Job description template
A complete digital marketing manager JD for Indian employers — with the channel-scope decision that determines whether you hire a specialist who compounds or a generalist who spreads thin.
The failure mode in digital marketing hiring is not a bad candidate; it is a JD that asks for six specialisms and a budget it will not name. Performance advertising, search, content, lifecycle email, social, analytics and design are seven crafts. One person can genuinely own two or three and coordinate the rest. A posting that asks for all seven attracts people who have touched all seven and mastered none — and then the hire is blamed for the scope. Decide the two or three that matter to you this year, and write the JD around them.
Replace everything in [square brackets] before you post it.
Job title
Digital Marketing Manager
[Company name] sells [product] to [audience] in [markets]. Marketing today is [state honestly what exists — e.g. two paid channels, a blog and a newsletter].
We are hiring a Digital Marketing Manager to own [name the two or three channels that matter most] and the [leads / signups / revenue] they produce. You will plan and run campaigns, own the monthly budget for your channels, work with [agency / freelancers / in-house design] on production, and report on cost per acquisition and its contribution to [pipeline / revenue]. This is a hands-on role: you will be in the ad accounts, not only in the plan.
Experience: [x–y] years, with at least [n] years owning budget rather than executing someone else's plan.
Location and work model: [city, office locality] — [on-site / hybrid / remote].
Reports to: [Head of Marketing / Founder]. Works with: [sales, design, engineering, and the agencies you use].
Compensation: [band and structure, or a statement that it is benchmarked to experience and channel scope]. If any part of pay is tied to marketing-sourced pipeline, say so and say how it is measured.
To apply: send your resume to [email / apply link] with one campaign you would run for us in your first month and what you would measure. Process: [n] rounds, including a working session on a real account problem.
The template is the easy half. These are the decisions that decide whether the posting works.
Write the channel list, then mark each one owned, coordinated or out of scope. Owned means this person plans it, runs it and is accountable for the number. Coordinated means they brief and review someone else. Out of scope means someone else owns it entirely and you will not ask.
This single exercise resolves most digital marketing hiring failures, because it converts "manage all digital marketing activities" into a job a specific person can be good at. It also tells you honestly whether the band you have set matches the scope you have written.
These are different crafts with different metrics, different cycles and mostly different platforms. A performance marketer who has run D2C on Meta with a same-day purchase cycle does not automatically transfer to B2B lead generation with a three-month sales cycle and a CRM-attributed pipeline number, and neither transfers cleanly to app install and retention.
Say which one you are. Then say what your primary metric is — cost per acquisition, cost per qualified lead, return on ad spend, or cost per install — because that single word tells an experienced candidate more about the job than three paragraphs of responsibilities.
You do not have to publish an exact figure, but you should indicate the order of magnitude and, more importantly, the decision rights. Managing a budget you can reallocate is a different job from executing a plan someone else sets, and both are legitimate — but candidates price and choose between them.
Also state what is in-house and what is agency. "Manages our performance agency" and "runs the accounts personally" attract different people, and a candidate who has only ever managed an agency will struggle in an account-owner role no matter how well the interview goes.
Signals specific to digital marketing manager applications — not generic screening advice.
The people you want have been the scapegoat for a number they did not control. They read job descriptions for that risk.
Marketing has the widest synonym spread of any role in this set, and Indian and American usage differ — which means a keyword filter written in one dialect silently drops candidates who write in the other.
Other roles, hiring guides and recruiter tooling.
Stack depth over stack breadth. The JD that attracts engineers who ship and filters out keyword collectors.
The role most often mis-scoped as a data scientist. Fix the scope and the pipeline fixes itself.
Lifecycle ownership, not talent acquisition with a bigger title. Scope it by headcount supported.
Six roles, each with its own screening guidance
The components a job offer letter usually carries, the difference between an offer letter and an appointment letter, and the omissions that cause offers to be declined or disputed later.
A working method for shortlisting at scale: build the scorecard first, run two passes, know which filters are real and which are proxies, and calibrate before you trust anyone's judgement
Score applications against your own job description
JD screening scores every application against your own job description and shows the requirement-level gaps behind the score.