3 key secrets to building extraordinary teams

How to hire the right people at the right stage of growth

Developing new technology, identifying product/market fit, creating a go-to-market strategy… When building businesses, these are the types of challenges entrepreneurs tend to spend the majority of their time thinking about (and talking about with other entrepreneurs). And it’s easy to understand why: These are challenges that entrepreneurs can tackle largely on their own, without having to rely on anyone else.

But you can only solve a small fraction of the problems that you will face if you want to scale. You need to hire.

People – not products – are the lifeblood of hypergrowth companies. Ultimately, the conversations and relationships the people at your company have with customers, potential customers, investors, and others, will determine how successful you are in the long run.

This is a lesson that took me 20+ years and the founding of five companies to learn. Believe me, as an introvert, I’d love to just geek out on the 1% of stuff I can figure out on my own.

Instead, you need to:

  1. Hire people before skills: Scrappiness and cultural fit matter more than intelligence and experience.
  2. Hire for the right stage: you will need certain types of people at different points of your growth
  3. Get internal feedback but not consensus: hiring managers need to own the decision

This is how hypergrowth companies are born.

3 Hiring Tips for Scaling a High-Growth Startup

Last year, my most recent company, Drift, grew from 80 to 260 people and went from one office in Boston to three, with additions in San Francisco and Seattle. By the end of this year, we’ll be adding a significant number across the offices. And in the years to follow, we’ll likely open offices in EMEA and other regions around the globe.

Meanwhile, our customer base is expanding. While we started out selling almost exclusively to startups, we’re now attracting bigger companies with thousands of employees. It’s a whole different ball game – one that requires a different type of player. So in order to maintain growth, we’ve had to grow the company and hire aggressively.

But here’s the thing: Hiring the perfect people for your company is simple in theory but difficult in execution, especially when you’re growing at hypergrowth speed. It’s taken me years of practice, and years of learning from mistakes, to get hiring right. (And even now, I’m always learning.) To help you avoid the same mistakes I’ve made over the years, I wanted to share three key principles for hiring at high-growth companies.

Image via Getty Images / Mykyta Dolmatov

1) Hire people, not skills.

Over time, your company’s product will inevitably change. Your internal processes and approaches will inevitably change. And that’s what makes hiring based on skills alone such a bad idea – the skills your company needs aren’t static. They too are inevitably going to change and evolve as your company grows.

By only focusing on those bulleted lists of skills on a candidate’s resume, you’re not thinking about the impact that candidate will have in the long-term, and you’re not getting an accurate picture of what that candidate is like overall as a person. When building a high-growth company, you need that granularity. You need to know that everyone you hire is going to be able to thrive in a high-paced startup environment. That’s why when hiring at Drift, I’ve learned to place much more value on personal traits over professional skills. Specifically, I look for the following:

Cultural Fit (Importance = 45%)

No matter how impressive a person’s skill set might be, it means nothing if that person can’t get along (and keep up) with your team. Let’s face it: working at high-growth companies is hard, and it can feel impossible when you’re not surrounded by people you enjoy working with. That’s what I mean when I use the term “cultural fit.” The objective isn’t to instill conformity, it’s to create a positive work environment where everyone can feel free to express their opinions and perspectives.

At Drift, one of the tools we use to help us evaluate if a candidate will be a good fit is a personality test. Specifically, we use the Predictive Index, which sheds light on a person’s core needs and work motivations. We don’t use the test to screen candidates, but we do use it to identify potential red flags, which we can address during the interview process.

Scrappiness (Importance: 35%)

The four most telling words a new hire can say: “I’ll figure it out.” If you find someone who says that (and can follow through on it), you know you’ve found someone with drive — someone who will plunge headfirst into any challenge and help move the company forward. But to clarify, the type of drive I look for in new hires is different from traditional ambition. Because traditionally ambitious people, while hard workers, tend to obsess over their own personal rise up the corporate ladder. They always have an eye on that next title change, from manager to director, director to VP, or VP to C-suite, and that influences how they perform. That’s why a decade ago, while running my previous company Performable, I added a new requirement to our job descriptions: “Scrappiness.” Today, it’s one of our leadership principles at Drift.

