Cutting the clutter
Constraints
- Capital to pay competitive
- Little or no founder brand yet
- Little or no startup brand
What you need
- Great engineer who can partner to build stuff
- Skills perfectly matched to Tech Job Description
- Great attitude
You can cannot easily hire a person who has all the skills, in-fact why should they join you if are still figuring out what the startup would become when can get paid more elsewhere.
Hiring tips
- Hire team members who have potential to learn and become stellar over period of time
- You can compromise bit on budget but never compromise on attitude. Hire team members who can thrive with you in ambiguity, yes cheer is needed. Remember early days there more non-believers than believers
Running the interviews
Keep it simple, Engineering team has to execute. Here is how you can setup the interview
- Pick a problem that engineer has to solve on a daily basis. E.g Build a new module for a website or a component logic for backend. (Keep it as real to what they may experience on daily basis)
- Tell them you are a startup they will be expected to learn along the way.
- You would require Independent contributors, thus hire them before you hire engineers who require coaching and guidance
- You cant find 100% skillset match but you can find 80% value match.
Pay
- State upfront what you would be paying them before the interview ( check if they are still interested , saves both of you time )
- Tell them challenges you may face as startup at times and your plan to compensate them over time.
- Engineers unlike sales have less variable pay, early hires keep it all fixed and variables are by surprise ( or event based )
Equity
- Stage based milestones /outcomes based. E.g. Share it as you reach a round of funding or hit a certain gross margin. RSUs are more popular than ESOPs now or fixed amount of stocks are popular.
Notes:
You would be wearing multiple hats thus dedicate 30%-40% of your time to hiring. Once you close the position you can create bandwidth.
- Always hire people who create bandwidth for you. If you hire team member who takes your bandwidth it means you require to restructure them under existing team members
- Hire people who are better than you, even if you are a CTO it does not mean you know it all in terms of technology.
Overtime
- Your team should be your council in decision making for technology, culture & values.
- Should be able to hire team members better than themselves.
Common Mistakes
- Waiting for the perfect hire
- Hiring without deep dive tech interviews
- Missing the cultural round
- Not setting expectations
- Hiring only tech focused engineers
A good engineer in early days
- Should estimate time to complete ( even if not perfect)
- Should be focused on customer problem solving not just tech problem
What if you go wrong
- Well, its not always candidates mistake explain and part ways if you see cultural complications in early days.
Have more questions… drop a note
