September 30, 2022

On hiring

My personal journey on understanding the importance of hiring.

Hiring is the highest leverage function as an entrepreneur. Getting hiring right helps you unlock tremendous momentum and make the end outcome achievable.

The advice that is often prescribed is that founders should interview the first 100 hires in their startup. If you are not part of the hiring process, how do you check for culture fit? Then, there are extremes.

“Elon Musk personally interviewed the first three thousand employees at SpaceX because he wanted to make sure the company was hiring the right people”

If hiring is so important than why do you think many are bad at it? Why most look to outsource it as soon as they find validation through funding?

In this post, I try to write down my experience and lessons learnt on hiring and its importance. Not knowing how to hire is major roadblock to a startup’s scale. Talented people will unlock growth for your business in ways you couldn’t envision. I have been a beneficiary of getting it right a couple of times and suffered when I got it wrong.

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Some Principles of Hiring

You all are aware of my love for operators who write. So, to convey the important principles of hiring. I decided to go with the ones shared by Hunter Walker of Homebrew venture fund. Learn to hire well and you will never loose

In his own words, why Hunter thinks that hiring skillset of a founder is deterministic of their success.

Success is a signal of two meaningful truths: you have the talent you need to execute your roadmap and A+ people have decided that you are worth working for.

There are 3 prinicples to keep in mind for us to execute and recruite good talent.

1. Know What Excellent Looks Like
2. Ask Candidates Who Reject You To Name Names
3. Sell Past The Close

This is especially critical for people who are joining very early stage and at a higher responsibility role. I have written about importance of hiring front line workforcein the past. We also hired senior folks. I would encourage you to read the entire aritcle to understand how these principles play out.

Experiences

I was very adamant of writing down a job descritpion before we think about hiring for a role. Second, spent some time executing the responsibilities of the job description. Third, reach out to people who I thought were very good in responsibilties through Twitter. This provided me with sufficient understanding of challenges to solve, skillsets required and the thought process one should deploy to execute the role’s responsibilities. Through this exercise I was able to gain a broad range of traits that one needs to check in the prospective people.

In early stage, we are not evaluating candidates on their skillset , first. Instead, they are weighing the proposition by evaluating us and the overall business. They have to answer the question, “Why should I consider this chance?”

Once the interest is piqued and an initial fit was mutually declared. We opened up the entire organisation to them. Walk-in , talk to anyone, vet our story and size our pitch. I have had the priviledge of having some enlightening conversations with these candidates. They have not joined us for various reasons but still stay in touch with us checkin time to time.

For one such candidate, we went on a field trip to just let them see the impact we were making to producers we served. And this was after I had just returned from a long trip. Taking these steps, I learned the hard way.

Prior to the shift in our approach. We successfully hired a senior person who clearly wasn’t aligned with what we wanted to achieve. During the process of hiring we focused only on “what this person could do for us?” They signalled well.

We invested couple of months in getting them onboarded. One fine day, they just didn’t show up. It set me and the company back by good 2 months. We had to recoup and replan our approach to GTM. This experience led me to a realisation about hiring.

Wrong outlook

In industrial economy, we hired for the subservient nature of human beings. The shift to knowledge economy hasn’t helped us shift our approach on hiring.

Contributions focus is critical in determining the type of talent you would like to bring onboard. It will bring immense clarity to why a person is the right fit for a role.

Every hiring looks urgent but is very important to do it right. Rushing our way through it sets us back further than not hiring in the first place.

Cedric Chin is an another operator who focuses on writing his experiences with different frameworks. He has a post outlining how to hire well in a cash strapped manner.

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Epilogue

When we ran into working capital problems while running Subjimandi.app. There were two reasons. One was due to a failed experiment and then the second was growing too fast as we launched a new consumption region.

I had the opportunity to raise a bridge round from few well wishers and previous backers. But, I didn’t.

The thing that stopped me and made me assess was not knowing where to find the talent to scale the company. I realised the importance of hiring and recruiting great talent through my journey of running a startup for over 2 years. Yet, I saw the gapping hole in my investment towards spotting talent. I was too occupied trying to solve the uncertainity of grade produce and ended up having less time for everything else.

Between keeping the lights on using battery(bridge money) or generating electricity(recruite talent) to power more lights. I chose to switch off the lights and close the shop to save team’s time. I was bitter about it but have come to terms with it over the course of past 6 months.

This is why I am super focused on getting good at hiring and spotting talent. Stay tuned there is more to come on this topic.

Signing off till the next time,

Vivek V.S, reading on talent.