Scrappy people don’t rely on titles or defined sets of responsibilities. Instead, they do whatever it takes to get the job done, even when no one is looking, and even if the tasks they’re performing could be considered “beneath their title.”

Intelligence & Experience (Importance: 15% & 5%, respectively)

Now, I know what you might be thinking: “Culture fit and scrappiness account for 80% of what you look for in new hires? While intelligence and experience only account for a combined 20%?” Don’t get me wrong, intelligence and experience are important qualities, but if you find a scrappy person who fits in well with the team, that person can learn fast and gain the experience they need. Over the years, I’ve learned it’s much easier to teach scrappy people new professional skills than to teach highly experienced people how to be more motivated, or how to get along with teammates better.

It’s also important to remember that at a fast-growing company, everything’s in a constant state of flux. So when you’re considering a person’s intelligence and experience, make sure you take into account their genuine hunger to learn as well as any life experience (even if it’s not directly work-related) that points to a person being able to adapt and thrive in rapidly changing environments.

Image via Getty Images / AndreyPopov

2) Hire for the right stage.

While focusing on people, not just skills, is a crucial hiring principle, it’s really only half of the equation when it comes to figuring out whether or not someone is right for your company. The other half of the equation? Growth stage.

This is something I picked up from the High-Growth CEO Forum. When hiring, you need to take into account the four key stages of company growth:

  1. Startup: focus is on developing the product
  2. Initial Growth: focus shifts to driving sales
  3. Rapid Growth: focus shifts to leading the market
  4. Continuous Growth: focus shifts to dominating the industry

In order to make the best hiring decision possible, it’s not enough to find the right person, you need to find the right person for the right stage of your company’s growth. Trust me: This is a lesson I learned the hard way, and it’s a lesson I continue to re-learn every day.

After making some hires that didn’t work out as I’d planned, and losing some people who I thought would stick around for longer, I had to step back and ask myself: Why does this keep happening? The issue wasn’t that we were hiring “bad” people, it was entirely on us: We weren’t paying attention to growth stage.

For example, back when Drift was still in the startup stage, we hired some people who’d made their careers at the enterprise level — folks who were accustomed to working at the continuous growth stage. On paper, these hires looked great. (They were from big, well-known companies.) But in practice, we’d brought them into the company much, much too early. Their own level of professional growth didn’t align with our growth stage as a company, so from the get-go, there was a disconnect.

Ultimately, what I learned is that when hiring for a high-growth company, you need to find the growth stage sweet spot. You’re looking for people whose professional growth is slightly ahead of your company’s growth, so they can help lead your company into the next stage. Just remember not to look too many stages ahead when hiring (which was the mistake I made), otherwise a hire might end up stagnating in their role and feeling under-utilized.

On the other hand, a high-growth company will often grow faster than a person can grow professionally, especially at the management level. Again, this isn’t a knock against that person, who may have done a stellar job during a company’s previous growth stage. But the reality is that when your company grows from 20 people to 80 people one year, and then from 80 to 260 people the next, not all of the managers and directors you have in place are going to be able to keep up. And while promoting internally is always a great option, it only works if the person you’re promoting is capable of growing at hypergrowth speed and leading a team through the company’s next growth stage. And that’s easier said than done.

Let’s take at Slack as an example, one of the fastest-growing companies in recent memory. After officially launching in 2014, Slack saw its revenue soar to $25 million in 2015, then to $100 million in 2016, and then to $200 million in 2017. Incredible, right? But just think about that growth from a management perspective: How many sales managers do you know who could lead a sales team from the $0 to $25-million revenue stage through the $25-million to $100-million revenue stage and into the $200-million revenue stage in the span of just four years? I don’t know many people who look like that. And that’s why it’s so important that, when you’re hiring (and when you’re trying to figure out whether or not you should promote internally), you pay close attention to growth stage.

Here’s a trick for figuring out what growth stage a candidate (or employee) is currently suited for: Ask. Have an upfront conversation about how you envision the company growing and how quickly systems and approaches would need to evolve. Do they seem up to the challenge? Are they eager to move as quickly as possible and to take on new, bigger challenges in the near future? If you find yourself nodding your head, you know you’ve found someone with a lot of growth potential.

Image via Getty Images / Thomas Barwick

3) