[8/10] How to build growth team at a startup?
Designing your hiring process: best practices & common pitfalls
This is the 8th essay in the Firestarter series on skills to lead growth function.
A quick recap: the first 3 essays published in January focussed on the skills to build a growth plan. The next 4 essays in February focussed on functional knowledge to execute the growth levers. And, the last 3 essays to be published in March will focus on the skills to manage the growth function.
Specifically, the last 3 essays will seek to answer the following questions around hiring and running growth teams and processes, that are routinely faced by startups:
How do you build a growth team? This essay will delve deeper into questions such as:
How do you attract talent to your startup?
Should you hire generalists or specialists for your growth team?
What should be the hiring process? Which skills should you check for and how?
How do you manage the regular operations of a growth team? That is the operational know-how of the planning process, business reviews, growth sprints, etc.
How do you manage the individuals within the team? That is, talking about one-on-one’s, performance reviews, and so on.
How to strike a balance between hiring without a plan, and planning in absence of a team?
Now, it is intentional that the part on building the team comes last in this series, even though it might seem, sequentially speaking, as the first thing to do. That is to say, an obvious counter-question can be: wouldn’t you have to build a team first before even doing anything else?
However, in my experience, having a version of growth model and roadmap, and having a point of view on the relevant growth channel and levers, comes before a growth team is put together. Because they dictate the type of growth team you’d put together.
This, of course, creates a chicken-and-egg situation. Building a growth model and roadmap might require some part of the growth team to be there in the first place. Generating hypotheses, setting up instrumentation, and running experiments, in order to build conviction into a growth channel or a growth lever also needs execution by a team. So, what gives?
Putting together a growth team or a growth plan are not discrete one-time events in the lifecycle of a startup or its growth function. They are both ongoing processes. Growth plans get revisited periodically (every quarter or so), and teams are always adding and losing individuals and skill sets.
So, what I mean by the statement that growth plan comes before growth hiring is that putting together a tentative version of growth model and roadmap and thinking through the growth channel and value growth levers help in hiring better. Let me explain with an example.
Let’s say you are building a vertical marketplace for home decor. As the founder, or a founding member in the team in charge of growth function, you are eager to build your growth team. In order to ‘start growing’. But specifically, what would you consider as the best case scenario in the next 12 months?
Would it mean increasing revenue per user to the point you have product-market fit? Or would you aim for the same objective but with less cost per user as a lever? Or are you happy with the product-market fit but want to validate it for a different order of magnitude: have the same economics but for ~1,000 new users per month instead of the current scale of ~100 users per month? Is there a user growth channel that you have already figured out, or have strong conviction on, that you want to scale? Or are you already thinking about diversifying by building new growth channels? Not to mention: are you completely sure about the persona and positioning you have picked or do you think it still needs more sharpening?
Most importantly: if you could pick only one or two specific growth wins over the next 12 months, what would they be?
Now these might seem like a lot of questions to answer, and honestly a little premature (as in: let’s hire the growth team and they will figure it out). But why these questions need to be considered, and a point-of-view on them need to be built beforehand, is because that would dictate the skill sets that you would be hiring for. Should you first hire performance marketing practitioners? Or should you hire specialists in content-led organic growth? Or should you hire people who specialize in partnerships and business development? The answer, of course, is: it depends on your growth model and the channel and lever assumptions in it.
Another example can be for the same business but in a different growth stage. Instead of being in the early stage, now it is in the growth or late stages. Say, the first set of channels (digital advertising, content-led organic growth, etc.) are already doing well, and respective teams have been built for those sub-functions. And you, as the growth lead, are looking for more growth opportunities.
Once again, it is better to go through the heuristics from the previous essay (new channel, new product, new market, or new persona) and you need to build an informed point-of-view on what the growth levers are, and hire for those skill sets.
