🎙️ This free edition of MKT1 newsletter covers Season 1, Episode 3 of “Dear Marketers with Emily Kramer & Friends” podcast, brought to you by Typeform, Framer & Mutiny. Listen or watch the full version of the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Plus read the full newsletter below for an even deeper dive on the topic.
Question: “Dear marketers, I’m Branca Ballot, VP of Marketing at Glide. I’ve hired 100s of people in my career and it’s still very tough. How do you hire a great team?”
Answer: Dear Branca & marketers,
You’re right, hiring marketers is always hard. And hiring a marketing team is like building one of those 3-D puzzles from the 90s, after losing the box that shows you what you’re building. This is especially the case right now, with marketing changing so quickly and budgets still low after years of marketing cuts.
In this newsletter & podcast episode:
Devon, Grace, and I discuss the challenges of hiring and organizing marketing teams, how to structure the interview process, and how to set marketing candidates up for success.
How to build a marketing team
Marketing teams are more like product teams than sales teams
Org Charts, AORs & π-shaped marketers
Hiring & Interviewing
Questions and assignments that actually work
Our best advice for building a high-performing marketing team
Our most ridiculous interview “power moves” to avoid (podcast only!)
Templates & resources: Job description templates, interview questions and assignment suggestions (for paid subscribers)
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Listen or watch the full version of the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
“Someone can be perfect on paper but not the right person for the role.”
- Grace Erickson, Dear Marketers, Episode 3
Building a marketing team is like building a 3-D puzzle
No two B2B startup marketing teams look exactly the same. You can hire 25 marketers and still not have marketers in the exact same role. Your team needs to be built around your company’s market and audience, GTM motion, stage, and existing team members. So even when you’ve hired 100 B2B startup marketers (like Branca, who called in with today’s question), it will still feel like you have room to learn and do things even better.
Since there are so many functions within marketing, great marketers tend to come with a range and unique blend of skills. This complexity can hold you back before you even start hiring, as it can be difficult to explain to recruiters, founders, and execs who you need on your team and what each person will do. It’s important right from the start to prepare recruiting and finance for the fact that your hiring plan is a bit of a moving target
“Making marketing hiring plans is kind of a fool's errand.” - Emily Kramer, Episode 3
Building a marketing team isn’t like building a sales team
“Sales is really laser-focused on a single KPI, which is quarterly revenue. Whereas product and marketing are not, they're focused on short-term revenue, but they're also thinking long-term. They're thinking about big bets that can change the trajectory of the company. - Emily Kramer
My go-to analogy when trying to help the rest of the company understand marketing hiring is to compare building a marketing team to building a product team (which includes eng, product, and design), rather than to a sales team. There are more similarities between running product and marketing, than sales and marketing. A light bulb then usually goes off.
If you, as a marketer, approach it like a product team too, you’ll recognize early on that you are building a multi-disciplinary team. You’ll realize you need a team that can balance both short-term and long-term projects, and not just think about growth tactics for driving pipeline, but also content and brand efforts that will build awareness.
“There are so many specializations within the broad category of marketing that don’t exist in the same way on say, a sales team or a customer success team” - Grace
“A sales role is very well-defined. Every sales person you bring on adds a predictable amount of incremental value to the business, right? They can carry a book of business of a certain size. Whereas marketing is much more like product in that there's a lot of ambiguous problems to be solved. It's not necessarily clear exactly what to do next. And so marketers have to think a little bit more like product managers” - Devon
Marketing org charts
There are a million types of marketers, and therefore 10 million ways to organize your team (note: this is exaggerated back-of-the-envelope math). I’ve written extensively about org charts here. But to summarize, while org charts vary widely, I typically organize it in 3 main sub-functions:
“Fuel”: Content & Brand
“Engine”: Growth marketing, demand gen, & marketing ops.
