Marketer with No Experience: How to Hire and Test One

When a marketer with no experience is a sensible hire

A beginner makes sense when the business already has a clear direction and someone on the team to guide them. The owner or a senior specialist knows what they want and has time to review the work. In that setup, a junior takes over the routine: content calendars, handling inquiries, spreadsheet reports, product cards on Uzum, Telegram mailings.

The model of hiring someone and letting them figure out how to sell does not work. Without a strategy, even a strong specialist is guessing, and a beginner more so. Someone who has not seen dozens of campaigns cannot tell a poor result from a normal one, so they need a frame: who the product is for, what the offer is, which channels you use and what counts as success.

What to check instead of years of experience

The experience line on a junior's CV is empty, so look at things you can verify yourself.

Courses and certificates are a pleasant bonus, but they show that someone studied, not that they can work with a real customer.

• Have they run at least one live project: their own Telegram channel, help for a friend's shop, an Instagram page, marketplace listings, paid or not
• Can they walk through it step by step: the situation, what they did, why, what came out of it, what they would change
• Do they describe a modest result honestly instead of rounding it up
• How do they handle numbers: can they work out cost per inquiry or the share of people who reached a purchase in a plain spreadsheet
• Do they write well in both Russian and Uzbek, since your customers read both
• Do they ask clarifying questions before starting

A test task built on your own business

A good test task is small and fair on time: a couple of evenings, not a week of free labor. For example, review your Instagram page and propose three ideas for improving it. Or describe your customer and write three messages for them. Or go through an export of inquiries and work out where the most expensive and the cheapest ones come from.

Judge the thinking, not the polish. Did the candidate notice that data was missing and say so? Did they ask questions first? Did they suggest testing an idea rather than rolling it out at once? That is the behavior you will get on the job. And never use a test task as a way to collect free work. Strong candidates sense it and walk away.

The first three months: tasks and boundaries

Write a plan for the newcomer in which difficulty grows gradually, and put it on paper.

Without regular feedback a beginner locks in mistakes, and you only learn about them after the money is spent.

• Month one: learn the product, the customers and the inquiry history, keep a report in a spreadsheet, help with content
• Month two: small independent tasks, such as a mailing to your customer base, updating listings, testing several headline options
• Month three: ownership of one metric, for instance the number of inquiries from a single channel, with a joint review of results
• Every week a short meeting: what was done, what did not work, what you learned

What should never be left unsupervised

Advertising budgets in Meta Ads or Google Ads, deals with bloggers, changes to prices and discounts, replies to complaints in public channels: anything where a mistake costs money or reputation. Give limited access to ad accounts until you have seen how the person works. A junior can prepare the settings, but it is better to launch them together.

Where to look, and where a business should start

Entry-level vacancies in Uzbekistan are often posted in Telegram job channels, and you can also reach out through professional chats and the career pages of universities and training centers. A convenient format is an internship with a fixed term and clear criteria: afterwards you either hire the person or part on good terms.

If you are not yet sure what tasks to set, start with strategy rather than a job post. At markdev we work on marketing strategy and consulting: we help define the audience, the offer, the channels and the metrics, so a future employee, including a beginner, understands what they are working on. Tell us about your task and we will work out together whether you need an in-house marketer, a contractor, or a plan first.