Whispered Hiring with Karrie Sanderson, Marketing Strategy/Chief of Staff (LiveRamp)

In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Karrie Sanderson, Marketing Strategy/Chief of Staff at LiveRamp, about her distinctive approach to building exceptional marketing teams. Drawing from her diverse experience at leading brands including Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Pfizer, Smartsheet, and Typeform, Karrie shares frameworks for identifying talent gaps, evaluating candidates beyond traditional metrics, and navigating today's employer-friendly market. Her insights reveal how strength-based leadership can transform both hiring processes and team dynamics.

Topics Discussed:

• How departures of senior talent create strategic opportunities to reassess organizational structure rather than simply backfilling the same role without evaluation.
• Why LiveRamp's "hungry, humble, smart" framework identifies candidates with the right balance of curiosity, humility, and emotional/organizational intelligence needed for senior roles.
• How Coca-Cola's strength-based team building methodology creates complementary leadership teams where diversity of strengths leads to more effective problem-solving and innovation.
• Why posting senior roles publicly can generate 2,000-3,000 applications, and the tactical approach to leveraging 8-12 specialized Slack communities as filtered talent pools.
• The critical importance of handling candidate rejections professionally, especially for senior roles where "ghosting" qualified candidates can damage employer brand in tight-knit industries.
• Why the traditional categorization of CMOs as brand, demand gen, or product marketing specialists creates an artificial framework that sets marketing leaders up for failure.
• How a "people first" onboarding strategy that invests 2-3 weeks in relationship building accelerates long-term performance despite seeming counterintuitive when roles have been vacant.
• Why passive candidates often make superior hires because they're "running to" rather than "running from" opportunities, and how to adjust evaluation criteria for their different engagement patterns.
• The diminishing value of case studies and take-home assignments when hiring senior executives in competitive markets, and more effective alternatives for assessing strategic thinking.
  

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 recently 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