Recruitment for Startups: Finding the Awesome Ones
There’s no getting around the fact that working for a startup is sexy. As an ex recruitment consultant, I would have my ear chewed off on a regular basis by candidates desperate to work for one and I get it — I work for one myself. You learn a hell of a lot, it gives you a crazy amount of job satisfaction and if you’re involved in something that’s actually successful — well, that’s the gold at the end of the rainbow. But to be successful, you’ve got to hire people who are going to get you there. There are loads of recruitment buzzwords thrown around to describe these people (and they’re not exclusive to startups by any means): “top talent”, “high calibre, “world class talent” — they all mean the same thing. Awesome people. Awesome people who are awesome at what they do and might be awesome at a few things they didn’t even know they could do. Home Run’s success, like any business, is entirely down to the people; the founders and consequently how they hire. As Chief of Staff, it is part of my job to oversee company wide hiring. I certainly don’t profess to be an expert, but here are some thoughts about Home Run’s approach to this rollercoaster ride of a thing called recruitment.
Chapter 1 : Only the Best Will Do
Like every employer, we only want to hire the best people. I know, it’s been said before. There are endless articles and blog posts and books and literary cornerstones about how to attract people who are the best of the best of the best — but this isn’t about recruiting astronauts. This is about getting the best people for the job and for your business. For us, this doesn’t mean people with the shiniest credentials, it’s about having high standards when it comes to intelligence, ambition, motivation and resilience, before we even start to consider the specific nuances of a particular role.
When I first met the founders of Home Run, they told me that they believe that the first 20 full time employees are the most important hires the company will ever make. They are the benchmark against which all future hires of the business will be measured and by looking at them, you’ll be able to tell more about a company’s future than even the most extensive financial forecast. I admit, I was thoroughly impressed with the seriousness of their approach to my own recruitment and the amount of research they’d done into how to do it well. One particular school of thought which was new to me before I joined Home Run and that I now love, is that you must hire people who are better than you. If you are intimidated by the awesomeness of the candidate sitting opposite you in the interview room, they’re probably the one. And I’ve seen it work. We hired someone recently for a role in a completely different part of the business to mine and I honestly walked out of that interview thinking “blimey, they could do my job better than me!” Against your instincts perhaps, this feeling is a GOOD thing. If you consistently hire in this way, you’ll be steadily raising the bar. It also forces you to push yourself. Hire people who will be snapping at your heels and it’ll keep you running up that mountain.
Chapter 2 : Take Your Time
As a recruitment consultant, I worked with many different types of businesses, all with different recruitment styles. I was very familiar with the startup that hires swiftly and dismissively: “get ’em in for a beer and if they’re a laugh I’ll hire them. If they suck I’ll just sack ’em in a week or two. Everyone wants to work for startups so I’ll have no problem replacing them”. This might work for some employers but in my experience, a slap dash recruitment process tends to put off the really awesome people. Once you’ve identified what “the best” means for you, it will take time to find these people. At Home Run, we take the same amount of time to hire our most junior roles as we take hiring management. Larry Page, CEO of Google until 2015, signed off on every single hire across the company. He saw each and every employee’s application — that was 57,100 people by the time he stepped down. Finding those awesome people takes up a lot of everyone’s time, which can be a challenge for any business. But startups are particularly volatile. Anything can happen and the situation changes from week to week, so somehow navigating a deliberate and thought out recruitment process for a role you need hired yesterday amongst all the chaos can be incredibly frustrating. We learnt very quickly, however, that if you do not take your time to ensure that you’re hiring someone who can actually do the job, it’ll come around to bite you. This means: test your candidates. Case studies. Analysis. Interviewing is like sitting exams; most of the time, taking an exam tests nothing more than your ability to pass exams. If not thought out carefully, interviews test nothing more than a candidate’s ability to get through an interview.
So, get your candidates to put some substance behind that well groomed interview style. At the first face to face interview stage, we often like to give our candidates a timed exercise, then leave them alone in a room for a while to complete it. You not only get to see their competence according to the results but it shows how they perform under pressure. Did they get flustered? Did they ask for extra materials? If they didn’t finish the exercise in the time limit, what would they have done differently next time? Yes, it’ll take up valuable hours writing these exercises and designing the whole process but trust us — it is time well spent and worth it in the end.
