Choosing Your First Marketing Hire
gkogan.co
gkogan.co
My comment isn't about the linked article per se, but I noticed recently (having made several first marketing hires myself) that it's really important to:
1) Have a very good 'head of marketing level' friend help you make your hiring decision
2)Be loose with titles - if you call the new hire your CMO/HoM and then realise later that they aren't up to that job, it's hard to hire above them without causing problems (leading a team is a very different skillset to setting up the first marketing channels, and not everyone who is good at the latter transitions well to the former).
Lastly, a tip for marketers looking to transition into working at a startup with a smallish marketing team (2-5 marketing hires) --> If they are advertising for a 'growth hacker' (with quite a generic skill set), then run for the hills and don't apply. Nine times out of ten, they realised too late that their CMO doesn't have the experience/skill to get the job done but, because they don't want to hire above them, they look for a 'growth hacker' to be CMO in responsibility but not pay or title (or decision making capacity).
Absolutely. A friend, or a consultant, or see if any of your investors (if you have them) have a marketer-in-residence.
Regarding titles, "Head of Marketing" is a safe one, in my opinion, because it isn't attached to a specific seniority (and pay scale) the way "CMO" or "VP" are. Can also go with "Marketing Lead." As for "growth hacker," it's time we all forgot about that term, and I'm glad to say I haven't seen it in a while.
Having been on the receiving end of such a company once (and having unfortunately accepted the job), I strongly concur with the sentiment laid out: never, ever, ever accept a marketing job offer where the yardstick is delivering the moon and more every Friday like clockwork.
Marketing is, first and foremost, a systematic activity. You get a small gain here and a small gain there, week after week, with systematic testing in between. Your bread and butter is compound interest, if you will, if one can compare growth rate to investing.
Unicorn-sized ideas that move the needle a lot do occur, naturally; but not often, nor regularly.
"Hiring a growthhacker" is just code for "we don't have the money for a marketing department or even an agency so we want you to do everything yourself and find magic solutions to why our product isn't taking off and we really hope you have a friend who works at Techcrunch or we're all going to think you were bad at your job."
Those are all very different activities with their own tiers of expertise. If you are still going to try for one person, ask them "is your strength in tactical marketing or strategic marketing?" If they answer "both" it's neither, or equally mediocre. You may think you need strategic, because you watched a few seasons of Mad Men. But, you probably need a tactical marketing pro with 3-5 years experience executing on their own.
I've found this isn't that consistent. If you're looking for a strong demand-gen marketers you can also look at the larger companies where that is core to their growth, like Expedia or Booking.com
One small nitpick if I may... Your interview questions aren't stellar. Better interview questions are behavioral driven IMO, e.g.:
> In our business we sometimes need do [activity]; can you tell me about a time when you [did activity]?
And then probe deeper, as they answer, on the hows, whys, and their decision process.
The same applies to sales or engineers. Or most if not all other knowledge-based jobs, for that matter.
What blogs do _you_ read?
I don't read many blogs, and especially not marketing blogs. I'm subscribed to http://tomtunguz.com/, https://www.kevin-indig.com/, backlinko.com, and https://len.podia.com/inner-circle. Even so, I only look at the post titles in my inbox and click through when it's relevant.
The world of growth/marketing advice is super noisy, so I mostly learn from experience and from trusted friends/mentors/advisors rather than blogs. Then I try to distill that in my own blog.
Being a self-learner I tried my best to find good content for him to learn on his own (Hubspot has amazing lessons for anyone starting from 0).
Today he went on to his first marketing job interview.
What would be your advice to him?
Another thing I have been discussing with him is how he can take advantage his current Organisational/Work/Social Psychology (thats was his specialisation) knowledge while working pursuing a Marketing career.
I think there should be good insights in Marketing once you better understand human behaviour.
This is pretty much like saying your first tech hire should be a VP of Engineering who can roll up their sleeves and do front-end and back-end and data-infra and create neural networks. Sure, maybe they can do it. But how good a job do you think he will do overall?
The first marketing hire, especially when you don't really know how to hire a marketing person, is going to be a gamble - no matter what the experience of the person is or what level of success the person has achieved in the previous company. I have hired very successful hands-on marketers who have failed terribly because the dynamics of the company changes. So does the target audience, the message, etc.
Often times, most marketers will take credit for the success their team achieved. For e.g. if you ask what was the metrics you handled, they'd most likely share the team metrics that was a collective responsibility and give you numbers based on that. You need deep experience to see through these claims.
Also, the first hire you make almost always needs to be tactical unless you have a large budget. But even tactical markets cannot do anything unless you have enough marketing budgets. Also, the medium of promotion is important. FB marketing is very different from LinkedIn marketing. Both of them differ from AdWords as well. These are almost entirely different from content networks like Outbrain and Taboola. Oh did I talk to you about DSPs?
Unless you know which medium you will be using to promote, you cannot hire a specialist. And there's no one who is going to be equally skilled in all channels. I have seen marketers waste tens of thousands of dollars because they wanted to try a new channel which they had no idea to optimize.
In short, don't think following this guide is going to help you make the right hire. Unless you are a marketer yourself, most likely you will make the wrong hire.
If I were to hire a marketer for a startup and I cannot spend time hand-holding the person, I'll just hire someone who has some experience running organic as well as paid campaigns and is willing to experiment and learn. Marketing is mostly a function of trial and error. So hire someone who is willing to do this.
Good advice. Many companies just hire the first jackass that talks a good game. But much of marketing is being a jackass that talks a good game.
I'm looking to bring on our first marketing hire (director-level) We're a tech-enabled service specifically in the property management industry. You can think of us as the PwC specific to our industry. (www.apmhelp.com)
We're at $100k/month in revenue ($35k mrr, the rest is one-time projects) and all of our growth in our 13 months since inception has been word of mouth and niche forums. We feel we've hit "product market fit" as we're able to do one call closes with our average deal size being $24k in AR for recurring clients.
Our primary target audience is older and definitely on Facebook so prior experience running campaigns on FB is a must.
DM if interested! We're completely remote and have big aspirations =)