
Choosing Your First Marketing Hire - gk1
https://www.gkogan.co/blog/first-marketing-hire/
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louisswiss
Interesting post with some really useful insights.

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).

~~~
Kagerjay
I don't understand how anyone can call themselves a 'growth hacker', you might
as well advertise you're a golden unicorn at the same time

~~~
ddebernardy
I believe @louisswiss was discussing the company advertising to hire a growth
hacker, rather than the marketer/developer advertising themselves as one.

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.

~~~
jklinger410
>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.

"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."

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ogou
Be very specific about your goals or else the position will burn people out
fast. There are many aspects to marketing. You may think you want a "person to
get us leads", but you end up needing creative services, ad trafficking,
content marketing, social media management, copywriting, partner marketing
management, brand management, web development, and (grrrr) email template
design.

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.

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kposehn
> Marketers from large companies are insulated from growth metrics by the
> management layers above them.

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

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gk1
Author here. Happy to discuss any questions or get your feedback.

~~~
martinald
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?

~~~
gk1
Asking around your network, maybe [https://growth.org/](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.

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adarsh_thampy
I have been a hands-on marketer who has handled multi-million dollar campaigns
every month. Apart from the post being slightly self-promotional (a pitch to
hire the author as a consultant), I strongly feel this is not the way to hire
your first marketing person.

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.

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purplezooey
_Your first marketing hire should probably be a director-level person who can
be made accountable for generating a sales pipelines, with experience at a
company 2-5x your size._

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.

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taylorhou
Thread jacking cus I'm hoping lots of marketing folks will read the comments.
=)

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 =)