The key takeaway so far is that having some working version of the growth plan is necessary even before the team is built. It makes us look for the right skill sets. And, inversely, it avoids the obvious mistakes, such as hiring specialists for a particular growth lane which are either not relevant, or just not the most optimal bet, at the stage for the given business context. Specialists, by definition, will have a blinkered view of the problem statement, and will often not explore solutions that are outside their toolkit.
Another solution to this chicken-and-egg dilemma is to hire generalists to put together a tentative growth plan, build theses around what the roadmap for user growth and value growth should be, and run for some period of time with that setup. There is, of course, risk that sub-optimal implementation of an experiment or a channel by a generalist, can prematurely cancel a promising growth lever (and this can often cast a long shadow - ‘oh yes, we tried that idea; that doesn’t work for us’). But this risk can be mitigated by having the generalist consult with some expert specialists, for that channel/lever, on the set up and the best practices.
How do you attract top talent to your growth team?
The above section almost assumes that both specialists and generalists are lining up to join your startup. However, this is often not the case. The paradox often is: good talent that you want to hire is wanted even more strongly by their current team; and if no team wants them, or if their current team doesn't want them, they aren’t that desirable to you either.
This also means that the good talent is often happy wherever they are. They are so busy with driving their project to success that they have not even seen the role that you have put out there or have personally messaged them about. They just don’t have the available bandwidth (actual time or mental), and — more importantly — the motivation, at that point in time to consider it.
This, to a large extent, cannot be solved for. But what can be solved for is: when they do decide to explore new opportunities, your organization should be in consideration. And, you can perhaps connect the dots between this and the idea of funnel in essay 5 on User Growth levers.
As the founder, or the growth lead, you now have two jobs: you have to build awareness not just about your product among the relevant customers, but also about the organization or team among the relevant talent. And, just like in the case of the former, the right way to measure activities that build awareness at the top of the funnel is not conversions, but its leading indicators. Which can be: what percentage of candidates knew about you even before they came across this specific role.
Having some awareness of the organization, of the problem statement, and of the team, can be a huge differentiator, as well as a driver for conversions. If you are already sold on the idea that building awareness beforehand would be useful, but have questions on the ‘how’, the previous statement offers possible answers to them too: education about the problem statement (the success so far and the challenges ahead) and about the existing team (and their experience).
Once you hire the right talent, it starts acting as a positive signal to other prospective candidates. Talent density then starts acting as a flywheel for your team: hiring the first person might be very hard, hiring the tenth person perhaps gets easier, and eventually hiring the hundredth person might not be easy but it would most certainly be easier than it earlier was.
You can make the flywheel work for you even more by amplifying their individual experiences, or an aggregated version of their experience: getting certification as best place to work, your glassdoor rating, being listed in top startups to work for, etc.
All things said, the bottomline when it comes to hiring is: everyone wants to be on the winning team. And, in case of growth, the proof is in the pudding. If your growth rate is slow, ironically you will have a hard time hiring a great talent to your team even though your organization probably needs it more, whereas if you are winning, you will have an easier time attracting the right talent, even as the utility of additional talent for you (and perhaps opportunities for the talent) is now diminishing.
So, if the organisation and the team is doing well, you need to talk about it.
How to design the hiring process for your growth team?
Let’s say that the efforts from the previous section are working out, and you have a good pipeline of candidates to hire from. Also, from the first section of the essay, you have clarity on what the growth roadmap looks like and what specific skills are required to drive those levers. And so, you are now ready to do the actual work of hiring.
Your job as the hiring manager is to:
Decide on the skills that you are going to be checking for, and
Design the process to test the skills
When it comes to the first task, almost irrespective of the role, your framework should be to evaluate a candidate along 3 major dimensions: aptitude, attitude/energy, and integrity. Aptitude further has two major sub-dimensions: general aptitude and domain-specific knowledge.
The common pitfall, especially in case of hiring specialists, is to assign too much weight to domain-specific skills (which, paradoxically, you don’t have a way to check for, unless you are bringing in external experts to the panel) and not thinking holistically and giving due weight to and evaluating for other dimensions (general aptitude, communication skills, attitude towards collaboration, etc.).
