Whispered Hiring

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Ashley Brucker Stepien, who leads Marketing and Growth at Hex, about how AI is flattening marketing organizations and reshaping who gets hired and why. Drawing on senior marketing leadership roles at Ramp, Amplitude, Webflow, and Pendo, Ashley shares why she now hires almost entirely for curiosity, how she builds generalist teams instead of specialist silos, and how she vets senior candidates with backdoor references before the formal interview process even begins.Topics discussed:Cutting the middle management layer as AI flattens marketing orgsBuilding generalist teams: give people a problem, not a jobBrand as the new differentiator once AI makes marketing sound the sameHiring for curiosity over background and pedigreeNurturing a network for years before a role even existsRunning backdoor references at the start of the process, not the endThe dialogue test: does this become a conversation or an interrogationReplacing take home presentations with live, unscripted workshopsABOUT YOUR HOST: Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.comInteract with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with JD Peterson, Chief Marketing Officer at Perceptyx, about how he rebuilds and tests a team the moment he inherits it. JD has led marketing and growth at Culture Amp, Zendesk, Trello, and Marketo, scaling Culture Amp from 8 million to 100 million in ARR as Chief Growth Officer. He shares why he thinks the CMO is the hardest senior GTM hire to make, and why he has stopped giving candidates take home assignments.Topics discussed:Running a day two survey on an inherited teamJudging potential over current output when inheriting talentSetting team level values distinct from company valuesA two lens framework for evaluating AI inside marketingWhy the CMO is the hardest GTM hire to makeA sourcing hierarchy that puts recruiters lastTesting for stage fit by asking what candidates would cutReplacing take home tests with a 30 60 90 planABOUT YOUR HOST: Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.comInteract with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

Kenny Scannell joined Otter.ai as CRO three months ago and immediately started rebuilding the revenue org while onboarding four senior leaders at once. Instead of leaning on an enablement team or a structured checklist, he built his entire hiring and onboarding process around Otter plus Claude, and what he describes makes most current approaches look slow.The part worth paying attention to: Kenny's team built a custom 30-point discovery call scoring model that automatically pushes AI-generated scores into Slack the moment a call ends. That, combined with how he sourced and hired four senior leaders in 90 days largely on his own, makes this one of the more operationally specific conversations we've had on how AI is changing the way CROs build and run teams.Topics discussed:A 30-point discovery call scoring model built on a four-box value selling frameworkReal-time Slack alerts with AI-generated call scores after every discovery callUsing Otter plus Claude MCP to generate fully contextual onboarding docs in under three minutesCrawling past Otter conversations to surface inherited context for new hires on day oneWhy AI-generated onboarding frees the manager to invest more time in direct relationship-buildingUsing Claude and Cowork to crawl LinkedIn, rank candidates by parameters, and draft outreachTaking full ownership of senior sourcing while TA focuses on AE, SDR, and engineering rolesDeploying an AI interviewing agent as the first screening step for high-volume rolesWhy candidates need experience at both a scaled company and a scrappy one to succeed at growth-stageThe open-ended failure question that reveals adaptability, honesty, and how someone processes setbacks

Sai built Hyperbound from a two-person YC startup to 35 people and a Series A in under two and a half years, after pivoting through 17 different ideas. He's a first-time founder and engineer by background who has had to figure out GTM hiring entirely from scratch. In this episode, Andy and Sai get into the specific frameworks he's developed for vetting startup fit, using his own product inside the hiring process, and what he sees coming for the sales manager role. It's a rare look at how a fast-moving founder actually thinks about building a team, not how they wish they had.Topics discussed:The opt-out move Sai runs in the first interview to self-select for startup fit before wasting anyone's timeWhy he weights hunger over experience 70% of the time, and how he actually tests for it beyond just askingThe rule that either Sai or his co-founder must have done a role themselves before hiring for itParking a truck with a live coding problem on an LED screen around San Francisco to source engineersRequiring every AE and BDR candidate to complete a Hyperbound AI roleplay as a screener, then watching whether they act on the coaching feedbackHanding AE candidates a real recorded discovery call and asking them to build a month-by-month account plan, specifically to catch whether they can reality-check the timelineTelling candidates upfront to use AI on take-home assessments, then pressure-testing their reasoning to separate people who prompted well from people who just copy-pastedWhy Sai thinks the sales manager conversation is focused on the wrong thing, and what a 1:20 or 1:30 manager-to-rep ratio actually requires of the people in those seatsABOUT YOUR HOST: Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.comInteract with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

