Recruiting Process for Marketing

To increase your chances of landing a job, it is important for you to use all of your available resources. The recruiting process has many steps including career exploration, industry &, organization research, applications networking and interviewing. The Villanova Career Center has resources including Handshake, Big Interview, Vault Career Guides and many others (including our staff) to help you along the way.

  • Common Entry Level Jobs include Media Planner, Account Coordinator, Assistant, Associate, Analyst, Specialist, Trainee. For more examples of titles, duties, salary, education levels and more, visit the “Vault Guide to Marketing Jobs” and the “Vault Guide to Branding, Image, and Marketing Consulting Jobs.”
  • Applications for summer internships typically open at the end of the fall semester or in the early spring semester. Corporate marketing and larger marketing agencies tend to launch applications in the fall and may have earlier timelines than the boutique and smaller agencies. If you have an interest in a specific employer, it would be beneficial to periodically check for internship applications starting at the beginning of the fall semester.
  • Search for jobs and internships on Handshake, CareerShift company websites, social media, industry and job association sites, professional associations, through university recruiting programs and recruiters. Since Villanova is a target school for many companies, it is recommended that you search first on Handshake.

  • You should be prepared to answer Behavioral Interview Questions—a set of questions to assess whether you have the soft skills and motivation to succeed within an agency or company. These often include general questions about your background and why you want to work for the organization, combined with behavioral-based questions asking you to give examples of past experiences. Use the S.T.A.R. approach to structure your examples; Situation/Task that you were facing, Approach and actions you took to address the issue, Result of the actions you took. Learn more about “Developing Your Interview Stories” in Module 5 of Big Interview’s Written Curriculum.
  • Increasingly, video conferencing and asynchronous, pre-recorded interviews are becoming common for first-round interviews. You can practice being recorded for an interview through the Big Interview platform–a free resource offered through the Career Center.
  • If you would like to practice common questions you may expect from a marketing interview, including communication and organizational skill questions, check out Marketing (General) interview questions within the Marketing industry question sets in Big Interview.
  • It is also recommended that marketing professionals have a portfolio. This could be a physical portfolio, but you should also have an online digital portfolio. Popular portfolio websites include Wix.com, Adobe Portfolio, WordPress, Flickr, Crevado, and many more.  
  • When going into an interview, you should also be aware of current events, popular marketing campaigns and be able to speak to advertisement and marketing strategies that are interesting to you. There are various online resources to help you stay up to date including:
    • DMNews – Digital Marketing News
    • The HubSpot Marketing Blog
    • Marketing Land
    • MarketingProfs
    • Pardot Blog
  • The Career Center offers one-hour mock interview appointments that can be scheduled via Handshake to further develop interview skills and receive feedback. As a Student, you can also reserve interview rooms within the Employer Engagement Suite. For more information on interviewing, please visit the Career Center’s Interviewing webpage.