Yousuf Bhaijee is a growth executive with 13+ years experience at Eaze, Zynga, Disney, Life360 (IPO), CSC Generation, and more. He now spends his time as a growth advisor for clients such as HP, Ergatta, Plushcare, and more. Yousuf also coined the Word of Mouth Coefficient.
Scott Tousley is an OIR at Reforge and the Head of Startup Growth at HubSpot. He's spent the past 7 years at scaling freemium acquisition channels at HubSpot, go-to-market for new product launches, and built HubSpot's first PQL lead scoring model. He also advises B2B climate tech startups.
How long does it take to hire the right Growth Leader?
An executive search can take up to 12 months to find the right candidate, regardless of whether you are looking for a VP of Product, Head of Engineering, or Chief Marketing Officer.
The problem is those 12 months can be wasted entirely. You may think you have found the right person, only to realize 3 to 6 months later they were the wrong person.
This ends up hurting both the company and the individual. The company loses invaluable time, money, and sets the culture in the wrong direction. The individual is set back in their career and will have to pick themselves up by restarting at a new company. It's a bad experience for everyone.
Why does this happen? We'll look at the root of the problem to understand:
What are the breaking points in the growth leadership hiring process?
Why do these breaking points exist and how can they lead to the wrong hire?
How do we increase the probability of a great hire by knowing these reasons and accounting for them in our process?
It all starts with the biggest fundamental flaw — lack of Model/Leader fit.
Breaking Point #1 — Lack of Leader/Model Fit
The first breaking point happens before the executive search begins:
So goes the typical story for a fast-growing Series A startup:
They have healthy retention and signals of product/market fit
They have 1 reliable marketing channel driving acquisition
They want to "step on the gas" so they hire a VP of Growth
They post a job application for VP of Growth and cross their fingers for a swiss army knife of executives who can fix all of their problems.
The problem? They've never built a growth model to identify their points of leverage. They don't know how their product actually grows.
They're stuck in a chicken/egg scenario. How do they define their growth model if they don't know how to define their growth model?
Which comes first ... the growth leader or the growth model?
This is a similar problem that Andrew Chen's shares in his new book, The Cold Start Problem, about how to hire a Head of Growth:
"How do you hire a head of growth? First, you have to define the correct job requirements, and what you’re looking for ultimately depends on the context of your startup — Are you trying to get your startup off the ground? Or are you trying to scale its success? Or are you focused on fending off competitors? Or growing yourself out of a saturation point. Depending on your goals, you should be looking for different things. The initial step is to define your needs."
When building the growth model to optimize for Leader/Model fit, this leaves founders with two options:
Build the first growth model themselves
Hire someone to build the growth model
Option 1: Build the first growth model themselves
The first option is for founders to build their first growth model.
For example, in Reforge's Growth Series Program, founders learn how to describe their growth model, so that they can effectively answer the question, "How does your product grow?"
The upside? Founders increase the probability of hiring the right growth leader because the executive search is targeted at candidates who fit their growth model.
The downside? It takes time to learn and build a model. And many founders don't have enough time to learn the material and would rather hire an expert.
However, as Elena Verna writes in her article Six rules of hiring for growth , your growth model as a founder should be taken as seriously as product-market fit:
“Your growth model, just like product-market fit, is part of the core foundation of your company. Product, marketing, and growth leaders can help you evolve and scale initial traction, evolving your business for long-term success. But doing the first growth-model exercise with the founding team will help you create an authentic growth model that closely leverages your product-market fit strengths and takes advantage of the market opportunities. In fact, companies leverage their growth models to win against direct competitors.”
Option 2: Hire someone to build the growth model
The second option is hiring someone else to create the growth model.
However, most founders fail to realize there are two options when it comes to hiring.
Hire a full-time growth leader
Hire a growth advisor
Most founders go straight to the first option. They look for a full-time hire without considering hiring a temporary growth advisor to help build the growth model.
The upside of hiring a full-time growth leader is the time commitment. They dedicate 40+ hours a week to building a model, crafting the strategy, and executing. When founders have a short runway and they're racing against the clock (competitive pressure, short on cash, etc) this may be preferred.
However, the upside of hiring a growth advisor is gaining more clarity around your model without committing to a full-time hire. It's going slow at first so you can go fast later. We will discuss this option a bit more as we dive into the second breaking point.
💡 Key Question: Will you build your growth model or hire someone to build it?
Breaking Point #2 — Disconnect between recruiting costs and candidate impact
The second breaking point happens during the executive search:
Let's take a look at the typical recruiting process.
It starts with looking at resumes and ends when the candidate starts the job. This comes with a few problems:
It takes 3-9 months to fill an executive role. Executive searches are hyper-competitive, expensive, and time-consuming. During the process leaders may be interviewed by 8+ people, have 6+ reference checks, lengthy salary negotiations, and founders still pass on strong executive candidates (due to fear of false positives in the interview process).
