You posted a job for a "Marketing Manager." You received 247 applications. Your recruiter sent you 12 candidates to review.
After three rounds of interviews, you made an offer. The candidate accepted. Three months later, you realize they're a social media specialist who's never built a demand gen program, doesn't understand your CRM, and thinks "attribution" means giving credit in Instagram posts.
This is the marketing hiring failure pattern playing out at hundreds of companies right now. Here's why it keeps happening—and how to fix it.
Your 'Marketing Manager' job post might attract 247 applicants, but if you can't tell a demand gen expert from a social media specialist, you're just sorting resumes blindly.When you say you need a "marketing professional," you might mean:
These aren't interchangeable roles. A brilliant brand marketer will likely fail at demand generation. A superb marketing ops professional won't excel at content creation. A demand gen expert won't necessarily understand product positioning.
Yet traditional recruiting approaches treat "marketing" as a monolithic function and send you candidates based on "5+ years marketing experience" without understanding the actual discipline you need.
Ask your recruiting firm: "Does this candidate actually know HubSpot, or did they just list it on their resume?"
Can they:
Or did they just send a few emails and call themselves "HubSpot experienced"?
Most recruiters can't tell the difference. AI adoption is transforming marketing, with 91% of organizations now using AI in operations and 86% expecting to hire for AI-focused roles. Marketing recruiters who can't assess technical proficiency with modern tools will send you unqualified candidates.
Would you hire a designer without reviewing their portfolio? Of course not.
Yet companies hire demand gen managers without reviewing campaign performance data, content marketers without reading their published work, and marketing ops professionals without seeing dashboards they've built.
The best marketing candidates can show you:
If your recruiting process doesn't include portfolio review, you're hiring blind.
Traditional recruiting firms charge 20-25% of first-year salary. For a VP Marketing at $200K salary, that's $40,000–$50,000 in fees.
This creates perverse incentives:
Organizations using on-demand recruiting report up to 30% lower hiring costs precisely because hourly billing aligns incentives better than commissions.
A recruiter who handles "all marketing roles" likely can't deeply assess demand generation, product marketing, marketing operations, content marketing, and performance marketing. Each requires different evaluation criteria.
The questions you'd ask a demand gen candidate:
...are completely different from what you'd ask a product marketing candidate:
Specialized recruiting expertise matters in marketing more than most functions.
Effective marketing recruiting requires five elements:
Don't post a generic "Marketing Manager" job description. Define exactly what you need:
Are you hiring for:
Each requires different experience, skills, and assessment criteria.
Modern marketing requires technical proficiency. Can candidates actually use:
Don't accept "familiar with" on resumes. Assess actual proficiency through practical questions and portfolio review.
Require candidates to show their work:
No portfolio = no consideration. This single change will dramatically improve your marketing hiring quality.
B2B SaaS demand gen is different from consumer brand marketing. Enterprise marketing (selling to 10,000+ employee companies) is different from SMB marketing. Technical product marketing is different from consumer product marketing.
Match candidates to your:
Experience in similar environments transfers better than generic "marketing experience."
Marketing roles have high turnover partly because expectations don't match reality.
Be explicit about:
Better clarity upfront = better retention later.
The average marketing org uses 10-15 tools, but most recruiters can't tell if candidates actually know HubSpot or just sent a few emails and listed it on their resume.Several trends are reshaping marketing hiring:
AI Is Raising the Bar: AI-related marketing roles face significant shortage, with demand far exceeding available talent. The marketers who thrive are those who can leverage AI tools for efficiency while applying creativity and strategy that AI can't replicate.
MarTech Expertise Is Non-Negotiable: The average marketing organization uses 10-15 tools. Candidates who can't operate complex MarTech stacks won't succeed. AI roles command about 67% higher salaries than traditional software roles, and the same premium applies to AI-fluent marketers.
Specialization Continues: Companies increasingly want experts, not generalists. Demand gen specialists. Product marketing specialists. Marketing ops specialists. The "I can do everything" marketer is being replaced by focused discipline expertise.
Remote Work Has Expanded Talent Pools: You can now hire the best demand gen manager regardless of location. But this also means candidates have more options—they're evaluating your opportunity against remote roles at tech companies nationwide.
Organizations increasingly use flexible, blended models—combining internal teams with outside recruiting partners—to access marketing talent rather than relying only on full-time internal recruiters who may lack specialized marketing assessment capability.
Here's what cost-effective, high-quality marketing recruiting looks like:
✓ Define the specific marketing discipline you need (not generic "marketing")
✓ Assess technical proficiency with your actual MarTech stack, not resume keywords
✓ Require portfolio review showing actual work and performance
✓ Match candidates to your business model, ICP, and industry
✓ Set realistic expectations about the role, resources, and success metrics
✓ Use recruiting partners who specialize in marketing and can assess discipline-specific expertise
Most companies can reduce marketing hiring mistakes by 50%+ and reduce recruiting costs by 30-70% simultaneously by improving their marketing recruiting process.
The question isn't whether you need better marketing recruiting. It's whether you can afford to keep hiring the wrong marketing talent.
Talk to a marketing recruiting specialist: Schedule a consultation to discuss your marketing hiring challenges.
Calculate your recruiting costs: Use our Recruiting Resource calculator to see if you have the right number of team members in place to hit your hiring goals.