For CEOs and investors hiring CMOs and VPs of Marketing these days, there’s a real desire to get it right.
After all, we no longer have a good market to lift up an average marketing leader. We have a shaky market which means that we need the strongest marketing leaders we can find to outwit the market.
But first, hiring teams need to make sure they are aligned around the ‘ideal candidate profile.’ If they’re misaligned, they can waste time… or worse, usher in a marketing leader who faces divisiveness from day one.
Here’s a behind the scenes look at how the most successful hiring teams I’ve worked with get aligned, and how you can too.
1. Approach your hiring role less like a restaurant critic… and more like a chef.
When you’re hiring a CMO or VP of Marketing, it’s tempting to act like a restaurant critic giving a review of a tasting menu: “Too tactical.” “Not bold enough.” “Hasn’t created a category.” “Doesn’t have a firm handle on SaaS metrics.”
But to run a successful marketing leadership search, the key decision-makers need to act less like independent restaurant critics and more like collaborative chefs. That means getting into the kitchen early, defining the key ingredients, and taking responsibility for what emerges.
2. Surface multiple perspectives early; don’t suppress them.
Everyone has an opinion on what marketing should do. For the sales leader, it’s often all about leads and demand. For the product leader, clear positioning and messaging is important. For investors, experience going through an acquisition and experience reporting to boards could be most important.
I’m a fan of doing many intake interviews up-front to gather input into the search. This leads to a richer sense of the needs and the culture, and it helps illuminate where there’s alignment and where there isn’t.
3. Identify misalignment early and often.
If there’s misalignment, that’s a good time to get the key parties together to resolve it rather than doing it on the candidates’ time. I’ve often found that since not everyone has the same understanding of marketing, they can use different terms to describe what they need. This is not always a problem, since sometimes the intent is the same but the vocabularies differ. These alignment meetings can happen at the beginning of the search, but are also useful throughout.
4. Define and document key criteria that you’re looking for.
Don’t just discuss the key criteria; document it. Then you can refer back to the written criteria throughout the search, by interviewing based on it, sharing feedback based on it, and using it as a backdrop when discussing differences across candidates. In short, having stated criteria allows you to be more intentional than instinctive.
5. Anticipate tradeoffs, and accept them.
This is a biggie. Often, the wish list for ‘the one’ is clearly the description of a unicorn. It’s important to sniff out when the items on your wish list are likely to be contradictory. Anticipate and accept the tradeoffs. For instance, the most analytical person, who’s great with spreadsheets and measurement, may not be the best evangelist for the company at trade shows and customer events.
6. Answer the question ‘Whose decision is this?’
Is it the CEO’s decision? The CRO’s? The investors? The marketing team members? The classic RACI framework is helpful here: there are those making the decision, and those that contribute their input, agreeing to accept the decided outcome.
7. Be flexible, not fixed.
Identify your hypotheses on what will make the ‘ideal candidate’, but be open to changing them. Often in marketing searches, there are two big things to calibrate for:
- Altitude: Do we want the person who is more scrappy or more comfortable working at scale?
- Superpower: Do we want the person who has ‘majored’ more in product marketing/positioning/messaging, or the person who has majored more in growth marketing/demand?
The best hiring processes allow for learning and evolution. I like to call this ‘Learn first. Recruit second.’ You’ll refine as you meet candidates. Engage in research interviews with candidates early on, where you are not just in evaluation mode, but in a mode of learning and sharpening your sense of what’s needed. The sooner you learn, the sooner you’ll get to the finish line.
8. Flag any significant drift from the key criteria, as the search proceeds.
If feedback starts to feel like a Google review (“3 stars out of 5, would not hire”), take the time to unpack that feedback. Revisit the criteria and the job to be done. If there’s drift from the key criteria, name it and discuss it. Sometimes it makes sense to evolve the criteria. For instance, maybe there’s a new hire in another area of the business whose skillset overlaps with the initial criteria, and you realize that you can focus less on X and more on Y with the new marketing leader.
9. Make room for candidate input.
In the most successful searches I’ve done, there’s a sort of co-creation that happens between the hiring leaders and the candidates. That’s a good thing. Some candidates may bring new ideas or approaches that shift your thinking.
I encourage both sides to not just talk in an interview, but to hunker over work products together. Maybe that means looking at current sales enablement materials, or dashboards used to measure marketing ROI, for instance. That way, both sides feel like they’re sitting at the same side of the proverbial table together, and they get a sense of how they would work together.
10. Ground things more in the now than in some imagined future state.
You’re not just hiring for ‘a great marketer.’ You’re hiring for this business, at this stage, with the rest of this executive team, with the current state of the marketing data and tech stack and the current maturity of the marketing function. Often, I see companies yo-yo back and forth between what they need now and what they will need in the future. Almost always, the unlock comes from focusing on the current state, and the outcomes the new hire will need to drive in the next 12-18 months.
Net: Alignment turns scattered opinions into shared intent.
When you bring your leadership team into the process early, invite diverse input, and codify what success looks like, you increase your odds of hiring the right person.