The most common startup hiring mistakes and how to fix them
Hiring is mission critical, yet most leaders treat it as an afterthought. In my work with organisations going through hiring challenges, oftentimes taking their startups from 20 people to over 100, I see the same mistakes being made.
In this article I outline the 15 most common startup hiring mistakes, and offer some tips for how to fix them. By the end, you’ll know how to more effectively approach hiring in a way which supports growth and maximises the impact of your teams. This requires an honest introspection and critical look at your organisation, so get ready for some hard truths.
Getting started
1) You think the fastest way to get people hired is to start quickly.
This is one of the most frequent mistakes that I see, and I get it: You’re in the business of getting things done, and not much gets done by just planning or talking. BUT: Just four quick preparation steps are enough to drastically improve your hiring results, and don’t actually take a lot of work and time.
2) Your company’s career page advertises a soccer table, free lunch, free beer, and company parties
Excuse me, it’s 2022. Workers want different ways of working, flexibility, and more control over where, when, and how they work. Soccer tables, free beer, and company parties also smell of corporate bro culture, and aren’t interesting to all the candidates that you need in your applicant pool (some examples: parents and other caregivers, people who don’t drink, women who may have been sexually harassed at corporate events). Focus on benefits that are actually relevant to everyone.
3) You say you “care about diversity and inclusion”, but it doesn’t actually show.
Do you “care” or are you “actually doing something” about diversity, inclusion, and equity? If your job posting or company values mention an “investment in diversity”, but everyone on your team page looks the same, candidates will at least have questions. “Caring” alone doesn’t mean anything. Either include what you’re actively doing about it, or leave it out.
4) You have no visibility into your hiring.
As you get started with hiring, set up basic hiring metrics in your applicant tracking system (most ATS have built-in metrics). You need to have visibility into your hiring in order to
See how you’re doing overall (metrics: applicant numbers, number of candidates per stage)
Understand how much effort and money it takes you to hire one person (metric: number of applicants and interviews per hired)
Assess the effectiveness of your interview stages (metric: pass-through rates)
Job postings & what to look for
5) You look for the skills that made you and your peers successful in your teams.
It can be really tempting to look at our own success and assume that what made us successful will be what makes others successful. This is a bias. It fails to recognise that innovation requires factors like creativity, conflict, and difference — all of which require some degree of difference.
You need more people that complement you than people who are like you. Building great startups requires hiring people who are smarter and better than you are.
6) You look for “passion” in your candidates.
Passion is not a job requirement, skill, or qualification. As a founder or CEO, you may be passionate. Your employees, however, are not entrepreneurs, and they are likely not going to get a million-dollar payout once your startup sells, and they get to just be, you know, employees. So let them work their contractually set hours and reserve their passion for their hobbies, pets, or loved ones. In addition, “passion” opens the door to “hero culture” of individuals “going above and beyond”, which often leads to poor team practices, poor scalability, and burnt out employees.
What to look for instead: Assess whether people bring good work practices like strong communication, collaboration, mentoring skills, and a desire to work with others, in addition to other traits of high-performing teams. These are the things that actually make people and teams successful.
7) You look for “culture fit”
“Culture fit” as a concept needs to go away, now. It’s often coded language for “someone who is not like us”, and one of the many reasons why the tech industry is still predominantly white and male. Innovation requires diversity of experiences, perspectives, and requires healthy disagreement - the opposite of groupthink and monoculture. “Culture fit” opens the floodgates to biases running rampant in your hiring, and the line between “culture fit” and outright discrimination is very, very thin:
Someone who was socialised in a culture where it’s deemed impolite to take credit yourself? Not taking enough ownership, no culture fit.
A woman asking not to be interrupted as she’s making her point? Not listening, too assertive, no culture fit.
Someone who asks for the ability to leave on time to pick up their child from childcare? Not passionate enough, no culture fit.
I could keep going. Remove “culture fit” from your process and focus on impact-add instead: assess for the impact that candidates will be able to have and how they will enrich your company culture.
Assessing candidates & preparing interviews
8) You exclude candidates who stayed at jobs for less than a year
Many hiring managers reject candidates who they think were “job-hopping” because their tenure is frequently under a year. You know why people leave jobs after a short time?
The job sucks.
They’re having a terrible experience, e.g. are treated poorly. Many members of underrepresented groups leave roles after a short time because the environment turns out to be toxic and they need to protect themselves.
They’re getting better pay or benefits elsewhere. Changing jobs is still the best way to get a good pay raise.
Fix it: Talk to these candidates and ask them instead! Respect if they don’t want to talk about their reasons. Don’t disqualify them based on tenure in previous roles.
