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Comment by gk1 | Hacker News Reader

Author here. Happy to discuss any questions or get your feedback.

Good post and good advice as usual.

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.

Valid point. Hope others take note, if they'll be interviewing marketers in the near future.

It's not just marketers. :-)

The same applies to sales or engineers. Or most if not all other knowledge-based jobs, for that matter.

I really enjoy your blog. I've been reading it for a few years.

What blogs do _you_ read?

Thanks for saying that! Very glad to hear it.

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.

A good friend of mine finished his Master in Psychology and only later found what he really loved: Marketing.

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?

If your friend is interviewing at a startup, my advice would be to embrace and display an experimental and analytical approach to marketing. Don't act like you know what works, but instead have a few ideas and a plan for testing them, and then a way to find new ideas to test. If he's interviewing for a more traditional marketing role at a traditional company, I don't any advice to offer.

Thanks for the insight, I will gladly pass it onto 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 was a really well-written post. It is a far too common occurrence for startups to hire a well-credentialed VP to run marketing only to find out 6 months later that he/she can't execute at all.

Where's a good place to find marketing people? I feel I'm strong at finding good developers from various weird and wonderful channels, but I have no idea where to hire marketing types?

Asking around your network, maybe https://growth.org/ (I don't participate there but it's a large marketing community), marketers at companies you admire who've been there for 2-3 years and you suspect might be open to a change, and good marketing blogs. Some ideas to get you started, at least.

Depends what type of marketing you are looking for. For example, if you are looking for social media marketing, browse whichever social networks you want to target.

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