Always Be Recruiting
Almost everyone I’ve spoken to of late have recruiting as top of mind. Human capital is now more of a constraint than financial capital. Below an excerpt from One to Ten related to hiring.
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Hire Great People
People make a disproportionate impact on your venture’s trajectory. And yet, the way we hire seems weird. Just imagine, we make offers to people we expect to work with for years based on how they perform over several hours of those staged, contrived activities we call interviews. How weird is that? More importantly, how do you up your recruiting game?
Hire for attitude, aptitude, and experience in that order.
Optimize for attitude and aptitude over experience unless it’s a highly specialized technical role or a high-pressure commercial role like VP of sales. Experience counts equally for these types of roles. Having the right attitude is paramount to success in early-stage startups where change is the one constant. Do they show an ability to adapt? Are they coachable? How do they take feedback and what’s an example of feedback they took on board? Have they changed their mind on something? These are all good questions to probe on attitude.
In terms of aptitude, I look for evidence of the ability to learn. I’ll ask how someone learns and to tell me about one recent thing they’ve learned that they’re excited about.
As for experience, I ask candidates to point to the one accomplishment of theirs that would point to success in the role in question. I want to understand how they perceive the role, what success would look like, and how they tie this back to their track record.
Reference early, not late.
Employers tend to take candidate references at the tail end of a process just prior to giving an offer. This doesn’t make sense. At that point, it becomes a box-checking exercise. Even worse, the temptation is to hear what you want to hear since you’re already invested in the candidate and don’t want to start over. Flip the model and take references toward the beginning of a process, especially for executive roles.
Try before you buy.
Look for ways to ascertain what it would be like to work with someone outside of the interview setting. I have product, sales, and marketing candidates give a presentation either on our business or on a product they’re familiar with. The former is harder as they won’t have the context but it’s also more of an opportunity for the candidate to shine. Communication skills manifest more naturally in presentation settings. Do they think quickly on their feet in response to pointed questions or a changed agenda? How do you feel about this person representing you and your company in a meeting when you might not be there?
If presentations aren’t as important, what other joint exercises could you do for each party to get a feel for what it’d be like to work with each other? Perhaps you could invite an engineer to sit through a design review. Or go through a fake business model with a finance candidate. I’m currently evaluating an opportunity where the founder invited me to a private Slack channel to be able to bounce thoughts off each other. It’s been a natural way to test chemistry and how we work through problems.
While it won’t be possible for all candidates, you can also get to know key hires via some sort of engagement, such as an advisor, a consultant, or a board member, before diving in. This enables both parties to get to know each other without having to fully commit right away. I’ve used this approach for my last four roles and only made one mistake.
Raise the average.
Every candidate you hire should raise the average caliber of the team they’ll be joining. Amazon famously uses this strategy by explicitly having a “bar raiser” from another department interview candidates to ensure that they will increase the quality of that team.
Hire VPs at the early stages of growth.
Many founders mistakenly hire executives too late after achieving product–market fit. They then experience rapid growth and have to scramble to recruit them while the organizational debt piles up. Hire functional leaders who can help you scale up earlier than you think. Elad Gil nails it when he writes: “Hiring bona fide executives well in advance before things break is the difference between a sudden ongoing meltdown at your company versus not. Many founders wait to hire executives ‘when we have enough scale to support them,’ instead of viewing the executives as crucial to supporting future scale. The thought process is inappropriately inverted. Executives exist to help you scale and run the company, not the other way around.”
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And here’s Jason Lemkin[1]:
The #1 hiring mistake founders make after $1 million ARR:
A manager instead of a VP of Marketing
A manager instead of a VP of Product
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A product manager for now, not a VP of Engineering
First, the junior hire costs more…They don’t pay for themselves…A true VP is accretive.
Second, you get burned out. A true VP takes 80–100% of the function off your plate. Compare that to a junior hire who just helps you implement stuff. Do not confuse the two.
Find the budget for the few extra dollars for a true VP. It pays off very, very fast. A true VP is a profit center.
Well said. At Brightcove, we greatly benefited from having seasoned VPs in place who could build their functions out, which contributed to our initial years of hypergrowth.
Always be recruiting.
Fill your talent pipeline even if you’re not currently hiring for a role. Maybe you’re impressed by the account manager from one of your vendors. Could she be a future hire for you? Or that director of engineering from a partner who may be looking for their next career move in six months. Don’t be afraid to drop hints either: “I’ve really been enjoying working with you. You seem happy where you are now, but if you ever start thinking about what’s next, we’d love to have a conversation.”
I recently met the founder of a unicorn that took years to hire a couple of his C-level execs. Play the long game.
Recruit those you can’t hire to be on your board or as an advisor. You may be able to pull them in further.
Recruiting talent can be a long game. I left Brightcove in 2012, after a seven-year run in online video. I’d been speaking to Sorosh Tavakoli, who was looking to build out his team, including his board. I told him I’d be glad to be part of the board, but I was done with video and so there was no way I’d join full-time. Fast-forward ten months, and a lot of conversations, and I’d joined full-time as chief commercial officer.
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