Written by Lilach Bullock
Three small businesses, two hires, fourteen months
I have watched three separate small businesses hire one marketing generalist and expect that person to cover strategy, content, paid ads, email and analytics like a full department. All three burned through two hires in fourteen months. Nobody wrote the job description wrong on purpose. They just priced one salary and hoped it would stretch across five job titles.
The pattern repeats because the mismatch never shows up in the interview. It shows up around month four, when the hire is drowning in ad hoc requests and the business is annoyed nothing strategic has moved. By the time anyone names the real problem, you are already advertising the role again.
In my own fractional work I typically see 12 to 20 hours a week as roughly the minimum for a marketing hire to have real impact rather than just reacting to whatever lands in their inbox that day. A full department’s worth of output from a single person, on a single salary, inside a normal working week, does not fit, however strong the interview went.
The hire history question that beats a resume
When a business books an hour with me to decide between a consultant, an agency or an in-house hire, the first thing I ask is not about budget. I ask about their last three hires in that function and how long each one stayed.
If a company has churned through two in-house marketing managers in eighteen months, that tells me more than their budget spreadsheet does. It tells me the role itself is probably broken, not the people filling it, and that a fourth internal hire is likely to fail the same way the first two did. That answer changes my recommendation before we have discussed a single deliverable.
I have seen the reverse version of this too, where the scope was wrong rather than the people. One fractional arrangement started at 12 hours a week and was expected to cover demand generation, a brand refresh, three campaigns and mentoring a junior marketer at the same time. By month three the business had been waiting two weeks for copy feedback. We renegotiated: either 25 hours a week, or cut down to two core projects plus mentoring. They chose the second path, and that is when work started moving again.
Four checks that filter out half the applicants in fifteen minutes
For consulting and freelance marketing roles I now run four specific checks on a call, and based on my own hiring over the past two years they filter out roughly half the people who apply, in about fifteen minutes.
First, a live workflow demo, not a description of one. Second, one concrete cost or time figure from a past piece of work, not a vague claim about results. Third, confirmation of what currency they invoice in, which sounds small and has saved me from scope and payment confusion more than once. Fourth, what they stopped recommending in the last six months, because anyone still pitching the same tactic they pitched two years ago is not paying attention to what has changed.
Candidates who dodge any one of these four tend to keep dodging once you have hired them.
The 40-minute caption test
Portfolios show you someone’s best day, possibly with help, possibly months old. A timed task shows you their actual working speed under a real constraint, which is closer to what you are paying for.
I have watched consultants build a full week of on-brand social captions, with three rounds of revision built in, in under 40 minutes. That single timed exercise told me more about how they would perform inside a live account than any case study on their site. It also exposed the ones who needed two hours for the same brief and padded the gap with jargon about process.
The same logic is why I stopped hiring a freelance designer for blog graphics, social tiles, lead magnets or decks two or three years ago, and I will not hire one for that category of work next year either. Once I could see, timed, that an AI tool produced usable output in minutes, the case for a human freelancer on those specific tasks disappeared. It is not true of every role. When I am paying a copywriter sixty pounds an hour to write two hundred subject lines, AI can do that instead. When I am paying them to build brand voice and campaign strategy, it cannot, and a timed task is exactly how you find out which one you are hiring for.
The CRM problem that has nothing to do with marketing
None of these checks are specific to marketing. As fractional CMO for a non-profit I now manage a marketing team, agencies and contractors, and the same logic applies when I am briefing a hire that is not a marketer at all. Ask about churn in the last three people who held the role. Ask for a small piece of live, timed work instead of a slide deck. Ask for one real number instead of a general claim. Confirm the practical detail, whether that is invoicing currency, working hours or reporting lines, before anyone signs anything.
It also means giving whoever you hire real access once they start, not a spreadsheet somebody else built for them. I have worked with a fractional arrangement where the CMO never met the team in person, never saw the CRM and was basically designing marketing in the dark. That happens to internal hires too, not only consultants, whenever a role gets defined on paper without giving the person the actual tools and data to do the job.
Author Bio:
Lilach Bullock is an AI implementation consultant and fractional CMO with 21 years in marketing. She helps business owners put AI to work across content, SEO, social media, email marketing, automation and lead generation. Her work has been featured in Forbes, the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, WIRED, HuffPost and the Content Marketing Institute, and she has worked with Twitter, IBM, Dropbox, monday.com, Hootsuite and Greenpeace. Forbes named her a Top 20 Social Media Power Influencer worldwide. Based in Israel, she works with US, UK and international clients.