Dini Mehta ran sales at Lattice with under 3% voluntary attrition over four years, promoted nearly 50% of the management team from within, and built the kind of org where the best people kept choosing to stay. In this episode, she breaks down exactly how she did it: how she designs roles before writing job descriptions, why she keeps doing reference calls until she hears something negative, and the 90-day onboarding approach she uses with every senior hire that feels uncomfortable on purpose.She also has a sharp take on AI fluency that goes well beyond the usual interview question, and makes a case that most senior onboarding is a quiet failure hiding in plain sight.Topics discussed:Four questions to answer before you write a job description or pick a titleWhy Dini creates roles for exceptional generalists even without a defined seatSpending 30% of operating time meeting talent with no open rolesSourcing through "who are the three best people you know in this domain"Running reference calls until you surface at least one blind spotEmbedding internal recruiters inside the revenue org, not alongside itDoing a bi-annual feedback loop with recruiting to evolve hiring profiles as the business changesThe 45-minute interview where the candidate asks all the questions, and why the first 15 minutes don't countAsking candidates to run a live mock team meeting to reveal management styleThe AI fluency interview question that separates candidates who have actually built something from those who haven'tWhy experience can become a liability, and what to look for insteadThe 90-day over-communication approach to senior onboarding, and the specific milestone that tells you it workedABOUT YOUR HOST: Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.comInteract with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

Most AI pilots fail not because the technology is wrong, but because nobody agreed on what success meant before it started. Anurag Goel has built his entire function around fixing that gap. As the leader of a 125-person specialist team at Red Hat touching $4B in ARR, he's moved pilot-to-deployment conversion rates to three times their previous pace by doing one thing differently: defining success in executive business terms before anyone writes a line of code.Anurag built this function from scratch at Red Hat after doing similar work at Adobe and Salesforce, and this conversation gets into the specifics of how he hires for it, structures it, justifies it internally, and tests candidates in ways most hiring managers haven't considered.Topics discussed:Why AI pilots stall at the executive layer and how scoping business KPIs upfront changes conversion ratesThe three-profile hiring model for value consulting roles: management consultant, financial storyteller, B2B software fluencyHow sequencing early hires across external experts, internal sales reps, and former customers built the foundationThe case study round structure that tests how candidates prepare and present, not whether their answers are rightUsing one interview question to separate surface-level AI users from people who build with itWhy "builder mindset" in this function means co-creating a shared vision with the customer, not internal executionHow to justify an overlay function's existence with a single two-part metricTesting for "fire in the belly" through specificity of past examples, not behavioral question frameworksABOUT YOUR HOST: Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.comInteract with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

