Leadership · 4 min read
The founder's guide to hiring your first marketing lead
It's one of the most important hires you'll ever make, and one of the easiest to get wrong. Miss on the timing, the type of person or the brief, and you can lose a year and a salary learning what you could have known going in.
Founders tend to make the same three mistakes with this hire: they make it too early, they hire for the wrong profile, and they brief it badly. Let's take them in order.
Don't hire until you have a signal to scale
Marketing leaders amplify what's working. If nothing is working yet, you don't have a marketing problem. You have a product or positioning problem, and no hire will fix it. The right time to hire is when you have early evidence that customers want what you've built and you simply can't keep up with making more of them aware of it.
A great marketing lead is an accelerant. Pour an accelerant on a fire that isn't lit and all you get is a smell.
Hire the profile that matches your stage
"Marketing" spans wildly different people. The brand strategist who built a category at a scale-up is rarely the scrappy operator who'll run your first paid experiments and write the emails themselves. At the earliest stage you almost always want a builder, not a manager.
- The builder: does the work themselves, comfortable with ambiguity, runs experiments, ships weekly. Right for your first hire.
- The architect: designs systems and strategy, hires and leads a team. Right once you have a team to lead.
- The specialist: world-class at one channel. A force multiplier later, a dangerous first hire now.
If you hire an architect before there's anything to architect, they'll spend your runway writing strategy and hiring people you can't yet afford.
Write a brief about outcomes, not activities
The worst job specs list responsibilities: "own social, manage the website, run campaigns." The best ones name outcomes: "in twelve months, we should have a repeatable channel that delivers qualified pipeline at a known cost." Hire against the second kind, and you'll attract people who think in results, not to-do lists.
Set them up to win in the first 90 days
- Give them direct access to customers in week one. Insight beats opinion.
- Agree the one number that defines success before they start.
- Protect their focus: one priority, not seven.
- Be honest about what's broken. They'll find it anyway; better they hear it from you.
The bridge before the hire
If you're not quite ready for a full-time leader but you're past doing it all yourself, this is exactly the gap a fractional CMO fills. You get an experienced pair of hands to find what's working, lay the foundations, and shape the role properly, so that when you do hire, you bring the right person into a setup that already works.
Done well, this hire changes the trajectory of the company. Done badly, it's an expensive lesson. The difference is almost always in the thinking you do before you post the job.