Your head of marketing gave notice, or already walked. The instinct is to repost the job description and start screening. Do that third. The two weeks after a marketing leader leaves are mostly operational, and the companies that handle them badly lose more to drift than to the vacancy itself.
Here is the order that works.
1. Settle the operational questions first
Four things need an answer this week, and none of them involve recruiting.
Who approves spend. Ad platforms keep spending without supervision. Agency invoices keep arriving. Name one person — usually the CEO or finance lead — who approves marketing spend until further notice, and set a threshold they will clear within 48 hours. Unapproved does not mean stopped; it means paused in a way nobody noticed for three weeks.
What is mid-flight. Walk the calendar with whoever is left. A rebrand, a site build, a trade show with a paid booth, a campaign with creative in review, a contract that auto-renews next month. Every one of those just lost its owner. Write the list down and assign a name to each line, even if the name is yours.
What the team has been told. Tell the marketing team the day it is public, name a temporary point of contact, and say honestly that the plan for the role is still being worked out. The failure mode is not saying too little about the plan — it is saying nothing at all, which the team reads as “we are next.”
What external parties know. Agencies, freelancers, and your own sales team were taking direction from someone who is gone. One email naming the interim contact prevents a month of work continuing on last quarter’s brief.
2. Do not repost the old job description
The description you used last time describes the company you were when you wrote it. If you have grown, added a product, changed who you sell to, or built an in-house team where there used to be none, the role is different now even if the title is not.
Three questions tell you most of what changed:
- What did this person actually spend their time on? Ask the team, not the org chart. If 70% of the week went to managing vendors and pulling reports, you may be hiring an operator, not a strategist.
- What was consistently not getting done? The gap is the job. A CMO who was great at brand and never built a pipeline model leaves a hole with a shape to it.
- What does the next 18 months need? A company about to raise, enter a new segment, or rebuild its funnel needs a different profile than one defending a mature position.
This is also the moment to be honest about whether the seat needs to be a CMO at all. Plenty of companies replace a departed CMO with a director plus outside senior guidance, and get more done for less. The full comparison of fractional, full-time, agency and consultant covers that trade-off properly, so I will not re-argue it here.
3. Be realistic about the search
A senior marketing search is slow. Defining the role, sourcing, screening, final rounds, an offer, a notice period, and a ramp — in my experience that adds up to several months end to end, and longer if the first search produces no one you want. Treat that as a planning assumption, not a prediction, and build for it rather than hoping to beat it.
What decays during those months is specific and worth naming: the content calendar empties, nobody renegotiates the agency scope, lead quality questions go unanswered because no one owns the data, and your best marketing person gets recruited by someone who offers them the title you have not filled. None of that is dramatic. It just compounds quietly.
4. Choose a bridge on purpose
There are three real options. One of them is doing nothing, and it is sometimes right.
Promote the internal number two. Often the best answer and the one most companies skim past. They know the customers, the product, the history, and the people. It costs a title, a raise, and your time coaching them. Against it: if they have never owned a budget or managed vendors, you are asking them to learn executive work while holding the function together, and a failed battlefield promotion is expensive in a way the spreadsheet does not show. Give them a defined scope and explicit support, not just the workload.
Bring in interim or fractional leadership. Fits when there are live commitments, a team or agencies with nobody steering, and decisions waiting on someone senior. You get experienced judgement in weeks instead of months, with no severance attached. Against it: they are part-time by construction, they will not be in every meeting, and the engagement is only as good as the access and authority you give it. Our retainers run $7,500–$15,000 a month across three tiers, which is real money and worth comparing honestly against a promotion plus a raise.
Let it ride. If marketing is one coordinator executing a program that works, and you have no launch or raise in the next two quarters, the CEO can hold the reins for a quarter. Against it: the CEO’s attention is the scarcest resource in the company, and “a quiet quarter” has a way of becoming three. Put a date on it and review it on that date.
5. Make sure the bridge hands something over
A bridge that leaves nothing behind was overhead. Whatever you choose, require these before the permanent hire’s first day:
- A current picture of the funnel, the spend by channel, and what each channel actually returns
- The KPI baselines, written down, with the date they were measured
- A vendor and contract inventory with renewal dates and who owns each relationship
- Honest notes on the team: who is ready for more, who is at risk, who is in the wrong seat
- A prioritised list of what was deliberately deferred, and why
Hand that to the new CMO on day one and they start at week six instead of week one. Skip it and they will spend their first quarter rediscovering what you already paid someone to find out. If you want help getting that assessment done fast, the 30-Day Marketing Diagnostic is a fixed-scope version of exactly this list.
The first move, though, is the cheap one: open the calendar, find everything the departing CMO owned, and put a name next to each line today. The hiring decision gets easier once that list exists.
Talk to a CMO if you want a second opinion on what the role should be before you post it.
