Hiring a performance marketer
A hundred and ninety applications full of impressive multiples — 6× ROAS, 40% lower CPA — and hardly any of them say on how much money. That missing number is most of the hire.
A ratio without a denominator is a story, not a result. Performance marketing is the most metric-dense discipline in this list and the metrics are almost useless as written. A 6× return on £3,000 a month and a 6× return on £300,000 a month are different professions: at small spend the job is creative and scrappy, at large spend it is structural, statistical and largely about not breaking something that works. Both write the same CV bullet. Underneath that sits attribution — most candidates report platform-reported numbers, which systematically flatter, and very few distinguish what they influenced from what they were credited with. The classic false positive is a CV of glowing multiples from an account that was profitable before they arrived.
How much money, on what
Selene goes after budget and channel mix immediately, because a paid role at £5k a month and one at £150k are not comparable hires.
Spend, channels, and who makes the creative
The two facts that shape this role are the monthly budget and whether this person also produces the creative. A marketer used to a large budget and a specialist creative team can be badly placed in a small business where they have to make the ads themselves.
One sentence changes the guide
It is a good question because it cannot be answered from a dashboard. Anyone can report what performed; only someone who has genuinely owned a budget has had to decide what to stop, defend it to a finance team, and live with being wrong about it in public.
Exceptional, not just good —
“Someone who can tell me what they would cut first if I halved the budget tomorrow.”
→ Reallocation judgment became a must-have; unqualified ROAS figures stopped being scored.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria calibrated to £25k a month with in-house creative. The spend band is doing most of the work here — at £3k or £250k, four of these six would be rewritten, and the platform certifications everyone lists sit at the bottom either way.
No gates — and the certifications are not one
Nothing here is a hard filter. Platform certifications are the thing most often treated as one, and they sit at weight 1 for a reason: they are free, take an afternoon, and are held by a large share of the pile including most of the people who cannot allocate a budget.
Scored with the spend attached
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.
Where a metric appears without the budget behind it, it is recorded as an unverified claim rather than as evidence — which on this discipline changes the ranking considerably.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Getting the actual monthly spend on the record before writing a single criterion
- Reading all 190 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist that treats an unqualified ROAS figure as a claim, not a result
- An interview brief that asks each candidate for the denominators behind their numbers
Yours
- Getting marketers to apply — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or source candidates
- Any account audit or planning exercise, with her brief in hand
- The interview, and the conversation about what they would do in month one
- The offer, and every call that matters
Nearby roles
Name the monthly spend
It is the number that decides this hire, and the guide changes shape the moment you give it.