CEOs are incredibly cavalier about hiring senior growth marketers, and I suspect most people don’t appreciate the full cost.
Startup marketing VP salary + other costs
Head of Growth (or VP or CMO) hires cost over $120K base, plus equity and recruiter fees. And of course, they’ll need a budget to “set them up for success” that’s typically in the range of $50K - $250K/month for a startup.
But these hires only have a 30%-50% success rate, depending on who you ask. And you won’t know until 9-12 months later if you’ve made the right hire. (How much runway do you have?)
All in, we’re looking at a £500K - £1M investment. Naturally, it’s important to get that right!
My favourite interviewing “hack"
This gold nugget came from an interview I did with Paddy Lambros, Head of Talent at Atomico, when I was building out our Hiring for Growth workshop.
Paddy leans heavily on question pairs during employee interviews, where rare insights often come from follow-up questions.
Start with the usual questions (e.g. “tell me about a time when you…) but always have at least one follow-up paired with it, such as:
Why did you decide to do that piece of work?
How did you measure success?
Why do you think that happened?
Walk me through your thinking?
What did you learn?
What would you do differently?
Why did that matter to you?
In our Hiring for Growth workshop, I share tips on how to source candidates and convince your top choice to accept the job (without just chucking more money at them) plus offer a bank of domain-specific interview questions you can use to narrow down the right talent.You can check out the recording and slides from the workshop here.
I hope this helps!