Now that you’re ready to schedule interviews, you may want to ask them to do a bit of homework that applies to your product/company. You’ll also want to explore their approach to building a B2B SaaS content strategy that supports both SEO and brand.
Your team should include specific roles. Learn what they are and what to look for in your first marketing team.
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Here is an email you can send to candidates that you have selected based on their profile (resume), work portfolio and maybe a cover letter.
“Dear Jane,
Thank you for applying for the content manager position at our company.
In addition to getting to know you through video interviews, it’s going to be your work that will impress us. For that reason, we encourage you to complete one (or more) of the writing prompts below before we start the interviews.
To make your work meaningful, we came up with three examples that are real and should be usable right away. In your role as our Partner Content Marketer, the Content Buck stops with you. No one should have to review your work before it goes ‘live’. So make sure this is of the right quality level. Feel free to have others review it before you send it to us.
If we like your work, we would love to use it and will, of course, compensate you accordingly."
1. Wow prompt: make our audience notice us
"Please write a short piece that builds on some of the ideas found on our website. Use language that draws in our audience. Turn the voice from being about us into text with our Customers or Partners at the center. Make our audience the hero. This article should be about them and their needs and aspirations. Consider a headline that could be the subject line for an email or the first sentence in Google Search results. It has to grab attention and have our audience want to click on it and learn more."
2. How prompt: help our audience through their journey
"This piece is about guiding our audience on their path to become more productive. Use education, answering potential questions (how to), lists and guidelines to help someone take the next step at any stage in their journey. You can focus on the first stage where they are still figuring out if they have a need, and contemplate possible solutions. Or the second stage where they are looking at multiple options to solve for their needs. Or the final stage where they may have settled on wanting to work with a solution that we offer, and now they want to make sure they can trust us, rely on us and make the jump to commitment. Write a short text that helps people answer questions they have, or learn something to help them along their journey."
3. Now prompt: calling someone to action
"Write an email that can be the first email of that new service. Help them understand how to start. The email needs to start with their needs in mind. We need to assure our new customer that we know what we're doing by taking them by the hand. We want to make it easy for them to follow our lead. The customer wants us to become their trusted guide.
Feel free to pick any of the three examples that help you impress us. You can do more than one as well. This exercise is not about quantity though. It’s about letting your qualities and talents shine.
Thank you again for applying to become part of our team. This role is one of the most strategic positions on the team, and we look forward to seeing your work and get to know you better.
Please post your work as a google doc and share it with us at least a day before your interview.”
Content Marketing Interview Questions
Use the following questions to probe a candidate’s mindset, experience, and fit for your company’s go-to-market model:
Strategy and planning
- How do you align your content strategy with business objectives like lead generation or brand positioning?
- Walk me through how you'd create a quarterly content calendar.
- What steps would you take to launch content for a new product feature?
- How do you balance long-term content pillars with short-term campaign demands?
SEO and analytics
- How do you conduct keyword research for a new article?
- What tools do you use to measure SEO performance?
- What KPIs do you track to determine if a piece of content is successful?
- How do you adjust a content plan if your traffic drops?
Content execution and workflow
- What’s your process for creating a high-performing blog post from start to finish?
- How do you collaborate with designers, developers, or subject matter experts?
- What tools do you use to manage content workflows?
- How do you ensure brand voice and consistency across content types?
Creative judgment
- What content piece are you most proud of and why?
- Describe a time you had to write for a technical audience. How did you adapt your tone?
- How would you repurpose a long-form blog post into other formats?
Communication and stakeholder management
- How do you handle feedback from sales or product stakeholders?
- What’s your approach to aligning content topics with customer pain points?