GuideHow marketing gets bought
The first marketing hire
Definition
The first salaried marketing role in the company. It is a sequencing question: the right hire is set by what the company already has, and it goes wrong when the ad is written before that stocktake.
How you recognize it
Start with what exists. A company with a plan and someone senior holding it should hire a specialist: the plan names the constraint, and you buy the hands for it. A company with neither should expect a generalist hired to “do marketing” to become a request queue; work arrives from the founder and from sales and gets done in the order it arrived, and nobody can say whether it was the right work. Direction has to exist before hands can be pointed. If nobody inside can set it, the first thing to buy is direction, senior and possibly part-time, and the specialist comes second.
What to watch for
The job ad lists six specialisms in one role; nobody is senior in six, so whoever signs will be junior in most of the job. The salary is budgeted for hands while the expectation is direction, and that gap surfaces early, as a strategy you are writing yourself. The reporting line is settled last or left open: a first marketer reporting to a founder with no hours for them works unmanaged, and one reporting to the head of sales becomes sales support. Where the role reports is where its priorities will come from, so settle that before the ad goes out.
The question you ask
“Do we have a plan for this person to execute, or are we hiring them to write it?”