In the first of this series of hiring top talent for your C-suite, we dive into the best ways to define, find and hire, a Chief Marketing Officer.
In the early days of a startup, as a founder, you’ll likely take on much of the responsibility for early growth and marketing efforts of a startup. But if you’re looking to accelerate that growth and add expertise to some of those processes, hiring a Chief Marketing Officer will take a weight off your shoulders.
Unlike many of the other specialised positions in a startup’s leadership team, a CMO can have a fairly broad remit. Indeed, marketing tends to cover such a wide area of activity, that this person might be throwing themselves into a 360 campaign conceptualisation in the morning before setting up your marketing automation processes in the afternoon.
But hiring a CMO is certainly not simple, nor is holding onto them. In fact, CMOs have the highest turnover rate of everyone in the C-suite, due to the nature of how dramatically a role can change as a startup enters different phases of its growth.
Here, we breakdown our advice on how to define the ideal CMO candidate, where to look for them, and how to interview, hire, and onboard them.
Different types of CMOs
Before we dive into how to hire your CMO, it’s worth understanding what sort of CMO you should be looking for. Broadly, this fits into three different categories for different stages of your company:
1. Product Marketing CMO
Stage: Seed / Pre-Product Market Fit
At this very early stage, finding product market fit is everything and a high-level strategic CMO should feed into this. Their efforts should be focused on finding the equilibrium of proposition, customer, and market. To do this, extensive customer research and rigorous testing are crucial.
2. Performance Marketing CMO
Stage: Series A / Post Product Market Fit
Once you’ve nailed down your PMF, you need to grow. This CMO should have revenue and scaling front of mind at all times. In essence, they should figure out the best ways to acquire customers in the most cost-effective manner. What type of company you are in will impact the best channels to do this—for DTC brands, paid media and influencer marketing are often key, but really they should be exploring all channels.
3. Brand Marketing CMO
Stage: Series B onwards
You’ve established PMF, you’ve got a strong community of customers behind you and, even better, you’ve got revenue coming in. As you start to scale (potentially internationally), establishing a strong brand for yourself will be crucial—and your CMO should be leading on this. This branding needs to tell a compelling narrative and needs to be consistent across all products and markets, so it’s no mean feat.
Defining the CMO you’re looking for
Every company will have different needs from the CMO they’re about to hire. As with any role, hiring has elements of self-reflection to understand what you need as an organisation and who the person is going to be to help you achieve that.
Start by sitting down to define the fundamental problem that you’re looking to solve with this hire. Specificity is key—address any gaps, weaknesses, or potential future problems that may arise. For instance, you want to grow your revenue from £10m to £50m.
It may help to start by identifying similar companies in your space who are further down the line and therefore likely already solved this problem. Use LinkedIn or TheOrg to identify the specific person, and define what characteristics and experience they have you admire.
There will be some internal calibration to go through, use example candidates to benchmark with your board, investors or any other stakeholders that will be weighing in on the decision. In addition, you’ll need to align on budget: can you afford the type of candidate you want to attract? Salary is always an attractive part of your offer, but it isn’t everything. You may not be able to compete with larger companies, so you need to consider what else it is that you can leverage to attract these individuals.
That said, you also need to be realistic. Be honest about your brand leverage: if you are an early-stage nutrition startup, for instance, you’re unlikely to attract someone from Burberry, and nor would they be a right fit for your business. Ambition should be balanced with pragmatism.
Searching for your CMO
With so many tools and platforms at your fingertips to find your next hire, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. One critical decision to kickstart things is finding the right hiring partner: this will help you make the right hire without taking up too much of your time.
Certain things to look at for in your hiring partner:
- Structured methodology first, coupled with a strong network. Be wary of partners who are too reliant on their network, as there will always be gaps and you may end up missing out on high-potential candidates.
- A track record in your industry. Look at whether they’ve hired from similar and slightly later stage businesses to you, and for proof of their value, how those businesses are doing
- Track record of overcoming practical hurdles (e.g. relocation, if that’s applicable to you). It may be that searches start domestically but going international may allow you to source from a much wider pool of candidates, particularly as this may help with your international expansion going forward.
Interviewing and hiring your CMO
The key is to define a short but rigorous way of assessing candidates and stick to this with everyone you speak to.
Here’s one we’ve tried and tested many times, somewhat inspired by Amazon’s hiring philosophy, that has yielded exceptional results time and time again:
Step 1: Intro call
Who: Hiring Manager
Length: 45 – 60 mins
Chance to give a quick overview of the company and the role, and get a solid introduction to the candidate. This should include a verbal functional assessment, assessing their motivation for the role, and temperature check initial chemistry.
Step 2: Practical functional assessment
Who: Hiring manager + other stakeholder
Length: 1 – 2 hours
You should give the candidate a task to present back, leaving time at the end for a discussion and questions. It’s becoming more popular to consider giving candidates a stipend in order to get the best out of them
Step 3: Final interview
Who: Hiring manager, team, peers
Length: 2 – 4 hours
This is a chance to get a 360 opinion on the candidate’s suitability for the role and the business. This can really be adapted to your needs and may include: them sitting in on a meeting, giving them a co-working task to do with colleagues or other leadership team. It’s best to do this in person and if they’re travelling for the interview, make this at least half a day.
Throughout, make sure you are considering this a two-way process, to understand whether you are the right organisation for them. To do this, give them plenty of chances to ask questions, raise challenges, and be as honest as possible.
Making any hire requires significant investment—of time and effort—to ensure you end up with a great candidate. For CMOs and any other CXO position, this is even higher stakes. If you need help with leadership hiring, Vine Talent can you with all the elements and processes mentioned above. Click here to find a time in Josh’s diary (Founder of Vine Talent) to discuss further.
