Interviewing for Ecommerce #ecomchat – Key Points

This week’s #ecomchat was on Questions to ask to evaluate someone’s ecommerce knowledge (or as Dan prefers, “Interviewing for Ecommerce” – a more streamlined title!) – a subject that is relevant to Client side teams, agencies and Consultants alike.

For example, when interviewing for a new role, what should you ask? When assessing agency pitches, how can you weed out the savants from the also-rans?

The chat was based around 3 key question as usual and below is a summary of the key points and discussion threads.

Question 1 – What questions would you ask to determine someone’s knowledge of social media?

• @jamesgurd kicked off with “How would you decide which social media networks the business should have a profile on?” – aiming to find out the commercial understanding of how to prioritise investment and resource.
• @danielmcoleman proposed a general rule that you should ask open ended questions (e.g. “how does social influence SEO”), otherwise you are asking them what you know not what they know.
• @jocelynkirby followed this logic suggesting asking “what do you think about (a specific social network)”, so giving people no steer, finding out how they structure a response.
• @neilkwhitehead suggested asking “What are the most successful campaigns you’ve seen via twitter and why?” – great for finding out if people monitor social marketing but limitation is that not everyone remembers who did what, even if they do understand the key learning.
• @craigwsoftcat recommended “What is Tweetdeck” – this type of question identifies knowledge of the tools out there for managing social media presence.
• @magique83 mentioned testing breadth of knowledge around social media tools, for example “What social media tools are you aware of/used?” e.g. Klout, FollowerWonk etc
• @craigwsoftcat suggested referencing a recent social media “disaster” and ask what went wrong and what they would have done differently.
• @teminamoledina made a great addition to the list: “What are the top internal and external risks in using social media as an acquisition strategy” – really probe how rounded people’s understanding is.

Question 2 – What questions would you ask to determine someone’s knowledge of email marketing/CRM?

• @danielmcoleman started the ball rolling with a classic: “”What is CRM?”
• He followed up with “What can you measure/test to improve campaign performance?” and @jamesgurd suggested drilling down into specifics such as “”What should you test if you have a decreasing open rate?”
• @magique83 threw in a useful question to test knowledge of service providers: “Who are Return Path and how can they help deliverability?”
• And a real teaser thrown in by @teminamoledina: “If you could only choose one, would you choose A/B testing or segmentation?” – @jamesgurd replied that he’s need to know the business/products/customers before answering as there is no right answer.
• @edwinbongo raised that he doesn’t like questions that deal in definition. His preference is to ask people to detail a specific campaign and how much revenue it generated.
• An interesting discussion emerged around whether or not you should need to ask someone what they think CRM means – some argued it’s pointless as knowledge more important than theory, others argue that you can’t be a serious candidate for email/CRM if you don’t even have an idea of what the acronym stands for and what it means in the context of the business.
• @agwp made a good observation, that scenario-based questions can work well, for example “Our client is complaining that their CTR is low. What would you investigate?”
• @magique83 suggested asking “How can we increase our email signups without impacting the quality of the lists?”
• @Sharlie_angel mentioned that for any of the questions, she always asks which blogs, resources and Twitter accounts they follow, read and learn from.
• @ravisodha explained that asking about strategy shows deep understanding i.e. “Why could company x do y. What are the alternatives/pros & cons”.

Question 3 – What questions would you ask to determine someone’s knowledge of analytics and optimisation?

• @edwinbongo came up with a cracker: “Explain the limitations of basing revenue figures on a last-click basis”
• @jamesgurd expanded on that with: “Explain the difference between attribution analysis and modelling”
• @danielmcoleman threw in an essential: “How do you validate that your analytics is tracking correctly?”
• Another useful suggestion from @edwinbongo to test people’s knowledge of using web analytics reports, “what are the 5 segments you find yourself using most often in reporting?”
• The suggestions kept rolling in with this beauty from @magique83: “Explain Event Tracking and name some good examples of what could be tracked with it”
• @teminamoledina chipped in with the useful “How do you track a ‘tweet this’ link and what is the value of this action?”
• And the illustrious @danielmcoleman proposed “Describe techniques to analyse data across multiple web properties in the same organization” which is a real teaser.
• To bring the session to a tumultuous close, @magique83 nailed his colours to the mast with: “How would you use Analytics to help you determine what CRO project will return the greatest ROI?”

Thanks again to everyone for joining in, we hope to see you next week. And please let us know what subjects you would like to see discussed on #ecomchat as we’d like to build a content calendar to help people plan their involvement.

Thanks, James & Dan