Hiring and Growing an All-Star Marketing Team
When it comes to building an all-star marketing team, there are many, many, many aspects to getting it right. I’ve included two of the aspects below … but they happen to be two of the most critical ones for your team.
First, you need to attract bring in great people, which requires a combination of sourcing and interviewing and strategizing. Then you need to take great care of those people by giving them a picture of how they can grow their careers with you.
Check out both stages below, and let me know if you ever want to talk about all the many, many other things at play!
Hire well: Marketing hiring system
Goal of the hiring plan for every role is to bring in exceptional people and skilled team members from all backgrounds through an inclusive hiring process that sets them up to succeed.
Sourcing
Referrals. A recommendation from a teammate goes a long way. Please send along any referrals of people you know or have worked with in the past. We’d love to meet them.
Cross-posting. All roles are posted to the careers page where they’re categorized into different departments. In addition, open roles are x-posted to the following websites:
Job boards. There are a handful of marketing-specific job boards that we use to get visibility into niche spaces. If you know of a great job board that has worked well for you in the past, please drop a note here.
General marketing roles:
MKT1 job board ($100 per listing per month)
Demand Curve ($250/listing/mo)
DGMG Jobs ($99/listing/30 days)
People-First Jobs (free, for now)
Product marketing roles:
Product Marketing Alliance -- useful for product marketing roles (free for 14 days, $100 for 30 days)
Content marketing roles:
Superpath (free)
John Bonini’s Freelance 50 (for sourcing)
Diversity. We aspire to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive hiring process. To that end, we advertise open roles on job boards that serve underrepresented groups in tech. Here are the ones we use today. Again, if you know of any great ones, please leave a note.
All roles:
Power to Fly (underrepresented groups)
Fairygodboss (women)
Pink Jobs (LGBTQ)
We Work Remotely (geographically-distributed)
Brand design roles
Assessment
What we look for in candidates
We use Google’s Rule of 4 for evaluating candidates for roles. This framework puts forth four distinct areas of competency that we will look for during the interview process. The areas can vary from company to company. Here are the ones I’ve used to success before:
Role-related Knowledge - Is this person in the top 10% of people in their field? Questions tailored by the hiring manager for evaluation.
Critical Reasoning - Are they a dynamic and flexible thinker? Can they think critically? Are they able to see each side of a potential challenge or situation and devise the optimal solution?
Communication - How well do they communicate (especially important in a remote environment)? Do they take initiative & responsibility?
Cultural - Do they bring a positive cultural contribution to the company culture? For example, at Oyster we would evaluate based on Oyster’s values: joy from work, social impact, trust, diversity and inclusion, and customer-first focus.
Oyster values
The goal is to have an interview process that evaluates for these four criteria four times in aggregate across all interviews (some interviews will assess all four, others just some).
Interview stages
1. Qualifying interview: Recruiter does a 30-minute phone interview with candidates to assess their interest and their fit. Recruiter will need three to five qualifying questions about the role from the hiring manager for the role to conduct their interview.
These questions should allow you to review the answer given, along with the candidate CV and feel qualified to decide whether to move them forward or not.
Please submit these questions to the recruiter prior to their first phone screen so they can add them into Greenhouse.
2. Async interview:
We use this interview as a way to introduce new team members to the way that we work together at Oyster. The candidate is asked to share a Loom response to a question and written responses to a couple others in GDocs.
Expected time from candidate: 15 minutes
Format: Google Docs and Loom
3. First interview: The hiring manager conducts this interview. The intention is to assess the candidate’s fit with the needs of the role, typically around the skills and mindset required to do the job effectively.
Time: 60 minutes
Format: Zoom
4. Second interview: A teammate conducts this interview. Optional: This can be a group interview if the role is particularly cross-functional. The intention is to assess how well the person will work together with peers and stakeholders.
Time: 30-60 minutes
Format: Zoom
5. Exercise: This is a skills test to gain a better understanding of how the candidate thinks and works. Depending on the role, this could take a number of forms, including a work review, a portfolio review, a case study presentation, or a take-home project.
Expected time from candidate: 2-3 hours
Format: Varies, but probably Google Docs / Slides + Loom
Hiring manager assesses and shares feedback either sync or async with candidate
6. Third interview: Exec / team lead. Final gut-check as needed on candidates.
Time: 30-60 minutes
Format: Zoom
Each interview stage should be consistent for all candidates within a given role to ensure a fair and equitable process. The goal is to have a completed scorecard / rubric after each stage. If you use a product like Greenhouse or Lever, you can build these scorecards and rubrics directly into the system.
Interview rubrics
Whenever I have the privilege of hiring new teammates, I try to be as thoughtful, fair, and organized as can be. (Usually “organized” is the first attribute to go out the window.)
I want every candidate’s experience to be similar and to remove as much of my own bias as can be.
And I found that one of the best ways to do this is to be prepared for each interview with
A list of questions, ideally the same ones you ask of each and every candidate
A sense for what you’re looking for with each question (“why am I asking this?”)
A framework for ideal answers and pause answers, so I’m not just going with my gut
To help me make progress toward these three goals, I’ve spent the past few years jotting down my favorite interview questions. They are all here in Notion, and you’re welcome to have them.
In addition to the questions themselves, if you scroll further down the page, you’ll see:
What it tells you — A section explaining the “why” behind the question
Ideal answer & pause answer — A hopefully more objective way of measuring a candidate’s response to the question
Grow: Marketing career framework
Marketing career framework for people managers and individual contributors
The progression system relies on a matrix of levels and steps that are tied to career progression, title changes, promotions, and raises. Here is a sample guide:
How level changes happen
You’ll receive a promotion to the next level once you display a strong, consistent record of meeting the expectations for that level. See the table at the bottom of this Notion wiki for specifics about what each new level entails.
Specifically, when it comes to level changes:
Level changes can happen at any time.
To ensure that we're regularly thinking about and talking about these promotions, there are four calibration events that happen quarterly throughout the year across all Buffer teams. These are intended to be moments to reflect and think holistically about how team members are developing and progressing.
In addition to the promotion conversation between the manager and teammate, there is an additional advice-seeking component from peers. The peer review is relatively straightforward: For those who are nearing a promotion, the manager will check in with the people who work closest to that teammate and ask for examples of that teammate's work that match to the new level they are hoping to attain
How step changes happen
You can receive a step change by meeting the criteria for any one of the three elements of the next level in the career framework.
For example, if you’re a Level 3, and you’re rocking the expectations for Leadership & Influence at a Level 4, then you can get a step change (raise). This way, you don't have to be working at 100% the next level before seeing any salary increase or recognition
It’s also possible that you may level up in multiple categories at the same time, which would mean moving more than one Step at once (Step 1 to Step 3 for instance) or going straight from one Level to the next (for instance, a Level 3 / Step 2 to a Level 4 / Step 1)
Step changes can happen at any time. There is no need to match these to a company-wide calibration, and no further approval is necessary beyond the teammate and the manager.
The marketing career framework
There are three elements by which we measure a teammate's progress:
Experience & Skills: A combination of excellence in your craft, your growth mindset, and your ability to contribute new ideas and best practices.
Delivery & Impact: Your effect on everyday team productivity, on your peers, and on the business as a whole.
Leadership & Influence: Your level of independence, influence, and how you use your skills to change the course of both your team and the business at large.
Here’s a marketing career framework PDF that covers all the specifics of each stage.
