Conversation
Highlights

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 to leverage the strength-based team building approach from Coca-Cola when hiring, focusing on team composition rather than just individual excellence.
• The “hungry, humble, smart” framework from The Table Group that Karrie uses to identify ideal team players with both IQ and EQ intelligence.
• Why senior leadership vacancies should trigger organizational reflection rather than automatic backfilling of the same role.
• How to effectively recruit through 10-12 targeted Slack communities instead of broad LinkedIn postings that generate thousands of unqualified applicants.
• The importance of treating passive candidates differently—not penalizing them for less initial enthusiasm and focusing instead on whether they’re “running to” versus “running from” something.
• Why Karrie does more screening interviews herself than most senior leaders to ensure proper recruiter calibration and maintain high hiring standards.
• How replacing traditional case studies with group Q&A sessions reveals how candidates think on their feet and interact in team settings.
• The counterintuitive onboarding approach of prioritizing relationship-building for 2-3 weeks before diving into deliverables, which accelerates long-term performance.

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