Key Stats

Market Trends

RevelUp: New Hire Impact Program

The first 100 days of any new role are critical to success. We recently launched RevelUp, a program to support our new hires by leveraging our experience as operators to help them achieve impact faster. RevelUp has been so well received by our clients that it is now included free as part of our search services and is a unique differentiator for RevelOne.

In the last several months, we’ve helped new marketing leaders in several key ways: as a sounding board for strategies or new ideas; assistance with major challenges & reducing risks; advice on org design and role scoping; referrals to vetted freelancers, agencies, & MarTech; and connections to the best subject matter experts to accelerate learning on key decisions.

Thought Leadership: RevelOne’s New Research on the Top B2C Marketers

We’re finishing up a detailed research project analyzing the characteristics of the Top B2C Marketers at successful VC-backed startups.  The findings are fascinating, but they also have implications for our executive search clients as the research dispels several myths. It suggests where search strategies can be expanded to include more candidates from non-obvious pools. Like in the movie Ratatouille where “a great artist can come from anywhere,” top marketers come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. 

 We will release the top-level findings through a series of articles publicly, but details and ad hoc answers to specific questions will be shared with our VC and PE partners and our clients. 

Select Clients from 2020

Consumer Clients 2020

Logos for Q4 2020 Email to Clients and Partners v3 experiment.pptx 1

Starting a new job, becoming productive, and plugging into a company culture is a challenging experience even in an office surrounded by supportive co-workers. In a remote setting, however, you are doing it sitting alone in your home through a computer screen. If not well-planned, once the first couple days of HR onboarding and intro Zoom calls have died down, you might find yourself sitting alone unsure of what you should be doing or hesitant about pinging people on Slack repeatedly with questions.

Research shows that organizations with strong onboarding improve new hire retention by 82%, productivity by 70% (Glassdoor), and engagement by 55% (SHRM). And onboarding well is much more challenging and more important in a remote setting.

We’ve run our own firm as 100% distributed since we founded it six years ago, so we were forced to tackle this challenge from the start. (On a related note, see our earlier piece on hiring remotely, How to Hire Someone You’ve Never met in Person.)

Even after we get through this crisis, the increasing popularity of remote and semi-remote models means that remote onboarding is a skill that many companies will need going forward. And even for companies that shift back to in-office work, the same investments in greater structure that support remote onboarding will make in-person onboarding more effective as well. 

This article lays out some of the principles and specific tactics that we have seen work well.

  1. Send Some Stuff Before Day 1
  2. Go Deeper on Tech Setup
  3. Invest Heavily in Documentation
  4. Build an Onboarding Plan that Goes Wide and Mixes it Up
  5. Pack the Schedule, Assign a Buddy, & Involve the Team
  6. Track Progress and Competency
  7. Loop Back & Learn

 

1. Send Some Stuff Before Day 1

It’s important to send employees both critical and welcoming items in advance as physical manifestations of their new job. Companies that provide computers should make sure they are ready and set up. Additionally, it’s good to send items that help with home productivity like a second monitor or webcam. You can send books relevant to the industry, role, or company culture (go physical, not Kindle). A care package or gift basket of some kind can be a nice touch and some companies send a Postmates gift card to buy lunch on your first day. Finally, company swag like a mousepad, coffee mug, or a hoodie can also bring a little of the team’s identity into the home.

2. Go Deeper on Tech Setup

Most companies have some kind of basic tech checklist when it comes to setting up email accounts and core SaaS tools, like HR systems or the company’s CRM. But in a remote environment, the pile of SaaS apps we throw at our employees aren’t just supporting tools, they are literally the medium through which the employee experiences their job. So the details matter and it’s worth going a couple levels deeper to avoid employees spending weeks discovering various gaps and settings ad hoc.

First, make sure you cover ALL the tools they will need for their job. This could mean a secondary SaaS tools like a niche campaign management tool or research database that only some of the team uses. Develop a comprehensive list of all the tools that ANYONE on the team uses and then you can edit it down to the subset for each person. Also, using a password manager (Dashlane, LastPass, 1Password) is a great way to manage setup and access in a smoother and more secure way.

Next, go one level deeper on providing details around settings and configuration. This may sound dry, but these become friction points that make getting started more complex and puts the employee in the awkward situation of repeatedly asking teammates for help which can feel more like an imposition in a remote environment. 

Just to get specific, here are a few examples:

3. Invest Heavily in Documentation

In many companies, after their “Day 1” HR setup, the employee is just dropped into their group where the rest of onboarding becomes some mix of apprenticeship and osmosis. This might include a few intro sessions followed by initial tasks, attending meetings, and being around people as they do stuff.

In a remote environment, companies need to capture the processes and activities that make up the job in more detail. You want to capture as much of the tribal knowledge that lives inside people’s heads or in norms that new hires just “just pick up.”

This documentation then becomes the foundation for a detailed onboarding outline that maps out ramping into the role. It should cover roughly the first three months for the employee, break out the different parts of their job, and assign training and partnering roles to other team members.

