How to Hire Entry-Level at an Early Stage Startup

A Guide for Team Managers

Having spent the past couple of months working on team building, hiring and firing, I now adamantly believe 80% of a team’s ability to drive forward relies on hiring well up front. So goes the mantra:

“Hire slow and fire fast.”

The biggest problem with hiring for entry-level positions at an early-stage startup (size 15–40) is the interviewing process is unstructured. Team managers know they want to hire smart, hungry, and ambitious employees but without a structured process, managers end up hiring sloppy — e.g. hiring someone out of convenience, not fully vetting for culture fit, etc. Hiring quickly may solve a short-term need, but will fail longer term.

The solution is building and adhering to a structured process. Having done this for entry-level hires at a startup without an in-house recruiter, I’m going to share a useful bare-bones structural roadmap: 1) Structuring teams, 2) establishing criteria and 3) running the process.

It is up to you, the team manager, to design the experience and customize for each step of the process.

1. Structuring Teams

First, think about your team within the context of the company’s business. What is your team’s ultimate function? How do your team’s responsibilities get carved out? How can you build a team around those responsibilities? For example, a growth team’s business functions can be divided into acquisition and retention, and work functions into analytics and general operations. You can then potentially structure the team in two ways:

1. Specialized: Junior team members will focus on specific sides of the business but gain exposure to both analytical and general operational skillsets. Early-stage startup employees should expose themselves to all operational aspects of the company to understand the feedback loops, e.g. how product, support, and operations all intertwine.
2. Stacked: Junior team members remain generalist across business functions, but specialize in their work function; e.g. an associate will be 80%-20% analytics-operations, and the analyst will be 20%-80% analytics-operations.

Second, think about how you want to shape your team. You may not have the luxury of building a team carte-blanche due to capital and time constraints, so work with the cards you are dealt. If you are currently building a more specialized team, do current team members execute better operationally? Do they lack analytical skills? If so, emphasize hiring over that weakness — find someone who can do the analytical work to round out your team. Caution: do not get caught in a situation where you are in heavy analytic debt that cannot be overcome with existing team members.

Similarly, your team structure could consist of mission critical but not high-leverage roles; ask if these could be filled with contractors. These are roles where there is little growth opportunity internally, but you need ASAP. However, be mindful of team culture.

Once you have defined the structure of your team, figure out what kind of person would thrive in the roles and responsibilities you have defined.

2. Establishing Criteria

Know exactly the responsibilities for the role you are hiring for. Be very specific on your criteria and don’t make short cuts. For example, if you have analytic debt, don’t fall into the trap of hiring another execution guy because he or she is stellar.

Below are some criteria you can specify and prioritize:

1. Hardworking: type of jobs, timing of jobs, number of jobs, leadership roles, recurring positions, and cumulative GPA. Look for reliability and consistency, which is a non-negotiable for any entry-level employee.
2. Coachable: sports, mentors, team projects, research with professors. This malleability demonstrates cooperation and interest in self-growth.
3. Technical / Analytical: computer science, engineering, math, physics, economics, finance classes or majors. For an analytical hire on a non-engineering team, look for someone who has at a minimum 1) worked with large data sets (e.g. pivot tables) in excel and 2) worked with but not necessarily have built their own models. These skills are fundamental in building a data-driven culture.
4. Ambitious / Take ownership: work history, work/school pedigree, variety of classes/interests, multiple majors, major vs minor. Because an early stage startup will require employees to wear multiple hats, the ability to take ownership of projects is imperative.
5. Personable / Positive attitude: volunteering, sports, activities, hobbies, fraternities/sororities. While personability is good, a strong positive attitude is crucial. The last thing you want is someone who complains and gets mired in the problem. Instead, you want to find someone who takes the hit, then moves on to figuring out solving the problem. That is the type of attitude required day in and day out at an early stage start-up.

