MICHAEL HORN :: NEW YORK BASED INTERNET ENTREPRENEUR

MARKETING DIRECTOR @ CRAFT COFFEE

Craft Coffee is hiring a marketing director, but it’s not your average hiring situation. We don’t want you to work for us, we want you to work with us.  We want you to run things. We want to give you a big equity stake in the company and make you an integral part of our team.

YOU ARE

The online marketing expert that we’re looking for is so experienced and so badass that a traditional job post just seems insufficient and unnecessary.  You should be able to look at our business and know exactly how you would lead customer acquisition efforts for us.

If you are qualified for the role and you would justify the offer that we’d like to make, you’re so entrenched in the world of internet marketing that it will simply be obvious to you how you would activate our marketing engine.  You should be able to tell us what you would do — very specifically.

WE ARE

You can google us and find out we’ve been featured in top publications, we’re funded by amazing investors, and our customers love our product.  We’ll expect you to come to us after already having fully educated yourself about who we are and what we do.

IS IT A FIT?

What you should be asking is: Why Craft Coffee?  Is the opportunity right for you? Will the team be a good fit for you?  If you’re a qualified candidate, we’ll sit down and talk.  That’s what real teams do.  We’ll talk about our plans and the massive opportunity here.

If you are a very experienced internet marketer who would love to work with us at Craft Coffee, please email us and tell us how you would dominate this role.  Please be very specific about:

• your past experience, 
• why you would be interested in joining Craft Coffee, and 
• specifically how you would come in and change the game in our customer acquisition efforts. 

Email: marketingdirector AT craftcoffee DOT com. It’s a direct line to our CEO.

Only serious applicants please. I promise we will not respond to recruiters, consultants or agencies.

Craft Coffee is hiring.  If you’re interested, check out our jobs page at http://craftcoffee.com/jobs

Hiring at a startup is a big deal.  The people you bring on board will be the foundation of a company that is expected to do a lot with a little.  You’re expected to grow a lot and to do it quickly—all based on the blood, sweat and tears of your core team.  At Craft Coffee, the team we’re hiring now will be essential to our future success.  

This post is specifically about hiring for non-technical positions.  Tech hiring is a different beast.

Our hiring process started out without much structure and we quickly realized that this was an unfeasible approach.  We had two main job openings — marketing and operations.  For those two positions we received over 400 applicants.  The trouble then becomes how much time it takes to actually consider each of these people.

Try reading 400 resumes some time.  It’s painful.

First, a couple resume tips for applicants:

• No matter how much you’ve done, or how strong the desire to list everything you’ve ever accomplished, do not submit resumes longer than one page.  When I’m reading 400 resumes, the last thing I want to see is a two, three or four page burden.
• On a similar note, when you start shrinking that font size to fit more on the page, just stop yourself.  Filling more stuff on to the page with tiny font is just as bad as a multi-pager.  

Now, a tip for future employers:  In the current economic climate, expect to see very large volumes of applicants for good jobs.  You need a process in place to try and make sure your time is spent wisely, and that you focus your limited resources on only the most promising candidates.  

You’ll be amazed at the deterrent power of asking a few simple questions.  Even the most basic ones, like: why do you want to work here?  First, it will stop a huge number of applicants from even applying.  Of course, if that’s too much of a hurdle for them, then they wouldn’t be a good fit for your company.  So now they’ve done your hiring job for you.

Then, even the folks who apply and answer the questions will do things like copy and paste their cover letter into the answer section of any question you ask.  Fail.  Again, they’ve done your job for you.

After those two categories of applicants, you’ll be left with a tiny minority of people who you would have otherwise needed to take the time to consider.  

What you’ll find is that most answers are completely generic.  Candidates will not take the time to give you real answers.  Again, fail.  

Even better, in your application ask a very simple quiz question that pertains directly to the job.  In our current operations job post, we ask a couple basic questions about shipping a box to Japan, which is something that we do every month.  The resulting answers to these questions will provide you with an amazing amount of clarity in a number of ways.  

It’s amazing how much time you’ll save yourself by asking just a few simple questions.  Then you can focus on the couple of applicants who have the best chance of being a good fit.