9) You mostly focus on technical skills when you interview engineers
I see this issue a lot, especially in early-stage startups and scaleups. Overindexing on technical skills is a common fallacy in engineering organisations, and while it may seem fine in the near-term, it usually becomes a major issue not long after, resulting in dysfunctional teams, toxic behaviours, and low performance.
Fix it: Include questions around non-technical skills (“soft skills”) in all your interviews (just don’t make it a “culture fit” interview, please). Behavioural questions like these are really useful to identify how a candidate would actually act and perform as part of your team.
Interviewing
10) You’re overconfident in your ability to interview.
You usually look at the candidate’s CV and then take it from there. You don’t believe in structured or standardised interviews or an interview process. Fix it:
You’re missing out on a lot of potential time and energy savings in your interviewing:
Structured, standardised interviews are super easy to scale and easy to replicate.
They allow you to gain a sense of the skills of different candidates much faster and assess who’s the best fit for the job.
They help you actually gauge how candidates will perform on the job, something that studies show informal interviews are ineffective at.
You won’t miss or forget crucial questions.
The interviews can be distributed across the team more easily, and interviewers can fill in for each other if needed.
You’re not relying on your instincts or own ability to read people alone. Our brains use biases to help us make decisions faster, but in hiring, these can be wildly misleading.
Standardising your process and using structured interviews is much easier than it sounds! Even 30 minutes of preparation will go a long way to make your hiring scale! Use a guide like this one to prep.
11) You had to reject more than one candidate because you were overruled by the team.
It sounds like you and your team are misaligned on what you’re looking for, and you may need to clarify who the decision-maker is in your hiring. Take the following steps:
Gather your hiring team, i.e. everyone involved in the interviews
Discuss the cases of misalignment: What factors made people disagree about whether someone is qualified for the job?
Review the job posting together: Is it accurate and complete? Is everyone in agreement about it?
Discuss roles in the hiring: Who has input? And who’s the ultimate decision-maker? Even in smaller teams, I strongly recommend having only one person own the ultimate decision.
12) You find that while you get clear opinions from interviewers during the hiring process, once you debrief with the hiring team, it becomes difficult to make a decision.
Stop debriefs or group discussions at the end of a hiring process to determine if someone should be hired or not. These group discussions are a breeding ground for group think, halo effect, recency bias, and other biases that you’ve worked so hard to eliminate from the hiring process prior. I’ve seen more than one team talk themselves out of hiring someone over irrelevant details.
What to do instead: Ask all interviewers to submit their feedback about a candidate independently (!) and immediately (!) after their interview. Review the responses, approach interviewers directly if you have questions for clarification. Make a decision based on that. If you make a decision that not everyone will agree with, speak with folks about it directly.
13) You want everyone on your interview team to agree with a candidate being hired, and you keep interviewing until you find that person.
Remember that the main goals of interviewing teams should be to gain different perspectives and decrease biases in the process, not to find a candidate that everyone is happy with.
Align your team (see point 11), and ask them to score their overall interviews based on a scale of
Strong yes: This is an exceptional candidate who exceeds the requirements for the role.
Yes: Candidate meets the requirements for the role.
No: Candidate doesn’t meet the requirements for the role.
Strong no: We identified issues with this candidate that should lead to us not hiring them.
Both “strong” ratings should only be used in exceptional cases, typically under 5-10%, respectively.
14) Candidates jump ship before the process ends.
This is usually either a sign that your process is too long or your interviews are a negative experience for candidates, leaving them with a bad impression of your company.
Review candidate feedback (many applicant tracking systems (ATS) have a built-in option to send out surveys!) and fix any issues.
Take reports like Lever’s hiring benchmarks, which includes cohort data for comparison.
New hires join
15) You’re not happy with the candidate you hired, and they’re not performing as expected.
Employee performance is always a mix of their individual experience and skills, and environmental factors such as the tasks at hand and your work culture. I recommend working reflecting on the following questions to get a better sense of what happened; be honest with yourself here:
What made you excited about hiring them in the first place? Are those things still true, or were they overshadowed by what’s going on now?
What’s the main source of misalignment? Is it a mismatch in expectations of the job at hand, or “culture fit” challenges? (See no.7 for “culture fit”.)
How was this person onboarded?
How has the expectation and goal setting with them been going?
What was their response to the feedback you gave them about their performance? (You did give them feedback, right?) How are they feeling about how things are going?
Review your hiring process: Did you really assess all skills and qualifications that are needed for this role? Where may you have blind spots?
Hiring is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. Examining your company’s hiring processes against the mistakes outlined above will mean you’re taking huge steps towards a solid hiring process that captures the best talent for your team.
Found your perfect candidate and ready to onboard them? Read my guide to onboarding your first manager, with free onboarding template (it can also be used for any new employee!).
