In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Connor Fee, COO at Fathom.ai, about his systematic approach to scaling operations across revenue, data, and finance functions at a 100-person company. Drawing from his leadership experience at UserVoice, Clearbit, Shortcut, and Winning by Design, Connor reveals how he transformed a company lacking leadership culture into an aligned executive team and shares his counterintuitive hiring methodologies. His insights demonstrate how AI-powered interview analysis can eliminate traditional hiring blind spots while accelerating senior talent evaluation.
Topics discussed:
- How Connor conducted a three-day executive offsite that moved from "knockdown screaming match" over a game of Fishbowl to establishing four company-wide goals that directly dictate hiring priorities, transforming reactive backfilling into strategic talent acquisition aligned with business outcomes.
- The "WHO method" scorecard methodology for senior roles that forces executive alignment by defining four specific six-month outcomes before considering candidates, including Connor's example of requiring five iterations to align on what their head of data would actually accomplish.
- Connor's systematic approach to hiring unfamiliar roles: conducting 10-15 discovery interviews with finance leaders across PLG and non-PLG companies, then using Fathom's AI to extract common hiring mistakes and build targeted interview frameworks for functions outside his expertise.
- The "top 10 strengths" phone screen technique that reveals self-awareness and coachability - Connor pushes candidates through the awkwardness of identifying strengths 7-10 using follow-up prompts like "What would your boss say?" and can predict final hiring outcomes based solely on how they navigate this discomfort.
- Advanced reference check methodology that bypasses positive bias: asking "What was their biggest challenge way back when you worked with them?" to create temporal distance, then following with "This person told me you'd say their challenge was X - would you agree?" to give references explicit permission to elaborate on known weaknesses.
- Implementation of RAPID decision framework to eliminate cross-functional bottlenecks, with Connor explicitly defining himself as "decider" while giving his CEO veto power and telling his team that input will be "taken very seriously" but final decisions aren't democratic.
- AI-powered candidate screening using Ashby's pattern-matching against five ideal LinkedIn profiles to automatically score and surface top 10% of applicants, with Connor noting "it doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to get us to the top 10%" to solve signal-to-noise problems.
- The daily 30-minute check-in onboarding protocol for senior hires combined with shared Asana boards for queuing non-urgent questions, ensuring new executives are never more than 8 hours away from getting unstuck during their first three weeks while maintaining Connor's availability for immediate issues.
ABOUT YOUR HOST:
Andy Mowat has built GTM engines for top companies throughout his career. He led Revenue Operations and Demand Gen at four unicorns, including scaling from $10M to $100M ARR at both Upwork and Culture Amp, and helping guide Box and Carta through IPO scale. With a passion for connecting people, Andy has advised executives on their careers for years and launched Whispered to make searching for executive roles less intimidating.
Learn more about about Whispered: www.whispered.com
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