🤝How to hire superstar growth leaders – with Anish Shah (CEO at Bring Ruckus)⭐️

This episode features Anish Shah, CEO of Bring Ruckus, a firm focused on attracting, vetting and recruiting the best talent in growth – that includes digital marketing, product, analytics, and design.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🤔The key challenges Anish’s clients face while hiring talent.

🤝How a founder looking to hire growth talent should begin to cultivate relationships with potential growth hires.

⛔️Why brilliant growth hires at the wrong stage of a company’s growth can not only set back a company’s growth but also its culture.

🌟What top growth candidates look for in a company.

😖What a common unsavory experience is among top growth candidates.

🗣Why Anish doesn’t advise CEOs to go out and pitch growth hires that they’d make millions – and what he advises them to say instead.

🙅🏻‍♀️Why job boards are not ideal for recruiting the best candidates.

💎How Anish advises companies to differentiate themselves and why that is so important

KEY QUOTES

Superstars are scarce

You just have such a small pool to choose from of people who’ve got the background of building up popular companies, of running all the channels, of really having that level of muscle memory. So, if there’s 100 companies trying to hire 40 people, what do you do then?

The stark difference in company culture

Within a big company, you can rain down a little bit of terror on the employees below you, and you can get away with that. Within a startup, when you do that, it really demotivates people because you need to have that passion in there. So it can not only set back your traction, but it can also set back your culture, and it’s just really demotivating the people on the ground floor who are doing all the day to day work.

How not to incentivize people to join

So these days, when I’m really trying to convince the best people to join one of our clients, I don’t go out there saying, “Oh my god, you’re going to make millions off this equity.” It’s 2020, nobody’s making millions off equity anymore. It’s not 2009.

What matters to growth superstars

I really pitch them that, “Hey, look, meet the CEO, make sure you grow a good relationship with them; and look, I’m letting the CEO know as well that they need to take care of you.” These are the 3 or 4 pitfalls that I can foresee happening in the role potentially. If you do not take care of this set of growth hire, and so you need to be very aware of that.

An often overlooked opportunity when hiring

You might go to a company’s careers page and they all look the same, you have that same team photo where everyone’s throwing their arms up in the air and everyone says the same things about themselves that every other company does. But those pages are really an opportunity for you to differentiate yourself, not just look like everyone else, don’t just look at every other company and try to emulate it. Figure out what’s super unique about you and what’s super unique about your culture and dive into it.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Anish to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Anish, welcome to the show.

Anish: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

Shamanth: Awesome Anish. There’s so much of your work that I’m very, very curious about, especially because I would think it’s a very challenging job for yourself and for your clients because growth talent is so scarce, as I’ve myself seen, just in my own experience in the growth world. So tell us this, what are some of the key challenges that your clients face when it comes to hiring growth talent?

Anish: Yeah, absolutely. Really the key challenge is supply and demand. Particularly in a city like New York, growth hires are more in demand than I think in any other city, and everyone is looking to hire the exact same people. So I think the difficulties are

you just have such a small pool to choose from of people who’ve got the background of building up popular companies, of running all the channels, of really having that level of muscle memory. So, if there’s 100 companies trying to hire 40 people, what do you do then?

Also, I think with regards to growth people, especially the best ones, they’re not going to just show up on your doorstep, they’re not going to apply to your job listing online, you have to actively cultivate relationships with them even if the timing isn’t exactly right. You might not be hiring the exact role for them, they might not be on the market, but you have to put in a lot of work throughout your tenure as a founder or CEO if you’re really trying to bring in the key executive growth hires. It’s a lot of work, and you’ve got to go through a lot of conversations with people. I think the core kind of challenge is that whole supply and demand issue.

Shamanth: Yeah, and something you said in your answer jumped out at me — this was the phrase “cultivating relationships with potential growth hires.” I’m curious, let’s say, there’s a first time founder, they are starting to see some traction, and they want to bring their first growth hire on. How would you advise that they cultivate relationships to start to bring that particular growth hire in?

Anish: It’s a great question. I think one of the best ways to get started is to have a couple of good advisors on your team who already have a lot of those connections. If you’re raising a round to start it off as a first time founder, you can go to one of your seed investors, things like that, ask around; and honestly, if you are building your company and it’s a legit company — you have a good product, you have a little bit of funding — look at the market at people who have worked at other companies in your industry, see who the big names are, and you could probably drop a few of them a cold email and say, “Hey, can we get some coffee.”

I think you’ll be successful in at least getting a couple of conversations. If they’re great connectors, and if they know a lot of people in the industry, they’ll be able to bring other people to you as well. Obviously, working with a company like ours, we’d help bring some of those people to your doorstep as well, but I think it’s important to have a few of those conversations at first to even understand what growth is. We’re working with a company soon, they’re not even officially our client, but it’s someone I met at an ecom growth event that was hosted by a few VCs, and it’s a person who has a great company, a great product, something that’s really unique to the market, but when I talked to him about all the different kinds of growth channels that he was working on, they were so behind the curve in comparison to how great the product actually was.

