Hiring for startups 101 – new blog series
How to hire for your startup is one of the most crucial (if not the crucial) tasks for any startup founder but rarely gets the attention it deserves from bloggers. There are probably more posts a day on how to pitch your company than about best practices for hiring for your company in a month.
Cover of Hiring
So I decided to try to change this a bit and create a series of blog posts on hiring. “Hiring for startups 101″ plans to cover everything from finding great leads to running a smooth interview process to making an offer and converting a candidate.
I am hoping to get input from as many people as possible in this process and looking forward to your feed-back. Watch out for the first post in the upcoming days.
“Tell me who your friends (advisors, employees,…) are and I will tell you who you are”….
“Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are” is an old saying that has some real truth to it – but it is not only valid for your private life but might also be a very useful guideline for professional situations. Interpret it in the broadest possible sense and it might help you evaluate people and opportunities very quickly:
- I found that one of the strongest indicators of a founder’s / CEO’s talent is his ability to attract top-notch talent very early on. So if you are considering joining or investing in a start-up, I would do a lot of due diligence on the quality of the team, especially its key members.
- Same holds for advisors that are associated with the company you are looking at – do they have really smart, respected and committed advisors or is it the same list of advisors you have seen at many other start-ups who are lending their name for a few percent?
- And what other start-ups is the CEO / founder close with and being considered a respected peer?
So the next time you have to evaluate a person, focus less on university degrees and past professional experiences and rather on the quality of people that this person is surrounding himself with – it might be the much more valuable signal!
Related articles
- Land a Big Name to Advise Your Company (inc.com)
- Advisors Stop Screwing Startups (learntoduck.net)
Breaking into the Valley? Use the “Canadian mafia”
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There is a PayPal mafia, a Facebook mafia and a Twitter mafia, all powerful networks of entrepreneurs and investors based in the Valley. And now there is a really strong “Canadian mafia” emerging. It started to formalize with the launch of the C100 a few years ago. The organization is comprised of a select group of mostly Silicon Valley-based Canadian entrepreneurs, technology executives and VC’s and has launched some amazing programs like “48 Hours in the Valley” or the “Canada CEO tech summit“. But even more importantly, the Canadian angle is starting to open doors in all sorts of places.
I spent the past month in the Bay Area and found that one of the most successful ways to get into a specific organization is to find out if there is any Canadian connection. And interestingly enough, there are Canadians (or people with a connection to Canada) sitting almost everywhere. You can find them in the big Internet companies like Google, Apple or Facebook; you can find them in major tech blogs and among conference organizers; you can find them among VC’s or super-angels. And Canadians are actually starting to talk about a Canadian mafia and feeling proud about being part of this emerging community.
So the next time you are trying to get that important meeting, try the Canadian angle – it might be the most powerful way to break into the Valley.
Related articles
- ‘PayPal Mafia’ Gets Richer (businessweek.com)
- The “Twitter Mafia” Poised to be Silicon Valley’s Next Great Network (techcrunch.com)
- Whither the Facebook Mafia? (betabeat.com)
Go for passionate users, not a large sales force
One of the key questions for every start-up in the B2B space is the go-to-market strategy and the natural initial focus is always on creating a scalable sales and marketing process. How do I create qualified leads at the right costs? How do I move these leads to opportunities and then paying customers? Can I do this with an inbound sales force or do I need to have people on the ground?
While figuring out a scalable maketing and sales approach is important, most start-ups forget that there is the much larger opportunity to have passionate users do the distribution for your company. This usually requires 3 things:
- A simple product that provides value to a single user within a larger organization
- A price point for the product that is low enough that a user would be willing to expense this on his personal credit card (the best scenario would be that the product is free)
- A viral loop built into the product that ideally creates network effects
How to hire for your start-up
I recently read a great article about Google’s recruiting machine that described in some detail how Google’s hiring success is based on 4 elements: “data, money (lots of it), sophisticated programming, and an army of young, eager recruiters.” And while Google plays in a league by itself (and can throw tons of money at the problem), every start-up should consider 2 lessons learned from Google’s approach.
1. Be aggressive about filling the funnel:
One of the most important elements of running a successful hiring process is a company’s ability to feed the top of the funnel. Posting on job boards, offering internship programs, leveraging your existing team for referrals, networking and targeted PR are some of the basic strategies but the most successful is still to actively go after potential candidates. Identifying, contacting and qualifying them is a lot of manual work and unless you put serious resources against it, you will not make enough progress. Those resources can either be internal or contractors with the latter group having worked very well for Google.
Who are Google’s recruiters? They’re young, highly paid and, often, on a six month contract. “They’re probably the company that I’ve seen that uses the most [contractors],” says Michael A. Morell, co-founder and managing partner of Silicon Valley recruiting firm Riviera Partners. “There’s a lot to be said for new people trying to prove themselves in the first six to 12 months.” It’s difficult to find an accurate or exact employee-to-recruiter ratio at the company, the number of recruiters varies dramatically. At any given time, Sullivan says, 70% of the recruiting staff might be on contract.
2. Qualifying the leads
The other important element of the hiring process is to qualify the leads by using a systematic, data-driven approach. You can either look at past performance (e.g. GPA and standardized testing scores if a candidate has recently graduated) or have your candidates perform internal tests (like coding, writing or even Excel tests, depending on the position you try to fill). A really good example for an unique quantitative approach is Hubspot’s hiring process for inside sales.
There are many other important elements of a successful hiring process but aggressively thinking about the top of the funnel and using more data in the qualification of leads are probably the two areas where most start-ups can make an immediate difference to their hiring success rate.
Related articles
- Inside Google’s recruiting machine (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
- My Google Interview Experience (news.ycombinator.com)
- Hiring Tips for First-Time Entrepreneurs (inc.com)
