Whispered Hiring

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...

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 in...

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 th...

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 Ha t 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...

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...

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 approac...

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 own...

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 obsessi...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Nicole Baer, Chief Marketing Officer at Carta, about how she designs, sources, and evaluates senior marketing talent. Drawing from leadership roles at Logitech, Zendesk, and Aon, and having founded two marketing consultancies, Nicole brings a practitioner's perspective to the full hiring lifecycle. Her frameworks for using fractional...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Adam Kuznia, SVP of Client Services at Invisible, about the habits and frameworks behind his approach to GTM hiring. Adam has led teams across customer success, sales, marketing, and revenue operations at companies including DataCamp, Opal, and Sales Impact Academy. His philosophy on network maintenance, candidate evaluation, and psycholo...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Cody Guymon, President at Zonos and former COO at Qualtrics and Workato, about how he built a career from rev ops to the C-suite and what that path taught him about hiring. Cody owns all of revenue at Zonos and has sharply defined views on which traits are irreplaceable now that AI is doing the order-taking. Topics discussed: How Cody mad...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Alla Mezhvinsky, VP of People at Glean, about the preparation failures that derail executive searches before a single candidate is contacted. With deep experience leading talent acquisition at Instacart, Square, ClassPass, and Zynga, Alla brings a practitioner's view on what separates searches that close fast from searches that spin....

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Doug Hanna, Former President at Kustomer, the AI powered customer service platform acquired by Meta and since spun out independently. Drawing on executive roles at Zendesk and Grafana, Doug shares the hiring frameworks he has built through hard experience, covering role design, leveling, recruiter selection, and reference strategy. Topics...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Jon Dick, Chief Customer Officer at HubSpot, about the hiring philosophy behind his decade-long rise from VP of Marketing to CCO. Jon's central argument cuts against conventional wisdom: stop searching for people who've seen the movie, and start finding people who can direct it. His frameworks for defining roles, evaluating AI cap...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Matt Martin , Co-Founder and CEO of Clockwise , about his contrarian approach to executive hiring that prioritizes immediate fit over long-term potential. Matt shares his tactical frameworks for structuring board involvement, selecting recruiting partners, and conducting first-call conversations that accelerate funnel velocity while maint...

In this episode, Andy Mowat speaks with Paul Staelin , Fractional CCO at CornerstoneX and former CCO at Vercel, Trifacta, and Birst, about building customer success organizations that drove 40-point NDR improvements. Drawing from his Siebel Systems training and two decades scaling post-sales functions, Paul shares why CS teams fail without three distinct DNA profiles, his "time machine" question t...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Frida Ahrenby , three-time CMO at companies including Rillion , GetAccept, and Bambora, who built her foundation in sales before transitioning to marketing leadership. Frida reveals why the economics of scaleup marketing have fundamentally shifted in the past five years, forcing a move from 30-40 person departments to expert-driven teams...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Brian Frank , Partner at Permanent Capital and former COO at Cameo, about his battle-tested approach to recruiting built over 10 years leading RevOps at LinkedIn. Brian reveals why most hiring managers fail by outsourcing critical recruiting decisions, and shares the systematic frameworks he's developed to identify, assess, and close...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Josh Hanewinkel speaks with Whitney Littman , Vice President of Customer Success at ZoomInfo , about building high-velocity hiring systems for customer success organizations in AI-native GTM environments. Drawing from seven years scaling CX at DocuSign and her current role leading post-sales strategy at ZoomInfo, Whitney shares her framework for maintaining eve...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Josh Hanewinkel speaks with Sanjay Kini , Chief Customer Strategy Officer at 6sense , about scaling a customer organization from 5 to 300+ people during 6sense's growth from $5M to $200M in revenue. Sanjay's approach challenges conventional hiring wisdom at every turn, from giving hiring managers final authority even when other interviewers disagree, to...

Over 13 years at Gainsight , Nick Mehta cycled through more CMOs than any other executive role. Not because the marketers weren't talented, but because he failed to define what was actually achievable before hiring them. That realization reshaped how he approaches executive hiring. Nick breaks down the self-awareness framework that filters executive candidates, why he back-channels before meeting...

Building a 57,000+ LinkedIn following eliminated Kristi Faltorusso 's recruiter dependency. One post now generates hundreds of qualified CS applicants while her network delivers pre-vetted referrals through direct outreach. But the deeper insight is how she completely rewired her hiring methodology after repeatedly failing to replicate playbooks across companies. Customer success roles are never p...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Ghazi Masood, CRO at Replit, about building GTM organizations in product-led growth environments. With experience scaling Auth0 through hypergrowth and acquisition, plus leading revenue at Retool, Ghazi breaks down how PLG hiring differs by role, why he rarely posts senior positions, and the back-channel timing that saves months of wasted...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Jessica Chiew, Head of GTM Strategy & Operations at Canva, about her rigorous approach to hiring builders in product-led growth environments. Drawing from her experience scaling GTM operations at Asana and Canva, Jessica shares tactical frameworks for testing whether candidates can truly execute versus simply tell polished stories, st...

In this episode of Whispered Hiring, Andy Mowat speaks with Heather Doshay, Founder of Waypoint Works and former VP of People at Webflow and Head of Talent at SignalFire, about identifying and developing high-slope talent. Heather introduces her PEAKS framework for spotting individuals whose growth rate matches or exceeds company trajectory, and challenges conventional hiring wisdom on everything...