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Went Hot: January 12, 2008 - 5:32 pm
Posted By: oldschool 222 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.themadhat.com)
Category: SEM Industry
15 Comments
Went Hot: January 12, 2008 - 5:32 pm
Posted By: oldschool 222 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.themadhat.com)
Category: SEM Industry
15 Comments
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Comments
Some of those questions have no bearing on whether someone will be any good at the job.
Others seem just a little odd. I mean, someone who you hire to write the back-end processing and validation for a shopping cart will have no need of knowing anything about PageRank for example.
There are whole areas of important SEO knowledge, that people might have, that you asked nothing about, too.
I hear what you are saying. In reality, anyone can be a great interviewer and answer the right questions, and then come on board and do a lousy job. I just though it was a good quick list to be aware of, and mainly from the standpoint of someone looking for a job. I have my own list of questions that I have used and trust me, I have wanted to just say "ahh... thanks for your time" after a few answers. Here is one I love to ask when interviewing employees that will handle SEO tasks - "what is the most important component of a Search Marketing campaogn?"
Two of my favorite (disqualifying) answers were "page rank.. definately" and "meta tags".
The best SEO worker knows only a tiny fraction, not more than a few percent, of what he would like to know about the details of Google's ranking algorithm. And he knows nothing about the actual relevance score of each page in the SERPs, including those he optimizes for clients or for
experiments. The worst SEO worker thinks that there's only little more beyond what he knows.
By testing knowledge you'll never hire the person who can cope with the increasing unknown and penetrate into it a little bit.
One problem worth pointing out is that any of the people who can answers all of the great SEO interview questions... those people simply aren't available for hire.
TimDineen, what is "a great SEO interview question"?
@emanuelh - SEO job interview question: "What do you do for fun in your spare time?"
If the answer is "read Sphinn" or something similar I'll take that over experience and get started with some training activities...
FYI: I don't disagree with the techniques here. It's just hard to qualify any candidates in the SEO field these days.
Why is it hard to qualify any candidates in the SEO field these days?
Those questions are fine if you're looking for someone with some SEO experience. I've found that you might be better off looking for someone without SEO knowledge, however, and then training them.
I'd personally rather hire someone who never heard of Matt Cutts, than one who knew him. But maybe that's just me. (No offense to MC!)
If I actually had to answer those questions, I'd end up writing a book :)
Why are you hiring an SEO? is a good question to ask yourself before you ask any of those questions.
Are you looking for a consultant? Are you looking for someone who will negotiate link deals? Are you looking for someone with power user accounts on Digg, Stumbleupon, or Reddit? Are you looking for an editor that goes over your copywriter's work? Are you looking for someone who is good at building link bait tools, or someone who can consistently attract attention with compelling blog posts? Are you looking for someone to analyze internal link structures and troubleshoot site issues (e.g. 301 implementation, duplicate content, etc)? Or are you looking for someone who is going to drive up sales with PPC?
What are you looking for?
Not a single person in the SEO industry I believe can do all those things all at the same time. Consulting, for example, is all well and good but its worthless if you have no one to implement anything in a timely manner.
In other words, before you start playing the 20 questions game, ask yourself what exactly that you want. Then you can throw out most of the questions that don't apply (like the difference between toolbar PR and PageRank - a social media marketer doesn't need to know stuff like that).
@ Jill - I know that is another school of thought - to hire fresh and train people yourself (I believe SEOMoz does that). The down side of course is that you can train someone to either work for or become your competition.
@ Halfdeck - that is a good question to ask "why are you looking for an SEO?". I sad thing that I have seen with non SEO folks hiring SEO folks is that their "why" is that "they want more traffic" but they don't really know enough to manage that person or know whether or not they are doing a good job. In one instance, I was personally asked by an employer "how come we're not #1?" after doing a few weeks worth of work. That was very revealing.
@ TimDineen - RE: "those people simply aren't available for hire." - I am not so sure about that. I think that many SEO's that are not in management level positions, especially if they don't feel their is an opportunity to move up in their current position, would make themselves available for the right opportunity that presented itself.
The comments on the article are the oddest that I have seen in a long time!:shakes head:
I was wondering why I started getting a bunch of comments on a post I wrote over a year ago. Thanks for the Sphinn oldschool.
The point of that post was to simply gather a list of questions. Doesn't mean all of them are relevant or that all of them need to be asked, and there are certainly more things you need to ask.
@g1smd - what does hiring someone to code the back end of a shopping cart have to do with SEO?
@Jill - agreed on the training angle...that's likely what I'll be doing from now on unless it's something I won't be very hands on with.
@Halfdeck - This was the end of 2006...and I was looking for someone with a high level picture of everything SEO related at the time. Of course if you're hiring for a specialized position a lot of those questions won't apply, so you would ask them.
This wasn't really a end all interview question post...it was an idea gathering post.
You're welcome MadHat - it continues to make its way around the web. I found it from another post that I was reading, but I can't recall which it was.
Great but need to be revised to current trend, give a link from the current post and talk about new one's :)