A hot hire for any young brand
Starting your own business can be both incredibly frustrating and incredibly rewarding. Once your company is ready to go, you face the challenge of hiring someone who can manage to keep your business going “full steam ahead.” While marketers are a good answer for this, there is another option: growth hackers.
What on Earth is a growth hacker? According to Sean Ellis, a growth hacker is someone whose forte is growth. Everything they do for you and your company will center on how decisions will impact scalable growth. Can you change from promoting your business on Twitter, to promoting on Pinterest? A growth hacker will ask, “does it help drive your growth forward?”
Can’t a marketer do the same thing?
There are people who will argue that a marketing expert can do the same thing, and this may be true, but as Ellis points out, “a marketer with the right talents and approach can kick some serious ass once product-market fit and an efficient conversion/monetized process have been proven. The problem is that most startups try to hire for skill and expertise that are irrelevant.” What he is saying is: You should focus less on a particular skill set for a particular job title and get someone who knows how to effect change in your company and keep a watchful eye on its growth, even if this means they are not a VP of Marketing type.
According to Ellis, you should look for someone who has the ability to take responsibility for growth and entrepreneurial drive; after all, that is a huge, risky, responsibility in of itself. But, the right growth hacker will have a deep desire to connect your target market with the appropriate solution. And for this they will need ingenuity, creativity, and the ability to test out and change up solutions and techniques.
The right person will also be disciplined and have the ability to prioritize their own ideas, as well as other members of the teams’ ideas and suggestions. And the faster they can articulate their ideas and work towards effecting a change that grows the business; the faster the process can be repeated for each new problem.
Finding someone who can take care of your business with the same care and concern you do is never easy, but, exploring other options, like growth hackers, can give you a larger pool to choose from when you begin the hiring and interviewing processes.
