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Top 5 questions to ask a PPC candidate in a phone interview
Hiring is tiring.
Take your typical interview process - a phone screen or two, multiple technical interviews, and culture fit interviews. You don't want to waste your time, your fellow interviewer's time, or the candidate's time.
It is critical to make interview questions count if you want to save yourself significant heartache, especially during the initial phone interview. Unfortunately, if you surf around, you'll find the same classic phone screening questions:
"Why are you leaving your current job?"
"Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"
"What was it like working with your current boss, what where his/her strengths and weaknesses?"
Yes, these behavioral questions are the best predictors of future performance, but where are the relevant questions we can ask search marketing candidates?
From experience, I've found the most valuable search-related questions to ask are those that kill two birds with one stone. Let me clarify.
It is important to not only extract nuggets of a candidate's past behavior, but to simultaneously test for qualifications and competency. This is important when you only have 30-60 minutes to phone each candidate and dozens of candidates to screen.
My favorite 5 questions to ask a PPC analyst:
1. What is Google's Quality Score and what role does it play in ranking?
This used to be a technical question I'd use in the first face-to-face interview but I was stunned to find that some candidates either a) Did not know what QS was or b) Thought I was talking about PageRank!
While I do not expect Google's textbook answer, I am hoping the candidate understands the basic concept behind QS (clickthrough rate + other factors) and that QS is part of the Ad Rank formula where:
Ad Rank = CPC bid X Quality Score.
I now use this question to open the technical section of a phone interview. A primary function in their role as PPC analyst will be to educate non-search people. Their ability to explain Quality Score and Ad Rank to me in plain English is something I pay very close attention to.
2. Our company brand is called "red widgets." However, we also rank first organically for our brand "red widgets." What PPC strategy would you propose for the keyword "red widgets" and why?
This question looks at the candidate's logic as well as their experience with branded keywords. Some good answers I have heard include:
"Depends on the aggregate ROAS for both the organic and paid campaign. If we have a better return overall when Adwords is running, then go for it."
"I would probably run a paid campaign because it is a brand keyword. Some studies I have read showed that running a paid campaign for brands acts a double reinforcement of the brand."
There is no 'correct' answer that fits all industries or situations, but if you're interested, read Jon Mendez' case study on buying branded keywords.
3. Our company has 5 million keywords. How will you manage an account this size?
An open-ended competency question. Automation of mundane tasks and increasing productivity is a major focus at my company. All of our search marketers are dedicated to sourcing and trialling new tools and finding ways to be more time-efficient.
Usually the interview candidate will refer to bid management tools, but what I'm looking for here is their PPC toolset experience (keyword tools, web analytics tools, inventory management tools, etc.) as well as their opinion. We like opinionated, articulate people. Tell me why 5 million keywords are stupid. Or how you'd manage them on a tiered basis of top performers, has-potential, and dead wood.
Another example: A candidate brought up the differences in in-house Google APIs and using Adwords Editor, which suggested to me she had experience in managing accounts with significant keyword inventory.
4. I am advertising for "red widgets" but I'm concerned about the increase in costs. What should I do?
Believe it or not, some candidates tend not to ask further questions and launch straight into a very long, complex solution. What would you do if your boss gave you too little information? Was it an increase in CPC or CPA? Have competitors begun a bidding war? Did you turn on broad/phrase/exact matching. Do you have negative keywords?
If the question seems a bit vague or brief, ask the interviewer more questions to clarify!
My favorite response was the cheeky candidate that said: "If all else fails, reduce the budget by $400K and hire 3 developers and a dedicated SEO guy."
5. Let's pretend that I'm from a competitor who is buying the same trademarked keyword that your department owns. Despite a polite email, I have refused to stop bidding on your trademarked term. What steps do you take?
In our organization, trademark infringement is an issue that rears its ugly head every now and then.
This question tests not only candidate knowledge on Google's trademark infringement policy and best practices for bidding on a competitor's keywords, but also their conflict resolution skills. I usually choose to be an obstinate and prickly competitor that refuses to back down.
This final roleplay question can often get heated or weird, but is the ulterior goal is to simply test their conflict resolution skills.
Creating Your Own Questions
These are five example technical questions that I like to ask during phone screening.
When creating your own set of phone screening questions, customize them to your department or company's own objectives, but the intent is the same - use technical questions to put candidates at ease, allowing them to give away behavioral answers more freely. Save time by crafting two-for-one questions.
I also make no apologies for the Google bias - in Australia, Google completely dominates the search market. Yahoo Search Marketing is a very small percentage of our spend and MSN hasn't rolled out adCenter locally.
D'oh. I just realized that I'll have to come up with some new questions for any potential Aussie search marketers! Maybe instead of phone screening, I'll force them to use VOIP + avatar screening. I could see Rand interviewing prospective candidates in his virtual Pumas. The candidate would also have to negotiate their way across the virtual world to the pseudo-Mozplex, which is surely a good test of online savviness?
