Hiring For Small Startups

Creating a successful company is about solving the right problems. You can’t do that if you don't have the right people so you better get good at hiring. Almost every startup begins life as a no-name "who are you?!?" company that can't get a response from any engineers, let alone good ones. You're probably wondering how it is that you raised $3M from a top tier VC but you can't convince a single competent mobile engineer to join you. This process can be frustrating and the pressure can lead you to make simple mistakes, compromise your standards and hire your way to failure.

During my career I've recruited and hired great people from bigger and more well established companies. I couldn’t compete on salary, perks, work-life balance or the straight faced assurance that the company would be around in 10 years. Here are some things I learned.

• Understand Your Candidate
• Paint A Balanced Picture
• Highlight Your Cultural Values
• Invest In Inexperience
• Think Outside The Bay

Understand Your Candidate

What motivates you doesn't necessarily motivate the person you are trying to hire. You may be all about the mission but the person you are talking to may really only care about a particular problem domain, career growth, perks, upside, work/life balance, commute, etc. To be a good recruiter, you need to ask the right questions and understand who you are trying to recruit and quickly figure out if you can honestly deliver on that. That is a key first step and without it you are flying blind. Ask about the things they love about their current job and the people they work with. Ask about what they don’t like and what they think the perfect job/company would be  for them. Understanding what people want isn’t rocket science.

With this advice comes a warning. No matter what kind of pressure you are under to hire a candidate, if you determine that what they want is something that you can't deliver (i.e. work/life balance, a specific title/level) make the hard call and don't force it. The consequences to the candidate, your team and your reputation are just not worth the risk.

Paint A Balanced Picture

Related to the last point, while you want to get people excited about your mission and team and the future for them, you have to paint a realistic picture of what it will be like as well. Basically, I'm telling you to not catfish a candidate. No matter how great of a storyteller you are, you can't stop the reality that hits on day 1.

When I was recruiting people out of bootcamp for my team at Facebook, I would tell them very directly that we work against spammers and attacks can come at all hours of the day. I talked about the challenges we dealt with and also the cool technologies we were developing. It scared off a lot of people but the people who joined the team were so excited for our work and thrived. Part of why this approach worked was that I developed a strong narrative for the team’s mission. It is critical that you develop a narrative and speak with passion about it.

Highlight Your Cultural Values

You want candidates to have a sober look at how you conduct business so that they can either embrace it or self-select out as early in the process as possible. If you are building a transparent and collaborative work environment, you want the top down style manager candidate to figure out for themselves. The challenge comes when your company is a successful rising star and people are blinded by dollar signs. This is where your interview process needs to kick in. Testing for cultural fit should be baked into each interview and there should be one interviewer that is primarily focused on it.

Below are some areas to cover

• How ideas get generated and decisions are made
• How you manage collaboration and shared responsibility
• How disputes are resolved
• Examples of how the company handled mistakes
• Examples of people at the company who are successful and why

Invest In Inexperience

Many of the world changing technology companies were started by people straight out of school who were too inexperienced to realize what was/wasn't possible. I've talked to many founders who feel like all their problems would be solved if they could hire a few senior engineers. While having senior engineers is great, fresh college grads bring an optimism, sense of adventure and hustle that should not be discounted. Do not take this as advice to throw your standards out the window. You still need to interview them to make sure they meet your standards for technical skills but they will not have some of the more practical skills around handling production code or designing for scale or reuse. Let's face it, if you are a 2 person startup, this is your best route for getting your ideas forward so you need to become very good at evaluating amazing college grads from the rest.

Some of the most transformative people I hired at Facebook and Uber came straight out of college. One person, in particular, stands out for me. He had zero work experience or background in security or machine learning but he was so eager to learn and try out new things that he came up game-changing ways to solve our problems. Most people would have looked at his inexperience and behavior and thought he was going to be an erratic mess but they would be wrong. He is still at Facebook (as of this post) and crushing it.

Think Outside the Bay

If you are in a hot market like San Francisco or Seattle then you know it is next to impossible to get any engineer without beating a top-tier compensation package. Hiring remote team members can help you grow but it isn’t the silver bullet one would hope for. There is an overhead to managing remote people. When considering this, only look at people who have several years of experience and a strong track record at companies you have heard about.

In Closing

Building a world class company is all about building a world class team. There are many obstacles and challenges you have to deal with but if you are systematic about it, maintain your principles and keep positive after the 8th engineer rejects your offer, you will be fine.

I'm planning to write some related posts on hiring at scale, building an interviewing process and multiple posts on culture and values.