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
