Whispered Hiring

How I Hire with Robin Bordoli, CRO & CMO @ Weights & Biases

In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Robin Bordoli, CRO & CMO at Weights & Biases, about his engineering-informed approach to hiring senior GTM talent in AI-native companies. Drawing from his experience leading revenue organizations through IPO at Marketo and Jive, plus CEO roles at Nextroll and Figure 8, Robin shares his five-element pre-search system and how he applies optimal stopping theory to make mathematically rigorous hiring decisions.
Topics discussed:
Why VP of Field Engineering is the hardest GTM hire, requiring leaders who can manage four distinct technical roles (solution architects, pre/post-sales solution engineers, forward-deployed engineers) while balancing deep technical acumen with commercial instincts that most candidates spike one direction or the other.
The mandatory five-element pre-search framework executed before meeting any candidates: JDs written from scratch with force-ranking criteria (specific program spend, pipeline targets, ARR stage), hunting grounds, minimum five sample profiles ranked against the JD, interview process with decider/inputs/socializers explicitly designated, and role-specific take home exercises.
How to design AI-resistant take home exercises using open-ended scenarios (annual planning with constraints for demand gen, live sales positioning with 10 minutes prep for PMM) requiring 1-3 hours prep plus live presentation, where synthesis quality and trade-off articulation matter more than the artifact itself.
The three-round interview structure optimized for 9-hour total candidate investment, with Round 3 socializers serving as the final gate where candidates can expose naivete about equity/board dynamics or reveal poor judgment through inappropriate requests.
Why external recruiters provide three strategic advantages beyond sourcing: accessing passive candidates planning six-month professional exits, providing market intelligence on whether hundreds or five people fit specialized criteria, and creating trusted advisor dynamics where candidates reveal vulnerabilities they won't share internally.
Applying optimal stopping theory (the 37% rule) to sequential hiring decisions: estimate total qualified candidates meetable in your timeline, interview the first 37% to calibrate on the strongest, then extend offer to the next candidate exceeding that benchmark.
Three executive diagnostic questions that expose readiness: "What four adjectives appear in a word cloud from everyone who knows you well?" "Where were you the best and worst versions of yourself and why?" "What are your decision criteria and where does your current role fall short?"
The counterintuitive onboarding framework that prevents executive failure: explicitly contract for 30-90 days where the only ask is listening and learning, while concurrently assigning a first project that's in their wheelhouse but requires cross-functional engagement to balance psychological safety with purposeful integration.
 
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.com
Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

How I Hire with Julien Sauvage - CMO @ Cordial

In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Julien Sauvage, CMO at Cordial, about building authentic hiring processes that cut through scripted interactions. Drawing from his experience scaling marketing at Salesforce, Gong, Clary, and Talend, Julien reveals why he starts every interview by saying "I hate interviews," how to identify storytellers within three sentences, and why the commoditized 30-60-90 day plan has become useless for evaluating senior talent.
Topics discussed:
How to assess storytelling and listening skills immediately: evaluating whether candidates create narrative contrast in warm-up questions versus flat responses, while ensuring they demonstrate empathy and active listening rather than constant pitch mode.
Why you must build the plan and define outcomes before the org chart: using the create-capture-convert demand framework to color-code performance gaps, then determining whether to solve with programs or headcount rather than reflexively backfilling roles.
The strategic outsourcing decision matrix: why PMM and brand require full-time employees who breathe company identity daily, while creative and MOPs can be outsourced when CEOs won't approve design headcount over campaign managers.
The broken state of VP+ recruiting: receiving 3,000 applications for a senior manager role at Cordial, leading to targeted outreach through operator networks instead of posting senior roles that waste everyone's time.
Why company pedigree matters and when to take risks: prioritizing candidates from high-growth companies over inflated titles at stagnant organizations, while recognizing when to make strategic bets like his jump from public company VP to three-person team at pre-unicorn Gong.
Creating joyful interview experiences through radical authenticity: starting with "I hate interviews, let's not make this feel like one" to drop facades and enable real assessment of how candidates handle ambiguity.
The go-to interview question for marketing leaders: "What's the riskiest bet you've taken?" to assess boldness, self-awareness, and ability to reflect on both wins and failures in a risk-averse industry.
How to close candidates with brutal honesty: explicitly stating "there's no dream job" while painting the real challenges alongside opportunities, removing fluffy mission-driven narratives that candidates see through.
Why the 30-60-90 day plan is dead: everyone uses GPT to generate identical plans, making it worthless for evaluation while emphasizing the need for balance between strategic thinking and delivering quick wins in the first six months.
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.com
Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

