Hiring someone to run your ad budget is one of the few marketing decisions that costs you money twice. Once in their fee. And again in every taka or dollar they spend badly while you wait to find out.
Most founders I speak with did not hire the wrong person because they were careless. They hired the wrong person because the interview was about case studies and dashboards, and those are the easiest things in this job to dress up.
So here is the list I would use if I were on your side of the table. Twelve questions. For each one, the answer you want to hear, and the answer that should end the call.
I run accounts myself, so yes, I have a bias. Use the list on me too. That is the point of it.
How to use this list
Do not send it in advance. You want their first answer, not a prepared one.
Pick the six that matter most for your stage, ask them on a 30 minute call, and score each answer 0, 1 or 2. Anything under 8 out of 12 on your six is a no. Any single "disqualify" answer is a no, whatever the total.
Part 1: Who is actually doing the work
1. "Who will log into my ad account every week?"
Good answer: a name, and it is the person on the call. They tell you how often they are in the account and what they check on each visit.
Disqualify if: "our team", "a dedicated account manager", or anything that sounds like the person pitching you disappears after the contract is signed. This is the most common gap in the market. The senior person sells, the junior person runs.
2. "How many accounts are you personally running right now?"
Good answer: a specific number, and a reason it is capped. A senior operator knows their limit because they have hit it before.
Disqualify if: they dodge it, or the number is so high that your account can only get an hour a week.
3. "What happens when you are sick or travelling?"
Good answer: a clear plan. Documented account notes, rules that pause spend automatically, and a named backup if the engagement needs one.
Disqualify if: they have never thought about it. That tells you they have not run accounts long enough for something to break on a Friday night.
Part 2: How they measure money
4. "Which number will you report to me every week?"
Good answer: something tied to your bank account. MER (total revenue divided by total ad spend), contribution margin, cost per qualified lead, or payback period. Platform ROAS is fine as a secondary number.
Disqualify if: the whole report is Ads Manager screenshots. Meta and Google both model conversions. The modelled number and the real number drift apart, and you only find out when cash is short.
5. "What is my breakeven ROAS?"
Good answer: they ask for your gross margin before answering. Breakeven ROAS is 1 divided by your margin. At a 25% margin you need a ROAS of 4.0 just to not lose money. At 60% margin you need about 1.7.
Disqualify if: they quote a "good ROAS" without knowing your margin. A 3.0 ROAS is great for one business and a slow bleed for another.
If you want to check your own number first, the ROAS calculator does the breakeven maths for you.
6. "How do you check that Ads Manager revenue is real?"
Good answer: they compare platform revenue against Shopify, WooCommerce, your CRM or your bKash statement for the same date range, and they explain what a normal gap looks like and what a broken setup looks like. They mention Conversions API and deduplication without you prompting them.
Disqualify if: "the pixel handles it." The pixel alone has not been enough since iOS 14.
Part 3: What they do first
7. "What will you do in the first 14 days?"
Good answer: audit before action. Tracking, event quality, account structure, spend going to audiences or placements that never convert, creative fatigue, landing page speed. A short written list of what they found and what they plan to fix first.
Disqualify if: they want to rebuild the whole account in week one. Rebuilding resets learning and makes the "before and after" impossible to judge. Sometimes a rebuild is right. It is rarely right before an audit.
8. "Show me a leak you found that the client did not know about."
Good answer: a specific story. What looked fine on the dashboard, what was actually wrong, how they found it, and what changed after the fix. Client names can stay private. The detail cannot be vague.
Disqualify if: every story is about scaling spend. Anyone can spend more. The skill is finding money that is already being wasted.
9. "How do you decide when to kill a campaign?"
Good answer: rules written before the test starts. A spend threshold, a cost ceiling, a time window. They know the difference between a campaign that is still learning and one that is simply not working.
Disqualify if: "we give it time" with no number attached. That is how a test turns into three months of spend.
Part 4: Fit and honesty
10. "What results can you guarantee?"
Good answer: none, and they explain why. What they can commit to is a process: audit, test plan, weekly review, honest reporting.
Disqualify if: a guaranteed ROAS or a guaranteed lead count. Nobody controls your offer, your price, your stock or your competitors. A guarantee means they either do not understand the job or plan to report a number that flatters them.
11. "What kind of client should not hire you?"
Good answer: a clear line. Budget too small to test properly, no tracking access, a product with no margin, a founder who wants posts and likes rather than revenue. Good operators turn work down.
Disqualify if: "we work with everyone." That usually means they need the retainer more than they need the result.
12. "If this is not working at day 90, what happens?"
Good answer: an honest review against the number agreed in question 4, a clear recommendation (change strategy, change channel, or stop), and a notice period that does not trap you.
Disqualify if: a long lock-in contract with no review point. If they are confident in the work, they do not need to hold you hostage.
The scorecard in one view
Question 2 = strong 1 = partial 0 = weak / DQ
1 Who logs in weekly ________
2 Accounts running now ________
3 Sick or travelling plan ________
4 Weekly business number ________
5 Breakeven ROAS ________
6 Revenue reconciliation ________
7 First 14 days ________
8 A leak they found ________
9 Kill rules ________
10 Guarantees ________
11 Who should not hire them ________
12 Day 90 review ________
Any disqualify answer on 1, 4, 6 or 10 ends it for me, whatever the total.
Agency, freelancer, or senior solo operator?
This list works for all three. What changes is where they usually fail.
- Agencies tend to fail questions 1 and 2. The pitch is senior, the execution often is not.
- Junior freelancers tend to fail 4, 5 and 6. The campaign setup looks fine, the money maths is missing.
- Senior solo operators tend to fail 3 and 11 if they are honest about capacity limits. That is a trade you should know about going in.
I went deeper on this trade in solo specialist vs agency and the channel specific version in Meta Ads consultant vs agency. If you only need senior thinking a few days a month, the fractional performance marketer model may fit better than a full retainer.
If you are hiring in Bangladesh
Two extra checks for BD founders.
First, ask how they reconcile revenue when a big share of orders are cash on delivery or bKash. If they have not dealt with returns and cancelled COD orders inflating reported purchases, they have not run a BD ecommerce account seriously.
Second, ask what they think your CPM and CPC should be. Anyone quoting US benchmarks for a Dhaka audience is guessing. My Facebook Ads cost in Bangladesh breakdown is a fair place to sanity check their answer.
If you are hiring remotely from abroad
For SMB, B2B services and SaaS leaders hiring offshore, add one question: "Walk me through how you would report to me and how fast you reply." Time zones are rarely the problem. Silence is. You want a fixed weekly written update and a direct line to the person running the account, not a ticket queue.
Before you book any calls
Run your own account through the Performance Leak Auditor first. It takes a few minutes and gives you a baseline. Then when a candidate answers question 8, you will know whether they are spotting real problems or reading from a script.
If you would rather have someone go through the account with you, I do a free growth audit. I will tell you what is leaking, what I would fix first, and whether you even need to hire anyone yet. Sometimes the honest answer is that you do not.
