How to Hire the Right People

Hiring new people is one of the key challenges in a growing company. Many recently funded companies or those that have experienced faster than expected growth, allocate all their resources towards hiring. It is essential to hire the right people, as they will help your company to move forward. Below I’ve listed some advice, based on my experience on how to avoid mistakes when choosing the correct candidates.

Think twice before hiring an employee from your growing competitor.

An employee within a growing competitor is unlikely to leave as they are likely to be growing in their role. For example, over the last four years our company has doubled its staff each year. During that time, some employees in junior positions have progressed to management positions.What is the reason for them to leave? What can the competitors offer them?

From the other prospective, those employees who aren’t preforming well and not getting promoted will be open to “new challenges” from the competition. This will result in your company being a step behind your competition.

Don’t think that you are perfect employer

At Mobio, I used to ask candidates in interviews, “Why are you looking for a new job”? The responses varied from the lack of opportunities to grow, to the tedious tasks within their current positions. This made me assume that we would be much better as we were growing fast and were desirable.

After some time, I understood that we were not perfect and that some employees would also leave our company due to dissatisfaction. This realisation made me question what could we offer that was different from everyone else? Will the candidate fit our culture? Will they be interested?

Use recommendations from the employee’s previous place of work properly

Most people ask for a recommendation but they rarely know how to use them. People tend be polite so would never say that something is wrong with a person or that they are unprofessional. A tell-tale sign in this case would be if you heard hesitation in their voice during the recommendation. Another flag would be if they say “Well, I can’t say something special, it depends on what you are looking for”. This would be flagged as a bad recommendation. The best employees tend to have recommendations along the lines of, “Yeah, this guy is great, hire him and you won’t regret it”. In the past, I’ve hired people based on these recommendations and they were the best hires I made.

In case you need to hire the whole department , hire the director — he will do the rest

Executives should always participate in a hiring process. Bad managers tend to be ones won’t get involved in the hiring process for their own team. Recently we have been trying to create a strong R&D team. We have had tried multiple CTOs throughout, however each has complained that they had a weak team. Eventually we struck gold, and our current CTO built his team in less than two months with more than half of the team having worked with him before.

This lesson should be applicable to any department within your business. Securing strong c-suite employees is essential. This may not be the cheapest option, however will provide the greatest returns in the long run.

Don’t think in-house HR will do your job

If hiring new employees is set to be regular task, having your own HR manager will be of benefit. At Mobio we decided to hire a HR manager when expanding from 15 to 30 people. A benefit of having your own HR manager is that they will be able to use their contacts, social networks and job sites to find suitable candidates for each role. Without HR, it can take months to hire the proper candidates as employees may lack experience in this process. Personally, I know companies with 50 staff and no HR managers however I can’t see how they could hire effectively without this.

One more thing

This advice is based on my own experiences only, and may not be set in stone but I hope that it will be helpful for you too.

Share your experience in hiring in comments!