Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Growth candidates relying on platitudes over first principles are red flags

Bangaly Kaba · 20Growth: The Biggest Growth Lessons from Leading Teams at Instagram & Instacart, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth Teams, How To Onboard Growth Reps Efficiently and The Relationship Between Growth and The Rest of the Org with Bangaly Kaba, H · Dec 16, 2021 · at 16:00

Bangali Kaba, former Head of Growth at Instagram, outlines interview red flags when evaluating candidates for growth roles during a discussion with host Harry Stebbings.

0:00 / 0:39exact quote · 39.2s
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“I think it's, I'd say red flags to me tend to be just a lot of platitudes and not, they can't really give specifics as to why. So when you ask like, okay, you said this, you said our business is, is weak in this area. Why? Like what makes you think about that? And they can't really come up with like strong hypotheses. They can't point to like how they infer things from data. They can't really go two or three layers deeper. Even if it's wrong, like it might not be right because obviously they don't have complete information, but if they can't really kind of like work from first principles to explain their thinking, I think it's something you should be concerned about because I think it will likely be a situation where over time they will continue to fall into that trap and in the seat, they may or may not actually know how to move the needle.”

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