Recruiting Star Performers To Your Start-Up? Look For The ‘Elders’.

Hiring at any start-up is hard. At AirShr everyone who has joined our family has undergone a paid audition. This rule is without exception because the risk of making poor talent decisions can have disastrous consequences on momentum, the balance sheet and a fledgling culture.

Of course there is also risk in joining a new venture. Candidates need to trust that the venture’s leaders are executing on a compelling vision in a way that will afford them an environment to create value by doing their life’s best work.

Last week I was fortunate to join Michael Overell, CEO and Co-Founder of RecruitLoop and Renee Welsh, CEO of Booking Boss to comment on how to attract star performers to start-ups. I provided particular emphasis on AirShr’s philosophy of attracting ‘elders’, an approach I learned as a solider:

“In most professional circles, and particularly in software engineering, ‘elders’ are the people that junior engineers want to have a conversation with. They have presence, ooze humility and have usually seen your problems 100 times over. The only way you can identify an elder is through networking and observation over time, you can see the software engineer who is the natural leader, to whom others turn for advice, and who always has time and the curiosity to troubleshoot,”

Thanks to Zoe Palmer for bringing Michael, Renee and I together. It’s a great discussion and you can read it here.