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Content Strategist (Search & Editorial) interview questionsEditorial Round — What You Would Stop Publishing round

A 60 min interview plan with a time-boxed script, what each question is for, and the signals to score against. Key skills: Auditing a published library where most pages earn nothing, deciding between pruning, consolidating and leaving alone when the evidence for each is weaker than the folklore, commissioning what a model cannot reproduce, and setting a standard for AI-assisted drafting that survives a volume target.

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The portfolio

10 min
•

I'm [YOUR_NAME] and I own content at [COMPANY_NAME]. Two things about the hour. Most of what I'm going to show you was made by people who are still here and who did competent work under the brief they were given, so I am not looking for someone to tell me it is bad — I am looking for someone who can tell me what to do about it, which is a harder question and a different one. And I want you to be willing to recommend deleting things, or to tell me why you would not, but either way I want the reasoning rather than the instinct. This is a field with a lot of confident advice in it and not much evidence, and I would rather hire somebody who knows which is which.

•

Here's the library. About 1,400 published pages. Around 60 of them account for most of our organic entrances. Roughly 800 were generated from one template with the subject swapped, and Search Console reports a large share of those as "Crawled — currently not indexed". Here are three of the templated pages. Ten minutes: tell me what you're looking at and what you want to know next.

What this question is for, and what to listen for

Purpose

The opening discriminator. The distribution is not unusual and is not by itself a problem; the templated set being crawled and declined is the specific finding, and it has a specific meaning that separates candidates who know the vocabulary from candidates who know the mechanism.

Signals to score

  • Reads two or three of the templated pages and notices how much language they share
  • Knows what "Crawled — currently not indexed" actually means: fetched, evaluated, and not selected for the index
  • Distinguishes that state from "Discovered — currently not indexed", which is a crawl-budget or scheduling signal rather than a quality one
  • Says that the state is a judgement about the page's value rather than a technical failure, and does not send the candidate hunting for a rendering bug
  • Asks what the 60 winning pages have in common before deciding what to do with the rest
  • Asks whether the templated pages were ever intended to rank, or exist for another reason
  • Asks what queries the templated set was built to target, and whether those queries have volume
  • Separates pages with no traffic from pages that are near-duplicates of each other, treating them as different problems
  • Asks whether the templated pages have internal links, and whether anything else depends on them
  • Asks who owns the template and whether it can be changed, before proposing to change it

Follow-up questions

  • Is "Crawled — currently not indexed" a technical problem? Should I get an engineer?
  • The 800 pages were signed off by my predecessor as a growth strategy. Were they wrong?
  • What do you want to know about the 60 that work?
  • Some of the templated pages do get a trickle of traffic. Does that change anything?
  • How long would an honest audit of this take you?

What the tail is doing

18 min
•

So what do we do with the 800? I've read a lot of advice that says prune them — that a large tail of weak pages holds back the rest of the site and cutting it lifts everything. My predecessor believed the opposite, that they cost nothing and might one day earn something. Tell me who's right, how confident you are, and what evidence would change your mind. Then tell me what you'd actually do on Monday.

What this question is for, and what to listen for

Purpose

Deliberately presents two confident positions and asks the candidate to adjudicate between them when the honest answer is that the evidence is thinner than either camp admits. It is the calibration question of this round, and the strongest answer is less certain than the weakest one.

Signals to score

  • Declines to fully endorse either position, and says why the evidence is weak in both directions
  • Names the mechanism behind the pruning case — crawl efficiency, dilution across near-duplicates, site-level quality assessment — as plausible rather than proven
  • Points out that most pruning evidence is uncontrolled case studies where other things changed simultaneously
  • Distinguishes near-duplicate pages competing with each other from merely low-traffic pages, and treats them differently
  • Prefers consolidation to deletion where several thin pages address one real subject
  • Prefers noindex to deletion as a first move, on the grounds that it is reversible
  • Says explicitly that deletion is irreversible and that reversibility should be priced into the decision
  • Proposes testing on a subset with an untreated control rather than treating all 800
  • Gives a confidence number when asked and it is not high
  • Names what would move them: what happens to the treated subset against the untreated one

The cut and what replaces it

20 min
•

Say we consolidate the tail and it frees up most of a team. What do they make instead? I want specifics, and I want you to answer one thing directly: what would you commission that a model cannot produce for itself in ten seconds?

What this question is for, and what to listen for

Purpose

The question that has reorganised this discipline, and most candidates answer it with a quality claim — better, deeper, more expert — which is a difference of degree against something that improves monthly. The answers that hold up are structural rather than qualitative, and a candidate who reaches for structure has understood the change.

