Hey guys, it’s been quite a while! I meant to post this next part sooner for a lot of you who messaged me and commented, but it’s been really busy at the company lately. I finally got a chance to do this part, and put a lot more research and talking to my colleagues for this one, and really enjoyed it. Hope you all do too!
A couple months back I started a series to share some of what I’ve learned throughout the years at Fiix, the company I now run along with some of my closest friends. It is always so inspiring to learn from other entrepreneurs who have built greater things than me and see others who are just starting build their ideas in to reality. This motivating atmosphere of the entrepreneurial community is what drew me from day one, and why I love sharing advice to see you all grow. I thought the best way would be this series, and I’m so glad about the support it’s gotten so far. For those of you who didn’t check out the earlier parts but feel they might help (since the series is a progression through building a startup), I’ll put the links below.
Part 1: Coming Up With The Idea
Part 2: Validation & Traction – Getting Your First Real Customers
This week’s will be on building your dream team. I’ll focus more on what you probably haven’t heard instead of on the requirements – if you’re writing code, you know you need developers, and you don’t need me to tell you that. But how to identify the right developers when their resumes feel like they’re all the same? Now, that I can try and help with. Without further ado, let’s get started.
The Need For Excellence
You’re starting a business or creating a product, which means your first couple hires are literally the chief executives of your team. And if you are approaching investors, know that they often don’t care about the product until you have hundreds of customers or thousands in revenues and great growth metrics. They care about your founding team, and this is why:
The core team sets the bar, runs the show, and pretty much decides the company’s fate – whether you’ll continue growing or fizzle out quickly. Therefore, you need people who are more than just average employees or contractors – you need greatness.
Greatness isn’t just talent, but effort. It manifests in someone who is passionate about the idea, your idea in specific, not just a paycheque. Someone who will outwork the 9-5 that others might be content with, and get the job done while enjoying it. Someone who you can trust to finish their tasks, learn exciting things from and mesh with as a person. A good rule of thumb to keep it simple is this: Would I want to work for this person and be their friend? If you’re leaning to yes, that person is likely a good pick. In the end, a willingness to learn and put in effort is often far better than a professional with more experience who couldn’t care less. Therefore, finding people who not only fit the role description, but also embody the vision and culture that you want to create is essential for early success.
It Starts With You
Before you even make a job posting, you have to create the atmosphere and culture you want to attract. Think of what you would want if you were in your ideal candidate’s shoes. If you need a software developer, think about what would make you as a general individual fall in love with the prospect of working at your company. It’s obviously not the money – a startup is risky and often offers equity. You’ll need a lot more compelling reasons to work there instead. Think long and hard about this package of benefits, because most of it won’t be written on an employment contract, but it should be written on your forehead. What I mean by this is your vision, passion, excitement and love of learning should be so obvious and attracting that another person would be like: damn, I’d love to work with them.
Thinking about your vision and culture isn’t enough – you need to write that stuff down and make it evident. All members of your team, no matter what level they are, must know your mission. These statements and values must be an authentic reflection of you and your brand, or your team and potential candidates simply won’t believe it. If you advertise that you’re providing a relaxed and creative work environment but you rule with an iron first on final decisions and prefer an authoritarian management style, your desired hires will never give you a chance.
To give you an idea of how to get started, I’ll outline some of the ideas we stressed in the beginning stages with early hires:
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First, we wrote down the vision of why Fiix as a company even exists: Making the experience of owning a car, your vehicle to explore the city and world around you, more safe, convenient and enjoyable than ever before.
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Next, we bring in the product: We make our vision happen with our mobile mechanic service that lets you skip the hassle and expensive costs associated with spending a day at the repair shop, and instead have certified mechanics you can trust fix your car on your time. By allowing people to have inspection, maintenance and repairs done at their home or office, the main annoyance of owning a vehicle will be removed and the safety of society will be improved as people hopefully won’t put off getting their repairs as long (this is actually extremely common and does lead to a lot of accidents, so we did research to prove that – adding your own case studies will help make your vision & solution more credible as well).
After you hammer down those two, then you go to your team culture, which needs to align with all your previous statements. For us, we decided we wanted an office environment that doesn’t feel like a traditional corporate workspace. We want people to show up comfortably, think creatively and desire internally to work extremely hard to bring our vision to life. To make that happen, we cut any notion of a dress code, made sure to show off our social media & personality in informal talks before hiring and we asked the candidates questions to see if they could think outside the box. Ensuring the candidates prioritized safety, convenience and trust in their own values was also very important, and we’d use a series of questions within the interview and even casually to figure out how well an employee fit with us. In the first few weeks, we always did intensive timeline checks to see how employees could handle a peak-time workload on the daily if needed, which we thought was the best way to gauge their ability to work hard and if they were truly passionate about the work they were doing. You can try doing any of these yourself or go and invent up new methods – as long as you get an employee who you’d work for in the end, you’re fine.
