Recruiting people in complex domains
signalling with content
There are many ways of building good company. But there is only one way of builiding a great company. It revolves around people and it starts with recruiting a team.
Hiring and recruiting are intermixed when in the midst of team building. The act of hiring is reactive, we are chasing to find the right person. Recruiting on the other hand is finding talent and pitching them to take you seriously if and when they are open to shift/join.
Problem with complex domains
With both agriculture and logistics, I was struggling to solve the real need for talent especially for roles that are detrimental for success like sales, procurement and operations. Tech and product roles are much harder to fill. The challenge was two fold. Finding people to invest their efforts and care about the space.
In a previous post on Front Line workforce, I penned down my thoughts and process in hiring our team.
Our front line workforce were early career folks who were looking to kick-start their careers. The lack of experience was overcompensated with interest to learn.
We relied on younger and early career over few years experienced people for two specific reasons.
Budget. You can’t bring in experienced folks when you are not a recognised name. So, more money and perks have to be thrown in to help a candidate join you.
Zero unlearning. The time and effort it takes for a slightly experienced person to unlearn is much more compared to training a person.
Still, the challenge was to asses these folks when not sufficient work was available.
The motivation to hire stellar candidates was essential as they will be the people who will be the brains at the local level. They will be tasked with driving the process outwards to the customer.
Last point I would like to make is about the nature of business. We were in produce space, essential commodities. Our differentiation that we could build and sustain was our people and their competence. Everything else was or would have been commoditised.
Building and developing team in a complex domain is much harder compared to a social media. In the case of Subjimandi.app , produce grading and selling required interpersonal and produce knowledge. Talent was present, we had to focus on the filtering for fit.
Founders start focusing on team building to increase their execution capacity. But the opposite happens. More people leads to more clarification through communication. The problem that excited them doesn’t resonate with the people being interviewed or hired.
The added layer of complex domain makes it even harder to signal to folks. Hiring from network leads to misalignment issues eventually. People from the network often join for the founders but don’t resonate or care enough about the problem being solved.
Yet, enduring companies are built in complex domains. Let us take the case of stripe.
Let’s talk about stripe
One of the great companies of the recent past is Stripe. It is a private company working on the vision to “Increase GDP of the internet” for the past 10 years. In simpler terms, its a payment gateway company that helps businesses or people collect payments online.
It is often covered for it meticulous nature of product building driven by writing culture. There are many ex-stripe folks writing about the time they have spent at stripe and how it was filled with people who care about their work that they do.
……, I can say with confidence that nothing great in this town is built without the whole team linking arms to build it together. And, that true collaboration makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. And, that getting there requires working your butt off to do work you’re proud of and leaning on and supporting your colleagues to do the same. At Stripe, we had all that pulsing through our veins.
No one thinks payments is as cool as social media and look forward to working for them. So, stripe invested a lot on being deliberate about recruiting.
Again all startups say “our team is our most important asset”; leaders say “the hardest part of my job is hiring good people”. But what most companies actually do day-to-day on recruiting is disastrous: generic job ads, clueless outside recruiters, screening on brand name, candidate-hostile interview processes, slow response times, etc. The poor recruiting results of most companies reflect the work they put in.
Stripe was different in two respects: effort and thoughtfulness.
In terms of effort, Stripe’s recruiting was absolutely relentless. On the front of the pipeline this meant investing in potential candidates that wouldn’t apply for years, through genuine 1:1 relationships as well as many small events that introduce Stripe and its team. Once candidates were active, Stripe tried to move very quickly
This led to stripe being one of the most revered startups in the community. Now, folks find it aspirational to work. They find that building payment solutions is really important problem to solve. Even their recent layoff receive a lot of praise.
Making it obvious
The lesson we can take away from the stripe example is about building it in open. They invested significantly in sending a signal to overall developer ecosystem to consider stripe as their next option.
Founders often don’t share their canvas of the problem we are solving. Investing early by building in public could help founders outline their canvas to a wider set of people across the talent pools. This ensures that the people who respond are responding to the signal and care about the problem.
Factors of Canvas
Region is the boundary in which the startup is operating. In the case of stripe it was the entire internet economy. When it came to subjimandi, it was produce markets. Similarly, until recently with my current role, it was India’s agri-logistics.
Economy talks about the current structures, incentive mechanisms and cashflows that are dominant. For example, before stipe came into picture. The way payment were collected revolved on the internet revolved around Paypal. After stripe, any developer needed 9 lines of code to start.
Domain would be the sector in which we are operating. Agriculture or Logistics. For example with subjimandi.app, why grading of produce is not prevalent.
Society is the people/consumers for whom we are building the solution. In the case of agri-logistics. It was about the truck drivers, transporters and shippers moving agri-loads across India.
Communicating the information about these factors and positioning the startup is strong signal. It brings forward curious folks interested in what we are building.
Working with people who joined us because they cared creates a environment that create lasting impact. I have seen both the sides in the past. I wrote about it in the hiring post I penned documenting my experince with hiring.
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.
Summing it up
Recruiting unlike hiring doesn’t start with preparing a job description. It starts with creating content about the canvas in which we are operating. Sharing nuggets about the economy and how we are trying to impact it. The people who will be using the solution. And lastly, the domain before and after the solution.
Get people to care not just interested.
If all of this looks convoluted and complicated to execute. Do the easy thing, hire women. They will solve for our lack of rigour and deliberate effort by asking pointed questions. I will write further on it at a later date.
Signing off till next time,
Vivek , recruiting with content to create intent.