Useful Questions When Hiring Your Next Content Strategist

The best interview question you can pose to a candidate are always open ended and give opportunity to think as opposed to recite a standard response. This will enable you as the interviewer to assess their ability to organise thoughts, provide clear and concise information, analyse and interpret data and their capacity to empathize with others. All of which are key skills you will be seeking in a content strategist.

You will also want to ensure they have a strong knowledge of SEO. These days writing creative and interesting content is important but knowing how to optimise it so that it brings the benefits you’re your website is equally as important. Here are some SEO questions you need to ask when hiring you next content strategist.

1. Walk us Through Your CV.

How can an interview not open with this question? It brings together both the eager hiring manager, keen to extract more detail from the CV that s/he has already reviewed and digested.

As obvious as it may seem, this really is the most underestimated question of all time. It will provide a number of amazing insights into some of the key aspects of the candidate seated front of you.

Being an open-ended question, it will give you an idea of their communicate skills. You will get a sense of their prioritisation skills, as to which aspects of their CV are most relevant to the job vacancy or company.  It will highlight discrepancies between their oral account and what is written on the CV.

2. Did You Ever Run a Successful Piece of Content?

This question is really good at unearthing some interesting information such as, the candidate’s general concept of success and the metrics that they use to measure success.

While there is clearly a difference between a 10%-200% increase, it is crucial to use this to question the candidate’s ability to highlight the context in which the gains were produced.

One thing is to bring 10% increase on a small team for a small business another is a company with a large team, budget for strategy and an already highly ranking website.

3. Have you Ever Had An Unsuccessful Campaign And How Did You React To That?

This will give the interviewer an insight into the emotional intelligence of the candidate and to gauge the candidate’s relationship to failure. Are they willing to admit when things went wrong, review the campaign and learn from the process?

4. What Do You Think Of The Website You Would Be Working On If Successfully Hired?

This shows preparation on the part of the candidate, in addition to thought. If they provide critical feedback, it is a sign that they can brainstorm ideas, find potential weakness and strengths and are comfortable sharing opinions.

5. Do You Know What Link Building is?

For anyone working in the area of content, it is always interesting to ask if they are aware of link building. Regardless of whether or not you are planning to utilise the candidates’ editorial skills to produce link-worthy content.

This question will give you an immediate understanding into the level of involvement of the candidate in the overall SEO efforts of their previous company. In other words, the awareness of what link building is a proxy for their overall SEO knowledge. Some candidates might barely be aware of this side of things and may be just aware that their company outsource link building.

It is clear that those who work in content and ignore what link building is altogether might lack a well-rounded level of experience and may not be considered as senior or las you would expect them.

These questions will allow you to gain an insight into the candidates though process, communication skills and empathy which are exactly the skills you will need from a content strategist.