Interviewing Tips for CEOs with Aimée Lapic

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Aimée Lapic. Aimée is a college friend of mine, so we've known each other for a very long time. She is also, more importantly, the CEO of Hanna Andersson. She is the former CMO of GoPro and Pandora, so lots of great brands. And she's a public company board member at Cardlytics. Aimée, it's great to see you.

Aimée Lapic: Oh, Matt, it's always amazing to see you. Thank you so much for referring to me as a college friend and then saying we've known each other a long time, because the two of us went to college when we were 10, right?

Matt Blumberg: Right. Yeah, at most. All right. My question for you today is about interviewing. So let me start with, if you have one, what is your favorite interview question and why?

Aimée Lapic: I am always trying to figure out, when I interview someone what their aptitude for curiosity is. So by that I mean, I really want to ask someone, "Please give me an example of when you were curious about something and that curiosity led to the growth of your business or solved a problem or really uncovered something that you never would've been able to see if you hadn't been curious to start with."

Matt Blumberg: That's really interesting. I mean, I agree, intellectual curiosity is a critical skill for being a senior executive. I bet you learn a lot with that question. Does it stump people? Like are there people who are like, "I don't know?"

Aimée Lapic: No, but there are people who don't really know what I'm asking, and they answer it more about like how they grew the business or what happened as opposed to, what insight led them to unlock something that then grew the business.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah.

Aimée Lapic: And that's what I'm looking for. Honestly, you can teach people almost any skill, but you cannot teach inquisitivism or intellectual curiosity-

Matt Blumberg: Yeah.

Aimée Lapic: That is innate to an individual.

Matt Blumberg: That is fantastic. All right. So let me ask another specific question about interviewing. So you're a career CMO. There are lots of schools of thought, about CEOs interviewing for the role that they used to have. And some people do it really well, some people do it really poorly. When you're looking to hire a senior marketer, whether it's a CMO or director, VP level, is that any different for you, since you've graduated, essentially from that role into CEO? Or is it the same?

Aimée Lapic: Yes. Well, I honestly feel like the level of questions is much more specific in what I'm looking for. So when I interview someone to be a head of marketing or a VP of marketing, I'm really looking for A, what's their passion for the business, and B, how they think about customer experience and how holistic that customer experience is, and then C, specifically what have they done versus what they've seen happen to kind of drive the customer experience to the next level? And unfortunately, for those folks who hadn't really done it themselves, but they've seen it happen, I can figure that out within five minutes basically.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, I was going to say, are you more confident or less confident doing those interviews? It sounds like more confident.

Aimée Lapic: I'm really confident doing those interviews, because I really do know kind of what it takes to honestly think about the customer experience holistically and then execute against it in a way that most CMOs or most CEOs might not have having grown up that way. And there are good marketers or senior marketers who don't really think about the customer experience as holistically. Who think in terms of, I'm either a brand marketing person or I'm a customer acquisition marketing person, or I'm a retention marketing person. I notice-

Matt Blumberg: But then they go to tactics as opposed to-

Aimée Lapic: They go directly to tactics.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah.

Aimée Lapic: Yes. And I'm looking for that kind of customer experience mindset.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Aimée Lapic from Hanna Andersson. Thank you so much for being here.

Aimée Lapic: Thank you.