If there is a company in the same space as ours, and I like their blog, or their front-end design, or any other aspect of the business, I’ll try to find out who is responsible for this work, and then start a conversation. This is how you get to the doers – and you need doers in start-ups.
These conversations can take weeks or months. However, a leopard never changes theirs spots, so whether they decide to come across today, or in a month or a year, it would usually have been worth the wait.
Furthermore, great people are usually already in stable jobs. If you are hiring someone without a job, that is a bad thing.
When hiring, it is important to be patient. You shouldn’t just hire to get something done.
Hiring should be done with a long-term view. You need to feel excited about every hire, as if you’ve just won over someone awesome who is truly going to make a difference to your business.
You need to put them through tests and understand how they think and work.
Resumes won’t cut it. You have to dig deeper. Give your developers a coding assignment, read their blogs and public feeds; give your community managers something to blog about and some resources to base it on and see what they come up with; put potential support hires on the phone and email for a day and see how they measure up.
Hire slow, fire fast. Be ruthless and cut out underperformers. There is no room for them on the bus.
Once you’ve found the right person, get out of their way and let them do their thing. If you have to over manage them, they are not A players.
The key here is to create a vision for the structure of your company early on – potentially when there are just two or three employees.
What will it look like when there are 20 employees? Tech companies grow quickly, so you should always be on the lookout to fill positions that will need filling in the future.
Above is an example of the organisation chart I’ve created for BuyReply. We’ve filled a few positions, however, the point is that we know what we’d like BuyReply to look like in six months to a year.
This helps manage growth, it helps communicate vision and clarifies direction to investors, and it helps you plan ahead and mitigate the risks of failing from growing too quickly.
