At Local Service Spotlight, we have found two things to be huge predictors of success for people who are new to digital marketing. These might be people who want to succeed in our program, or people we want to help create a vertical-focused agency. And after working with dozens of candidates, we can say with experience and confidence that these two criteria tell us almost everything we need to know about whether someone is ready to grow with us.
The two things are simple. One, can they make and publish a one-minute video? And two, do they have strong follow-through when given a repurposing task and feedback?
That is it. No trick questions. No fancy resume screens. Just these two real-world demonstrations of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness — the same EEAT signals Google looks for when ranking content and the same signals we look for when building our team.
Criterion 1: make and publish a one-minute video
The first thing we ask of any candidate is whether they can simply record a one-minute video and put it out into the world. It does not need to be cinematic. It does not need a professional studio. It just needs to exist, published, with their face and their voice attached to it.
The reason we do this is rooted in how we operate every day. Our 9 Triangles framework includes a triangle we call LDT — learn, do, teach. When there is a breakthrough in our space — say, a new development with AI agents — the first thing we have to do is learn how to use it ourselves. The second thing is implement it with the businesses we work with. And the third is teach about it, whether that is in our weekly coaching group, in videos like this one, in articles, or on social media.
This is exactly what the content factory process is built on. You make a video. You edit the video. You put it out there. Then you promote the ones that perform best with dollar-a-day ads. That cycle — produce, process, post, promote — is how we turn real work into real content at scale, and it is the backbone of everything we teach business owners and young adults who want to grow their digital presence.
So who would we be to go out and preach about how everyone should be making one-minute videos and putting them out there — because it helps for personal branding reasons, because it helps build authority toward earning a knowledge panel, because it helps in every single way — and then bring on someone who cannot do that themselves? It would not be logical. It would not honor our own LDT principle, which says we need to practice what we preach.
This is not a theoretical requirement we invented to sound impressive. This is a real standard we enforce because our experience has proven that people willing to put themselves on camera, even imperfectly, demonstrate a level of initiative and self-trust that correlates directly with their ability to do the work. When a candidate records a quick video talking about who they are and why they want this position, that one action tells us volumes about their character that a polished resume never could. That is EEAT in action: real experience from a real person, documented and published for anyone to verify.
Criterion 2: follow-through on a repurposing task
The second thing we look for is whether candidates can demonstrate strong, consistent follow-through. One of our qualification tasks for new hires is asking them to repurpose a long-form video into an article, following our blog posting guidelines.
In reality, we are teaching them how to use AI as part of this process. We expect them to use AI — that is the whole point. The quality of the article itself is not necessarily what we are evaluating, because we write articles in a certain way, and even a really good first draft is going to have QA points that we send back.
What we are really looking for is how they respond to that feedback. Can they understand what we are saying? Can they demonstrate that understanding by telling us what specific changes they made and why? Can they keep working toward a strong final product without going quiet or getting defensive?
We do not just want them to take our feedback, put it into ChatGPT, and throw it back at us saying they are done. We want them to actually understand what we are saying, demonstrate that understanding, let us know what specific changes they made and why, and then keep working toward a really good article. That process of iterating with clear communication is what separates someone who can grow with us from someone who will stall.
This matters because we have worked with people who look great on paper. They can write a solid article or record a decent video. But when communication gets real — when there is feedback to process, revisions to make, and a conversation to maintain — they disappear. They stop replying in Basecamp. They stop responding to emails and texts. No matter how talented someone appears on the surface, if the follow-through is not there and they are not willing to communicate with you, those people become very difficult to work with.
Responsiveness is not a bonus in our world. It is the baseline. We expect everyone on our team to be replying in Basecamp, replying to emails, replying to texts, and staying organized. That is how trust is built, and trust is the foundation of everything we do for the local service businesses we serve.
This is where trustworthiness — the T in EEAT — shows up most clearly. We cannot evaluate trustworthiness from a resume or a cover letter. We can only see it in action: in how someone handles a real task, applies real feedback, communicates changes clearly, and maintains responsiveness over the course of a working relationship. The repurposing task gives us a controlled, authentic environment to observe exactly that. It is a demonstration of expertise and experience that no interview question can replicate.
Why these two criteria work together
These two non-negotiables are not arbitrary. They mirror the actual work our team does every day. We help local service businesses — plumbers, HVAC technicians, roofers, electricians, dentists — turn their offline reputation into online authority. That work requires people who can produce content, process feedback, and communicate reliably. If a candidate cannot demonstrate those abilities in a low-stakes qualification task, they will not be able to do it under real-world conditions with real clients counting on them.
The one-minute video tests willingness to be visible and to honor the content factory process we teach. The repurposing task tests the ability to learn, iterate, and communicate — the operational follow-through that separates A-players from people who stall after the first draft.
Together, these two criteria give us a reliable, experience-based qualification system that has been refined through working with real candidates in our real pipeline. It is not perfect, and we want to keep building on it. But it has already shown us, time and again, that the people who pass both tests tend to be the ones who thrive in our environment.
We want to hear from you
If you run a business and you are hiring people who might be completely new to digital marketing, we would love to hear what you look for. What filters do you use? What tasks do you give? What signals matter most to you?
And if you are reading this and you feel like you fit these two criteria — you are willing to put yourself on camera, you can take feedback and run with it, and you communicate with purpose — we would love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to Local Service Spotlight and introduce yourself. We are always looking for people who are ready to learn, do, and teach alongside us.