How to Hire a Growth Marketer?

The searches for growth marketing managers have grown by 360% in the last year as per Google Trends. It’s the era of fast-paced growth for startups and Growth Marketers are leading the transformation toward modern and disruptive ways of marketing for organizations. 

With more new businesses opening up than ever before, technology innovations being brought up every single day, and consumer demand changing directions rapidly – standing out among the noisy landscape has become tricky. 

Enter growth marketing, which has now become an integral part of scaling up businesses. Gone are the days when acquiring customers was almost guaranteed with paid ads and inorganic marketing. Modern businesses need a strategic combination of virality, word of mouth, and organic growth. 

It's evident you need to hire top Growth Marketers to accelerate your customer acquisition and drive business growth. But what should you look out for in growth marketing candidates? How can you hire an ideal Growth Marketer? What are the steps you would need to 

We find answers to all of these, and more in this blog. Stick around for a deep insightful discussion about how to hire a Growth Marketer for your company. 

What is The Role of a Growth Marketer?

You will find different organizations having their own versions of the role of a Growth Marketer. While it tells you how versatile the role is, you also need to deeply understand the various role and responsibilities of a Growth Marketing candidate. 

Unlike traditional marketers who primarily work on the top of the funnel, Growth Marketers hold the stakes for the entire customer acquisition funnel. In other words, a Growth Marketer acts as a marketing manager who drives revenue and not just leads.

To understand how significantly the role differs from that of a marketer, let’s take a look at the sales funnel, which typically looks like:

1. Awareness
2. Acquisition
3. Activation
4. Retention
5. Referral
6. Revenue

Traditional marketing covers only the top two stages, i.e. awareness and acquisition of the sales funnel. Growth Marketing, on the other hand, covers the entire funnel from awareness to revenue.

Now as Growth Marketers work in each stage of the funnel, their roles are multifaceted at the ground level. Growth Marketers are responsible for the entire customer base, growing the base, retaining more customers, and building a prolific brand in the middle of all revenue-oriented practices. 

To sum it up, the goal of Growth Marketers is to capitalize on all the growth opportunities (and even create some) for your business. To fulfill an organization’s growth objectives, a Growth Marketer should be well versed in the following:

• Search engine optimization
• Content marketing
• Paid search / Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Paid social
• Email marketing
• Acquisition marketing
• Conversion-rate optimization
• Well versed with Marketing, CRM, and Analytics tools like Google Analytics, Hubspot, GetReponse, ActiveCampaign, Userpilot and more

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For all the chores, Growth Marketers follow the same workflow:

Ideate→ Experiment → Analyze → Release

A typical day for a Growth Marketer consists of the following responsibilities

• Building and executing growth plan in association with the senior executive team
• Ideating, creating, and updating marketing content
• Strategically planning, measuring, analyzing, and scaling paid campaigns
• Managing and continuously monitoring social acquisition channels
• A/B testing campaigns
• Brainstorming and implementing creative email campaigns 
• Initiating effective and engaging referral programs
• Using data-backed decisions for launching marketing campaigns and optimizing engagement and conversions

• Extracting key analytics data to create reports for stakeholders
• Keeping a close track of opportunities, challenges, and trends in markets and acting accordingly
• Working closely with data, sales, and product teams 

How to Hire a Growth Marketer: Step-By-Step? 

A Growth Marketer plays a huge role in driving business growth both as a marketing leader and a part of the growth team. By studying the latest trends, ideating creative campaigns, executing them constantly, and analyzing the results – Growth Marketers focus on creating data-driven strategies that improve key performance metrics. 

Throughout the sales funnel – from awareness to revenue, a Growth Marketer is responsible for proactively experimenting with marketing tactics and optimizing the key metrics.

While the skills required for a full-stack Growth Marketer are way too many, you should primarily check for management capabilities in your target candidates. Additionally, how hands-on a candidate is with data-driven experiments and rapid adaptations, defines how good a marketer they can be.

Step 1: Study Top Competitors and Create a Candidate Persona

Growth Marketing is not a role that has been there for long. It’s a fairly new role, and even the most expert recruiters fail to differentiate it from marketing and end up hiring the wrong candidates.

So prior to planning and sourcing talent for filling the role of Growth Marketer, find out how does an ideal candidate looks like.

Begin with competitor analysis of candidates hired for a similar role. Find out the professional backgrounds, experience, and more common aspects of Growth Marketers working with successful brands.

Analytical skills, creativity, data-driven actions, decision-making, adaptability, and core marketing expertise are the primary skills you should be looking for in a Growth Marketer. 

But skill requirements are not always enough. Fill up the following criteria for creating an ideal Growth Marketer candidate persona:

• Educational qualification
• Certification (if any required)
• Work experience - years and roles
• Similar industry experience  
• Hands-on experience with growth marketing tools
• Personality traits for culture-fit
• Career and life goals 

Step 2: Analyze Company-Specific Role Requirements

Now you know how to spot an ideal Growth Marketer. But how would you know if the candidate you pick would serve your company well? 

Growth Marketing is a wide spectrum of skills and responsibilities, and one persona cannot do it all – especially while scaling up. You need people specialized in SEO, content marketing, paid ads, media buying, and more verticals covered under growth.