“Foundation”: Product Marketing (often including customer, partner, & ecosystem marketing)
“As the company grows, keep in mind the structure of the rest of the business too. So on product marketing in particular, look at the structure of the product team and think about how to build out the product marketing function to support that. Not necessarily mirror it, but to make sure those teams are well supported by by your team. Similarly, actually look at the structure of the sales team, even though you're not hiring marketers like you would hire salespeople. Make sure you're building a marketing team that supports these partner teams really effectively.” - Devon
If you hire an amazing leader that makes you rethink the org chart, that’s okay too. No matter what, build your marketing team around your company and the people on your team, where career trajectories and responsibilities are clear.
AORs or Areas of Responsibility
In addition to organizing and planning hiring based on an org chart, me and my co-hosts all love using AORs—we’ve been doing this since our Asana days.
AORs help marketing know who is doing what. They also make it crystal clear to the rest of the company who owns what because it’s very complicated for other teams to understand what our fancy and ever-changing marketing roles mean.
Since marketing is often a matrixed organization, people’s roles include apples and oranges. You can own horizontal functions like campaign management or specific areas like “social media”. So AORs let you break all this down. I recommend keeping this list in Asana, Notion, Google Sheets, wherever it’s easy to find!
Do I really need all these frameworks and structures around hiring?
“To the point of being a great team...If you believe strongly that doing something—like having AORs, or having a certain hiring process, or using OKRs—is essential to you having a great team, but the rest of the company doesn't yet, as the marketing leader, you should move forward with conviction.
When you're doing it well, you can bring the rest of the company along with you, and show how marketing works, not just the work marketing does. That's when you start getting brought in on more strategic conversations about the business, because people see that this org is the best one at the company” - Grace
Grace, Devon and I all think you need systems in place to build a great marketing team, in fact, that’s the point of my podcast and newsletter in general! So, even if other teams aren’t doing this yet, don’t be afraid to implement these processes just for your marketing team (or even part of your marketing team). Marketing is multi-disciplinary, with many different roles and responsibilities across the entire funnel, multiple audiences, working in multiple mediums, etc…some systems and processes will inevitably be necessary.
You can also use your process, systems, and organization as selling points when hiring. Show how organized your team is—it will go a long way with candidates that care about this stuff!
“So I think all of the organization stuff and the OKRs and the AORs, they're not just acronyms, right? They're ways to actually build a high performing team and then that helps you hire because you can point to all of the ways in which your team is killing it” - Devon
Hire π-shaped marketers, not t-shaped marketers
So who do you actually hire when marketing has so many roles and you are trying to build a 3-D puzzle without a box?!
“Early on, it’s really helpful to hire π-shaped marketers—people who have depth in two areas and breadth across marketing. But as the team scales, it starts to make more sense to hire specialists or T-shaped marketers.” - Emily
π-shaped marketers have broad experience across marketing and deep expertise in 1.5 to 2 of the 3 main areas of marketing. Unlike a T-shaped marketer, who has broad knowledge but only goes deep in 1 area, π-shaped marketers provide more ground cover.
You should hire mostly π-shaped marketers when scaling up your team. Eventually, you’ll augment these generalists with more specialists, but early on, hire agencies and contractors who are specialists to complement your team of π-people! With so much changing in marketing and your organization figuring out what’s working, this is the way to go.
I divide marketing into 3 main sub-functions and think of π-shaped marketers as being an expert in one area (like growth marketing), having deep knowledge in another (like product marketing), and having a working knowledge of the third (like content & brand).
In the below diagram, I break down the types of π-shaped marketers. I also included the very rare marketer who spikes in all 3 areas (in orange). This is really hard to find, so I recommend just searching for a marketer with 2 areas of depth.
How has the ideal marketing hire evolved in the past few years?
The idea of hiring generalists and π-shaped marketers is even more important with the rise of AI, agents, automation, etc. You want people who understand how to connect the marketing dots, can set strategy, and dive in and help in many areas—and who are great at using modern tools and building workflows.
