I made this when our VP of Growth told me to start recruiting a growth marketer for HubSpots then-new customer service product. I understood the role but I’d never hired for it before. It ended up being a five-month journey of finding someone to join our team.

The #1 lesson I learned during the hiring process is recruiting is shockingly similar to customer acquisition. My favorite customer acquisition framework is Ramit Sethi’s concept of “Go where the fish are.” You start by identifying what type of fish you want to catch, figure out where those fish are swimming, and then cast your net.

The first step is to identify the fish I want to catch — identifying 

 who we need on our team. I’m asking questions such as:

What are the personality traits of our dream candidate?

What impact have they had in previous roles?

What technical skills does this person need to have 

? What skills are not as urgent that they could learn in the future?

 projects this person would focus on during their first three months on the job?

Where do they learn about marketing? How do they think about personal and professional development?

If I couldn’t answer these questions, I would simply waste everyone’s time. If I didn’t know what we needed, we would end up with someone we didn’t need.

As a result, I used these questions to build a “growth marketer scorecard” for our perfect candidate. The scorecard was divided into three buckets - personality, core skills, and technical skills - where each skill was ranked 1-5 after the interview.

The most important bucket is personality. It’s the toughest to change. Examples include if they enjoy autonomy, thrive in challenging environments, and obsess about self-improvement.

The second most important bucket is core skills. They transcend the entire funnel and take a while to teach. Examples include their quality of writing, how they empathize with the customer, and make decisions from a mixture of data and consumer psychology.

The least important bucket is technical skills. Examples include fluency in HTML or CSS, SEO keyword research, or running basic CRO experiments.

The next step was turning this scorecard into a job description.

Scott Tousley

While at HubSpot, I developed this hiring scorecard before kicking off the hiring process, to help the team get really crisp on what they were looking for in a new hire and why.

Growth marketer hiring scorecard at HubSpot

Growth Marketer Scorecard

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