When it comes to the second task of designing the process to test the specific skills, the goal is to have a process that gives a score for the skills, as objectively as possible. And the guardrail is to have as few steps or take up as less time as possible, for both sides, to arrive at those scores.
Screening stage
Once the responsibilities and requirements for the role have been decided on, articulated in a job description document, and published on the job boards, applications would begin to come in. Often, there is only a certain amount of bandwidth available with the interviewers (say, 30 hours over the next 30 days by when the team has to close the role). And so, while in an ideal world, all candidates would get a chance to go through the selection process, realistically the number of candidates that the interviewer can talk to is fixed. And this scarcity that drives the selection ratio in the first stage of resume or profile screening.
For specialist roles, resumes are often screened by years of experience (volume metric) and markers of quality of experience (quality metric). For example, a performance marketing manager role might require more than 3 years of experience in managing campaigns on digital advertising platforms, executed for marquee organizations or agencies operating in similar domains. However, such a screening process can lead to false positives (candidates without good first principles thinking might get screened in) and false negatives (candidates with exceptional skills and potential, but with just 11 months of experience, might get screened out).
For generalist roles, the resume screening often gravitates to the academic record in the early-to-mid stage roles, either directly (that is, startup hiring from tier-I colleges) or indirectly (that is, startups might be looking for experience in tier-I consulting firms, who themselves might have hired primarily based on academic record). Such a screening does not imply that there won’t be false positives and negatives, but the implicit understanding is that false positives will get removed later in the process and the hiring team has made peace with false negatives as a trade-off for speed of hiring.
The takeaway is that the objective of the screening stage is to allocate more of the limited amount of hiring manager’s time to the more promising candidates. Such a trade-off can lead to both false positives and false negatives. It is important while designing the process to be cognizant of the parameters you are screening for, the trade-offs, and then to continually improve the process based on how it is performing out there in the real world.
Side note: more objectivity can be brought in during the screening stage with tests that can check for the skills, rather than use indirect signals such as academic record, years of professional experience, or self-declared level of competence with tools, that resumes and LinkedIn profiles offer.
However, these skills might be difficult to objectively assess, or the tests might be too much of an effort for the hiring manager/team to design. This is precisely the problem statement that Skilletal seeks to solve with skill assessment tests for growth roles.
Interviewing
After the profile/resume has been shortlisted, it progresses to the interview round. Now, the objective of designing an interview (or a series of interviews) for a role is – just like the broader hiring process – to build a common understanding in the hiring team on:
The skills being tested,
The ‘right’ questions to evaluate those skills
Let’s say that we are conducting an interview for a growth analyst position. The team agrees (or the hiring manager decides) that the skills being tested are:
Analytics fundamentals (domain aptitude)
Growth fundamentals (domain aptitude)
Communication skills (general aptitude)
Receptiveness to feedback (attitude)
Now, if it is a 45 minute interview, and 10-15 minutes are to be set aside for mutual introduction and to answer the candidate’s questions, there also needs to be a structure around which questions will be asked in the remaining 30 minutes to test the above skills. Crucially, it needs to be made sure if those questions do indeed test for those specific skills, and are not just ‘interview questions’.
For example, if the idea is to check problem solving skills, the temptation might be to ask a question like ‘estimate the number of red cars in Bangalore’. Or to get them to ‘estimate number of golf balls that can fit in a Boeing 747 aircraft’.
But are these questions checking for those skills, or are these ‘interview questions’ that one can prepare specifically for? The false positive is that the candidate is familiar with this type of question and thus solves it well, but this type of thinking has no correlation with the kind of problem solving they will need on the job. And the false negative is that the candidate is actually good with problem solving but is just not familiar with the format in which such guesstimate questions are expected to be answered.
Which brings me to the questions from the other end of the spectrum: from being too unrelated to the skill set or domain to being too specific. Such as, ‘tell me 3 ways conversion rate for my website will improve’. The pitfall of such a question, despite at surface being a very different kind, is the same: as an interviewer, you have a set expectation about the right answer itself (in this case), or the right format in which answers will be approached (in the previous case), which comes in the way of genuinely assessing the skill of problem solving.