The art of marketing interviewing
I’ll be writing a guide to the marketing interview process in spring or summer, so this section is a small preview. Also, listen to this episode for all our commentary on interview questions and assignments.
“Resumes are overrated. What you really want to get at is: do they have experience managing ambiguous projects and influencing others to get stuff done. I’ve been at tech companies of varying sizes, and that is a consistent thing. Folks need to be able to manage ambiguous problems, bring clarity, and drive progress and outcomes." -Devon
Define the role
First, determine if you need to make a marketing hire. I think about these things:
Do you have a fuel or engine problem, and based on this diagnosis, who do you need to hire next?
Where are the AOR (areas of responsibility) or org chart gaps?
What existing team members are way over capacity? Is this a talent problem or a not-enough-hands problem?
Do you have big-bet ideas you think can drive growth but no one to focus on them?
Where are you ready to swap out agencies with in-house talent?
Are you dramatically holding back growth by not making a hire?
Does a hire make sense with your marketing efficiency metrics & budget?
Then, clearly scope the role, make a scorecard, and job description (in that order). ChatGPT is pretty good at writing starter job descriptions you can edit, if you feed it specific details about your company and team. I also have a multiple job description templates with scorecards for paid subscribers here in my template library.
“Having clarity upfront about the skills, attributes, and qualities you're looking for helps with consistency when comparing candidates. If you have a few finalists, it helps you hone in on what you really need and who's spiking in those areas. It also reduces bias as a guideline for interviewers. With marketing roles, cross-functional interviewers are often on the panel. You want them to have guidelines and parameters for what they're assessing. Big fan of scorecards.” - Devon
Opportunistic hiring
As much as we love a scorecard, as I mentioned, we’re also willing to adjust the scope and remake the scorecard if an amazing candidate surfaces opportunistically. If a candidate can cause a step-change in your team’s effectiveness, the original “shape” marketer you were looking for might not matter. This often happens when the team is small and you have so many gaps to fill—the exact order that you hire one skillset or another doesn’t matter.
Marketers who break the mold and are worth making hiring exceptions for tend to be:
Equally as good at “fuel” functions as “engine” functions, with spikes in all 3 sub-functions of marketing.
Strategic with a high quality bar, yet still willing to be really scrappy
Been in similar marketing situations (GTM motion, audience, etc) before, but recognize you can’t copy and paste a playbook
“I think a myth is that the interview process should be exactly the same for everyone. I understand that you try to have a fair assessment. But I think it's false to assume that you're going to follow a script. I think actually, the same goes for how you do marketing. It's false to assume you're going to follow a script. And I think you have to be adaptive.
Maybe there are some core questions you want to ask everyone. Maybe there's a scorecard that's standard. But you need to ask different questions for different people. And I think just following a script makes for a terrible interview experience for the people you're trying to hire. And it really doesn't serve you in assessing if they're going to be a great fit.”- Emily
Interview questions
In the podcast episode, we went through some of our most frequently asked questions and evaluated why we like them and where they fall short. Here’s a quick summary:
Question: What are your quarterly goals right now at your current job?
Is it a good question? It depends on the level of the role, some junior employees may not have a lot of control over if and how quarterly goals are set.
Better version: “How do you think about planning your OKRs?” or “How do you set goals and what are they?
Why? At a senior level, it’s more important to understand how they set goals rather than just what their goals are.
Question: What marketing tool are you using frequently? What would you change about it?
Is it a good question? Yes, especially now with the evolving marketing tech landscape.
Why? It shows if they are keeping up with new tools, evaluates product sense and if they think critically about the tools they use, and helps suss out if their approach to marketing is modern vs. traditional.
Pro tip: The “What would you change about it?” part of the question is key—it shows real experience with the tool. Anyone can mention a tool, but when you ask this question, you’ll know how deep in it they are.
Question: Think of something complicated that you know a lot about and explain it as simply as possible.
Is it a good question? Yes, great for assessing communication and synthesis skills.
Follow-up question: “Now, explain it even more simply.” You can do this multiple times too!
