How to Hire Growth ⚡️
What I've learned in over a decade of hiring growth PMs, marketers, and generalists about how to stop wasting time and find a "hell yes"
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Hell Yes
You should only hire someone if you are a “hell yes”.
That’s true in any role. And in growth, it’s non-negotiable.
Why?
Because growth roles are barrels, and an excellent barrel is many times more impactful than a merely good one.
But here’s the problem: growth roles T-shaped.
So your desired skills can quickly balloon into a laundry list of 20+ bullet points.
To get to “hell yes” we need signal amidst the noise.
What makes a great growth hire?
Over thousands of hours of interviews and hundreds of candidates, I’ve boiled it down to the following 2 skills:
CPU 🧠 — raw intelligence and problem-solving firepower.
Speed ⚡️ — fierce pace and extreme bias-to-action.
If an individual spikes on both, typically all else follows.
CPU 🧠
CPU — intelligence — is the most important factor.
The best growth hires I’ve ever made are problem-solving machines.
So, a vast proportion of the interview goes toward validating this requirement.
This skill can show up in many ways, from being structured and methodical, to being able to solve intricate problems.
The more this skill shows up in specific growth areas like data fluency and experiment design, the better.
But absent that, I’d still prefer a shaper yet less-experienced candidate over the inverse.
Speed ⚡️
A smart person should figure out the right direction.
The next unlock is how fast they get there.
I look for speed in every facet of how candidates show up.
Do they respond fast? How soon can they interview? How rapidly do they solve problems?
Call me silly for evaluating outside of interviews, but the trend is undeniable.
I recently helped a startup hire a Growth PM. The (excellent) candidate we hired was introduced over email in the late afternoon and offered to interview at any time the same day.
That’s speed.
Close relatives of speed are agency, drive, and work ethic. The best candidates know how much their input counts, so they push hard.
Look for this fire.
Interview Plan
This is my tried-and-tested growth interview plan.
This plan works. I’ve stress-tested it across dozens of startups, from seed to scale.
It’s specifically for growth product managers and growth marketers, but can also be adapted to adjacent roles like growth engineering, data science, and design.
First Round
Recruiter screen [30 minutes]
Optional hiring manager sell [30 minutes]
Hiring manager screen [45 minutes]
Onsite 1
Qualities [45 minutes]
Execution [60-75 minutes]
Capabilities [45 minutes]
Onsite 2
Optional final skills [30-60 minutes]
Optional founder, investor, or advisor AMA [30 minutes]
Hiring manager AMA [30-45 minutes]
Ideal candidate volumes:
10±3 candidates at First Round
4±2 candidates at Onsite 1
2±1 candidates at Onsite 2
Total time spent with finalist: 5-7 hours.
Let’s unpack.
1. First Round
a. Recruiter screen [30 minutes]
This is the first step for nearly all candidates. The exceptions are referrals who might go straight to the next interview.
Recruiters should ideally exit this screen extremely excited for the hiring manager to meet a candidate.
I’ve seen recruiters reluctantly advance candidates. This is bad. Make sure you agree on requirements and where the bar is.
🎯 Goal: Gauge fit and sell
💡 Skills: Communication, experience, culture fit
👥 Interviewer: Recruiter
💻 Format: Phone or video call
b) Optional hiring manager sell [30 minutes]
This interview is only for candidates where more selling is required.
Usually, these are passive candidates whom the company targeted or who were referred.
Hiring managers and candidates should exit this conversation excited to move forward.
🎯 Goal: Build trust and validate mutual excitement
💡 Skills: Communication, passion
👥 Interviewer: Hiring manager
💻 Format: Video call or in person
c) Hiring manager screen [45 minutes]
Hiring managers should be extremely excited about candidates after this interview.
The Onsite is very time-intensive for all parties, so only advance Strong Yes candidates.
Some of my favorite tips on how to efficiently conduct this interview are in Andrew Chen’s write-up here.
🎯 Goal: Broad and shallow vet, and also confirm critical requirements like compensation and location
💡 Skills: CPU, speed, and a shallow check of every other desired skill
👥 Interviewer: Hiring manager or trusted delegate
💻 Format: Video call or in person
2. Onsite 1
Onsite 1 is where you confirm your “hell yes”.
