Who is Justworks?
Justworks helps small businesses get off the ground by taking HR off their plate. Payroll, benefits, compliance, and HR support run through a single platform so owners can focus on running the business. Headquartered in New York, the company is evolving from a PEO into the operating system for the small business journey, serving small business customers across both self-serve and sales-assisted motions.
Situation
Product marketing is a difficult function to hire for, and it gets harder as roles get more specialized. At Justworks, product marketing roles had been taking three to four months to fill, with the most niche searches running longer. Internal talent acquisition teams are built for breadth, not for evaluating a discipline as specific as PMM, and an earlier engagement with an outside recruiting firm had produced lists of candidates without any real assessment behind them.
The open role raised the difficulty further. Justworks was rebuilding its growth product marketing team and redesigning how customers discover, buy, and expand on the platform, shifting from a traditional B2B sales motion toward a consumer-grade self-serve experience. The Senior Product Marketing Manager, Growth role sat between product, growth marketing, and design and spanned both acquisition and expansion, owning funnel conversion, net revenue retention, and customer lifetime value. Candidates with the right title were common. Candidates who had actually run experiments, partnered with product and design to architect intentional journeys, and owned both halves of the funnel were not.
Solution
Fluvio ran the search end to end. The engagement opened with structured intake sessions with the hiring manager (Director of Product Marketing), and cross-functional partners in product management and lifecycle marketing, which produced a sharper definition of the role than the job description alone.
Candidates were sourced through Fluvio's product marketing Talent Network and screened across two Fluvio-led interviews before any of them reached Justworks. Every submitted candidate came with a written recommendation covering applicable experience, the case for the hire, and the specific risks worth probing.
Justworks ran a condensed internal loop: a hiring manager and stakeholder interview, a cross-functional case study panel, and a final conversation with the VP of Product Marketing. The search closed with the hire of a candidate just four weeks from kickoff, against a historical average of three to four months.
“What you’re buying is judgment, not volume. Fluvio does the work on the front end so you don’t have to, and when he tells you someone is qualified, they are. ”
Client Interview
Mark Kurtz
Director of Product Marketing, Justworks
WHAT PROBLEMS WERE YOU ENCOUNTERING THAT LED YOU TO BRING IN AN OUTSIDE RECRUITING PARTNER?
I've been at Justworks five years, and over the last two, every product marketing role has taken a while to fill. Three to four months is normal for us, and the more specialized the role, the longer it runs. That isn't a knock on our talent acquisition team. General recruiters aren't experts in every function, and product marketing is niche to begin with. Once you're hiring into a niche within the niche, it gets very hard to tell a qualified candidate from someone who just has the right title on their resume. This particular role was a growth PMM sitting between product, growth marketing, and design, covering both acquisition and expansion, at a moment when we're redesigning our entire buying experience. I needed a partner who could actually evaluate that.
WHAT MADE THE FLUVIO PROCESS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER RECRUITING ENGAGEMENTS YOU'VE RUN?
I wasn't spending time with unqualified candidates. Everyone I met had already been through multiple conversations with Fluvio, and every submission came with a written point of view on why the person fit and where the risk was. I've had the other version of this, where you get a spreadsheet with a LinkedIn profile and a resume attached, and then you spend an hour on a call walking through candidates who were never really vetted. At that point I'm doing the work myself. With Fluvio the vetting had already happened, and it had been done by someone who understands the discipline.
HOW DID THAT CHANGE HOW YOU SPENT YOUR TIME AS THE HIRING MANAGER?
It let us compress the process. We ran a hiring manager and stakeholder interview, a case study with a cross-functional panel, and a final conversation with our VP, and we were confident making a decision off that. That only works when the top of the funnel is genuinely qualified. Candidates also arrived with accurate expectations about the role and the compensation, which matters more than people assume. When expectations are set badly at the start, you find out at the offer stage. My time went into choosing between strong candidates instead of screening out weak ones.
WHAT WOULD YOU TELL ANOTHER PRODUCT MARKETING LEADER CONSIDERING FLUVIO FOR A HIRE?
Use them for the roles where you can't afford a mis-hire or another four months of searching. What you're buying is judgment, not volume. Fluvio does the work on the front end so you don't have to, and when he tells you someone is qualified, they are. I'd advocated for Fluvio internally before this search, and having now run one with them, I'd do it again.