This agenda provides a clear reference point of expectations for the employee and greater emotional comfort that their time and activities are mapped out. For the rest of the team, it creates accountability on who’s doing what and visibility on what context the employee does or doesn’t have so far.

From a tactical perspective, we use a multi-tabbed Google Sheet for this. The first tab covers the day 1 Admin, HR, and tech basics and then subsequent ones cover first weeks and months with sessions broken out by subject, goals, links to docs, and participants. You can use other online tools like Asana or Trello as well, but the more online and flexible your documentation is, the better. 

Most organizations use some form of modern cloud-based document tool (Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Sharepoint) which all have advanced search and URL links to each file, allowing you to create nice cross-links and a “table of contents” to organize key docs. You get greater transparency and access to information for everyone and you save the new employee having to ask people for docs repeatedly or go on archeological digs through messy directory file structures. This also gives a new employee options for reading and exploration when they do have quiet time. You’ll need to assign someone to organize and curate these docs over time as things inevitably get messy over time if left alone, but it’s worth the investment for both onboarding and productivity of the entire team.

4. Build an Onboarding Plan that Goes Wide and Mixes it Up

Think through “a week in the life” of a role and the various workflows, activities, and deliverables. Depending on the role, this includes activities like analyses, presentations, sales calls, product deliverables, campaign optimizations, internal meeting prep, reporting, etc. Think about both the regular and ad hoc activities that go into each role. You’ll never capture everything and roles change over time, but you should be able to outline 90% of what typically happens. 

It’s also worth thinking about what kind of context and foundational knowledge is needed to lay the groundwork for these activities. Company introduction, including history, mission, values, org are all key. Then you can ladder down to areas like industry context, customers, competitors, your own products and go to market strategy. These are the kinds of topics that are often learned “around the office” by dropping in on conversations and meetings, but you need to design for them explicitly in a remote world. 

It gets dry and tiring to learn everything by having it told to you in many training sessions (especially over Zoom). So it’s good to vary the formats and settings in which all this information is delivered. This could include:

5. Pack the Schedule, Assign a Buddy and Involve the Team

Once you have your detailed outline, be aggressive with filling the new employee’s calendar. In person, dead time can be filled by looking over someone’s shoulder and colleagues can see you’re just sitting there and pull you into a meeting, but it’s easy to feel isolated or adrift when at home alone. So overcompensate on planned sessions and even in between, you can assign lists of specific documents to read as part of training. 

Assign one person to be the new employee’s buddy or “onboarding coach.” They are the owner of the overall onboarding plan. This could be their manager or a peer depending on what makes sense. This provides a first point of contact for questions and can help adapt the plan and fill in gaps as well.

Another nice tactic is to split up the onboarding duties across the team. It’s an organic way to meet more people in the company and have people exposed to new team members right up front. In a remote environment, people may not collaborate or be on a project together for a while, so months could go by without a chance to really connect.

People also have different learning and communication styles, so hearing about new subject matter areas or training topics from different people can be a better way to absorb knowledge. Finally, it can be a nice development opportunity for team members giving the training. 

6. Track Progress and Competency

The onboarding outline should track progress and have accountability. Have a checklist against the core abilities and activities. Rather than just showing them once and hoping that they got it, you can track proficiency with a little more structure. We use a matrix something like the following: Introduced/observed, Can do with partner, Can do Independently, Can do Proficiently. This is great for the employee in understanding what is expected of them and creating a sense of progress and success in their onboarding. Equally important, it sets expectations among the rest of the team as to what the new employee is capable of and their readiness to contribute in each specific area of the job. 

7. Loop Back & Learn

It’s important to think across multiple time horizons beyond the typical “week 1 setup.” The onboarding plan discussed above gives you the structure to think about the first weeks in great detail, and expand to follow ups and check-ins over the first few months.

Checking in is even more important in a remote setting. You won’t see the new employee looking confused, busy, lonely or whatever they are feeling at the end of the day. Build in touching base on how it’s going — we assign a check-in at the end of every week. It’s a good time to calibrate and tune your plan. Are there too many meetings, not enough? Are there specific questions that have come up? Some could be quick answers during the check-in, or might lead to adding a follow up session to the plan. 

In our onboarding plan, we have the first 2 weeks mapped out an hourly schedule level. Then the rest of month 1 with more space as people join in to regular meetings and activities. Then month 2 and month 3 ramp into a lighter formal schedule with weekly and monthly milestones.

We also try to build in some repetition and recap on key subjects. No one remembers everything after hearing it once and the same topic means more after some additional context or seeing it happen “live” in meetings, customer interaction, or hands on execution. Each organization can assess which fundamental topics are worth that repetition.

Finally, use each onboarding experience to gain feedback and iterate. No matter how much time you put into the initial plan, there are topics and sequencing that will get missed.

We target three months as the milestone where people should be up to speed. At that point, we’re asking employees how it’s going, confirming that they feel ready, and if there are areas they don’t understand or where they want more time. 

