# Hiring Your First Marketing Person in Kolkata At some point growth makes an in-house marketing hire sensible. Getting the first one wrong is expensive, and the most common mistake is hiring for the wrong shape of role. ## Decide what the role is for A first marketing hire should be defined by the constraint you are trying to remove. If the constraint is that nobody is executing, hire a doer. If it is that nobody knows what to do, buy strategy from a specialist and hire someone to execute it. Hiring a generalist to do both usually produces neither. ## What to look for - **Evidence of measurement.** Ask what they tracked in their last role and what they changed as a result. Candidates who answer in impressions and followers are describing activity, not outcomes. - **Comfort saying something did not work.** Anyone whose every campaign succeeded is either very lucky or not being straight with you. - **Willingness to do unglamorous work.** A first hire in a small business will be updating a Google Business Profile and chasing reviews, not running brand strategy. - **Local market understanding** if your customers are local. Knowing how search behaves across Kolkata's areas is genuinely useful and not something you can quickly teach. ## Questions worth asking What would you look at first in our account, and why? What would you stop doing? What is a reasonable cost per enquiry for a business like ours, and what would you need to know to answer that properly? The last one is the most revealing: a good candidate will tell you they cannot answer it without your close rate and order value. ## In-house, agency, or both Most SMEs at this stage end up with a hybrid: someone internal who owns content, social and customer communication, with specialist work such as technical SEO and paid search bought in. That is usually cheaper than hiring for every skill and more responsive than outsourcing everything. If you are weighing that decision, we are happy to give you a straight view of which parts are worth keeping in-house even where it means less work for us. [Get in touch](https://thedigitalmagic.com/get-a-quote/) and ask. ## Frequently asked questions ### Should I hire a marketing generalist or a specialist? Define the role by the constraint. If nobody is executing, hire a doer. If nobody knows what to do, buy strategy from a specialist and hire someone to execute it. Hiring one generalist to do both usually produces neither well. ### What questions reveal a good marketing candidate? What would you look at first in our account and why, what would you stop doing, and what is a reasonable cost per enquiry for a business like ours. The last is most revealing: a good candidate will say they cannot answer without your close rate and order value. ### Is it better to hire in-house or use an agency? Most SMEs at this stage end up with both: someone internal owning content, social and customer communication, with specialist work such as technical SEO and paid search bought in. That is usually cheaper than hiring every skill and more responsive than outsourcing everything.