Startup Recruitment

My friend Leo recently wrote a pretty good post on recruitment and gave a few tips that I thought was valuable to share. My favorite tip was "Don’t stop recruiting until you have someone on board." That is such good piece of advice in my opinion because it's often too easy for hiring managers to get excited too early on and loose sight of potential fall-outs and better fitting candidates that might be out there. Like the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins suggests, you always want the best of the best on the bus and should never settle for just good enough.



In any case, here are my additional thoughts that I left as a comment to his post:

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One thing I would like to add is that prior to interviewing a candidate, it’s always a good idea to first formulate some relevant questions and then evaluate the questions’ alignment with what you want to find out about your candidates either on your own or if possible, with your team. Keep in mind that these questions will serve as a framework rather than something to read off to a candidate. The idea is to have high level questions that will facilitate a more focused free-flow conversation between the interviewer and the candidate during the interview.

I have in the past managed a good number of hiring managers that make the mistake of walking into interviews without any well thought out framework resulting in a hire based on a falsely positive feeling of the candidate. More often than not, they soon realize that he/she is not a good match only a few weeks to a month after the candidate was hired. What a costly mistake that is. When you think about it, between energy spent managing him/her, employee benefits, sign on paid vacation or bonus, and salary, you have just lost a good chunk of money over close to zero ROI.

Lastly, I want to point out that although it’s important to have a pitch. It’s even more important that it’s short and concise. The last thing you want to do is sit in an interview and end up blabbing away about your business the entire time which then looses focus on the real reason behind the interview. It sounds silly but a lot of hiring managers make the very same mistake.

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Recruitment often seems like such an easy thing but in fact, it's really a science and an art in and of itself.