Startups Recruit People

Here are some suggestions for hiring people:

　　 1) spend more time hiring people.

The overwhelming majority Founder No time spent in hiring people. After determining the company's vision and product market mix, you should spend 1/3 to half of the time hiring people. This sounds crazy, because you always have a lot of work to do, but hiring people is the most valuable thing you can do, and great companies must have great employees.

You can't outsource employment work - you need to spend time retraining talents and stimulating potential. Applicant The intention to work in your company is to meet every person who comes to the interview. Keith Rabois believes that before the company reaches 500 people, CEO or founder should personally interview and interview each employee.

　 2) at the beginning, do specific work in person.

Speaking of spending time, you should take time to learn the specific work that you need to do before you hire for a job. If you can't understand your job well, it will be difficult to find the right person. A typical example of this is a technical hacker CEO who decided to hire a sales vice president because he did not want to do sales related matters. It will not succeed. He needs to do sales related things himself to learn specific details. On this basis, he can choose from several final candidates according to the investors' suggestions.

　　 3) hire smart and efficient people.

For every specific job, you will have some specific needs, but intelligence and efficiency should always be included. It is strange that everyone often forgets these two needs. Predictably, such employment is doomed to failure in the early days of start-ups (and perhaps never succeeds).

Fortunately, these two characteristics are easy to judge.

Communicate with the candidates what they have done and ask for the most impressive projects and achievements. It can also be more specific, asking him how to arrange the time of the day and the things completed last month. Then go deep into a topic and ask him what he actually does because people tend to attribute their success to their contributions; ask him how to solve a specific problem facing your job.

Through the above communication, plus some questions you asked in the course of reviewing your resume, you can well judge whether his work is efficient. Usually, after an hour or so of conversation, you can come to a conclusion. If you don't get any effective information in the interview process, it's bad; if you are bored with the interview, it will be even worse. A good interview feels like an interactive conversation, rather than a mechanical question and answer.

Remember, in a start-up company, everyone you hire looks like a new job in the first 3 to 6 months. Smart and efficient people have good adaptability.

　　 4) let people try new jobs, not just interviews.

This is the most important skill I can provide. It's hard to know how you feel about working with someone through just a few rounds of interviews, and it's easy to know when you work with him.

Whenever possible (in fact, it is always possible), let him work with you for one or two days before deciding to hire. It can be evenings or weekends. If you are interviewing a programmer, let him write some code for a practical but less urgent project; if it is a market post, let him write a press release and send out some reporters. You need to sign a contract with him and pay for it. newspaper Pay like other contract workers. {page_break}

In doing so, you will have very, very intuitive feelings about how you work with this person and whether he is suitable for his position, which you can not get through the interview. At the same time, he will have some understanding of your company's work.

　　 5) focus on the right talent channel.

Basically, this can be attributed to "more use of your networking resources". The best recruitment channels are friends and friends of friends. Keep in touch with the best people, even if you don't think you can hire them. If there is only 5% chance of success, it is still worth doing.

All the best start-up companies I know employ this kind of employment, and the hiring process is much longer than people usually imagine. The vast majority of bad start-ups find excuses for not doing so.

When you hire a person, once he is sure that he has his own social circle, you should sit down with him and dig out the list of people who are worthy of your employment in his social circle. Maybe you have to work hard for it.

For good people, you often need to take the initiative to hunt. They never find jobs, so don't confine your vision to those who are looking for work. A difficult question is how you hunt acquaintances, and I have no standard answers here.

Hiring skilled people is often more difficult, and hiring ads make things worse. Meetings are a good channel to provide venues for those interesting technical meetings, which will be very helpful for technology recruitment. Once you have established a good cooperation channel, campus recruitment is also effective.

Don't limit your search area to the locality. Sometimes people will have the desire to migrate from other cities.

Looking at the source of talent as a long-term investment, you may spend time with someone, and you will not talk about hiring topics in a year or longer.

Use your investors and their networks to find candidates. In your email to investors, let them know what kind of people you need to hire.

　　 6) have a mission. Don't be surprised how often you need to spread it.

In order to effectively recruit, you need to set a mission for the company. In addition to working with a great team, candidates need to believe in your mission, that is, why this job is more important than other jobs. Having a mission and making people excited may be the best thing you can do to build a great team before you actually start a business.

As an entrepreneur, you assume that everyone will be as excited about your company as you are. The reality is that no one will do that. You need to spend a lot of time making candidates excited about your mission.

If you have a good mission and you are good at telling this mission, you will find a better person.

You should use your board and investors to help you close the candidates. Once you decide to hire someone, enter the closing mode. The new reporting staff (and CEO) should do everything possible to close the candidates and talk to the person once a day. {page_break}

　　 7) hire someone you like.

In Stripe, this is called Sunday test - do you want to come to the office on Sunday, because you want to be with this person? People who like working with you are very important for company culture. Quite a few times, I met very good candidates, but I didn't like it. Only once, I decided to hire, and from the result it was a wrong decision.

People usually say, remember that you need people with different ideas. But in terms of traits, you need teamwork, such as integrity and intelligence.

