I’ve been the head of growth for several startups.

I’ve even evangelized growth for a couple of the fastest growing SaaS companies. If there’s a role that’s hard to fill, without question, it’s the growth marketer, growth engineer, head of growth, growth lead, or whatever you call the open growth position at your company.

Sounds nice, right?

All companies need growth no matter what position they’re in. But it’s hard to hire for this role because it doesn’t just take experience to fill it, it takes the right experience. The balance of technical skills with a deep understanding of marketing psychology, branding, and statistics. The complete blend.

If one piece is missing, the equation is off. The marketing doesn’t quite stick. The traction doesn’t quite hit.

After hiring over ten different growth hackers, lead growth strategists, and growth engineers, I’ve learned to ask these seventeen questions in every interview. When a candidate has experience in each piece, the interview goes from phone to in-house to offer letter in a matter of days.

1. What Competitor Analysis Tools Have You Used?

2. What’s Your Experience in Paid Social?

3. Can You Run an Effective Google AdWords Campaign?

4. What’s Your Experience With Google Analytics and Data Studio?

5. Do You Have Badass Data Analysis Skills?

6. Can You Run A/B and Multivariate Tests to Optimize Pages?

7. How Do You Study a Visitor’s or User’s Interaction With Your Website?

8. Can You Throw Up a Minimum Viable Test?

9. Can You Build an Automation Sequence That Converts and Retains?

10. Can You Write Social Copy That Pops?

11. How Would You Pitch a Journalist?

12. Can You Guide a Customer to Their First Win?

13. Can You Build a Website or Chrome Extension?

14. Have You Built a Strong Presence on a Social Channel from Scratch?

15. Have You Come Up With Original Marketing Tactics?

16. What’s One Growth Framework You’ve Used?

17. Can You Design a Facebook Ad, Board Presentation, and Landing Page?

18. What is Growth Hacking?

19. What’s an Example of a Time You Broke a Rule and Achieved a Positive Result?

20. What’s Your Super Power?

21. Where Do You Want To Be In 3 years?

22. How Would You Define Growth Hacking to Your Grandma?

23. What’s Your Favorite Growth Hack?

24. What Would You Tell Your Client If You Weren’t Hitting Your KPIs?

1. What Competitor Analysis Tools Have You Used?

This is one of the most basic marketing skills, but also one of the most overlooked. You need to analyze paid marketing, backlinking, and team structure of your competitors.

Competitor analysis shows you where the low-hanging fruit is in any market. The real skill comes in interpreting the data. You can be looking at the best opportunity in the world, but without the right knowledge of the marketing ecosystem, the numbers are just numbers.

A few of the tools I expect the interviewee to know include SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, and Alexa.

growth hacking questions

Then I expect them to interpret the data by seeing opportunities that tell me they can picture the full funnel. For example, if they see no traffic from Facebook, they may come to the conclusion that it’s because it wasn’t a profitable channel for them.

However, an experienced marketer might notice they ran poor Facebook ad campaigns because the copy and images had no focus on the benefits of the product. Rather than an obstacle, they’ll see an opportunity to take a startup from five figures in revenue to seven.

2. What’s Your Experience in Paid Social?

If a candidate doesn’t understand how to drive paid traffic to a landing page, then the chances of them discovering an opportunity from any analysis drops significantly. The two most important advertising avenues today are Facebook and Instagram.

A growth marketer with experience on other platforms is a plus, but because they’re not as widely used, we don’t place a heavy consideration on them (e.g. Reddit, Pinterest).

On the surface level, I look for a marketer who uses formulas for ad copy and has databases they regularly pull images from.

On a deeper level, I look for a marketer who has experience with bidding strategies, device targeting, location targeting, naming campaigns, working with “Lookalike audiences“, and custom audiences.

Then I ask about ad sequencing. This quickly separates the novices from the experts. I see whether they have knowledge about how to run video ad sequences and pure branding ads to generate a lower cost-per-lead.

But, that’s not all.

A good sign is if they talk about remarketing videos after a percentage of watch time and using PR features to warm an audience before running conversion ads.

Now that I know whether they can run ads, I check their ability to discover a new profitable audience using social media advertising. I propose a hypothetical situation where they have a product but have no defined customer base.

Their job?

To find it with social media advertising without wasting a ton of money.