Then, about 6 months in, when someone is up to speed and fully rolling with their job, it’s a good time to get retrospective feedback on their onboarding. Now that they are up to speed, looking back, what would they do differently in their onboarding? We’ve received good feedback that’s led us to invest more in certain areas, less in others, and even change the sequence in which we cover topics. 

In summary, the same tactics and principles that make for strong onboarding in a remote environment will serve you well in general. The most recent generation of productivity and collaboration software provides a more flexible toolkit for developing documentation and workflows. More broadly, we’ve found that being forced to break apart a job’s components have led to insights around role definition. By thinking holistically about what a new hire needs to succeed, you can develop an onboarding program that delivers the training they need, and does so in a way that introduces them to more colleagues and makes them feel a part of the team culture.

 

About RevelOne

RevelOne is a leading marketing advisory and recruiting firm.  We do 300+ searches a year in Marketing and Go-to-Market roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech.  For custom org design, role scoping, and retained search, contact us.

Searching for the first marketing leader for your startup is hard and may cost precious time and market opportunities when you get it wrong. Start by getting clear on what kind of marketing leader you need. Here’s how.                                                         

 

The first key question is when is the right time to hire this leader.  The answer depends on whether you have a marketing-driven or sales-driven business model.  For marketing-driven companies, you need a Head of Marketing once you have proven product/market fit since you don’t want to rely only on organic user acquisition.  At this point, your investors will want predictable dials you can turn to scale revenue. For Sales / B2B companies, add marketing as soon as you have an effective, repeatable sales process and you need to add fuel to the fire.  This should be one of your core competencies very early on and most startups invest in it too late.

Unfortunately, hiring marketing leaders has never been more difficult. You’ll be competing with many “hot” companies to hire the best candidates. Further, marketing channels are becoming more complex, and evolving faster than ever – causing marketers (at all levels) to specialize to stay current.  To help you navigate these challenges, RevelOne has developed a proven, multi-step process for marketing leader searches.

The first step is clearly scoping the role. Don’t rush this step; it’s the foundation for your search success and will result in mis-hires if done poorly. Thought and effort put into scoping the role will yield a myriad of benefits throughout the search process. We offer the following suggestions to help.

Bring in the right experts 

Even if you have an amazing internal HR team, they may not be the best resource to help you scope the role of your marketing leader. Because marketers are becoming increasingly specialized, it would be difficult for any internal HR team to fully understand the nuances of their expertise.

Instead, invite a functional expert to help. Who should you ask? Perhaps a board member with a marketing background or a marketing freelance consultant. Or maybe a colleague from your startup incubator or business school has a background in marketing. Reach out to them to help. (Shameless plug: You can also reach out to RevelOne; this is one of our core competencies and we are happy to do it even if you do the search internally.)

Focus on the nearer term

It can be tempting to think about the marketing leader who will be able to build your company into a globally-recognized brand. You may need such a CMO — 5 years from now — but odds are you don’t need those skill sets quite yet.

Instead, focus on the business impact you want your marketing leader to have in the next 2-4 years. You want someone who can build your initial growth strategy and also do hands-on work, hire and lead a team, and who can boost your KPIs in their first quarter or two.  This is very different than the CMO who is a strategist and manager of a large team and takes you public. Very few people do both or even transition from one to the other profile.

Beware of the “kitchen sink” problem

Especially for technical founders, it can be tempting to scope a role that includes every marketing skill you can think of. This lack of skills prioritization is the #1 reason we see searches go sideways. Because of the increased specialization, it’s unlikely that you’ll find a single person with all these skills (and if you do, it’s likely to be impossibly competitive to hire them).

Instead, consciously make tradeoffs to prioritize the key skills required to hit your specific growth goals. Ask a functional expert to help you anticipate which channels will be most effective in helping you acquire new customers. For example, you might prioritize skills related to paid social and SEM skills, in which case you should for performance marketers. Or perhaps you believe your product has strong viral components, in which case you want someone with product/growth skills. Or maybe you need someone to develop your sales channels, in which case you’ll want someone with a partnership marketing or business development skillset. Take a look at our Framework for Scoping Key Marketing Roles to learn more about what each role is and what skills are included.Focus on hiring someone with knowledge, skills, and abilities in the channels you care most about, and let the other stuff go.

Worry less about job titles

As marketers specialize, marketing job title variations proliferate — we’ve seen as many as five different titles applied to what is essentially the same role. (To see some examples, refer to our Framework for Scoping Key Marketing Roles which lists some of the most common title variations for each role.) Our advice? Do some research into what the best, well-known companies call different types of roles.  Also, if you are unsure how to level a Leadership role, and think it might skew slightly junior, use a ‘Head of Marketing’ approach to give you flexibility.

Good luck with your search, and let us know if RevelOne can help.

 

About RevelOne

RevelOne is a leading marketing advisory and recruiting firm.  We do 300+ searches a year in Marketing and Go-to-Market roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech.  For custom org design, role scoping, and retained search, contact us.

As many companies face a rapid transition to working remotely, teams are learning how to collaborate, make decisions, deliver feedback, and remain connected at a personal level despite not being physically together.