How I Hire with Tolithia Kornweibel - CEO @ Beam Benefits

In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Tolithia Kornweibel, CEO of Beam Benefits, about her progression from CMO to CRO at Gusto before taking the CEO helm. Having scaled through Gusto's growth from 300 employees to its current size while managing both marketing and sales organizations, Tolithia shares why she deliberately operates without talent acquisition at Beam and how transparent communication about company challenges, including directing candidates to read negative Glassdoor reviews, actually strengthens hiring outcomes. Her approach challenges conventional wisdom, from eliminating 90-day plans to maintaining hands-on involvement from day one.
Topics discussed:
Why sales leadership remains the hardest GTM hire to get right, with success depending as much on organizational readiness to support transformation as finding the right person, and why it must show impact within one sales cycle.
The "describe your perfect boss" interview technique that reveals collaboration style and independence spectrum positioning, with resistance to "micromanagement" serving as an immediate disqualifier for small company environments requiring altitude flexibility.
How transition from Gusto's 70-person talent acquisition team to zero TA at Beam forced a shift to continuous networking and proactive relationship building, often having 3-4 hours of exploratory conversations before formal interviews.
The deliberate use of job postings solely as shareable links for network distribution, acknowledging that at VP level and above, submitted applications are essentially unusable due to volume and AI-generated noise.
Why keeping interview panels to 4 people maximum (2 decision makers, 4 total) while encouraging candidates to request additional stakeholder access serves as both efficiency measure and positive signal of thoroughness.
The mixed value of Gusto's hiring committee structure requiring conviction ("if it's a soft yes, it's a no") for values alignment, while creating educational tax for GTM leaders needing to justify hires to engineering-heavy committees.
The case against 90-day plans for senior hires: "Your half-informed decision is probably better statistically than anything we were coming up with before" because senior leaders are hired specifically to drive immediate change.
Why senior leaders must become "mildly dangerous" with AI tools quickly, not for innovation but to implement brilliant basics, validate ideas rapidly, and create psychological safety for their teams' experimentation in an AI-transformed landscape.
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.com
Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

How I Hire with Manny Medina - Co-Founder & CEO @ Paid

In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Manny Medina, Co-Founder & CEO of Paid (an AI agent monetization platform), about dismantling the traditional SaaS hiring playbook that helped define his previous company, Outreach. After scaling Outreach to over 1,000 employees and hundreds of millions in revenue, Manny reveals why he's now refusing to hire senior executives and instead building Paid with a radical junior-first, contractor-heavy approach. His contrarian insights challenge twenty years of VC-backed wisdom about org structure, talent evaluation, and the fundamental economics of building software companies in the AI era.
Topics discussed:
Why the era of templated org structure playbooks is dead: Manny challenges the assumption that every SaaS company needs the standard SDR → AE → CSM structure, arguing companies should question whether these roles should even exist rather than automatically copying what worked elsewhere.
Mission charts over org charts at Paid: Instead of traditional reporting structures, Paid organizes around specific revenue missions (self-serve for agent builders, SaaS companies selling agents, enterprise) with teams aligned to outcomes rather than titles or hierarchies.
The "AI first, then contractor, then person" hiring framework: This progression allows maximum flexibility to correct inevitable hiring mistakes while testing whether roles can be automated before committing to full-time headcount.
Why "no breath is better than bad breath" thinking is dangerous: Manny learned that hiring mediocre talent lowers the bar for future hires and signals to existing team members they can coast, creating a gradual slide from A-players to B-plus teams.
The power of forward deploy engineers learning directly from customers: Putting junior talent in front of customers accelerates their learning curve and business acumen faster than any internal training, while costing a fraction of senior hires.
How aggressive negotiation reveals future management headaches: When candidates push too hard on compensation during offers, it often predicts they'll renegotiate every 60 days, turning one-on-ones into advocacy sessions rather than productive work discussions.
Hiring mistakes aren't permanent if you stay close: By personally onboarding everyone and maintaining proximity to new hires in the first 30-60 days, you can quickly spot mismatches between talent and role requirements, then course-correct before damage compounds.
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.com
Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

