How to hire the right growth hacker to scale your startup

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For the past few years, Southeast Asia has been experiencing hyper-growth in startup innovation and investment activity. Many of such startups are now facing the challenges of building their teams and positioning them for scale.

I previously hired growth and marketing employees at a Y Combinator startup, and now I’m working on a growth/marketing jobs site. With this experience, I’ve written down my thoughts on the necessary attributes for someone to lead or even work on growth.

The characteristics

• Being numbers and data-driven: One of the most important assets for a growth manager is the data at their disposal. They rely on this to make better and informed decisions. In my opinion, growth managers are like scientists; they combine both theory and experimentation.
• Being an effective communicator: Being an effective communicator helps with sharing stories and building narratives that convince other team players that an idea or experiment is worth it. Storytelling is a feature of a growth marketer since, more often than not, growth managers need developers and designers to understand the proposed growth vision in order to complete certain experiments.
• Being a good team player: Growth is not only about growing a specific KPI (although that’s the goal), but about building a foundation and nurturing a mindset that impacts other development areas, like product and design. Being a team player allows a growth marketer to help build a growth mindset in other departments, while understanding and respecting the limitations of such a process.
• Being a good listener: A lot of a growth marketer’s time is spent learning from customers or the intended audience. They also have to be open minded about their starting hypothesis and adapt to what the data is saying.

The process

Here’s my process for reviewing candidates for growth roles and learning more about their abilities:

1. Select a few applicants that meet the minimum criteria for the job (i.e. paid marketing experience for two years).
2. Give them a paid project they can complete in one to two weeks. Depending on the time available to hire, I suggest projects that tackle putting together a product release (even if it’s just a simple feature). State the problem and let the applicants come up with a comprehensive solution sans the actual product. The reasoning behind this is because a sustainable growth framework includes most of the necessary steps for building and launching a product.
3. Select the top candidate based on execution. This includes an explanation of their process, the presentation (with a focus on writing), the quality of the final product delivered, and the next step the team needs to take in order to learn and improve.
4. Eventually, part of the selection process does come down to your general feeling or opinions toward the candidate. We humans tend to make a decision ultimately based on gut-feel. I know it sounds counterintuitive, subjective, and potentially against the whole premise, but the truth is I’ve never hired someone I didn’t feel great about.
5. Finally, select one person and give them a two- to three-month stint on the job. There’s usually a four- to six-week onboarding process for any new employee, if not more. But this should be enough time to clear out any doubts that your team can work together with this new person.

The mental playbook

What’s interesting about growth is that there’s no specific playbook on how to do it—let alone do it well. But one thing I’ve learned is that leaders have to make decisions from first principles in order to size someone’s ability to execute in the future.

In my experience, someone’s output comes down to their modus operandi and their ability to adapt.

Some questions I try to define during the process are:

• Is this person authentic and honest?
• Is he/she methodical?
• Does this person follow a process?
• If so, which one? How and why?
• Is this person reliable?
• Are they attentive to details?
• Can they adapt to our working culture?
• Will this person do everything it takes to fulfill our mission?

One of my favorite parts of this process is to try and understand what thing(s) a candidate intentionally left out from their project or presentation and why. Usually, there’s a hidden meaning in ignoring or avoiding certain parts of the process, but don’t get too cynical about it. In the end, this relationship is only as strong as the trust between the parties involved.

Ultimately, it’s important to realize that there are many factors impacting growth for any company.

The compensation

Compensation would vary depending on the product you’re selling. I think the question that I’d try to answer is: “What are my company goals?” Are you looking for a sales person that’s hitting OKR targets every quarter or are you actually looking for someone who can impact not only your revenue growth, but influence product decisions and lay down a growth foundation across all parts of the company?

If you answer is the latter, then what you’re looking at, in my opinion, is a compensation package that involves an average market salary for growth marketing (depending on experience and location), with some sort of profit sharing, just as you’d do with other employees. Also consider equity from the get-go, if it’s applicable.

Final thoughts