How To Build A Technical Assessment For Your Next MarTech Hire

The needs of specific MarTech teams require unique interview processes that mix together creative and cultural analysis with technical assessment. Getting the balance right requires interviewer’s having an in-depth awareness of skills shortages in their team, and how their own MarTech stack works for their company and customers.

With the MarTech industry going through exponential growth over the last few years, finding talent in this marketing niche is a lesson in patience and application - when you do find the right person, how do you make their assessments effective, and how do you gather the right sort of data to make a qualified call on whether they would be a good addition to your team?

Establishing an onboarding program able to really get to grips with prospective talent’s skill set is part and parcel of any recruitment and interview strategy. 

But MarTech has touchpoints across sales, marketing, customer service and tech, so what makes an effective testing assessment for someone with such a broad impact on your business?

Data Analysis

The heart and soul of MarTech is the rapid and effective analysis of large data sets. With wide customer and audience traffic heading back to the company, part of your MarTech day-to-day will be building systems of data “cleaning” to better gather the right sort of information, impact marketing decisions, and seek a better outcome. 

Assessing their personal and previous business experience of handling data, analyzing it, and making concerted efforts to improve marketing outputs as a result should be a key line of questioning.

Personal Skill Set

MarTech pro’s have to show employers they have an eager technical mind, but also one fervently focused on L&D - critical lines of questioning around personal development are suggested, especially around examples of how they have imported new skills into a previous role and what they value in their marketing teams in terms of MarTech knowledge and requirements. 

UX/UI

MarTech covers a wide range of creative content inputs for distribution - but professionals in this line of work need to have a handle on how UX/UI impacts the customer journey. 

Lines of questioning around examples of good or bad UX/UI, and why it's good or bad, is essential in assessing your MarTech leader’s predilection to customer-first marketing practice.

CMS 

MarTech leaders will undoubtedly have working experience of CMS such as WordPress or Squarespace, but how they’ve developed those skills and how they interacted with the host sites will be vital in understanding another part of their digital skillset. 

Better yet, if your candidate has a personal website, focus on the creation of it - ask them how they built it, what influenced them in the making of it, and, if relevant, how they collaborated with others to make it. 

Technical Communication

For candidates at the leadership or executive level, assessing communication capability is absolutely required. Decision-making across departments, for example, Marketing to Sales, will require a leader able to translate difficult data sets into actionable intel. MarTech is a unique technical role in an otherwise creative and content-driven industry and the ability to straddle both the Tech and Layman space is needed.

Assessment needs to focus on the method of translation and anecdotal evidence of how your candidate employed it. Candidates need to prove how they did it, who they did it for, how delivery impacted an end result, and what the key takeaways from it were. 

Business Acumen

Connecting MarTech skills to overall business outcomes is the final stage in your technical assessment. Marketing sits above, within, and aside from every part of your business that faces your customer, and MarTech leaders need to have a solid understanding of how their efforts affected business output.

Technical assessments are, of course, only one part of the interview process. 

Asking the right sort of technical questions, mixed with relevant business-focused lines of query, will paint a much more detailed picture of not only your candidate’s technical skillset but their appreciation of MarTech in a wider business context.