Founder: Exit Five | Former CMO | Building the #1 community for B2B marketers at exitfive.com
As a CMO and VP of Marketing I made plenty of mistakes hiring. Hiring people and hiring agencies. Most of the time the root cause of that mistake was my problem - not the candidates, not the agencies. But me. It's me. Hi. I'm the problem it's me. Anyway, here's what I've learned: It comes down to me being able to articulate what I wanted and what good looked like. - Each hiring mistake came down to not having goals and a clear "what will this person do, and why, and what does success look like" - or not having at least tested that we "need" this role inside of the company first. For example, if you think you want to hire a product marketing manager, can you first do some of that job yourself so you can have a deeper understanding of what you need before jumping right to hiring. If you want to start doing events, don't jump right to hiring an Event Marketing Manager, but first do some of that yourself - learn more about the role, then go find the person to own it full-time. I would learn so much more about finding the right person and giving them the right plan and goals this way. - Each agency mistake was similar - I'd chase a shiny object and go look for an agency to hire and expect them to magically solve my problem or help each some goal without having a deep understanding of what I was really trying to accomplish. "We need to do a better job with PR" --> Rush to hire a PR agency --> Of course I'm going to be unhappy with the results. VS. Develop a hypothesis about PR, what we could be doing better, start to test some of this internally with the existing team or do it for 20% of my time, get some learnings, create a better and more specific plan, then go find a PR agency to help scale. Or working with a Creative Agency and not being happy with the output, but also not being able to properly articulate what I wanted with clear examples of what "good" looks like. Can you relate to this?
Ding Zheng
5mo
One of the reasons I prefer working with folks that have already tried and failed with video vs going into it cold Being able to articulate not just what good looks like but understanding what makes good difficult is key
My gosh, the amount of saved hours and energy this would bring if more of us worked like this.
I love the 'do it yourself first' approach. So often, people get hired and expect to 'own' the thing and figure it all out. Managers will hire this way and claim their style is 'hands off' but really what's happening is they don't want to get into the weeds of that thing and hope some magic happens and that person figures it out. And, when it doesn't work out, they blame the person, not themselves.
Sam Browne 🦖
5mo
“…without having a deep understanding of what I was really trying to accomplish.” Yes. We equate throwing money (sometimes a lot of money) at a problem. with solving that problem. But the agency can only do what you ask them to do. They can’t take your vague, half formed kind-of idea and give you exactly what you want. If you don’t know what that actually is, it’s impossible. The best result I’ve had with agencies is when I’ve gone in with a clear brief, and a small, well chosen handful of references.
Elizabeth McFaul
5mo
Having been on both sides of the agency relationship, the mistake I’ve seen most companies make is hiring an agency or a new role without having the operations to support it. - A social media agency won’t be able to help pay without your approval: who will do that? - A technical writer or content writer will need their pieces approved: are you able to let go of the ‘perfect’ phrasing in favor of publishing? - A PR team needs narratives in advance: can you decide on release dates and scope and stick to them?
David Kim
5mo
I can relate. It's a good rule of thumb to try the role a bit especially if a team has never done something before or a team is small. At later stages, it can be helpful to shape roles collaboratively with new hires because they should have some idea about what good looks like. They may have also the expertise to take the function beyond the limitations and understanding of the hiring manager.
Rish Bhandari
5mo
Someone finally said it, about doing it yourself first. This is something bootstrapped business owners like myself go through in initial stages. Constrained on resources, funds, people we have to choice but to try everything and honestly like you said, it definitely helps during the hiring phase. Because we've been in the shoes of that role, we know what expectations to set for each new hire.
Jesse Gernigin
5mo
Hiring is a super power and people that do it well should be paid a premium. No more AI crap.
Agnayee Datta
5mo
Relate so much, I'm crying. Have made exactly these mistakes - they were very expensive mistakes. I'd add a third mistake to this list - not trusting my intuition when I knew it wasn't working and waiting too long to make hard decisions (and face the problems I'd created). Silver lining: very important lessons learned the hard way.
Building agencies
5moYour point about doing some of the work yourself is critical. You don't need to be an expert in paid media to hire one, but if you are totally ignorant to what they do, then they are set up for failure. "Do [role]" isn't enough guidance. The more you know, the better you'll hire. Or at least pull someone into the hiring process that can help develop expectations/tests/etc