Covey’s how-to-hire series offers unique insights from people ops professionals on the front lines of tackling the challenges of talent sourcing today.

Today, we hear from Daily’s Vice President of Sales, Tonni Bennett, on how she hired a Head of Revenue Operations as a sales leader building their sales team.

Hiring is an important part of the job of any sales leader, and running an effective interview process is key. Bad hires are costly. In my experience the worst hiring mistakes are not the result of hiring an unqualified person for the job, but hiring someone who has the right experience on paper but was not given the opportunity to succeed with clear and reasonable expectations.

When I joined Daily, our sales team was in the early stages of growth, and I knew I would need a strong revenue operations partner to help me succeed. Our business has a usage based pricing model which adds a lot of complexity to managing and forecasting revenue, as well as creating scalable, repeatable processes. A great revenue operations professional would be able to guide me by interpreting customer data and providing insights to direct our growth strategy and the resulting tactical plan of execution. Without this resource it would be difficult to drive towards revenue goals.

Here’s what I did (and what you can do too) to recruit a top-notch Head of Revenue Operations.

Outline the job requirements— and the “why” behind them

This sounds obvious but I can’t tell you how often this is skipped over, or done poorly. Unlike an AE role which has mostly the same criteria each time you make the hire, this role is typically hired once every few years, and the role can look very different for each business. It’s important to slow down on this step and ensure there is clarity about what this role entails and what success will look like, in order to speed up the hiring process overall. 

Determine what success means for the role

A Head of Revenue Operations is a particularly tricky hire because it is highly cross-functional and can encompass many different responsibilities. Your revenue operations hire is going to be unique to your company’s industry, stage and business model— this role isn’t something you can just copy and paste a job description for. 

To figure out what you need from the role, get your internal stakeholders together in a room— sales, marketing, customer success leaders, and whichever cross-functional leaders will work directly with this hire. 

Then, ask your cross-functional stakeholders:

What does success look like for this role in the short-term and long-term? Focus on outcomes that align with your company’s strategic goals, not tactical projects and tasks!

At 90 days, what do they need to have accomplished?

At 180 days, what do they need to have accomplished?

After the first year, what do they need to have accomplished?

What job functions do you expect this person to perform?

Who should this person report to? 

Ask your team to physically write these things down as a group so they can realize the scope of what they’re asking of a candidate and see if you need to pare down the role requirements. If your job requirements are too broad, or you have them supporting too many teams, you might set this person up for failure by stretching them too thin. Assess your core needs, prioritize role responsibilities, and adjust requirements accordingly. 

It’s important to make sure the finished product is realistic as a job role for a single person and to determine who this person will report to. Revenue operations can report to different departments depending on the needs of your business and this should be carefully considered as the direct manager will determine the day to day priorities for this hire.

For instance, if this person is going to work cross-functionally with Sales, Marketing and Customer Success it may make sense to have the report to a COO instead of one of those leaders. In our business, Sales needed the most support and new business is our highest priority in 2023 so our hire reports to me.

Analyze organizational talent gaps

Especially if this is your first rev ops hire, you need to think critically about what level of seniority and experience you need in the role. 

Are you looking for a strategic sales leader who can build an entire sales team function and coordinate how sales and marketing should work together? You’ll need a senior professional with a great depth of experience to pull from. 

Alternatively, if you are looking for someone who can be a more hands-on operations person to manage your tech stack— and you have other talent in your organization who can provide strategic guidance— you may be able to hire someone more mid-level.

For the role at Daily, my preference was to find a more senior leader, but believed I could make someone more mid-level successful if they were sharp and hungry. We were open to creating the necessary support for the right candidate, so we specifically kept must-have requirements to a minimum. In doing so, we left the door open for a more diverse pool of candidates. However, not all organizations have this level of flexibility for the role, so carefully consider what the must-have requirements are for your unique organization.

Develop the job requisition request

Once you’ve clearly defined what you’re looking for. It’s time to put the proverbial pen to paper and write that job requisition request (a.k.a. the job req)!

