How To Hire The Leader Who Will Take Your Startup To The Next Level?

It is a known fact that the recruitment processes force companies — and leadership hiring is way more challenging and important. When we look at the startups that set out with the goal of growing every day, choosing the wrong leader can cause relatively permanent damage — such as time and money, and team motivation

At this point, startups should follow the famous phrase of Steve Jobs while performing their leadership recruitment processes: “A players hire A players; B players hire C players, and C players hire D players. It doesn’t take long to get to Z players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies.” So, first, it is vital to work with the right hiring team from the very beginning. These should be founders’ team and line managers who know the company’s values and ultimate mission and correctly analyze which people should be sourced and interviewed in this direction. Once this process is complete, you can start looking for the right leaders that are crucial to your startup’s future.

A few tricks to consider in the recruitment processes will directly affect your success rate. So now let’s look at the critical points in all these recruitment processes.

Sourcing Process

While every recruiting process is essential to your startup, a leader interview is especially important. First of all, you should know that you will be interviewing many candidates from different places, times, and backgrounds. Your hiring team should use their energy and motivation correctly with this awareness. The biggest mistake to be made in the sourcing process is sourcing a few candidates who graduated from certain schools or have experiences in certain companies and trying to end the process hastily. This hasty attitude is also a sign of bias. Because we are human beings, it is quite normal to have bias. However, there are various methods to break or improve this bias. Moreover, according to Mall IQ’s study, the hiring team’s progress by exchanging ideas on candidates will eliminate this problem and help you discover different points against the candidate. According to a report conducted by Zippia, while everyone can become a leader by developing their own talent and vision, only ten percent of people are born with a leader spirit. While this is the case, serious research needs to be done in order to find the right leader among the limited candidate pool.

On the other hand, the positive and friendly approach you have shown to the candidates during the interview will allow them to express themselves correctly by feeling comfortable. Hence, That will enable you to make more accurate inferences about the candidate.

Interview Process

During the interview, it is essential to reflect on your startup’s general mentality and values for this process. This attitude will cause the leader to have a first impression of your startup and continue the process on their side, positive or negative, according to their first impressions.

It is necessary to be very careful that the interview is not only focused on the position that has been advertised. Asking the candidates questions about themselves is very important in the interview process to establish healthy communication with the candidates. For this reason, do not hesitate to ask questions about the candidates themselves and their interests. In addition, it will help the hiring team to ask questions such as “Is there anything you would suggest we do differently from what we do?” This way you can tell how well the person knows you and how good they are at bringing a new perspective and whether they have a critical point of view. Do not forget that a leader with a critical perspective is an indispensable leadership trait for a startup.

According to The Enterprisers Project, it’s up to human resources professionals to optimize the limited interview process, so avoid asking boring questions like your biggest weakness or where you see yourself in five years? In addition, take care to keep the conversation lively and energetic.

Experience and Values

Most startups aren’t just concerned with the candidates’ managerial background when hiring a leader. While evaluating a leader’s experience, you need to look at hard skills and soft skills. In your startup, which is currently under development, you need to look for influential people who are role models for others in living your values and intellectually curious, and can co-create with the team rather than telling what to do . In addition to the above leadership traits; being flexible and thinking quickly, traits such as staying positive, listening to the team’s needs, and being supportive are also fundamental.

Finally, it is really valuable to live common values rather than having the same cultural backgrounds as the leader’s team. Because working with people with the same cultural backgrounds will cause your company to become a place of similar people who have similar perspectives . On the other hand, trying to bring people with shared values together is to form a whole by preserving people’s different thoughts and characteristics. Moreover, it will provide diversity and richness to your startup. In addition, as hiring team members, you should clearly state what kind of leader you are looking for in line with what type of vision. This attitude will help you move forward more easily during interviews and find the right leader.

As Talentmeloners, the first of the elements that we pay the most attention to in our own leadership positions interview processes, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, focusing on finding a large number of candidates from different backgrounds who might be the right match to the company values and vision. Secondly, we try to get to know the candidate by avoiding cliche questions which are also useless by creating an interview environment where candidates can express themselves comfortably and without anxiety. Our questions and cases are designed to understand whether the candidates have the following leadership qualities which will be helping them to lead in a startup environment beyond their technical competencies.

• ability to challenge the status quo and offer new approaches
• being at ease with ambiguity and uncertainty and can adapt to change
• being a doer over a thinker
• co-creating with their teams to overcome challenges and offer new approaches
• leading by example — leaders who do what they say
• building trust-based relationships internally and externally
• creating the best/ truly human environment where people can be at their best every day

Gamze Çoban