task should take no more than two to three hours and ideally uses a real, anonymised problem from your business. Long unpaid projects drive out the best candidates, who have options.
A structure that works:
- Give them a brief: a product, a monthly budget, a target CPA, and a few lines of historical data in a spreadsheet.
- Ask for a one-page plan: channel split with reasoning, the first four weeks of testing, what they'd measure, and what would make them change course.
- Ask them to critique an existing campaign screenshot or export. What would they cut? What's missing?
- Run a 30 minute debrief where you push on the reasoning.
The debrief is the point. The document tells you little. How they defend a budget split when you challenge it tells you almost everything. I use the same logic in technical hiring: the take-home is a prompt, the conversation is the test.
Score every candidate on the same sheet before you discuss them. Reasoning, commercial sense, measurement, communication. Four lines, scored independently, then compared.
How to tell it's worked: your interviewers disagree about the candidates for specific, discussable reasons, not because everyone just liked someone.
Step 6: Check three things before you make an offer
In a competitive market you can't afford a slow, sloppy close, and you also can't afford a hire that unravels in month two. Three checks, done quickly:
- References from someone who saw the work. A line manager or client, not HR. Ask what the person would do differently if they ran the account again.
- Platform access and numbers they can talk about. You're not asking for confidential data, only whether they can describe the account structure and results at a level that matches the CV.
- What they're comparing you against. Ask directly. If there's another offer, you need to know the salary band and the start date constraint now, not after you've sent a number.
Then move fast. A process that drags past three or four weeks loses people, and strong candidates often accept the first reasonable offer simply because it arrived first. Offer verbally, confirm in writing within a day, and keep the salary inside the range you advertised. Going far above it for one hire creates problems with the team you already have, which is the part nobody enjoys explaining.
On the legal side, keep your process consistent so you can defend it under the Equality Act 2010, and use the same task and scoring sheet for everyone. CIPD guidance on fair recruitment is a sensible reference for anything you're unsure about.
How to tell it's worked: the candidate accepts within a few days and the start date is agreed, not floating.
When a step goes wrong
Nobody good applies. Check the advert first. Is the salary visible, are the channels named, does the budget sound real? Then widen sourcing to agency-side people and referrals.
Every candidate sounds the same at screening. Your questions are too general. Swap in the awkward ones from step 4 and ask for specifics about spend, accounts and failures.
The task results are all weak. The brief is probably too vague or too big. Cut it down, add the data, and test it on someone in your own team first.
The best candidate declines. Ask why, properly. Usually it's money, speed, or an unclear first-year plan. Fix whichever it was before the next round, because the next candidate will raise the same thing.
The hire isn't working at day sixty. Go back to step 1. Was the role defined differently from what they were told? A mismatch in scope is far more common than a mismatch in skill.
If you're rebuilding the process from scratch, start with step 1 and don't skip it. Hiring a performance marketing manager is mostly the discipline of deciding what the job is, and how often does that happen before the advert goes live?
