Hiring is one of the hardest jobs you have as a manager, team builder and even coworker. I have a distinct memory of hiring my first SEO employee at Uber over five years ago. The search took months, and the pressure to fill the headcount was overwhelming (lest it be taken away). The fact of the matter is I just take hiring with great care. And it looks like I’m not the only one. One of the hottest Twitter topics this year was when Lily Ray, Senior Director, SEO and Head of Organic Research at Amsive Digital, shared her favorite hiring question during the Search Central NYC Meetup. Ray revealed that when interviewing potential employees, they asked them to explain the difference between a few critical search engine processes: crawling, indexing, ranking and rendering. While the onus of hiring at first felt daunting, I now love identifying and interviewing special SEO talent many years later and have contributed to finding a large portion of the SEO teams at Uber and Square. Hire the right team and I believe you can surmount any SEO challenge. Hire the wrong teammate, and the whole team and morale suffer. So how do you weed out SEOs in a 30- to 60-minute interview and figure out who is all bark and no bite? What if they’re more of a snake oil salesman than a spider crawling expert? I asked some of my favorite SEOs their favorite SEO interview questions. Find out the answers below. 10 SEO interview questions to ask and why1. “Have you done this before? How did you overcome the biggest challenges?”– Kevin Indig, Former SEO Director at Shopify Why Indig likes this SEO interview question
2. “Imagine we wanted to rank #1 for <insert keyword>. What should we do?”“…and then every time they answer say something along the lines of, “and what if that didn’t work? What would you do?” And see how long they keep going.” – Tyler Reardon, Global SEO Lead at Chewy Why Reardon likes this SEO interview question
3. “You’re a vending machine repair specialist. You walk into a room and see a dark vending machine. What’s the first thing you do?”– Jamie Indigo, Senior Technical SEO, Deepcrawl Why Indigo likes this SEO interview question
4. “How do you go about making sure your recommendations get implemented?”– Areej AbuAli, Head of SEO, Papier / Founder, Tech SEO Women Why AbuAli likes this SEO interview question
5. “How would you set up an SEO test?”– Jackson Lo, Sr. SEO Lead, Growth, Shopify Why Lo likes this SEO interview question
6. “Organic traffic is down – walk me through how you would diagnose its cause.”– Victor Pan, Head of Technical SEO, Hubspot Then follow up with: “You checked x, y, and z and that wasn’t it – what else could it be?” I keep going until they hit the bottom of the barrel. I want to know how they respond to uncertainty. So I throw a hint e.g., “so I noticed our rank showed Y, so the interviewee has a chance to react to new information. I get to understand how they approach problems (bonus points if they look at it differently from the team).” Why Pan likes this SEO interview question
7. “Describe a complex SEO challenge you’ve encountered, and walk me through step by step how you approached trying to solve it, and why you chose the route you did.”– Kyle Faber, Founder and Head of SEO, Snark Digital Why Kyle likes this SEO interview question
8. “Tell me about a project that you’re particularly proud of, why you’re proud of it and what you learned from the project.”– Niki Mosier, Director of Digital Marketing and Content, AgentSync Why Mosier likes this SEO interview question
9. “What’s the most important SEO initiative?”– Eli Schwartz, Author, “Product Led SEO” / Former SEO Lead, SurveyMonkey Why Schwartz likes this SEO interview question
And my personal favorite question to ask when interviewing SEOs is… 10. “What was your most difficult technical SEO project and what was the business impact?”Why I like this SEO interview question
Best case, I’ll selfishly learn something interesting during the interview about something I didn’t know was possible. I’ll also learn if they understand how to look at analytics, how they think through attribution and other critical skills related to being part of a successful SEO team. Worst case, they’ll reveal that they do not focus on the business metrics or do not understand how to tell the narrative of their business impact, disqualifying them from a senior role in the organization. The post 10 SEO experts share their favorite interview questions appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/ZJ3fCAN
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
April 2024
Categories |