Hire the best, against all odds

Hiring at a tech startup is a tough tough game. Even with huge supply in the market, due to the uncertainty in tech causing mass layoffs, there are several challenges trying to highlight top-tier talent into your company. Some of the challenges include

• Standing out amongst the sea of other companies that people are looking at i.e. Name brand recognition

• Competing against hyper inflated salaries that FAANG companies have promoted that has completely changed the lens through which candidates view compensation

• Flakiness of candidates because of the number of offers that they are comparing/contrasting against

However, if these are all challenges due to a company’s small size, that size also presents a tremendous amount of opportunity. There are many other things to do like interview calibration that are required for a successful interview process, but I am focusing on the points that lend themselves more so to a small-sized organization.

• As much as the candidate is selling to you, you are selling to the candidate — Have a clear outline of the unique value proposition of your company. There are 1000s of startups that a highly talented candidate has the ability to interview with and evaluate. Crisply articulating the mission of your company and the benefits that you provide to your employees, be it monetary, cultural or employee growth-related, can be the reason a candidate chooses your company over a FAANG or other startup.

• Unconventional interviewing methods to reduce touchpoints — You don’t have to follow the standard script followed by big companies. You could skip steps, add more people on the same round but reduce the number of rounds, introduce the candidate to executives to show the importance of the interview and many other techniques. Basically use the lack of red tape and bureaucracy in your small organization to your advantage.

• Speed, speed, speed — I CANNOT overemphasize this point. If there is one point from this list that you should remember, it is this. There is nothing more impressive to a candidate when you are able to respond to them quickly, whatever the stage of the process they are in. Candidates are so used to being either ghosted by companies or being asked to wait for weeks, if not months, for the completion of the interview process. If you are able to blitz through the entire process from first touchpoint to extending an offer, in 1.5–2 weeks, it is absolutely mindblowing to candidates because it displays how quickly the organization could move when it comes to important things.

• Being thoughtfully scrappy — Scrappiness is a great trait to have when it prevents people or organizations from overthinking the solution to a problem. Ensuring that you can be scrappy in the way you go through the process, and cut some corners to get to a great candidate in an efficient fashion can result in some amazing outcomes, but it is important to ensure that you are thoughtful about those corners you cut. Make sure people within the organization who are the decision makers, are in agreement with your interpretation of how the process plays out, and once they do, go all out.

• Treat your rejected candidates with empathy— One of the worst things that can happen to a candidate after an interview, is that they get ghosted and never hear back from the company or that they are given a standardized template of rejection, with no real insight into why the process played out the way it did. This reeks of making rejections scalable, because bigger companies tend to go through so many candidates that they are unable to spend the time to think of the rejected candidates with empathy. On the other hand, as a smaller company you don’t have that problem. If you have conducted debriefs with the interviewing panel, and had that discussion about why the candidate should be passed on, you already have all the reasoning behind why the team did not think the candidate was a good fit. I would highly advise you to collate that together in a way that would be perceived as constructive feedback to the candidate. Most importantly, after making the candidate aware that they have been rejected ask the candidate first if they would like to receive feedback, and if they do let them know your compiled thoughts. This builds a tremendous amount of goodwill while also sharpening your own ability to provide useful feedback.

• Access to top leadership to help sell the opportunity — The Leadership team at a small company is always only a couple of degrees of separation away, or less. Use that to your advantage. If the candidate is unsure about something, or doesn’t fully understand what the strategy of the company is or isnt fully sold on the company yet, ask the Leadership/Executive team to pitch in. They are strong advocates of the company and provide that full court press that is required to be able to allay any concerns, fears or questions that the candidate might have. This is not something big companies can rely in, and they might just throw in another Director or Managing Director into the mix. Seeing the CEO or CTO of a company come through to talk with you personally, can be a huge positive boost for the candidate.

• Limitless ownership and accountability— When companies are smaller, the sky is the limit when it comes to taking on responsibility. From a candidate’s standpoint, if there is a void of responsibility, and they are the ones stepping into it to take control of it, that is a huge value-add to the company and makes things work so much smoother. As long as there is a healthy culture of encouraging people to take on responsibility, which will result in getting recognized for that — be it monetarily, or through some other means, there is a great amount of opportunity for people to take on ownership of things they want to become experts at. This could range from say things like Engineering services, increased stakeholder interaction, servicing Client needs, working with operational teams to make their lives easier — the list goes on and on. This is markedly different from larger, more bureaucratic organizations, whose definition of increased ownership could be very narrow in scope.

• Flexibility of opportunity you are sourcing for — Be flexible in the way you represent or talk about the position in the market. At the end of the day, if you have a certain amount of budget allocated to the opening, and you have a couple of different needs that the team could benefit from, think a bit unconventionally about how you could fill that position. Lets say your team is backfilling a Senior Software Engineer position. You dont have to backfill it with a Senior Software Engineer per se. You could open up roles (even in parallel) to source against comparable positions like Technical Lead, or Software Engineer and an Intern, or a fairly hands-on Engineering Manager. That opens up the talent you can have access to compared to if you boxed yourself into a specific role you were on the lookout for. Similarly, when you talk to candidates, gauge what their strengths and weaknesses are and tailor the opportunity based on those if you think the person is a good addition to the team. One thing I tell candidates is that its way more important we find the right person, than fill the wrong person for the “right” role.

• Make it personal (involve the Hiring Manager) — We have found it immensely useful to have the Hiring Manager do the initial reachout and interview setup with candidates. While we could have our Recruiter do it, we have noticed a marked difference in candidate response rates when the Hiring Manager themselves reaches out. It makes the outreach that much more personal and meaningful to a candidate because they immediately have a direct line into the team that they could be joining.

Ensuring you are hiring the right person for a role is the most important part of growing a startup. You don’t really understand this until you get a wrong person into a role, and have to deal with the immense amount of turmoil and additional work that produces. Hiring might seem really tough, it might seem like the role has been open for too long, and there might be a temptation to “just” fill it, but make sure you don’t fill it with the “wrong” candidate — where wrong could mean ignoring certain red flags, or overriding the majority opinion of your interview panel or if you found someone who was mediocre and you have misgivings about. 

However, if you find the right candidate, then waste absolutely no time to make sure you can close that candidate.