The job ad reads: 'Marketing Manager. Own content, paid, events, product marketing, brand, and website. Must be a self-starter.' I understand why it's written that way — the founder genuinely does need all of it. But that role, at that seniority, at that budget, doesn't exist. Hiring for it is the most reliable way I know to waste a year.
Why the generalist hire fails
The person who accepts that role is usually two to four years into their career. They are competent, willing, and completely unequipped to decide what not to do — which is the actual job. So they do a bit of everything, at shallow depth, with no strategy underneath. Six months in, there's a blog with eleven posts, a paused ad account, a half-built webinar programme and no pipeline. That's not a performance failure. It's a scoping failure that happened before they were hired.
Separate the two jobs
There are two distinct roles hiding inside that job ad: someone who decides what to do, and someone who does it well. They're rarely the same person and almost never at the same price. The decision-making job is a handful of days a month and requires a decade of pattern recognition. The execution job is full-time and requires depth in one channel. Buying them separately costs less than one bad senior hire and works considerably better.
- Strategy and prioritisation: senior, part-time, expensive per day, cheap per month
- Execution: full-time, deep in one channel, hire for craft not breadth
- Everything else: contractors, on a defined brief, for a defined period
- Reassess the shape every six months — the right structure changes as you grow
Which specialism to hire first
It depends entirely on where your revenue actually comes from, which is a question most founders answer from memory rather than data. Look at your last twenty closed deals and find the common origin. If it's the founder's network and events, hire someone who can run field and partner marketing. If it's inbound search, hire a content and SEO specialist. If it's outbound, hire someone who can build lists and write sequences that don't sound like everyone else's. Hire toward the motion that's already working, not the one you wish were working.
What to give them on day one
A written ICP. A positioning statement. One number they own. A named person who makes decisions when they're stuck. Most first marketing hires get none of these and are then judged on their initiative. If you can't produce those four things, you're not ready to hire — and that's a genuinely useful thing to discover before you've made someone redundant twelve months later.
The most expensive marketing hire isn't the senior one. It's the junior one who spent a year doing a bit of everything because nobody senior had decided what mattered.
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