Best interview questions for your hiring process
Communications Specialist Interview questions
Communications Specialists are exceptional at crafting content and carefully worded communications to present your brand to the world. They know what works best for both internal and external communications.
Skills you should try to find in your Communications Specialist:
- A real people person who loves to collaborate with others, both internally and externally
- Extremely organised with the ability to work on multiple projects at once
- Experience communicating across a variety of different channels
- Impeccable communication skills, both written and verbally
- Analytical mindset to be able to track campaign performance and gain valuable insights
Interviewing a Communications Specialist
Do you need a new Communications Specialist in your team? With our interview questions designed for Communications Specialists you’ll be able to prepare for the interview quickly, easily, and efficiently.
Please note:
Our interview questions are suggestions for the earlier stages of the interview process and for candidates with average work experience. That’s why they are somewhat general and best asked early on during the interview process.
How to open the job interview
Interviews naturally breed nerves. No matter how confident the candidate, a job interview can still be scary and cause a person to shut down. So the first part of your interview should aim to make the candidate feel comfortable speaking with you. You’ll get much more information out of them and a better sense of the person they are if they feel like they can trust the environment they are in.
To achieve this, you can ask a few simple opening questions to get the conversation started.
Best interview questions for your hiring process
See our Communications Specialist job description hereFor the interview
A positive opener to start
What has been your journey so far?
What do you love the most about being a Communications Specialist?
Behavioral Questions
Tell me about the first steps you would take to really familiarise yourself with our company and brand.
Tell me about a campaign you created that was particularly successful.
This is the candidate’s time to shine. They should have experience handling a variety of different campaigns. This question gives you insight into their level of experience.
Tell me about your process for repurposing content pieces across different channels.
Content is often repurposed and adapted to distribute it across more than one channel. Find out how your future Communications Specialist goes about achieving this.
Soft Skills
How do you go about pitching your content/campaign ideas to internal stakeholders?
The Communication Specialist should not only be good at coming up with creative ideas, but they should also be able to sell those ideas to internal stakeholders.
How do you deal with criticism?
A standard soft skill question but particularly relevant to this role, as in this line of work constant quality assurance and feedback are essential.
How do you manage your time to ensure you hit deadlines across different projects?
A Communication Specialist has to work on a lot of different (cross-functional) projects and campaigns all at once. That’s why time management is an essential skill to have for a Communications Specialist.
Hard Skills
What experience do you have creating content strategies?
This question is aimed at uncovering the candidate’s specific work experience and the type of strategies they have worked on before.
What social media experience do you have?
Social media is often part of the Communications Specialist role. Find out what the candidate’s experience is in this field.
Which marketing tools have you used in the past?
There are a lot of different tools out there to create, distribute, and track communications campaigns. Find out what tools the candidate is familiar with.
Operational / Situational Questions
Imagine you just sent out a press release, and now you notice it contains a typo. What do you do?
The candidate should have a clear quality assurance process in place, but mistakes can still slip through. See how the candidate responds to a situation like this.
Imagine your manager tells you to come up with a creative, out-of-the-box idea to promote our brand. What do you do?
Creativity and brainstorming are important skills for a Communications Specialist to have. Find out more about their creative process.
Imagine you’re really pleased with a piece of content you created, but your manager is not happy with the result. What do you do?
Sometimes the candidate will simply disagree with the manager. Find out how they respond to a situation like this to see how they will likely work in your team.
Start hiring and prepare your interview
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The Communications Specialist has to know your brand inside and out to effectively communicate its benefits to the world. That’s why it’s essential that the candidate has a good idea of how to really get to know your brand from the start.