Jessica Li
In an earlier article, I wrote about how and when to build go-to-market teams at deep tech companies. There, I noted that it is more important for growth hires at deep tech companies to have functional expertise than industry expertise.
But how do deep tech companies connect and cultivate strong relationships with talented nontechnical growth people outside of their industry? In this article, I answer this question, articulating exactly how to:
- Write role descriptions that entice talented growth people.
- Create company marketing materials that brands your startup well to talent.
- Craft thoughtful end-to-end candidate experiences for growth talent.
- Close top growth candidates.
Write a job description that explains how you operate
Underscore the autonomy. Incredible growth people are independent and creative and are drawn to environments that explicitly value these traits. Growth talent wants to know that they have room to experiment, fail and iterate with the support and trust of their company. Highlight the creative agency you give to your growth team. Paint the role as one of managing a subset of the startup and its initiatives.
Show you are ready for a growth marketer. Do not expect your growth person to be a panacea for the company. Growth people work cross-functionally, but there are boundaries where the growth role starts and ends. Growth people cannot sell a product that is not ready. Growth people cannot fix product bugs. Growth people cannot replace excellent customer service. Ensure your role description is clear on what the growth person would do and what they would lean on other teams for. Demonstrate that you have a team structure in place where a growth marketer could fit in and thrive.
Articulate your talent needs. Growth is a broad category. Some growth marketers are more creative. Others are more quantitative. Some have more industry experience. Others have more functional experience. Be clear on what type of growth marketer you need and how this person’s talents would complement those of the existing team.
Use marketing to share your history and chart the future
Generate excitement and establish credibility. People can naturally be skeptical about new technologies and younger companies. Do anything you can to ameliorate these concerns. Link to relevant news articles from well-known publications and thought leaders in your industry. Incorporate customer testimonials that speak to the transformative impact your product creates. Name drop well-known advisors, investors and team members.
Highlight your impact. People are drawn to deep tech companies because of the world-altering, life-saving impact they can have. Deep tech operators love dreaming big and discussing game-changing moonshot ideas. Connect with this passion by putting a face to your impact story. Make your company’s impact feel real and tangible. Go beyond customer quotes and short testimonials to tell the full story of a customer and how their life was changed by your technology. Include their name (with their permission), their background story, their photo and even their voice to truly bring your impact narrative to life.
Share your own founding journey. People join startups ultimately for the team, so let candidates get to know you as a person. Be open, human and vulnerable. Share more on what drove you to quit more mainstream, stable jobs to found a company. Talk about the challenges you could not get out of your head and had to found a startup to tackle. Even discuss times you may have felt lost or doubted yourself but persevered and found success with your team. In sharing your motivations and fears you connect more deeply with people, and they become more bought in on you and your vision.
Explain the “why now?” Many people dream of joining a startup someday, but they keep putting off doing so because they are afraid of the risks. Preempt and address this concern by articulating the role of timing. Answer the “why now?” What are the multifaceted tailwinds in the industry and the world that make now the exact best time to join your startup?
Leverage third-party validation. Have thought leaders and network leaders in your industry (who do not work for you) share your job posting and add their own verbiage around why they are excited about you and your company. Just like earned media is more powerful than owned media, third-party validation is more impactful than solely your recruiters sharing.
How and when to build marketing teams at deep tech companies
Conduct authentic outreach
Use your own cultural voice. Instead of drawing on templates and conforming to boring industry standard language, make your quirkiness shine through. One of my favorite job outreach messages was one that used Leslie Knope (character from the famous show “Parks and Recreation”) as an example of the kind of super organizer the company was looking for. Craft your messages in a similar way. Drop in a nerdy joke or a geeky pun. People want to work with fun humans, not robots. Let your personality shine through!
Write personalized messages. It is easy to tell when someone is reaching out with a generic copy and paste message. With the surge in demand for growth talent, growth people are being reached out to many times a week, if not everyday. Make your message stand out by adding layers of personalization. Allude to their prior experiences, including less-obvious ones outside of their current role, such as an interesting project they may have done several jobs ago or in university. Show alignment with your role even and especially when that alignment is less obvious. People can immediately see when you have taken the time to not only try to understand them but also try to connect with them at the passion and long-term goals level.
Have an open house. People join a startup ultimately for the people. At a startup, you will be working through massive challenges and long hours with your team, so it is crucial that the team gels well together. Candidates know this and want to get a deep understanding of the culture prior to joining or even applying. In the age of COVID, getting to know people and getting a sense of culture is challenging, so provide a virtual platform for candidates to get to know you not just through formal interview conversations. Instead, have an open house with the explicit goal of getting to know people as people, not as candidates. Let candidates meet everyone on your team, not just their interviewers. Do breakout rooms or play a fun game.
Ask fun questions. Avoid template questions. Great startup growth operators love solving new challenges, thinking deeply and working creatively on interdisciplinary projects. Make your interview process engaging for them by asking questions that tap into these talents. Give them a thoughtful problem to solve or at least think about, maybe even one you are facing at your company now. By asking thoughtful questions and providing thoughtful projects, you demonstrate greater empathy for the role and provide the ideal platform for growth people to showcase their talents to you.
Be thoughtful when making an offer
Offer equity. Growth is a very revenue-tied role, and you want your growth person to be incentive aligned and focused on the financial impact they have.
Articulate concrete career growth opportunities. You want to hire growth talent that stays with your team for the long haul. Having consistency in your growth team is crucial. Growth is a function that takes time to build: At the start, you spend months experimenting with different channels and figuring out what works and what does not work. With this insight, you iteratively craft and implement better growth strategies. Having someone with not only the raw talent but the nuanced understanding of your company’s growth channels is critical. To incentivize growth talent to stay with your company, be intentional and thoughtful about opportunities for them to grow their skill set and careers within the company.
Involve investors and board members. When closing candidates, consider involving your investors, advisors or board members, especially ones who have high profiles in the industry. Doing so leverages the aforementioned powerful third-party validation, establishes more credibility for your brand and brings your full community of team and board members closer together.
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