How to stop making hiring so hard: getting out of your own way

I’m with you: hiring is hard. You need people to fill gaps, but the many different elements at play make it challenging to navigate. Here’s just a few examples: 

• Skill alignment: There can be a lack of skilled workers in certain areas

• Timing: Finding the right people at the right time is tricky

• Competitiveness: The hiring market is highly competitive, and especially startups are struggling with offering competitive compensation and benefit packages

• Cost: The price for skilled employees is going through the roof 

• No pipeline: Not getting enough people through hiring process 

• Decision making: Getting all internal stakeholders (Teams! Recruiters! Bosses!) on the same page is challenging   

• Employer Branding: Unlike corporations, startups don’t have an established brand

• No time: You can’t dedicate enough time to hiring as you’re busy finding product-market fit / delivering / scaling your organisation 
  

In this article I’m going to get very real with you. I work with dozens of leaders every week which has given me a unique insight into how organisations hire. Most are coming across the same issues, for the same reason. It’s time to address the elephant in the room. Prepare for some tough love! 

You are the reason you’re unable to hire people 

That’s right - you are getting in your own way with hiring. Most startup leaders have no plan, rely on reactive hiring and, here’s the big one, look for copies of themselves. This ultimately blocks your ability to innovate and creates huge issues for scaling successfully. 

The most common mistakes leaders make: 

• Leaders don’t invest enough, early enough

  • Your first 100 people will shape your company drastically, by shaping your culture and network effects. But this early stage is also when most leaders don’t have or make the time for hiring: they’re too busy delivering, coding, or fundraising. As a result, a lot of hiring is happenstance.  

• You don’t know what you want + need 

  • Early on, there is often no clear job or role descriptions, expectations are unclear, and there’s no internal alignment with the hiring or recruiting team.

• …or where to find it

  • Many leaders lean heavily on their networks for hiring. In other words, you’re fishing in the pool that you know and wonder why you can’t find new fish. 

• You think too short-term 

  • Leaders hire reactively for the biggest skills that are needed right now, or better: yesterday.

• You don’t have a plan 

  • Many startup leaders consider hiring and interview plans a waste of time and prefer to just get started. While the temptation of this approach is understandable, it typically leads to lots of time wasted later on. 

• Your job postings are BS 

  • Many job postings consist of endless lists of required skills, experience, and qualifications into their job postings, while the benefits section still contains “perks” like “great culture”, “free beer” (“free Club Mate” if it’s a Berlin-based company), “pizza parties”, and “modern equipment”. 

• Your process is BS 

  • Interviewers with no training or experience run interviews that are created from scratch for each candidate. Evaluation criteria are entirely unclear, is amended throughout the process, or thrown out the window once a candidate has been interviewed who seems like a “great fit”.

• The team isn’t aligned on what’s needed 

  • Another issue I see all the time is that leaders don’t spend time aligning their team on what’s needed, so after lots of interviews, once they want to decide on making an offer, they realise that everyone is in disagreement about whether a candidate is even qualified for the job, or what skills the job requires. Or what the job actually is.

• The hiring process takes forever 

  • And because of all that, the process takes forever. Many startups say they urgently need to hire and then take three months for one interview process.

• Passion + Culture fit = Similarity Bias 

  • Passion. Many startups still hire for “passion”. 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 get to just be, you know, employees. So let them reserve their passion in whatever way they like, whether that’s for their hobbies, pets, or loved ones. 

  • Culture fit. “Culture fit” typically refers to a job candidate’s attitudes, values and beliefs being in line with the culture and values of an organisation. In reality, it’s often explicitly or implicitly coded language for “someone who is not like us” Hiring for “culture fit” opens the floodgates to biases running rampant in your hiring, and the line from “culture fit” to actually discriminating against candidates is extremely blurry.

• And so, you end up hiring what you know: yourself 

  • Consciously or unconsciously, many leaders hire what they know: a copy of themselves. 

  • This pattern matching is a tendency we all have: We all think that what’s made us successful will also be positive traits in others. It can show up in many ways: 

    • People with similar backgrounds, experiences, ways of thinking, communication styles, and operational modes.

    • Technical founders over-indexing on technical skills.

    • Hiring mostly from networks. 

    • Focusing too much bringing on individuals to solve specific problems, instead of creating a functioning system.  

What is hiring actually about? 

Hiring is mission-critical - but your hiring isn’t actually about hiring. Most leaders’ definition of hiring success is wrong. Hiring success isn’t about the number of people you’ve hired, hiring success is measured only by the IMPACT your hires have added to your startup.