And then there’s the challenge of hiring. It’s the most common and important question we’ve been getting from clients:  How do you successfully hire someone you’ve never met in person?

Companies will need to develop this skill as just waiting to hire might leave you flat-footed when the recovery comes. Also, no one knows how long this situation will last and some limitations are likely to be around for a while. So whether you are moving forward with strategic hires or pausing for the immediate term, it’s worth building this capability now.

It’s important to think through what gaps we’re trying to address for both sides in the relationship:

We’d like to share what creative approaches and best practices we’re seeing in the market with regard to both the psychology and process required to hire great people. This article focuses on the personal, cultural, and behavioral elements of the process as that’s where people feel the greatest gaps around not meeting in person.

Psychology & Expectations Setting Up Front 

Acknowledging concerns and trepidation up front are important to getting people on board and ready to execute the process you put in place. The hiring manager and team will want to know how they can get to know the candidate well enough to make a decision. The candidate will need to see a path to making this big decision in a new environment. When expectations aren’t addressed well upfront, we’re seeing that hiring managers can hesitate and waste time, and strong, interested prospects can withdraw.

Tactically, the first interview round may not change much as many companies start with phone or video screens already. In fact, by not having to get the person situated in your office physically (coffee, bathrooms, etc.), you will save valuable time that can be used to get to know them better.  For this first interview, we continue to recommend the “top grading” style interview methodologies – where you deeply probe their previous experience in precisely the areas that align with the objectives of the role.  

Tools & Techniques to Really Get to Know Candidates

Next, you’d typically be moving to in-person meetings onsite.  Having done thousands of zoom interviews over the past few years (and as a remote team ourselves), we believe you can assess a candidate’s skills almost as effectively virtually; however, you get only a fraction of the cultural, behavioral, and personality characteristics you would in person. Rather than just porting what you would normally do straight over to video, here are some ideas on how to get to know a candidate, assess fit, get your team comfortable with a hire, and ultimately get the candidate ready to join.  

1. Collaborate on the Process

For senior candidates, consider sharing your modified remote interview process so they can become comfortable with what’s coming, and see if they have ideas for interactions they think would help. For these candidates who will be managers themselves, you’ll get a sense of how they think about culture and communication. You’ll also have a live opportunity to see how they problem solve, think creatively and work with you in a real situation.

2. Leverage a Personality and Behavioral Assessment Tool

While in-person meetings, working sessions, and dinners certainly help with evaluating personal fit, people actually bring biases to all those interactions and are notoriously bad at assessing underlying behavioral traits in a consistent, relevant manner. Fortunately, there are sophisticated personality and behavioral assessment tools that don’t take long (10 minutes) and can provide actionable insights. Many companies use them today already and they can play an even larger role in a remote hire.

For example, RevelOne uses OAD, a leader in this space, whose assessment can help with topics like:

In a small percentage of cases, these assessments may flag a mismatch for the role, and you’ll be glad you caught it. Most of the time, however, they provide a roadmap for a more productive conversation focused on insights into the candidate’s working style and it’s empowering to have greater depth and nuance in your understanding of a new hire and how you’d assimilate them productively into the team and organization. It will also provide a more structured, consistent basis of comparison across individuals your team met only via Zoom.

3. Have the Manager & Candidate Talk about their Assessment Tool Profiles

An additional step you can try when using an assessment tool is having the hiring manager or other team members of the team discuss their own profiles with the candidate. Most assessment tools include insights on how different types of people communicate and work together and in a remote process.  It’s another way to add more depth to both sides getting to know each other. (Note: it’s worth syncing with your HR team as they may have guidelines and rules around what level of detail can be shared)

4. Doing a Case, Workshop, or Brainstorming Session with a Group Over Video

If you do a case or give “homework” in your interviewing process, then use a video call to talk through it or do a sample workshop or brainstorming session. You’ll see how the candidate interacts in a group setting and it allows multiple team members to interact with them as well. Make sure to structure the session to have interaction or group discussion. That could mean multiple team members asking follow up questions on the homework, or teeing up a few new example topics in the business for the group to explore together. For whiteboarding, there are several online tools to use, though you can also just keep it simple and work together in a shared Google Doc.

5. Giving a Brief Presentation Over Video

To see candidates communicate in a different form than an interview conversation, have them prepare 4-5 slides on a company-related topic or a public presentation/deck they have used in the past. If you want to get creative (and this fits with your culture), have them present on a completely “irrelevant” non-business topic that you or they select. You can see how they think in a different context and react to an offbeat assignment.

6. Blind Reference Checks 

Cold reference checks can be an even more important tool with candidates hired remotely, but they, of course, have to be done discreetly and only with trusted common connections for situations where a candidate is still employed by his/her current company.

7. Extra Zoom Calls to Fill in Gaps

Consider including a few additional peers or team members who normally might not have been in the interview loop. A few extra conversations are especially important near the end when trying to close candidates. Just be careful that people are clear on roles and expectations so you don’t end up with vetos or left turns late in the process. You can include extra calls with the hiring manager, founder, or key execs. Set the agenda based on open questions from the candidate and assign different topics to each team member to make sure you use the additional time to cover more ground.

