How to find that perfect first marketer for your startup

Role scoping, success criteria, ICP, and more.

Reading time: 7 minutes

I’m following up on my last post, Stop! Don’t hire a VP of Marketing with this post on how to go about hiring the right marketer for your startup. In this post, I’m covering:

• Role scoping

• Success criteria

• ICP - Ideal Candidate Profile

• Attracting the right candidates

• Screening process

• Interview process

• Closing the hire

Scoping out the role

This is likely the hardest and the most important part of hiring a marketer — scoping out who to hire and why. Surprisingly, founders often pay the least attention to this part. They throw together a job description based on what advisors or board members tell them. If you get this part wrong, how can you expect to get the rest of it right?

Here are a few things you can do to get this part of the process right:

• Slow down — I know you needed this person last week, but slow down and talk to as many heads of marketing/marketing advisors as possible to understand what marketing does and the different job functions, roles, and responsibilities in a marketing team. When you put out a JD for a marketing hire, you want to be 100% aligned with what the industry and the candidates understand the role to be.

• Urgent vs. important — Think about your life as a founder with this person on your team. What will you do less of? Where do you want the most impact? The biggest shift? Founders are tempted to hire someone who will take care of the nuts and bolts (send emails, set up a CMS, and do other operational stuff), and while all of this may be urgent, it may not be significant for your startup’s growth.

• GTM model — Make sure your first marketer’s experience aligns with your GTM model. PLG? Sales-assisted? Marketplace? Sales-led enterprise motion? Don’t hire someone who’s a “first” to your GTM model even if they have a stellar LinkedIn profile with a gazillion followers.

• No unicorns — There are no unicorn marketers who can do it all well, so don’t write a unicorn job description. Be specific about your first hire’s job responsibility, scope, and impact. If you want the person to help with messaging, positioning, and sales narrative, you’re looking for a product marketer. Ideally, this person also has strong competency in one other marketing function, like content marketing or demand generation.

Success Criteria

Write out the success criteria for this role. What does success look like for this person in your startup 30, 60, and 90 days after they join? Here’s an example:

• Objectives — Get up to speed on the industry and category

• Learning Goals — Understand core target customer needs

• Performance Goals — Support sales in closing deals in Q1 pipeline

• Key Results — Develop positioning and messaging

This exercise will give you a concrete sense of what you want this person to accomplish in your startup and help you with screening and interviewing.

Ideal candidate profile (ICPs)

Once you’ve scoped the role and the responsibilities you expect this individual to fulfill, look for ICPs. Here are some guidelines I’ve used to look for ICPs:

• Best-in-class tech companies for your business model (If you are a two-sided marketplace, look for candidates who have worked for tech companies like Uber, Thumbtack, or Zillow)

• Has relevant experience at your stage but is also not a first. Their experience should not be so far in their past that they have lost the muscle to roll up their sleeves and get-shit-done. (super important)

• Has experienced a 0-$50M growth curve.

• Stuck around at a startup to see it grow a little (at least 3-4 years at the same place).

Make a list of candidates and sit down with your co-founder or other leadership team members to talk about each candidate. Rate each one on a scale of 1-5 (1 = poor fit, 5 = terrific fit) to get everyone on the same page.

Attracting the right candidates to you

I’ve seen startups do all the above right and fail spectacularly in this step. Why? Because you don’t have your story down or you are not telling it effectively.

When a founder reaches out to a potential candidate via LinkedIn or through a warm introduction, the first place a candidate visits is your website. She will also search for other signs of credibility, like press coverage, social media, podcasts, or thought leadership content. If you don’t have a clear, compelling, differentiated message, she will be confused and wary of engaging.

Good messaging is not just for your prospects and customers. It can attract or repel great talent.

Screening process

Have clear, agreed-upon screening criteria. Usually, this looks like a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves.

Must-have examples: 3+ years of work experience, industry expertise, technical expertise, and experience working with a sales team.

Nice-to-have examples: Progressive career advancement, experience using specific martech tools, remote location.

Have a test run with a few candidates and compare notes to see why you gave them a thumbs up or down.

Ask for writing samples if you are hiring a content marketer. Look at their social media presence if you are hiring a social media manager.

Interview process

Unless you have a recruiter or a hiring manager who knows what they are doing, the interview process at a startup can be messy. The candidate interviews with the entire company, barring a few engineers. No one preps the interviewers. They show up late and ask questions that have little to do with the job function 🤯. Here are a few simple steps to get your interview process streamlined:

• Be thoughtful about who interviews this person. No more than five people are necessary to interview one candidate.

• Go for more time with fewer individuals. Thirty minutes is not enough to assess a candidate properly and for that candidate to evaluate you. Additionally, the interviews invariably run long, and now you both have even less time to evaluate each other. I think forty-five to fifty minutes is appropriate.

• Give each interviewer a role and make sure they prep questions that align with the assigned role. Here are a few roles:

  • Subject matter expertise (if you don’t have an SME in your team, then tap into an advisor or an investor)

  • Technical or analytical assessment (especially if you’re hiring a growth, demand gen., or developer relations person)

  • Culture fit assessment

  • Teamwork/collaboration style assessment

  • Growth mindset assessment

• Schedule a formal presentation or an informal working session. Give them a topic of immediate use/concern for your startup. Example: We have to 3x our pipeline this year; how will you go about it? We are launching a new app. How will you plan the launch? You are assessing their creative thinking and problem-solving abilities and how they communicate, present, and share ideas. An exercise like this will give you a much better sense of the candidate’s abilities than half a dozen one-on-one interviews.

Closing the hire

You are almost at the finish line, yet many startups lose their best candidate at this final stage. How frustrating and disappointing! The sales mantra “always be closing” applies here too.

If this is the candidate you want, never let the candidate feel like she is not important. Take the time to answer any outstanding questions and be transparent about your timeline. Until she’s signed the offer letter, there are no guarantees! Always have a couple of backup candidates if your first preference doesn’t work out. Keep candidates warm and give them every opportunity to choose you over another startup.

Audra Aulabaugh

writes Hooked by Madrona, and her post on pre-closing offers practical tips for pre-offer talk tracks.

Hooked on Pre-Closing - Issue 15

Another great read is this post by

Molly Graham

on how to design compensation for your startup. She provides easy-to-follow guidelines to design your compensation philosophy that can help guide every hire.

Part 2: Compensation for Startups: Designing Your Compensation Philosophy