Hire for passion, not skill
There’s a lot of information out there providing guidance, tips and tricks, horror stories and success cases about how to hire the right employees. And for good reason — hiring, whether in a startup or enterprise, is one of the biggest challenges business owners face.
You have to define the role you’re hiring for, assess the candidate for skills and experience, ensure they’re a good fit and will mesh with the rest of your team. This can be particularly tricky as an early stage startup founder — with a team of 30 or less, each new hire you bring on will have a significant effect on the rest of the company, so you need to be mindful of your hiring decisions.
Atop of these difficulties is the pressure to find the best of the best. If you don’t, you run the risk of creating high employee turnover in your business — a phenomenon that costs nearly US$11 billion annually across industries.
So how do you ensure that you’re hiring the right people?
There’s this idea that when hiring, you should focus on the candidates’ skills and experience above all else.
But I’d like to challenge that idea. Instead, startup founders (particularly early stage founders) should hire for passion, not just skill.
That’s not to say skills and experience aren’t important, because they are. Yet, skills can be learned on the job. Experience can be gained with a bit of time.
Passion, however, cannot be learned.
It exists or it doesn’t.
And in all of the hurdles, twists and turns that a startup faces, hiring people who are passionate about your company is going to be the key to growth and success.
Lessons learned from Groove
While there are numerous articles about hiring and interviewing best practices, it’s a bit more difficult to find candid stories of startups’ hiring experiences (the good and the bad).
Groove (a SaaS startup providing customer service management tools for businesses) however, has an excellent blog where the CEO, Alex, openly shares hiring lessons he has learned over the years.
He tells the story of an early hire made years ago. This candidate had it all: top skills, great experience, great interviewing, and a killer resume to match. The candidate’s listed references were fine, so Groove’s CEO, Alex, offered the candidate the job.
A few weeks in, however, it quickly became apparent that things weren’t working out. While the candidate seemed ready for the startup grind during the interview process, it was different once on the job. The candidate simply wasn’t putting in the necessary effort and “didn’t deliver when it came time to work”.
Hiring those who aren’t invested wastes time
Another story recounts the experience of Alex chasing a candidate for weeks on end. This candidate was extremely qualified, and was a perfect fit for the developer role Groove was hiring for. Alex candidly tells of chasing this candidate for nearly eight weeks, scheduling meeting after meeting trying to convince the person to join. In each email, Alex found himself upping the ante and increasing the offer of equity ownership. Yet, it didn’t work. The candidate declined.
In a few short weeks after that experience was over and done, Groove hired someone else for that same role, someone who worked out very well with the company.
The difference here?
The first candidate simply wasn’t invested in the company — no matter the offer, they didn’t buy in. The second candidate, however, was passionate about what Groove was working on, which is why they were able to hire that person in less than two weeks.
Hiring to ensure the candidate aligns with your values
One final story tells of another early hire who truly seemed like the perfect fit: topnotch skills and experience, and rave reviews from previous employers. They were “top of their league in terms of talent”.
Yet after several weeks, things started falling apart. Due to this new employee’s experience level, they were nearly unwilling to work on anything that “they deemed beneath them”. They only wanted to work on particular high-level projects and were unwilling to be scrappy and flexible.
Alex realized that this individual simply didn’t share the same values he and the other employees had for the business. They believed in scrappiness, working together, and being flexible to get things done and push ahead. As the candidate didn’t buy into the same values, and wasn’t asked about shared values during the interview process (because Groove hadn’t fully articulated their values and culture yet), it just didn’t work. They had the skills and were by all means considered top talent, but they didn’t share the passion with Alex and the rest of the Groove team.
Hiring good people will always be a dog fight
Each of these three cases are stories of hiring failures as Groove grew from $0 to $250K a month. After 5 years since their launch, they’ve grown to $10M in annual revenue, which leads me to think they learned a lot from those hiring experiences — they figured out how to hire people who were passionate about the business and shared the same core values.
In a separate post, Alex writes about how Groove has been able to hire top talent without bidding against Google. One of the greatest takeaways from this article is that as an early stage startup, you’re likely not going to be able to offer candidates big benefits: corporate perks, health insurance and retirement, or big paychecks.
If you try to compete against bigger companies on salary and offer super talented candidates larger paychecks, you’re going to:
- Quickly run out of financial resources
- End up with employees only motivated by money
Even if you’re able to give them the bigger salary up front, it’s not sustainable long term when you’re struggling to raise funds and your runway starts to shrink. That person is going to grow unhappy when you’re unable to pay the high salary, and they’ll likely quit.
Why?
They weren’t in it for the right reasons from the beginning. They were motivated by a nice paycheck and the allure of striking it rich with a startup.
Hire evangelists, not mercenaries
In a startup, the going can get tough — very tough at times, which is why it is so important to hire people who are passionate about your company and truly believe in the vision.
Pandora is a great example. In the first few years (talking very early 2000s), after raising $2 million in funding, the business ran out of money. CEO Tim Westerngren wasn’t ready to call it quits, but was unable to pay his first 50 employees.
Most would jump ship during an extremely difficult time like that. But those 50 employees stuck around, for two years, without being paid.
Why?
They fully believed in what they were building at Pandora. They were passionate about solving a huge problem for the music industry, so they kept going. They stuck together through the toughest of times, something that’s really only possible with people who are passionate about the company.
If startups are like roller coasters, find people who will enjoy the ride
Things change a lot in a startup, and they change fast. Roles evolve over time; funding can go from big highs to great lows; the product can change; the business can pivot. These turbulent times require people who are flexible, dedicated, and passionate about their work. When 50% of employee churn is attributable to burnout, as a startup founder you need to ensure that your employees are there for the right reasons and are invested in their work.
The relevant skills are important, but they can also be learned. Finding people who wholeheartedly believe in the vision of the company, on the other hand, can be more challenging.
But if you start considering passion, motivation, and shared values when interviewing and hiring people, you’ll build a startup team that is dedicated to growing the business. You’ll find people who will stick around through thick and thin.
What is your approach to hiring? How do you ensure to hire the right people in your startup? Let us know in the comments below!
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