You may work with your HR department, a recruiter, an agency, or an AI sourcing tool like Covey Scout to create this req. Whichever you pick, there are three key components you need to include in your job req:

Years of Experience — This can be a range or simply a minimum number of years. However, experience alone doesn’t make someone a good fit, so be careful not to be too restrictive, or you might filter out some of the best candidates. For example, you might prefer eight years of experience as a rev ops leader, but if you set the minimum years of experience in sales ops as only 5+, you broaden the pool of qualified candidates. A candidate who has only been in rev ops for five years but has held other relevant roles in sales or marketing for several years prior may have the skills and understanding you need. 

Preferences — These are the qualifications that are highly preferred, but not necessarily hard requirements. For example, at Daily, we had a strong preference for someone that had experience with a usage-based pricing (UBP) model. Someone without UBP experience could have still been successful, but they would have had a steeper learning curve to understand the complexities of UBP revenue streams and go-to-market strategy. Like experience, finding a candidate with these preferences is ideal, but should not be a deal breaker alone. Preferences may factor in more greatly the more senior the role and larger the pool of candidates.

Soft Skills — These are actual skills needed to be effective at the job! They do not necessarily rely on specific experience or previous roles. For example, some of the soft skills we looked for were being detail-oriented (as they’d be project managing some complex projects), highly collaborative (working with our entire exec team), and efficient at prioritizing needs. 

In my experience skills are the most important things to vet for during the interview process! Focus most of your interview process on understanding the match of skills! 

Just because someone has an impressive resume doesn’t mean they were actually good at the job. 

Just because someone has been good at the job elsewhere doesn't mean they're the right fit for your company or your role. The other company may have needed someone stronger at different skills than you need.

After you’ve outlined your job requirements, it’s time to turn it over to your sourcing specialist and wait for the talent pipeline to fill (more on sourcing later).

Conduct initial interviews

Think of the first couple of interviews as sales calls. Your first interview should function like a discovery call where you see if the candidate fits the position's minimum requirements. By the end you determine if they are qualified for you to truly evaluate and are interested in evaluating your business in return. If so, you earn a second interview to dig deeper and see if they are passionate about solving the same problems you’re facing and what their approach is to doing the job. I would warn against going beyond three interviews total; otherwise, you risk losing great candidates.

Your questions in these initial interviews should center around two goals: 

Discover enough about the candidate to qualify or disqualify them for the next round of interviews

Sell the benefits of working with your company to get them excited about the opportunity

If you do too much of either, you risk losing the person. If you drill the person with questions without also getting them excited about the role, they'll likely be turned off from continuing in the interview process. This is surprisingly common! Alternatively, if you only sell your company without asking questions, you’ll waste time pushing people through the interview process who you never really vetted.

Discover

In the first interview, ask yourself what experience, skillset, or qualifications you need to confirm—beyond what is on the candidate's resume. Just like an initial sales call, you need to find—in 15-30 minutes— whatever would warrant a true evaluation and commitment of time from both parties. 

In the second interview, ask situational questions that will reveal how the candidate operates and how strong they are at the soft skills you’re looking for. If you ask someone if they are organized, they will say yes. If you ask about how they organize and prioritize their schedule each week in their current role you’ll learn a lot more.

For Daily, one factor I looked for was ability to work in an early-stage company. We needed someone who was good at building and could thrive in a constantly changing and at times demanding environment.

To keep these core needs in mind, create an interview guide with a checklist of minimum requirements a candidate must have to move forward. In the first interview, check off each requirement so you can easily track which areas you need to explore further in the next interview. This process will keep candidate vetting focused, efficient, and effective— especially if multiple stakeholders are involved in the interview process.

Sell

Just as you wouldn’t sell a product the same way to every customer, don’t sell the job the same way to every candidate. Outline your core elevator pitch, but tailor it to each candidate’s interests and passion. If you’ve done a good discovery you should be able to create a compelling pitch.