Here, I look for them to mention the use of Facebook Audience Insights, Google Analytics, Amazon search, YouTube search, and a competitor analysis tool to help them identify this audience.

define growth hacking

If they bring up little-known resources like Quora questions or even the phrase “affinity score,” they earn bonus points. But all the bonus points in the world doesn’t mean anything if they don’t have skills in attributing campaigns. That means using a URL builder tool to ensure all paid traffic is tracked in Google Analytics.

That way you can say, “This ad campaign led to this conversion”.

Lastly, they should understand where to check for attribution in Google Analytics and how to adjust the conversion window that Facebook reports on.

3. Can You Run an Effective Google AdWords Campaign?

Google AdWords is the best friend of social media advertising. The reason is your campaigns on social often influence the hits on Google search. In other words, the more people hear about you on Facebook, the more likely they’ll click your Google AdWords’ ad.

One of the key attributes I look for in Google AdWords experience is the proper use of Ad Groups. Most often, you should only have one keyword per an Ad Group. If they don’t know this, it immediately throws up a red flag. I also ask about device targeting, location targeting, and bidding strategies.

Then I ask them about their philosophy on bidding on company names and branded terms via Google search. I go deeper by probing into what they consider great bidding opportunities. A top Google AdWords strategist knows that the end goal is a quality conversion with a likely prospect, but that usually doesn’t happen right away.

Often AdWords campaigns are set to take prospects to the site and then Facebook retargeting is implemented to bring them to the ultimate conversion.

This knowledge matters because by knowing the ecosystem around the conversion process, an AdWords strategist can make more precise bids that drive revenue for the companies they work with.

4. What’s Your Experience With Google Analytics and Data Studio?

Most marketers will throw on their resume that they know Google Analytics, but it’s often far from true. Google Analytics provides a wealth of knowledge for how your marketing campaigns work from paid to organic. It will even tell you how well your individual site pages are optimized for different traffic sources.

I start with goals. Do they know how to set conversion goals in analytics and implement Google Tag Manager? If they don’t know how to implement either one, then that’s a big, bad sign. That means any goals whether capturing leads or turning email subscribers into paying customers have never been properly tracked.

I step into the finer details by asking about excluding IP addresses, identifying bot traffic, and creating proper dashboards as in Google Data Studio below to keep an eye on their company’s most important KPIs. Google Data Studio is a free tool that streamlines reporting for website analytics to Facebook and AdWords campaign performance.

If they have experience with Google Data Studio, then that tells me they’ve probably used analytics with strong depth and have given company presentations on their findings. This is a big plus if the position requires them to be customer- or C-level executive facing.

5. Do You Have Badass Data Analysis Skills?

I didn’t understand how important data analysis skills were. Then my boss asked me to use SQL for better attribution. When I started with SQL, I noticed that the numbers Facebook and Google Analytics gave me weren’t the right ones. I had no choice but to take it directly from the source- that is, dive into the back-end database with SQL queries.

This not only allowed me to get better attribution but to design more effective marketing experiments. For example, I used SQL queries to discover that our Facebook login underperformed the standard email capture on our landing page when measured down the funnel.

The reason? Facebook emails were old which led to a low open rate on nurture emails.

If the candidate doesn’t understand SQL, they should at least know Excel. With Excel or Google Sheet knowledge, they can clean data faster, perform pivot table analysis, and index-match function to help combine relevant data.

If the candidate doesn’t even have a high-level understanding of Excel or Google Sheets, then they won’t survive as a growth marketer.


I don’t care how much traffic you can throw at a website. If traffic doesn’t convert – it doesn’t convert. That’s why you need testing tools like Omniconvert and Optimizely because rarely does traffic convert well on the first run. It often takes many iterations of a website before visitors engage. Then even more before they convert.

Iterations on landing pages mean changes in copy, images, and email capture pop-ups. Knowing how to test is equally as important as what you test. For example, if you’re running a viral campaign while you’re conducting A/B tests on a landing page to get sign-ups for the campaign, you’ll get skewed results.

The reason is at any time in the campaign you may experience an unusual uptick whether an influencer sharing it or getting featured in a publication.

The best way to get reliable data when testing?

Paid traffic. This often means Google AdWords and Facebook ads. By focusing on segmenting traffic based on the source, it provides more reliable insights. This way you can make changes to your website with confidence.


