Wow! Is it a great time to be a growth marketer, or what? List after list outlines that the role of Chief Growth Officer is one of the fastest growing C-suite titles for 2019 & 2020. It’s no wonder – companies either need to grow, or they risk dying a slow (or quick) death. If you are a company looking to hire a growth person – good luck – there is more demand than ever for top talent. But with a good job description and a solid company, coupled with a solid interview process you’ll increase the odds that you find the best talent.
Here’s a set of interview questions to help you get started.
When looking at hiring a growth person, contractor, or agency it’s often tricky to come up with challenging but reasonable questions that can be used across any experience the potential hire may have. As such, I’ve built a short list of scenarios and more direct questions to elicit thought. I usually ask the growth person to pick one or two scenarios that they feel comfortable expanding upon, and then give them some time to complete the exercise. There is no right or wrong answer. What you’re looking for here is the candidate’s ability to think through a problem, and how they’d approach a situation they may encounter on the job if they work with you.
Feel free to steal these and use as your own!
Scenarios
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You have $1000 to drive as much qualified traffic to our website as possible. Where do you start?
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You have zero budget but we need to fill 10 seats to our $499 event in 2 months. What do you do to reach this goal?
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Tell us about one email newsletter or a company who is using email really, really well. What makes it great?
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We have 100 leads per week that come in. Our sales team tries to reach out as fast as possible with a personalized message and a call. Roughly 30% of the leads reply back or answer our calls. What strategy would you use to increase that to 50% over the next month?
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We get our leads from 3 primary sources: Paid Linkedin ads, Google Paid Search, and Organic Google search traffic. If Sales doesn’t close a deal with these leads in the first 30 days, they go into our general marketing email campaign bucket. We send 1 or 2 emails every few months and we average 1 deal from these emails. How could we 5x this deal velocity from this existing pool of leads over the next 90 days? What questions would you have for us?
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Our “founders” email always gets a 30% open rate, which we think is great. Someone told us that we could get 50% open rates for email lists. How would we do that?
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We are holding steady on the total number of visitors hitting the site, and we get .5% of visitors to sign up for our newsletter. How would we increase that to 5%?
More direct questions
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Tell us the most impactful marketing success you’ve had in the past year, and why
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Tell us about a campaign you either messed up, failed at, or wish you could do over, and why
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What’s your email strategy when it comes to onboarding? What about activation?
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How many times or for how long will you message a lead before giving up?
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How do you differ in marketing an app vs a website?
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How much have you done with sequences or drip campaigns? Have you run branches off of a core campaign before, so you end up with highly personalized or groups of cohorts who get specialized messaging?
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Who do you need to help you build out your email campaigns?
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Do you design your own HTML emails, or do you want/need help?
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Do you code HTML emails or do you get help for that?
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many different scenarios and questions you can have your candidates dig into. Remember – the goal here isn’t a set of perfect answers – it’s how your candidates approach the problem.
Not seeing something in the list above that works for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Post in the comments below.