It should be extremely clear if you want to present an offer after Onsite 1.
It’s hugely time-consuming for the hiring manager to run every interview.
So define the “most skilled person” (MSP) and give them specific interviews to lead.
The MSP for these interviews are usually ICs that the growth hire will work closely with, like engineers, data scientists, designers, and marketers.
a) Qualities [45 minutes]
🎯 Goal: Deeply validate innate qualities
💡 Skills: Speed, agency, initiative, drive, work ethic, organization, ideation
👥 Interviewer: Hiring manager or MSP
💻 Format: Video call or in person; Q&A with case studies
b) Execution [60-75 minutes]
🎯 Goal: Deeply confirm execution ability
💡 Skills: CPU, problem-solving, analysis, copywriting, engineering, experimentation, taste
👥 Interviewer: Hiring manager or MSP
💻 Format: Video call or in person; 5 minutes to prep, 40-60 minutes for candidate to execute solo, 5-10 minutes to jointly review
c) Capabilities [45 minutes]
🎯 Goal: Deeply confirm on-the-spot skills
💡 Skills: CPU, intelligence, problem-solving, rigor, numeracy, clarity
👥 Interviewer: Hiring manager or MSP
💻 Format: Video call or in person; Q&A with case studies
3. Onsite 2
Only “hell yes” candidates who you are trying to close should make Onsite 2.
Of course, you might have one or two final areas to vet. The first interview makes space for this.
Optional final skills [30-60 minutes]
🎯 Goal: Validate any remaining gaps
💡 Skills: Values, humility, receptiveness to feedback, self-awareness, or any other remaining question
👥 Interviewer: Hiring manager
💻 Format: Video call or in person; topgrading format
Optional founder, investor, or advisor AMA [30 minutes]
🎯 Goal: Build trust, sell, close
💻 Format: Video call or in person
Hiring manager AMA [30-45 minutes]
🎯 Goal: Build trust, sell, close
💻 Format: In person
Growth Hiring Traps
Growth PM vs. Growth Marketer
Deciding between a Growth PM and a Growth Marketer seems to flummox every startup.
And for good reason:
Guidelines:
Both Growth PMs and Growth Marketers grow the business.
Growth PMs (mostly) use the product, and Growth Marketers (mostly) work outside the product.
Growth PMs touch many growth levers: activation, retention, churn prevention, monetization, virality, and more.
Growth Marketers primarily touch acquisition through various channels: search, paid, social, affiliates, influencers, partnerships, virality, and more.
So, if you mostly want someone to reach more users through acquisition channels, hire a Growth Marketer.
If you mostly want someone to use the product to drive growth, hire a Growth PM.
This is crucial to define up front, as the skills are very different.
Sourcing
Where do awesome Growth people hang out?
Referrals: Comb your 1st and 2nd degree connections.
Email all investors, advisors, and company friends asking for the best growth people they know.
Use a tool like Teamable or Scoutr to easily mine your team’s contact lists.
Sit down with each person in your team and use the mind palace technique to compile a list of individuals.
Inbound: Advertise the role in public.
Outbound: Excellent candidates tend to be quite busy and quite happy.
Work with an excellent recruiter like Top Funnel to source for you.
Treat this like the funnel it is: track volume and conversion at every step.
Remember: Growth people tend to know each other since it’s part of the role to trade strategies, tactics, and benchmarks.
So, look for connectors in addition to directly identifying potential candidates.
Take-homes, presentations, and work trials
Please.
Avoid take-homes, presentations, and work trials like the plague.
Why?
Doesn’t directly assess the top attributes of CPU or speed.
Slows down the hiring funnel by up to a week per candidate. Disastrous for hiring speed.
Biases towards candidates with more time. But free time is not a variable we care about.
You can test all important skills during Onsite 1. Use the interview plan above!
Next, you might wonder: “What exact questions should I ask?” and “What does good look like?”.
The trouble is, I actively interview at startups I work with, so I can’t give away all my secrets… yet 😉.
If you want to go deeper, just drop me a DM. Maybe one day I’ll stop interviewing and share the full playbook.
Until then, share this with people hiring for growth.
Another banger, much appreciated. When you were scaling Superhuman/other PLG companies, did you mostly focus on Growth PM folks then?