This is the first part in a 3 post series related to startup hiring and growing your organization.
You started off with your co-founders working out of your kitchen. The dreams about what you together could build carried you through the days with brutally scarce resources. So far you hadn’t been punched in the face by the entrepreneurship war. It was all about the possibilities. And your co-founding team were so in sync pushing towards your dream it felt like you had mastered the art of telepathy.
Now enter phase 2 of your company’s lifecycle. You just raised some 💰 and you’re looking to increase your output velocity by making a few key hires. Sh*t is getting real! When going from extreme scrappiness to finally having resources available to execute your dream, it’s not uncommon to see entrepreneurs rushing into scaling their team. And speed is always essential for any startup. But take a deep breath, and don’t just go out there and try to bring in the best functional talent you can find. Hiring is expensive…salary, insurance, equity grants, laptops and cellphones are just the basic direct costs. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, when you also consider costs associated to your team involved in interviewing, onboarding, training and managing the new hire. Hiring the right people for the right jobs is by far the most important thing you do in your company. Don’t underestimate it. It takes time and requires preparations. At any time your company enters an organizational growth phase you need to be sure you’re ready for it. You have to be ready to hire.
To help you understand this, together with Bay Area recruiter Tim Farrelly at the Coit Group’s we’ve identified the 4 most critical items you need to define and articulate before you start hiring:
1 - Identify your true organizational needs. The first an most fundamental question to ask yourself is, do I actually need to hire or am I simply doing something poorly? Before you hire make sure you understand your operational processes. We often see organizational problems originating in teams that are unnecessarily inefficient, that can be easily fixed by adjusting workflows — not by adding more people. Also understand the work distribution in your current team as some people may be swamped, while others are bored from not having enough work. Some problems may be solved by simply shifting tasks amongst your existing team. Throwing more people at an inefficient process can be devastating. Don’t recruit to fix. Only recruit to scale.
If you bring in an external recruiter to help you fill your hiring needs, the first thing they should do is to learn about your company structure — not just to understand the culture, but to identify and target organizational inefficiencies and bottlenecks. — Tim Farrelly, Coit Group
2 - Prioritize cost and benefits. Even companies with funding have a limitation to its resources and need to make hard priorities around what roles to fill first. Don’t try to recruit for all your needs at the same time. Focus and prioritize on filling roles where you expect the impact and benefit to be greatest. Don’t always default to hiring more engineers because your backlog is long. Often the right choice is getting more clients in through the door and you need to focus on sales and marketing. Furthermore, rarely does the biggest benefit come from hiring senior management. Most early stage companies need doers. Another useful exercise to help you prioritize is considering the costs of NOT hiring for a specific role. Compare what the the overall impact on your company would be if you did not have the various roles filled within the next 6 months. Open positions which are not actively destructive can be pushed into the future.
3 - Decode the foundation. Once you understand what you really need more people for, you have to recognize how the all the roles will fit and operate in you organization. Regardless if you use a conventional pyramid hierarchy or aholacracy, you will need clearly defined rules around how people are organized and operate. The essence is to define an environment which ispredictable. Predictable for both new and existing hires. Uncertainty will create friction. Eliminate uncertainty by articulating “hard elements” like organizational charts, role descriptions for all roles (even those who have been with the firm up until now), career paths, compensation benchmarks, etc. And never forget the “soft elements” like culture values (an entire series of blog posts could be written around the topic of culture). Once you have all of this, make sure the rest of the organization understands this. Bringing in new people may have impact on some existing people’s jobs, where a redistribution of responsibilities may feel like a demotion. Predict where people will be impacted. And communicate, communicate and communicate.
4 - Define the process. Before bringing people in for interviews, make sure you have articulated what the hiring process look like ahead of time. Who is involved at what stage, what is the evaluation focus at each stage of the process, how is debriefing done after each stage, etc. Make it a team effort. Way too many startups have non-existing recruiting processes creating a time consuming, unprofessional and unstructured experience for not only the candidate but also your team members. Yet again, make this predictable. It’s the only way to make it efficient. But don’t settle to define the process of interviewing. Think about what you do before and after interviewing. What can you do before a candidate meets with your team, to build a pipeline and a pool of talent. Top talent is rarely out looking for jobs, and you can only win them by building relationships over time. Furthermore, make sure to define what your company does after interviewing those you decline. Ideally everyone who got an inside view into your company by interviewing with you should be an ambassador of your brand and the people they’ve met. Take care of these people, even if it’s not a perfect fit. And finally, once you have found that special person you want to hire, make sure you think through their onboarding experience for a smooth integration into the team.
Nailing down a well-defined, well-structured and efficient hiring process can save literally hundreds of hours. — Tim Farrelly, Coit Group
Hiring is difficult. Don’t wing it. Be diligent. Be ready. 💪 👊
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