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Hayley Cornwell Steinberg’s career began in content, but she now runs a whole marketing operation for a Series B startup.
Her team recently ran a process to hire for an in-house journalist role. We invited Hayley to join us for an AMA specifically to chat about what she’s seeing as someone trying to hire a full-time content marketer in 2026.
TL;DR: Hayley chatted with the Superpath community on hiring, getting hired, and building a marketing team with a journalistic mindset in 2026. If you read nothing else, grab onto these three key takeaways:
Being able to lead with impact and show your original thinking and judgment are key in landing interviews. Showing AI skills is important to prove you know how to scale and systemize your work, but first, you have to have work worth scaling. Your portfolio and applications should show off your metrics and impact, plus your originality, expertise, points of view, and voice/tone.
Storytelling is really different in a journalism vs. a content marketing context. That’s not to say that great content marketers can’t develop a journalist’s lens, or vice versa; but they’re different skill sets, and it’s tough (but important!) to find both for your team.
Hayley’s building teams for storytelling with business impact. “The people I want in my corner can think holistically about the whole marketing engine, not just their piece of it.” They have core competencies in their main role, but they can also think beyond just their scope, be original, dig out cool stories, systemize their work with AI, etc.
Below is her AMA with the Superpath Pro community, lightly edited for readability.
What does a good “portfolio” look like now with AI in the picture? How did great candidates show off their AI skills when a lot of it is a bit of a black box?
I love this question! I think a great portfolio looks a lot like it always has, but I look with an eye that is asking “is this truly original?” I’m looking for sharp angles, strong execution, and work that clearly couldn’t have been generated by AI: an original point of view, real reporting or expertise, a strong or interesting voice/tone.
“I think a great portfolio looks a lot like it always has, but I look with an eye that is asking ‘is this truly original?’”
The AI side comes up in the interview, where I’ll ask candidates to walk me through a piece: where AI helped them move faster, and what their process looks like from idea to published. I often ask “what’s one thing you do the same way in your writing/creative process every single time?” The strongest candidates can explain their workflow clearly, show me what’s repeatable about it, and tell me exactly where their own judgment made the difference.
What made candidates really stand out among the masses?
The candidates who stood out had a mix of journalism or reporting experience and marketing experience, usually in content marketing. That ended up meaning:
I’ve applied for many jobs I’m fully qualified for but haven’t landed an interview through applications alone. Did you ever interview people who only submit an app? If so, what did they do to get past the threshold?
Yes, I’ve interviewed and hired plenty of people through apps alone! I’m a firm believer in inbound and outbound apps being valuable and taking the time to go through them all, although I know not everyone does and that can be frustrating.
My advice is to lead with metrics and impact. Put the results front and center: traffic, pipeline, conversions, audience growth is a big one for me (e.g. in a newsletter), whatever you moved.
“My advice is to lead with metrics and impact. Put the results front and center: traffic, pipeline, conversions, audience growth is a big one for me (e.g. in a newsletter), whatever you moved.”
When I see someone has had a meaningful business impact in what can often be a creative role, I’m impressed.
Also show that you can create leverage/move fast without needing a big team of contractors or copywriters under you. If you’ve built systems that use AI at key points in the writing process, include them: the actual workflows you’ve built and what they made possible (again, impact). This is a standout one for me, because as a hiring manager I’m being asked to do more and hire for very few seats.
When I’m reviewing applications, the question in my head isn’t really “Can this person write?” Of course that’s still part of it, but now, it’s more like: Can you work with data? Can you find interesting stories? Can you write something that’s truly original? Because so many people can’t do that now, so I’d say from a portfolio perspective, include things that show you can do those things.
I’ve never worked as a journalist, editor, or researcher. But I’ve got nearly 20 years experience doing the equivalent. For folks like me, how can they make their application attractive (aka demonstrate relevance)?
There are skills that journalists have that can be developed in other roles. It’s more of a matter of surfacing those competencies through resume bullets and examples in your portfolio. Things like finding stories in data, having run your own surveys or built data report programs, getting sources on the record, finding and telling really interesting stories or angles people haven’t put out content about before.
