The job description arrives in my inbox about once a month. It reads roughly like this.
Marketing Manager. Own our marketing strategy, produce content across channels, manage paid campaigns, run email marketing, coordinate trade shows, and report on analytics.
That is six jobs. It is being offered at one mid-level salary, to one person, usually the first marketing person the company has ever employed. Nine months later the founder tells me marketing did not work out and they are thinking about an agency instead.
The person was not the problem. The order was.
The job description that guarantees failure
Nobody is genuinely good at all six of those things. The candidate you hire will be strong at two, adequate at two, and out of their depth at two. They will still be accountable for all six.
So they do what any reasonable person does under those conditions. They spread themselves across every channel, each of which needed real focus, and produce work that is shallow everywhere. The paid campaigns run without proper testing. The content goes out inconsistently. The email programme gets built once and never optimised. Every individual piece looks like it is happening, and none of it compounds.
Then there is the harder problem underneath. That job description asks one person to decide what to do and then do it. Those are different skills with different price tags, and combining them at a mid-level salary is where the whole thing comes apart.
Decide what the first hire is actually for
Strategy is deciding what to do. Who you target, what you say to them, which channels to use, and, most importantly, what you refuse to chase. Execution is doing the chosen work well.
Senior people who genuinely do both exist and they are expensive, well beyond what most companies under 50 people plan to spend on their first marketing salary. When a company does stretch to afford one, the usual outcome is a senior person writing LinkedIn posts, which is an expensive way to buy content production.
So answer the question honestly before writing any job description. Do you know who your best customer is, what makes you different, and which two or three channels are worth your money? If yes, you need a doer. If no, hiring a doer will leave you with someone producing work in channels nobody has justified, and hiring a strategist at a doer's salary will leave you with someone who cannot deliver what they recommend.
Hire the doer, rent the strategy
For most companies this size, the sequence that works is to rent the thinking and hire the doing.
A fractional CMO or an experienced advisor a few days a month sets direction, defines the customer, chooses the channels, and reviews the work. A full-time execution hire owns the doing and reports to the founder with that direction in hand. The combination usually costs less than one senior generalist and produces considerably more, because each part is being done by someone whose actual strength it is.
It also solves the problem that makes first hires fail quietly: a junior or mid-level person left to set their own strategy will default to activity. They will produce content, post consistently, and run campaigns, because activity is visible and strategy is uncomfortable to do alone. Nobody wants to tell a founder that the channel they are excited about is a waste of money.
The one case where this flips is a company that already has clear positioning and needs someone to run a specific channel properly. Then hire that specialist directly and skip the advisory layer.
What the first hire should actually own
Narrow the role until it is a job rather than a category.
"Owns marketing" is not a job description. "Owns content production and the pipeline it generates" is. "Owns paid acquisition and cost per qualified lead" is. One channel, one number, one person.
A narrow role does two useful things. It lets both sides know inside a quarter whether it is working, and it stops the person being held responsible for outcomes in channels nobody resourced. The classic version of that unfairness is a content hire who gets asked in month six why trade show leads are not converting.
Tie the number to something real. If you have run the conversion math backwards from a revenue target, you already know how many qualified leads the business needs, and that is the number the role should carry. A goal invented by adding 20 percent to last year gives the hire nothing to work with.
How to interview for it
If you are not a marketer, interview conversation will not tell you much. Marketing candidates are good at talking about marketing. Use a short exercise instead.
Ask them to look at your website before the interview and come with the single change they would make first, and why. That one question sorts the field quickly. Strong candidates ask about your customers, your sales cycle, and what data exists before proposing anything. Weaker candidates arrive with tactics: redesign the homepage, start a podcast, run ads on LinkedIn, none of it connected to who buys from you.
Three questions worth asking in the room:
- Tell me about a campaign that failed and what you learned. People who have actually run things answer immediately, with numbers and a specific decision they would change. People who have watched give you a paragraph about brand awareness.
- Walk me through the numbers on something you owned end to end. Ownership shows up in detail. Vague answers usually mean they were adjacent to the work.
- What would you need from me to succeed here? A good answer includes access to customers, a clear decision-maker, and honesty about what the business will not do. Candidates who say they need nothing have not done this before.
Ask what they would stop doing, too. A candidate willing to recommend cutting something in an interview will be willing to say it in month four, which is when it matters.
Give it the right amount of time
Expect two to three quarters before meaningful pipeline impact, and longer if your sales cycle runs long. The first quarter goes to learning the business, talking to customers, and finding out what the existing data actually says.
Judging at 90 days measures onboarding rather than performance. What you should see by then is clear thinking, sensible prioritisation, and a plan you can follow. If the plan does not exist at 90 days, or you cannot follow the reasoning behind it, that is a real signal, and it is different from the numbers not having moved yet.
When to hire the second person
The signal is not that the first hire is busy. Everyone is busy. The signal is that they are repeatedly choosing between two things that both genuinely need doing, and the choice costs you either way.
Make the second hire deliberately complementary rather than another generalist. If the first person creates, the second should run operations, analytics, and campaign mechanics. If the first person runs demand generation, the second should produce content. Two generalists split the same six-job problem into two three-job problems, which is better but still wrong.
And keep the reporting line to the founder while the team is small. Marketing decisions sit on top of positioning and pricing, and those are founder decisions. Putting the first hire under sales usually converts them into a sales support function, which is a reasonable job but not the one you thought you were filling.
The takeaway
Before you post the role, answer one question honestly: do you know who your best customer is and why they buy? If the answer is no, whoever you hire will spend six months working that out, and that is strategy work you did not budget for and cannot evaluate.
Get the positioning roughly right. Rent the thinking if you need to. Then hire one person to own one channel and one number, and give them three quarters to make it work.