Whispered Hiring with Mollie Bodensteiner - SVP of Operations @ Engine

When 70% year-over-year growth meets precision hiring, you get Mollie Bodensteiner's playbook. Instead of posting roles and drowning in LinkedIn noise, she's built Engine's operations engine through whispered networks and ruthless outcome definition. Her contrarian approach reveals why the best senior ops hires never see job boards—and why silence from new hires should terrify you more than any red flag.

From converting enablement pros into RevOps stars to using AI-era case studies that actually work, Mollie shares battle-tested frameworks for scaling teams when every hire matters and every miss costs months.

Topics discussed:

Working backwards from business outcomes to avoid organizational cargo cult hiring — Defining revenue targets, operational efficiency metrics, and market expansion goals first, then mapping scope and handoffs to prevent territorial conflicts during hypergrowth phases, rather than defaulting to "we need a CMO because we don't have one."

The two-week referral sprint methodology that eliminates job postings — Running network-first sourcing through VCs for pattern recognition and backdoor reference checks, using strategic investors as talent validators rather than just sourcing engines, before considering external postings that generate noise over signal.

Testing ICP thinking through the "describe yellow to someone blind" framework — Mollie's signature interview question that reveals how candidates adapt complex concepts to audience limitations and constraints, directly mirroring the core GTM challenge of messaging to prospects with different contexts and pain points.

Why enablement-to-operations career paths outperform traditional ops hiring — Converting people who teach processes into systems operators since they already understand stakeholder management and translation challenges that pure systems thinkers often struggle with in cross-functional environments.

The AI-resistant case study evaluation system using assumption mapping — Structuring 45-minute presentations focused on questioning and thought process rather than deliverables, specifically asking "what did you wish you knew that you didn't ask" to reveal reasoning patterns that ChatGPT can't replicate.

Daily communication protocols over structured onboarding documentation — Using Slack canvases for async question capture with three-times-weekly check-ins, since silence in the first two weeks indicates disengagement more reliably than any other early-stage performance metric.

The restaurant analogy for 90-day relationship crystallization — Explaining to new hires that working relationships solidify like choosing familiar restaurants after exploring a new town, requiring active feedback exchange during the exploration phase before patterns become permanent.

Systematic fresh-eyes capture through challenge permission protocols — Explicitly authorizing new hires to question status quo decisions with "see something, say something" frameworks, since hypergrowth companies lose decision rationale faster than they can document it.

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