The Surprisingly Hard Thing about Hiring
Lately, I have been spending a significant amount of time on hiring for SupportBee. Writing out job posts, interviewing candidates and onboarding the ones that we hire. I have realized that the hardest thing about hiring isn’t writing the job post or assessing skills in the interview. While these aren’t easy, there is a lot of help available if you want to improve. The tricky part is learning to hold the bar high. Let me explain.
Like most companies in our stage, we have a validated product roadmap. If we execute faster, we will grow faster. As a business owner, my temptation is to hire the first person that can get the job done. A lot of people can get the work done! However very few people can contribute to the culture of your company and help you get better as a team. Jeff Bezos puts it really well when he says
Every new employee should increase the average level of productivity on whichever team they join, ensuring that the company’s standards get higher and higher as time goes on. (source)
That’s the hardest part for me. Holding the bar high for hiring when you are moving much slower on the product than you would like to. When you lose potential customers for features or improvements you have had on your roadmap for a while. Passing up on people who are good enough to get the job done but don’t necessarily raise the team’s standard.
Even though it’s hard, I believe this is the right thing to do if we want to build a great company. When you hire great people, you can trust them to make the right decisions, including decisions about hiring other great people and that’s the only way to scale well.
PS: We are hiring our Chief UI/UX Designer and a Senior Javascript Hacker to lead our Frontend.
