The best way to scale your hiring in both volume and quality is to create a solid mini-project ("prompt") to allow candidates that look good "on paper" to demonstrate their Super-Powers, their passion to want to become part of your team, and their understanding of your business and the opportunity. Here are a few ideas to create your own "Screening Prompt." I've written them as an email that you can send to candidates that you have selected based on their profile (resume, and maybe a cover letter).
“Dear Jane,
Thank you for applying for the Digital Marketing Manager (aka "Growth Hacker") position at our company.
In addition to getting to know you through video- or in-person interviews, it’s going to be your work that will impress us. For that reason, we encourage you to complete one (or more) of the following prompts below before we take the next step.
To make your "homework" meaningful, we came up with three examples that are real and should be usable right away if you land the job.
FRICTION
Please "Mystery Shop" us, and share your findings. What's your experience as a prospect or visitor? How do we follow up and where do you see friction or potential confusion? What would you do to improve this early part of the funnel?
EXPERIMENTATION
Looking at our website and the content, please "design" and share an experiment that you would propose we run. An A/B or multi-variant test that would get us new insight and be actionable. How would you think about that and what criteria would you use to make this meaningful?
CONVERSION
As part of the mystery shopping, how would you improve our website content, email communication, and landing pages to drive engagement and have people take the next step? Feel free to write an example email that can be the first email someone would see from us and that has a great "Call-to-Action" (feel free to make up anything we would promise them in an email like that).
PICK
Feel free to pick any of the three examples that help you impress us. You can do more than one as well. This exercise is not about quantity though. It’s about letting your qualities and talents shine.
Thank you again for applying to become part of our team. This role is one of the most strategic positions on the team, and we look forward to seeing your work and get to know you better.
Please post your work as a google doc and share it with us as part of the next step in this journey.
Stijn"
I hope this helps you get great candidates. Many prospects will probably not take this leap, and I believe that's ok. You only should be talking with the potential hires who are willing to invest this type of effort into such an important decision.
Growth Hacker Job Description
Tools, data, analytics, dashboards, planning, web developer. Marketing automation. A/B tester. A competitive edge is a plus. Results oriented.
- Your philosophy for marketing is based on data. You live by the principle of “Always Be Testing” - Your day job is a constant series of optimization experiments with landing pages, emails, website layout, and navigation, digital ads, creative and messaging.
- You own the digital journey of the customer. You know it better than anyone else. You turn customer personas into real digital, data-driven, actionable segmentation. When your colleagues have an opinion, you can validate it with real data or a test.
- Funnel friction is your enemy. You’re constantly finding ways to make it easier for our prospects and buyers to move ahead in the funnel make decisions, provide us with information that allows us to better support them and drive conversions. You develop all the nurture campaigns (onboarding, loyalty, upsell) to maximize customer engagement and reduce churn.
- You have a deep bag of technical competencies. Front-end web development, Google Analytics, and various Marketing Automation tools like Hubspot are things you can teach others. You’ll always be on the lookout to automate and scale our marketing infrastructure with the newest developments, without using technology for technology's sake.
- For the marketing team, you own the communication about results and outcomes. You keep the team on their toes by constantly showing how we are doing vs. before, vs. benchmarks and vs. the competition. Dashboards, reports and constant questions are the tools you use to help us grow.
Your KPIs are Conversions (in the various stages of the marketing funnel), Funnel speed, CAC, Churn, and ARPU