"Fire Fast, Hire Slow” This is a controversial idiom in the startup world, but I personally am in favor of it. Many VCs and CEOs will spend a large portion of their time recruiting for their companies, because they understand how key quality is to success. Once you have the vision & culture goals crystal clear, then you can move on to the actual process of hiring, which may be longer than you expect. There is no one right way to go about this, but here are some tips we have learned:
1) Identify Your Needs For Now, Not Necessarily Later
You need to be very realistic about both your capabilities and priorities when making the first few hires. Obviously, choose good picks and think long term about the candidates themselves, but the position should only be what is absolutely needed. Most of you will probably not get a top executive of Google to step down for your idea, so don’t waste your time on professionals who you won’t be able to attract. Now, even if you could get them, you need to make sure they’re worth it for what you need now. If you don’t plan to do heavy marketing for months and need the product built, then don’t spend your time looking for the marketer right now. Get your product designer and tech team set up, then move to the next need. And repeat.
2) Look at multiple ways to solve your needs
It’s hard to get great quality talent to sign up on an equity basis while building your product or before you get a large amount of traction. You should be willing to hire contractors or pay money out of your own pocket if you need temporary workers. However, for all long-term employees who plan to stay around, you want to in general provide their compensation through equity as it is a reflection of their belief in your culture, company and vision.
3) Think of double-layered or deeper level strategic questions to get the information you want
You want candidates that are creative, innovative, open, fast-thinking and motivated. The problem is, every decent candidate will be able to tell you that and rehearse their script. In my opinion, engineering your own unique questions is best as no one can just plaster their rehearsed lines on your question. Some top VCs will ask the same question in different ways to see if someone’s answer align each time, or if they’re just BSing. Elon Musk will ask about the specifics regarding problem’s solved, because he believes anyone who has actually solved a really difficult problem will know all the little details you likely wouldn’t know about otherwise. Authenticity is hard to create, but spend the time to make it happen and you’ll be able to get candidates who are the real deal.
4) Try to develop a sort of scoring system to help you quantitatively group candidates
It’s often pretty hard to decide which candidate is more skilled between two close picks – usually, a manager may just choose one candidate based on anecdote they said or even just choose between by chance. However, by using a scoring system, you can easily remember and have a baseline to evaluate every candidate by, and even break down how well they did on certain areas of the interview (practical component, technical knowledge, personality/interest in company, etc.). The numbers shouldn’t be strict and of course you should use intuition if things are close, but this system will help you get a better idea of a candidate’s skills/vibe & allow you to consider later on aspects such as how much of an incentive you want to provide them to retain their talent.
5) Complex interview processes will help you find the best
This may perhaps be the most useful tip I have and I’ve seen it across so many entrepreneurs I’ve talked to. It’s been the bulk of what I spent my time looking into, and hopefully, you’ll be able to make use of this.
The goal of your interview process should be to not simply choose the most qualified candidate, but rather, who will fit the best. This is not as simple as it sounds.
Good interviewees know how to game the system – they’ll put on a smile and act professional and butter things up a bit so that they come off as a great candidate. I don’t blame them – we’re all told first impressions matter, and putting in effort there is a good sign. But it may not be completely accurate. Your goal should be to find out if that candidate will align with how they presented themselves before they work for you. The worst thing is hiring someone who seems great at first, but then ends up coming with a ton of unchecked baggage in terms of attitude and personality. Avoiding this will help you decrease turnover, create a better team culture, and make new hires fall in love with your workplace. So, how does it work?
The best thing I’ve heard is looking for passion/desire to work at your company, demonstrated by the cover letter (if there isn’t one, this may indicate they lack genuine interest in your company), and afterwards, excitement when talking to members of your team who aren’t in charge of hiring. If a new candidate is excited and speaks about it to your coder, that is usually a great sign that they are genuinely interested in the work you guys have to offer. To bring their personality out, have people who aren’t part of the hiring process have informal chats or have a team mixer. If they are just as passionate, exciting and enjoyable to be around as they seemed on their LinkedIn page or in an interview, then you’re usually golden. Or at least, you’re likely better off than just hiring them after they shoot off answers to a couple brain-teasing questions.
And that’s what I have for this week! You may think I missed certain areas, but I really wanted to focus on aspects I felt are often less discussed without getting ridiculously long. Hopefully, that was the case and the tips for hiring become useful and used by you.
Really trying to have the next part out in the next month or two, but it may be quite hard. I don’t want to sacrifice quality for you guys so I do spend quite a while on each section and I am here for the couple days after to help answer questions you guys may have. Next edition will likely be “It’s Time to Pitch!” and focus on how to sell your company to either investors, business clients or contacts you want to bring onto your board of advisors. How you sell is extremely important to make sure you represent the brand well and get the connections you need to thrive. Until next time – hope you’ve all had an amazing time in 2018 so far and I’ll catch you all soon!
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