Dear Applicant,

We were very impressed with the background and skill set you outlined during our conversation last week. With this in mind, we’d like to move you on to the next round of the interview process for this Marketing Coordinator role.

Below you will find instructions for a short assignment indicative of the kind of work that you would be doing with us. What is presented below shouldn’t take more than an hour or two. We invite you to let your personality shine and remember to have fun!


Write a 500-word blog with the headline “5 Reasons Why Local SEO matters.” Be sure and include necessary hyperlinks and follow the stylistic guidelines outlined on the other blogs on our website. Do not include your name anywhere on the document. When finished, use the following username ([email protected]) and password (free_labor) to upload and publish the blog live on our site. This task will allow us to assess your writing ability and see how well you navigate our internal systems.

With the first two tasks having been completed, we’d like you to craft a fully-developed marketing strategy for one of our prospective clients. We definitely have already done a full marketing strategy that we are ready to pitch the client next week, but we want you to complete one too, so that we can compare yours to ours. The company’s name and any onboarding documents we have will be sent in a follow-up email shortly. The strategy should include budgetary information, measurable KPIs, and make it seem like you actually work for our company already. Typically these marketing strategy documents run at least 15 pages. Please be sure and leave your name off of this as well. Completion of this task will illustrate your ability to follow directions and complete complex tasks in a timely manner.

With that done and dusted, we’d like to see how you function in an in-office setting. Specifically, we’d like you to come in and clean our floors. Jake, our night janitor, will leave the cleaning supply closet unlocked so that you can easily access the tools needed for the job. As you may know from taking the virtual tour of our HQ, it’s about 5,000 sq. ft. in total, so be sure and budget your time wisely. Also important, we like this work to be done overnight so it doesn’t distract our staff during the day. How well you clean our floors will enable us to further measure your work ethic and see how you tackle new and exciting workplace challenges in the workplace.

At this point, you’re probably tired. But you’re almost done! While slightly unorthodox, this second-to-last request is essential! For this skill assessment, I am going to need you to come to my house, make my children’s lunches, and ensure that they get on the bus in time for school each morning. I will ask that you do this for a full week so that I can gauge your willingness to take on long-term projects and work with those outside of the marketing team, which in this case would be my 7-year-old twins, Olive and Mabel.

Last and certainly not least, our CEO has been in some hot water lately over some (baseless and unfounded) insider trading rumors. We need you to sign the attached document taking the fall for any and all insider-trading-related activities. It’s highly unlikely that you get indicted on this, but if you do, your loyalty will be rewarded later on. We’re talking house arrest, at worst. This is the one document where we would like to sign your name very clearly. In doing so, you will show our CEO, and the rest of your company, your brand loyalty and willingness to “be a team player.”

If you could all this work back to us by the end of the day tomorrow that would be great! We look forward to reviewing it and talking about next steps, which would include several more increasingly complex assessments, 7-10 additional rounds of in-person interviews, a full cavity search, and a mouth swab so we can analyze your DNA and use your lineage to embarrass you on one of those genealogy shows.

Let’s connect again at a time that is opportune for us and tremendously inconvenient for you. Good luck!

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