How to Get Hired in Marketing at an International Company

I am always interviewing people for various positions within Marketing departments. I am usually disappointed in the quality of candidates HR was coming in with. I warned my managers that I was going to ask for my 15 minutes back if they wasted my time with a stupid interview.

If you want to work for me, these are the things I look for in an Internet Marketer.

You need to write excellent casual English. You can’t work in a dotcom serving a global audience and be an internet marketer without excellent writing skills in English. I don’t care how lyrical your poetry sounds in Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese or Ubuntu. It’s all English, all the time. I will typically send you an email to schedule a phone interview. Your response better be clean, polished and well written — no casual SMS texting style emails.

You need a crisp, clean, consistent and well formatted resume or CV. I want to know what you accomplished at those other companies. What were the goals, how long did it take you, what size was the team. What your role was in accomplishing those goals. I don’t care about whether you like cricket or long walks in the sand. Just your job. If I see typos, grammatical errors, inconsistency in tense (worked, works, and will work in same sentence), you’re finished. Your lack of attention to detail doesn’t impress me. Don’t cut and paste from other people’s online resumes either. I’ll notice it and Google it and see who else I really should hire.

You need presence on-line. I will Google you. I’d better see you on more social networks than just Facebook. If you don’t have an active Facebook and Linkedin account, I’d be suspicious and put you in the “maybe” pile. This, more than your MBA, means a lot — that you get it. Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Instagram and any new mobile technologies will attract me even more. I want to see references. I will read those profiles completely. I will check the dates when you joined. I will notice the number of followers you have and the quality of those connections. I will read the comments you leave to others, I need to see that interaction within your social media.

If you’re looking to do SEO, I’d better not find forum posts where you’re pitching your web site to link farms or hit-builders just to jack up meaningless traffic. I want to see the keywords you worked on, the competition, where you finally ranked and how long it took to get there.

If you are a content writer, I want to see at least three samples of online content. I will test it with a plagiarism tool. If I like the work and our in-person interview goes well, I will ask you to hand-write another piece here in my office without any internet access, including your phone. Be prepared. If I tell you that you’ll probably be working on real estate sites or fashion sites, or whatever, do a little research the day before.

If you are a linker, you need to be able to tell me what the different types of link exchanges are, how they work together, and why PR and authority have value or why you think they don’t anymore. You need to be able to tell me the process you go through to get links, and what the expectations should be for a particular industry, if you’ve had experience linking in the past.

If you are a web designer, don’t let me catch you downloading free web templates and passing it off as your own. Just like the content writers, you will spend an hour in my office designing a Photoshop mockup of a web site. If you have UI and site architecture experience, I may ask for even more examples. BTW, and this is a huge pet peeve of mine: web designers have a background in DESIGN, not computer applications. You should have a really slick portfolio on line. If you can’t make me jealous when I see your work, don’t bother me at all. I’ll want that hour back.

Bottom line, I like a small team that works efficiently as a team. The more HR-related tasks I have to do, the more I am kept from doing the important work that meets company objectives. To me, and most Americans, we identify ourselves by our jobs. The first question we ask in an introduction is, “So, what do you do?” It’s that vital to us. More than what our father’s name is. More than what our backgrounds are or whether we’re married or single. Keep that in mind next time you’re interviewing with an MNC or just happen to end up interested in working for a company whose marketing department happens to lead by an American, especially this American.

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