Coming back to the growth analyst role interview, if you are checking for growth fundamentals, you can ask the candidate to pick a business/app that they are familiar with as a user (avoiding one that you might have a biased point of view on, such as a current or previous project of yours), and ask, say, the engagement metrics that they would be tracking. And, to test their problem solving skills, you can ask them for possible directions they would take during data exploration, or hypotheses that they would first seek to validate.
Here, I believe, the goal of actually seeing their approach to solve a problem might get achieved. The format might be familiar to them, but due to domain knowledge, and not due to preparing for job interviews. And you might invariably have some expectations on the right way to solve the problem and the right answer, but you will at least not be too fixated on what the right answers are due to over-familiarity with the problem statement.
The key takeaway is that interview questions and prompts can neither be winged nor be wholesale borrowed from elsewhere without context. They have to be designed consciously keeping in mind the skill tests being tested for, the right questions to test them, and while being cognizant of the pitfalls.
Assignment
While the ethics of asking the candidate to do an assignment in their own time is often debated, if done with the right guardrails and after setting the right expectations, it can be a huge value-add.
The expectation can be to understand how they approach and structure a problem, how they conduct primary and secondary research, and so on. Such an insight into the candidate’s style of working often doesn’t come from interviews. And is, in fact, closer to a real world scenario where you don’t have to think through a problem statement in real-time. The candidate’s strength might be going deeper into a topic, talking to customers, and thinking through a problem from all angles, but such valuable skills don't get their chance to shine in, say, case study interviews.
For the candidate too, this stage can be very valuable. You can ask the interviewer in the discussion on your assignment submission if they agree with your approach or not. If this was similar to the problem solving approach they had in their team or not. It can give an insight into the working style of the team and if you can see a match between your style and theirs or not.
Especially for senior roles, such an exercise often is far more beneficial for the candidate. They get a chance to evaluate the company independently by conducting primary and secondary research. They also can evaluate beforehand what potential growth levers are, and guage the viewpoint of current leadership on them to check and build alignment.
Reference checks
While the selection criteria that we discussed above are supposed to predict the on-job performance, nothing perhaps correlates to it better than their actual on-job performance in previous roles. And yet, the step of asking the candidate’s previous managers how their past performance was, is often underutilized. Though, for understandable reasons.
Without the right ways to frame the questions to ask the person on the reference check call, this step is almost redundant. However, with the correctly framed questions, this step can be very powerful.
The core principle to make reference checks useful is: how can we make the questions as objective, as matter of fact, as possible?
Suppose we want to ask about the candidate’s weaknesses. If we frame the question as ‘so, what are his/her weaknesses’, we might get an inaccurate reply. Either very positive (‘they don’t have any weakness’) if they are trying to get the conversation over with. Or very inaccurate in case they are just searching for something to say and say the first thing that pops up in their head.
A more objective framing of the question can be: in the performance review meetings between you, was there a recurring area of improvement that came up?
Similarly, instead of an overall good or bad, or hire again versus not hire again, sort of rating at the end of call, you can frame it more objectively: is this person in the top 10 percentile of people you have worked with?
The same applies for the candidate too. They should frame questions objectively while doing reference checks on the manager (or the broader team or organization). For example, instead of asking ‘do you think there is a good work-life balance in the team’, you can ask ‘so what time do you generally leave the office’?
Summary
To recap: in this essay, we dove into aspects of putting together a growth team. We looked at:
How to balance between hiring without a plan, and planning in absence of a team
Why and how we should always be hiring by building awareness among the potential candidates
How to design the hiring process and the common pitfalls in various stages and ways to avoid them
In the next essay, we will dive into how to run the team successfully once it has been put together.
If you have any suggestions on this article, or need any clarifications, I am reachable at sudhanshu@skilletal.com