Digital marketing recruitment has a tell. The brief lists channels. The agency returns people whose LinkedIn headlines list the same channels. Nobody has asked whether the person can open a Google Ads account, read it, and say what is true. PPC recruitment in the UK is full of that substitution: a stack of CVs for a job that needed one adult in the room.
Viktorija Sherriff does not run a volume desk. VS Recruitment is a boutique headhunting practice. She starts a search for a £450 engagement fee and works her network — including performance marketers she actually knows, not profiles scraped from a job board. If you need a media buyer who can live in an account, that is a search. It is not a broadcast.
PPC recruitment is a craft hire, not a channel hire
Paid search still pays the bills in a lot of UK businesses. It is also easy to hire badly. “PPC executive” can mean a person who has changed bids on a brand campaign, or a person who has rebuilt a structure, argued with a conversion action in GA4, and told a director that the last quarter’s “scale” was branded traffic wearing a costume. Those are not the same hire. A CV that says Google Ads, Meta and GA4 in a skills block does not tell you which one you are looking at.
The hiring pain is rarely “we cannot find CVs”. It is that the CVs all look plausible. Digital marketing recruitment rewards people who write tidy headlines. The work rewards people who can sit in an account on a bad Tuesday and not panic. A specialist UK headhunter is useful here because the good people are usually already in a seat, protecting a number, and they will not apply to a vague advert. They will take a call from someone who can describe the brief without wasting their time.
What she actually vets
Viktorija is not a media auditor. She will not pretend to certify a Google Ads exam. What she will do, because she has hired in this market, is refuse to treat a tool list as evidence. For a PPC or performance brief she wants to know whether someone has owned structure and bidding, not only reported a ROAS number they did not define. For Meta, whether they have actually spent and learned, or inherited a catalogue campaign. For GA4, whether they can tell an event from a conversion and a dashboard from a decision.
That is the same instinct she brings to built sector recruitment: credentials that matter in the work, not badges collected for a CV. Construction has CSCS and SMSTS. Digital has fewer clean tickets and more theatre. The way through is conversation, not a filter.
Performance roles go wrong in public
A weak site manager is a problem on a site. A weak Head of Performance is a problem in the board pack. Digital marketing recruitment that sprays CVs tends to optimise for interview fluency. People who can talk about incrementality, full funnel, and “the algorithm” will beat people who can show you the change they made last month and why. If your business lives on Google Ads and Meta, that inversion is expensive.
There is also the hybrid brief: someone who can do paid search and still talk to a GA4 implementation without hiding. Those people exist. They are not numerous. They are almost never sitting on a job board with a keyword-stuffed summary. A network-only search is how you reach them without advertising that you are desperate, which in this market is its own kind of signal.
What a PPC brief should contain
Performance marketing roles are much easier to fill well when the brief describes the account rather than the channel list. The questions that matter are simple, and they are often left unanswered:
- The number. Which result does the role own: cost per lead, revenue, return on ad spend or qualified pipeline?
- The spend. Which platforms carry the budget, and roughly how is it split between search, shopping, paid social and anything else?
- The set-up. Is the work fully in-house, shared with an agency, or overseeing an agency? Each needs a different person.
- The measurement. Who owns conversion tracking and GA4, and will the hire be allowed to change it?
- The audience. Who does the person report to, and how often will they explain results to people who are not specialists?
Candidates who are good at this work ask these questions themselves. If the brief already answers them, the first conversation is about fit rather than discovery, and the strongest people stay interested.
How to test whether someone can run the account
The most useful interview is a walk-through of an account the candidate has actually managed, anonymised where they need to protect a client or employer. Ask them to cover:
- How the account was structured when they arrived, and what they changed first.
- How they chose a bidding approach, and what data it depended on.
- How conversions were defined, and whether they ever found tracking that was wrong.
- A month that went badly, and how they explained it upwards.
- Something they stopped doing, and why.
Listen for decisions and consequences. Strong PPC specialists talk about trade-offs: volume against cost, brand against generic terms, short-term efficiency against learning. Weaker candidates describe features of the platform. If you want a practical exercise, keep it short and base it on a sample scenario rather than your live account, so nobody is asked to do unpaid consultancy as the price of an interview.
