Resumes for growth hackers and marketers look nearly identical now that every candidate has learned to use both words. The interview is where you actually find out which one you're hiring, and most founders ask the wrong questions to get there.
Why titles stopped being a reliable signal
Growth hacker became a prestige title around the same time marketer started sounding old-fashioned on LinkedIn. Plenty of candidates who are really brand marketers relabeled themselves growth hackers without changing what they're actually good at. The title on the resume tells you what the market rewards this year, not what the candidate can do.
Questions that surface real experimentation muscle
Ask: 'Walk me through one experiment you ran that failed, what you expected, what actually happened, and what you changed next.' A real growth hacker has a specific failed test on hand instantly, with numbers. A candidate who pivots to talking about a successful campaign instead is telling you they don't actually run structured experiments.
Questions that surface real positioning and story muscle
Ask: 'Tell me about a product that was hard to explain, and how you changed the way it was talked about.' A real marketer can walk through the before-and-after language precisely and explain why the new framing worked. A candidate who describes running more ads or testing more subject lines is answering a growth question, not a positioning one.
The red flag answer for each track
For the growth-hacker track, the red flag is a candidate who can only describe successes, never a documented failed test; real experimentation produces far more failures than wins. For the marketer track, the red flag is a candidate who can't explain why a message worked in terms of the buyer's actual language, only in terms of the campaign's reach or impressions.
A 90-day test project for finalists
Before finalizing an offer, give your top candidate a small, real project matched to the track you actually need: three structured experiments with a written hypothesis for a growth hire, or a rewritten positioning statement plus one piece of sales-ready content for a marketing hire. What they produce in a week tells you more than any interview answer, and it's a cheap way to avoid discovering the mismatch three months into a full-time hire.