I read the interview guides. All of them.
When you’re the one on the other side of the table, you go looking for whatever the hiring manager will be holding, and for B2B event marketing roles it’s usually a list of twenty or thirty questions about budgets, KPIs, vendor management and “a time you handled a last-minute change.” Fair enough. Those lists are written for the person doing the hiring. This one is written from my chair, by someone who is very much hoping you’ll call (I’m looking for a full-time role with one events team, and I wrote about why I want a year two), and it pairs each question with what I think a real answer sounds like.
My bias, up front: the standard questions grade how well a candidate talks about events. I’d rather you grade what they did in the weeks after one.
Ask How They Measure Success, Then Ask for the Date
Every guide has some version of “How do you measure the success of an event?” and almost every answer you’ll get back says attendance, engagement, leads, ROI. All true. Anyone can recite it in the parking lot.
The follow-up that separates people is when. When did they last look at the number, and who handed it to them? At Arxan, after our first year at RSA Conference, leadership asked me whether I could prove the booth produced revenue. The next year every badge scanned at the booth was tagged in the CRM as RSA-sourced, every lead went to a rep within 24 hours, and we tracked the 30-60-90 day follow-up every single week, which is how, by the end of Q2, we could point to specific opportunities and their dollar value. That spreadsheet bought us year three.
A candidate who can name the week they saw the pipeline number has lived it. One who can only say “ROI” has read about it.
Ask About Their Worst Ten Minutes
“Tell me about a time something went wrong” is on every list, and it’s a good question with a lazy grading rubric. Listen for the order of operations, and specifically for whether the fixing came before the explaining.
Mine is The Target Run. A breakout speaker walked on stage with no screen because the sales rep had forgotten the TV, and I drove to Target, and the session went on. The part I’d want you to dig into is the minute before I got in the car, when I split the problem up: you handle the speaker, you handle the AV crew, we reconvene in twenty. Calm is a habit, and you can hear it in how someone tells the story. If they still sound breathless telling it years later, the habit isn’t there yet.
Ask What They Look at First on a Site Visit
I didn’t find this one in any guide, and it’s the cheapest way I know to learn whether someone has actually been on a build.
People who have only seen events from the attendee side will talk about the ballroom. People who have stood at a loading dock with a truck idling will talk about the dock. I start at the back door, every time, and I’ll ask how tall the dock door is long before I say anything nice about the chandeliers.
Ask How They’d Treat a VP Who Landed Late
Budget and vendor questions get plenty of airtime. Hospitality gets almost none, which is odd, since the customer dinner during conference week is where a lot of B2B deals quietly move a stage. Ask a candidate what they knew about their guests before the guests arrived. I keep notes on allergies, the name of somebody’s kid, a flight that got bumped to the red-eye, and the person a partner was hoping to meet but was too polite to ask for. That file is the whole reason “Concierge” is in my title.
Ask What Happened Ninety Days After Their Last Event
This is the question I most want to be asked, and I couldn’t find it on any of the lists.
Goldcast’s guide alone runs to 30 questions across three levels of seniority, and it’s a genuinely useful read for a hiring manager. Every question on it stops at load-out. So does every question on the others.
Load-out is where a lot of event work ends. For the Tostitos activation at Super Bowl 2026, the pier had to be back to public access in six hours, with vendor invoices and damage assessments filed within 48. Then, like almost every agency job, I handed back the radio. The badge scans, the follow-ups and the deals that did or didn’t come out of that weekend all happened in a building I wasn’t in.
Ask anyway. Someone who has mostly done one-offs will tell you, honestly, that they don’t know, and that tells you something useful: whether they’ve ever had the chance to learn from their own receipts. Arxan gave me that chance. So did the two longest runs on my resume, seven years and 300+ tournaments at Presidio Golf and eight consecutive New Year’s Eves producing the same San Francisco party, where the January post-mortem was the real deliverable and the party was close to a byproduct.
Ask If They’d Take a Smaller Title
It feels awkward. I’d welcome it.
I’d start in coordination for the right team, happily, wrangling shipping manifests and badge lists. I know exactly what a perfect badge list is worth at 7 a.m. on day one of a show, and I would much rather earn the bigger job from inside the building than talk my way into it from the parking lot. A candidate who flinches here is telling you how they’ll feel about the boxes in month two.
One More
Ask what they’re wearing to the venue walkthrough, and hire the one who says comfortable shoes.
The Takeaway
The standard lists are fine for screening. They’ll tell you whether someone knows the vocabulary of event marketing, and plenty of people do. They won’t tell you whether the person across the table has ever stuck around long enough to watch an event turn into pipeline, or how badly they want to. I want to, very much! If your team has a calendar of shows and a Q3 pipeline review I could finally get invited to, let’s set up that interview. Bring the hard questions.