Before you dive into A/B testing your website, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit to grab. You can see these opportunities using heatmapping and tools that record visitor and user sessions. The growth marketer should mention tools like Hotjar, Crazy Egg, and Full Story to help them do this.

They should be familiar with a variety of tools that can help with scaling your company.

8. Can You Throw Up a Minimum Viable Test?

A growth marketer should understand minimum viable testing to validate ideas. That means using landing page tools like Unbounce, Instapage, and LeadPages that enable you to throw up a page with a unique value proposition in minutes.

This skillset can save you thousands of dollars on paying a designer and coder to validate an idea by building a custom landing page. Plus, it gives you the ability to run campaigns at scale whether webinars or ebooks without having a lag time in development to push initiatives forward.


There are two halves to the acquisition equation. First, you need their contact information, then you need to nurture them until they pay. That may come in the form of email content with relevant value, SMS texting to remind them to jump on an educational webinar, or auto-adding them to a Facebook custom audience so they get remarketed with testimonials.

If you want a high-converting system, then you need marketing automation. That means a growth marketer should understand how to use tools like Zapier, Autopilot, Twilio, and Drips.

Why do we need this?

Marketing automation sequences are also critical to increase retention. Once again, ideally you’re using an email sequence segmented by user type and SMS texting to ensure they attend webinars.

Without marketing automation, even the best funnel will remain a complete mess. Find the marketers who can lock it all together.

10. Can You Write Social Copy That Pops?

A rule of thumb: if a growth marketer can’t write engaging posts on social media, then there’s little hope they can do it via email, on landing pages, or even SMS.

If they can write long-form copy that pops, then they have potential to cultivate the necessary skills to build an audience.

What I’ve noticed – the best marketers write the best social post copy, too. It’s not a surprise because copywriting is involved in almost every piece of marketing material. If you can’t hone the skill? Then you might as well throw your funnel down the drain.

11. How Would You Pitch a Journalist?

It’s a rare skill to pitch journalists and generate positive responses. Features from fan pages to publications to podcasts provide value for early-stage startups needing to establish credibility and get their first wave of traffic hitting their site.

The art of pitching a journalist relies on the relevancy of your message to the journalist’s past writing, timing with current events, credibility, value proposition and headline writing skills. If a growth marketer can get you features on-demand with this skillset, then they’ve made themselves an invaluable asset.

12. Can You Guide a Customer to Their First Win?

If the customer doesn’t get their desired result from your product, they’ll leave. Many products – no matter how great – aren’t intuitive. They require a little hand-holding. Products like Hubspot even have their own academy to help train marketers on how to use their platform.

A growth marketer who has experience creating user tutorials and an onboarding flow using a software like Appcues or even Loom can provide a ton of value on the retention side. Keep in mind, a product with poor retention is often not a valuable product at all.

To that end, a growth marketer should have enough experience to guide a new customer to their aha moment with your product while setting the right expectations every step of the way.

13. Can You Build a Website or Chrome Extension?

A growth marketer must have experience building on platforms whether Shopify stores, WordPress themes or Chrome extensions. They should have deep enough knowledge to throw something up in a day and start selling.

Even if it means outsourcing Chrome extensions like I do. If they don’t understand how to build or even outsource the construction of a platform, then they’ll have a lot of trouble understanding how to market it.

14. Have You Built a Strong Presence on a Social Channel From Scratch?

Those who’ve never built a strong social presence on a channel from scratch, don’t understand how much effort it takes. You’re often talking about hundreds and even thousands of hours of producing and distributing content to grow your presence.

Having a growth marketer on board who understands the level of work required to have social influence will enable you to set proper expectations, then exceed them.

15. Have You Come Up With Original Marketing Tactics?

If you’re going to hire a growth marketer, they need to be a problem solver. The best problem solvers can create original solutions whether that’s a new way to clean a data set, scrape data, or run ads to custom audiences created from little-known locations.

If the growth marketer can’t point to an original solution they’ve created, then I wouldn’t rely on them to solve your hardest problems.

16. What’s One Growth Framework You’ve Used?

There are many growth frameworks. Most include some variation of “cost, investment, expect results.”

A more advanced one would look like the following:

Objective — what is the purpose of the experiment?

Hypothesis — what is the key hypothesis of a successful experiment?

