Only Focus on Hiring

If you are a startup about to raise a big round (to eventually hire) or beginning to kick off hiring for a new position, this post is for you. Make hiring your only focus, and when that changes consider the process complete.

It is too common to leave a job posting up indefinitely with hopes the perfect candidates comes stumbling through the door. The truth is you are probably more likely to provide a bad experience to great candidates by doing this, and worse, waste your current teams time.

Getting Ready
Hiring is all about creating a great experience, learning as much about the other person, them about you, and finding value alignment. The initial steps are fairly simple but get skipped too often.

Know what your company values. You can’t be everything, be specific.
Understanding what your team values. Again, can’t be everything.
What do you need to raise the bar of your team over 6 months, 12 months and 3 years.

Each one of the steps are critical for having a highly effective hiring process. The first one should have happened when the founders set out on the journey. However, company building often gets sideline compared to the immediate product problems. In most companies, this should be a simple reflection of what the founders value and writing them down. It seems unimportant when you are a company of less than 10, but it’s how you find great fit with your first 10 hires. This will determine the next 100 as hiring becomes more decentralized.

If you don’t do this, you will burn a lot of resources hiring and firing people who don’t fit your values and vision. Or worse, you hire but don’t fire. As the team continues to grow from 10 to 100, the founder interview is constant no’s (Wasting your time and everyone before you). Or worse, you lower your quality bar and let in people who don’t align with your company values which dilutes it slowly.

Understanding team values is also something that is skipped too often. The most common example of this hiring a type of team (Ex. Platform) when you don’t need one. More recent example is hiring ML or data engineers when there’s no muscle for it. I’ve worked at two B2B SAAS companies that had nothing to do with infrastructure, hardware, or extremely complex data processing. They were standard B2B platform companies that managed a reasonable amount of data, support specific workflows, and solved problems for customers. In both cases, we hired a platform team too early. We needed a single person really to manage our infrastructure, or could have just used services like Render and paid a higher cost. We hired platform teams because “we will scale”. They operated within the company focusing on unimportant work. Then were let go. The “unimportant work” isn’t a reflection of the individuals, but a reflection of what mattered to the team + company at the time. We need more features built, and clean up tech debt of our existing product. We didn’t have scaling problems. We were hiring for a made up “what if we do need to scale”.

For the record in the second company, it was the second time seeing this and my advice was very clear: “we don’t need a platform team” (with proper arguments specific to the business). It was acknowledged and ignored. I then saw a repeat of the events play out.

The final point is what in this specific hire are you looking for, helps you understand what level of Engineer you are looking for. If you don’t need a Staff Engineer, they are expensive and harder to find. But it’s important to understand what success looks like for this person in 6 months, 12 months and 3 years. 3 years because tenure tends to sit around that. As you go through interviews, you can easily ask yourself, can the person do the job in the first 6 months? I have this area XYZ that I want to improve over the next 12 months. Can they help? Will they continue to raise the bar in 3 years?

The final 3 year timeframe is more about learning rate. Learning rate is often the forgotten component through an interview process, but determines their long term success. Most hiring is reactive, thinking long term is often ignored. I have no issues hiring junior engineers because you spend the interview process determine their learning rate. For most Software Engineers, it’s learning rate and past experience. Every junior hire I’ve made so far has been extremely effective. The ramp was a little slower because they had to pick up some basics. After 8+ months, they had no issues with the role.

Building the Process
Too many interview processes are just inherited from other companies without first principals thinking. The world has changed, we have an LLMs. How does that change your interview process? Does someone with 15 years of experience need to know Leetcode? Amazon and Google, ask specific questions, does it make sense for you?

Be really intentional about each step of the interview process. Every step is a cost to your team - it’s literally the interviewers time. I’ve found that putting the Engineering Manager as early in the process to run a culture interview is the best first step for a small startup. We are looking for a specific set of values. Wasting our engineers time on technical problems so they can fail the culture interview isn’t worth it. At big companies, it’s probably the opposite.

