Write the Job Post That Repels the Wrong People: Hiring Your First In-House Marketer

You can usually tell what a brand's last marketing hire was like before you've met a single person, just by opening the ad account.

I saw one recently where every campaign was beautifully named and neatly organised, dozens of them, all paused. Months of tidy little tests, none scaled, none killed properly, nothing that ever became a real line of revenue. The person who built it was clearly diligent and clearly busy. They just weren't accountable to a number, so they optimised for looking productive instead.

That account wasn't a media problem. It was a hiring problem wearing a media costume. And it almost always traces back to the job post, because the job post is where you decide who shows up.

Most founders write a job post to attract as many good people as possible. I think that's backwards. The job post's real job is to repel the wrong people, loudly enough that they self-select out before they ever waste your time or theirs. Here's how I'd write one for your first in-house marketer.

Start by telling the truth about the job

There's a story I keep coming back to. Picture two shops on the same street. One advertises a nap room. One advertises a treadmill. Who applies to each?

Tired people apply to the nap room. People with energy to burn apply to the treadmill. Neither is a bad person, but you get exactly who you advertised for.

Ecommerce is a treadmill. The ad account doesn't care that it's a Saturday, or your birthday, or a public holiday. Spend keeps running, a feed can break at 11pm, a sale needs watching through the weekend it's live. That's not a flaw in the business, it's the nature of it, and the kindest thing you can do for a candidate is say so on the way in.

So I'd write that into the post in plain language. Something like: this is a 24/7 business, the work doesn't keep office hours, and we need someone who finds that energising rather than oppressive. That single honest paragraph does more filtering than anything else on the page.

Here's the thing. The people who read "24/7" and feel a flicker of dread were going to resent the job by month two anyway. You haven't lost a good hire, you've dodged a bad fit. And the people who read it and lean in, the ones who genuinely light up talking about this stuff, are the only ones you wanted. Honesty up front isn't a turn-off. It's the filter doing its job.

Describe outcomes, not a list of tasks

Most ecommerce job descriptions read like a tool inventory. "Manage Meta and Google campaigns. Run Klaviyo flows. Build landing pages. Report weekly." All of that is activity. None of it tells you, or the candidate, what winning looks like.

The problem with a task list is that it attracts task-doers. People who'll happily build the campaigns, run the flows, send the report, and never once ask whether any of it made money. You'll get exactly what that paused-campaign account was: motion without result.

I'd flip the whole thing to outcomes. Instead of "manage paid social", write "own new-customer acquisition: hit a blended CAC under our target while growing new-customer revenue by a set amount each quarter". Instead of "run email", write "own returning-customer revenue and the repeat rate that drives it". You're describing the result you'll judge them on, not the buttons they'll press to get there.

This does two things at once. It repels the candidate who wanted a comfortable task list and a place to hide, because suddenly there's a number with their name on it. And it draws the operator who actually wants that, the kind who'd rather be handed a goal and the rope to chase it than be told which dashboards to open on a Tuesday. The outcome-based post is itself the screen.

A small honest note on the numbers: pick targets that are real for your stage. A brand doing roughly A$3m a year has a very different acquisition math to one doing A$30m, and writing a fantasy CAC into the post just attracts people who'll nod along to anything. Put a believable outcome on the page and you find people who can actually read a P&L.

Screen for ownership, because that's the whole job

Once the post brings the right shape of person in, the thing I'm screening hardest for in conversation is one trait: will this person put their hand up and own a result, including when it goes wrong?

The tell is in how they talk about past work. The person you don't want explains a bad quarter with a wall of other people's failures. The warehouse was late, the designer didn't deliver, the founder changed the brief, the algorithm shifted. Every one of those might be true, and it's still a red flag, because what they're telling you is that when this goes sideways it'll be everyone's fault but theirs.

The person you do want says the opposite. "We missed the number. I should have seen the stock issue coming and built the plan around it. That one's on me, here's what I'd do differently." That's not self-flagellation, it's ownership, and it's the single most valuable thing a first marketing hire can bring. The most value in any company flows to the person willing to be individually accountable for a messy problem that depends on other people. You want that person aimed at your growth.

So I'd build the interview around it. Hand them a real, hairy problem from your actual business, the kind no single person fully controls, and watch whether they reach to own it or reach to caveat it. Ask them to walk through a campaign that failed. The ones who can't name their own part in a failure will never own your results either.

Decide honestly: buy experience or build potential

The last call to make before you even post is what you're actually hiring: someone who already knows how to do this, or someone with raw talent you'll develop into it.

I used to lean hard toward potential. Hire the sharp, hungry generalist, pour experience into them, grow your own. It's a lovely idea and there's a reason early-stage brands do it: when you can't afford proven talent, potential is your only option.

But potential is expensive in a way that's easy to miss. You pay for it in the months of mistakes, the deals lost while they learn, the time you spend teaching instead of growing. For your first marketing hire specifically, the one who's meant to own a number from day one, I lean the other way now. Buy the experience. Bring in someone who's already run acquisition for a brand your size and can add to the place from week one, rather than someone you have to turn into that person while the account bleeds.

The exception is when the problem is genuinely zero-to-one, a brand-new segment or channel nobody's mapped yet. There, raw thinking can beat a stale playbook. But for "make our existing growth engine work harder", proven beats promising more often than founders want to admit.

Where to from here

So the question I'd sit with before you write a word of the post isn't "how do I make this sound appealing". It's the opposite. If your job post were honest enough to scare off everyone who'd resent the work by month three, who's left, and are they the person you'd actually hand the account to?