Why? Tests how well they can break down complex topics and think on their feet, a key skill for product marketing, content, and many marketing roles.
Pro tip: Ask this toward the end of the interview when candidates are more comfortable. You’ll also learn fun things about people since they don’t need to explain anything work-related. Grace talked about macrame when I asked her this question, and she’s still embarrassed about it—I’m not sure why she did great!
Question: Walk me through the marketing funnel (or “prospect to customer journey”) and the marketing-to-sales handoff in your current role.
Is it a good question? Yes, especially for growth, demand gen, and marketing ops roles.
Follow-up question: “Where are the biggest “leaks” or lowest conversion rates?” or “What part of this journey have you focused on most and why?”
Why? It reveals how well they understand their company's go-to-market motion. The best candidates don’t just explain the process, they also critique it.
Pro tip: This is a great question for non demand-gen roles too (e.g., content marketing) to gauge how well they understand who they are targeting and how the business works.
Other questions we like:
What metrics do you care about and why? Helps assess if they think strategically about performance and measurement.
Where do most of your traffic, leads, or qualified opportunities come from today? Follow up: And how do you think that would differ here? Shows if they understand their company’s key growth drivers and understand how to be adaptable to different startups. And it helps you evaluate whether their experience aligns with your company’s business model and go-to-market motion.
Tell me about a project you’ve led from idea to execution, focusing on the parts that you personally did. I kick off every phone screen with this question and make sure they cover all the details included in a GACCS brief (goals, audience, creative, channels, stakeholders) without much prompting.
What makes a good interview question?
Mix strategic and tactical questions. Good candidates should be both scrappy and strategic.
Look for multi-purpose questions. The best questions reveal multiple insights (e.g., knowledge, problem-solving, and business awareness).
Avoid vague behavioral questions. Instead of "Tell me about a time when X," ask specific questions that apply directly to the role. I like to ask about problems you’re currently facing (or just recently faced) to see how well you’d collaborate on real scenarios.
Assess adaptability. Many roles require marketers to shift strategies based on new data, tools, or business priorities.
Assignments
We had mixed opinions during the podcast on how to go about running assignments, but we all agreed on something: You need to do some version of them for every marketing role.
"I have learned so many times—or been surprised, but not actually surprised, because it happens all the time—when I actually make candidates dive into the data, dive into a spreadsheet, write words, do the practical stuff…and they can’t. And I have never figured out a way to test for that other than, hey, do it." - Emily
Read the commentary and suggested assignments from the above LinkedIn post here.
Here are our guidelines for marketing assignments:
If using take-home assignments, keep them structured and time-bound
Set a strict time limit (e.g., two hours). It can be helpful to send it out at, say noon and ask for it back around 2 pm—but up to you and plan this in advance. That ensures everyone has a fair shake and isn’t “competing” against someone that spent 12+ hours on a 2-hour assignment!
Avoid making assignments directly related to your business, unless they are done live in an interview or paid projects—it just starts to feel shady otherwise!
Avoid requiring decks unless presentation design is part of the job. Instead, a structured doc with bullets works.
Consider live workshops or whiteboarding sessions and provide a rough idea of the problem beforehand. This method helps avoid issues with candidates spending excessive time or seeking external help and helps you see their real-time thinking and how you can work with them.
"I prefer a live workshop where they have to problem-solve in real time. It eliminates the risk of someone over-preparing or getting help from others, which makes it a more even playing field." - Grace
What to evaluate in an assignment:
Include tasks that test high-level strategy and in-the-weeds execution (e.g., analyzing data, structuring a campaign, or writing).
For roles requiring analytical skills, provide a dataset and ask candidates to draw insights.
For roles requiring writing, ask for a written response on a prompt.
Don't assign 30-60-90-day plans—they require too much inside knowledge, take too long to complete, and feel like unpaid labor.
Always Follow Up With a Discussion
Review assignments live with candidates. This way, you’re not just evaluating the final product, but also their approach and reasoning, and it makes them feel like their time doing it is valued.