Let’s say you’re an employed content marketer right now. What skills would you be trying to develop on the job that you think might be helpful in the future?
If you’re producing really good content right now, you’re in a good place. The next step is figuring out how to do 5x the work you’re doing today. That comes down to building systems that give you leverage and let you scale.
A few places I’d focus:
I’m curious about your experience with finding the right culture fit at a startup. For marketers coming from a large corporation, what should they know? Who tends to thrive or flounder?
Great question! I’ve worked at both big and small companies, and the biggest adjustment is speed. Large companies come with red tape and established (and sometimes frustrating) processes. At a startup, you need to move quickly and stay agile (and be willing to flex what you’re working on), and if you’re coming from a big company, it helps to show that you can do that.
You also have to be comfortable with ambiguity and direction changes at a functional and company level.
Sometimes the processes you’re used to won’t exist yet. In some cases, building them will be your job, and in others, you’ll just have to go with the flow.
If that sounds exciting rather than stressful, it’s a great transition to make.
The people who thrive have a lot of agency. They can find a problem and go solve it without waiting to be told what to do, and they think about things from impact as opposed to tasks. The people who flounder tend to be the ones who need specific direction at every turn.
Having worked as a translator for the last 12 years, most recently in marketing (leisure and tourism and wines) and law, I’m looking to branch into content marketing and strategy in UK English. Where would you advise starting to find your target market?
Assuming you mean finding clients to freelance for, I’d start where you already have experience: leisure and tourism, wine, and law, because you already know the language, the audience, and the players in those industries, which is an advantage over generalists.
To get your first content marketing work, portfolio is everything, so here are a couple of ways I usually suggest building one quickly:
Do you have any advice for someone looking to transition from the agency world to an in-house role?
The biggest question in-house leaders (this may be a generalization, but this is my take) have when looking at agency candidates is: did you get to see the work through to real impact and do you have the metrics? Agency folks who can point to metrics stand out. I know that can be hard, since it often depends on the client reporting results back to you, but if you can show impact, it’s a huge differentiator.
The great thing about agency experience is that it proves you can multitask, switch contexts quickly, work really fast.
Play those strengths up. Then show that you’re ready to go deep. Talk about the ongoing client engagements you enjoyed most, or the clients you were passionate enough about to put in extra time. Anything that shows you want to own something long-term, not just deliver and move on, will go a long way.
I’m a fellow content-to-marketing leader. Likely scaling my team in the next year or two. How do you think about hiring/delegating? Do you keep content work for yourself and hire people with complementary skills, or do you hire content marketers because you can more easily lead those folks?
This is a really good question because, in the beginning, I always thought that I should be able to do it myself and I’ve clearly landed somewhere differently! I think it depends on how you’re going to use content.
When I looked and laid out the marketing plan and learned how little brand visibility we had, it was very clear that content and tools (and by tools, I mean interactive things that you’d put on a website or that you’d put in an industry newsletter) and data reports were going to be the fuel for everything that we were going to do.
Once I felt like I had someone in the seat who could help with the execution of the campaigns and getting that stuff out into the world, then I looked and said, “Okay, I need a content person, or, in this case, the in-house journalist, to be able to tell those stories.”
The other compounding factor here was the fact that we need somebody who’s going to be pitching to reporters, and that is something, I think, that is really hard to find bandwidth for. In the absence of this person, yes, I’m absolutely pinch-hitting doing this, but I think if it’s going to be the fuel long term, then you bring somebody in.
I also did work with fractional support and I think once I realized how much we were going to need to be doing, it became clear to me that that wasn’t going to be enough.
What has been the hardest part of hiring for the in-house journalist role in the current market? Is there anything you didn’t expect?
The hardest part has been finding people who aren’t purely journalists or purely content marketers.
The journalists I’ve talked to are great at finding and reporting a story, but sometimes don’t know how to connect it to business impact or give a story a marketing edge, e.g. putting an “interesting” or unexpected spin on a story.
The content marketers sometimes have less of that instinct to go out, find the story, interview people, and bring in different points of view.
