Hiring a great product marketer for your go-to-market strategy and helping your startup accelerate growth after finding PMF. As a specialized product marketing recruiter with over a decade of recruiting experience (including 2.5+ years owning PMM hiring at Datadog), I’ve learned what separates average candidates from the ones who drive real growth.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we hire product marketers for startups. What you can expect. And why our approach works.
Product Marketing Is a High-Leverage Hire
At a startup, PMMs wear a lot of hats. The best PMMs help you:
- Define your GTM Strategy
- Translate complex products into compelling narratives
- Align Product, Sales and Customer Success
- Act as the voice of the customer, truly understanding their pain and your value proposition
- Accelerate product-market fit and revenue growth
But finding them? It’s difficult. That’s where a focused product marketing recruiter comes in.
Step 1: Define “Great” for Your Stage
Before sourcing a single candidate, we work with founders, CMOs or VPs of Product Marketing to define what great means based on your stage, team, current challenges and roadmap.
Early-stage (Seed–Series A):
- We look for generalists who can do everything from positioning to launches, enablement and competitive analysis
- Candidates that have operated without playbooks and have experience building from 0 to 1 (this can be for a new product, within a large org)
Growth-stage (Series B+):
- We search for “generalists with spikes” – depth in specific areas like launches, segmentation, and GTM alignment
- Often with prior SaaS scale-up experience
For late stage (Pre or Post IPO):
- We look for functional specialists who truly solve a pain or gap in a larger team (Enablement, Platform Storytelling, Competitive Intel)
- Often with experience navigating highly matrixed environments
Each search starts with a custom scorecard that aligns your goals to candidate strengths.
Step 2: Tap Into a Specialized PMM Network
The best product marketers aren’t job board applicants—they’re currently thriving, but open to the right opportunity. We leverage:
- Our proprietary network built over 10+ years
- Targeted outreach on LinkedIn, and via Social Listening Efforts
- Referrals from trusted PMM leaders we’ve worked with
Because we specialize as product marketing recruiters, our outreach is highly personalized, speaks to your target audience, and gets responses.
Step 3: Assess for Startup Fit (Not Just Experience)
When brought in as a retained partner, we help you create your interview and assessment process from the ground up. We help you design a structured interview process; including interviewer focus areas, questions banks, and scorecards & grading.
We help you go beyond the resume, dig deep and have consistency across your interview process. We’ll screen for what will actually make this a successful hire.
Step 4: Help You Sell the Role
Hiring product marketers means selling just as much as screening. Every step of the way. Think: “What’s in it for them?”
We coach founders on how to pitch their vision, product, and role. We also help craft compelling job descriptions and LinkedIn outreach that attracts top talent.
Throughout the process we uncover what is most important to that individual candidate. Helping you understand their motivations and ultimately, close amazing talent to join your team.
We support every stage of the hiring process, from initial screens to final interviews, offers and negotiation.
Ready to Hire a Product Marketing Leader?
Let’s talk about what your next PMM hire needs to look like. We’d love to share more about what we are seeing in the market and how we can help you find them.
About WithAgility
We are the Recruiters for B2B Marketing & Product teams. WithAgility provides executive search, fractional recruiting and talent consulting to the fastest growing technology companies in the world. For help hiring your next leader or scaling your team, contact us today. We look forward to working with you.