My new hiring process (part one)

✍️ My old hiring process

Getting the go-ahead to make your first hire as a marketing team-of-one is exciting.

Until you remember that when you work at early-stage start-ups, HR is also a team of one, outsourced, or (in my case here) totally nonexistent.

My hiring process in the past has followed a fairly common and unstructured pattern:

✔️ Schedule a few 1:1 conversations with candidates

✔️ Let every conversation steer itself

✔️ Have the best candidates meet with 2-3 other people

✔️ Get feedback from the other interviewers

✔️ Make the final call based on my gut feeling

It’s worked well enough for me up to this point. I’ll give myself a B/B+ for success rate.

But one of our co-founders, Ray, asked me voluntold me to create a new, structured hiring process so we could be sure to get our Product Marketing Manager hire right.

At first, I was hesitant and a little uncomfortable.

I already had too much work on my plate. Coming up with a new hiring process would take up even more of the time I didn’t have.

I told Ray sure. Then he Slacked me an hour-long recording from Dr. Geoff Smart on how to hire the right way.

Reluctantly, I watched the entire video on a flight home to Chicago — and I’m really glad I did.

My new hiring process at UserEvidence

Watching this presentation opened up my eyes big time.

With 433 applicants, I couldn't use my old process to make an A+ hire.

Dr. Smart's talk schooled me on:

• The types of questions you should consistently ask

• When and where to ask them

• The importance of consistency in how to ask each question

I quickly realized I needed to create an interview scorecard to stay organized, ask the right questions, and rate every answer.

Step one: phone screen

My scorecard included phone screen questions taken directly from Dr. Smart, like:

• What’s your dream job?

• What are you really good at professionally?

• At your last job, what were you hired to do?

• What accomplishments are you most proud of?

I always thought these were fluffy questions that didn’t actually tell you much about each candidate.

But now I see how critical it is to ask every candidate the same questions during phone screens.

This scorecard helped me run effective phone screens to vet 35 initial candidates.

After each phone screen ended, I used ChatGPT to summarize the transcript and generate answers to every question I asked.

I scored every answer right away. Still more of a “gut feeling” score, but helpful to do in the moment while the conversations were fresh in my head.

After each person said they were in, I sent calendar links (ahead of the event) to book 20-minute time slots and get each interview on the books.

Step two: skills assessment

I invited 16 people to participate in a skills assessment call with me.

I asked questions, like:

• Give me an example of when you reworked positioning and messaging. What was the outcome?

• Tell me about the last time you brought a new product to market. How did you measure success?

• How do you build solid working relationships with other GTM functions?

Using my same ChatGPT workflow, I scored every answer 1-10 and assigned ratings like this:

Step three: CEO interview

After the skills assessment call with me, I had candidates with the highest scores meet with Evan (my CEO) for 45 minutes.

I wanted to get him involved earlier in the process so he could ask his own questions, catch things I missed, and dig into areas I had concerns about. 

I didn't go all ChatGPT on Evan for his interviews. But I made sure he consistently asked the same questions and rated each candidate immediately after each call.

Together, he and I landed on the top candidates that would move onto the final round.

Turns out, interviewing people for two days straight is exhausting. But for something smaller with the right people and recognizable faces, this first go-round definitely paid off.

Step four: paid work assignment and presentation

I gave the final three candidates a work assignment.

I went back on forth on whether to use a hypothetical scenario or a real UserEvidence scenario with actual data. I chose the latter — and I’m really glad I did.

Candidates signed NDAs and got paid $750 each for their time. I thought this was more than fair, especially when many companies ask candidates to do unpaid work assignments these days.

I gave the candidates the same prompt with real data. They got access to HubSpot, listener access in Gong, and a chance to meet with me to make sure they were on the right track.

Each candidate presented their final 45-minute presentations to Evan, Ray, and I.

We left ~30 minutes for the actual presentation and ~15 minutes for Q&A.

What worked (and what didn’t)

We scheduled all three presentations in one afternoon — back-to-back-to-back —without any breaks in between.

It was exhausting. I'd definitely add short breaks in between next time around.

 But it was really interesting to see how each candidate approached the same work assignment in very different ways.

The new hiring process helped me vet candidates more effectively, better evaluate each candidate's skills specific to the role, and get a first-hand glimpse of what it'd be like to work with each person.

If you want to see the hiring scorecard I created, get a copy of it here.

Even though I found my A+ hire, I had a painful learning moment along the way.

I made the very tough call to pass over another candidate who had worked for me before — someone I consider a friend.

Telling this person they didn’t get the job was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my career. It sucked. 

I’ll share more about my big miss in the next edition of Evidently.

🤓 Stuff I’m learning (and digging) right now

• Pablo Rochat — Katie Cooper (the brains behind our company LinkedIn page and best B2B social freelancer I know) showed me his profile a while back. Pablo’s posst are 100% out there but always make me laugh.

• AudiencePlus’ “content release” approach — They recently started announcing a schedule with new content they're shipping every week. I have no idea if this is working or not but it’s different. And I love different.

• Klue’s Compete Network — I’m a huge fan of Klue’s Marketing team. Great marketers and even better people. Their team is executing a true masterclass on how to build a media brand in B2B SaaS with the Compete Network.

💰Opinions are cheap and proof is gold

In the most recent episode of The Proof Point, guests Amanda Natividad (SparkToro), MJ Smith (CoLab), and our very own Evan Huck went all in on audience, customer, and market research.

My biggest takeaways:

• Research should be a continuous process. B2B marketers have to stay on top of changes in customer behavior, industry trends, and their underlying motivations.

• Demographic and firmographic data will only get you so far. You need to fully understand your audience and their broader context of influence — peers, competitors, and societal trends.

• The holy grail is a combination of quantitative and qualitative insights for each audience. This will give you a well-rounded understanding of who you’re marketing to.

Listen on Spotify, Apple, or head over to YouTube watch the show.

UserEvidence, who?

UserEvidence is a customer evidence platform that helps B2B marketing teams generate verified proof points that credibly prove the value of your product.

Using custom surveys at key moments throughout the customer journey, you can capture case studies and testimonials, as well as competitive intelligence, product stats, and ROI data.

Turn happy customers into your best sellers with UserEvidence.