Services

Growth marketing recruiting

Growth marketing hires fail differently than sales hires. The number is further from the person, the feedback loop is longer, and the title covers four genuinely different skill sets. We search accordingly.

Which roles do we place?

• Digital Marketing Specialist
• Content Marketing Specialist
• Paid Social Specialist
• Growth Marketing Manager
• Performance Marketing Manager
• Lifecycle Marketing Manager
• Demand Generation Manager
• Product Marketing Manager
• Growth Engineer
• Director of Marketing
• Head of Marketing
• VP Marketing

What's the problem with the title?

"Growth marketer" describes a paid acquisition specialist, a lifecycle and retention operator, an analytics-heavy experimentation lead, and a generalist first marketing hire. Those are four different people. Hiring the wrong one is not a performance problem, it is a scoping problem, and it usually surfaces two quarters late.

Most of the value in a growth search is spent before sourcing, deciding which of the four you actually need. That is what the kickoff is for.

Which of the four do you actually need?

The scoping question has a shortcut: ask what has to be true in six months for the hire to have worked, then read which of the four that answer describes.

• "We know which channels work and can spend into them." A paid acquisition specialist. Wants budget, a measurable funnel, and a product that converts without a human in the loop.
• "The people who sign up stay and expand." A lifecycle and retention operator. Closer to the product team than to sales, and usually the wrong hire before you have enough users for cohorts to mean anything.
• "We can tell which of our bets are working." An experimentation lead. Needs volume; without it, every test is underpowered and the role becomes opinion with a dashboard.
• "Marketing exists at all." A generalist first marketing hire, who will do positioning, content, a website rebuild and the first paid experiments. The most common real answer at Seed, and the one least likely to be written in the job description.

Should you hire growth or brand first?

At most venture-backed startups, growth — but for a narrower reason than the usual one. It is not that brand does not matter; it is that brand work is hard to evaluate before you know who you are selling to, and a first marketing hire whose output cannot be judged for a year is a difficult first marketing hire.

The exception is a category where the buyer chooses on trust before they ever evaluate — regulated industries, security, anything with a long procurement cycle. There, positioning and credibility ARE the growth work, and hiring a paid acquisition specialist into it produces expensive clicks from people who were never going to buy.

What's different about how we work?

Same process as our sales searches: recorded kickoff, written brief before outreach, a first slate framed as calibration, written prep for every candidate who reaches an interview. The difference is where the effort concentrates. In growth searches the scoping conversation is the search.

Related: GTM and sales recruiting → · How we work →