Recruiting for a startup
This article is part of a series about how to manage a small software start-up, the first article & overview is found here.
As mentioned in the previous article, there shouldn’t be any employees, but only co-founders, working together at the start. When there is demand for what you are doing, you will feel a strong pull to get more hands. Before diving right into looking for more people, resist the urge and consider what you are doing — hiring the first employee is a big step that should not be rushed.
Do you need to hire?
The best book I have read on managing a company is REWORK hands down, there are many gems on all aspects, but especially the essays on recruiting stuck with me:
- Do it yourself first: “Never hire someone to do a job until you’ve tried to do it yourself first. That way, you’ll understand the nature of the work. You’ll know what a job well-done looks like.”
- Hire when it hurts: “If you feel overworked for a sustained period of time, or you feel like the quality of your work is sliding, that’s when it’s time to hire” — not before
When planning to hire people, make sure you have looked at alternative options before, for example:
- Hiring temporary staff or an agency instead
- Paying more for a helpful tool to do the work more efficiently
- Saying no to potentially unbeneficial work
If you are still absolutely sure that you need more people in your team, understand how hard it is to hire good people:
- You need to sell job positions just as you need to market your company to investors and customers. I have seen especially younger founders believing it would be a privilege to join them — this most likely won’t work.
- Not only will it take a lot of effort to advertise your position and go through the recruiting process, but new people will also not lift your burden when hired in the beginning; they need to get familiar with your company, potentially learn specific technologies, etc., before they can really bring value.
- You need to plan for quite some time until you find a fitting hire — even when a decision is reached, most employees in Europe have notification periods and maybe have to finish other duties before joining your company.
Process
I recommend using specialized recruitment software from the start instead of trying to hack your process in sheets. We chose Breezy because it is well documented, and the startup plan had all the features we needed:
- Customizable recruitment pipeline with candidate cards to comment on
- Pipeline with automated emails and other actions
- Questionnaires with video upload
- Integrateable job platform
The high level recruiting workflow we followed at my company was as followed:
- Sourcing
- Screening
- Initial interview
- Skills interview
- Example work submission
- Workday
- Reference Calls
I will describe some aspects of these steps in the following sections. A good recruiting process offers insights into the candidate’s potential performance, gives the candidate an idea about the job, and builds excitement to work together.
Remember that you need to follow up fast in each step to not lose candidates and make a good impression — my advice is to always decide on a move to the next stage on the same day, the latest the day after.
When faced with a lengthy hiring process, 39 percent of survey respondents lose interest and pursue other roles— Robert Half
In general, aim for high communication standards. For example, always give a reason for rejection after the screening phase. Expect the same standards from the candidate; we rejected candidates that didn’t respond to emails within 7 days.
Another piece of advice on communication is to describe your recruitment process to any new candidate early on to know what to expect.
There is a lot of work that goes into creating an effective recruiting process; some additional inspiration can be drawn from Google’s practices.
Sourcing
The goal of sourcing is to find people with relevant skills, experience, and attitudes and get them to apply on your job platform. Like finding leads for your business, you will use multiple channels such as job conferences, portals (e.g. join), or advertisements. An excellent source for entry-level positions is to look specifically for university-related events and platforms (for example in Zurich, ETH job fairs)
Once you make the position public, you will be contacted by hundreds of agencies and recruiters. If you are growing organically (i.e. without outside money), it can be pretty tough to work with recruiters as they will charge at least 15–20% of a hire’s annual gross salary on a success basis.
Also, there are very few outstanding recruiters out there, so you should carefully consider if you want to spend additional time explaining to recruiters what an applicable candidate profile is.
Screening
One key rule for recruiting is to minimize the time spent on irrelevant or weak applications so you can maximize your time with outstanding candidates. Don’t be afraid to reduce the number of applicants; it’s good if your process scares away people that don’t fit your company’s culture.
Apart from very few exceptions, I would only talk to candidates who took the time to apply for the position by filling out a questionnaire, even better with a video response of why you should hire them. The difference in the quality of interviewees is remarkable using this simple tool.
Hire great writers: Being a great writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. — Jason Fried
I clearly need to work on my writing skills ;-)
The questionnaire should be a mixture of asking about personal motivation, specific skillsets, work culture, and making sure the candidate will be happy with the role — some examples:
- Working at a startup is a high-risk adventure; what would be your primary drivers to bear this risk?
- How do you imagine existing solutions look like? What would be their most significant challenges to solve? How would you suggest tackling them?
- When was the last time you radically changed your opinion?
I think it’s essential to only interview candidates that answer questions authentically and thoroughly — I have usually been disappointed when giving a chance to candidates that didn’t give proper answers to all questions.