How I Hire with Alina Vandenberghe - Co-CEO & Co-Founder @ Chili Piper

In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Alina Vandenberghe, Co-CEO of Chili Piper, about building high-performing remote teams through radical transparency and unconventional talent development. Over 10 years of scaling Chili Piper into a leading demand conversion platform, Alina has developed contrarian approaches to executive hiring, from requiring GTM leaders to pass technical competency tests to sharing complete financial data during interviews. Her insights reveal how treating internal promotion as the default path, rather than external hiring, creates both stronger leadership and better cultural alignment.
Topics discussed:
Why Chili Piper opens their entire data room to all employees, including cash runway, churn rates, and board decks, and how this transparency enables SDRs to develop executive-level thinking and grow into VP roles within the company.
The "electrons and protons" framework for role optimization: identifying energy-giving versus energy-draining tasks for each employee, then strategically deploying fractional specialists and AI agents to handle the draining work while maximizing individual impact zones.
How to evaluate remote work readiness beyond the resume: screening for intrinsic motivation through storytelling passion, why office experience is non-negotiable for junior hires, and the correlation between self-directed learning and remote success.
The technical competency requirement for all GTM executives, including testing CMOs and CROs on JSON and JavaScript understanding, to ensure they can credibly engage with RevOps buyers and technical stakeholders.
The three-part framework for evaluating departure stories: verifying honesty through back-channel references, assessing ownership versus blame mentality, and gauging compassion toward their current employer as a predictor of future behavior.
Why leading with questions rather than data during executive interviews reveals strategic thinking: asking candidates what metrics they need rather than presenting your board deck shows how they prioritize and think about the business.
The paradox of building a fully remote company while prioritizing in-person recruiting at industry events, using stage presence and dinner interactions as leading indicators of cultural fit and relationship-building ability.
The intensive onboarding approach where new executives spend multiple days at Alina's home, observing founder-mode operations firsthand and understanding how personal mission integrates with business execution, plus explicitly communicating where founder support ends and external mentorship begins.
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.com
Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

How I Hire with Patty DuChene - SVP of Marketing and Growth @ Sendoso

In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Patty DuChene, SVP of Marketing and Growth at Sendoso, about her systematic approach to inheriting and rebuilding teams post-acquisition. Drawing from her experience scaling from first sales hire at bootstrapped Wrike to leading teams through high-growth trajectories, Patty shares her 45-day team diagnostic framework, her contrarian stance against case studies, and why she deliberately targets hospitality veterans and returning parents for revenue roles.
Topics discussed:
The JD forensics methodology for new leaders—systematically auditing every team member's original job description against their actual time allocation through self-assessment, revealing scope creep patterns where critical functions (like demand gen) were consuming 40% instead of planned 10% of bandwidth.
Why deliberately posting senior roles publicly functions as a behavioral screen for leaders who retain entrepreneurial hunger—specifically filtering for executives willing to navigate competitive application processes rather than waiting for recruiters to approach them passively.
The acquisition integration playbook of cataloging competitor intimidation factors first—identifying specific capabilities that created competitive anxiety, then reverse-engineering those strengths into role definitions and team gaps for the combined entity.
Google's empirical finding that three 45-minute interviews predict role fit regardless of seniority level, making organizations requiring 6+ interviews or extensive case studies symptomatic of executive indecision rather than thoroughness.
Non-traditional talent arbitrage strategies targeting hospitality professionals (bartenders managing 2am crowd control translate directly to cold-calling resilience) and returning parents (daily EQ testing with children builds exceptional people leadership capabilities that surface in management roles).
Two behavioral interview questions that bypass resume screening: Asking "What are you most proud of?" without clarification to assess self-direction versus approval-seeking, and "What's the last thing you taught someone?" to evaluate knowledge transfer capabilities essential for cross-functional influence.
The strategic onboarding framework of pre-structured cross-functional stakeholder meetings with specific agendas, enabling new hires to understand each leader's decision-making triggers and craft compelling change narratives from day one.
The 45-day confidence litmus test for senior hires—executives who haven't begun making autonomous decisions by this milestone typically indicate fundamental issues with executive presence that compound over time, requiring immediate intervention or replacement.
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.com
Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

