The 50-Interview Role Calibration Method
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
When hiring a senior role you have never held or managed, you do not know what good looks like, what the KPIs are, or what the market pays — so any candidate can seem plausible. Ravi's fix is to run roughly fifty interviews with people already in that role before making any offer, using a fixed question set that extracts the job description, the metrics, the priorities and the compensation band from the candidates themselves. The interviews cost time rather than money, and by the end you hold a scorecard assembled from fifty practitioners. He also anchors seniority by hiring from a company one tier above his own, on the logic that a business at the next revenue level has already validated that person.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Name the role you cannot evaluate
Identify the seat where you have no reference for good performance. Ravi had never hired a CMO, and in a young industry there was no obvious template for what one should do.
Watch out This is most dangerous in roles adjacent to your own strength, where you assume you already know.
- 2
Book about fifty interviews with practitioners
Treat the interview round as research rather than selection. The only cost is your time, and even the worst case teaches you what your current team is not doing that they should be.
Pro tip Masterminds, coaching programmes and peers with the role already filled are additional sources of the same information.
- 3
Ask the same calibration questions every time
Ravi's set: what does a good person in this role do, what are their KPIs, based on our numbers what growth should we expect, what would your top three priorities be, and what are your on-track earning expectations.
Pro tip The earnings question is how you discover the market rate without guessing.
- 4
Do not hire the first strong candidate
Ravi's eventual CMO was the very first person he interviewed, but he completed all fifty interviews before returning to him. Finishing the round preserves the calibration and the negotiating position.
Pro tip Completing the round also let him negotiate pricing from an informed position.
Watch out Cutting the round short leaves you with a hire you still cannot evaluate.
- 5
Write the offer from the aggregate
Convert the fifty conversations into an explicit expectation document — responsibilities, KPIs, priorities and compensation — and make the offer against that, not against a candidate's self-description.
- 6
Anchor level one tier above you
Ravi hired his CMO out of Mindvalley, a business doing over $100m a year, rather than from a $10m company, reasoning that if a nine-figure business justified keeping this person, a $10m business can certainly deploy them.
Pro tip Neil Patel's rule pairs well here: hire someone who has done the thing three times, since once is luck.
Watch out Senior salaries feel alarming day to day; Ravi reframes the cost as hiring a coach for that function.
In the wild
Ravi considers himself strong at marketing, having built marketing systems for thousands of businesses, yet had never hired a chief marketing officer and had no template for the role in a young industry. He ran fifty interviews with other CMOs, asking each what a good CMO does, what their KPIs are, what growth his numbers should produce, their top three priorities, and their on-track earnings expectation. The first person he interviewed was the one he eventually hired — from Mindvalley, a business doing over $100m a year — but only after completing the full round.
→ A calibrated scorecard, a known market rate, a stronger negotiation and a hire from a company one tier up.
Ali's marketing lead had been with him three years and produced results — a ConvertKit Black Friday campaign made around £500,000 in a weekend — but Ali had never worked with a CMO and had no way to judge what else should be happening. Applying the method would mean interviewing marketing leaders from businesses two to twenty times his size, asking the same fixed questions, and using the answers either to write a development plan for the incumbent or to justify a senior hire.
→ A concrete list of what is missing, obtained at the cost of time rather than a bad hire.
Common mistakes
Interviewing only to fill the seat
If every conversation is judged as hire or no-hire, you never extract the role definition. The point of the round is to learn the job before you evaluate anyone against it.
Hiring laterally instead of upward
Recruiting from a company at your own revenue level imports your existing ceiling. Ravi deliberately targets the tier above so the company's cumulative knowledge jumps.
Guessing compensation
Without asking candidates their on-track earnings expectation across a large sample, you either underpay and lose the hire or overpay from anxiety. The sample gives you the band.
From the transcript
“when I hired the CMO, I just did 50 interviews with other CMOS”
“What does a good cmo do? What are the KPIs of a good CMO?”
“by the time I had finished 50 interviews, I knew exactly what a CMO should be doing, what they should be getting paid all of…”
From the episode
$25m CEO Coaches me on How to Grow our Business - Ravi Abuvala: Scaling with Systems
Ravi Abuvala: Scaling with Systems