8. Video Happy Hours with Candidate 

Since candidates can’t come by for lunch or happy hour, try it virtually on Zoom. It could be a 1:1 with the hiring manager over wine, beer, or tea at the end of the day to create a different vibe, or perhaps with a small group of team members. It’s working well for friends and family who have been adopting this and you can adapt to what fits with your culture.

9. Set the Stage for the Close

The above ideas are all meant to provide incremental engagement and fill in gaps relative to the usual in-person meetings. As you gather enough context to get to an offer with a strong candidate, you want to frame the close together as well. 

It’s good to acknowledge the situation, recap the steps you’ve taken, and ask them if they still have gaps or concerns and troubleshoot how to fill them together. At this stage, it’s nice to position it on a positive note: if this feels like it’s a strong fit for both sides and might be a no-brainer in “normal” times, let’s work together and do whatever we need to do to get comfortable and not miss this opportunity.

We’ll continue to add ideas as we see them and let us know if there’s any way we can help.

 

Also, check out our article How to Interview Marketers (who are often good at marketing themselves).

 

About RevelOne

RevelOne is a leading marketing advisory and recruiting firm.  We do 300+ searches a year in Marketing and Go-to-Market roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech.  For custom org design, role scoping, and retained search, contact us.

At RevelOne, we support our clients beyond executive search, often providing advice on broader marketing talent strategy, helping to prioritize key roles, and placing expert contractors to fill interim gaps. One specific topic that comes up frequently is when to hire full-time and when to bring in marketing contractors. We’ve put together a holistic perspective to help you navigate this critical question in your organization. 

Because marketing channels, tactics, and digital tools have grown increasingly complex over the past 15 years, staffing for best-in-class results has become a nuanced puzzle of internal and external resources that can be difficult to piece together. We hope this article will give you a decision-making framework that you can reliably use to determine what type of hire your business needs.

Permanent full-time employment is the compelling de facto model for most employers. It’s a big investment to bring expertise into an organization, get new hires up to speed, and have them solve unique business challenges while continuously executing, learning, and improving. Furthermore, equity gives in-house employees a strong incentive to stay and succeed and aligns them toward a common goal. Developing a flourishing culture and community – which are powerful benefits with network effects – is easier and best done with full-time employees. In many roles, organizational context is necessary for achieving excellence, and in-house team members have an easier time accessing and acquiring this knowledge. Even still, it often makes sense to leverage expert contractors in addition to permanent employees as long as you have a strong understanding of your goals and are intentional about the expert profiles you seek.

When to Hire Contract Marketing Talent

There are two situations where it’s pretty straightforward to use contractors: you have a part-time need or a temporary need. An example of a part-time need is an email specialist for 20 hours/week who can start building a top-rate lifecycle program until the ROI justifies a full-time hire. Temporary needs, on the other hand, could include seasonal work, special projects, leaves of absence (like parental leave), or coverage during long searches for full-time hires. In these instances, consider external support, especially if you don’t want to assign the work to an existing employee.

Since the above scenarios are easier to recognize, let’s explore three specific, unique situations where it’s better to bring on contract marketing hires than full-time employees.

1. You Have an Unproven Need

When you aren’t sure if something will work, but know you want to try it, consider external support until you clarify your requirements. This is the classic “try before you buy” concept. For example, suppose the only paid advertising channel you use is Facebook and you want to explore other channels. You are convinced TikTok will crush it for you. Do not ask your Facebook person to do it – it’s a different demographic and user experience altogether. It also takes a long time to acquire the deep knowledge and skills needed to succeed in a new channel; you’re much more likely to find success using expert contractors with specialized skills that aren’t quickly learned.

If you try to hire an FTE to focus on it, you are very unlikely to attract top talent without budget and proven success in the channel. Even if you do, you risk rapid churn if the channel doesn’t perform as you hoped. The very thing you hired her for – her passion for and capability with a particular skill set – will make her unsuitable and/or uninterested in anything else you can offer. Interim expert marketers are excellent for proving new tactics, channels, and strategies to both increase your conviction and help you draw A+ permanent talent when the time is right.

2. You Can’t Hire Fast Enough to Hit Your Revenue Goals

If you simply can’t hire fast enough or you want to test and learn faster than your current team can support, consider external resources. Remember, there is an opportunity cost to not having the right marketers in place. This is especially true after large funding rounds when new marketing leaders start with a mandate to rapidly build out the team so they can hit new targets. In these cases, external marketing support complements full-time recruiting well, providing much-needed interim expertise (and outcomes) while recruiting builds out the long-term team.

In other cases, the challenge isn’t pace, but sequencing. Suppose you have been using an agency to manage significant spend across 5 different channels. You plan to hire 4 FTEs to cover the work internally, transitioning the work away from the agency. Interim experts can provide a great bridge between all-external to all-internal, a transition that can be quite clunky (and expensive) with staggered FTE recruiting and onboarding.

