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Drilling Into Low-Level Project Details Exposes Pretenders in Growth Hiring

Andy Johns · 20Growth: Top Growth Lessons from the Early Facebook, Twitter and Quora Days, The Most Important Question to Ask When Building Your Growth Team, How To Test For True Candidate Depth and Quality When Hiring for Growth with Andy Johns, Venture Partner @ Unu · Nov 17, 2021 · at 13:22

Andy Johns, Venture Partner at Unusual Ventures and former growth executive at Facebook and Wealthfront, shares how founders can distinguish truly deep candidates from articulate pretenders.

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“One of the easiest tools to test for depth is to ask them to point out a couple examples in which a growth project or a growth experiment was run at One of the prior companies that was successful and then spend the entire interview just drilling in on every facet of that experiment. Now, if this person can't talk about the lowest level details of that experiment, then they weren't truly involved in it. Somebody else was probably running it and then they're taking credit for it. So you can do that for technical interviews, for product interviews, and certainly for growth interviews. It works for everything.”

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