What is the Growth Hacker job?
Let’s start with a bit of history! It’s always interesting to go back to the origin of a word to really understand its meaning. In fact, today (and that’s why I’m reading this article) this word is thrown around a lot, which makes it lose all its meaning.
This job comes directly from the USA with Sean Ellis, employed at Dropbox. His role was to increase the number of users of their solution. When it came to finding his successor, he was faced with a problem: for him, the word “marketing” didn’t fit his role. In fact, his objective was simple: acquisition, but not with traditional levers. His job was to seek out acquisition channels that were little or not used by competitors, and all at a lower cost. This is where the idea of “hack” was born. The marketing, business and technical dimensions have given rise to the job title of Growth Hacker.
The different types of jobs available as a Growth Hacker
With the various levers and workflows becoming increasingly complex, the Growth Hacker profession has specialized into several categories: Growth marketing, growth business and growth engineer.
B2B Growth Marketing aims to generate as many MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) as possible for sales reps. It’s there to make the most of salespeople’s time, so that they spend 100% of their time in prospecting meetings. These leads must have knowledge of the product/service being sold, the budget and a willingness to buy. His classic technical stack, for example, is as follows: Hotjar / Leadfeeder / Google Analytics / Sales Navigator / The Growth Machine / Google Ads / Zapier
B2C Growth Marketing aims to generate customers exclusively via digital channels. Its role is to avoid spending too much human time on a prospect. Its main KPIs will be ROI and CPL. He has the ability to create content and/or add value to it. It therefore tackles 3 major topics: SEA / SEO / Conversion. His classic technical stack, for example, is as follows: Hotjar / Leadfeeder / Google Analytics / Sniply / Facebook Manager / Google Ads / Linkedin Ads / Launchrock
B2B Growth Business aims to increase SQL (Sales Qualified Lead). Unlike growth marketing, it focuses on outbound acquisition channels. He will cold prospect potential targets. Its main mission is to equip and organize the company’s sales force. He has a Data dimension and is able to leverage the databases built up via various tools to supply both sales and marketing teams. His classic technical stack, for example, is as follows: Sales Navigator / Mirror Profiles / La Growth Machine / Phantombuster / Captain Data / Lemlist / Hubspot / Dropcontact / Kaspr
Find out more about the difference between inbound and outbound marketing. here.
The Growth Engineer is a profile with a technical major. Often, he’s been through both types of Growth before, so that he fully understands the issues at stake for both the Marketing and Sales teams. Its role is to optimize and develop custom workflows as needed. Its aim is to combine acquisition workflows with the automation of internal company processes. For example, from making an appointment to delivering the service/product to sending the invoice. His technical stack is unique to his company.
Once you’ve got the 3 main families of Growth Hackers clearly in mind, it’s time to look for companies that can recruit this type of profile! Yes, that’s the point 😉
Companies looking for Growth Hackers
Contrary to what you might think, not all Growth posts can be found in the Start-up universe. Indeed, SMEs and ETIs are increasingly looking for this type of profile. However, the job title does not always include the term Growth Hacker.
Today, where you need to pay attention is on the job description. If it includes this type of assignment: “Optimize and automate lead generation processes to feed sales reps”.
While the job title is “Marketing Manager”, you can be sure that it’s actually a Growth Marketing profile that’s being sought here.
In smaller start-ups, growth profiles are generally found in the Growth Business department, which is responsible for both prospecting meetings and the production of the prospect file. Then, it should achieve its results, whatever the means used. The smartest salespeople will naturally turn to Growth Business (sometimes without realizing it). So, if you’re interested in this type of position, I’d advise you to look for Business Developer ads in companies with fewer than 50 employees.
Above all, don’t forget to ask whether a tool budget can be allocated to you. Unfortunately, many people I know find themselves stuck because the company can’t afford to spend 200/300 euros a month on tools. Which, between you and me, pales in comparison to the time saved!
It would be irrelevant to give you an exhaustive list of companies that recruit Growth Hackers. A Growth should be able to compile this list on its own 😉
In addition to classic channels such as Linkedin, Indeed, Welcome to the jungle and so on, don’t forget to consult this forum regularly. For Growth Hacking monitoring, this forum is great, but there are regular job offers. If your future employer is smart enough to post on this forum, you can be sure that he or she already has an appetite for Growth.
Remember one thing: finding a job as a Growth Hacker (I’m talking about real Growth Hackers, not those who just know how to launch a Waalaxy 😉 ) is easy, because along with developers and recruiters, they’re the most in-demand profiles. On the other hand, you need to be selective in your choice of company to ensure that you have enough freedom to implement your ideas.
Once you’ve found your future company, it’s time to prove that you’re the right person for the job!
HardSkills VS Softskills, which is more important for a Growth Hacker?
The role of a Growth Hacker, whether marketing or business oriented, is to generate more leads at lower cost. It must therefore work on 3 major themes:
- The number of leads
- Lead quality
- The cost of a lead
The quality of the lead is extremely important, and you mustn’t fall into the trap of so-called “vanity metrics”.
The Growth: “Yesterday I generated 34 appointments for my Sales team”.
The Sales team: “Yeah, only 8 of them were really on target”.
Here, it’s true that there were 8 good leads who had a need and could afford to pay for the solution, but inflating the number to 34 means that Sales wasted their time on 26 customer meetings, which represents a very good week for a Sales person. Put this lost time in relation to a salesperson’s salary, and you’ll quickly see the ROI of Growth plummet. The quality of the lead is therefore very important, and you shouldn’t hesitate to be aggressive, commercially speaking, to skim prospects before sending them to Sales.
In the case of Hardskills, it’s experience that counts – unlike other professions, where years mean nothing, but rather the number of companies we’ve worked with, the number of channels we’ve used, the methods we’ve employed, our knowledge of the various tools we’ve used to best adapt to the company’s processes before challenging them, our teaching skills and our reporting. The difference that quickly distinguishes seniors from juniors is automation. A senior employee won’t be looking for excessive automation, because he knows that there are bottlenecks that only a human can overcome to produce quality work. I invite you to read this article to find out more.
Often, like a designer, you’ll be asked for a portfolio of your experience. I advise you to update a simple google sheet with the following data:
- The customer
- The targets
- Number of enriched lines generated per target
- Number of appointments generated
- The channels used
- Workflow mapping
Mapping example:
A quick qualitative analysis of why this campaign worked and the other didn’t
Since we’re dealing with a new profession, diplomas are of no value here. There are very few training courses in growth hacking, even though they tend to spring up like magic: Scalezia / Germinal / GrowthTribe / Rocket School. Training courses are only relevant when they deal with 1 subject, not 2! As soon as you’re stuck or would like to go further with 1 tool, the training courses become relevant to get the most out of the tool at 100%. In my opinion, it’s a self-taught profession. For our agency, I’d rather recruit profiles who tell me I’ve learned by responding to topics on the growthhacking forum than profiles who have undergone this type of training. Why? This brings us to the Softskills section.
For Softskills, even if it’s a very fashionable term these days, are by far the most important skills in a good Growth Hacker. For Growth Marketers and Growth Businesses, curiosity, resourcefulness and perseverance are 3 key factors. It’s a sector that’s constantly changing, because it’s on the borderline between what’s authorized and what isn’t, so workflows will inevitably and regularly be broken, and they’ll have to be put back together with a new tool or a new method.
In conclusion, the Growth Hacker profession has a bright future ahead of it, and it’s an exciting one at that. The quickest way to become a growth player of interest to companies is to start out as a freelancer, so that you can tackle a wide range of issues.
