Marketing Intern Interview Questions and Scorecard

The first marketing intern I interviewed had no work history at all, and I spent forty minutes asking questions built for someone who did. It was a wasted interview. She had never run a campaign, never owned a channel, never reported a number to anyone, and every question I had prepared assumed otherwise. The candidate was fine. The interview was the problem.

Hiring an intern is a different evaluation from hiring a marketer. There is no track record to check, so you are judging curiosity, initiative, writing, judgment, and whether the schedule they describe is real. That requires a different question set, one built to find potential in a person who has not been given the chance to prove any yet.

At FirstHR, we build for small businesses that hire without an HR department, where the same person posts the role, runs the interview, and then supervises the intern all term. This page gives you six downloadable question sets, a reason to ask every question, what a strong answer sounds like, and a scorecard.

What to Assess in a Marketing Intern

Assess six things: motivation, writing, channel and tool familiarity, judgment, coachability, and schedule reliability. Notice what is missing from that list. Marketing skill barely appears, because building it is the entire point of the internship, and a candidate who already has it is applying for a different job.

That reframing changes the questions. Instead of asking what campaigns someone has run, you ask what they made that nobody assigned them. Instead of asking about last quarter's numbers, you ask what happened after a class project went out. The marketing intern job description defines the tasks; the interview has to find the person who will grow into them.

The two traits that predict a good term most reliably are initiative and coachability. Initiative decides what happens during the many hours an intern works unsupervised at a small business. Coachability decides whether your edits improve their work or start an argument. Both are visible in an interview if you ask for them directly.

Settle Paid or Unpaid Before You Interview

Decide the pay structure before you post the role, never during the interview. Whether an unpaid internship at a for-profit business is lawful under the Fair Labor Standards Act turns on the primary beneficiary test, which weighs seven factors about who gains more from the arrangement. It is decided by how you build the internship, not by what a student agrees to.

Practically, most small businesses should just pay. A paid internship widens the applicant pool well beyond students who can afford to work for free, it removes the compliance question entirely, and it lets you assign real work without worrying about which side of the test you are on. The full legal analysis lives in our guide on how to hire interns.

Which Question Set Should You Use?

Use the core set with every candidate, then add the sets that match your situation. A one-hour interview comfortably fits the core questions, one skills block, a project walkthrough, and a few situational questions, which is the full plan included with the scorecard.

The sets overlap on purpose, so drop any question that does not fit your business rather than asking all forty in one sitting. More question sets for adjacent roles sit in the hiring templates library, including the marketing assistant version for a paid entry-level hire.

6 Free Question Sets to Download

Download all six as one file, or copy the individual sets you need. Every question carries a reason to ask it and a note on what a strong answer sounds like, so you can grade a candidate whose experience you cannot verify against a resume.

Set 1: Core Marketing Intern Questions

The eight questions to ask every candidate, in order, covering motivation, learning goals, channels actually used, the first two weeks, and hours.

Set 2: Skills, Channels, and Tools

Find the floor of what they can already do unsupervised: writing for a real audience, platform fluency, basic analytics, spreadsheets, and judgment about AI drafts.

Set 3: Coursework, Projects, and Portfolio

The replacement for asking about a previous role: class projects with real audiences, unassigned work, and which part of a group project they personally produced.

Set 4: Situational and Judgment

Short hypotheticals with no trick answers: a typo that already shipped, a public complaint, an exam collision, a slow afternoon, and an image found online.

Set 5: Coachability, Behavioral, and Logistics

STAR-style questions on feedback, group work, and missed deadlines, plus the logistics block on dates, hours, course credit, and remote days that most employers skip.

Set 6: Scorecard, Red Flags, and a 60-Minute Plan

A 1-to-5 rubric across six areas, a red-flag list, a list of things that only look like red flags, and a minute-by-minute plan for the hour.

Four Questions, and What a Good Answer Sounds Like

Four questions carry most of the signal in an intern interview. Each one works precisely because it does not require employment history to answer well, and each one has a recognizable strong answer and a recognizable weak one.

The most useful follow-up in all four cases is some version of what happened next? Candidates with real experience, at any scale, have an answer ready. Candidates describing something they only planned run out of detail in about two sentences.

Judging Potential With No Work History

Sort what you hear into four buckets: real signals of potential, gaps you can teach around, actual red flags, and things that feel like signals but predict nothing. Most bad intern hiring decisions come from the fourth bucket, where school prestige and interview polish quietly do the deciding.

Nervousness deserves special mention. For many candidates this is a first professional interview, and treating anxiety as a communication score punishes inexperience rather than measuring it. Give a nervous candidate a second run at a question, and grade what they say the second time. If you recruit through schools, the same logic applies across your whole campus recruitment process.

Fair, Legal, and Structured Interviewing

Keep every question tied to the job, and ask the same core questions of every candidate. That single habit is simultaneously your compliance posture, your bias reduction, and the reason your hiring decisions get better over time. With student candidates a few extra traps apply.

The full list of questions to keep out of any interview, with better replacements for each, is in our guide to illegal interview questions. This is general information, not legal advice.

Scoring and Red Flags

Score six areas from 1 to 5 within ten minutes of the interview ending, and write the evidence next to each number rather than the impression. The areas are motivation, writing and communication, channel and tool familiarity, judgment and initiative, coachability, and reliability with schedule fit.

Scoring matters more for interns than for experienced candidates. There is no employment history to anchor the conversation, so an unstructured interview drifts toward whoever was easiest to talk to. A rubric filled in from notes, on the same interview evaluation form for every candidate, is the only thing that stops that drift.

Then tell every candidate what happens next and by when, including the ones you decline. Students talk to next year's applicants, and a clean rejection costs you nothing while a silence costs you a pipeline.

What a Marketing Intern Costs

There is no federal wage classification for marketing intern, so benchmark from the nearest occupation and set an hourly rate well below it. Intern pay at a small business is usually set as an hourly figure between the applicable minimum wage and the entry end of the professional marketing range.

A paid intern is an employee, so the applicable minimum wage, overtime rules, and payroll taxes all apply. Post the rate in the listing rather than leaving it open, both because several states now require a range in the posting under their pay transparency laws and because students compare offers primarily on pay, hours, and dates.

Interviewing Without an HR Department

At a large company an intern candidate meets a recruiter, a panel, and a program coordinator. At a small business one person does all of it, usually between other work, which is exactly why a prepared question set beats improvising a conversation you will have twelve more times this month.

Hiring interns across more than one team? The general interview questions to ask interns cover the parts that do not change with the department: school schedules, supervision load, and whether the internship is paid.

If you have never run one of these before, the mechanics of conducting the interview matter as much as the questions: same order every time, notes as you go, and a scorecard filled in before the next candidate walks in.

From Interview to Offer and Onboarding

The interview is step one. Once you choose someone, an intern needs a written offer with the dates and hours stated, the standard paperwork, any forms the school requires for credit, and a first week that is planned rather than improvised. Use the internship offer letter to put the terms in writing before the first day.

A paid intern is an employee, which means the same new hire paperwork as anyone else, and an onboarding template keeps the first week from becoming a scramble.

Plan the exit too. A real conversation at the end of the term, built from a short list of intern exit interview questions, tells you what to fix before the next intern arrives and whether this one is worth an offer.

FirstHR connects the offer, the e-signature, the onboarding checklist, and the document storage in one place, so a small business can take an intern from signed offer to a planned first week without a spreadsheet and four email threads. FirstHR is an onboarding and HR platform, not a marketing tool or a job board, so pair it with those. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR.

Frequently Asked Questions