Each interview process is entirely unique to the company. You should look at each step, ask why do we have it? What’s the cost? What’s the filter rate? What are we filtering for? As your run the process, you should also refine this. At Convictional, if someone passed the culture interview, then failed the final founder interview because of culture. It was a personal reflection of my failure. Why didn’t I catch it? And I review why. Sometimes I got the wrong read, or didn’t ask the right questions. Mistakes are fine, but you need to constantly be improving yourself and the process.

Once the process is built, explain it and share the thinking with the team. Interview training seems like a big company thing, but it’s not. When each team member in the hiring process knows what great looks like, it is far more effective. They should know what their role is too. This can be an hour call or if you are team is great, a single internal memo.

Networking
You shouldn’t alway be hiring, but you should always be networking. You want to be able to tap on a network when you need to. It takes time to build relationships. This is why more recent grads may find it easier to hire. They just hire everyone they went to school with that are smart and undervalued (missing lots of experience). It’s also easier for people who have been in the industry for a while because they also have existing networks to lean on.

Start building yours now.

Referrals
I promise you that you are undervaluing your current employees network. Start by exporting a CSV of their Linkedin connections. My suggestion on day 90 of their employment, ask them for that CSV. Go through it, and ask them who they would work with again and who is smart.

Big companies are doing this so why don’t you. It works really well. Companies will offer a referral bonus blindly before they do this. Know who your potential referrals could be first.

It’s also important to explain there are different types of referrals.

Introduction - You get on a call with them, explain the company, then you introduce the hiring manager to them over email. This is much more involved. This is what the referral bonus is often tied to.
Use your Name - The hiring manager does cold outreach, but uses your name. “Hey John, I saw you worked with Jim at company XYZ.” You can agree with the current team member how much you want to talk about them in your email.
Just point at smart people - We won’t mention you but just point at the smartest people you know and people you believe will succeed here.

People always assume referral programs are only the introduction path. For us introverts that can suck at staying connected, I can very easily point at a bunch of really smart people. This ultimately lowers the risk of hiring.

Outbound
If you are hiring your first 10 engineers, I’d recommend only explicitly staying in your network. It’s the lowest effort/cost to success rate you will find. If you have decided to be a founder, you should ask yourself, “who are the smartest person I know who can do that job?” Go get that one person. It’s a hard task, but welcome to start ups.

You will eventually will exhaust yours and your team network. When that happens, it’s time to lean on your company values list. You want to look for the following signals:

People who have done the work in the domain before. This may not work because solution bias may exist. It may work because they get to have a fresh start with fewer customers.
People who have done the work in an adjacent domain before.
Other companies that have similar company values. This one is harder because most companies make up values and don’t live them. But not impossible.
Past companies of your current employees. Look at your employees, and maybe others at those past roles align.
Specific indicators for company values. At Convictional, we were an async culture and heavily valued writing. Strong signal, personal blog with writing on it. It showed held opinions, could write, and already did what we did at Convictional.

It’s a numbers game. If you’ve never been in a sales role (I haven’t), plan for 200 outbound custom messages to 1 offer accepted. Yes, you will have to write 200 custom messages. It’s about spearfishing, not carpet bombing. But you know the numbers.

Inbound
In terms of inbound, be loud about it. Don’t ask for things you do not need. Ex. CV if you don’t plan to read them. If you only are planning to hire in a timezone, city, etc., be very clear.

If you are hiring a “hybrid” role, stop lying to yourself. Do you operate as a remote company or an in-person company. You can’t do both, or you just do everything twice.

Running the Process
If you’ve jumped to here without doing the previous steps, you’ve already failed. You’ve already missed critical steps that will cost your company. If someone quits in the first 6 - 12 months, that is probably because you skipped the pre-work. If someone is dismissed because of a bad hire, that’s the pre-work lacking. If someone isn’t reaching their full potential, that’s the pre-work lacking.

