There is a great lowball question that you can use on anyone interviewing for a marketing role.

Ask the candidate to imagine a leading tennis brand is looking for a new marketing manager. Two candidates make it to the final interview. The first is an ex-tennis pro who has spent the last 10 years in the lower reaches of the top 500 players and knows the game intimately. The second is a marketing manager from a soup company keen on a new challenge but with no experience of the game or prior interest in tennis.

Who is the best candidate?

You can argue that the tennis pro has an innate and extensive knowledge of the game and that makes her the ideal candidate. But you can also use that experience against her. She is a pro, not a normal customer, and her deeper and more widespread knowledge of the game might stop her empathising and ultimately converting amateurs to buy into the tennis brand.

Similarly, the soup marketer’s inability to tell one end of the racket from the other can be used as a strong argument against hiring him. But, then again, taking someone with no knowledge of tennis forces that person to study the market more carefully and removes a lot of the over-confidence and innate biases that prior experience often brings

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.marketingweek.com