Whispered Hiring with Dustin Joost - CRO @ Suralink

In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Dustin Joost, CRO at Suralink, about his systematic approach to breaking traditional hiring patterns that create organizational blind spots. From his experience scaling revenue teams from seed stage through public companies, Dustin reveals how talent market dynamics fundamentally alter recruiting strategies and why the best revenue leaders optimize for stage-fit over industry experience. His frameworks challenge executives to rethink what makes candidates "incredibly deadly" in evolving GTM environments.

Topics discussed:

• Why optimizing for "complementary excellence" over carbon copies prevents blind spots as businesses mature, and the specific assessment criteria Dustin uses to identify candidates who fill strategic gaps rather than replicate existing team strengths.
• The intellectual curiosity + hunger + self-awareness combination that creates "incredible deadliness" through coachability, including how to evaluate these intangibles during interviews and why this trinity outweighs industry-specific experience for executive hires.
• How to implement "just-in-time hiring sprints" with 90-day retrospectives covering channel conversion metrics, bottleneck analysis, and specific SLAs for interviewing committees—treating talent acquisition like product development cycles.
• The bench pipeline methodology of maintaining 3-5 pre-vetted candidates through weekly conversations, enabling urgency without lowered standards while staying two quarters ahead of hiring needs based on 90-day average time-to-fill benchmarks.
• Why non-traditional backgrounds (teachers managing 30 different learning styles, theater actors mastering tension/payoff storytelling) consistently outperform traditional sales hires in complex category creation and enterprise motions.
• The "magic wand friction point" interview question that surfaces cross-functional empathy and systems-level problem-solving in one response, revealing how candidates think about their role in the entire customer journey versus lone-wolf mentalities.
• How candidates break through noise using creative outbound tactics—commenting on CRO posts for pattern recognition, leveraging second-degree connections with templated referral messages, and demonstrating sales methodology in their own candidacy approach.
• The "strategy, structure, people, process" onboarding framework combined with empowerment-then-monitoring approach, using first 30-60 day execution depth (sales leaders running cycles, marketing leaders joining prospect calls) to distinguish managing-up from genuine impact.

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