3. Your Organization Has Systemic Recruiting Challenges

Recruiting is challenging and can often take longer than you would like. But there are sometimes systemic reasons that make internal talent strategies notably difficult:

It’s worth noting that these challenges are magnified exponentially as a skill set’s demand increases and labor supply decreases. In these cases, you should consider external marketing support, at least as an interim solution until the contributing factors can be mitigated. If they can’t, then external support can help you continue to make progress while recruiting advances at a slower-than-desired pace.

4. You’re Still Early in Your Growth Trajectory

Like most startups, your marketing needs will inevitably change as you evolve from seed stage to later venture rounds, and as your revenue and team continue to scale. One growing trend to address this inevitability is the “Fractional CMO” or “Fractional Head of Marketing.” In the early stages, you might not have the need or the budget for a full-time marketing leader. The type of leader you need might also change from where you are today, to where you’ll be in 6 – 18 months. However, you can bring on an expert contractor to serve in this role for 2-3 days a week for a few quarters, then reassess. This type of resource can be quite versatile – helping drive strategy, owning implementation (either with in-house or agency resources), and provide leadership to more junior members of the marketing team.

When to Consider Not Using Contract Resources

Anytime the hours required are full-time, you have a high degree of confidence in the skills needed, and you have access to high-quality talent (yourself or through a partner like RevelOne), hiring a permanent full-time employee is the best path for both productivity and cost-efficiency. That said, you may face hiring freezes or other constraints that are very real.

If you are facing the following situations, you might want to think twice before using an expert contractor or do so with caution.

1. Highly Cross-Functional Roles

Some roles require significant collaboration with a variety of internal stakeholders, all of whom have different goals and motivations. Interim expert contractors lack historical context, as well as knowledge of personalities and other team dynamics. Keep this in mind if you’re planning to tap a contract resource for one of these cross-functional roles.

A good example of this is a marketing analyst role. Doing this job well requires not only an understanding of marketing demand across a variety of stakeholders, but also an intimate understanding of the data architecture and landmines that must be avoided to pull the right data. The risk of failure is high. You’ll benefit from spending some extra time upfront in vetting the person to ensure they are a good fit. They might be a contractor, but they will still have a big impact on your organization, even long term. One of the benefits of our Interim Expert Network is that we vet and qualify these marketing freelancers and only present the best ones to you, saving you time, de-risking the hiring process, and accelerating impact. 

2. Very Senior Roles

Senior roles typically require managing others and stewarding the company’s culture and values. It’s becoming more common for former CMOs and VPs of Marketing to pursue fractional or interim engagements. This makes it easier than before to find the right person, but the stakes are still high in tapping a contract resource for a leadership role. For the reasons discussed above, it often makes sense to use interim experts at an earlier stage of growth. Just be sure you’re focused on the right type of senior leader. Also make sure that you temper expectations. Naturally, a fractional senior marketer will be less invested long term than a permanent leader (they probably won’t be granted equity, for example). It could also appear that you’re less dedicated to marketing if you’re not willing to invest in a permanent hire. With good communication, you can overcome that perception and ensure your whole team understands the decision. 

3. To Build Core Competencies

When building a core competency within marketing, using contractors should be part of your talent strategy, but not the entire strategy. For example, if you are an e-commerce company, it is preferred to manage the top performance marketing channels (Google & Facebook) in-house via full-time employees. As discussed earlier, interim expert contractors can help you prove out new channels before investing in full-time employees. The sooner you can get to this point, the more cost-effective your hiring strategy will be. Plus, you’ll be building internal capabilities and core competencies that are required at scale.

Recruiting full-time marketing talent is a great de facto solution, but hiring external contract support can be immensely valuable when done well and in the right context. Both are hard and have become specialized skills in their own right. And that’s where we can help!

 

About RevelOne

RevelOne is a leading marketing and sales advisory and recruiting firm.  We do 300+ searches a year in Marketing and Sales roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech.  We also offer interim and fractional contractor placements to help our clients build dynamic teams. For custom org design, role scoping, retained search, or expert contractors, contact us.

Once you’ve aligned on the profile and most crucial skills for a new marketing hire, it’s time to shift gears to targeting high quality, relevant candidates. (For more on defining your role, take a look at our first article in this series, Hiring a Marketing Leader: How to Scope the Role.)

For specialized marketing roles, this is always tougher than people expect.  Personal networks and inbound applicants to a job posting are natural starting points. But it’s easy to overestimate the size and relevance of personal networks and, in both cases, you risk not attracting the skills you need. LinkedIn is the typical next stop. But even with its massive reach, trying ad hoc searches on titles and keywords won’t pick up nuances around channels, business models, and company size and stage. These strategies have their place, but they’re typically not enough with highly competitive and specialized marketing roles that will require both nuanced targeting AND a large pipeline to get to your hire.

Marketing channels have continued to increase in complexity, causing marketers to specialize to remain current. This dynamic contributes to a more competitive talent pool with fewer resumes that match a company’s specific requirements. Here, conventional search methods just don’t cut it. Our experience navigating the recruiting needs of our clients has proven the value of casting a wider net, and doing so strategically. We offer the following suggestions to support a more robust and dynamic search strategy.