Your hiring efforts are a meaningless waste of resources if your hires aren’t impactful. Many leaders think impact works like this: you hire a person with a certain shape, as in experience, way of working etc., and you get exactly this impact in the same shape. 

But actually, that’s rarely what happens. Sometimes impact looks like this:

Or takes on a whole new dimension! 

Impact in any organisation, including a startup, is always a combination of individual factors (qualification, experience, traits and skills), the environment, your company culture, the team, your practices, decision-making, communication, and you as a leader.

Many leaders also drastically underestimate how much work they need to do after hiring someone in order to help them succeed and actually realise impact. 

The reality of hiring is that you need people who help you change, not people who help you remain the same. Above all, you need people that, given the right environment, are able to utilise their expertise to help you accelerate your startup’s growth and innovate.

With every new person you hire, your culture will incrementally change. Remember, someone who challenges your accepted views of something is extremely valuable to your startup. Make your culture move in the right direction. If 100 people later your company is the same that it used to be, you're doing it wrong. 

Now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s focus on how to hire more effectively. 

What to do instead

Step 1: Start with impact 

Think about what skills people should possess to have the impact you need. Speak with your teams! Identify what complementary skills they need. Ask yourself and them: what impact do we need? Impact isn’t just conveyed in lines of code or designs delivered. Look at your team now. What skills, experiences, perspectives, communication and collaboration styles and ways of working do you have now? Where can you grow? What perspectives are we missing? 

Write those skills down. This is the impact you need!

Step 2: Think bigger than one person - think about the environment 

Your startup’s success isn’t about your ability to hire, it’s about your ability to make people succeed and what you do to help them get there. Ways for thinking about the environment - I’ll give you some options, pick one and start there!

• Company values on the wall vs reality. Are you actually living your values? Ask your team about your company culture. Actually listen to what they say. 

• Culture: What behaviours get rewarded/punished in your company?

• Organisational variables: What’s special/specific about your startup? How do you need people to work?

• 10 TRAITS of high-performing teams: Purpose, clear roles, relationships, comms, collaboration, how conflict is managed, measuring outcomes, etc.

• SPACE framework: Dev productivity, satisfaction, performance, activity, communication, and efficiency.

Step 3: Hire for impact add 

• Check your biases 

  • Let go of the notion that you need to be the smartest person in the room. This is bigger than you. Your job as a leader is to bring in people who are better and smarter than you are; it’s the only way to grow your company successfully.

  • Know what you don’t know. Broaden your view. Change the glasses you’re wearing. 

• Make a plan & standardise

  • “PROCESS” isn’t a dirty word. Our goal: A repeatable process with a predictable outcome. Outcome: you can trust that you have the right information and insight to make a decision that’s informed and as unbiased as possible.

  • This is not as hard as it sounds! The first big step: standardise your process.

  • Stop believing that you have special instincts or a particular ability to assess people. Instead:

    • Know what skills you’re assessing for based on impact.

    • Align your team. Do they agree that those skills are important? Here’s a breakdown of steps you can take!

    • Standardise your interviews - this is a great resource to get you started.  

  • This is going to save you SO much time and effort later on! In addition, it’s going to make your hiring process significantly more equitable and give you a process whose results you can actually trust.
    

Step 4: Write an effective job posting. 

• Identify: What really makes your company unique? Speak to factors that people actually find motivating, such as great work-life balance, personal wellbeing, challenging and interesting work, an inclusive company culture, internal growth and advancement opportunities, development programmes, flexible working arrangements, how your values are actually lived in your company.

• Leave out meaningless perks or virtue signalling.

• Some examples to get you started: 

  • Example(I’d suggest removing the “preferred qualifications”, it can discourage some candidates from applying)

  • This is an archived version of a structure I used to use with my team quite successfully for engineering roles, and this is one for engineering manager roles 

Step 4: Decide on your whole interview process before you start interviewing candidates.

Form an interview team and align with your interviewers. Run a calibration meeting during which notes are taken. Here’s what should be discussed:  

• What questions will be asked?

• What are the five most crucial skills for this role? 

• How will you observe those skills in the interviews? 

• What will each interview round focus on? 

These notes now become the basis for grading in your interviews. As a result, you’ll end up with a standardised scoring system. 

Step 5: Hire your next dream team member! 

If you find hiring hard, you’re not alone. The steps outlined above are a great starting point for overhauling your hiring process and recognising where there is room for improvement. For most leaders, changing their definition of impact and pivoting to this as the focus of hiring decisions results in a profound improvement in their outlook on, and the actual results of, the hiring process.