Marketing manager job description
A job description built out of channels attracts people who have touched all of them. The question that decides this hire is different. Has this person made something work when nobody had heard of the company, or did they inherit a brand that made the campaigns land. Those two careers look identical on a resume. Here is a description you can post, and how to tell them apart.
The job description
We are looking for a marketing manager who owns pipeline contribution rather than campaign output. You will decide where the effort goes, and you will be expected to explain why the things you stopped deserved to be stopped.
What you will own
- The plan: which channels, what each one is for, and what would prove it is not working
- Positioning and messaging, tested against real buyers rather than against internal preference
- The website as a working asset instead of a brochure that gets rebuilt every two years
- The handoff into sales, and the quality of what lands in their queue
- Reporting that connects spend to something the rest of the business recognises as revenue
What the job needs
- Genuine depth in at least one channel, defensible in detail
- Enough breadth to know what the other channels cost in time and attention
- The willingness to hear from sales that the leads were bad, and to act on it
Signals we weight heavily
- You have shut a channel down
- You have changed a message because a buyer told you it was wrong
- You have marketed something nobody had heard of
What a marketing manager is actually accountable for
Activity is easy to show and expensive to mistake for progress. The seat answers for demand the sales team recognises as real, and for a message that survives contact with a buyer who has other options.
- Demand your sales team will actually work, judged by them rather than by a lead count
- A message the buyer repeats back, rather than the one the company most enjoys saying
- Knowing which channel is carrying the result and which one is spending quietly
- Shutting something down on evidence, while it still has internal advocates
- Building something that keeps producing when the budget is cut
Four ways a marketing manager hire looks right and is not
Every one of these passes a resume screen. Ladders eye-tracking study timed the average initial scan at just 7.4 seconds, which is long enough to check the four signals below and not long enough to check anything that would contradict them.
Looks right
Managed a large media budget
Budget size measures the trust the previous employer placed in the function, and quite often an agency was doing the execution while the manager approved the plan and the invoices. A budget that large usually came with a brand that made the advertising work. Ask what happened the quarter spend was cut.
Looks right
An impressive campaign portfolio, possibly with awards attached
Campaigns are judged on craft in a portfolio and on pipeline in your company, and the two verdicts frequently disagree. Ask which campaign produced revenue the sales team recognised, and how they knew it had. Very few portfolios can answer what happened after the launch week.
Looks right
Full-stack marketer: paid, content, search, email, events
At a small company that list often means one person did all of them shallowly because there was nobody else. That is exactly right if the seat you are filling is the same seat. It is a problem if you are hiring for depth in the one channel your growth depends on, because the resume looks stronger and the depth is not there.
Looks right
Comes from a company whose marketing you admire
A marketer at a company with a strong brand and settled product-market fit inherited distribution before they arrived. The judgement you are buying is what to do when nobody has heard of you and the message is still wrong, and that is not the environment their instincts were formed in.
What to ask for evidence of instead
Four questions, and what the answer actually tells you. Take these into your own process whether or not you ever talk to us.
- Which channel did you shut down, and what were the numbers at the point you decided?
- What it tells you: Marketers accumulate channels because stopping one looks like an admission. The people worth hiring can describe the evidence, the internal argument and who was unhappy about it.
- How did your last sales team describe the leads you sent? Not the number, the words they used.
- What it tells you: A marketing manager who has never heard sales complain has either not been close enough to them or is reporting on volume. The good answer usually includes a specific complaint and what changed in response to it.
- Tell me about a message you were wrong about, and how the buyer told you.
- What it tells you: Whether they have ever been near a buyer. Listen for the mechanism: sales calls they sat on, a customer conversation, a page that did not convert. Positioning that was only ever tested in a workshop is positioning nobody has tested.
- What would you do in your first quarter here if the paid budget were zero?
- What it tells you: Removes the answer most candidates reach for and exposes what else they have. It also finds out fast whether their previous results came from the channel or from the money in it.
How Continuity1 runs this funnel
The screening above is the job. These are the numbers it produces when a function owns it end to end, set against the published benchmarks for the same market.
- 1 in 3
- Shortlisted candidates you meet who become the hire
- Aligned engagements run nearer 1 in 2, distant ones nearer 1 in 10. The market takes about 180 applicants to make one hire, and that sifting lands on your team rather than ours.
- Continuity1 tracked engagements
- ~3
- Interviews your team sits in, per hire
- Ashby puts technical roles at 17.6 interviews per hire across the whole process, up 52% since 2021. The rest of that load sits with the function, not with you.
- Ashby talent-trends report
- 1 in 9
- Accepted offers that ghost before joining
- Indian employers report nearly 4 in 10 offers dropped. We lose 1 in 9.
- nasscom community
- 95%
- Offers that close inside your stated band
- 20 of the last 21. A flat fee earns nothing from an inflated offer; a percentage of CTC earns more.
- Continuity1 tracked engagements
Every brief becomes a success profile before sourcing starts, calibrated with the people who will manage the role. That calibration is the step most hiring skips, and it is why a shortlist either matches the job or matches the job advert.
You review a scored shortlist and make the calls. The filtering never lands on your calendar.
Questions teams ask
Generalist or specialist for the first marketing hire?
Generalist, if you are still finding out which channel works, and only if that generalist has real depth somewhere. A generalist with no depth anywhere runs everything at the level a freelancer would and teaches you nothing about which channel deserves the next investment.
Should the marketing manager own the website?
Somebody has to answer for what happens on the pages buyers actually land on, and if marketing does not, the site becomes a design project with no owner. Owning it does not mean building it. It means being accountable for what it does.
How do we evaluate a marketing portfolio?
Ask what happened after each piece of work shipped, and who else was involved. Any portfolio can be beautiful. Only a few can tell you the result, the attribution argument behind it, and which parts of the work were done by an agency.
Marketing manager, demand generation, or brand?
If you need pipeline next quarter, write the advert for demand generation and say so, because brand-led candidates will apply and will then be measured against a target they did not sign up for. If the real problem is that nobody can describe what you do, that is a positioning hire, and putting a lead target on it will make it fail.
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