I'd hire the one who can't open Klaviyo

Happy Sunday!

I spent a good chunk of this week in hiring interviews, and one of them turned into a debate with my own team. We were looking at candidates for a client-facing Account Manager role, and the question on the table was simple: do we weight years of Klaviyo experience, or do we weight how someone actually thinks?

My team leaned toward the candidate with the deep retention background. I didn't, and I had to say out loud why.

The case I made

An Account Manager isn't really a marketer. They're a mini consultant, and the thing about consultants is that nobody hires them for their tools. They get hired for how they think under pressure.

This isn't a hunch I made up. The big firms have been doing it for decades.

McKinsey, Bain, BCG, none of them recruit a new analyst because that person already knows the industry cold. They recruit for clarity, for structured thinking, for the ability to stay calm when a room is tense.

I run hiring the same way. I genuinely don't care if you've never opened Klaviyo, because I can teach you flows, segmentation, reporting, the whole calendar of how we work. That stuff is learnable, and we teach it well.

What I can't teach

The other half is the part that either lives in a person or it doesn't. How do you stay composed when a $10M founder is upset and taking it out on the account in front of you? How do you talk like someone leading the relationship instead of someone waiting for the next task?

I know this because I've been burned learning it. I've passed on candidates whose resumes looked great on paper but fell apart the second they were challenged in the room. I've hired people who knew the platform inside and out, then watched them freeze when a client pushed back hard.

That's the lesson that took me a few wrong hires to really believe. Most Account Managers don't fail because they're missing knowledge. They fail because they can't hold the room when it matters.

Why I changed the room's mind

Technical skill turns out to be everywhere. You can find a hundred people who know how to build a flow, but composure under real pressure is the rare thing, and it's what actually decides whether a client trusts the person sitting across from them.

So when my team pushed back this week, that's where I landed. Hire the person who can think and stay steady, then teach them the retention side. The reverse almost never works, and I've got the wrong hires to prove it.

If you're hiring for a role like this, hit reply and tell me how you're thinking about it. I read every one.

Have a great week.

- Raymond