Initial Interview
The first interview should verify the screening step’s positive impression and establish if the job position matches the candidate’s situation, experience, and expectations. Always try to get an “early no”. Train everyone to stop the interview if a negative result is clear, instead of wasting everyone’s time (this is very hard). Potential blockers that can be identified early are, for example:
- Unfitting mode and location of work (consulting, remote, part-time)
- Salary expectations, not happy with stock compensation
- Technological interest, the solution is a simple web app, but the person wants to work on machine learning
It is essential to understand what the candidate is looking for as a next career step and if this is really the right move for him, as otherwise, he will quit after some months, and you have to do the process all over again. (and leave the candidate equally unhappy)
Another goal is to get both the candidate and the interviewer excited about working together. A pitch should be prepared that explains how the product is working, presents the roadmap, and shows how the candidate will fit into the team. The pitch should lead to a fluent conversation with questions and doubts from the candidate — if none are raised, this should be seen as a big red flag.
Especially when creating the first impression, it is essential to remember that an interviewer also needs to sell the position to a candidate. An interviewer should be able to differentiate his company from other employers — some repeating motivations we found in people applying to startups were:
- Building something new and meaningful
- Flat hierarchies, being able to influence the decision making
- Little bureaucracy, more flexibility & freedom
Try not to forget to create a relaxed atmosphere, especially when interviewing people with less work experience. You will get more value out of the interview when they feel comfortable and are more positive about the work environment.
A good rule of thumb to progress candidates through the pipeline is to ensure a certain excitement is felt in every step of the process.
Skills Interview
Whereas the initial interview is more about personality and is structured similarly for most job positions, the skills interview should be particular and standardized to compare each candidate’s performance.
We structured all interviews to contain short interview questions with ascending difficulty and two “mini problems”. The questions are basic knowledge and mindset checks, whereas the problems show more about the candidate’s ability to understand given constraints and present solutions.
We found it vital to start with questions you would consider extremely simple, such as what the “final” keyword stands for in Java — you will be surprised how many candidates don’t learn the basics right. For the mini problems, it’s a good idea to give a high-level specification that leaves some necessary information to understand if the candidate tries to understand the problem first before diving into creating a solution. Don’t look for straight away correct answers but identify the reasoning process of the person.
Example work submission
It is almost impossible to evaluate a prospective employee’s potential performance without seeing examples of actual work in my experience. Therefore, we always required a portfolio of past work, and if the shown work wasn’t sufficient, we would give an assignment for candidates to complete on their own time.
There are many controversial debates, especially in programmer’s circles, about asking for “free work” from candidates when giving these assignments. In my opinion, as an employer, you simply need samples for evaluation — and as a candidate, you need to collect a portfolio for your craft anyhow. We also accepted completions of assignments from other employers if they show sufficient skill.
When evaluating the work samples, I wouldn’t focus too much on the actual result, but on how it’s presented, organized, and communicated. For example, for coding assignments, we would check the repository set-up, commit messages, tests, and readability of the submitted work.
There are many examples of coding assignments on the web. For product managers, we asked to design an MVP specification and for marketers to create a sample website mock-up, for example.
Workday
The workday is the opportunity for the whole team to meet the candidate and share their perspective. Also, select employees can feel how it is like to work together and have more in-depth conversations.
This is a significant time investment for all involved parties, so the responsible hiring manager should really believe in the invited candidate.
Some companies already pay a certain sum at this stage of the process; Travel, food & accommodation should be paid at the very least.
The workday’s structure should not be aimed at getting the most “output” of the candidate but instead at gaining confidence that he or she fits into the team.
Ideally, the candidate would come in person — however, remote also works if there is some social time planned in.
Before the Covid-related measures, we had the following structure:
- Sending preparation material three days in advance (code repositories, documentation, business plans, marketing material, etc.)
- 15-minute presentation by the candidate about themselves, their background, future aspirations, and hobbies in front of the whole team and Q&A session
- Additional culture interview by a different team member to get at least two perspectives
- Lunch with the whole team. Further opportunity for the candidate to ask more questions about the team & company
- Case study, exercise, or similar where you or an employee works together with the candidate
We usually had a maximum of 3 hours to really work on the exercise from experience, and it’s challenging to get it right. For engineers, we worked on system design exercises relevant to our products; for inspiration, check this primer.
Reference call
As a last check, we usually called at least one or two references from the candidate, which is a pretty standard procedure but make sure the candidate is actually fine with you calling them. In reference calls, just as in sales calls, it’s important not to impose your thoughts into the questions and have them open-ended, for example:
- What do you see as the next career trajectory for the person?
- What kind of advice would you give people working with this person?
- What is the one area you think the person would like to improve?
It is of little use to just ask yes/no questions such as “Did he do a good job?” — mainly because references will not want to give a bad impression in most cases. It’s a good idea to always ask for examples for any statement to make sure it’s actually backed up by evidence.
Even though the call’s primary purpose is to catch potential red flags, the most value is actually provided by learning how to onboard the person effectively. Find out what helps them do great work from the experience of previous managers.
Onboarding
Once a new person is hired, don’t forget to invest in properly onboarding the person — this is overlooked by too many companies and severely impacts new employees’ well-being and performance. Have clear onboarding documents, assign a senior employee as a mentor to ask questions, raise worries, and have at least bi-weekly check-ins on how everything is going.
The handbook from GitLab has inspired me immensely in this regard, which is a living document showcasing the culture publicly.
In the next article, I will write about how to work with your team to build products and offer services effectively.
