Hiring is probably the most important job of an early stage (<20 person) startup founder. There is some element of luck involved with very early stage hires, but a great candidate is unlikely to land in your lap. How can founders maximize their chances of hiring great people? Here are some concrete tips for hiring engineering roles (many apply to other roles as well):
Recruiting and Sourcing
Start with people you already know. This is obvious, but the key is to do it systematically. Spend some time thinking about who you went to school with, worked with at previous jobs, or have communicated with. Check your cofounders, existing employees, emails, calendar, LinkedIn, twitter, Facebook, AngelList, GitHub, relatives, investors, and memories. One of my best hires was a grad student I had heard of mentioned as an awesome programmer when I was a lowly undergrad. While I never met him in school, I remembered his name. He was just about to graduate, and was looking for a job.
Use referrals. The single best source for new candidates is the people you already have. Usually people don’t think much about hiring. Having an incentive can help, but honestly it’s never been a great motivator. Instead, have a social event with food brought in, with a game or social theme to try to drum up discussion of great people to refer.
Time travel. The hardest part about hiring away a top person is timing. For every person you talk to, assume you may want to try to hire them in the future. Great people are almost always well employed and immersed in important projects. They are unlikely to jump out in the middle of something they’ve committed to. So it’s critical to catch them when they are ramping down on their projects. Always ask when would be a good time to reconnect and consider their options. Six or twelve months may be too far out for the hire you want to make now, but it will arrive faster than you expect. Travel to the future and contact them when that happens. Always leave a good impression to help your future self hire.
Get out and meet people. Attend in-person meetups, or even better give talks about technical topics that highlight exciting aspects of your work. This can lead to engineers who are looking for a new challenge. Focus on increasing your connectivity to the social community of people you seek to hire from. This can be done by using your social calendar, changing your work environment, adjusting travel plans, and learning about the technologies and communities they are a part of.
The road less traveled. There are many great developers educated outside the campuses at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and CMU. Some of the most talented people I know never finished or never went to school at all. Looking in a particular geography can also be limiting. Sometimes people will move for a great job. If you can stomach the immigration system, people educated outside the US can be great performers. Or, get good at having remote employees (a bigger topic for another time).
Summer interns. Give them real projects, have them present their work at the end of the summer, and keep in touch with the best ones.
Mostly avoid recruiters. Recruiters rarely have access to people who are early employee material, and they’re very expensive. YMMV.
Be patient. Recruiting takes time. Making a bad hire is worse than not making any hire.
Interviewing
Ask opening technical questions. A good technical question is easy to understand and leads naturally to deeper and broader topics with additional probing. Focus less on getting to narrow right/wrong answers (puzzles are not useful) and more on having a discussion that can bring out the limits of what they understand. Good candidates can reach an area you don’t know well and teach you something. Try to learn something from each interviewee. Flip the power dynamic in the room and allow people who are truly passionate about their craft a chance to explain a topic they care about. See if they can explain things well.
Decide while impressions are fresh. After an interview, write your thoughts down immediately. Share only with a designated hiring manager, who lets each person form their own independent opinion. If the early feedback is looking good, consider making an offer on the spot. This sends a signal that you’d love to have them on the team. It feels great to be wanted.
Finding the Right Fit
Hands on. Early hires need to be able to contribute right away, but they also need to be able to hire and build future teams. Very successful managers and executives at big companies are used to “having people” to execute on the details. Early stage startups can’t operate that way.
Try before you buy. Consider a short consulting project before making a permanent offer. This gives you much more insight into how they’ll work as part of a team.
Hire for the team. Early employees are super critical because they’re the team that will hire future teams. Imbalances lead to company cultures that bottleneck on missing skills. Evaluate the skills on your team and identify gaps. Technical teams can be balanced by having people with skills in design, product management, marketing, and sales. Intensive, focused teams can be balanced with people who are natural connectors and communicators. The diversity of the initial team can have a huge impact on the diversity of the company in the future.
No blowhards. Usually the challenge with this is a very technically skilled person who doesn’t seem great to work with. Screen for good teamwork and communication skills. No employee is worth destroying the team for. There are plenty of nice people in the world.
No mercenaries. Mercenaries don’t care what they do as long as they’re paid to do it. It’s impossible to get a mercenary to do the work of a great employee who truly cares. Mercenaries order their priorities in terms of compensation before trying to determine how excited they would be about the challenges or mission. Sooner or later, they will stab you in the back. Avoid.
Closing
Listen. Understand what the candidate is looking for. Can you offer something that helps meet their desire for career growth, learning, flexibility? Aligning your role with what the candidate desires is a powerful way to attract top people.
Sell. It’s a competitive hiring market and great people are always in demand. Exceptional people want challenging problems to solve and other exceptional people to collaborate with. Compensation is important too, but top people look for more than money. Selling the job isn’t about being deceptive or pushy — it’s about getting people excited to be a part of something greater.
Other Important Stuff
Compensation. There are lots of guides on this topic. This one is pretty good.
Titles. Early stage engineers shouldn’t need fancy titles. Keep it simple, with few if any gradations. It’s not what you’re called, it’s what you do. Everyone who works at an early stage startup should realize that people know who’s who without the need for titles. Titles matter more when you grow big enough that many people don’t know each other personally and more hierarchy develops. None of that is an issue at early stages.
Minifounders. Some people want a kind-of sort-of founder-like role. This is a recipe for major discord down the road. Not recommended.
Pitfalls
No silver bullet. Let’s say you have an all technical team and are looking for a “business person” or “sales guy” to handle everything you don’t want to do and can’t be bothered to learn. It’s tempting to see a good candidate as a solution to all your problems, but in reality it’s unrealistic to think that a single hire can take over a huge part of a building a business. Worse, you don’t know what to look for because you don’t know what the job really requires. Try doing part of the job for a while, get help from your advisors and investors, and have realistic expectations.
Compounding mistakes. You’ve made the wrong hire and it isn’t working. The truth is, bonuses and other band-aids won’t solve the real issues. You and your employee are better off parting ways. Now you know much better what you are looking for in hiring a new person, and they know much better what they are looking for in a new job. Bad news isn’t a fine wine. It doesn’t get better with age.
Don’t lose faith
The weeks (months) are ticking by and you just can’t seem to find the right person. The process is becoming wearying. Don’t lose faith, instead examine your assumptions and refresh your thinking. There is no single formula for hiring great early employees. Some luck can be helpful. But by putting in some effort and approaching the process with a little thoughtfulness, you can be ready for luck when it arrives.
Acknowledgements: Chris Zak, Boris Chen, Vinay Hiremath, and Junfeng Yang provided feedback on a draft of this article.