BUT big caveat: you don’t need to have been a journalist to be a great fit. There are content marketers who have that investigative, data-driven approach: they’ve run their own surveys, dug up their own stories, and gotten sources on the record. It’s just harder to find.
“You don’t need to have been a journalist to be a great fit. There are content marketers who have that investigative, data-driven approach: they’ve run their own surveys, dug up their own stories, and gotten sources on the record.”
What’s something you did in the hiring process that you wish you didn’t in hindsight? Or any false assumptions?
Early on, I underestimated how different storytelling is in a journalism context versus a marketing context, and I assumed candidates with a pure journalism background would pick up that difference maybe a little more easily.
I don’t mean every story should be about the company, but there’s nuance, like framing a story so it logically leads the reader toward a conclusion that’s favorable to the business, as long as the data supports it, of course. That instinct was often missing, whether it was in a brainstorm style question or in the assignment. It can definitely be taught, but it made me realize I really wanted someone with both journalism experience and some marketing experience, even if it wasn’t specifically content marketing.
When we chatted a few weeks ago, you were talking about looking for someone with a middle ground on AI, someone who doesn’t reject AI entirely, but also isn’t completely AI-pilled. Could you share a little bit more about what that ideal candidate looks like and what skills they bring to the table?
TLDR: I want someone who uses AI for leverage, not as a replacement for (editorial) judgment.
That means they’ve built AI into their work in a systematic, repeatable way that gives themselves (and/or others) more leverage.
They aren’t just prompting ad hoc, that’s old news. They have workflows for research, outlining, repurposing, and first-pass editing that make them faster and more consistent. But a human stays in the loop at key stages, which I think are typically ideation, where the angle and the “why should anyone care” come from, and drafting and editing, where voice, accuracy, and taste come in.
This requires still using strong editorial instincts, systems thinking, a clear and sometimes controversial POV.
What’s been the hardest part transitioning from content to leading all of marketing?
The marketing ops side of things. In all my interviews for head of marketing roles, when asked what I would hire first for, if it wasn’t there already, I was clear I wanted someone on the systems side that could help me move faster.
TBF, reporting has gotten a lot easier with Claude MCPs, with SFDC/HubSpot, but having someone to help unpack the minutiae of routing, etc. has been paramount for me. Along my transition from content to where I am now, I picked up product marketing and demand experience, but marketing ops / sales ops is hard to get your hands in until you’re in that seat.
Thinking about how you hired for an in-house journalist role and looked for a mix of skills, not necessarily just specializing in journalism: hypothetically, if you were to hire for a content marketing role, would you say you prefer someone with a mix of skills as well? Especially in this age where AI also allows people to build skills across disciplines?
Yes, as long as the mix sits on top of strong core competencies. For a content marketer, those are:
Beyond that, flexibility, thinking holistically, and being willing to learn and flex into different areas are huge. Marketing leaders, and probably leaders in every function, are being asked to do more with less and to run small, lean teams. I used to run content teams that were larger than my whole marketing team now. That means a content marketer will inevitably have to flex into product marketing, demand gen, or wherever the gaps are, depending on what the team needs to prioritize at a given moment.
The people I want in my corner can think holistically about the whole marketing engine, not just their piece of it. Plus, if we’re having team meetings, and brainstorming, I want people who have ideas outside of their immediate scope.
Can I ask about how you’ll measure success for an in-house journalist, KPI-wise? And how do you translate that value to your leadership?
Good question! There are three main ways I’ll measure success:
I’m feeling a lot of friction now because production is outpacing consumption in my team. What I mean is I’m not reading nearly as much as I’d like to, learning new things, getting new ideas, etc. and I’m finding myself pretty uninspired by writing as a result. I’ve got a journalism background and I’ve built AI workflows that have been remarkable for my efficiency, without sacrificing too much of the writing part. I wanted to use these time savings to do more learning, reading, SEO fixes, but this crazy level of content production has completely filled these time savings, and I’m still not getting time to do the reading or learning that I want. How do I deal with these frictions when I know they’re probably only going to become worse as a result of higher and higher expectations?
This is a great question, and I think so many people feel this right now. A few thoughts:
Thank you SO much, Hayley!!
For more from Hayley:
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