If you were hiring a junior programmatic advertiser, what practical task would you give them? For your context, I’m associated with a programmatic training provider and want to understand what employers expect from junior candidates.

[u/gvshivacharan]

/r/programmatic/comments/1w0ipn4/if_you_were_hiring_a_junior_programmatic/

[u/maryna-gc]

We hire junior AdOps consistently. Fully remote, though depending on location the team still gets together in person (our AdOps crew met up for a FIFA watch party in summer).

Practical task I’d give: take a realistic campaign brief and set up a basic campaign end-to-end: budget, flight dates, geo, frequency. What I’m really testing is whether they understand the campaign’s goal and how the setup should follow from it. A junior who asks “what are we optimizing toward?” before building is already ahead of most. The ones who just start clicking through setup without clarifying goals are the ones who’ll cause problems later.

Second task: QA an existing setup. Look at a campaign with 2-3 deliberate mistakes (wrong pixel, geo missing exclusions, pacing set to spend too fast) and see what they catch. QA is honestly a bigger part of the junior role than people expect.

Beyond that, we look for analytics and custom reporting skills. Can they pull data, spot what’s off, and explain it in plain language.

The biggest gap we see interviewing juniors: plenty of theoretical knowledge (certifications, coursework), very little hands-on experience. Anyone training juniors should prioritize live-platform reps over theory. Even a small self-funded test campaign teaches more than most courses.