The Paradox of Empty Desks and Unemployed Talent
Despite 396,400 unfilled vacancies across the Netherlands in 2024, marketing graduates are struggling to find their first professional roles. Recent research reveals that one marketing graduate applied to over 300 positions over 20 months with minimal response—a story that's becoming increasingly common across the country.
This disconnect between talent supply and employer demand isn't just unfortunate—it's economically wasteful. Companies desperately need fresh marketing minds who understand digital-first strategies, sustainable branding, and multi-channel campaigns. Meanwhile, universities are producing graduates with theoretical knowledge but struggling to translate that into employment outcomes.
The problem lies in how we evaluate early career marketing talent. Traditional hiring processes—built around CVs, cover letters, and generic interviews—fail to capture the creative thinking, analytical skills, and practical execution abilities that modern marketing roles demand. Instead, both sides get trapped in a system that prioritizes credentials over capability and promises over proof.
For students entering the marketing field, this means months of uncertainty and rejection despite having relevant skills. For employers, it means longer time-to-hire, higher recruitment costs, and the risk of hiring candidates who look good on paper but struggle with day-one marketing tasks. Universities, caught in the middle, see their graduates' employment rates suffer despite delivering quality education.
The Friction Points Slowing Early Career Marketing Hiring
Application Volume Overload
Marketing remains one of the most popular career paths, leading to overwhelming application volumes for entry-level positions. Employers report receiving hundreds of applications for single marketing roles, making it nearly impossible to identify genuine talent through traditional screening methods. HR teams spend countless hours reviewing similar-looking CVs and cover letters, often resorting to keyword filtering that eliminates qualified candidates.
This volume problem is particularly acute in marketing because the field attracts diverse backgrounds—from communications and psychology to business and design graduates. Without clear ways to assess practical marketing capabilities, employers rely on narrow criteria that may exclude creative thinkers who could excel in the role.
Extended Time to Hire
European small and medium enterprises report an average of 3+ months to hire appropriately skilled employees, with marketing roles often taking even longer due to their cross-functional nature. Multiple interview rounds, portfolio reviews, and stakeholder alignment drag out the process while motivated candidates accept other opportunities.
The extended timeline particularly hurts international graduates, who face additional visa and language considerations. By the time companies make offers, the best candidates have often moved on or relocated, perpetuating the skills shortage.
Skills Mismatch in Practice
32% of European employers cite lack of right qualifications and experience as their biggest hiring challenge. In marketing, this manifests as graduates who understand theory but struggle with practical execution. Universities teach marketing principles, but students may never create an actual email campaign, analyze real conversion data, or develop a content strategy for a specific business challenge.
The gap becomes obvious when new hires need extensive onboarding to handle basic marketing tasks like setting up tracking parameters, interpreting analytics dashboards, or creating buyer personas from actual customer data.
Poor Signal Quality from Traditional Assessments
CVs and interviews provide weak signals about marketing potential. A candidate might interview well but struggle with the creative problem-solving and analytical thinking that marketing requires. Portfolio presentations can be polished but may not reflect how someone approaches unfamiliar marketing challenges or works under realistic constraints.
Traditional academic assessments also miss crucial marketing skills like stakeholder communication, iterative campaign optimization, and cross-channel thinking. Grades in marketing courses don't predict success in roles that require constant adaptation and creative execution.
Assessment Drift from Real Work
Most hiring assessments bear little resemblance to actual marketing work. Generic case studies, abstract problem-solving exercises, and hypothetical scenarios don't reveal how candidates handle the messy, interconnected nature of real marketing challenges.
Marketing professionals spend their days coordinating campaigns across multiple channels, analyzing performance data, adjusting strategies based on customer feedback, and communicating results to diverse stakeholders. These complex, integrated skills are nearly impossible to evaluate through traditional hiring methods.
The Unique Challenge of Evaluating Early Career Marketing Talent
Marketing presents particular evaluation challenges because it requires both creative and analytical capabilities. Unlike roles with clear technical requirements, marketing success depends on a blend of strategic thinking, creative execution, data interpretation, and communication skills that's difficult to assess through conventional methods.
The field is also rapidly evolving. Today's marketing roles require familiarity with marketing automation, customer data platforms, social media algorithms, and privacy-first tracking—areas where academic curricula may lag behind industry practice. New titles like "growth marketer," "marketing operations specialist," and "customer success marketer" blur traditional boundaries and make it harder to define role requirements.
