👔 How to Hire A-Players for Your Startup...

4 crucial strategies for recruiting top-tier talent to your startup, shared by OfferZen co-founder and hiring expert, Philip Joubert.

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Hiring is arguably the most important task business leaders do. While hiring is a single decision for you, the person you end up hiring will make hundreds or even thousands of decisions for the company… possibly including decisions about who else to hire.

It’s (painfully) obvious that some employees are more effective than others. However, we tend to underestimate just how big the difference is. Employee effectiveness seems to follow a power law, where top performers can be 10x more impactful than an average worker.  

A top performer is not just more productive but can actually come up with solutions and ideas that a group of average performers could never come up with. After all, giving five average composers 10 years won’t result in music that rivals Mozart.

Once you realise this the logical conclusion is that the quality of your team is the thing that matters most. But how do you build a team with a high concentration of these A players? Let’s dive in.

1. Define what you want

Before you reach out to any candidates, you need to define what you're hiring for. It can be tempting to pull a job spec from the internet and use that. I would strongly warn against this approach.

Job ads are really just that: adverts. They are designed to attract candidates but need to start by defining what you need. A good approach is writing a job scorecard. This scorecard would include the job mission (essence of the job), outcomes (what you want this person to achieve in the next 6—12 months) and a ranked list of the specific competencies you want this person to have.

2. Source candidates

If you don’t have enough candidates in your process you’ll never hire great people. After all, You can only hire from the pool of candidates that you interview.

Here’s a ranked list of the best channels to use when you’re small.  

1. Personal network
2. Talent marketplace (platforms like OfferZen save a huge amount of time!)  
3. Generate Inbound (founder social media, blog etc)
4. Cold outreach (eg LinkedIn messages)
5. Recruitment agencies

Sourcing is often boring work but it pays dividends. Remember, your hires can only ever be as good as you are at sourcing.

3. Assess candidates

It’s extremely important for early stage companies to develop an assessment process that disregards credentials as much as possible. If someone has all the obvious signs that they’re good (top university, work experience etc) then competition for them will be intense. As a small startup, you’ll struggle to compete.

Instead, you need to identify undiscovered talent - A players that are about to blossom.  

Principles when assessing candidates:

• Hire for strengths, not the lack of weakness: The best people tend to be really good on one or two dimensions while having a few big weaknesses. If you aim to hire someone who has no weaknesses you’ll end up rejecting most of the best devs
• Hire all-round players: When there’s high uncertainty (early-stage startups) hire generalists rather than specialists.  
• Speed: One of the biggest advantages you have as a startup is the ability to move faster than larger companies. Maximise speed at every stage of the process  
• Ask all candidates the same questions: Structured interviews are more boring but there is a ton of research that shows they are much more effective because you can benchmark candidates much more easily. Of course, you can ask follow-up questions that are unique to the answers of each candidate, but the bulk of the interview should be standard.

A typical interview process for a developer role would look like this:

• CV review (2—5min)
• phone screen (15—3min)
• Technical phone screen (1hr)
• Onsite interviews (3—5 hours)

Another great approach is to do real work with the candidate. For example, spending an entire day together coding. This doesn’t scale well but in the early stages, it’s a great way to identify top talent.

4. Close

Great — you’ve found someone you want to hire! Now, you need to convince them to join.

Below are three key approaches:

• Mission — you want to hire missionaries, not mercenaries. Missionaries will care a huge amount about what your company is setting to do in the world.
• Learning — we learn fastest when the stakes are real. Startups thrust way more responsibility on employees and junior employees usually get a ton of mentorship.
• Career progression — joining a fast-growing stage team is the fastest way to grow in your career.  

I would caution against promising things like work-life balance or perks if you’re still early stage. This is a battle you can’t win and you’ll only end up attracting the wrong kinds of people.

For a more in-depth guide on hiring developers specifically, check out our hiring guide.