I’m not even trying to pitch him on working with us to hire a great head of growth or anything like that, I basically set him up with 4 different tier 1 growth people to have a conversation with so he can start to get a landscape of what different opinions are. I think when you talk to 4 growth people, all are going to think they’re all geniuses, and they’re all going to give you 4 different directions on how they would approach your problems. I think it’s important to get all of that information digested and then start to think about how you would want to go out to the market whether you need a full time hire, whether you need a real great consultant, whatever it is. I think the first step is really doing your best to get some of those early conversations with really smart people who have good experience.

Shamanth: Yeah, and you have to put yourself out there. And not to segue too much from our topic of conversation, but I think that’s something you’re very, very good at, just reaching out to people cold because I feel like we met because you reached out to me cold, so I feel like that’s something you’re very good at — I would even go so far as to say is one of your superpowers.

Anish: Thank you.

Shamanth: Sure, and to get back to our questions, at what stage should a company start to look for their first growth hire, and what are the signs that a company should look for? What positions should the company first look to fill around growth?

Anish: Absolutely, particularly when we’re talking about earlier stage companies, I really take Maslow’s approach – at the very base of your hierarchy of needs of building a startup, you need to have a great product that has proven to get customers who really like what you’re doing, to get traction with them in one way or another. Obviously, the term that’s most popularized these days is Product/Market Fit, but you really should not be looking for a full time growth hire prior to getting Product/Market Fit. This is actually a mistake I’ve seen a lot of companies do, and it’s actually a great source of candidates for us because companies hire very early on with the promise of great products and great funding, and whatnot – then they put a product into market and realize, “Oh, this isn’t exactly what the market actually wanted; this isn’t exactly what our target customers wanted,” and then they have to pull back a little bit.

And if they hired a really great growth person, that person just has to sit on their hands because they don’t have a product to actually grow, they can’t run ads, they can’t do anything else. I think you really have to utilize whatever resources you have available, whether that’s the founders going and launching the first few paid ads, launching the first few emails themselves, doing their best to hustle to get on a couple podcasts, build a couple of partnerships, whatever it is, get your product in the hands of some people, get a little bit of traction.

It could be just from consultants as well — you don’t bring in someone for one month to start building out some of your early campaigns – and make sure that they’re trending in the direction, and that you don’t have any major product issues. You might sell your first 40 products through digital ads and then realize you have major inventory issues have to pull back, or your product is defective in some way or whatever it is — really nail that core in terms of you have a product that people want, it works well, and that the basic levers are working well.

Then I think you can bring a good growth hire in because I think the goal of a growth hire isn’t to figure out the very, very, beginning of how to get your product in the hands of the first 50 people, that’s really what the founders should be thinking about. The goal of a great growth hire is to add fuel to the fire and take it to the next level and make it a viable business.

Shamanth: Right, and certainly hiring too early is a mistake very many companies make, and very many startups make. What might be some of the other common mistakes that companies tend to make when they attempt to hire growth talent?

Anish: I have quite a few. Obviously, we’ve seen a lot of different hires coming into different types of companies. I would say, not necessarily understanding the stage where the company is at and bringing in talent who has most of their experience at a completely different stage. It’s very tempting if you’re an earlier stage company to bring in someone who has the pedigree and all the marks on their resume and worked at the big popular companies within your industry and whatnot. It’s obviously very tempting to bring that person in, but very frequently someone who comes from a very structured environment or maybe someone who’s extremely senior, they’re not going to know how to operate incredibly well within a start-up. Obviously, there’s plenty of people who have made that transition well, and they’ve proven what I just said wrong, but I see that going wrong very frequently where you might bring someone out of a major company like a Google or other very large, kind of more corporate structure, more hierarchical organizations, and they’re just not people who are able to come in and not have very many resources at their behest. They struggle, and it ends up not being the right move — either they get pushed out or end up leaving themselves.

Then on the opposite end, I think it’s also true – someone who’s incredibly scrappy, someone who’s incredibly entrepreneurial, because someone who’s not used to having to wait for permission, it’s very tempting for a big company to hire those people because they want to move faster, and they want to bring some of that startup-y entrepreneurial energy and some more innovation into their organization. But the reality is, I’ve seen those hires go very wrong as well, where these are people who are not used to having to wait a few weeks to get permission on something they want to do. They’re not used to making PowerPoint presentations just to prove why they should move forward with one of their objectives. So they’ll get frustrated, they won’t understand why there’s so many power dynamics that you have to deal with just to get things done, and they’ll move on too. I think it’s important to understand what stage you’re at as a company, and you’ve got to make the right hire for the kind of stage of company you’re at.

Shamanth: Right, yeah. And certainly, some of these mistakes can be very, very critical and they could set a company back very substantially. So to get back to…

Anish: Just to add to that, not only in terms of traction, but also in terms of culture – when you hire a VP or C-level growth person, and there’s actually a couple of interviews I’ve had recently with people who had some of that bigger company experience, and then when I’ve chatted with the CEOs of those companies, it really did set back the culture of the organization where they came in.

