What I look for when I'm building a marketing team from scratch

I've built marketing teams from nothing more than once. A blank org chart, a budget, and a brief that usually says something like "we need to get serious about marketing."

Every time, I've made some version of the same mistakes early on, and every time I've learned something that changed how I approached the next one. Here's what I actually look for now when I'm building from scratch, along with a few things I've stopped caring about.

Curiosity over credentials

The most dangerous thing you can hire in marketing is someone who already thinks they know the answer. The market changes too fast, the customer changes too fast, and the tools change too fast for certainty to be a useful quality. What I want is someone who gets genuinely uncomfortable when they don't understand something, and immediately wants to fix that.

Degrees and certifications tell me very little. How someone talks about a campaign that didn't work tells me almost everything.

Commercial instinct

Marketing exists to serve a commercial outcome. That sounds obvious but you'd be surprised how many marketers have spent their careers disconnected from revenue, pipeline, or P&L. I need people who feel the connection between their work and the business result, not just the people who get excited about the creative or the campaign, but the ones who stay curious about whether it actually worked and why.

Someone who builds, not just runs

There's a meaningful difference between someone who can run an established function and someone who can build one. In a start-up or scale-up, you need builders. People who are comfortable with ambiguity, who don't need a process to exist before they can start work, and who find a blank canvas energising rather than paralysing.

I've made the mistake of hiring brilliant operators in to build situations. They're not bad people and they're not bad marketers. They're just wrong for the moment.

Diversity of thought over harmony

A marketing team that agrees with each other all the time is a marketing team that isn't thinking hard enough. I want people who will challenge a brief, push back on a strategy, and tell me when something doesn't make sense. That only works if you build a culture where it's safe to do that. That's on the leader, not the team.

The best team I ever built had people from completely different backgrounds, sectors and disciplines. They argued a lot. The work was significantly better for it.

What I've stopped caring about

Whether someone has worked in our sector before. Whether their CV follows a neat linear path. Whether they're the most polished person in the interview room.

Sector knowledge is learnable. A genuine audience marketer, someone who leads with understanding people rather than industries, will outperform a sector specialist almost every time. And the most interesting candidates I've hired have had the messiest CVs and the best answers to the question "tell me about something that went wrong."

Building a marketing team is one of the most important things a business can do. Get the culture right, hire for the moment you're actually in, and be honest about what you need versus what looks good on paper.

The rest tends to follow.

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