Sales is the function where a bad hire is most visible and most expensive, and also the one where the CV tells you least. Every candidate has hit target. Far fewer can tell you what the territory looked like when they inherited it, how much of the number came from renewals, or what they built that outlasted them.

Marketing has the opposite problem. The discipline has fragmented into specialisms faster than job titles have kept up, so a single Marketing Manager brief often describes four different people: a brand thinker, a performance marketer, a content producer and someone who can run a CRM. The search fails not because the market is short, but because the role as written does not exist.

Ecommerce and customer growth roles sit across marketing, operations and technology, and report into a different function in almost every business. Title alone tells you very little, which makes benchmarking difficult and candidates hard to compare.

Then there is the thing that quietly decides most sales searches. Candidates compare realistic total earnings, not base salary. If the commission structure is complicated, back ended or recently changed, that will shape who accepts long before culture or career progression get a say.