I bit my tongue over a bowl of hot lentil soup and the sharp metallic taste of blood filled my mouth before I could even swallow. It was a stupid mistake and it happened because I tried to explain the mechanics of a flexible gold nib while I was still chewing. My jaw just missed its mark and now my words feel thick and clumsy and my pride feels even worse.
There is a specific kind of shame in hurting yourself through your own lack of rhythm. It is the same kind of feeling a hiring manager gets after they realize they hired a person who was very good at talking and very bad at doing.
The Attribution Question
I was thinking about this because of Cordelia and she is a woman who knows a lot about spreadsheets but very little about the dark corners of the internet. She sat in a room with two people and she asked them both the same question about marketing attribution.
She wanted to know how they would prove which ads were making the company money and which ads were just burning holes in the budget. It is a fair question and it is a question that every business owner asks when they see the credit card bill at the end of the month.
Tom: The Confident
The first candidate was a man named Tom and he had a very nice suit and a very loud voice. He looked Cordelia in the eye and he told her that attribution is easy if you have the right tools.
He said that he uses a last-click model and he blends it with a bit of multi-touch logic and he can tell her exactly which dollar produced which lead. He used words like seamless and transparent and guaranteed.
Sarah: The Cautious
The second candidate was a woman named Sarah and she had spent actually running the campaigns that Tom only talked about.
When Cordelia asked her the same question Sarah took a breath and she looked at the ceiling and she said that it depends. She explained that privacy changes and cookie deletions make the data look like a Swiss cheese sandwich.
Tom did not blink and he did not hesitate and he made the world sound like a simple place where every human action is tracked by a tiny digital breadcrumb. Cordelia liked him immediately because he gave her a sense of peace and he made the complex mess of human behavior sound like a math problem that he had already solved.
Sarah talked about how a person might see an ad on their phone while they are waiting for a train and then search for the brand on their laptop later and how the data would never connect those two moments. She used words like probabilistic modeling and incrementality and messy. She looked careful and she looked cautious and she looked like she was worried about lying to a person she might have to work for.
The Trap of Certainty
Cordelia walked out of those interviews and she told me that Tom was a leader and Sarah seemed unsure of herself. She said that Tom had a plan and Sarah had a list of excuses. But the truth is that Tom was confidently wrong and Sarah was carefully right and the process was designed to reward the man who was lying to himself and the room.
Modern attribution data: A “Swiss cheese sandwich” of privacy gaps and untracked human intuition.
In my shop I fix fountain pens and I spend a lot of time looking at nibs under a magnifying glass. A nib is a very small piece of metal but it has to do a very difficult job and it has to balance the flow of ink with the pressure of a human hand.
If a customer comes in and says that their pen is scratchy I can tell them that I will fix it in and it will be perfect forever. That would make them happy and they would think I am a genius.
But if I am honest I have to tell them that the paper they use matters and the ink they choose matters and the way they hold the pen matters more than anything. The honest answer is longer and it is less satisfying and it makes me look like I am trying to avoid the work. But the honest answer is the only one that keeps the pen from leaking all over their shirt a week later.
The Mechanics of Chaos
Marketing is exactly like a fountain pen nib because it is a delicate balance of physics and art and it is prone to breaking if you treat it like a blunt instrument. When a candidate tells you that they have a perfect system for attribution they are telling you that they do not understand how the system works.
They are ignoring the fact that people are chaotic and that technology is failing and that the data is often just a very educated guess. They are selling you a map of a city that does not exist and they are doing it with a smile because they know that you want to believe the map is real.
The problem is that the interview room is a theater and we cast the people who play the part of the expert the best. We want the person who can stand at the whiteboard and draw a straight line from a Facebook ad to a sale even though that line is actually a jagged mess of redirects and forgotten clicks. We punish the person who points out the jaggedness because we think that nuance is a sign of weakness. We think that if a person really knew what they were doing they would not have to say it depends.
But in the world of modern digital strategy it depends is the only answer that is actually worth paying for. If a person does not start their explanation with a list of things they cannot track then they are either a fool or they think that you are one.
They are ignoring the dark social channels where people share links in private messages and they are ignoring the word of mouth that happens over coffee and they are ignoring the fact that most people do not click on ads even when they are interested in the product.
The Gift of Certainty
Cordelia chose Tom because he gave her the gift of certainty and certainty is a very expensive drug. It feels good when you buy it but the hangover is brutal when the numbers do not match the promises.
She will spend watching him build reports that look beautiful but mean nothing and she will wonder why the revenue is not moving even though the charts are all pointing up. She will realize that he was not a leader but he was a person who was very good at reading the room and giving the room what it wanted.
Finding people who actually understand the grit and the grime of the machine is hard because those people often lack the polish of the career interviewers. They are too busy fixing the leaks and tuning the engines to spend their time practicing their elevator pitches.
This is why specialized help is so important when you are trying to build a team that actually produces results. You need someone who can hear the difference between a confident lie and a complex truth.
Partner with NextPath Workforce Solutions
You need a partner like NextPath Workforce Solutions to look past the suit and the loud voice and find the person who knows exactly why the data is messy and how to win anyway.
The Pace of Regret
I think about my tongue and how it hurts to talk and how I brought that pain on myself by trying to be too fast with my words. I was trying to impress a customer with a story about a Waterman pen and I forgot that I was still in the middle of a meal.
We do this in business all the time and we move so fast and we try to look so smart that we end up biting our own tongues. We hire for the feeling of being right instead of the reality of being effective.
If you are a hiring manager you have to learn to love the person who makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable. You have to learn to trust the person who tells you that your current strategy is flawed and that the data you love is probably a lie.
You have to look for the person who has the scars from the campaigns that failed because those are the only people who know how to build a campaign that might actually work. The expert is the one who knows where the holes are and they are the one who spends their time trying to fill them instead of pretending they are not there.
Tom will eventually leave Cordelia’s company and he will go to another company and he will tell them the same story about simple attribution and he will get hired there too. He will spend his whole career being a hero in the interview and a ghost when the results are due.
Sarah will keep working for a company that values her honesty and she will keep building systems that are resilient because they are based on the truth of how the world works. She will not have the loudest voice in the room but she will have the only one that is telling the truth.
I am going to finish my soup now and I am going to do it very slowly and very carefully. I am not going to talk about pens and I am not going to try to look like an expert while I have a mouthful of lentils.
There is a time for talking and there is a time for doing and the best people are the ones who know that the doing is the only thing that matters in the end.
A blunt tongue speaks a loud lie but a sharp nib writes a fine line.
The next time you sit across from a candidate and they give you an answer that sounds too good to be true you should probably believe that it is. You should ask them about the failures and you should ask them about the mess and you should look for the moment when they have to stop and think.
That moment of silence is not a sign of a lack of knowledge but it is the sound of a brain actually doing the work of being right. Marketing is not a straight line and it is not a math problem and it is not a guarantee. It is a messy and human and broken thing that requires constant care and honest observation.
If you hire for certainty you are just buying a very expensive mask and eventually that mask is going to slip and you are going to see the reality underneath. It is better to see the reality on day one even if it is not as pretty as the story.