A content marketing manager is hired to decide what gets made and how it reaches anyone, so test commissioning and distribution rather than prose. Ask for a short memo choosing three topics against a stated business goal, with the topics they rejected and why, plus the promotion plan for each. Then watch them edit somebody else's mediocre draft.
Former journalists and magazine editors who moved in-house bring the strongest editorial judgment and the highest standards for sourcing. Senior writers ready to stop writing everything themselves are the most common route, though you must check they can let go. In-house marketers from companies whose published work you already admire are worth approaching directly, since you can inspect the evidence before the first conversation. Newsletters, podcasts and industry communities expose people already close to your audience, and a well-written personal newsletter is stronger evidence than any deck. Read what a candidate published rather than the title they held, and be aware that many applicants are excellent writers who never owned distribution or a number. Publish the real remit in the [content marketing manager job description](/job-descriptions/content-marketing-manager).
Whether they write or commission, and what the content exists to achieve. State the production mix: freelancers, staff writers, subject-matter experts, video, a newsletter, customer stories. Name the goal in business terms and the measure attached to it, because content roles die from being judged on a metric nobody agreed. Say whether there is a freelance budget, who approves it and how quickly an invoice gets paid, which freelancers ask about first. Most importantly, state the access they get to internal experts and customers, since that access decides whether the programme produces anything worth reading. Also say who owns distribution, because a manager who commissions but cannot promote is dependent on somebody else's priorities every single week.
Two exercises, both short. A topic memo: given this audience and this business goal, choose three pieces to make next quarter, justify each, name three you considered and rejected with reasons, and describe how each one reaches a reader. The rejections carry the signal, because anyone can add ideas and few people can remove them. Then an editing test: send a competent but flat draft and ask for tracked changes plus a five-minute explanation of the biggest change and why. Strong editors restructure the argument and cut the opening; weaker ones tidy commas and leave the shape untouched. Ask what a definitional page such as a [hiring glossary](/glossary) is for, and listen for intent rather than volume.
Four, and one of them gets skipped too often. Start with a screen on remit and published evidence. Second, the topic memo reviewed with a commercial stakeholder who can challenge whether those pieces help the business. Third, the editing conversation. Fourth, and this is the stage teams miss, put the candidate in front of an internal expert playing a busy engineer or a customer, and give them fifteen minutes to extract a usable story. That single session predicts output quality better than the whole portfolio, because a content programme lives or dies on whether experts will give this person their time twice. Structure the loop with the [content marketing manager interview questions](/interview-questions/content-marketing-manager), and record scores against a shared rubric using your [applicant tracking features](/ats-features).
The market is full of people who can produce and short of people who can prioritise, commission and distribute, so expect a longer search than for a writer and pay for the judgment. Candidates are assessing whether content is treated as a sales collateral factory, whether they will get access to experts, and whether anybody reads the results. Show them your last three published pieces and what actually happened afterwards, including the ones that failed. Honesty here is far more persuasive than a mission statement or a promise of creative freedom. If you are weighing a full-time hire against a freelance bench, model both against your current [cost per hire](/cost-per-hire) before committing to the headcount.
Get a personalized walkthrough of Pitch N Hire on your own roles and workflow. No slides, no obligation.
Prefer to talk? Book a demo · View pricing
Free 1-user plan · No credit card · Talk to a real hiring expert
See your true cost-per-hire and how much Pitch N Hire could save you — our free Recruitment ROI Calculator gives you the numbers in under a minute. No signup required.
Open the free ROI calculatorPrefer a tailored walkthrough on your real roles? Drop your work email:
★ Free 1-user plan · No spam · Talk to a real hiring expert
