In this episode of How I Hire, Andy Mowat speaks with Tolithia Kornweibel, CEO of Beam Benefits, about her progression from CMO to CRO at Gusto before taking the CEO helm. Having scaled through Gusto's growth from 300 employees to its current size while managing both marketing and sales organizations, Tolithia shares why she deliberately operates without talent acquisition at Beam and how transparent communication about company challenges, including directing candidates to read negative Glassdoor reviews, actually strengthens hiring outcomes. Her approach challenges conventional wisdom, from eliminating 90-day plans to maintaining hands-on involvement from day one.
Topics discussed:
- Why sales leadership remains the hardest GTM hire to get right, with success depending as much on organizational readiness to support transformation as finding the right person, and why it must show impact within one sales cycle.
- The "describe your perfect boss" interview technique that reveals collaboration style and independence spectrum positioning, with resistance to "micromanagement" serving as an immediate disqualifier for small company environments requiring altitude flexibility.
- How transition from Gusto's 70-person talent acquisition team to zero TA at Beam forced a shift to continuous networking and proactive relationship building, often having 3-4 hours of exploratory conversations before formal interviews.
- The deliberate use of job postings solely as shareable links for network distribution, acknowledging that at VP level and above, submitted applications are essentially unusable due to volume and AI-generated noise.
- Why keeping interview panels to 4 people maximum (2 decision makers, 4 total) while encouraging candidates to request additional stakeholder access serves as both efficiency measure and positive signal of thoroughness.
- The mixed value of Gusto's hiring committee structure requiring conviction ("if it's a soft yes, it's a no") for values alignment, while creating educational tax for GTM leaders needing to justify hires to engineering-heavy committees.
- The case against 90-day plans for senior hires: "Your half-informed decision is probably better statistically than anything we were coming up with before" because senior leaders are hired specifically to drive immediate change.
- Why senior leaders must become "mildly dangerous" with AI tools quickly, not for innovation but to implement brilliant basics, validate ideas rapidly, and create psychological safety for their teams' experimentation in an AI-transformed landscape.
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
Interact with AI Andy: www.whispered.com/whisper-search
