Best interview questions for a Communications Manager

Communications Manager interview questions

Communications Managers are experts at delivering your brand’s message, both internally and externally. They have a great understanding of your product, organisation, and brand, and know how to effectively communicate it to the world.

You should look for the following skills in your Communications Manager:

Great communication skills, both verbal and written
A storyteller by heart who knows how to best communicate your brand’s story
Sales-driven mindset that can use communication to sell your products and services
Strategic thinking to set up large-scale, cross-functional campaigns
Confidence and the ability to present in front of large audiences

Interviewing a Communications Manager

Are you on the lookout for a new Communications Manager? Then you will soon have to invite the candidate over for a job interview to get to know them a bit better. Our job-specific Communications Manager interview questions ensure you ask the right questions to uncover whether your candidate has the right skill set.

Please note:
The interview questions we give you below are suggestions for the earlier stages of the interview process and for candidates with average work experience as a Communications Manager. They are therefore a little more general than the questions you might want to ask during a second or third interview.

Job Description available

See our Communications Manager job description here

For the interview

A positive opener to start

What do you enjoy most about being a Communications Manager?

What has your career path been so far?

Behavioral Questions

Can you tell me about a time one of your campaigns didn’t perform as you anticipated? How did you respond?
The Communications Manager has to be creative and willing to test new approaches and sometimes daring campaigns. These campaigns won’t always perform well. Being able to deal with this and learn from it is an important skill for the Communications Manager to have.
How do you keep track of the performance of one of your social media campaigns?
Measuring performance is an essential part of the Communications Managers’ role. So you want a candidate who knows how to monitor performance by tracking the relevant metrics.
Explain a bit more about your process for repurposing content pieces.
An effective communication campaign spans across different channels all at once. This means the same piece of content has to be repurposed for these different channels. Find out how your Communications Manager goes about doing this.

Soft Skills

Are you comfortable explaining your communication strategies in an easy-to-understand way to large groups or senior management?
Presentation skills are important for the role as they will have to convince management to give go-aheads and explain campaign results.
How would you describe your management style?
Depending on the size of your business, your Communications Manager will likely manage at least a few team members. Finding out about their management style means you get a better understanding of whether they will fit in with your organisation.
How do you keep your team motivated?
As the leader of the team, a part of the Communication Manager’s role is to keep the rest of the team members motivated. Find out how the candidate would achieve this.

Hard Skills

What marketing tools do you have experience with?
A practical question about their experience using industry tools.
How do you keep up to date with the latest trends and developments in the industry?
The industry is constantly changing, so the Communications Manager will need to ensure that they are always informed about what is happening and what’s new.
Do you have experience with influencer marketing? If so, what?
Depending on your business, you might want to collaborate with influencers to further promote your brand. This question lets you see if the candidate has experience in this area.

Operational / Situational Questions

Imagine we asked you to write a press release around a current political topic and you do not agree with our suggested line of communication. What do you do?
Politics and business, and whether the latter should take a stance on the former, can lead to heated debates. But often, at the end of the day, it’s the top management that decides what a company’s position should be. This question uncovers how your candidate would deal with such a situation.
Imagine you approved a press release, but once it’s sent out, you notice it contains a big mistake. What do you do?
Mistakes are human, but when sending out a press release this can (depending on the size and nature of the mistake) have a seriously damaging effect on your brand. The candidate should learn from the mistake, ideally rectify it straight away, and improve the quality assurance process after to prevent this from happening in the future.
Imagine one of your team members keeps making a lot of mistakes in their communications. What do you do?
As a manager, your candidate has to be able to provide a team member with feedback and try to prevent them from repeating the same mistake by teaching them how to do things differently/better.