Chapter 8: hiring for your startup

Sooner or later, the time will come for you to consider growing your team. You’ll have a lot to think about, especially while you are busy running your business full-time. 

You need to find time to keep a lean startup, manage time for hiring and normal work — all while getting top talent on board.

Do you actually need to grow the team?

If or when you experience scaling problems, you might be tempted to solve them by hiring someone new. Instead of launching into recruitment straight away, take the time to perform a root cause analysis to understand where in the chain things are falling behind, and try to find the right process to remove any bottlenecks first. Competition among early-stage companies for top talent is fierce; but the only way to think about startup jobs and hiring is that anything less than the best won’t do. You can see it as a case of ‘hiring for a business problem’ instead of ‘hiring person X before someone else does because they are great’. 

Before committing to bringing someone else on board, always make sure there are enough hours of ongoing repeatable work for new hires:

Startup hiring right > fast

This might sound counter-intuitive, but if you reached the point where you need someone else because you have run out of time, you need to find… more time to dedicate to startup hiring.

You don’t want to hire fast, bring the wrong person on board, and lose some of your best existing people as a result. That’s why successful startups who build a great company and cohesive team are intentional with the positions they create and hire for. They want to ensure they establish the right position that matches the needs of the company to the right individual job searching for that role.

You may be a small team without a formalized vision & mission statement, but you should already know what your goals are, what is important to you, and how you want to work together.

Use this knowledge as a guiding principle and take your time hiring for culture fit: find people whose business and life values align with yours, and who can communicate and work well together with the rest of the existing team.

To ensure culture fit in our ever-growing team, we have implemented a structured hiring process with several checkpoints. Every job listed on our careers page takes applicants to a long survey with 10-12 detailed questions: whoever is not motivated enough to fill it in is already not the right fit. Within those 10-12 questions, we always include a few key screening or filter ones whose answers we look at first, which is a second culture fit checkpoint.

The process continues with video submissions, interviews with the HR team and hiring managers, and a paid multi-day task—the whole journey can take around 6-8 weeks, in line with the belief that hiring right is better than hiring fast. Reviewing a candidate’s work and interactions with the rest of the team also helps us get a really good understanding of whether, and how, they would fit in if they were offered the role.

If you want a more in-depth look at the process and the rationale behind it, you can listen to our Director of Marketing Nick Heim in the video below + check out the podcast interview with our hiring partner Recruitee in the resources list at the bottom of the chapter.

Where do startups find the right people?

For a startup, recruitment agencies are generally expensive, especially if their fee includes a percentage of the annual salary upfront. Going at it the social way by posting on Twitter or Facebook may not be very efficient, but it’s worth a try; LinkedIn ads might bring in more targeted candidates, though they could get expensive fast.

As a small team, you are probably better off trying to find the online spaces where the people you need ‘hang out’. Two good examples are Stackoverflow if you are looking for devs and WeWorkRemotely for remote team members.

You should always use your network connections and reach out to any relevant contacts you made at conferences or accelerated programs you participated in. Additional tip: get help from these external experts during the interview process as well. They are likely to know what to look for in a candidate, especially if you have never done the job you are hiring for.

If you can’t afford a full-time salary, you can explore temporary alternatives that don’t involve hiring, such as contracting and working with external partners. You can also look at part-time hiring and job sharing options: you can allow candidates to apply separately or in tandem, with a joint CV that highlights the pair’s overlapping and complementing skills.

When to hire marketers

If you and your co-founders are mostly technical, it’s easy for you to get caught up in the product, especially at an early stage. When you are ready to go to market, you want to have someone marketing-minded who can help express your value proposition clearly and persuasively, and knows how to network their way around the industry.

Try to bring on board someone who has empathy for your market and launched projects with very little investment before.

If this is not possible right now, consider at least splitting your time between business roles: for example, be the sales or marketing person on Monday and Tuesday, the product person on Wednesday and Thursday, and the finance person on Friday. Having this kind of separation will allow you to focus on the main issues in each department, instead of trying to do everything at once.

Make employee onboarding easy

Work on your onboarding and make it a repeatable process so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time someone new joins. At Hotjar, have a Trello board with a list of tasks each new team member needs to go through during their first week; we include a few video messages from our CEO David Darmanin, which help new people hear the vision directly from one of the key founders.

The team at EnhanCV have a similar board, where new hires can familiarize themselves with company structure, values, and policies:

Measure effectiveness and get feedback from each new hire, so you can tweak the process accordingly.

Learn to become an effective leader

You may be an amazing developer, but that does not mean you will be an equally amazing team manager if and when your team grows 10x in size. In the startup world, the emphasis on ‘getting things done, fast’ doesn’t account for the learning curve you and your team will need to go through as you grow.

Start by understanding your individual strengths and weaknesses, so you can quickly figure out the easiest and most productive ways your team can work and grow together. At Hotjar, each new hire is given a copy of StrengthsFinder 2.0 and asked to take the 16 Personalities test; we add our results to a shared spreadsheet, so we get a better sense of how our individual traits strengthen and complement one another.

As a founder or staff member moving into management positions, you might later need guidance and training on how to build a high-performing team. Know that working a ton of hours won’t result in more customers or revenue, but it will lead straight to burnout: you must learn to take care of your team’s well-being, check in with them, and keep a good work environment. The best thing you can do is start cultivating a growth mindset right now, and look at ways you can improve yourself:

Blog Posts

• There’s a Problem with SaaS Startups and Marketing, Georgiana Laudi

• Who Should a Startup Hire First?, Roy Bahat

• A Counterintuitive System for Startup Compensation, First Round Review

• How Blind Hiring Can Make Your Company More Inclusive, Frida Polli

• Culture Code: Creating a Lovable Company, Hubspot

• A Bootstrapper’s Formula For Hiring Your First Employee, Brian Casel

• Traditional business leadership is broken. Here's what we’re doing differently, Hotjar

Video & Audio

• How Do You Know When It’s Time to Hire?, Dan Andrews

• Hiring @Hotjar: How constant optimizations result in a genius hiring process, Recruitee

Books

• StrengthsFinder 2.0, Tom Rath

• Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential, Carol Dweck