Welcome back to Startup Soup with Jean and Jen! Now that we’ve introduced you to the idea of minimum viable operations, we wanted to get started with a topic that’s important for all companies: hiring.
We all know that hiring quickly and effectively is critical for early and mid-stage startups. One or two key people can fundamentally change a company's trajectory, and one or two mis-hires can be the difference between hitting your goals and missing them. Despite the importance of hiring, there’s surprisingly little concrete guidance for early stage startups about how to find, screen, close and onboard candidates.
This topic will be one that we discuss multiple times, but to start, we’ve put together our top tips to help unblock your process and increase your odds of hiring the right person. As always, we’re not recommending you build out a hiring function to compete with the likes of Google or Meta, but instead, we’re identifying stage-appropriate tactics for your team. And remember, hiring isn’t just about filling seats. It’s about building a team that can thrive, especially in the unique environment of your startup.
1. Define Your Must-Haves
Start by identifying the top three non-negotiable skills or attributes for the role. These might include things like startup experience, familiarity with your customer base, excellent communication skills, or proven autonomy. Clarity is key. Like setting a budget before you go grocery shopping, identifying the top skills helps focus your search rather than getting distracted by impressive, but non-essential, qualities. Don't get caught up in “fluffy jargon.” If you find yourself listing out closer to eight to ten attributes, then great job! You’ve just made your first hiring rubric or scorecard. Still, we recommend picking out the top three most important skills this hire needs.
Being specific about who you are and aren’t interested in will help you attract the right candidates. For example, if you’re asking investors for introductions to great sales leaders, you might end up talking to a lot of folks who don’t match what you need. But if you get more specific and ask for introductions to great sales leaders with experience at fin tech companies, it narrows the potential field significantly but also increases the likelihood the candidates will be a great fit.
2. Run a Structured Process
Design your interview process around specific questions you need answered about each candidate. At the beginning, give candidates a rough sense of the interview process—you don’t have to be 100% exact here, but let them know roughly how many interviews and with whom they’ll be meeting. Without that kind of guidance, candidates can feel adrift and start to question the process.
For each interview, identify a clear purpose, whether it's assessing technical skills, cultural fit, or leadership potential. This prevents multiple interviewers from covering the same ground while missing critical open questions. Where possible, ask interviewers to interview “blind”—aka without information from other interviewers. Collect feedback mid-way through the process to identify open questions or if anyone needs to address specific concerns.
3. Interview in Cohorts
Whenever possible, interview multiple candidates simultaneously. Interviewing is a learning process—you may interview someone who is a great hire but not the right fit, but you may only realize that by talking to multiple people and comparing skills. You don’t need to interview one hundred people, but if you can find at least two candidates to put through your full hiring panel, it will make decision making easier. Often, startups get paralyzed by thinking “what if there’s better out there” because they don’t have enough people to compare to one another. On the other hand, you also don’t want to fall into the trap of hiring the first decent candidate simply because you are desperate to fill the role.
That said, don’t let cohort interviews stop you from hiring. I’ve experienced the “we can only find one candidate a month” problem, and it’s brutal. In that case, take copious notes if you decide against a candidate, so your learnings can inform your next round.
4. Define Success Metrics
Before making an offer, clearly outline what success looks like at the three month mark and at one year. In other words, when this hire is fully onboarded, what do you expect them to be able to do? What specific achievements or milestones should your new hire reach? This clarity helps both in selecting the right candidate and in setting them up for success once they join. It also helps you align on goals and expectations when discussing with the candidate, which will help them get clarity and feel more confident joining a startup.
In past roles, I’ve created the job description and the thirty/sixty/ninety day plan at the same time. It’s helped me to clarify where my expectations are too high—a common pitfall is expecting one hire to solve all your problems—and helped clarify what systems I would need to have in place before the hire started.
5. Build Team Capacity
Think beyond individual hires to the overall team composition. Not every team member needs to have every skill, but your team as a whole should cover all critical areas. If you hire someone who is great but missing a key skill, then make it a priority to fill that gap with your next hire. This also means you need to keep in mind your overall hiring plan—if you’re not going to hire anyone else into the team for six to twelve months, then you may need to prioritize certain skills more.
Building on our advice to identify the non-negotiables, you can also think through what needs to be existing expertise vs. the potential someone can learn or acquire. For instance, you might be okay with hiring someone who has never worked in startups before if they’ve worked in other fast-paced, high uncertainty environments—you believe they can learn about startups on the job. Or, you might hire someone who doesn’t know the specific programming language you use, but they’re strongly motivated to learn. On the other hand, you might say that you need someone who has sold to your specific customers before because of the time it saves you in building relationships.
6. Get Creative with Compensation
Startups are always working with less cash than big companies. That means you have to get creative on what your company can uniquely offer relative to bigger companies or other startups. Cash-strapped? Consider offering more significant equity. Equity and cash strapped? Consider focusing on schedule flexibility or amazing work life balance. You might be surprised how many talented and experienced folks would be willing to take a pay cut to work four day weeks.
The key is to be strategic about leveraging your strengths as an employer and leader. At Range, we were able to retain our team (and hire into it) even during the peak “job hopping for raises” era by focusing on the work experience—engineers told us it was the best working environment they’d ever had—and flexibility of schedule. But what worked for Range, might not work for your company. Play to your strengths and identify what assets you have to offer.
You can also look for channels to find people who care about those things—whether it’s using something like Key Values to find like minded teammates or looking at particularly active folks in an open source community that you contribute to.
7. Take Onboarding Seriously
Don’t fall into the “we’re a startup” trap of minimal onboarding. A well-planned first few weeks can dramatically accelerate a new hire's impact. If you’ve followed our advice above, you’ve already created a thirty/sixty/ninety day plan, which will make planning an onboarding super easy.
You can create a basic onboarding plan that covers essential areas to learn about, key people to meet, and early milestones. This doesn’t have to be fancy—think a half to full page doc with links. Consider having a dedicated onboarding channel in Slack or MS Teams for the new hire to ask all their questions and get unblocked quickly. Try to avoid setting a start date on a wildly busy day where the hiring manager can’t support the teammate at all. Your new hire might be able to figure things out on their own, but it’ll go a lot faster with help.
Bonus Tip: Hiring Remote Teammates
Hiring for remote teams can benefit from a little extra preparation.
Source strategically: Look for teammates who have had success working remote. If you’re looking to hire in lower cost geographies, familiarize yourself with top companies in those markets, so you can identify good candidates. Look for people who are writing or speaking about topics relevant to your company regardless of where they’re based.
Screen for communication: Make sure your interview process reflects remote work by including collaborative projects that allow candidates to work on their own schedule. Screen for strong written and oral communication skills, which are crucial for remote work.
Prioritize onboarding: Onboarding is particularly important for remote teammates to get up to speed and integrated quickly. Consider what documents and tools they’ll need access to and where to direct them. Be sure to set clear expectations for meetings and working hours.
Let’s get going!
Remember: each hire at the startup stage is a major investment of time and resources. You don’t need to build out a complex process that overcomplicates each hire, but adding in some minimum viable processes will significantly improve your chances of hiring the right person the first time.
P.S. Don’t forget the soup!
Here’s one of Jen’s favorite lentil soups. If you keep a few things on hand, this can be an easy and delicious pantry meal. It’s been Jen’s “minimum viable” dinner many times over.