Intro

We’ve interviewed dozens of growth candidates and advised hundreds of startups on hiring.

Lousy growth hires slow companies for months and waste millions — yes, millions — of dollars. But good growth hires help you scalably find customers, raise fundraising rounds, and teach you about your users at a deep level.

One startup came to us after wasting more than $300k on two growth hires and an agency that didn’t work out. They had to lay off 80% of their employees and almost ran out of cash.

We know many others with a similar story. We want to help you avoid their mistakes.

So we wrote this guide.

It’s meant for pre-seed, seed, and Series A startups making their first growth hire. The playbook is a bit different if you’re Series B or later.

We’ll start with a high-level overview of what to look for, and then we’ll get into the nitty-gritty of each step of sourcing.

What does a bad growth hire look like?

To an inexperienced founder, good and bad growth hires can look equally compelling. The red flags aren’t always obvious, and their sales pitches can be misleading.

Below are some traits we’ve learned to avoid. Click the arrows to see why.

What does a good growth hire look like?

A good growth hire is passionate about your company. A great growth hire is obsessed and curious.

They want to spread your mission even if they don’t get the job. They can’t help but learn things in their free time. They already use your product — or at least think a lot about your users.

Most founders overweigh technical skills and underweigh obsession. We understand why: they can get away with it for other technical roles like engineering and finance. But when it comes to growth, obsession matters.

Why?

You need to deeply understand your user to market to them well. You have to learn how they think about alternatives, hear about new products, and build trust. This requires a lot of research and motivation. Otherwise, it’s like riding a bike with no wheels. You can pedal quickly, but you won’t end up where you want.

Over and over, we’ve seen obsessed hires succeed, even when they didn’t start with ideal technical skills.

They don’t even need experience. We trained a fresh college graduate to 4x her company’s revenue within a month. An operations associate helped his company grow to $10MM in revenue within two years. An engineer has a similar story.

Technical skills can be taught. Obsession can’t.

This is great news for founders. It means you can hire someone junior without breaking your budget. They just need a way to learn the technical skills.

How do you source a growth hire?

We'll order these tactics by how likely they are to work.

If you’ve thought about all of the above and you still haven’t been able to find a good growth hire, reach out. We’ll comb through our network and see if we can help.

How do you vet a growth hire?

This depends on the level of experience you’re screening for.

If you’re repurposing an internal hire or making a junior hire…

You need to look for three things. Click the arrows to learn why.

Here’s how we do it.

If you’re making a mid-level or senior hire…

…it’s hard.

These people are very hard to poach. Why would they leave a company they’re successfully growing?

If you go this route, your goal should be to filter out the bad growth hires we mentioned earlier. They sound dangerously like good ones.

To do that, you need to screen for three things:

Pay them for a couple brief deliverables

One deliverable should build on their background. For example, if they have an email marketing background, have them write a drip sequence. This reveals whether they can actually do tactical work.

The other deliverable should be different from their background to gauge how scrappy they are. Flyering, field sales, and cold outreach are good choices here.

By starting part-time, you can suss out whether they’re playing the market or actually serious about working with you.

Ask them interview questions like these

(Note: we wouldn’t ask all of these in an interview. We might send one or two via email and pick two or three to ask about in person.)

Click the arrows to learn what kinds of answers we expect.

Final Thoughts

If you’re lucky enough to find a great senior hire, pat yourself on the back.

If you can’t, that’s OK. If you find someone who shares your values, has basic technical know-how, and is a good communicator (in writing and on calls), everything else (like technical growth skills) can be taught.

We’ve seen it too often to believe otherwise. We’ve trained hundreds of startups in growth.

If you have more specific questions about hiring for growth, we can help. Request a consultation — we’ll try to solve your problem.