My career path in Marketing is far from typical – I came in to it from a product management role at a research firm, and until for a long time was always in a technical or operations-focused marketing role. As I have matured as a marketing professional I’ve focused my career specifically on driving rapid growth at organizations. At the same time, the technology portfolio that marketers use to reach and engage the market has developed and matured. Obviously there’s been a crazy amount of technologies released to serve marketers and I believe we’ll see a lot of consolidation down the road. Regardless, the importance of hiring growth marketers who understand how to use technology has increased dramatically and there’s no reason to think marketers who can marry the creative and technical won’t be highly sought after in the future. Right now supply isn’t matching the demand when it comes to hiring growth marketers, and thus it’s exceedingly difficult to fill these roles. As a result I’ve evolved my personal philosophy in hiring, and have focused on looking for certain traits that can result in quality hires rather than focus primarily on experience.
Introducing the PHACE Framework for Hiring Growth Marketers
In a nutshell, I use a framework consisting of these talent characteristics: Proactive, Hacky, Analytical, Connected, and Empathetic. These aren’t the only things to look for of course, but I’ve found that if you are hiring growth marketing roles with candidates that rate highly on at least a few of those characteristics, they are likely to succeed. I had a chance to share this framework at the Sirius Decisions Technology Exchange in San Francisco, and the response from the audience (and follow-up conversations) was extremely positive!
In future blog posts I’ll do deep dives into each of those characteristics, but suffice it say that if you can evaluate candidates and use this as a framework, it will allow you to focus on hiring growth marketers without directly engaging in the talent war. After all, experience is a lagging indicator, and I always believe in hiring for upside and potential rather than focus on deep experience (not that that’s a bad thing of course!).
Presentation from the Sirius Decisions Technology Exchange: