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