The Secret Ingredient to a Successful Startup Hire in Under 60 Days

Hiring for startups is a paradox.

On the one hand, as soon as you nail a killer product or get funding, you’re going to need people—fast.

On the other hand, if you rush or recruit people with no startup experience, suddenly you’re losing precious time.?

But what about having the best of both worlds?

What if you could bag slam-dunk players for your startup and hire them under the industry's average of 60 days??

Welcome to PeopleConnect.?

We’ve done this hundreds of times in our 22 years’ experience solely hiring for startups. Below, I’m going to share five recruitment secrets that will help you get the A-team players you need for your startup to compete in an A-team league.

Ready?

Let’s get going.

1. Successful founders spend 20% of their time just on recruiting (at least)

Martina van Hettinga –?managing partner at i-potentials –?wrote that the most successful founders spend 20% of their time just hiring for their startups.

I’d have to agree.

I’ve always said that, after funding, hiring is the next biggest challenge for startups.

Most startups find themselves searching for the following eight positions when they’re just starting out:

• Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and/ or Chief Operations Officer (COO)
• Product Manager
• Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
• Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)?
• Sales Manager
• Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
• Business Development Manager
• Customer Service Manager

These people really are the rocket fuel of your startup. It doesn’t matter how much funding you have or how fantastic your product or service is –?without putting great people in positions of power over your growth, you’re not getting a foot off the ground.

According to a seminal Harvard University Business School survey, a panel of venture capitalists identified that 65% of their portfolio companies’ failures were due to "ineffective senior management" during early stage growth.

This was true back in 1989. And it’s still true today.

Never underestimate the importance of hiring for startups. If you really don’t have 20% of your time to set aside, that’s when you need an expert recruitment firm specialising in startups to get involved.

2. Your A-team player is not just a top scorer

You may have noticed that I make a few basketball references.?

I can’t help it.

My recruitment career started out as the youngest scout in NBA history –?later becoming Chief Scout for the San Diego Rockets (now the Houston Rockets) as well as the Phoenix Suns. Despite moving from the NBA to focus on hiring for the most successful startups in the USA, I’ve never stopped looking for the same kind of people.

So, what’s the secret ingredient to a successful startup hire?

I’m looking for someone who puts the work in.

Time and again, I’ve seen a candidate who looks great on paper – high-level education, fantastic track record, gleaming references – collapse when they join a startup.

Why?

Because they’re just not prepared for the 60, 70, and sometimes 80-hour weeks they’re working to get a startup going. They figure out they’re not happy working for equity. They get snappy about the lack of resources.

In other words, some people aren’t built for anything but a 9-5 in a big company.

In an early-growth startup, it’s absolutely normal for the COO to run out to get coffee. Or for the CFO to sprint out to fetch staples (OK, probably hard drives these days).?

When you’re hiring for startups, your A-team player will be someone who’s got both the skills to do their job and the attitude to cover everyone’s back. When SmartRecruiters asked 50 startup founders to share their biggest hiring challenges, the word "culture" popped up 15 times and the word "fit" popped up 20 times.

The word "qualified" only popped up once – and that was only in the phrase "there’s no pre-qualifying metric for awesome".

3. How to find the needle in the haystack?

Finding a needle in a haystack is hard for anyone without a magnet or a metal detector.

The analogy works when hiring for your startup too.

I’ve seen way too many startup founders rely solely on LinkedIn for recruitment. While LinkedIn is definitely a great place to get resumes, you’re looking at just a tiny part of the haystack.

Our search methodology at PeopleConnect finds candidates from three main sources.

Let’s look at each of them in turn:

• Headhunting. At PeopleConnect, we’re also old-fashioned headhunters. We can do things you, as a startup founder, likely can’t – we can call up your competitors as a third-party and talk to key staff about jumping ship. We can also call your competitors’ competitors and give you a list of other businesses to see if you’re interested in candidates from there too.
• Database. With 22 years of experience recruiting for startups, we have a database of over 60,000 names in the industry.?
• Job boards. We’re on 135 different specialist job boards and discussion boards –?LinkedIn is just one of the platforms we use.

After we’ve exhausted these three sources, we identify around 150 candidates. From there, we start weeding people out until we’re down to 20 candidates. We then interview them until we’re down to just three pre-qualified, A-team candidates for your startup.

Oh, and we get these three candidates to you within four weeks.

If you’re going through the hiring process alone, and you don’t have 20% of your time to make it happen, then think about how you too can tap into wider resources to find your ideal candidate.

4. How to know if your candidate is any good (or lying)

Here’s a shock: 78% of job seekers lie during the interview process, according to Checkster.

A separate study from Blind found that lying is common even in household tech names. Up to 11.57% of Amazon employees lied during the hiring process, and up to 10.58% lied when getting hired by PayPal.

It might be an extreme example, but the problem exists on a spectrum that runs from "wasn’t what he/she cracked up to be" to "pathological liar."

The cost and time wasted on a below-par hire can be catastrophic for startups.

So how are you going to vet your candidates to ensure they’re the real deal?

Let’s go through four secrets we use at PeopleConnect:

• Spot reference checks. It’s predictable to call up a candidate’s references and only hear great things about them. But what about when you ask that reference for another, unplanned person to call? And what if that person doesn’t have only great things to say there? Spot reference checks are a great leveller.
• Check college degrees. We always double check our candidates' college degrees. It’s one of the number one places that a lie is camped out.
• Check criminal records. You never know—and you’d be surprised.
• Personality inventory. We have our key candidates take a 15-minute personality test. Ours asks them to pick adjectives that describe themselves the best—and then pick adjectives that others would use to describe them. It’s fascinating what you can learn about someone from these tests.

Lastly, at PeopleConnect, we also begin any hiring process by asking questions about the culture of the startup we’re recruiting for. It’s the best way to find a good fit.

If you’re going through this process alone, think hard about the culture where you work—ask your existing team about it and draw up a list of qualities you need in a candidate. The more honest you are about what it’s like to work for you, the quicker you’ll find your team player.

5. Hire slow, fire fast?

This last one is more of a mindset than a secret.

But the more you can hire slowly and fire quickly, the better you’ll get at building A-level teams.?

Hiring slow is everything we’ve just gone through. It’s a comprehensive search process; it’s setting aside 20% of your time for recruiting; it’s figuring out what you’re looking for and thoroughly vetting your key candidates.

Firing fast is about what happens next.

If a hire isn’t cutting it, don’t be afraid to fire them. Remember that Harvard survey about 65% of startups failing due to senior management issues? By firing a sub-par hire, you’ll be doing everyone a favor.?

Don’t let the problem linger; there’s no time to lose.

At PeopleConnect, we tackle this issue by guaranteeing our people for three months. It means you have 90 days to test out the new hire in your company. They’re not a good fit? We’ll replace them for you, no problem.

These are some of the reasons why working with a professional recruiter can save startups time and money.?

It doesn’t mean you can’t use a DIY model. Many startups do.

If that’s you, I hope these five secrets of hiring for startups in under 60 days will help you build a winning team.?

If you think you need professional help, don’t hesitate to reach out. I love helping early-stage startups build great teams, and I’d be delighted to offer you my best advice.