Additionally, you could establish the criteria from a performance metric perspective; e.g. what are 2–3 key metrics this individual absolutely needs to achieve? For an account executive it should be hitting quota consistently. For someone in customer support it should be a strong level of empathy.

3. Running the Hiring Process

When your team is understaffed, the last thing you want to do is run a long hiring process when time could be spent on the business. Be direct but thorough: 1) Source 2) Filter 3) Call 4) Analytics test (if necessary) 5) Additional rounds 6) Close.

1. Sourcing: A major component of hiring that determines the quality and quantity of candidates. To attract soon-to-be graduates, focus on the universities you want to target using recruiting tools like NACELINK. The tricky part here is timing — most students graduate in May/June and won’t be able to start until June/July so plan your hiring process accordingly. To attract more experienced individuals, you can focus on closed networks, such as your VC’s network, sites like VentureLoop, AngelList, LinkedIn, etc. At the same time, you should be vigorously checking your existing team members’ networks — if they are stellar employees, their friends are probably just as good.
2. Filtering: Using your team structure and criteria as your lens, be ruthless at filtering, especially if you have hundreds of inbound candidates. While GPA isn’t the best barometer, there should be a threshold given the candidate’s major and school. Conversely, watch for culture fit (EQ over IQ) and role-specific qualities you require. Better signals are relevant internships and what outside projects the candidates have worked on, which indicate scrappiness, ambition, and ownership.
3. Calling: Because you may have a long list of candidates, you should batch calls as often as possible. For example, set aside 15 minute segments in a 3 hour block daily. In a first-pass, I always ask: 1) “Walk me through your resume”, to understand if the candidate is actually interested in a startup via a clear story, or just shotgunning their resume; 2) “If you left a year from now, what would be the main reason why?”, to indirectly gauge what the candidate is optimizing for and what they care about; 3) “Given your experience at X, what skill could you bring to the table in an analyst role? What do you want to improve most?” to assess strengths and weaknesses; 4) “What are your life values?” to quickly figure out their personalities and how they react to an unconventional question. You should have a gut feel after asking these questions if the candidate is a “no,” “soft yes,” or “strong yes.” Pro tip: don’t move candidates to the next step until you’ve gone through a couple of days worth of interviews; you don’t want to lower your bar as a result of initial poor applicant quality.
4. Analytics test: You should require an analytics test when 1) The candidacy is for an analytical position, or 2) the candidate has some real-world, post-graduation experience. At a base level, ask the candidate to synthesize a large data set (from scrambled or old company data), draw conclusions, and forecast. Look for answers beyond obvious trends; check for business implications and ownership — what follow-through, improvement, and back-up plans they would have in place if they had skin in the game. Lastly check for time management vs. quality on the analytics test.
5. Additional Rounds: While you should have the final say (unless the CEO feels very strongly), you should definitely get input from other senior managers and the CEO. You should provide specific instructions on what you want other interviewers to scrutinize and tease out but do not anchor their impression with your notes. The CEO should sign off on culture fit. Additionally, you should provide a luncheon or drinks to see how the candidate acts outside of work.
6. Closing: This is oftentimes the hardest part. It is a mix of balancing the candidate’s expectations with what your startup can offer. Three things I’ve learned from closing a candidate: 1) Get an idea of strong candidate’s dealbreakers (e.g. compensation, timing, responsibilities) early and work to mitigate these with each round of interviews. 2) Be willing to pay up for strong candidates; the short hit in budget will be paid back many times over. Furthermore, fight internally to get that candidate vetted as quickly as possible so you can move in on an offer. 3) Even if the candidate is a superstar, their timeline and the company’s timeline must match. If the candidate isn’t available for another month, don’t get anchored.

Hiring at a startup is not easy. While the above roadmap offers a bare-bones structure team managers can work off of, you should at a minimum have a structure in place. Goodluck!

Fellow operators and investors, share your thoughts below — I would love to learn how you run your hiring processes!

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Thanks to Laura B. and Ryo C. for edits and suggestions!