Chapter 3: Conquering the Fear of the Unknown
Another crucial reason to test your candidate’s ability to do the job, is that you actually might not know what kind of profile you’re looking for. And that is ok. Startups are always hiring roles for the first time. If you’ve never hired a Head of Marketing in the past and you don’t have a marketing background yourself, how are you expected to know the details of what the right profile will look like? Well, the first solution is obvious. Ask for advice. Use your network. And sure, you could use an external recruiter but more often than not, startups can’t afford their fees and it can be very hard to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to recruitment agencies. I speak from experience here (shout out to Altum Consulting, my previous company and honestly some of the best recruiters anyone could work with). Common sense should get you most of the way and although you might not be absolutely sure what the ideal candidate profile will look like, it is important to work out your priorities when it comes to experience vs. potential. Put simply, you need to figure out whether it’s more important to hire someone who has done the same type of role in the past or to hire someone who has heaps of potential but may not have a whole lot of direct experience. Ideally you’ll hire people who have equal amounts of both but this is rare so try to pick a priority and stick to it. And it’s ok to not know straight away. Test your theories. We have done just that on many occasions and often been very surprised by the results. Meet different candidates and see how they do. Meet the ones with degrees coming out of their ears, the ones who’ve done exactly the same thing before and the curveballs who wrote that killer cover letter but have no relatable experience. Then TEST them and trust the results.
Also, don’t be distracted by that candidate who has no apparent potential or relatable experience but they happen to share your passion for rare button collection — stick to your guns. Cultural fit is incredibly important, especially in a startup environment where you’ll be spending long hours with a small group of people, but you’re not hiring a new best friend.
Chapter 4: Ok, So How Do We Do It?
I’m not going to sit here and bore you with instructions for how to write the perfect LinkedIn message or what a good interview structure is. But here are a few final fundamentals which have proven crucial for Home Run, and other startups I’ve worked with when it comes to being able to hire awesome people.
Protect the candidate experience. I know you’re busy but trust me, word travels fast and if you treat your candidates like commodities you’ll find people stop applying. A couple of years ago, I worked with a company with a truly phenomenal brand who have gone on to do incredibly well. But for a short while, they had a Head of Talent who oversaw all hiring and did some serious damage to the company’s reputation because they treated their candidates like they were disposable. I would approach people for roles with this company and they would flatly refuse to even consider it because they’d already dealt with this person or knew someone who had. A high profile startup attracts a lot of attention and people talk. You never know when your paths might cross again and aside from anything else, we’re all people. No matter how experienced or sure of themselves that candidate is, they’ve put themselves out there by applying for a role with your business. They’ve made themselves vulnerable and paid you the compliment of wanting to work for you. So, call people back when you say you’re going to. Give feedback. Be honest and upfront about things like salary and progression. Never make a promise you can’t keep and for God’s sake spell their name correctly.
Be targeted and be bold. You’ll save yourself a whole lot of time if you do some research into where the best people are for the role you’re hiring. What companies should you be headhunting from and where should you be posting job advertisements where awesome people will see them? If you’re fishing for salmon you wouldn’t stroll down to any old riverbank and throw a line in — you’d find out which river the best salmon are swimming in and which riverbank is best to fish from. The best candidates often won’t come to you. Head hunt the people who won’t be applying to your job ad because they’re successful and happily working away in their current role. Remember though, recruitment is a two way street. It’s not just about whether someone is good enough for your company. If someone is not actively looking for a new job and you’ve approached them, you’re going to have to do a bit of seduction…but don’t give away the farm. ;)
The last thing I would add here is to always trust your gut. You may think you’ve got it all worked out; that you’ve figured out that you need someone from a specific background, with a First Class degree and at least five years of experience who can demonstrate drive and curiosity etc. etc. etc. And that person is sitting in front of you. They’ve laughed at your jokes and smashed their case study and the only thing left to do is to offer them the job. But there’s just something that doesn’t feel right. Something you can’t quite put your finger on. Saying no at this point can be the hardest thing to do especially when you’ve got a team screaming at you that they need the support and a million other things on your plate that mean you could really do with getting this recruitment process out of the way. The reality is that 90% of recruiting is saying no. You’ll have to turn down awesome people all the time. Trust your instincts and don’t settle for anything less than that feeling you get when you know you’re hiring a rockstar.
Final Thoughts:
There is no one sure fire way of recruiting. We’ve made mistakes and will continue to do so. Even the most robust processes can’t give you a 100% accuracy rate because there is simply no accounting for people. Don’t give up, keep your standards high but be adaptable and learn from your mistakes. If you hire someone and it doesn’t work out, don’t be afraid to clean house just because you spent three months hiring that person. If it’s not meant to be, move on and try to figure out how you could have spotted the 666 underneath their hairline earlier on in the recruitment process. Speaking for ourselves, we have been lucky enough to never have hired anyone even remotely devilish. Sometimes it simply doesn’t go the way you hope it will. A role in a startup can evolve very quickly, the business’ needs shift and if a person was brought in to do a particular job and that changes, no one is to blame. Hiring awesome people is very difficult — keeping them can also be tricky, but that’s a different story and if you give recruitment the due care and attention it deserves, there is no reason why a startup can’t set a precedent of excellence across the whole company that will filter down from the first 20 employees to the first 200 and so on. Never compromise on your foundations otherwise just when you think you’ve finished building your dream house, the whole thing will come tumbling down.
