Yashika D.
Affiliate Marketer
SUMMARY OF EXPERIENCE
• Yashika has 2.5+ years of affiliate marketing experience at CJ Epsilon, managing programmes for global brands such as AT&T, HelloFresh, and Groupon across performance monitoring, publisher management, and client reporting.
• She has delivered measurable results across her accounts, including 16% YoY revenue growth for HelloFresh Canada and a 30% conversion rate uplift for Marshalls, driven through data-led optimisation and affiliate performance tracking.
• Her toolset covers Advanced Excel, Power BI, Salesforce, and AI-based publisher recruitment tools, and she has held direct client and publisher-facing responsibilities including solo-led calls and insight presentations on high-touch accounts.
👍 What we loved about them
• Strong communication skills: During both interviews she mentioned that she has been leading client and publisher calls on a one-on-one basis for the last year and a half, and that she presents data with her own analysis layered in. At CJ, this kind of exposure typically sits with more senior people, so the fact that she's been trusted with it at her level does suggest she's been operating above her formal title for a while. We feel this makes the transition to more autonomous account delivery more realistic than it might look on paper.
• Structured and nuanced in her approach: Throughout both calls, she consistently distinguished between publishers who were generating clicks and those converting to revenue, and she proposed different interventions for each. For click-active publishers, she'd look at tracking or landing page issues and then use goal-based commission incentives. For truly dormant publishers, she'd offboard them. We feel this level of nuance matters in this role because it avoids the trap of treating all underperforming publishers the same way, which tends to either waste budget or write off salvageable relationships too early.
• Highly opinionated and thoughtful: In the scenario where a publisher threatened to prioritise a competitor's programme due to better commissions, she didn't immediately offer to match them. Instead, she held the line on what made sense within her budget and only considered a targeted commission bump if the timing was commercially justified, such as a high-priority seasonal window. We think this reflects someone who understands that reactively outbidding competitors on commission is often a short-term fix that erodes margin without solving the underlying relationship problem.
ℹ️ Things to be aware of
• Yashika has a 60-day notice period.
• Her experience sits entirely within one network and one employer, so multi-platform fluency and true end-to-end programme ownership are both areas she's still stepping into.
• Commission structuring and budget decision-making have been close to her work but not hers to own directly, and she hasn't operated in an agency environment before. She's ready to grow into this role, but it would be worth setting clear expectations early on around the commercial responsibilities she'll be picking up for the first time.
💁♀️ Where he may need support
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Although he lacks extensive experience with LinkedIn and Bing ads, his proficiency in Google ads suggests a high adaptability to new platforms.
👩💻 Technical interview performance
Objective
This candidate was invited to a 60-minute follow-up interview to assess their technical capabilities in more detail. During this interview, we assessed their critical-thinking skills, technical expertise, and overall conversational skills.
Technical abilities
• Programme auditing and performance diagnostics [8/10]: We think Yashika's understanding of the audit process is solid and clearly grounded in day-to-day practice. She ran through her steps with genuine specificity, covering placement tracker reviews, live asset checks, URL verification, offer copy accuracy, and cookie-level tracking, all without needing to be prompted. Her thinking didn't stop at identifying an issue either; she moved straight into recovery mode, mentioning make-good requests and client visibility in the same breath, and she's clearly done this enough times to know that spotting a problem is only half the job. On the diagnostics front, when pushed on the 30% revenue drop scenario, she demonstrated a sensible mental framework, talking through seasonality patterns, YoY comparisons, and how to separate a normal seasonal pullback from something that actually needs an intervention. She went deeper than just "check the numbers," and we feel that approach would serve her well when managing multiple accounts independently, where proactive issue detection matters more than reactive fixes.
• Publisher recruitment and relationship management [7.5/10]: We feel Yashika has a well-formed sense of how publisher ecosystems work and how to prioritise within them. Her tiering framework is practical, and she articulated the commercial logic behind it clearly, particularly around where flat fees go versus commission-based placements and why mid-tier publishers tend to be the most flexible to experiment with. Her approach to new versus mature programmes was also thought through well. For a new programme, she'd go heavy on top-tier publishers to establish credibility and early revenue, then graduate toward mid and low over six to twelve months. For a mature programme, she flips it and focuses energy on newer publisher categories such as influencer and content. We liked that she brought in competitor analysis as part of her new programme outreach thinking without being asked, which showed she's thinking about recruitment with context behind it. On relationship management, she handled the scenario of a non-responsive, declining publisher sensibly, escalating to senior POCs and being willing to offboard after a sustained period of no engagement. We think her instincts here are commercially sound for someone at her stage.
• Client communication and account ownership [8/10]: We think client communication is genuinely one of Yashika's stronger areas. She has a consistent view that clients should be kept in the loop, but she's also sensible about where the threshold sits between what needs flagging and what can be resolved quietly before it becomes noise. Her handling of the revenue dip scenario was reassuring from an account management perspective. She emphasised having context and a resolution plan ready before getting on a call, and she's clearly someone who would show up prepared. We also liked that she raised competitor intelligence as something worth sharing with clients proactively, particularly around commission benchmarking, which is a commercially aware instinct that many people at her level don't naturally lean into. Her comments about leading calls solo, presenting data with her own analysis, and owning specific accounts and publishers at CJ paint a picture of someone ready to step into a more autonomous account role. We feel she'd be reliable on the client-facing side with a sensible onboarding period.
• Programme strategy and prioritisation [7/10]: Strategically, Yashika thinks in the right direction and her prioritisation instincts are sensible. When she worked through the written programme audit scenario, she went category by category through content, editorial, influencer, and sub-network partners, and her instinct to cleanse underperforming publishers before optimising active ones is the right order of operations. She also framed the upcoming Partnerize migration as an opportunity to set the programme up cleanly, which shows a level of forward thinking beyond pure execution. That said, we feel her strategic thinking is still largely shaped by what she's done operationally. Her answers were strong on what to do but lighter on how she'd structure a forward-looking plan for a programme, for example, setting quarterly targets, building a recruitment pipeline, or defining success metrics beyond revenue. The commission structuring piece also exposed a gap. She has useful awareness from being close to the process at CJ, but she hasn't owned that decision-making directly, and in a standalone manager role that'll matter. We think with the right exposure early on, her commercial instincts give her a reasonable foundation to grow into the more strategic parts of this role over time.
Areas of growth
• Her platform exposure is limited to CJ, so tools like Partnerize, Awin, or IMPACT will come with a learning curve. She also hasn't worked with PR-led or link-building publisher channels, which is a gap given what the role requires. Her recruitment thinking also tended to be situational in the interview, so developing a more structured, proactive outreach cadence over time would push her to the next level.
• Commission rate structuring and budget allocation are areas she hasn't owned directly, and that will need hands-on development from day one. Her strategic framing also tends to stay close to past experience, so building a habit around programme roadmaps, pipeline planning, and longer-term publisher strategy would be an important development area as she grows into the role.