(aka...Marketing Matchmaking for product-led SaaS founders hiring their first marketing leader)
People who aren't marketers aren't really sure how to gauge senior marketers' abilities.
Marketing is constantly changing. If you had your hands in the weeds 15 years ago, those weeds are a completely different breed today. So even the CMO→CEO trend isn't necessarily helping people be confident about hiring marketing leaders.
Marketing is only one piece of growth. People assume that a marketer coming from a big brand or a company that scaled is guaranteed to be great at what they do, anywhere. But people can be in a successful company almost despite their marketing performance, just as easily they can be in a company that doesn't scale despite their marketing abilities.
CEOs and CROs have never done marketing. And they're intensely aware that people who are good at marketing are great at spinning stories. So they're always a little uncertain about whether they're getting spin or truth. Until their new Head of Marketing has been on the job for 3, 6, 12 months...and has either made a huge impact. Or fallen flat.
Recruiters are out of reach for startups. Lots of recruiters think it would be great to work with startups but it's hard to be an extension of the brand whey they don't know it themselves, or culture...young company doesn't know what they are yet, making it hard for recruiter to pitch or build trust, etc.
Recruiters screen candidates for a basic checklist. They might look at firmographics like whether they scaled from $100M to $200M, took a company from Series A to E, scaled a team from 2 to 200. But if they were able to screen candidates for real marketing strategic and creative abilities, the CEOs wouldn't need to interview them. And recruiters are priced out of reach for early-stage startups who need the most guidance in this.
Skills assessments don't assess senior marketing abilities. There are tests that assess how well you understand the tools and tactics. Like Google Analytics or HubSpot. They're about the mechanics. Not the strategy, creative thinking, or forward-thinking abilities. And, again, marketing is always changing. These tests quickly go out of date.
Case in point: I answered three questions on the TestDome Growth Marketing test. Apparently, I'm certified & top 25%. Two questions were about ecommerce; almost no application to b2b SaaS. One was multiple choice: which CRM lists would prove marketing-generated sales? There wasn't enough data to answer in any way, but still the choices provided weren't the right one. (Was MQLs really a right answer? That is not a measure of marketing's contribution to revenue.)
Without being clear on how to measure the intangibles of what makes a great marketing leader, and the right one for your brand, some people fall back on almost arbitrary quantifications. Job listings that require MBAs, or specific GPAs in your undergrad work, or who require that you've marketed MRIs to physicians in Marietta, GA, when those things aren't what make a great marketer, by the time you're 10-20+ years into your career your undergrad/grad work no longer matters, and any great marketer can learn any audience and product and make it work.
All of this is causing the hiring process for senior marketers to become so protracted and convoluted...no one has time for it. Several rounds of interviews over several weeks. Multiple rounds of homework assignments. Calling references when there are still several candidates in play. Candidates are putting in upwards of 20 hours to land a single job. Not to mention the time that CEOs and their teams are putting in. Trying to gauge marketing knowledge and ability, leadership ability, brand fit.
And if you've never actually built a brand platform or run a demand gen campaign or launched a blog or built HubSpot dashboards that the C-suite actually understands....you still won't know if you learned what you needed to.
Early-stage startups (pre-seed → A/B) especially need someone who has the big vision & strategy and is ready to execute. But when you're talking to somebody who's been in a leadership role already, you actually don't know how hands-on, they've been with any of the stuff that you're looking at, as far as their landing pages or the site architecture, SEO value, any of that stuff, you know, it could be all of them. It could not, they could be completely reliant on teams and agencies. And if you're talking to someone who seems ready for their first leadership role, you don't know if they really have the capacity to step up to that level. Or if they'll feel underwater once they have to think big vision, brand direction, overall strategy and get it done. It can be really comfortable to be in the weeds with the tools and tactics, so much so that you read enough blog posts about strategy and growth, you think you're ready to layer that on. But it's actually quite complex. To build the vision, enroll the leadership, thread it through every part of the company and every stage of the lifecycle and get it done.
All of the above applies to CEOs who seek to hire marketing agencies instead of in-house marketing help. In fact, it's even harder to get that right. And to manage them.
Hiring processes have become wildly complex and lengthy. In attempt to balance out for the above, startups are putting marketing leaders through several rounds of interviews that can stack up to as many as 10 to 20 hours, plus multiple homework assignments.
Employers who aren't marketers don't understand the nuances of language for attracting the right marketer. What someone 5 years into their career is looking for (who will my boss be, how will this lead me to the next thing, what will I be doing, what if I don't know how to do what I'll be doing, how will you help me learn and grow, do you understand marketing better than I do) is very different than what someone 10 or 20 years in will be looking for (how much autonomy will I have, how much will I have to explain or make the case for marketing, does this brand fit my brand, etc.)
So, basically, we're talking about a matchmaking service for founders + marketing. That solves all of this.