　 8) set some cultural values.

Spend a lot of time wondering what kind of culture you need to build (there are some good examples on the Internet). Ensure that the whole company knows these cultures well and accepts them. Any newly hired person should be matched with culture.

Andrew Mason said that values are a decision-making framework that helps everyone to make decisions you want in the face of conflicts of interest, such as conflicts between growth and customer satisfaction.

Uphold your values as a belief. If candidates and these Sense of worth Even if he is excellent in other aspects, he must willingly give up hiring. The diversity of opinions and personalities in a team is good, but the diversity of values in start-up companies is very bad.

Some people have their own way of doing things and are never willing to follow your values. You will eventually fire them.

　 9) do not compromise.

In the initial stage of entrepreneurship, you always need manpower, so it's easy to hire a person who is not smart enough, or a person who doesn't match your values very well, because you really need someone to finish the work. Especially in the early stage, never compromise. A personnel problem can destroy a company. It's better to lose an order or postpone the release of a product than to employ a mediocre person.

Able people attract other competent people. Once you hire a mediocre person, it will destroy this positive cycle.

　　 10) pay generously, but take equity as the main means.

In the early stage, you should be very frugal in almost every aspect, but the reward for talented people is an exception.

You should be generous in equity. Ideally, you pay a little lower than the market level, but give a very generous stock. "Experienced" people often have higher output, sometimes you need to pay more for them, but remember that great companies are not usually created by experienced people (exceptions are small roles, experience is very important).

I believe that I will make many people angry, but this is the right strategy. If you need a salary above the market level, you can work in a big company, but there is no equity.

Ideally, the wages you pay can meet the needs of employees' cash flow. How to allocate stock right It's hard, but a good rule is to double the offer of the first 20 employees to your investors. For a good company, but not yet on track, the data I see is about 1.5% of the first employee and 0.5% of the twentieth employees. There are great differences between different companies.

By the way, a very successful start-up company pays almost the same salary for all its engineers. It seems to work well. Their salaries are lower than those of other companies, but these engineers enjoy work and believe that stocks can bring a lot of wealth. Those who are willing to accept such remuneration are what you need in the start-up stage.

You will need to negotiate and negotiate and learn how to do it. On the whole, it's bad practice to destroy your salary structure for hiring someone. The news will spread and everyone will be unhappy. {page_break}

　　 11) pay attention to red warning and trust your reason.

In the interview and salary negotiation process, you should pay attention to some things, because these things usually mean that this person will not succeed in the start-up company. Paying attention to titles is one example; paying attention to such reports as "how many reports in my organization" is a worse example. You will soon feel a sense of these things and do not turn a blind eye to them.

If you have difficulty deciding whether to hire a person, do not hire.

　 12) continuous recruitment

Unfortunately, recruitment is not a temporary activity like a transaction. You need to think of it as a long-term job, not when you need to fill in a certain location. There will be considerable uncertainty in the operation of the company. If you find someone is very suitable for a role, though you do not need this role within two months, you should still hire him.

　　 13) quick dismissal

I've never met a new startups who fired enough quickly. Similarly, all the entrepreneurs I met learned this lesson in a few years.

You don't need to ensure that the decision to fire is 100% correct. When a person is obviously not suitable, things will not get better in most cases. A quick break is good for everyone, rather than procrastination and unrealistic fantasies that maybe things will get better. This is especially true for people you need to leave. If he stays in your company for only one or two months, it will not have any negative impact on his future interview. At the same time, others in your company may have realized before you that this person is not suitable.

Having to hire people is one of the most painful things that entrepreneurs must do, but you have to overcome difficulties and believe that firing will bring better results than procrastination.

　　 14) devote some energy to the hiring process.

Let everyone in your team participate in the recruitment process to determine whether to hire and write reasons. If you make the wrong decision, these materials will help you review the hiring process. After the applicant has left, it is best to have a brief discussion with all the interviewers.

Let's bring the applicant to lunch or dinner, insist that everyone should be punctual and prepare for the interview, so that every applicant will have a positive impression on your company.

The process of organizing interviews --- coordinating the whole interview process by one person, ensuring that every topic you care about is talked about, all the interviews are convened, and so on. At the same time, make sure you decide whether to hire a consistent way, for example, do you need everyone to agree to hire?

Remember, though your team is excellent at what they do, they may not be a good interviewer. It's important to teach the team how to interview.

　 15) no employment

Many entrepreneurs hire people just because hiring people is a cool thing, and people often ask how many employees you have. Companies usually perform better in smaller sizes. It's always worth taking time to think carefully about the least things you can do, and then organize a team as small as possible.

Don't hire people to hire people. If you need to do something, there is no other way to do it except hire someone.

Good luck. Hiring people is a very difficult but very important job. Don't forget that after you hire someone, you need to keep them. Remember to be a good manager and hold regular meetings to make employees happy and challenging. It is important to keep a positive atmosphere in the company, which is very important for retaining talented people. Give employees new roles every six months. Of course, focusing on hiring talented people will help retain other talented people.

Always identify and promote talented people. It doesn't seem as attractive as considering solving new problems, but it will help you succeed.