Companies get this wrong more often than they should. They either hire too early — before there is enough signal to know what good looks like — or they hire a generalist when they need a specialist, or they write a job description that describes a role no one excellent would take. This is what I have observed working across hiring decisions at scale-ups, and what I think the right framework looks like.
The inflection point I typically see is around £30,000–50,000 per month in paid spend. Below that, a full-time senior performance marketing hire is hard to justify on economics alone. A freelance performance marketing manager can carry that load at lower total cost and without the overhead of an employment relationship.
Above that threshold, especially if you are scaling rapidly, the case for a full-time hire gets stronger. The key question is whether you have enough work to justify the person's full attention and enough budget to attract someone genuinely senior.
Ask about attribution. Not in a technical gotcha way — ask how they think about measuring what is actually working. Good candidates will immediately talk about the limitations of last-click, about the difference between reported and actual incrementality, about how to handle conversion windows. Weak candidates will tell you about their ROAS numbers without any caveat.
Ask about a campaign that failed. Good candidates have a clear answer ready and take genuine ownership of it. Weak candidates struggle to recall one or blame external factors entirely.
Ask what they would want to understand before launching anything. Good candidates ask about margins, about the sales cycle, about what existing data you have on conversion by channel. They are trying to understand the business. Weak candidates ask about current CPC benchmarks.
Many companies hire a mid-level performance marketer and give them a strategy brief, then wonder why strategy does not emerge. Execution and strategy require different capabilities. Someone who is excellent at running campaigns inside a defined framework is not necessarily capable of building that framework from scratch.
Be honest about which you need. If you need someone to own strategy — channel selection, attribution design, budget framework — you need a senior hire or a senior freelancer. If you have the strategy defined and need someone to execute it reliably, a strong mid-level hire is better value.
Hiring a Google Ads specialist when what you actually need is someone who can think across channels is a common mistake. The best performance marketers think in terms of customer acquisition economics first and platforms second. They use Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, and others as tools in service of a broader acquisition model — not as destinations in themselves.
If your next hire's CV only shows deep expertise in one platform and no evidence of cross-channel thinking, that is worth probing before you proceed.
This is most companies at the scale-up stage. The right answer is usually a senior freelance performance marketing manager who can own the function while you figure out what the full-time role actually needs to look like. If that is useful to talk through, I am happy to do it.