It costs $100k+ to transition out a bad executive hire. The U.S. Department of Labor’s estimates the average cost of a bad hire is at least 30% of their annual salary. This is a $100k+ loss when hiring the wrong growth leader.
There is a huge disconnect between recruiting costs and candidate impact. This is one of the biggest problems, outside of obvious time and money challenges, that we'll explore further.
Consider the total recruiting costs relative to the recruiting process.
As you would expect, 100% of recruiting costs are spent by the time the employee starts.
However, consider recruiting costs against how accurately we evaluated the candidate.
Here's what we see:
Accuracy plateaus after the first hiring manager screen. Despite how great we think we might be at interviewing, research shows we are quite bad at it. Most people are bad at interviewing. And there is little value from doing 5+ additional rounds of interviews.
Accuracy of assessment skyrockets during the first 3 weeks of starting the job. Very few hiring managers acknowledge this, but the real interview starts when the work starts. Companies and candidates really get to know each other only when they start working together. It takes ~3 weeks to determine if you made a great, mediocre, or terrible hire (and it goes both ways for candidates and employers).
This leaves us with two options.
Continue trying to optimize the traditional hiring process
Consider an Advise Before You Buy model
Option 1: Optimize the traditional hiring process
While challenging to optimize, as the executive recruiting function is an entire industry in itself, there are a few small tweaks we can make:
Leverage the growth model to source relevant candidates. This increases the probability that candidates entering the recruiting funnel are a great fit. We covered this in breaking point #1.
Shorten the hiring process. How fast can you source or run interviews? How many candidates can you concurrently pull into the recruiting funnel? However, consider that speed of hiring vs confidence of hiring the right person may have an inverse relationship.
Unfortunately, the trend is for companies to further bloat the hiring process (more rounds, homework, etc.), with each additional further compounding the problem. Again, we are trying to limit the disconnect between recruiting costs and candidate impact.
Option 2: Advise Before You Buy model
A better option is to Advise Before You Buy. Only the most forward-thinking employers are pursuing this (others are stumbling into this by circumstance).
How it works:
You hire a growth advisor as a 1 to 6 month paid engagement (depending on need)
Advisor is compensated by a monthly retainer and/or equity grant
You decide if advisor should be your full-time growth leader based on your experience with them
The biggest benefit is you reduce the risk of hiring the wrong leader. You are minimizing the delta between recruiting costs and candidate impact.
You see the person's work immediately without going through the grueling hiring process. You're trading short-term costs (compensation and minor equity dilution) for risky long-term costs (hiring the wrong leader).
This also helps you cut through the noise. You're targeting an untapped talent pool. There's an entire industry of executive recruiters fighting with each other to get full-time hires placed. Why not bypass the competition and offer a ~1 day a week advising agreement, and if you like the candidate, you pull them into a full-time role?
We'll dive into a few FAQs since speaking with the few founders who are starting to adopt this model.
FAQ: What should be the outcome of Advise Before You Buy engagement?
Every leadership role at every company has a Key Failure Point. This is defined as the most likely reason someone would fail at a leadership role in a company.
A successful Advise Before You Buy engagement is designed to test a candidate along the Key Failure Point (rather than just spend time with the candidate).
For example, a 100 person D2C e-commerce company is hiring a CMO. They have had 3 CMOs in 3 years. No one has ever addressed the topic, but with digging they learn that the key failure point is that the CEO has never been aligned with the creative strategy, which sets the CMO up for failure. Therefore, the test would be a 1-3 month engagement where the advisor works with the marketing team on creative strategy and resources and pitches the CEO. If the CEO is excited about the new creative direction then you have solved for the key failure point pre-hire.
In another example, let's say you're a 300-person B2B SaaS company that wants to build a product-led growth motion (e.g. improving activation/onboarding, retention work, etc). This candidate would likely fail because they could not form a close partnership with the VP of Product and influence the roadmap. This becomes the key failure point that you test for in the engagement.
FAQ: How long should the Advise Before You Buy engagement last?
There are two common options.
The first is an Accelerated Engagement that lasts 1+ months for 1-3 days a week. It works best in this scenario:
You already know your product’s growth model (ie how your product grows) and you know specifically what you need.
You have a specific point of leverage you're testing for (ie ROAS in paid acquisition on social) or Key Failure Point (ie ability to work closely with VP of Product/Marketing).
The second is a standard engagement that lasts 3+ months for 1-3 days a week. It works best in this scenario:
You don't know your growth model, points of leverage, or key failure point
You're in a new industry/category where existing playbooks do not apply. For example, the legalization of cannabis in 2017 where you could not yet advertise on Facebook or Google. Or mobile gaming in 2010 when everything was new without an existing playbook.