GA4 and measurement: the question most briefs skip
Paid media decisions are only as good as the conversion data behind them. A specialist who cannot explain how a conversion is recorded in GA4 or in the ad platform is making bidding decisions on trust. That is not always a deal-breaker — some teams have a dedicated analyst — but the brief should say which situation the hire is walking into. Ask candidates how they would check tracking in their first week, what they would look for in the event set-up and how they would handle a gap between platform-reported and analytics-reported results. The answer tells you whether they will protect your budget or simply spend it.
Red flags in performance marketing CVs
- Results quoted as percentages with no context: no budget range, no time period and no definition of the metric.
- Long lists of tools, with no single account they can describe in detail.
- Every success credited to the candidate and every failure to the client, the agency or “the algorithm”.
- No experience of explaining results to a manager or director who is not a specialist.
None of these rules someone out. They show where the conversation should go. The same approach underpins every digital marketing recruitment search: talk about the work, not the headline.
In-house, agency-side or somewhere between
The same job title means different work depending on where the seat sits. An agency-side PPC manager may run eight or ten accounts, switch context several times a day and spend a good part of the week on client calls. An in-house specialist usually goes deep on one business: its margins, its seasonality, its sales team and the internal politics of the marketing budget. Someone moving from agency to in-house often finds the first few months harder than expected, because they now own the result rather than advising on it. Someone moving the other way has to get used to defending recommendations to several clients at once.
Neither direction is wrong. The brief should say which world the hire is joining, and the interview should ask whether the candidate has worked in it. If you are hiring your first in-house specialist after relying on an agency, say so. The right person for that brief is someone who can take over an account without losing a month of performance, and who can tell you honestly which parts of the agency relationship to keep.
What a good PPC shortlist looks like
Two or three people, each of whom can walk you through a real account and explain the decisions they made in it. Each should have a clear reason to move, a realistic notice period and salary expectations that match the brief. If the shortlist needs a covering note to explain why someone is on it, they probably should not be. A shortlist built this way takes longer to assemble than a CV drop, but it usually saves several rounds of interviews.
How a £450 search is supposed to feel
You send a plain brief. Sector: digital. Role: the actual job, not a fantasy. Constraints: salary band, whether this is an in-house seat or an agency, whether the search is confidential. If it is a fit, you pay £450 and the search opens. Viktorija works people she can already reach. She does not scrape. She does not email fifty lookalikes. You meet a shortlist that can survive a look at the account.
If the brief is not a fit — you want a junior volume hire, or you want a hundred CVs by Friday — she will say no. That is the point of a boutique practice. Digital marketing recruitment is not improved by pretending every vacancy is the same.
UK employers still have ordinary duties while they hire. Right to work checks are on GOV.UK. Equality law still applies to how you describe a role and how you decide; the Equality Act 2010 is on legislation.gov.uk. None of that is exotic. A careful search just does not skip it in the rush to fill a media seat.
If you need PPC recruitment done as a search rather than a spray — Google Ads, Meta, GA4, a Head of Performance who can read the work — start a search. A short note is enough. VS Recruitment is not a job board. It is one headhunter, working a network, for people who still have to hit a number next month.
Frequently asked questions
What does a PPC specialist actually do?
They plan, build and manage paid search and often shopping campaigns: account structure, keywords and audiences, bidding, ad copy, landing page feedback and conversion tracking. Then they report what the spend produced against the number the business cares about.
Should a PPC hire also run Meta and paid social?
Sometimes. Some people are strong across both, but many are clearly stronger in one. Decide which channel carries most of the spend, hire for that, and check honestly whether the candidate has spent and learned on the second channel.
How do I test a PPC candidate without asking for free work?
Use a structured walk-through of an account they have managed, plus a short hypothetical scenario. That shows judgement without asking anyone to audit your live account for nothing.
Do you recruit agency-side and in-house PPC roles?
Both, as long as the brief is real. Agency-side roles need client handling across several accounts; in-house roles need depth in one business and the confidence to challenge internal assumptions about what is working.
What does the £450 fee cover?
It opens a named, network-only search for the role. It is not a listing charge or payment for a batch of CVs, and if the brief is not a fit Viktorija will say so before anyone pays.