The bullshit test demands a "stood up a new channel from scratch" credential. "A hard requirement is that they've stood up a new growth channel from scratch before." "Founders are trying to abdicate responsibility for their growth efforts, and hoping that a magical hire solves everything." "Early startups need to move the needle each week, growing 5 or 10% week-over-week, and no amount of PowerPoint can do that." The pattern: hiring panels screen aggressively for "PowerPoint-fluent but cannot ship" candidates. Resume must show specific channel built from zero with the specific work called out.

Hire a builder, not a leader — stage-fit is the dominant rejection reason. "You cannot outsource your initial growth ideas to new hires." "Hire a builder, not a leader. Growth leaders need 6-12 months to understand your specific business context. Instead, recruit an Acquisition PM or Activation PM — someone with tactical execution skills in a focused domain who can build processes from scratch." "Match your hire to your current friction point. Hiring a marketer for a product-led company will likely underperform." Two of three first-growth-hires fail on stage-mismatch, not skill quality. Resume must signal stage-fit and motion-fit (PLG vs. sales-led vs. marketing-led; pre-PMF vs. scaling) explicitly per role.

Frameworks beat tool-stack length. "Becoming an elite growth marketer has nothing to do with the specific hammer in your toolkit and everything to do with mastering the emerging skills, frameworks, and thought processes that enable you to solve new problems, repeatedly." Tool-stack length is anti-signal; framework fluency (AARRR, ICE/RICE, jobs-to-be-done, North-Star metric design, sequential A/B testing) is the signal. Skills section: 3-5 frameworks plus 3-5 admin-level tools, not a 30-tool laundry list.

Experimentation rigor + data analysis sit above acquisition tactics in the Hierarchy of Skills. The 4-tier framework (foundational → product → acquisition → monetization) anchors on 7 foundational skills: customer empathy, data analysis, experimental process, funnel optimization, copywriting, visual design, basic development. Reforge's commentary: candidates skip foundational skills (especially data analysis + experimental process) and jump straight to acquisition tactics; results in "tactical executor, not strategic builder" rejection. Every senior candidate needs at least one bullet signaling data analysis depth and one signaling experimentation rigor.

Pirate-metrics fluency is the disambiguation between growth marketers and marketing managers. The framework's value to a hiring panel is that it is checkable. A candidate who claims AARRR fluency should be able to name which stage they have owned, what activation-metric definition they shipped, what retention curves they monitored, what referral coefficient they engineered, what revenue chain they attributed against. Generic "growth strategy" claims fail; specific stage-naming with metric-naming passes.

Self-starter, ambiguity-tolerance, SQL fluency. Four operating-style filters HubSpot's growth-marketing screen tests: self-starter with autonomy preference, thrives in ambiguity, self-improvement obsession, data fluency including SQL. Behavioral-signal language ("stood up program from zero", "built first version with no prior infrastructure") is the cultural-fit proxy. SQL appears in the skills section of every senior growth-marketing resume that survives a HubSpot-level screen.

Lead with stage-fit (team size, ARR, motion), name the budget owned, and tie at least one experimentation outcome to revenue. Pivot candidates should name the pivot honestly in the summary line — hiring panels reward self-aware framing over keyword-padded "growth" claims.

Use the budget → decision → redirect → outcome cadence. Every experimentation bullet needs four elements: test count, win/loss/kill split, statistical specificity (MDE, power, n, p-value) for at least one named winner, and revenue chain. Vanity metrics (followers, page views, raw CTR) without downstream funnel and revenue tie are anti-signal.

Pick 3-5 frameworks (AARRR, ICE/RICE, North-Star metric design, sequential A/B testing, MMM dual-model attribution) plus 3-5 admin-level tools — not a 30-tool laundry list. Brian Balfour: tool-stack length is anti-signal; framework fluency is the signal. Name the niche stack (PLG vs DTC vs B2B SaaS) and avoid conflating them.