# Jonathan Spiess

Jonathan Spiess works in growth-marketing recruiting, helping companies define roles and find growth leaders.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/jonathan-spiess/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/growthleaders
- LinkedIn followers: 19,322
- Topics: recruiting
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-10-08

## Summary

Jonathan Spiess is most useful for practical lessons on growth-marketing role design, hiring decisions, and candidate framing.

- Best for: A B2B SaaS company filling a growth-marketing leadership role and wanting employer-brand content.
- Not for: A product-led growth vendor seeking a practitioner to teach PLG execution, or a DTC brand seeking sponsored placements.
- Check first: Confirm sponsorship formats, rates, and how to inquire through LinkedIn before planning a placement.

### Takeaways

- A salary is a cost line; a senior growth hire is an impact decision.
- A hybrid growth role still needs a primary job.
- A strong candidate's framing can hide their ambition.

## Main ideas

- **A salary is a cost line; a senior growth hire is an impact decision**: Spiess argues that companies should evaluate senior growth hires on their conservative business impact, not the salary gap alone. Their method is to map the candidate's likely effect on conversion, customer acquisition cost, paid-media efficiency, and revenue against the company's growth goals, then compare that figure with the compensation difference. They also answer the internal-equity objection: earlier hires were brought in to solve different problems, while this role needed someone who could own strategy, improve the growth engine, and free the VP of Growth to tackle the next set of problems.
- **A hybrid growth role still needs a primary job**: Spiess argues that hybrid roles can work, but only when the company examines its internal gaps and chooses a center of gravity—the one thing the person must be exceptional at. A senior role can have breadth, but without a primary job, the candidate pool shrinks, the search drags, and urgency eventually drives the decision.
- **Specialist recruiters and internal talent are complements, not rivals**: Spiess argues that internal talent teams and specialist growth recruiters should work together rather than compete. The same growth-marketing title can mean a hands-on builder at a Series A company or a team-builder with budget ownership at a Series C company. The search may call for paid acquisition, product-led growth, lifecycle, demand generation, or full-funnel ownership. Internal talent brings company context; specialist recruiters bring market reach, pattern recognition, and access to growth leaders who are not applying to job ads. A slow or blocked search has a measurable cost.
- **A strong candidate's framing can hide their ambition**: Spiess argues that high performers leaving unhealthy companies sometimes overcorrect: they focus so much on what they are escaping that employers stop hearing what they can build. The coaching fix is to lead with impact and ambition, then explain a preference for a collaborative, data-driven environment. Instead of asking bluntly about work-life balance, candidates can ask how decisions are made, how teams handle disagreement, and whether data can challenge a leader's opinion.

## Work to read

- [Why specialist growth recruiters exist](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/growthleaders_i-genuinely-dont-understand-why-internal-activity-7509268770092261377-smfr)
- [A founder tried to save $40K on one hire](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/growthleaders_a-founder-tried-to-save-40k-on-one-hire-activity-7493315967066763266-4HTJ)
- [This company created a job almost no one could fill](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/growthleaders_this-company-created-a-job-almost-no-one-activity-7493671470359937024-b-nb)
- [She improved paid media efficiency 4x—and still lost two jobs to framing](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/growthleaders_she-improved-paid-media-efficiency-4x-two-activity-7494030151849205760-jq0y)

## Partnerships

Jonathan Spiess works in growth-marketing recruiting. Their posts focus on hiring and role design, not sponsored content: candidate positioning after a toxic work experience, the cost of lowballing a growth hire, a hybrid product/growth role that failed to fill, and friction between internal talent teams and specialist recruiters. They do not describe a sponsorship offer, media kit, rate card, placement package, or other partnership format a brand could buy. The LinkedIn profile is the only published contact point, and no official partnership or inquiry route is identified. Ask through LinkedIn about available partnership formats and how to inquire.

## Alternatives

- Oscar Bennetts: When the search is about convincing proven commercial leaders who are not job hunting to consider a move, and the market is industrial or supply-chain adjacent rather than software. Bennetts writes to exactly that: experienced commercial people are paying attention even though they are not looking, and what decides whether they engage is the direction of the business and the quality of its leadership, not title or package. One post cites DDI research that 57% of employees have left a role because of the manager or leadership. The other argues the recurring gap is leadership and role fit rather than a skills shortage, naming branch managers promoted too early, sales managers stretched too thin, and commercial directors stuck in day-to-day delivery. If a B2B SaaS company's search is really a leadership-quality argument aimed at passive candidates, this is closer to the task than a growth-marketing craft writer.
- George LaRocque: When the hiring decision includes choosing or evaluating recruiting technology, or when compliance and market structure are part of the need. LaRocque tracks what is replacing the old pay-per-click, post-and-pray sourcing model: agentic pre-apply sourcing that qualifies a candidate before an application exists and is paid on the outcome instead of the click, with applications per job opening up 412% cited. One post covers the regulatory clock, with the EU AI Act's high-risk hiring rules moving to December 2027, plus US litigation exposure in Mobley v. Workday and a case against Eightfold. The other sets out LaRocque's hourglass market view, with capital piling up at the wide top and bottom while single-category vendors are squeezed in the neck, using Salary.com's SalaryTalent launch to test whether platform gravity transfers between categories. If the B2B SaaS buyer is itself an HR technology company, or intends to buy sourcing software as part of running this search, LaRocque is the better starting voice.
- Brett Butler: When the buyer wants one provider accountable for the whole hiring lifecycle rather than a shortlist. Butler describes owning the process end to end: identifying the need, defining success, building pipelines, structured interviews, onboarding, training, retention analysis and succession planning. They argue that staying with a client after the placement turns each hire into data that improves the next one. A second post is a candid personal history, covering early ventures, a startup that grew from roughly $1M toward $100M-plus in valuation and collapsed before a payout, and portfolio work at Bank of America / Merrill Lynch during COVID. It closes on the conclusion that most businesses fail on people decisions rather than ideas. That narrative is useful if the campaign needs employer-brand storytelling about hiring mistakes and lessons learned, or a supplier who stays past the hire.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/