Assignment & workshop suggestions:
This newsletter on marketing strategy exercises includes exercises you can adapt to use for marketing leader working sessions. Ask them to do the exercise with you!
10+ suggestions by role are available in the MKT1 template library (for paid subs only).
"I like having someone give me something in writing, even if the role isn’t writing-heavy. It helps me see how they think, structure their thoughts, and communicate asynchronously—because so much of our work is done that way." - Devon
After the interview…
Reference calls
“I think a spicy take, and I’m not sure if I totally buy this, is ‘reference calls are useless, especially if like the reference is given to you by the candidate.’ But, I think they can be useful in terms of like, what is this person really best at. Frame things in the positive because that's how the reference is going to want to frame them anyway.” - Devon
I don’t think anyone likes doing reference calls on either side for any role. So I’ve changed my thinking on what they are good for: I think reference calls are most valuable for selling a candidate and for helping you onboard candidates successfully. The reference will almost always talk to the candidate after. Use this to your advantage!
Selling the candidate
Our best advice for selling a candidate is to start selling from day 1 of the process. And then create an interview process that represents what it would be like to work at the company. We are also all huge advocates for transparency and keeping it real. We want to work for managers who have that quality and think others do too.
“This comes back to why I like to do the workshop so much. Part of the workshop is to give that person an idea of my working style. And if they think, ‘ooh, this is not for me,’ they can opt out because I'm probably not going to change my working style that much for an individual person on my team. Sell throughout the process to show that this is a team I want to be a part of, right? Every conversation is building for that person.” - Grace
“I think the authenticity matters so much and just being a human, cause as Grace said, they're going to have to work with you as a human, not as this polished salesperson.” - Emily Kramer
After hiring, onboarding and management are obviously critical. We also thought it was worth mentioning this in this time of tumultuousness on marketing teams and at startups:
“People have shorter tenures, nobody expects this to be like a 10, 15-year thing. That's just not realistic. And I think it's important to remember that on all sides. People do fill roles at a certain points, and then they do move on, and there's benefits to moving on. And I think it's valuable to know if you get laid off it doesn't mean your career is over or your career is not going anywhere. And I think similarly as a hiring manager, you have to realize that sometimes it just doesn't work out.” - Emily
Our best advice on building marketing teams
Emily’s best advice on hiring great marketing teams
This is likely the most sentimental I’ll get in a newsletter ever.
Grace, Devon, and I have worked together 2.25 times. At Asana, at Carta, and now as co-hosts of Dear Marketers (that’s the 1/4 time). Our other co-host, Jenny and Devon have worked together twice too (at Yammer and Asana).
That’s a great thing to strive for when hiring or being hired—find your future podcast hosts. Wait, no, that’s not what I meant, I’ll try again. Find people you can ride with for multiple chapters of your career, who will make you better at your job, who will make your teams and companies better. Great teams are built on trust, complementing each other (a compliment or two doesn’t hurt either), and hard work, of course. Look for that when hiring people and foster that when managing teams.
Grace’s best advice on hiring great marketing teams
Given Grace’s eloquence, she actually just gave the perfect quote on the pod itself.
“As the marketing leader, your team and the excellence of your team ultimately is what reflects on you. So if you want to look really good, hire the absolute, absolute, absolute best people, especially if they're better than you. Because at the end of the day, they're just gonna make you look that much more amazing at your job.”
Devon’s best advice on hiring great marketing teams
Focus less on finding people whose background checks all your boxes and more on finding people who are high-aptitude and who care about outcomes. The best hires I’ve made at startups are marketers who can figure stuff out quickly and are good at prioritizing the highest-impact work. Resumes are overrated because they don’t help you screen for that.
For more personal anecdotes and reflections on past hiring mistakes, our takes on hiring complementary skillsets and adaptability over rigid experience requirements, and to learn the interview power moves we’d never actually do, check out the full podcast episode: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
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