So the next step is analyzing your company’s unique talent requirements, and business goals, and documenting the right expectations with the filling of this role.

Suppose you have a small growth team with members who are well-versed in SEO, SEM, and paid social. In that case, you need an expert in content marketing or social media growth.

The idea is to compliment your existing team’s skillset and yet bring quality talent who enable rapid growth.

Step 3: Prepare an Appealing Job Description 

The first thing candidates check out before applying to your job or replying to your outreach, is the job description. So your JD should be significantly appealing and persuasive in order to get top talent to apply to your recruitment. 

Ensure including the following in your job descriptions:

• Specific Job Title: Mention the exact job title clearly. For ex: Growth Marketing Associate, Growth Marketing Executive, etc.

• Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities needed to accomplish your organization’s growth marketing goals.

• Roles and Responsibilities: What will the candidate own and what will be all the potential roles and responsibilities of the growth team?

• Perks and Benefits: What does your organization offer to its employees?

• About the Company: Highlight the company’s legacy and growth so far.

Talent Acquisition Specialist Job Description Template

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Role
Growth Marketers are essential to a company's ability to market to customers and sell the items. They are responsible for managing the marketing department's workforce and budget, as well as forecasting and optimizing our marketing initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Creating strategic marketing initiatives to aid in achieving company objectives
• Collaborating with the sales, financial, public relations, and production departments to coordinate marketing plans
• Deploying effective marketing initiatives and take full responsibility for their execution from conception to completion
• Supporting integrated marketing and communications using a range of platforms and tools, including internal and external channels, PR, digital, social, and the web, among others
• Making a judicious allocation of finances and preparing and overseeing the marketing budget on a quarterly and annual basis
• Keeping research database current by locating and compiling marketing data
• Staying informed about industry trends and competitor’s marketing strategies
  

Requirements

• Proven experience as a Growth Marketer or similar position
• Familiarity with marketing analytics tools such as Google Analytics, NetInsight, Omniture, WebTrends, Hubspot, Userpilot, Ahrefs, and more tools
• Experience in using electronic marketing automation tools including HubSpot Marketing, Bitrix24
• Extensive knowledge of various aspects of marketing, including brand marketing, PR, content management, digital marketing & performance marketing
  

Soft Skills

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Good presentation and public speaking skills
• Good leadership and collaboration skills
• An analytical mind

Step 4: Source Growth Marketing Candidates

• Active Candidate Sourcing: Prepare captivating job posts  highlighting the excitement this role brings in for the ideal growth marketing candidates. Post the job across multiple job boards and portals including but not limited to: 

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• LinkedIn
• Indeed
• Instahyre
• ZipRecruiter
• Monster
• GlassDoor
• CareerBuilder
• Mayple
• MarketHire
• HireDigital

Also Read: LinkedIn Sourcing techniques to Find Ideal Candidates 

• Passive Candidate Sourcing: Around three-fourths of the overall workforce consists of passive candidates. They wouldn’t apply to your jobs themselves. The road to redemption? Reach out to these candidates on LinkedIn, Twitter, emails, and more platforms. Use persuasive messaging to trigger a response and engage with passive candidates continuously.

Step 5: Conduct Interviews/Assessments

Once you have sourced enough active and passive candidates, begin your recruitment process. Start evaluating candidates with assessment or direct interviews based on the seniority level you are hiring for.

If you’re building up your growth team and hiring entry-level employees, an assignment can be good to kickstart your recruitment. On the other hand, senior candidates can be ideally evaluated with interviews.   

Regardless of whether you are evaluating a growth marketing candidate sourced via active or passive sourcing, here are the four parameters you should always be covering:

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• Analytical skills
• Creative thinking
• Management and leadership capabilities 
• Outstanding communication skills

Step 6: Extend Offers and Onboard Candidates

Reach out to shortlisted candidates and inform them or negotiate the payroll. Once the candidates accept your offer verbally, finish up the documentation formalities quickly and share the offer letter.

Onboard your candidates when they sign and accept the offer letter. Also, do not forget to update the other candidates who were not shortlisted, with feedback.

Top Qualities of Successful Growth Marketers

A unique combination of design thinking and analytical ability make a Growth Marketer stand out in their job. Here are the top 5 qualities you should be seeking in your target Growth Marketer while hiring:

• They build up on creativity
• They trust data and not intuitions for marketing decisions  
• For them - channel is secondary, strategy is the primary goal
• They focus on the entire funnel as a customer journey
• They are innovative and adapt to changes faster 

Supercharge Your Hiring for Growth Marketer with Nurturebox 

Growth is one of the most critical departments of fast-growth companies today. While hiring Growth Marketers might sound easy in the first place, the supply of quality talent is much smaller when compared to demand. 

The most optimal way you can find great growth marketing talent as per your requirements and preferences is by accelerating your passive candidate sourcing and engagement. 

Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement automation platform. Let’s check out how you can capitalize on outbound recruiting of Growth Marketers using Nurturebox in a jiffy:

• Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
• On your LinkedIn profile, begin searching for Growth Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria.
• Add qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click.
• Automate candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp, and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.