Additionally, marketing effectiveness is highly context-dependent. A campaign strategy that works for B2B software might fail for consumer goods. This means early career marketers need demonstrated ability to adapt their approach based on business model, target audience, and competitive landscape—skills that only emerge through practice with real marketing challenges.
Research from marketing industry associations shows that 68% of marketing managers struggle to evaluate junior candidates' potential for strategic thinking, while 74% find it difficult to assess practical execution skills through traditional interviews.
The Work-Sample Alternative: Evaluating Marketing Talent Through Real Tasks
Work-sample evaluation flips the traditional hiring script. Instead of asking candidates to describe how they would approach marketing challenges, employers present actual, role-relevant tasks and evaluate the results. For marketing roles, this might include developing a content strategy for a real business scenario, creating and optimizing a small ad campaign, or analyzing actual performance data to recommend improvements.
This approach benefits everyone involved. Students gain confidence by practicing real marketing work before interviews, allowing them to showcase abilities that might not appear on their CV. They can demonstrate creative thinking, analytical skills, and strategic reasoning through concrete examples rather than abstract descriptions.
Employers receive much stronger signals about candidate capabilities. They can observe how someone structures a marketing problem, what questions they ask, how they prioritize different objectives, and how they communicate recommendations. These insights predict job performance far better than interview responses or academic grades.
Universities benefit by aligning their programs with actual industry practices. When students engage with real marketing challenges, faculty receive feedback about which skills are most valued by employers, enabling curriculum improvements that boost graduate employability.
Work-sample evaluation also reduces bias in hiring decisions. When candidates are evaluated based on their approach to concrete marketing tasks, factors like presentation style, network connections, or cultural background become less influential than actual capability and potential.
How Talantir Transforms Marketing Career Readiness and Hiring
Talantir reimagines the transition from marketing education to employment through structured, practice-based career readiness combined with skills-first hiring challenges. Instead of hoping that academic learning translates to workplace success, we create environments where students engage with authentic marketing scenarios before entering the job market.
Our platform organizes marketing career development into progressive roadmaps that mirror real professional growth. Students might start by developing customer personas from actual demographic data, progress to creating multi-channel content calendars, and advance to optimizing campaigns based on performance metrics. Each case builds practical marketing capabilities while providing evidence of problem-solving approach and strategic thinking.
For marketing-specific challenges, we focus on the integrated nature of modern marketing work. Rather than isolated exercises in social media or analytics, students tackle scenarios that require coordinating multiple channels, balancing creative and performance objectives, and communicating results to different stakeholders. This preparation helps students understand the complexity and interconnectedness of marketing roles while building confidence for their job search.
Universities can deploy these roadmaps across marketing programs without extensive integration or faculty training. Students collect evidence portfolios that demonstrate their marketing thinking and execution skills, providing concrete examples for CVs, LinkedIn profiles, and interview discussions. Career services teams receive analytics about student engagement and readiness levels, enabling more targeted support for job placement.
Employers access motivated, better-prepared candidates through role-specific challenges that surface practical marketing capabilities. Instead of screening hundreds of similar CVs, hiring managers review evidence of how candidates approach real marketing problems, structure their thinking, and execute solutions. AI-generated abstracts provide consistent, transparent summaries of each candidate's problem-solving approach, reducing screening time while improving decision quality.
The platform supports marketing's creative-analytical duality by capturing both strategic reasoning and execution quality. Employers can identify candidates who combine creative thinking with data-driven optimization—the blend that drives marketing success but is difficult to evaluate through traditional hiring methods.
Conclusion: From Marketing Promises to Marketing Proof
Current early career marketing hiring treats potential like a guessing game. We ask students to promise future performance and employers to bet on uncertain outcomes. But marketing is a field built on testing, measuring, and optimizing—shouldn't we apply these same principles to talent evaluation?
Work-sample assessment transforms hiring from promise to proof. Students demonstrate marketing capabilities through authentic challenges. Employers make decisions based on observed performance rather than predicted potential. Universities align education with industry needs through direct feedback from real marketing scenarios.
The 396,400 unfilled vacancies across the Netherlands represent more than administrative inefficiency—they represent missed opportunities for economic growth, career development, and innovation. When marketing talent and employer needs remain misaligned due to inadequate evaluation methods, everyone loses.
What would happen if we started evaluating marketing talent the same way we evaluate marketing campaigns—through clear objectives, measurable outcomes, and evidence-based decisions? How might this shift benefit students seeking to prove their capabilities, employers needing to identify marketing potential, and universities working to improve graduate outcomes?
Explore how work-sample evaluation can reset early career marketing hiring standards.