Hiring a marketing executive
"Marketing executive" is a container, not a role. It covers people who have run paid budgets, people who have only written copy, and people who have mostly booked stands at trade shows. Every one of them applies to every one of these ads.
The title tells you nothing, so the CV has to — and it usually doesn't. A marketing CV lists campaigns and channels without saying which ones the applicant actually owned, what the budget was, or what happened. "Managed social media" covers both a £40k paid programme and posting three times a week. The reliable false positive is agency experience with impressive client logos: it signals proximity to good work, not responsibility for it, and it reads far stronger on paper than the person who owned a small budget badly-resourced and learned what does not work.
From a title that means five different jobs to one guide
Selene's first job here is narrowing the container: which channels actually matter to you, and whether this person executes a plan or decides one.
Which channels, whose budget, and who decides
Rather than asking for years of experience, Selene asks which channels carry your pipeline and whether the hire owns spend. That is what separates a hands-on executor from someone expected to have opinions — and the two need almost inverted guides.
One sentence changes the guide
Marketing ads ask for people who can do things. This asks for someone who can decide what to stop, which is both rarer and much harder to fake — you cannot claim it without a specific story, and the specific story is exactly what the CV format suppresses.
Exceptional, not just good —
“I want the person who tells me which channel to stop spending on.”
→ Evidence of stopping or cutting a channel became a must-have; breadth of channels stopped being rewarded.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria, aimed at your actual channel mix rather than a generic marketing checklist. Paid-media depth sits as a nice-to-have here purely because of what the manager said — on a different company it would be a must.
Nothing to gate on — but plenty to mis-rank on
No certification, no licence, no availability constraint, so the entire pile gets read. The risk on this role is not letting the wrong person through a gate; it is a guide that quietly rewards the longest list of channels, which selects for people who have touched everything and owned nothing.
Scored on ownership, not adjacency
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
Which agency or brand it came from never reaches the scoring either, which on a role this driven by pedigree is most of the intervention.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Narrowing "marketing executive" to the channels that actually matter to you
- Reading all 150 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist with the numbers she found for each claim
- An interview brief that asks for the numbers behind each claim
Yours
- Getting marketers to apply — Selene doesn't post to job boards or source candidates
- Reviewing portfolios and campaign samples; she reads what people wrote about their work
- The interview, and the portfolio conversation, with her brief in hand
- The offer, and whether you can afford the person she ranked first
Tell her which channel actually matters
SEO and email, paid and events, or one person doing all of it — describe your actual mix and watch the guide narrow to it.