Work Samples Beat Interviews: Assessing Marketing Skills Practically
Portfolios all look competent now and everyone claims the same tools. A short paid exercise tells you more in an afternoon than three rounds of conversation.
Two things stopped working at roughly the same time.
Portfolios became unreliable, because polished output is now cheap to produce and impossible to attribute. And skill claims became uninformative, because every résumé lists the same tools and the same AI fluency.
What's left is watching someone work. Done properly this takes an afternoon of their time and an hour of yours, and it replaces two interview rounds.
What a good exercise looks like
Real, small, and recent. Take something your team genuinely did in the last quarter and cut it down to two or three hours of work. A campaign to repurpose across channels. A landing page to audit. A messy data export to turn into a recommendation. A brief with a hole in it.
Scoped in writing, with a time limit you mean. State the expected effort and tell them to stop there. Candidates who spend twelve hours on a three-hour exercise distort your comparison and tell you nothing about how they work under normal conditions.
Tools open. Let them use anything, including AI. You are not testing whether they used it. You are testing the output and, in the debrief, the judgement behind it.
Paid, if it's more than about an hour. This is not only fair — it changes who accepts. Strong candidates with options decline unpaid multi-hour exercises, which means the free version selects for the candidates with the fewest alternatives.
The debrief is the assessment
The artefact matters less than the conversation about it. Twenty minutes, four questions:
"Walk me through your approach." You're listening for a sequence of decisions, not a description of the deliverable.
"What did you cut for time?" Reveals prioritisation, which is most of the job. Someone who cut nothing didn't finish, and someone who cut the important thing has told you something useful.
"Where are you least confident?" Strong candidates answer this immediately and specifically. Weak ones say everything's fine. This question does more work than any other in the set.
"What would you need to do this properly?" Data, access, a conversation with sales, brand guidelines. Tests whether they know what a real version of this requires.
What it catches that interviews don't
Whether the portfolio was theirs. Uncomfortable but real. Work produced live, on your brief, under a time limit, is attributable in a way a portfolio isn't.
Actual quality control. This is where AI-assisted marketing breaks in practice. You will see the difference immediately between someone who reviews output and someone who ships whatever came out.
How they handle ambiguity. Leave one thing deliberately unspecified in the brief. Some candidates ask, some assume and state the assumption, some ignore it. All three tell you how they'll behave on day forty.
Writing. Not their portfolio writing — their thinking-out-loud writing, in the notes and the summary. It's the most reliable predictor of clarity in the role and the hardest thing to fake at speed.
Where this goes wrong
Free labour. If the output is usable in your business, you have crossed a line. Use last quarter's problem, not this quarter's. Candidates recognise the difference and talk about it publicly.
Too big. A "small project" that takes a weekend excludes everyone with a job and a family, which is most senior candidates.
No feedback. If someone spends three hours on your exercise, they get a response with substance, including if they're rejected. This costs you fifteen minutes and buys a reputation that fills your pipeline for years.
Using it as a filter instead of a final step. Send it to two or three finalists, not to everyone who applied. Otherwise you've built a process that burns goodwill at scale.
Grading against a model answer. There isn't one. You're assessing judgement, not compliance with your solution.
For senior roles
The exercise changes shape. Instead of production work, give them a situation: here's our funnel, here's our budget, here's the problem we can't solve. Ninety minutes, then a conversation.
You're testing what questions they ask before they answer. A senior candidate who dives straight into recommendations without interrogating the premise is telling you exactly how they'll operate in your first strategy meeting.
The efficiency argument
A well-designed exercise plus debrief replaces the second and third interview rounds. That shortens your process, which matters — speed is one of the most common reasons strong candidates are lost, and it costs nothing to fix.
You end up with a shorter process that produces better information. That trade is available to almost every hiring team and very few take it.
Designing an assessment for a marketing role? Talk to us — we can help you build an exercise that's fair, fast, and actually predictive.
Hiring, or thinking about your next move?
We place digital marketing and technology leadership across the US. Tell us what you're working on and we'll tell you honestly whether we can help.
Start a conversation