A year ago, Srikrishnan Ganesan says, asking candidates to prove their AI fluency was too soon. Now, he says, it's table stakes and the answers candidates give are creating a sharp divide between those who will thrive and those who won't. In this episode, Andy and Sri get into how Sri screens for genuine AI adoption, why he thinks the pre-sale to post-sale handoff is collapsing faster than most GTM leaders realize, and the specific signals he uses to decide whether a leader is actually built to operate in a fast-moving company.Topics discussed:Why "I use it for emails and meeting summaries" is now a red flag in interviewsPushing customers to feel 40% implemented before the sales cycle endsHow candidates use AI to prep for interviews  and what it revealsThe specific question Sri asks before ever calling a referenceWhy being out of a role matters less than what the leader learned from itUsing exec partners from VC firms as a selective lens on certain hiresCurated customer call playlists as the foundation of exec onboardingABOUT YOUR HOST: Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.comInteract with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Peter Grant, CRO at You.com, about what it actually takes to hire technical enterprise AI sellers who can build, demo, and sell at the same time. Peter has spent 20+ years scaling GTM at Siebel, Salesforce UK, C3.AI, and OakNorth, and drove 40x revenue growth at You.com in 2024. He shares the exact frameworks, tests, and reference approaches he uses to find sellers who combine genuine technical fluency with commercial instinct.Topics discussed:Why AI sellers need technical fluency, not product familiarity aloneThe Lovable/Replit live demo test: filtering real builders from claimantsWhy early-stage CROs should carry a bag before building the teamWrite a specific JD before launching any senior searchHow AI is changing sales enablement cadence and certificationThe biggest hiring mistake: choosing people you want to drink withForce-ranking 5 sales stages to surface a candidate's real edgeThe best candidates treat the interview as a sales campaignCustomer references over manager references: what to actually askGood hires are visible on day one: booking meetings, everywhereSteve Garnett's 10-point hiring framework for technical GTM talentABOUT YOUR HOST: Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.comInteract with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Vikas Bhambri, CRO at Rasa, about the hiring frameworks he has built across some of the most demanding AI-native go-to-market environments. Drawing from his experience at Kustomer, Regal, and Yellow.ai, Vikas brings a people-first philosophy that runs from the moment you inherit a team all the way through panel discipline and decision ownership. His approach challenges how most GTM leaders think about assessments, sourcing, structured interviews, and what coachability actually looks like under pressure.Topics discussed:Inheriting a team you did not recruit or onboardWhy holding people to unmet standards is bullying, not managementSetting expectations when your team already knows change is comingWhy CROs cannot throw talent sourcing over the fence to recruitingLinkedIn as a deliberate sourcing network, not a rolodexStandardized interview questions as the foundation of fair evaluationThe opening question Vikas asks every single candidateWhy hijacking an interview is a non-starterExercises as a coachability test, not a credential showcaseWhy AI does not kill the exerciseHiring panels as a privilege, not a checkboxABOUT YOUR HOST: Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.comInteract with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Varun Puri, CEO and Cofounder of Yoodli, about what hiring looks like when you are a first-time founder building a leadership team from scratch. Varun previously reported directly to Sergey Brin at Google and incubated Yoodli at the Allen AI Institute. His approach cuts through credential theater with radical transparency, product obsession as a live screen, and a values-driven process built around trusting your gut.Topics discussed:Why trusting intuition is the most underrated hiring signal for first-time founders, and what it costs to override it. Varun describes bringing people on despite a clear Spidey Sense, each time watching it unravel within three months.How Yoodli uses its own AI roleplay portal to pre-qualify candidates before any human conversation. Candidates practice with AI personas of the founders so the real interview can skip the basics and go straight into substantive territory.Using live platform data as a screen for genuine product obsession. When a candidate says they love Yoodli but has logged in twice, Varun pulls the dashboard mid-interview and the conversation goes in a very specific direction.The one question Varun asks every candidate: if Yoodli fails in six months, what would have to be true for you to say this was the best professional experience of your life? It bypasses upside-dependent motivation and reveals what candidates actually value.Full cap table transparency as a negotiation philosophy, including sharing what Varun and his co-founder make. This reframes the conversation from if to how, and routinely unlocks creative compensation structures.The 500-item mutual expectations document that turned a board advisor introduction into a co-founder-level Head of Sales hire. Varun and Josh built it together before any offer was signed.Why the founder-to-founder reference is the highest-signal off-sheet channel. Varun uses VC connections to reach founders directly, not just the CRO, because that conversation surfaces what standard references never do.ABOUT YOUR HOST: Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating. Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.comInteract with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search