My Secret Trick for Identifying Great Startup Talent

If I could travel back in time and give myself?one piece of advice?about hiring employees for my startup, it would be this:

“Make sure anyone you hire is exceptional at writing emails.”

I admit, this is a weird hypothetical scenario. First of all, are emails really that important? And second, if I could time travel, why would I be using that ability to give myself advice about hiring employees?

For the sake of simplicity, let’s ignore the latter question and focus on the former:?Are emails really that important?

I realize it might seem like a strange priority. After all, shouldn’t a great startup employee be amazing at sales or marketing or product development or coding or talking or managing? Wouldn’t one of those qualities be more important than an ability to send emails?

Honestly… no.

That’s not to suggest none of those other things are important. It’s actually the opposite. All the important things a startup employee has to help with — customer acquisition, customer support, product development, team communication, etc. — they all rely, to some extent, on emails.?Email is perhaps the one constant across every part of a startup employee’s most important responsibilities.?As a result,?analyzing the emails people send is a great strategy for evaluating a potential new hire and what kind of impact the person will have on your company.

For reference, I’ve actually hired someone?based on an exceptional cold email the person sent?when trying to sell me something.?The email was so perfectly targeted,?succinct, and compelling that I took a demo, bought the product he was selling, and then asked him if he wanted a job.?That person quickly became one of my most effective salespeople ever.

The filtration process also works for avoiding bad hires. For example, I’m going to share a real email I recently received from an enthusiastic new startup employee. I’ll then explain how I might use the email to identify potential ways this person could end up sabotaging my company if I were to hire him.

Ready? Here’s the email…

Failure #1: Poorly targeted subject line

OK… so I didn’t include the subject line in my screenshot of the email. Here it is:

This person is clearly emailing me because he’s done some research and sees I teach entrepreneurship to college students. That’s a good start, but then things quickly take a wrong turn. Specifically, I’m not a student!

In this case, the sender is targeting his end user (i.e. “motivated students”), but that’s not who he’s emailing. He’s sending the email to someone he’s hoping will?intercede on his behalf. He should be addressing me, not them.

By itself, this misguided subject line might not seem like a huge issue, but it’s pointing to a bigger problem.?Specifically, writing great email subject lines requires?putting yourself in the shoes of your recipient in order to imagine what message will get them to open it.

There’s a name for that skill. It’s called?empathy.

Empathy is critical to startup success.?In order to develop a great product, you need to be able to empathize with your customer’s problem.?In order to sell, you need empathy to understand the customer’s buying process. And, for reasons that should hopefully be obvious, empathy is critical for providing great customer support.

Since empathy is also critical for writing great email subject lines (and, in general, great emails), people’s emails are a perfect way to evaluate their skills at cultivating empathy.

Failure #2: A big?blob?of text

Humans are visual creatures, and the way something looks impacts the way they interact.

In this case, this email frustrates readers before they even start reading because it’s a giant?blob of text. Hasn’t this person heard of paragraphs?

Here’s the exact same content formatted more appealingly:

Is this newly formatted email a home run? Of course not! But at least my eyes don’t start?glazing over the moment I open it.

Someone who doesn’t understand the importance of design and the impact design has on everything people do — even at the level of a text-only email — is someone you don’t want on your startup team.

Failure #3:?Alienating?opening sentence

After a shaky subject line, the email starts poorly with a first sentence that commits one of the?cardinal sins?of email intros. It starts with the phrase:

My name is…

As I’ve written?elsewhere ,?giving your name at the start of a cold email decreases your chance of a response by at least 90%.?All you’re doing is telling your recipient you’re a stranger, and people don’t like talking to strangers.

From a hiring perspective, someone who begins a cold email with his name is someone who thinks writing an email is the same as meeting someone in-person for the first time. For example, if you and I were sitting next to each other on an airplane, I might say, “Hi, I’m Aaron. Nice to meet you.” And that would be fine.

But different communication?mediums?rely on different etiquette in order to be optimally effective.?Most of us understand this intuitively, which is why we all communicate differently when texting versus talking on a phone versus Zooming versus using Slack. However, because exceptional communication is critical to startup success — both internally and externally — you can’t settle for an?implicit?understanding of different communication styles. You want your employees to be?explicitly?aware of these differences and how to optimally leverage all the communication tools they’ll be using.

Failure #4: Too much unnecessary info

Does your reader need to know what grade you are in school? Does your reader need to know your company’s launch strategy?

The most effective emails are brief emails.?Anything that’s not directly relevant to the value proposition of the message should be removed because a startup’s most precious asset is time. Employees who carelessly waste time in emails are employees who will waste your company’s time in other, more important ways.

Failure #5: Attention to detail

In my screenshot, you surely noticed the yellow highlight. If you look closely, you can see faint white text, but the text is impossible to read. Instead, it just looks like a long yellow line with no purpose.

Presumably, this sender wanted to make sure I saw the part he highlighted. Unfortunately, he didn’t bother to check how his decision might look in someone’s browser.

Whoops!

Again, this is why I argue that “exceptional email writing skills” should be the skill at the top of any founder’s hiring list. It’s not just because great emails are effective. It’s because great emails demonstrate the person’s attention to detail.

Emails that have formatting problems, typos, and other careless mistakes won’t prevent someone from understanding a message.?But people who don’t quality control their own emails are people who are equally?sloppy?at other parts of their jobs.

That focus (or lack thereof) will impact the potential success of your startup. Are you willing to accept that impact? If not, use email as a way of identifying great potential hires.

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Aaron Dinin teaches entrepreneurship at Duke University. A version of this article originally appeared on?Medium , where he frequently posts about startups, sales, and marketing. For more from Aaron, you can also follow him on?Twitter ?or subscribe to?Web Masters ,?his podcast exploring digital entrepreneurship.