How much does a creative strategist cost?

Full-time creative strategists typically run $90k to $160k a year depending on seniority and category. Fractional engagements usually land between $4k and $12k a month. Placement firms charge the hiring company a fee on top; strategists should never pay anything.

How long does it take to hire a creative strategist?

Sourcing and screening from scratch usually runs six to ten weeks. Hiring from a pre-vetted roster compresses that to days, because the evaluation has already happened before you meet anyone.

Should a creative strategist have their own portfolio?

A portfolio helps but it is weak evidence on its own, because it rarely shows which parts were theirs or what the control was. Ask for account access or specific attribution instead.

How to hire a creative strategist

Hiring a creative strategist comes down to testing judgment rather than reading a résumé. Ask to see the ad account itself instead of the case-study deck, give every candidate the same process question about what they would do with a losing account over one week, insist that any number they quote arrives with a baseline, and finish with a live working session on a real account in place of a take-home. Most candidates who read well on paper come apart in that session, which is why it belongs before the offer rather than after it.

The process, in order

Decide fractional or full time first. The answer follows how much creative you need rather than how much revenue you do. Under roughly twenty new concepts a month, a fractional strategist working a few days a month is usually the better buy, and past that point the cost of coordinating a part-time person starts to outweigh what you save on salary.
Ask to see the account itself. A case-study deck shows you the winner while hiding the ratio behind it, so ask which ads were theirs specifically, what they changed, and what the account looked like on either side of it.
Give everyone the same process question. “A brand hands you a losing ad account and one week. Walk me through exactly what you do, day by day.” Vague answers are the fastest disqualifier there is, and a strong answer will be sequenced, specific, and built on decision rules they can explain.
Require a baseline on every number. A figure like “3.4 ROAS” means very little on its own, so ask what control was, what beat it, and over what spend and what window. Round numbers with nothing to measure them against should lower your confidence rather than raise it.
Run a live working session. Spend an hour with them on a real ad account, with no take-home, and watch them diagnose it in real time. This is the only stage that reliably predicts the job, and it is the one most hiring processes skip.

What goes wrong

Hiring on portfolio polish: The best-looking reel often belongs to the person who briefed it least.
Screening for tenure at a known brand: Big-brand experience frequently means they inherited a working account rather than fixed a broken one.
Using a take-home project: It filters for who has spare time rather than who has judgment, and the strongest candidates simply decline.
Interviewing without an account open: Abstract questions get abstract answers, so put a real account on the screen and work through it together.