As a relative newcomer to recruitment, I'd love to hear the interview questions you agency folk and in-house recruiters ask of PPC candidates.
Next: SEOmoz goes organic in part two of this Hiring Search Marketers series!
Good questions. How about questions about click fraud? Also, I would like to hear success stories. i.e. What was the most successful paid search campaign you have managed and what was the least successful? Both from an ROI standpoint. What strategies worked and why?
Yes! Especially least successful campaign.
Besides showing their ability to understand where they went wrong, you might also find out how the candidate bounces back from failure.
"We infringed on a trademark of our competitors due to DKI and as a result of being sued, we beefed up our best practices on competitor's keywords by creating specific adgroups with no DKI" etc.
It would depend on the type of PPC role. Is it account management role - then I would try to get a feel for their performance under pressure.
I always opt to identify specialists by what they believe are the biggest misconceptions. You don't become good if you haven't sifted through a lot of fallacies and non-sense to figure out these things.
It depends on the calibre; if it is someone serious (as managing 5million keywords would be) then I would ask more strategic questions - what options in the Google ad panel are missing? What sort of additional information do you feel Google doesn't display.
It isn't what this person knows that everyone else might know, I'd be interested in a candidate that has knowledge other candidates probably don't.
Oren
Nice Oren. That would be a great face-to-face interview question:
"What do you believe are the biggest misconceptions with {insert SEM topic}"
I'd like to hear the passion and fire-and-brimstone they'd infuse into that discussion. It would also reveal what really gets under the skin :)
As for the account size, the number is supposed to throw them off a bit. Many of the candidates in Australia are used to dealing with a short tail of hundreds or thousands of keywords.
But even if they have limited exposure to big accounts, I want the candidate to be thinking aloud, so I can see how they apply logic and past experience to solve a problem.
How would you tackle an account of that size?
What tools and resources would you use and what strategies and tactics would you propose?
Shor -
Really enjoyed this post. Gave me some things to think about and see how I stack up when answering the questions. The only one I could add would be to ask what their daily/weekly process is when managing campaigns. What reports do they run? How do they deal with poorly performing keywords (CTR, Cost, Conversion Rate etc). What is their process in developing and testing ad text?
Again, thanks for the post.
The daily routine question is another good question but I'd recommend saving it for the face-to-face or the follow-up phone interview.
I tend to find the average daily/weekly routine answer can take around 5 minutes and in 30 minute initial phone screen that is a fair proportion of time.
I like all the comments in this post! I like presenting the questions to the potential employer. This supports conversation and creating a more useful answer. When asked how I would manage a 5 million keyword campaign. I would ask why they have 5 million keywords in the first place. Most of the accounts I’ve managed have dead words, so they clutter up the accounts. Then I would question how the groups were set-up and how many keywords on average were in each adgroup. More questions about spend and click volume. If the account seems organized and optimized, I would call in the experts like Efficient Frontier and SiteTuners. The only way to get lift with a strong campaign is to optimize the landing pages and build real-time intelligence into the execution.
Love your answer Anne! I'm sure you'd ace any phone interview.
You were not thrown off by the big number, you outlined a simple strategy for managing the account and you asked questions while making some poignant observations.
Thanks Shor, I like all your comments!
When I've been interviewed, I've been asked what search marketing blogs I'm currently reading. SEOMoz always impresses! :-)
I was once shown actual landing pages they were working on and asked how I would change them to increase conversions.
Some of the questions listed in this post have defintely made me think - guess I'll have to beef up a bit before I go on another interview!
I always ask this in face-to-face interviews.
"How do you keep up to date with the search marketing industry?"
It's an interesting question to ask because it reveals the candidate's passion for search. Some people have no answer, because they simply don't read any blogs at all - which was initially a 'Shock, horror!' type of moment for myself, but I've found it's fairly common.
Some people just subscribe to Marketing Profs and Mediapost and other 'traditional' online news sources.
Others only visit the official Google blogs or SEL.
But when a candidate says they are a big fan of the Michael Martinez blog or SEOmoz or Shoemoney, it tells me these are people who live and breathe search marketing.
Good point, and of course if they recognize you from a blog post, then hire them on the spot!
Hehe, my online pseudonym and the cartoon avatar is a good disguise.
I anticipate a day when a candidate tells me how obnoxious or uninformed 'shor' is :)
i liked this post a lot. great ideas for questions here.
i specifically like the questions about "how you keep up with search marketing industry". asking that seems to be so obvious to me, but maybe not so much for others. :(
i'd like to see you do a post on the culture fit interviews as well. i think that's something that is really important but seems to get overlooked many times until after the hire.
I think I can accommodate you :)
I plan to post some SEO interview questions, then flip the script and put employers on the hotseat and finally, I'd like to talk about what employers are really looking for when hiring a search marketer (the culture fit questions will be in this post).
Fit is very important! Too many times companies just want a warm body. When I manage a team, I have some of the senior members interview the candidate to help with fit. Good suggestion on a future blog post.
A single question that Guy Kawasaki would ask on the interview would be "What is the single most serious error you have made, when working for the company, and what were the consequences?"
