Finally, avoid hiring outside people for senior positions; hire from within whenever possible. There are two reasons. First, hiring outsiders can devastate morale: âWhy should I work hard when theyâll just bring in someone above me? Iâll never really have a shot at getting promoted.â Second, people need to be inculturated into the company, and this is easier if people come in at lower levels and work their way up.
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Because in the beginning youâre not going to have HR to help you find and hire a world-class team. You wonât even have a recruiter. For the first twenty-five or so employees itâll all come down to you and your cofounderâyour vision, your network, your ability to convince people that you know what youâre doing. You can lean on your mentors and board (and hopefully early investors), you can put them to work to prop up your reputation, but ultimately youâre selling yourself and your vision for success.
You need a story people can get behind. [See also: Chapter 3.2: Why Storytelling.] People you respect. People who will help you create something great. Your team is your company. And your first hires are crucialâtheyâll help you architect what your business and culture will become.
But more often the real shock of growth is that over time youâll bring on people who are just okay. Relative to the amazing people you brought in early, theyâll seem unimpressive. Mostly fine, good team players, get the job done.
And thatâs not the end of the world. As the company expands, you need all kinds of people at all kinds of levels.
You canât wait for the perfect A+ candidate to appear for every single empty slot. You need to hire. The best of the best donât always want to join a big team, or theyâre tied up in another job, or you canât afford them or give them the titles or responsibilities they want.
And sometimes the people you donât expect to be amazingâthe ones you thought were Bs and B+sâturn out to completely rock your world. They hold your team together by being dependable and flexible and great mentors and teammates. Theyâre modest and kind and just quietly do good work. Theyâre a different type of ârock star.â
By far the hardest part of growth is finding the best peopleâin all their different incarnationsâtrusting your team to hire them, then making sure theyâre happy and thriving.
Hiring a manager or senior contributor onto your team is a big investment, and bad leadership hires are disproportionately more disruptive because they affect more people. If you bring on a new manager whose values arenât aligned with yours, he will hire people that you may not think are a good fit. If he turns out to be a crummy collaborator, youâll be dealing with a line of complaints out the door.
Itâs wise not to rush into leadership hires, and instead make sure you know what an ideal applicant looks like. The easiest way to do that is to talk with as many prospective candidates as you can, including those who may not want the job but know the role well. Especially if youâre hiring for an unfamiliar position, you need to do your homework to understand what the bar should be.
When hiring, try to surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do. Genuine decencyâan instinct for fairness and openness and mutual respectâis a rarer commodity in business than it should be, and you should look for it in the people you hire and nurture it in the people who work for you.
At the end of the day, the best way to respect and reward the A players on your team is to surround them with other A players. This is how you attract more A players. And it means you must invest as much energy into hiring as you expect the team to invest in their jobs. You cannot expect someone to keep giving all of themselves if you put someone alongside them who isnât willing to do the same. You need to be as unreasonable in how you build your team as you are in how you build your product or experience.