Experiment design — what steps do you envision the experiment going through?

Expected cost — monetary, marketing hours, product hours (important to determine whether you need to take time from developers and/or designers)

Expected results — your hypothesis on relevant metrics

Gut feeling score — on a 1 to 5 scale (with 5 being best), how much do you believe in this?

Results — actual results on relevant metrics

Insights — key insights in bullet points. Be specific.

Next steps — what new activities does the experiences lead to?

If a growth marketer has never used a growth framework, then you can’t expect them to prioritize their testing correctly. A growth framework should underlie everything a marketer does from start to finish.


One of my pet peeves is a growth marketer who always needs to rely on a designer before they push marketing material live. You don’t need a design by a world-renowned artist before you publish a Facebook ad or a landing page. The reason is the best design doesn’t always lead to the lowest cost-per-conversion.

Sometimes the worst designs lead to better conversion costs – surprising, right? Knowing that fact and how to whip an MVP design is key for any marketer to survive in a world with constant A/B and multivariate testing.

For presentations, here’s an excellent example that a candidate submitted to us during her interview process. If a growth marketer can bypass a designer, then you’ll run more experiments which ideally equates to more traction.

18. What is Growth Hacking?

There are no two people with the same version of growth hacking in their heads. By asking this question, you don’t just deal with the definition of growth hacking, but you check to see if your expectations of each other are aligned.

We’re not talking about specific expectations here, but the overall vision that they have about what they do. Growth hacking is not just a series of steps to follow or a list of procedures; it’s a lifestyle that consumes you.


Clients set high expectations and sometimes they set rules that have to be broken in order to achieve results. And the end may or may not always justify the means.

So why ask this?

This is a question where you can gauge how powerful their moral standards are. And you can see how confident they are in their abilities by simply asking how far they’ve gone before.

20. What’s Your Super Power?

What ordinary thing do they do so well sets them apart from the rest? This is a question to stir creativity.

Asking for their super power is thought-provoking and it allows you to assess how they package themselves.

This is a question that tells you how they turn normal tasks in extraordinary ones, and why this is something that you need in your organization.

21. Where Do You Want To Be In 3 Years?

There are long-term goals and there are short-term goals, but 3 years seems to be a good midpoint for most people. What’s great about this question is that you can assess their focus; if their answer revolves around their specialization then you can see their passion for their craft.

You know that they’re striving to be better at what they’re doing.

However, it’s also a good show of ambition. You want ambitious people in your team, people who want to grow as much as they want to hack growth. These are people who want to be on the next level. Passion without goal setting has no direction; you want someone who has a clear cut set of goals.

You know that they will be motivated even if you don’t motivate them.

22. How Would You Define Growth Hacking To Your Grandma?

This is one of my favorite questions because it just works. You’ll find that a lot of people overthink this or fumble for an answer or get it wrong altogether. Sometimes, even if the response is great, it won’t be enough. This is because all you’re looking for is how they relate to someone who knows nothing about growth hacking.

You can’t expect your grandma to know about digital marketing. Neither is the position “growth hacker” going to ring any bells, but if you can’t explain it to them simply enough, then chances are, you haven’t really understood it well, either.

Growth hacking is a mindset. It’s about being relatable enough to any market that you’re set to go after in order to bring in results. If they aren’t relatable to your own grandma, then you’ve got a problem.

23. What’s Your Favorite Growth Hack?

This is a personal question that tells me a lot about a candidate. Whatever profession you’re in, there’s something that you like doing more than the rest of the standard procedures.

Here’s what.

You can tell a lot about a person by knowing what their favorite things are. Knowing what they like most about what we do will tell me a lot about them as a person.


This is an important question to ask because it determines what kind of person you’ll be hiring. Anyone can pull an excuse and try to appease a client – aren’t we all salesmen? – but what matters is that you can be honest with your client from the get-go.

But, there’s more.

This is also a question that will test the prospective candidate’s negotiation skills. After the client finds out that KPIs weren’t hit, they still need to provide a solution to these problems.

What’s The Most Important Part?

All the questions and skills in the world are great to implement, but honesty and willingness to learn matter more when looking for someone who has the potential to be a great growth hacker.

If they can’t be honest with you, then you can’t grow with them nor them with you. And if that’s the case, how can they drive growth?