Great - first thing set a timeline: start date and end date. End date doesn’t mean you’ve made a hire. It means you can’t only focus on hiring anymore, and need to pause. Hiring isn’t a passive thing. YC gives this advice when fundraising with VCs. When you are fundraising, it’s the most important thing. Same logic applies to hiring.

Strapped for time? shorten the timeframe. If you have too many other priorities, well, then adding a headcount won’t help. You will great a suboptimal experience from the start of hiring and throughout their entire onboarding. That won’t lead to great company building.

Think back to the last time you interviewed at companies. You probably had less than 20 companies you were interviewing at in parallel. For most, it’s probably closer to 5 or less. People who apply for a job, can keep track of it in their head. They remember each interaction with the company.

On the opposite side, you may be receiving lots of applications. You want to make sure each person applying is getting the correct impression of your company. Even if it’s a no, it doesn’t leave an awful impression. “Yeah applied, but never heard back.”, or “yeah they were 15 minutes late to the interview” aren’t great impressions.

People who are applying to jobs, or taking calls from your outbound messages are motivated. You can easily work people through your process effectively if you have the time/space for it. If the candidate isn’t serious about your hiring process (slow to respond to emails (days), late to interviews, lack of interest), take it as a sign that your company isn’t the right place for them.

When you are interviewing someone from an outbound message, my suggestion is you meet with them at least twice. It’s hard to switch between pitching the company and why they should spend 40+ hours a week and 3+ years here while also interviewing if they are good fit. It’s okay to add another call. Start with the pitch and get them excited about the mission, values, product and future potential. Let them think it all over and buy into the interview process. That’s when it becomes you trying to understand their values. In my experience and my observations from others, doing both often leads to a weak interview and potentially a bad candidates slipping through.

My final piece of advice with the process is “soft yes’s” is a sign of weak interviewers. Ranking systems are often:

Strong Yes
Yes
No
Hard No

For a startup, it’ should just be yes, or no. But people are nice, so you need to see actual conviction. The only people you hire is someone with at least 1 strong yes. If they meet 4 people in the process, there should be 1-2 strong yes’s. 4 people tends to show a good average in my opinion. I also tend to do 4 separate calls, so if someone is having an off day.

Hard no - the person lied on the resume and has no experience.
No - not the right fit, let’s move on.
Yes - I can see potential and they can do the job.
Strong Yes - I’m excited to work with them and they would raise the bar.

When people leave an interview “yeah I’m a soft yes”, or something equivalent. They are effectively saying I left the interview with no strong conviction either way, selected yes to be nice and it was probably an ineffective interview as a result (this is worth digging into why - not prepared? Didn’t ask the hard questions? Don’t know what you want?). This requires action from the hiring manager.

When to hire, when there’s 1-2 strong yes, 0 no’s. If 4/4 are yes, 0/4 are strong yes, then it’s not a hire. If no is 1 or more, it’s a no. Sometimes we’ve conducted another interview to figure out if it’s a bad day for either the interviewer or interviewee, but often still leads to a no or bad hire (don’t ask). There’s a lower risk in just saying no and moving on. 4/4 strong yes’s usually doesn’t happen.

If you’ve prepared correctly for interviews and know what you want, this should go smoothly.

Conclusion
As an Engineering Manager who comes from individual contributor work with no sales experiences, this process is draining. All the prep work. Sending 200+ custom emails trying to convince people to join you at a 10 person company. Pitching them on the company. Then interviewing them through multiple rounds, and coming to every interview prepared. Making an offer for it to get rejected, and repeating all again. It’s hard - that’s normal but go in with your eyes wide open.

Don’t lower your quality bar, don’t make a bad hire one time, don’t be lazy in this process. The downstream effects are much bigger to deal with (dismissing people, bad hires diluting the company, etc.) Casually hiring is weak hiring. Not knowing what you want or looking forward is weak hiring.

Be intentional. Go based on first principals. Convincing someone to join your small start up should seem like a slam dunk decision for them.