How to hire the right people for your Startup?

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You are on your journey… so congratulations! Most certainly you are doing a lot of things right and moving forward. As a founder and leader of your company you are actually building a puzzle and have to accommodate the pieces into the right fit, and one of the most important pieces of the puzzle is your team! Once you realize that you cannot possibly do everything yourself, or that investment firms place the “Entrepreneurial Team” as one of the most critical and underlying criteria for funding decisions, you will start putting the chess pieces on the table. Keep in mind these wise words declared by Steve Jobs: “Great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people.” Therefore, hiring the right people for your company is absolutely, fundamental to the success of your venture, just as much as having a great product or

idea.

You may want to start by conducting a gap analysis of your workplace and functional areas. Identify your weaknesses and deficiencies. Ask yourself which areas need support and how can you make your organization better, and where can you bolster talent. It may also be a question of capacity and you may simply need more help to accelerate your operations and gain greater speed to market. There will most certainly exist financial limitations that impede your progress so your company may need to ramp up gradually. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Can your company afford to hire someone new?
• Can your workload support the new hire?
• What is the right timing to hire before the work becomes overwhelming for your team?

We recommend that you identify your most urgent needs to start with. Understand that you can also look to partner with experts in functional areas to help fill some of the management voids to complement you. There is nothing wrong with bringing on board some sweat equity!

Understand your vision, mission, and desired organizational culture!

As you build your team, you also need to hire the right people so that there is harmony within the organization. Otherwise, toxic individuals can do more damage to your organization in spite of their expertise, experience and talent. Therefore, it is important that you understand who you want to be as an organization, how you want to treat your customers, and how you want your team to treat each other! You also want to develop your value proposition so that you can make sure everyone understands it and delivers on it consistently at every customer touch point. As Andrew Carnegie declared: “Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” As such, avoid the wrong hires that can drain the

fuel to your success, and make sure that your new team members are a good fit for your

organization.

Consider leveraging Freelancers

Depending on the position and the required role and functionality, there may be a lot of benefits to hiring a talented freelancer. There simply may not be enough work in this role to justify a full-time employee at the moment, but at the same time you need to make progress on critical tasks so a freelancer can help you fill the void and make progress without making a commitment. Another benefit of a freelancer is that it allows you to gauge their work ethic and quality of work ensuring that you are comfortable with the level of productivity and contribution to the company. In addition, you will be able to monitor their fit with the company and the organizational culture!

Do they get along with everyone else? Do they work well in a team setting? Are they fun to work with? Do they add value? If you have identified a “winner” then you can make the decision bring that individual on board as a full-time employee.

Develop Job Specifications

Before you bring anyone on board, however, we recommend that you think carefully about each position and the intended role that it fills, and then proceed to develop job specifications. This document will help you communicate your expectations for the job as you search for your ideal candidate. As an entrepreneur, you will need to keep your organization as lean as possible, so think about bringing on board multi-talented mavens that can work on and contribute towards multiple roles. As you build out the job specifications make sure to include duties and responsibilities of the role, the experience required, the expectations of the position, and of course core values and personal traits of the candidate that is sought. This is fundamental so that you are aligning your

candidates for a good fit within the organization.

Recruiting for Talent

As an entrepreneur, you should always keep your eyes open and be on the lookout for

extraordinary talent, individuals that have the potential of making an impact on your company. Since your resources may be limited throughout the early stages of your venture, you will probably not be leveraging a recruiter as they can be expensive. As such, it is recommended to create a careers section on the company website where you can post open positions. While there may not be that much traffic, rest assured that any candidate that comes across will more than likely have researched the company and will have been drawn to the position by interest in the company. Regardless, the most important tactic that can be applied during the recruiting process is to network with other entrepreneurs and with specialized groups where you can force serendipity and either hear about or come into contact with good candidates. Your Venture Capital firm or project accelerator hub can also help you untap needed talent. Of course, you can also go hunting on LinkedIn or other specialty communities and reach out directly to individuals that have caught your eye based on their experience. Remember that LinkedIn has recruitment tools available for you to use and member profiles often show recommendations from past employers and colleagues giving you insights as to their character and accomplishments.

Optimizing the Interview Process

A candidate needs to have the skills for the job! The interview will allow you to discover whether they do or not. However, simply regurgitating the history on a resume and going straight through the document will not help you flush out the best candidate. Furthermore, some candidates may even exaggerate their experience, so you need to validate that the knowledge and experience level is to your satisfaction. As such, we recommend that you use a mix of Situational / Behavioral questions in SAR (Situation, Action, Result) format so that you can flush out the candidates’ ability to think through problems and challenges while applying their skills toward the achievement of results. Frame the questions beforehand and ask the candidate to answer by explaining a

situation, showing what action was taken to address the challenge while describing the outcome and result. Remember that you are not only trying to discover potential, abilities, and capabilities based on the candidates experience, but you are also trying to discover personality traits as to how they fit your culture and how they work on a team.

The internet is full of examples of Situational / Behavioral questions that you can select for each of your job descriptions. Just the same, please see a few examples below:

• Describe a time when you had to deal with conflict at the office and explain how you addressed the situation?
• Tell me about one of your greatest accomplishments and how you achieved it? What was the result for the organization?
• Explain a functional problem that you encountered in your past roles and how you resolved it?
• Can you describe your experience with this XXX, how you applied this skill and share some of the results?
• Tell me about a situation when you had to be creative to achieve your goal?
• Explain a situation when your participation on a team led to the team achieving positive outcomes?

Wrapping it up!

We don’t wish to scare you but hiring the right candidates can definitely make-or-break your company. Not only do you need to impress investors with a talented entrepreneurial team, but it is essential to achieve harmony, engagement, high levels of productivity and efficiency. Everyone needs to row together to get to the destination in mind. As Henry Ford once said, “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” You can also derive from the same statement, that the inability to work together is failure! So please do not neglect the hiring function! Prepare properly and hire the right candidates!.