Orient Your Search Around Relevant Companies

At RevelOne, once we’ve defined a role profile, we ground our search around target companies. Anchoring on companies has a number of benefits:

This kind of comprehensive, company-based sourcing requires “market mapping” research, which typically leverages database like Crunchbase, Pitchbook, Datafox, or Mattermark. At RevelOne, we use both our own database of 55,000 marketers and proprietary company market maps we’ve built around key verticals (e-commerce, B2B Enterprise, SaaS) to support this process.

Identify your “bulls-eye” Segments

In thinking about your target company segments, start with a set of “bulls-eye” companies, where the marketing program is both relevant and known to be high quality. Your first targets are likely to be direct peer companies that do what you do, have the same general Go-to-Market strategy, and are of similar size and maturity. Ideally, the person running marketing is solving similar problems, and the teams they manage include individuals with the skills you seek. 

Think About What Levers to Adjust

You’ll need a strategy for venturing beyond your first bulls-eye segments. Within that already narrow target pool, you’re then choosing from the further subset of people who are interested in your company or vertical AND willing to make a move. If you’re talking about 100 candidates, with 20 are open to any move, and half of those interested in your company, you’re down to 10 possible candidates before you’ve spoken to anyone. 

You don’t want to lower the quality bar on non-negotiables like strategic or analytical thinking, overall marketing acumen, and culture fit, but you will need to be ready to adjust criteria around the specific company and channel experience.  To expand your candidate pool, you’ll need to prioritize which candidate characteristics you’re willing to shift next, including those describing both the company (e.g., industry, company size, stage, and culture) and the individual candidate (e.g., functional skills, level, and education). 

For example, if you’re an early-stage company hiring a product marketer for a highly specialized vertical, you might be willing to take a big company person from that same vertical rather than someone with hands-on startup experience. On the other hand, you might need an Acquisition specialist with deep Paid Social knowledge and finding expertise in that channel might matter more than matching your vertical. 

Managing a Finite Universe

This company-based methodology is also valuable in that it gives you a more concrete sense of the size of your talent market. Hiring managers are sometimes surprised to learn that once they’ve defined a highly specialized set of skills and a narrow group of relevant company experiences where they want to look, there may only be 125-200 people total in the market. Understanding those realities is critical to assessing when to make a decision and select from your candidate pool or adjust levers to expand the universe. Unfortunately, the alternative can be a long search that burns a lot of cycles and sets you back against your business goals.

Diversity & Inclusion

D&I is a much larger topic that requires multi-faceted efforts over time including network building and outreach into new talent pools. For the purpose of this article which focuses on targeting, we’ll just note that greater flexibility and thought around prioritizing levers as described above can be one tool in supporting diversity efforts. The small pool of people who’ve done the exact same role in similar companies may reflect a traditional demographic profile as well. Thinking strategically about expanding levers to a broader set of experiences will expand your candidate pool, providing more opportunities to find great candidates from a more diverse range of gender, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds.

Our experience has demonstrated the value of casting a wider net. We hope that the suggestions outlined above enable you to amplify your search and identify the right potential candidates for your organization.

Good luck with your search, and let us know if RevelOne can help.

 

About RevelOne

RevelOne is a leading marketing advisory and recruiting firm.  We do 300+ searches a year in Marketing and Go-to-Market roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech.  For custom org design, role scoping, and retained search, contact us.

Marketing is becoming so specialized that just because a leader has been successful at one company does not mean (s)he will be successful at another. A marketer’s success depends on a number of factors such as growth stage (do they need to build vs. optimize), primary marketing channels, and how well they fit with the culture.

Many leaders find it hard to effectively evaluate Marketers because they are often good at marketing themselves – telling compelling stories, using buzzwords, and taking credit for a team’s results. These “storytellers” are common in Marketing and Sales roles.  So how do you evaluate their “true” marketing depth – the strategy, execution, continuous improvement, and scaling of programs that grow the business and build the brand? How do you know they will drive results for your business?

It all starts with getting clarity on what kind of marketing leader you need and the specific outcomes you expect over the next 1-2 years. We recently delved into this in detail in our article How to Scope a Marketing Leader Role, and we’ve published our Guide to Frameworks for Scoping Key Marketing Roles that introduces 9 role frameworks.  You can use these to define the most critical marketing roles, including B2C and B2B Marketing Leaders, Brand Marketing, Performance Marketing, Lifecycle/CRM, Analytics, Product Marketing, E-Commerce, and Business Development/Sales. 

Next, here are some insights around pressure testing the depth and substance of what marketers have accomplished once you start interviewing them.

