The Challenges of Building Your Startup Team
This is part one of an eight-part series, exploring the ins and outs of growing your startup team. From attracting talent to developing an interview process, get ready for a complete crash-course in hiring your early-stage startup team.
Click to read all eight parts as a complete post, or download as a PDF.
As your startup begins to grow beyond its founding team, every new hire fundamentally changes the company DNA, and it becomes increasingly important to take a strategic, systematic approach to hiring:
After funding, the biggest barrier to startup growth is hiring — not having the right people, in the right roles, at the right time.
Hiring your first employees is an exciting, significant milestone for any startup founder. However, it’s also a challenging time: if you hire the right people, you’ll bring on board the skills and experience needed to grow your company and develop your product; but if you hire the wrong people, the success of your company is at risk.
Growing your startup beyond the founding team is daunting — particularly for first-time founders, or anyone who has never been involved in the hiring process before.
While hiring for any role at every stage of company growth is always difficult, for early-stage startups, growing your team is a particular challenge, for three main reasons.
1) EVERY HIRE CAN MAKE OR BREAK YOUR TEAM
As your startup grows beyond the founding team, every new addition to your team will fundamentally change your company’s DNA. New hires impact everything: product development; company culture; team morale; work quantity and quality; team capabilities… The list goes on and on.
In a small team, and in the fast-paced, high-stakes startup environment, the impact of any mismatch in values, processes or culture will be magnified. Hiring a good-fit team member can increase your capacity and skill set, as well as improving team morale. However, if your new employee is a bad fit for your team’s culture, they will have a negative impact on the work environment, and can actually lead to a decrease in productivity levels, despite an increase in team numbers.
2) YOU’RE PERCEIVED AS A HIGH-RISK OPPORTUNITY
It’s important to realise that joining a startup won’t be the right choice for everyone: for some, the opportunity will be exciting and energising, but for other people it will be overly stressful and risky.
Working at a startup is very different to working at an established company, and many skilled prospects will be reluctant to leave the perceived security of a job at an established company to join a startup with no funding, and no track record of success.
As a personal example, when I was joining Cobloom as the first non-founder on the team, I received advice from many trusted sources, advising me not to take this job and stick with my ‘safer’ former employer. When you’re getting that advice from people whose personal and professional opinion you trust and respect, it can be very difficult to trust your instincts and go against that.
3) YOU’RE UNKNOWN
When nobody knows who you are, attracting top talent is extremely difficult. Unless you or one of your co-founders has a noteworthy background, you and your company are unknown — particularly if you’re bootstrapping or you’re yet to raise your first round of funding.
This means you’ll need to work especially hard to attract good-fit prospects, and you’ll have to sell your company, your vision and your existing team to them. Too many companies forget that hiring is a two-sided process — not only does the job applicant need to impress you, but you also need to impress them.
OVERCOMING THE BIGGEST STARTUP HIRING CHALLENGES
Hiring should be one of the top priorities for startup founders, and you should be prepared to dedicate a lot of your time to everything associated with the hiring process.
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