Digital
Digital recruiting for growth, product and performance teams
KYO's digital search covers the people who own acquisition, the product surface and the numbers behind both: growth and performance, product and UX, digital strategy, web and development, and social and community. These are permanent, direct-hire roles at senior individual contributor level and above, inside companies with real in-house teams. The brief that works starts with which number this person moves, not with a list of channels.
Which digital roles does KYO search?
- 01Growth and performance. Paid acquisition, lifecycle and the experimentation cadence behind them. The hire who owns a number rather than a channel.
- 02Product and UX. Product managers and product designers working on the surface customers actually touch, usually alongside engineering rather than inside marketing.
- 03Digital strategy. The person who decides where effort goes, and who tends to get hired after a stretch of doing everything at once stopped working.
- 04Web and development. The site itself, its performance, and the roles that sit awkwardly between marketing and engineering and get owned by neither.
- 05Social and community. Audience building and the community layer, which is a genuinely different skill from paid and is frequently mis-hired as though it were the same one.
What makes a digital search different from the other two?
Titles move faster than the work does. A title from a few years ago often means something else now, and two companies will use the same words for very different jobs, so matching on title alone produces a shortlist of people who do not do the job. The second difference is that the discipline is measurable, so candidates arrive with numbers attached. That is useful, and it is also the thing to probe, because a result produced by a team of nine in a category with tailwinds is not the same result produced alone.
How do you tell a strong digital candidate from a plausible one?
| What you see | What it can mean | What to ask |
|---|---|---|
| A large number attached to a growth claim | Genuine ownership, or proximity to someone else's result | What was the team, what did they personally decide, and what happened when it stopped working |
| Long tenure at one fast-growing company | Deep operating knowledge, or a ride on a market | What did they build that would still work somewhere slower |
| Every channel listed on the profile | Real breadth, or a small budget spread thin | Which channel would they cut first, and why |
| A tool list standing in for a skills section | Fluency with the stack, or the tools substituting for the thinking | What did they do before that tool was in their stack |
| Short tenures in sequence | Contract-shaped work, or a pattern | The reason for each move, in order, without prompting |
What does a good digital brief contain?
The number this person is accountable for twelve months out, the budget and the team they have to move it, what is already working and must not be broken, and the constraint they are inheriting. That last item is the one most briefs leave out and the one senior candidates ask about first.
Start a search
Start a digital search
Tell Kelly which number the role owns and the rest of the brief follows.
kelly.yosten@kyosearchpartners.comCommon Questions
Do you place engineers?
- Web and front-end roles that sit against the marketing or product surface, yes. Core engineering search is a different market and is not what this firm does.
Is a growth hire the same as a demand generation hire?
- Often overlapping and not the same. Growth usually spans product and lifecycle as well as acquisition. Deciding which one you mean before going to market saves a lot of time.
Can you find someone who is strong in both paid and organic?
- Sometimes, and it is worth checking whether you need one person who is good at both or one person who is excellent at the one that matters most right now.
What if we do not know which digital role we need?
- That is what the hiring advisory work is for, and it is a normal place to start.