Hiring the Best

Sourcing, filtering, and hiring the best talent has been more difficult than closing deals. As the leaders of the company, we’re making judgment calls of whether or not a candidate would be a good fit. The judgment of culture, fit, and lifestyle need to be made by the team members who are contributing to the growth of the business. Building a team on core values, culture, fit and lifestyle has enabled us for scale. We want to share our lives, challenges, and sweat with people that are ready to do the same.

We’ve learned a lot about hiring over the last year. Our company has gone from 3 to 16 people. We have three offices in three countries and we aren’t slowing down. If anything, we need to source more candidates. I’m sharing how we think about the process.

Culture First

It’s easy to overlook a candidates cultural fit because of their amazing experience, years of management, or industry expertise. Don’t. If you can’t level with the candidate and there is little mutual care for the core values and culture from the individual, it doesn’t matter how good they are, they will always be a challenge. Leadership will waste time trying to find ways to accommodate this individual.

Yes, Should be Hard

Every stage of the interviewing process should be a chance for you to evaluate cultural fit. Certain conversations might be focused on technical qualifications or to share experiences but the goal in each is to evaluate cultural fit. Each conversation, interaction, and feeling that is brought up about the candidate gives you data points to evaluate. Saying ‘yes’ to advancing a candidate through your interview process should be very hard. ‘No’ should come easy.

Know Your Role

We don’t hire into a role until someone on our team has mastered it. Creating a product is hard enough. Without experiencing the role, incentives or opportunities, it’s very difficult to create alignment and set expectations for the employee. The role should be well defined before finding fit for it.

Speed is Your Ally

The flow of candidates should move quickly. There needs to be a large pipeline of candidates. A hiring decision can easily be made in less than 10 days. If there is doubt about a candidate, there is no doubt that there will be a problem, it’s a no. If you can get through the different stages of your interview process with no doubts and a strong cultural fit, then you have a yes. You can’t get to yes quickly if the process is not organized.