How I Hire with Mike Weir - CRO @ Finalis

In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Mike Weir, CRO of Finalis and former CRO of G2, about his tactical approach to executive hiring at inflection points. Mike shares the specific methodologies he uses to assess leadership gaps when joining early-stage companies, restructure inherited hiring processes mid-flight, and design roles that prevent the expensive cycle of executive turnover. His contrarian insights on posting strategy, interview control dynamics, and pre-emptive problem solving reveal how intentional hiring decisions compound organizational velocity.
Topics discussed:
Why head of revenue operations is the critical first hire within 30 days of any CRO joining: Serving as brain trust for business fundamentals while functioning as organizational ambassador who keeps leadership accountable to cross-functional stakeholders and long-term planning.
The precise methodology for inheriting in-process executive searches: How Mike evaluates existing candidates without prior team bias, uses the interview process to calibrate expectations with peer leadership, and reshapes job requirements mid-search when business needs shift.
The bright-line rule for executive recruitment: C-suite roles never get posted due to competitive intelligence risks and requirement customization needs, while VP-level roles always get posted to access talent pools beyond homogeneous networks—with specific tactics for managing high-volume applications.
Strategic role architecture decisions: When to hire Chief Sales Officer versus full-stack CRO based on company stage and CEO capacity, including the trade-offs of having the CEO become the final go-to-market decider and required operational depth this demands.
The "business conversation litmus test" for senior leadership interviews: If candidates cannot engage in strategic dialogue about real company challenges and offer substantive questions within the first interaction, they lack the executive presence required for autonomous leadership roles.
Mike's pre-structured onboarding methodology: A meticulously mapped 3-week schedule with defined meeting agendas for peer introductions, foundational knowledge transfer, and strategic context—designed to accelerate time-to-impact while securing early wins before complex problem inheritance.
The preemptive talent management approach: Why Mike negotiates difficult personnel decisions and active performance issues before new executive hires start, preventing them from absorbing political damage and relationship capital loss in their first 90 days.
Technical assessment frameworks for executive hiring: Using real business scenarios and current decision points as case studies to evaluate thinking processes, stakeholder engagement approaches, and decision-making frameworks rather than theoretical responses.
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.com
Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

How I Hire with Kyle Norton - CRO @ Owner.com

In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com, about building systematic hiring processes that overcome cognitive bias in high-velocity sales environments. Drawing from his experience scaling Owner.com from $20M to approaching $50M ARR while maintaining 2.5X year-over-year growth, Kyle shares data-driven frameworks for evaluating talent in SMB-focused sales organizations. His approach reveals how structured processes and post-hire analysis can dramatically improve hiring accuracy when traditional interview methods fail.
Topics discussed:
The "hire 18 months ahead" framework for companies above $20M ARR still doubling - specifically how Kyle hired an SVP of Go-to-Market Strategy from HubSpot to unlock initiatives he was personally bottlenecking, demonstrating when to pull senior hires forward versus waiting.
Kyle's counter-intuitive discovery through quarterly hiring analysis that sales craft performance in case studies was non-predictive of role success - leading to a complete restructuring toward evaluating "psychotic work ethic," organizational skills, and coachability over traditional sales acumen.
The systematic bias-fighting approach using Kahneman's principles: independent scorecarding across five company values, asking identical questions in identical sequence, and providing the same feedback to all candidates to create controlled comparison environments that prevent halo effect contamination.
Kyle's quarterly "hiring autopsy" process where RevOps correlates interview scores from all stages (recruiter screen, hiring manager, case study, bar raiser) against actual performance metrics, then conducts 90-minute outlier analysis sessions to identify process gaps and manage blind spots.
The champion-based hiring model that explicitly avoids consensus decision-making - where bar raisers provide structured feedback on specific criteria but hiring managers retain full ownership, preventing diluted accountability while maintaining quality control.
Kyle's "mutual references" system including his template that lists every direct report and counterpart from his career, granting candidates permission to source their own references while requesting the same access - plus his specific back-channel questions like percentile ranking among all functional peers.
Why cold calling the functional hiring manager remains the highest-conversion candidate strategy, and how Kyle's systematic LinkedIn content creation (generating 40-80K impressions per job post pre-algorithm change) created hiring flywheels that sourced 80% of initial IC team through network effects.
The shift toward hiring new graduates over experienced reps when backed by heavy enablement infrastructure - Kyle's data showing university hires ramp faster than experienced SDRs due to coachability and lack of bad habits, supported by strong enablement team investment.
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.com
Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