You have time to figure things out. There is a strong junior team in place that would benefit from a senior growth advisor.
FAQ: Where do I find growth leaders who could be a good fit?
After identifying your Key Failure Point and length of engagements, the final step is knowing where to find these potential advisors.
The beauty of the Advise Before You Buy model is there are existing "pools" of talent today that tend to go untapped. Here's where you can find advisors.
a) The Sabbaticalers
These are growth executives with 10+ years of experience and are voluntarily in-between jobs to figure out what's next.
They have likely spent the last few years growing a rocketship startup, are financially successful enough to work part-time, and are taking time off to recharge before finding their next adventure. Because of their recent success, they are able to experiment and advise.
An example are Reforge EIRs. A few other places to look are:
LinkedIn search where people have "advisor" in previous or current job experiences
Look at recently acquired or IPO'd companies with the title (ex VP of Growth) you're seeking
b) The Golden Handcuffers
These are full-time employees who have had a lot of success due to their companies’ growth but are looking for "something new" so they continue to feel challenged.
They are “resting and vesting” but have the mental bandwidth to take on a small advisory role. They can help for a small amount of time and tend to ignore recruiting emails with full-time opportunities (because of their large opportunity cost of unvested equity). A short time commitment is a way to cut through the noise (from dozens of weekly recruiting emails) and leverage their expertise.
Find great candidates by searching LinkedIn for companies you admire and find employees in roles that are relevant to your needs. They have likely been there for 4 years or greater.
c) Full-time Consultants and Advisors
These are the extended-stay Sabbaticalers that have fallen into a repeatable niche and will continue consulting/advising full time.
They tend to promote themselves on LinkedIn or Twitter as an advisor or consultant. They tend to publish their writing about growth or their experiences. There are a lot of writer/consultant combos out there who are great advisors.
You can find these people by:
Searching LinkedIn or Twitter bios for "advisor" or "consultant"
Looking at authors of industry blogs
Looking who is answering questions in industry Slack channels
💡 Key Question: How will you reduce the disconnect between recruiting costs and candidate impact?
Breaking Point #3 — Failing Up, Failing Down, or Failing Laterally
The final breaking point happens after the executive search:
This should be heavily mitigated by solving for the first two breaking points:
You've sourced candidates that fit your growth model
You've reduced the gap between recruiting costs and candidate impact
But growth leaders can still fail after passing the two breaking points tests. And they tend to fail in three possible directions.
Failing up - They fail to gain trust from CEO or board
Failing down - They fail to gain trust from their direct reports
Failing laterally - They fail to gain trust from other executives
Failing Up
This is when the leader doesn't gain trust from their CEO or board. The most common reasons are:
Lack of Leader/Model Fit. It's essential that you establish Leader/Model Fit that sets everyone, both the company and the candidate, up for success.
Lack of Impact. If there is Leader/Model fit but the candidate doesn't make a meaningful impact on the numbers. This is the second most common point of failure.
Lack of Communication. The founders and board need to know the results and the vision. What has the team accomplished and why? And where is the team heading?
Failing Down
This is when the leader doesn't gain trust from their direct reports. The most common reasons are:
Leader doesn't have relevant expertise. Let's say you hire a solely marketing-driven growth leader to manage a product team. If they can't speak the same language as product managers, engineerings, and designers, it will be a difficult experience for everyone. Advise Before You Buy can test for this—quickly in a real life setting.
Failure to communicate vision. No one wants to be on a ship when they don't know where it's going.
Macro or micromanagement. There is a fine spectrum of involvement. If the leader obsesses about the fine details or appears too distant from the team, they will lose trust in their leader.
Failing Laterally
This is when the leader doesn't gain trust from other executives. The most common reasons are:
Misaligned incentives and resources. For example, if a product-driven VP of Growth is optimizing the funnel, but the VP of Product needs to ship new features, they have misaligned incentives. One keeps 20% of the engineering team's code (ie failed experiments) when the other wants to keep 100% of the code.
Going rogue and losing trust. Often the growth leader needs to be scrappy with resources and "ask for forgiveness not permission" which can harm morale with other executives. Great for short-term wins but harmful for long-term trust.
Lack of impact. The growth leader should be showing impact to founders as much as they should to other executive leaders. No impact will hurt the desire for other executives to want to partner with the growth leader.
It's the founder and the growth leader's job to properly set expectations. This mitigates any major risk of failing up, failing down, or failing laterally.
💡 Key Question: How will you reduce the risk of the candidate failing up, failing down, or failing laterally?
Summary
There are serious costs of hiring the wrong growth leader.
It can be mitigated by:
Knowing your growth model and hiring around it
Considering an Advise Before You Buy solution
Identifying how the leader can fail up, fail down, and/or fail laterally
Remember, it's our job to hire the right growth leader. That starts from sourcing all the way through the first 90 days.
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