Make sure to cover:

Who your company sells to (who is your target market)

What stage your company is at currently

What the vision of your company is for the future

Why the role is exciting

Why the role is challenging 

If candidates were excited about this prospect and lined up with our list of qualifications, they were on to the next step in the interview process. Your pitch won’t— and shouldn’t— sound just like this. It should be tailored to your role and your company. And, while the pillar ideas should be fairly consistent, it should be expressed conversationally.

Have candidates complete a take-home exercise

The past is often not the best indication of what a candidate is capable of moving forward. Too much emphasis is often placed on historical expertise or skills. It's easy for someone to hide behind a role or title or be disqualified because they don’t have the most impressive background. 

A take-home exercise is your opportunity to have the candidate put their skills into action so you can gauge how much depth there is to what's on their resume and how they approach their work. Think about the most critical challenges the person in this role will face and the goals that you outlined in the job req. Use these core competencies to frame the take-home exercise.

At Daily, we were looking for rev ops leader that:

Was excellent at data analysis

Had a strong understanding of UBP and the implications it would have on revenue forecasting

Could untangle the complex systems structure we had

To assess these areas, we gave candidates two (short) take-home exercises that they could present in any format of their choice to showcase their skillset.

The two assignments were:

Data-based Exercise — for this assignment, we gave the candidates raw sales data to analyze and provide insights about.

Systems-based Exercise — for this assignment, we shared a real challenge we were facing in our systems and the key stakeholders involved, and we asked the candidates how they would go about solving it.

After the candidates complete the take-home assignment(s), schedule a final interview with a panel of internal stakeholders where the candidates share their work and have open dialogue about their work. 

Conduct a final interview with a panel of key stakeholders

The panel for the final interview should include the key stakeholders who contributed to defining the role in step one. Before the interview, send the job req to the panel participants to realign everyone. 

At the final interview for this role, we did not make candidates present their work, but we read through the presentation beforehand and came prepared for a conversation about their work. Specifically we ask candidates:

How they arrived at their outcome or conclusion

Why they chose the approach they did

How they would approach the same assignment in a different (hypothetical) situation

A head of rev ops— arguably more than most department heads— must be incredibly hands-on in their work. So the best candidates are often the ones who can dig into the details and come back with thorough follow-up questions about the assignment, showcasing their depth of understanding even prior to their presentation. 

In the candidate presentations for Daily’s Head of Rev Ops role, I looked for someone who would nearly bore me with the details of how they built something. I also wanted someone who could draw parallels between our challenges and those they had solved before.

The best candidates were able to share specific examples of:

How they were able to diagnose past challenges

What their process was to find a solution to that challenge

How they were able to bring people along with them in solving the challenge

A candidate who could not get into the weeds in any of these areas told me they were either too senior to get their hands dirty or just weren't all that good at their job.

After the final presentations are complete, you just have the hard job of determining which great candidate you want to extend an offer to. Good luck!

Use Covey Scout to fill your talent pipeline with the best candidates

Daily has a really solid process once we get someone in our talent pipeline. But, for those of us that don’t have a full-time talent acquisition team, sourcing candidates is the hardest part of finding a head of rev ops. 

The time and resources it takes to search professional networks, find someone qualified, develop messaging, engage with talent, and vet thousands of candidates feels insurmountable when your talent team is small or nonexistent. And when you're not a well-known brand or are an early-stage startup, you won't have thousands of qualified candidates knocking at your door. We needed help.

It was a lifesaver when we discovered Covey Scout— and with it, the ability to automate sourcing and recruiting highly qualified candidates. The level of care and detail Covey puts into ensuring candidates are not just highly qualified but also uniquely qualified for our role has been a game-changer for our recruiting efforts.

Now our recruiting strategy is:

Put together the best job req we can

Use Covey’s referral network tool to check out the talent in our network

Use Covey Scout AI to source and recruit the top talent
(and save a whole lot of time, energy, and money while doing it)

Learn more about how Covey is revolutionizing talent acquisition, and book a demo today.