How to hire your first marketer

Common mistakes & interview questions for early-stage SaaS marketing hiring

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With so many roles within marketing, knowing who to hire and how to hire your first marketers is difficult. Many founders make the wrong choice with their first marketing leader. We’ve built out many marketing teams from scratch and help early-stage founders on hiring, this is our best advice on how to get your first marketing hire right the first time.

This newsletter covers…

1. Biggest mistake we see with early-stage SaaS marketing hiring

2. How to evaluate if a marketer’s experience is the right fit

3. Interview questions for early-stage marketers

Note: It might be helpful to read this post that explains how to organize your marketing team as you scale your team before beginning the hiring process to understand the various marketing roles and responsibilities.

Avoid too many firsts

The biggest mistake we see founders make in hiring marketers is choosing someone with “too many firsts.” When you hire someone with “too many firsts” the learning curve is too steep. They can’t move quickly enough on marketing work that effectively tells your story and drives growth.

While this problem exists across the organization, the “too many firsts” problem is exacerbated in marketing because there are so many skillsets and sub-functions, and strategy and tactics vary greatly with stage and business model.

How to evaluate a marketer’s experience

To find the right first hire, we suggest you understand the marketer’s experience and make sure it isn’t their first time in more than 1 or 2 of the areas below.

1. Executing marketing plans (aka getting scrappy): Like all roles at early-stage companies, you need someone who can figure out what needs to get done, make a plan, and roll up their sleeves and actually do it. Since there’s very little chance a marketer has hands-on experience in growth marketing, product marketing, content marketing, PR, etc. you need someone who will just figure it out.

2. Owning marketing strategy: While you want someone scrappy, they also need to understand how to set goals and prioritize work across marketing. So, you need to evaluate their understanding of how all areas of marketing work together and their ability to set strategy for your business specifically.

3. Working at an early-stage startup: If the person only has experience at a late-stage private or public company, they may struggle to roll up their sleeves and execute (see #1). They also may have a hard time adapting to the lack of budget, support from other marketing teammates, and existing brand awareness, to name a few.

4. Marketing with your business model: Making the transition from b2c to b2b can be a challenge, but even within b2b having experience with your exact business model is valuable. How do people purchase your product—self serve, top down sales, a combo? A marketer that’s only operated in a sales-driven go-to-market motion has a very different set of skills than one who has only worked at companies with freemium offerings, and vice versa.

5. Managing people: Ideally, the first marketer you hire can grow into a marketing leadership role until you get to Series B or later (or $10M in revenue+)  If they’ve never managed people before, it can be a stretch to expect them to manage people and execute at the same time.

6. Owning the marketing sub-function you need most: Assess the skills of your existing team, the business model, and your current high-level growth strategy, then review the skillsets of each type of marketer (we detail this in this previous post and this more recent post). Then determine which π-shaped marketer makes the most sense. A π-shaped marketer is an expert at 1 functional area of marketing (product marketing, content, or growth) and proficient in another.

   For reference:

   1. Most often, we recommend hiring the product marketing/growth marketing π-shaped marketer. 

   2. Sometimes, we recommend the content marketing/product marketing π-shaped marketer. 

   3. Rarely do we meet someone who is a content marketing-growth marketing hybrid. This marketer could be a social media expert or potentially an SEO expert. If you do find one of these people as you’re scaling your team, hire them. But, it’s likely not your first hire.

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👁️ Related newsletters: Scaling your marketing org, Growth marketing orgs, and Modern marketing looks like product

📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which includes 25+ interview questions for an early-stage marketing hire.

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