A Simple Hiring Framework for Startups

This is the first post in what will be a series focused on recruiting essentials for scaling startups.

I started my career in agency recruiting. Over and over I observed great candidates getting overlooked because of pedigree (e.g. didn’t attend an Ivy League school) and unqualified candidates getting hired because they were the ‘safe option’ (e.g. had the right logo on their resume). Luckily, I had the pleasure of working with a few brands that really understood the strategic importance of recruiting and they helped to show me a better way.

In 2012, I cofounded Take the Interview (“TTI”), a recruiting platform designed to help companies more effectively interview and evaluate talent. I’ve had the pleasure of working with 100+ clients, ranging from enterprises like NBCUniversal and TIAA-CREF to scaling startups like Square and Blue Apron, and in the process I’ve learned a lot more about hiring from these great brands.

At this point in my career, I’ve conducted somewhere in the ballpark of 800 interviews, both as a recruiter and as a founder of a 50-employee startup. I’ve learned the hard way what does not work in recruiting, and I’ve stumbled across a few simple frameworks that have saved me much headache and helped improve the quality of my hires.

Here are are few insights I’ve picked up along the way:

It’s extremely hard to hire for a position that you have never held yourself.

When you are a startup founder, you are often times learning as you go. How do you know when to pull the trigger on that next hire? How senior should the position be? What are the necessary skills and experience you should be look for? It’s nearly impossible to figure these things out on your own. And you can’t stop to figure it out because there is just too much to get done. Yikes.

Most people really suck at interviewing.

Most people suck at interviewing for the simple fact that they don’t spend the time to prepare upfront and jump into an interview without a clear plan. Winging it not a strategy when it comes to hiring.

The world has waaay too many crappy job descriptions.

You are better than that generic, mind-numbing job description you are currently using. Your company is much more interesting than you give yourself credit for and your position is much more interesting than what you’re telling people. You are better than all those crappy job postings out there.

Most companies don’t actually understand their hiring needs until well into the interview process or after the wrong person is hired.

It is not easy to determine the exact skills you need, especially when you are a growing startup. You’re starting from scratch and every role is new in the early days. And as the company grows, even repetitive hires are far from cookie cutter.

The good news is interviewing skills can be taught, amazing job descriptions are quite easy to write, and there are a few simple steps to clarify your hiring needs before you start recruiting.

Let’s look at a few ways to address these problems and take your recruiting to the next level.

1. Perform the job yourself before hiring someone else to do it

Whenever possible, make it a point to do the job yourself before you try to hire someone else to do it. Your natural inclination will be to hire people on your team who possess skills that you do not have. Resist this temptation. How could you effectively hire your head of sales if you have no clue what it takes to sell your product? You need to grind it out for a bit, actually selling your product and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Plan on wearing multiple hats in the early days. You want to know from firsthand experience the necessary skills you need in a new role (with the exception of technical roles like engineering).

I have found that the very best early hires are adaptable generalists. You want someone fueled by passion for your mission, someone that can roll up his/her sleeves and do whatever’s necessary, someone that can learn and adapt quickly to the evolving needs of your startup. Resilience, learning-orientation, and alignment with your mission are critical traits to consider in your early hires.

2. Create a performance profile before you kick off your search

A few years back, I was introduced to Lou Adler and his hiring method called performance-based hiring. I have found no better recruiting framework to meet the needs of growing startups. Over time, I’ve put my own spin on this framework based on what I’ve found has worked for me, but the essence remains. Take what works and make it your own.

Here’s how we create our performance profiles at TTI:

• Block off an hour and gather all relevant stakeholders in a room with a whiteboard. Participants should include founders and executive teams and any other team members that may have domain knowledge they can bring to the discussion (e.g. your most senior account executive if you are hiring a head of sales).
• Whiteboard and consolidate answers to each of the 10 questions found on this worksheet. There are no wrong answers, just make sure everyone in the room has a voice. You’ll begin to see how aligned you actually are as a team. After each question has been answered, you’ll want to reconcile divergent perspectives. Healthy debate is almost always a part of reaching alignment. And if you don’t know the answer, seek council from a mentor or advisor who has hired for or performed that role before.

When you go through this exercise, it forces you to refine your thinking, clarify your needs, debunk faulty assumptions and expose unrealistic expectations. Simple exercise, powerful results.

3. When it comes to your job description, be real (warts and all)

Your job description should define the actual work that needs to be accomplished. Every job, from intern to VP, has five to six performance objectives that define success and should be present in your posting. All of this content can be found in your performance profile.

A few tips to keep in mind:

• Make sure the job description is action-oriented and tells a story.
• Avoid passive language; the goal is to describe what the right person will accomplish while in this role and the impact they will make.
• Don’t skimp on the nitty-gritty details of what it will be like in this role at your startup. The magic is in the details.

The first few times you do this, your job description may scare you a bit. It will feel too raw, a little bit too real. That’s exactly what you want. In a world of polished professionalism, people crave authenticity. Be real.

4. Plan out your interview process before you get started

If you plan on creating a performance profile, you’ll already have the hiring team together for this exercise. Now it’s time to determine who does what during the interview process.

Here are a few best practices for structuring your interview process:

• The candidate should only have to walk through his/her resume with you once. Do this together as a team versus having each interviewer do it 1:1. Be respectful of the candidate’s time.
• Each stakeholder should have a specific area of focus when interviewing the candidate. It’s quite possible the founders will own multiple areas, screening for job specific skills and culture fit.
• Each stakeholder should prepare their questions in advance and tie each question back to their area of focus.

A well-structured interview will help you make the best hiring decisions and have the added benefit of differentiating you among the competition. After the interview is done, make sure the candidate is clear on next steps and when they can expect to hear back from you. Properly setting expectations goes a long way.

Some final thoughts

I hope these tips serve you well. If you want to build a great business, it all comes down to the people you hire. Tackling these problems for your startup should be a top priority as you set out to put your dent in the universe.

Additional resources I’d recommend:

• Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta, does a great job of tackling how to approach hiring in the early days of your startup in his post, Who Should a Startup Hire First.
• Lou Adler’s performance-based hiring course on Lynda.com
• Dan Portillo, Talent Partner at Greylock, offers some wonderful insights in his talk, Debugging Recruiting.
• Ben Horowitz’s classic, The Hard Things About Hard Things, has some great tips on how he scaled two startups.
• Here are a few additional recruiting practices we’ve implemented at TTI.

Good luck and happy hunting!

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