How I Hire with Connor Fee - COO @ Fathom.ai

In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Connor Fee, COO at Fathom.ai, about his systematic approach to scaling operations across revenue, data, and finance functions at a 100-person company. Drawing from his leadership experience at UserVoice, Clearbit, Shortcut, and Winning by Design, Connor reveals how he transformed a company lacking leadership culture into an aligned executive team and shares his counterintuitive hiring methodologies. His insights demonstrate how AI-powered interview analysis can eliminate traditional hiring blind spots while accelerating senior talent evaluation.
Topics discussed:
How Connor conducted a three-day executive offsite that moved from "knockdown screaming match" over a game of Fishbowl to establishing four company-wide goals that directly dictate hiring priorities, transforming reactive backfilling into strategic talent acquisition aligned with business outcomes.
The "WHO method" scorecard methodology for senior roles that forces executive alignment by defining four specific six-month outcomes before considering candidates, including Connor's example of requiring five iterations to align on what their head of data would actually accomplish.
Connor's systematic approach to hiring unfamiliar roles: conducting 10-15 discovery interviews with finance leaders across PLG and non-PLG companies, then using Fathom's AI to extract common hiring mistakes and build targeted interview frameworks for functions outside his expertise.
The "top 10 strengths" phone screen technique that reveals self-awareness and coachability - Connor pushes candidates through the awkwardness of identifying strengths 7-10 using follow-up prompts like "What would your boss say?" and can predict final hiring outcomes based solely on how they navigate this discomfort.
Advanced reference check methodology that bypasses positive bias: asking "What was their biggest challenge way back when you worked with them?" to create temporal distance, then following with "This person told me you'd say their challenge was X - would you agree?" to give references explicit permission to elaborate on known weaknesses.
Implementation of RAPID decision framework to eliminate cross-functional bottlenecks, with Connor explicitly defining himself as "decider" while giving his CEO veto power and telling his team that input will be "taken very seriously" but final decisions aren't democratic.
AI-powered candidate screening using Ashby's pattern-matching against five ideal LinkedIn profiles to automatically score and surface top 10% of applicants, with Connor noting "it doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to get us to the top 10%" to solve signal-to-noise problems.
The daily 30-minute check-in onboarding protocol for senior hires combined with shared Asana boards for queuing non-urgent questions, ensuring new executives are never more than 8 hours away from getting unstuck during their first three weeks while maintaining Connor's availability for immediate issues.
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.com
Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search

How I Hire With Alan Stein - CEO @ Kadima Careers

In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Alan Stein, CEO of Kadima Careers and former post-sales/CS leader at Salesforce, Tableau, and Facebook, about his systematic approach to executive hiring after interviewing 500+ candidates at Google. Alan reveals the hidden reality that most senior roles are designed around specific people before posting, and shares the tactical frameworks that separate the 5% of standout candidates from those who unknowingly eliminate themselves. His insights expose the gap between what executives think matters in hiring versus what actually drives decisions behind closed doors.
Topics discussed:
The proactive role design strategy where Alan created positions around specific talent, including how he enhanced an escalation management role by incorporating predictive telemetry capabilities after the candidate suggested preventing escalations rather than just managing them.
The structured four-phase interview evaluation that 90% of interviews follow: recruiter knockout screen for location/comp/qualifications, hiring manager assessment for cultural fit + capability, loop interviews with specific behavioral/technical components, and the tactical "questions from you" phase where executives frequently self-eliminate.
Why LinkedIn optimization has replaced resume strategy for executive hiring, with specific examples of how Andy landed multiple unicorn roles without ever submitting a traditional resume, and the structured approach to making your profile function as an effective landing page.
The contrarian "take every interview to completion" philosophy, including Alan's real example of an offer being rescinded for being overqualified due to resource expectations from Google, and how to position yourself when pursuing roles below your traditional level.
Alan's Gmail monetization case study that he used across 500+ Google interviews to evaluate general cognitive ability through market sizing, pros/cons analysis, and executive recommendation synthesis—adaptable across companies for assessing strategic thinking under pressure.
The back-channel reference methodology that circumvents provided references, including the tactical approach of identifying LinkedIn mutual connections with stronger relationships to you than the candidate, and the "only respond if awesome" communication framework.
How acquiring company-specific terminology differentiates you from 95% of candidates through strategic intelligence gathering—V2 MOMs at Salesforce, XFNs (cross-functional networks) at Facebook—rather than generic research that anyone can Google.
The advocate cultivation system for breaking into target companies, where Alan explains identifying decision-maker influencers who can bypass the thousands of posted applicants by getting your profile directly in front of hiring managers before formal processes begin.
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.com
Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search