This question alone tells you:
- how honest the interviewee is
- the level of competence/experience/knowledge
- the level of responsibility he takes/how talks about other workers, etc
- the position he/she took in the company and how he/she dealt with it
Depending on the answer, I'd invite the person to the office and ask your or any other SEO-specific questions.
I have had quite a few PPC marketers call me over the years trying to get me to sign a contract with them. It doesn't take long to realize that my own AdWords Rep at Google can run circles around them. I find this to be very sad.
The question that makes me hang up on all of them so far is when I ask them if they can beat a 1.7 Net Profit ROI (revenue - cogs - adspend). 90% of them tell me they don't look at things on a Net Profit ROI basis. They then go into a long pitch about revenue generation. I reply with 'it's not what you make, it's what you keep' they again go into their revenue, branding, blah blah blah. I tell them that if they can come up with a plan to double my Net Profit after what I have to pay them to do it, I'll sign up--but if they can't they pay for the advertising campaign and we go our seperate ways.
No one has been confident enough in themselves to take me up on the offer. If you're different, send me an email at David dot Payne at my company name dot com and we'll go from there.
"The question that makes me hang up on all of them so far is when I ask them if they can beat a 1.7 Net Profit ROI (revenue - cogs - adspend). 90% of them tell me they don't look at things on a Net Profit ROI basis. They then go into a long pitch about revenue generation. I reply with 'it's not what you make, it's what you keep' they again go into their revenue, branding, blah blah blah."
One Call,
Assuming you're serious about your statement, with all due respect (and everyone's entitled to their own decision making process), you'll never get anyone in their right mind to agree to something like that.
I'm a very roi focused guy (as is bookworm), however if you should ever find someone saying they could do this, it would be akin to guaranteeing to get you on the first page of organic SERPs for a highly competitive keyword within a certain period of time. The fact is, there are just so many things outside their control - not the least of which is:
1) The quality of your product,
2) The competitiveness of your product,
3) The demand for your product,
4) Your ability to complete and validate a purchase related to a click through,
5) The COGS for your product, etc., etc., etc...
Each of these things has a very direct impact on the results you are seeking.
I think you would be much better served by giving a prospective SEO a realistic target to shoot for, such as CTR and conversion for a specific desired result - whether it be capturing an email address to deliver a desired white paper or purchasing an e-book, software title, etc... Net Profit? C'mon...
On an entirely separate and perhaps somewhat humorous note, I noticed you previously worked for Viking. My good friend Rick Hazell used to run the sales department there. Wondered if you might know him.
Nice post Shor. I'm also a big believer in open-ended questions where there are not necessarily right or wrong answers. To me, what's most important is to get a good indication of a candidate's intellectual capacity, behavior, conversational skills, etc.
Here are a few that I like to ask:
Give me a few examples of successful PPC ads you’ve created. What were the headlines and why did you choose them?
From your perspective, what are the five most important elements to achieving a strong click to conversion?
You have $5,000 per month to invest on a PPC campaign for a client. In a few minutes, walk me through your approach on how you would execute a successful campaign. Approach to keyword research, long-tail versus short tail keywords, tools you would use to manage the campaign, etc.
Describe what you feel an optimal landing page looks like - not just aesthetically, but "feature-wise" as well.
Got an interview soon, thanks for letting me in on what the other side of the table is looking for.
For the 2nd question, the interviewee should also point out that having 2 places for their ad to appear is better than 1; also sometimes the paid listings appear before the organic listings -- better to ensure the #1 spot. but, yes, all relative to whether there are more hits and less cost.
ppc for content networks is also something the interviewee could bring up for this question.
Hi All of U,
I am Raj want to know one thing that if i am running a PPC compaign for my site https://www.phpresources.itgo.com from 2 months , can i find better position in organic search by hitting my site easily??
Rajendra Prasad
I think its really great tips. Thanks for these information
Nice article shor. Thanks. I've never hired an experienced search marketer (apart from Tom, but that doesn't count!) so this kind of insight is very valuable.
We're thinking of hiring an 'apprentice' level person soon who will then be trained in paid and organic search. They won't have to have any experience of either field, so we are working on how to find people with *potential* aptitude for this stuff, even if they don't know their QS from their PR or their AdWords Editor from their API. Or even if they've never heard of any of those things!
Those are good questions - tight, focused, and requiring candidates to think quickly and wisely.
I also like to ask best/worst questions to get a feel for a person's resiliance. "What is the worst project you've ever been involved with? And why?"
-OT
Excellent article. We are currently in the process of hiring a SEM for our company, and to be honnest, we have no clue as to what questions we should ask (beside the traditional interview questions). This will help for sure. Thanks a lot!
Very nice article. Another commonly asked question, Why do you want to work for XYZ Company or Why do you choose XYZ company to work for ?
Great post! Gave me good insight into what I should expect - didn’t do so badly but need to learn more about management tools. Wonder what the equivalent Q's are for SEO.