Tell Me Apart: Hiring for the Tribe
Over the last four years, I’ve interviewed at a lot of companies. They range from companies consisting of just the founders with only an idea, to well established public companies with tens of thousands of employees. Of them all, TellApart had the most astounding hiring process. Three years later, I am still impressed by the caliber of talent they attracted to the team, and processes they used to ensure no hire was a mistake. TellApart’s hiring process is a fantastic role model for other tribe-stage startups to emulate due to their adherence to blitzscaling principles.
Make quick decisions
I had three rounds of interviews at TellApart, yet the entire process took less than three weeks. Their interviewers were experienced, had a list of approved questions, and knew exactly what they were looking for in a candidate. I appreciated both that TellApart valued my time, and that they were able to make decisions quickly.
Eric Schmidt mentioned Google found there was little gained from interviewing a candidate more than five times. Rather than subjecting the candidate to more of the same, TellApart understood that you could learn a lot about a candidate from the colleagues they had worked with previously. References can save both you and the candidate time: if the references give a thumbs down, or mention traits not in line with your company’s culture, don’t bother interviewing them.
Hiring is not a one-way street
A great company realizes that the interviewee is interviewing your company just as you are interviewing them. If a candidate does make it through your hiring process, you probably really want to hire them. Therefore, consider the type of environment these employees would be attracted to: they want to be challenged. TellApart not only asked the traditional coding questions, they also asked me questions where I walked out feeling I learned something. I knew I would learn from other employees because they set the hiring bar incredibly high.
As Eric Schmidt suggests, a company needs to sell the dream. TellApart excelled at this, because they understood how candidates would perceive their company. Autonomous cars sound a lot sexier than an advertising company. But then the engineers explained how TellApart worked to make ads relevant. If I saw an ad about a product I wanted, discounted 15%, wouldn’t I appreciate that ad? TellApart employees clearly understood and championed their North Star: make advertising useful by aligning the interests of advertisers, consumers, and TellApart. After all, everyone loves a win-win.
Do your homework
When a company is a tribe, the company culture slips out of just the founders’ hands and is scaled by the employees. Then how do founders maintain control of a culture? One solution is to adapt a seemingly unscalable strategy and do as Larry and Sergey did: screen every employee for culture fit. Josh, TellApart’s cofounder and CEO, approved my hiring. Not only does this ensure the founders can hire for fit, this also empowers the candidate. I felt like I belonged at TellApart because I knew Josh personally signed off on my contract. Even if a tribe decides not to implement executive review, a startup needs to think about how it will scale its culture as it hires employees.
Invest in your employees
If you’re a tribe, you’re likely hoping to grow your new employees into future leaders. You may need to hire generalists early on, but as Mariam Naficy said, look for people’s unique talents that will make them great leaders. And even if you hire these potential leaders, recruiting doesn’t end when they sign the contract. A tribe needs to invest in its members by giving them a safe space to fail. At Minted, they struggled to grow candidates because they didn’t have the capital to tolerate failure. Meanwhile, Google could throw Associate Product Managers into the deep end because they had the infrastructure and cash to experience failures. TellApart employees stayed at TellApart because they grew with the company. My mentor was only a couple years out of college, and was respected as one of the most knowledgeable engineers at TellApart. I started the internship not knowing what a request and response object were, to ending the internship as one of the most knowledgeable Facebook Graph API engineers.
Conclusion
Blitzscaling is clearly about scaling quickly, but how do you know when to take decisions slowly? Move too quickly, and your decision could have no basis in analysis; move too slowly, and you may miss your rocket ship. Understanding when to hold back and when to hit the gas is never more important than hiring. A quick rash decision results in a tough decision whether or not to fire someone, whereas a slow decision means talent will land in one of the multitude of other opportunities available in Silicon Valley. You can take as many classes as you want in school and work at as many startups as you want, but like any other skill, you can’t be good at hiring unless you practice. And unfortunately, excellent hiring is incredibly hard. Just as you wouldn’t scale a product without proven product-market fit, why scale your employee base without a proven hiring process? You may be able to ignore profitability, but hiring is a fire that cannot be allowed to fester. If you do, you might just find your tribe has gone up in flames.
