Hiring a media buyer is the hardest marketing hire a company makes, because the people doing the hiring usually cannot evaluate the work. The result is a job ad full of platform names and a shortlist chosen on confidence.
What most job ads screen for, and why it fails
Years of experience, a list of platforms, certifications, and "managed X in ad spend". None of these predict whether someone will make your account better.
Managed spend is the worst of them. A buyer who managed large budgets at a company with a strong brand, a good product and an in-house creative team has learned something quite different from a buyer who got a difficult account working on a small budget. The second one is usually who you want and almost never who the filter surfaces.
Hiring a media buyer: test the thinking, not the recall
Give the candidate a real account situation and ask what they would do. Something like: cost per lead has doubled over six weeks, spend is flat, creative has not changed, and sales say the leads are worse.
What you are listening for:
- Do they ask about tracking before blaming the algorithm?
- Do they ask what changed outside the account — a consent banner, a landing page, a sales process?
- Do they want to see the conversion data, or do they start suggesting bid changes?
- Do they say "I do not know yet, here is what I would check first"?
That last one is the strongest signal on the list. Buyers who diagnose before prescribing are rare and they are the ones worth hiring.
Ask a candidate to describe an account they could not fix. Anyone who has run media for five years has one. Anyone who claims otherwise is telling you something.
What the job ad should say
Be specific about the account, not the platforms. What you sell, what a customer is worth, what the budget is, what is broken. Good buyers self-select on whether the problem is interesting and whether the economics can work — and the ones who opt out on that basis have just saved you both time.
Say who they report to and who decides creative. The most common reason a competent buyer underperforms is that nobody could approve anything.
Budget three months you will not get back
An experienced hire takes roughly a quarter to be fully productive on your account — learning your product, your margins, your customer, your approvals. You pay for twelve months and get about nine in year one. Add recruitment cost and tools, and the first-year figure is a good deal higher than the salary.
The agency vs in-house calculator puts a number on that, including the costs that only appear after someone has started.
And the honest alternative
If you cannot fill a full-time role, or you need someone competent in the account this month rather than next quarter, there is a middle option: a named buyer working inside your team without the hire. It is reversible, which a bad hire is not.
Hire when paid media is core, permanent, and large enough to fill a week. Do something else when it is not.
The same question applies in reverse when you buy rather than hire: how many accounts the person running yours carries predicts attention better than any credential.
Questions people ask
What should I test in a media buyer interview?
Give them a symptom from your own account — leads up, quality down, or ROAS fine but revenue flat — and ask them to reason out loud toward a cause. Experience shows up as a short list of likely explanations in a sensible order, not as a longer vocabulary.
Do certifications matter?
They are a floor, not a signal. Platform exams test knowledge of the interface, which is the part that changes every year and is the easiest to learn on the job.
Should I hire junior or senior?
Senior, if this is your first. A junior with nobody to learn from repeats mistakes nobody in the building can spot. Juniors work well under supervision and badly without it.
How long before a new buyer is productive?
Budget three months. The first is access, context and finding out what is actually broken; the second is the first real changes; the third is the first readable result. Hiring does not shorten the learning phase.