How to hire new functions (for the first time)
Some lessons learned and practical tips!
About Me
Hi, I’m Stephanie, a Product Lead at Pave. After 6 years at Segment, I joined Pave in January, and I’m rounding out my second month here.
Why talk about hiring?
With 30 interviews under my belt, the majority of my time at Pave has definitely been focused on hiring. As someone who’s done a decent amount of product recruiting, it’s been humbling to realize just how different the recruiting process is across roles and company stages. I’ve learned a lot, so I thought I’d write about it.
Hiring new functional leaders
One of the most exciting parts of joining a startup in a leadership role is helping build the team. But it can quickly become anxiety inducing when you realize there’s urgency to hire not one, but many different roles.
If you’ve hired for a role before, you have a paved road ahead of you: meet your recruiters, set up your interview loops and you’re off. But if you’re hiring for new roles, especially leaders of a new function – especially one that might not be yours – the path ahead can feel more like a dirt track: you’ve never hired the role before, you’ve never done the functional job, and it’s a key hire because this person will be building out their own team.
As a product leader, I traveled this dirt track recently running a search for Pave’s first Product Marketing Manager (PMM) lead, as someone who is not a PMM.
Here are three lessons from the experience of hiring for a functional leader – especially for a function that is not my own.
Learning #1. Find your external experts to help you build the role
Interviewing experts is the most efficient way to create a clear candidate profile and a first class interview loop. Talk to two or three people who have hired the same role successfully at companies you admire. At a minimum, you should get their interview loops, their assessment of the talent market, and their thoughts on your role (what seniority? insights on compensation? any referrals?!)
From conversations with three PMM leaders I quickly became confident in three things:
Pave needed a player-coach, who could do both urgent IC work and hire the team.
Top tier companies were taking up to 6 months to hire a senior PMM. Pave needed to find great referral candidates if we didn’t want to wait this long.
These expert interview loops are going to become my interview loop 🙂 The questions were useful, but the rubrics were especially valuable. Calibrating a good vs. great PMM was not a skill I had honed yet, and these templates made it much easier.
Thank you Kevin Garcia, Andy Schumeister and Jaleh Rezai for being my PMM experts.
Learning #2: Creating a totally new function is a skill - test for it in your process
It’s easy to create an interview loop that purely tests for the skills needed to do the functional job (i.e. being a great PMM). But if this person will be the first of their function, there is actually quite a lot more to the job than just management. At a minimum, they need to educate the company on what they do and actually operationalize the function successfully.
I created an interview to test for this skillset, given its importance to the role. In addition to giving us signal on the candidate’s excitement and ability to do this “founding work”, it really helped set the candidates expectations: this work is coming for you should you choose to accept - get ready!
Learning #3: Good candidates should teach you things
High caliber leaders have spent a lot of time thinking about their function. This should absolutely show up in the interview process. Tactically, this looks like teaching you new things that force you to question assumptions you’ve held up to this point. In doing this, a candidate both showcases their domain expertise and their willingness to proactively challenge you.
There were many things I learned when talking with excellent PMM candidates. I learned about hiring strategy; when to think about hiring specialist PMMs vs. generalist as you grow a team. I also learned the importance of balance in partnering with Sales and Product, and what can practically fall apart when you over rotate to serve just one.
When I learned things from candidates, my overwhelming feeling was relief. These were folks who could provide great PMM leadership and guidance to not just their team - but also to me and other leaders in the company. This is exactly what Pave needed!
I hope these learnings are helpful as you begin your hiring journey. Good luck and let me know how it goes!