Scorecards and Work Samples for Senior Ad Team Hires

An advertising hire is usually decided before anyone is interviewed. The role gets written as a list of platforms, so the panel screens for platform familiarity, then is surprised when the person who arrives cannot decide anything without asking. I start by writing what the role must decide in its first ninety days and getting the panel to sign that page. Of the last nine searches I screened for, two closed with an internal promotion, because the scorecard made an obvious inside candidate visible in week one. The scorecard comes first: Four to six decisions the role owns, each with the evidence that would show a candidate can make them. Owning the monthly channel mix inside a fixed budget and defending it to finance is a decision. Five years of paid social is a proxy for one, and a weak proxy. The panel signs before I look at a single application. Disagreement at that stage is common and cheap. The same disagreement at offer stage costs you the candidate. The work sample: Three hours, paid by you at a rate agreed up front, built from your own reporting with spend and revenue multiplied by a constant so real figures never leave your systems. The candidate gets a situation from your last quarter: a channel that stopped scaling, or a gap between platform-reported conversions and what landed in the finance report. They say what they would do and what they would need to know first. I read the questions they ask more closely than the answer they reach. How scoring runs: The same questions in the same order for every candidate. Each panel member scores independently and submits before seeing anyone else's, and I submit mine before I see theirs. Where scores differ by more than one point we discuss the evidence rather than the impression. Debriefs where the most senior voice speaks first are the reason good candidates get talked out of the room. How I am paid: A flat fee agreed before the search opens, never a percentage of salary. A percentage gives me an interest in the offer going up and makes every word of my advice on compensation suspect. I take nothing from recruiters, job boards or assessment vendors involved in the process, and I will name any prior working relationship with your recruiter before we start. What I do not do: I do not source candidates. I am not a recruiter and I have no network to sell you. Bring your own pipeline or your own recruiter and I work alongside them. No psychometric testing. No reference calls run as a formality once the decision is made; if references are a real check they happen before the offer or not at all. Salary benchmarking only for South Africa and for remote hires into European time zones, where I have live numbers. Anywhere else I would be reading you a report you can buy directly. Not for: The first marketing hire at a pre-revenue company. The role changes shape every six weeks at that stage, there is nothing stable to score against, and you are making a bet on a person that you should make yourself. Also not for volume screening. If the task is reading three hundred applications, that is a recruiting operation and this is not it. Roles I take: Performance and paid media leads, growth leads, marketing operations, retention and lifecycle roles, and the head-of-marketing seat below C-level. I have run these searches inside edtech admissions teams, a furniture retailer building its first in-house media function, and two publishers hiring against advertising revenue.