1. How “hands-on” are they? 

Whether you are looking for a hands-on marketer or someone who is going to manage teams and resources, here are some suggestions for assessing how hands-on a candidate is likely to be in their next role. If performance marketing was a part of a candidate’s responsibilities, ask whether it was staffed in-house or through an agency. If in-house, the candidate is more likely to be more hands-on. Were they there in the early days standing up new campaigns and channels, or did they hire a team of experts that were senior and just managed them? How did they think about optimizing and scaling what the people on that team were already doing? Can they talk about the specifics of the platforms they’ve used and the variables they were optimizing or are they talking about the program only at a high level?

Keep listening for the level of detail the candidate provides when describing their experience. If they did the work or were intimately involved in the projects, they’ll talk about second order metrics, nuances of what worked and didn’t work in campaigns, challenges they faced in data flows or implementation, and specific insights learned. On the other hand, watch out for people talking about just top line metrics and generalities around the nature of their programs (as if they were simply watching the work get done).

Another approach is to ask open-ended questions about what their onboarding plan would look like. Listen for clues – are they talking about building teams and spending money, or do you hear a bias towards action, testing, interaction, or specific channels and tactics?

2. Have they been successful in your size/stage of company before?

In a startup, you need to accomplish a lot with few resources. You are developing hypotheses and structured tests informed by your previous experiences. You are building a playbook from scratch and that often means being a “doer” consumes more of your time than managing people.

At a large company, you are thinking about scale – what will move the needle. Managing several direct reports and teams with big budgets. And you often have to work with many constituents, so your ability to sell your ideas internally is as important as the programs and initiatives themselves. 

If you hire someone who’s only been successful in companies that are a different size or stage than yours, then there’s additional risk. A candidate who’s been successful in both environments – startups and large companies – is ideal, but can be hard to find. They can be scrappy, flexible and innovative in the less defined, unstructured environment of a startup, yet when the company grows over time to be a late-stage private or public company, they have the inter-departmental communications skills and experience to build consensus and scale programs.

3. Were they driving the impact, or were they just in the room where it happened?

When hiring key marketing roles, it’s easy to default to pursuing people with hot companies and successful brands on their LinkedIn. 

It’s easy for these candidates to talk about the accomplishments of the company or their group. But were these candidates just in the right place at the right time, or were they the ones leading strategy and driving impact?

You need to take the time to keep digging and “double-click” for the next level down of information. Every time you get an answer, ask several follow-up questions. For example: “What were the results? What was your role? What technology and tools did you use and why? What did you learn? What do you wish you did differently?”  Answering these questions requires a level of detail that’s hard to keep providing if you weren’t intimately involved. If you (as the interviewer) don’t know the subject matter, ask open-ended follow-up questions such as “tell me more” or “say more about that.” With time and patience, you’ll usually get to a point where you have a good sense of what the candidate did or didn’t do.

4. How deep is their functional knowledge and expertise in your priority areas? 

You’re hiring a Marketer to grow your business in the next one to two years, most likely via a known set of core channels and initiatives. The growth strategy and required marketing mix should match the Marketer you hire. For example, if you think you’re mostly going to grow by Facebook and Google, the candidate should have extensive experience with those channels. If brand is important but not critical, then you can have a Director of Brand that supports the marketing leader. 

How do you assess the functional knowledge and expertise of candidates, when maybe you’re not an expert?  Include in the interview process someone who knows the desired marketing functions well and can drill-down. This could be an internal or external resource or a talent firm. You want someone who can assess the relative strength of their skills across the marketing spectrum because no one is equally good at everything.

For example, when assessing performance marketing, ask which performance channels are they strongest in? Which channels did you implement, or scale, in past companies? Then “double-clicking” further – if the candidate said they launched a given program, ask about what key metrics were tracked, what was the technology stack, what two things didn’t work, etc.  You’ll learn the level of their functional knowledge pretty quickly in these deep dives.

5. Do their leadership skills and behaviors fit with your company culture and your executive team? 

From our hundreds of marketing placements each year, we’ve discovered that companies tend to hire on skills, but fire for culture. Skills and experience are absolutely necessary but are simply not sufficient for success in a high growth environment. To develop high-performance teams and reduce churn, the personality, interpersonal skills and resulting behaviors of your senior hires need to mesh well with your existing team and culture. It’s critical to evaluate this in the recruiting process – before it’s too late.

You could start to address this with typical interview questions about a candidate’s personality, skills and behaviors. But we believe this is too important of a topic to just “scratch the surface” on, in part because some candidates may provide prepared responses that they think you want to hear.

Fortunately, there are sophisticated personality assessment tools available today that don’t take long to complete, can be positioned as a learning opportunity for the candidate, and provide insights into your initial hiring decision and subsequent onboarding and integration of new leaders into your organization. We recently partnered with OAD, the leader in this space. We found the OAD tool to be the most modern personality assessment on the market, providing actionable insights on key talent decisions such as:

 

We hope that some of these suggestions, tools, insights and tips prove helpful as you interview marketers who are good at marketing themselves.

Good luck with your search, and let us know how RevelOne can help.

 

About RevelOne

RevelOne is a leading marketing advisory and recruiting firm.  We do 300+ searches a year in Marketing and Go-to-Market roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech.  For custom org design, role scoping, and retained search, contact us.