Shamanth: Yeah, that can certainly be the case. To get back to something you said earlier, you said the top growth candidates don’t really need to apply to job boards, they literally have people knocking down their doors. So clearly, some of the top growth candidates have a lot of choice. What are some of the things that these top growth candidates look for in a position or company – these could be obvious things, non-obvious things, what are some of the key things that these people look for?

Anish: Yeah, absolutely, it’s an amazing question, and it’s one that I feel like a lot of CEOs and founders maybe don’t get right. I think, for the most part, when you talk to growth people who are seasoned enough, who have worked at a couple of companies, who are well-connected in the community and have heard other people’s stories, you’re going to have had an experience somewhere within your career that was very unsavory. I’ve noticed that the very unsavory experiences are starting to sound fairly similar between a wide variety of people, and I think one real core tenet to having an unsavory experience is that you just weren’t taken care of by your CEO and your board.

They did not go to bat for you, and that made your experience really poor at whatever company you’re at, and that’s why you moved on.

So these days, when I’m really trying to convince the best people to join one of our clients, I don’t go out there saying, “Oh my god, you’re going to make millions off this equity.” It’s 2019, nobody’s making millions off equity anymore. It’s not 2009.

That whole pitch falls flat to the best people, and I advise every CEO don’t ever go out there to the market and say, “I’m going to make you rich” — it just feels gross and salesy. But instead, go out there and tell the best hire, “Hey, I’m going to take care of you, you’re going to be given a job that is feasible, you’re going to be given a job with metrics and goals and a team, and all of that’s going to be reasonable; we’re not going to give you some moonshot to go after that you’re never going to be capable of hitting and you’re just going to get frustrated over and over again.”

I think when I’m bringing people in,

and make sure you’re communicating with this person before they come in through the door with that, “Hey, look, we’re going to have a conversation, and we’re going to communicate about all of this, but all the way through, we’re a team, and I’m going to take care of you. It’s not going to be hierarchical, I’m not going to have you come into this organization and just beat down on you week over week if your metrics are down 2%. This is a journey, we’re both going to take it together.” That’s really how I’ve gotten a couple of our really strong people to join companies recently, and they weren’t paid more than market rate, but they just had a really good peace of mind in joining certain companies.

Shamanth: Right, yeah, and that relationship, that collaborativeness is something that oftentimes gets lost in a lot of traditional hiring processes where some hiring managers are like, “Right, let’s just put out a job description, people will come to our door, we will treat them really well.” Oftentimes that doesn’t work with some of the best candidates.

Anish: Absolutely. Something like that actually works very well in our favor. When a company takes those lazy methods, so to speak, and expects something really phenomenal to happen, and then it doesn’t; and then a couple of months later, they’re like, “Wait, it’s been two months, we haven’t found anybody that we’ve liked” — hat’s when a company will come to us and ask us to go do our job to find them the best people. Job boards are the laziest way to apply for a job, and I don’t recommend anybody to rely on job boards and just use a single click. You’ve got to get out there, you’ve got to meet people, and you’ve got to get a little more aggressive and a little bit more unique about how you’re going to meet people. But yeah, those lazy methods have been great for our business.

Shamanth: Something you talk about is how companies should position themselves to attract the best growth talent. You touched on some of that in terms of speaking about the kind of outreach you expect the most effective CEOs to be making. But how else would you recommend that companies position themselves well to attract the best folks, and what are some of the first steps that a company might take?

Anish: I think a lot of companies don’t do the work to figure out what is their unique value proposition, what about them makes them different from other companies out in the market – is it that you have a really impressive founding team? Is it that your product is in a unique market that nobody else has touched? Is it that you have really great investors? Is it that your Glassdoor reviews are sparkling? I think really figuring out those two or three unique value propositions that set you apart from other companies is really the way to go to stand out and get some people at your doorstep. Also being a lot more direct about them –

you might go to a company’s careers page and they all look the same, you have that same team photo where everyone’s throwing their arms up in the air and everyone says the same things about themselves that every other company does. But those pages are really an opportunity for you to differentiate yourself, not just look like everyone else, don’t just look at every other company and try to emulate it. Figure out what’s super unique about you and what’s super unique about your culture and dive into it.

Don’t be vague. Be as transparent as possible. Be as direct as possible. I think that’ll actually help you stand out. For our clients, we actually build up full landing pages for multiple of their executive roles where we go through this exercise with them. We try to figure out what are the two or three things about them that’s incredibly interesting to the best people out there and focus on that.

Shamanth: Everything you say, Anish, highlights that while hiring the best growth people is hard, it’s by no means impossible, and there’s a very clear path that a lot of founders, a lot of leaders can follow to get great growth talent, to be positioned to attract the best growth talent in their companies. Anish…

Anish: Absolutely.

Shamanth: This was incredible – this was incredibly insightful. Thank you for being on the Mobile User Acquisition Show. I hope to see you around sometime.

Anish: Absolutely, thank you Shamanth.

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