Signals to score

  • Names first-party data as the primary answer: things only this company can see
  • Names current, changing facts — prices, availability, inventory — that a trained model cannot hold
  • Names genuine primary reporting: talking to people, original observation, things not already written down
  • Names demonstrated expertise with specifics attached — real cases, real numbers, real failures
  • Rejects "better writing" or "more depth" as the differentiator, or is talked out of it quickly
  • Distinguishes content whose value is being read from content whose value is being cited
  • Raises that some content should exist to be a source rather than to earn a visit
  • Connects the commissioning decision to the earlier finding about which surfaces get cited
  • Says what they would stop making, specifically, and not only what they would start
  • Asks what the company knows that it has never published, and treats that as the brief
•

Now the standard. Your team will use AI to draft — that is already happening and I'm not going to stop it. Write me the rule. What is it allowed to do, what is it not, who checks, and what happens the first time something wrong gets published?

What this question is for, and what to listen for

Purpose

The policy question every content team now has and few have answered in writing. Prohibition is not available and is not the answer; a standard that survives a volume target is. The failure-handling half is the discriminator, because a policy with no incident path is an aspiration.

Signals to score

  • Accepts AI drafting as a given and writes a workable rule rather than a prohibition
  • Distinguishes tasks by risk: structuring and editing against generating factual claims
  • Requires every factual claim to be verified against a source by a named human, regardless of who drafted it
  • Puts the accountability on the publisher rather than on the tool
  • Names what must never be generated: statistics, quotes, case details, anything attributed to a person
  • Requires first-party material to come from the business rather than from the model
  • Addresses the volume incentive directly, and says what stops the standard collapsing under a target
  • Specifies who reviews and whether they have authority to block publication
  • Gives an incident path: how a wrong published claim is found, corrected, and logged
  • Says what changes after an incident, so the process learns rather than just apologising

What you would defend

12 min
•

Two to finish. First: name a page you'd keep that earns nothing — no traffic, no links — and defend it to a CFO looking at the content budget. Second: what would you need from me in the first ninety days to do any of this?

What this question is for, and what to listen for

Purpose

A candidate whose entire framework is performance-based will have nothing to defend here, and that is worth knowing — some content exists for reasons search cannot see, and a strategist who cannot articulate that will delete something the company needed. The second half surfaces the real blockers.

Signals to score

  • Names a specific category and defends it on a real function, not on sentiment
  • Reaches for something concrete: documentation, a page that answers a support question, a page sales sends to prospects, a legal or trust page, a page that exists to correct a wrong fact about the company
  • Distinguishes value that search can measure from value that it cannot
  • Defends it in the CFO's terms, with the cost of not having it
  • Does not defend everything, and keeps the exception narrow
  • Asks who else uses content that search reporting does not capture — sales, support, onboarding
  • Asks what happens when their recommendation to delete conflicts with the team that made it
  • Names a specific access or authority needed on day one
  • Asks whether they can decline a publication request from another team, and who arbitrates
  • Asks how content performance is currently reported and to whom
•

That's the hour. What I write up is your Monday plan for the 800 and the standard you wrote, and I'll tell you what we actually do — including if we do less than you recommended. Two things before you decide about us. The 800 pages have an owner who is still here, who did what the brief asked, and the hardest part of this job is not the audit, it is that conversation. And the reason I asked about AI drafting is that it is already happening across the team without a written standard, so whoever takes this role is not introducing a policy, they are catching up to a practice — which is harder, and I would rather you knew it now. [RECRUITER_NAME] will come back to you within [NUMBER] working days.

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Interview Template
Position
Content Strategist (Search & Editorial)
Round
Editorial Round — What You Would Stop Publishing for 60 min
Key skills
Auditing a published library where most pages earn nothing, deciding between pruning, consolidating and leaving alone when the evidence for each is weaker than the folklore, commissioning what a model cannot reproduce, and setting a standard for AI-assisted drafting that survives a volume target

Content Strategist (Search & Editorial) interviews — common questions

Who is this Content Strategist (Search & Editorial) interview plan for?
It is written for the interviewer, not the candidate: the hiring manager, engineer or panel member running the Editorial Round — What You Would Stop Publishing round for a Content Strategist (Search & Editorial) role. It gives you a 60 min script to follow in the conversation — 5 questions with what each one is for and the signals to score against — so you are not writing the round from scratch the night before.
What does the Editorial Round — What You Would Stop Publishing round assess?
This round is focused on: Auditing a published library where most pages earn nothing, deciding between pruning, consolidating and leaving alone when the evidence for each is weaker than the folklore, commissioning what a model cannot reproduce, and setting a standard for AI-assisted drafting that survives a volume target. It works through The portfolio, What the tail is doing, The cut and what replaces it and What you would defend, scoring against 50 observable signals, with follow-up prompts on 1 of the 5 questions for going deeper where an answer is thin.
How is the 60 min split up?
The portfolio (10 min), What the tail is doing (18 min), The cut and what replaces it (20 min), What you would defend (12 min). The timings are there so the round stays on schedule and every candidate gets the same shape of interview — which is what makes two candidates comparable afterwards.