Interview plan template
A 60 min interview plan with a time-boxed script, what each question is for, and the signals to score against. Key skills: Defending a search budget to an executive who believes AI ended organic search, under a live role-play with a wrong prior forecast in the room, a cannibalisation argument that has to be settled with evidence rather than conviction, and a decision that goes against the candidate.
Before we start, the format. This is a role-play and it runs about fifty minutes. I'm playing our CMO, the budget decision is mine, and I've already made it — you're not walking into an open question, you're walking into one that has been closed and you have this meeting. I'll stay in character unless one of us needs to stop, and you can call that at any point with no cost to you. Two things I want to say as myself first. I am going to be wrong about something in here, on purpose, and finding it is a large part of what this hour is for. And at one point the decision is going to go against you regardless of how well you argue — that is not a signal that you did badly, it is the last section, and how you handle it is the part I care most about. Ready when you are.
The opening discriminator, and it resolves on whether the candidate diagnoses before defending. There are at least two entirely different meetings hiding in this statement — one where the company needs the money and one where the executive believes search stopped working — and the arguments are not interchangeable. A candidate who starts rebutting has picked one at random.
The most revealing question in the round and the one candidates most often fumble in a way that is invisible to them. Defending the forecast is loyalty aimed at the wrong object. Trashing the predecessor is cheap, it is available, and it tells the executive exactly how this person will speak about them. The answer that works is neither, and it has to end somewhere concrete or it is just poise.
Tests whether the candidate can argue by conceding. The decisive move here is agreeing with a real part of the cut, and a candidate who defends the whole budget forfeits the credibility needed for the part worth defending. The decay asymmetry is the strongest honest argument available and most candidates never reach it.
The point on which the executive is wrong, and the section the round is built around. Branded paid search commonly reports excellent return while substantially cannibalising clicks that were arriving free, and the reported figure cannot distinguish the two. A candidate who knows this and knows how it is settled has the single most valuable piece of knowledge in the hour.
Tests three things at once that no earlier question reaches: whether the candidate can execute a decision they argued against without either sulking or pretending they agreed, whether they cut deliberately rather than proportionally, and whether they can ask for what they need at the exact moment they have least leverage. The partial win is deliberate — it removes the clean narrative of total defeat and forces a more honest reaction.
Stepping out of character — that's the end of the role-play, and thank you, because that is an uncomfortable hour and you did the hard part of it. Two things you should know. The forecast in that deck is real, the number is real, and the reason I run this round is that I handled my own version of that meeting badly and I would like to hire someone who handles it better than I did. And the cut in that scenario is not hypothetical pressure I invented for the exercise — the question of what this function is worth is live here, which means whoever takes this job will have some version of this meeting inside their first year, probably more than once. I would rather you knew that before you decide about us than after. What I write up is what you cut and what you asked me for at the end. [RECRUITER_NAME] will come back to you within [NUMBER] working days.
A single round does not cover a whole role. The other rounds in this library for a AI Search & SEO Manager (AEO/GEO/AIO):