Thread by @mahadevanarj

1/ HOW TO HIRE THE FIRST MARKETER FOR YOUR TEAM OR STARTUP

Andrus Purde (@andruspurde) has built 3 marketing teams, hired more than 30 marketers.

This thread will help to hire your first (or third) marketer.

(Thread)

2/ As we all know, hiring is hard, and it’s painful to be working in a team where you’re missing a core skill.

3/ The foundation: be mindful of the three big areas you’ll want your first marketer to be responsible for

It’s a good idea to start this thread (and your hiring process) from definitions. The three big areas that a marketing head needs to cover are:

4/ -Product marketing: positioning, competitive intelligence, research and customer insights including persona, sales enablement, product launches, “packaging” and pricing.

5/ -Acquisition: lead generation via digital marketing (SEO, paid, email) and other channels, conversion aka growth, marketing ops (measurement, tools), internationalization.

6/ -Communication: message and story, media, social, “viral”, analysts and investors, internal comms, creative.

7/ It’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the to-be-hired marketer needs to cover all three areas. For example, a founder can take care of bigger vision and communications, or the bulk of product marketing for a period

8/ Conventional wisdom: start with a “full stack marketer”, but category awareness can help to be more specific

The best “full stack marketers” know a little bit about all marketing functions but they’ve developed deep expertise in one of them.

9/ Such professionals are sometimes dubbed “T shaped marketers” with the horizontal stem of T representing everything they know about and the vertical stem representing the area(s) they know inside out.

Ideally, the vertical stem matches with what your team or startup needs.

10/ For many B2B or B2B startups with a self-service model (ie. customers buy without talking to sales), the ideal core skill is acquisition marketing. For many sales-led b2b companies this is product marketing or communication.

11/ If you’re establishing a new massive and futuristic category, or if you’re the next Google or Facebook, it’s probably communication.

12/ How to actively grow the candidate pipeline

The worst tactic for finding good candidates is putting up a job posting and waiting for candidates to put up their proverbial hand. The best people are not actively looking.

13/ -Network. Speak to everyone relevant in your immediate network and investor/advisor group (which you’ve probably done already)

14/ -Do active sourcing. If you’re not geographically limited, comb Medium, Growthhackers dot com, Slideshare and other sites for people who have shared their experiences with producing notable work.

15/ Not everyone shares publicly though, so you may want to sign up for a LinkedIn Recruiter account and use its rather powerful search functionality to shortlist and contact interesting candidates.

16/ -Use good old marketing- sometimes gotten results from running Facebook+Instagram or LinkedIn ads for open positions, so almost always spend some money to promote important positions to “friends of people who like the page” as well as segments targeting the specific skill.

17/ -Try the new cool tools. Use one of the many novel services that have popped up in the space.

18/ -Post on job boards. Of course, no harm posting open positions to job sites as well.

19/ Traits I look for during interviews

He picked up an interviewing strategy from Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt), the founder of Automattic. In a podcast interview he has said that he looks for 4 things when assessing people to work with:

20/ -Curiosity – how does someone learn, stay up-to-date, look for better ways, and change behavior as a result

-Work ethic – do they actually want to get work done at this stage in life

21/ -Taste – do their aesthetic and methodology preferences match with yours

-Integrity – are they honest and dependable

22/ My favourite interview questions

There are 2 questions I tend to ask almost always, independent of the role in question.

What (accomplishments, achievements) are you proud of? What would you, or have you, highlighted in your LinkedIn bio?

23/ Tell me about a time when you struggled at work. Take me through what you personally did/said/thought/felt. (aim is to understand painful lessons learned so far)

24/ Both are great questions as you can get a sense of whether they value results or inputs, whether the examples are about team or solo work and whether lessons learned to communicate finger-pointing or taking responsibility for one’s own actions.

25/ Agree on the fundamentals before making an offer

Marketing, like most things, is very subjective. There’s a lot of art to marketing, and people can have wildly different opinions on what constitutes a great logo, piece of content or onboarding program.

26/ But even the science side of marketing is not black and white.

You can measure content by traffic or new business generated.

You can measure onboarding activities by conversion to paid or by retention.

27/ You can measure the effectiveness of paid marketing by growth or by profitability.

There’s no right or wrong, but it’s important that you and the person you’re about to bring aboard agree on the fundamental metric the work will be measured by.

28/ Last but not least, don’t forget to make room and let go.

The aim of hiring is to bring someone aboard who is either smarter about an area than you, or more interested in an area than you.

29/ As a leader, you have to find the optimal balance between being supportive and helpful, and getting out of the way.

30/ Source- purde.net/2019/04/how-to…

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