Hacking our way to a growth hacker
We hired our Growth Manager without using recruiters or an HR department - here’s a quick overview on how we did it.
1. No Recruiters allowed
Since this was a senior role, our first instinct was to go with a headhunter.
Well, we outlined the ideal candidate’s profile, used some great looking CVs on LinkedIn as inspiration and explained our Culture and Values to the headhunting company. They in turn formulated the official description and included a section about what makes our company unique.
The moment we received the job file, we knew it wasn’t going to work. It was going to attract solid candidates because it was a good offer, but it wasn’t going to attract the people we wanted — because the people we want would never apply for a job opening that was framed in that way.
We recognised the headhunter’s efforts but let them know we were going solo. It was scary at first because we don’t have an HR department and we knew it was a jungle out there, but we were determined to find the right person.
The first thing we did, was to write a long post describing the job and why we’d decided to look for a Growth Manager. We published it on this very blog, which is dedicated to company Culture. We strongly believe that our Culture is one of our greatest assets and we wanted the value we place on culture fit to be clear from the get-go.
Then, we asked for feedback from someone who works with growth leads all day long: Jean from Growth Hacking Course.
He gave us an important piece of advice regarding titles. We were sick of the term ‘growth hacker’, it sounded gimmicky and we found that many people who are actually working on growth aren’t that keen on the term either.
We loved the title of Growth Architect, because we wanted someone who would design our next phase of growth. Jean slapped us back to reality by letting us know that while our reasoning was understandable, we didn’t write that job post in order to change the way growth experts are referred to, and it certainly wasn’t the time or place to try and validate our hypothesis that the term Growth Architect was better or more appealing than growth hacker.
Our objective was to get someone who was great at growth, and the way to get that job posting noticed is to use well known keywords and industry jargon.
We realised then that even those who are vocally against the term growth hacking, have to tag their posts with that keyword in order for them to get found by the right audience (or like us, including it in the title of this post!). So, we agreed that we’d leave that fight to someone else (or perhaps take it up in the future).
2. Be radically honest
Being transparent with each other is among our values, and we stick to that not only internally but also with potential hires. When we published the job description, we weren’t coy about the salary range, got real about the challenges that we were facing in the growth area, and the fact that we were looking for seniority.
During interviews we were open about the company’s strengths and weaknesses, and our future plans. We wanted someone who was enthusiastic about helping us improve and learning along the way.
3. The right job boards
Our blog post led readers to a Workable page, where they could apply. Workable has some great features, like automatically posting your opening to job boards with broad reach such as Indeed, ZipRecruiter and Glassdoor as well as LinkedIn.
But we wanted even more reach! I‘m a subscriber of Rodolphe Dutel’s Remotive newsletter and had noticed their remote-friendly job board. It seemed like the perfect fit for us.
Then, we made a list of the ideal-looking candidates we had seen on LinkedIn, and did personalised outreach one by one with the help of a VA. This tactic didn’t get us any applications, but everyone we contacted replied gracefully and we got on some very talented people’s radars!
Finally, we used our Founder’s (and his contacts) solid Twitter presence to ramp up momentum.
So through Workable, Remotive and Twitter, we found ourselves inundated with a lot of very impressive candidates. Importantly, our own network of contacts sent referrals our way once they saw that we were hiring.
4. Owning the process
Someone within the company (in this case, me) had to own the process, the outcome and deal with the admin stuff. I was happy to, because this was an extremely important hire for our team which would have direct impact on my department and our company wide objectives. I listed it as one of my area’s objectives for the Quarter and worked towards this goal every day.
We also had the benefit of having set up imperfect hiring processes in the past, which gave us wisdom on what to keep doing and what to rethink (my colleague David outlined some of our hiring learnings here).
5. The Culture fit
Before embarking on this hiring journey, it was critical that we define what culture fit actually means to us, and formulate a core values speech that every candidate had to read.
I think a key to our success was that during this process there was someone within the company that was able to fully transmit the workplace culture to candidates well before an actual interview took place, and upon first screening was a good judge of whether they’d be a good fit and should pass to the next round. This is something that would have been much harder to accomplish had we been relying solely on recruiters.
So who got the job?
Yaye, our current Head of Growth is exactly the person we were looking for. He fit right in, understood our challenges and is already making waves!
All the work we put into finding the right person paid off.
We’ve been a remote-first company for over 6 years and we have incredibly high employee retention — we‘ve also learned how to use our culture as recruitment strategy — and we’re not going back to headhunters just yet ;) .
This post was written by Larissa, Marketing Manager at MarketGoo.
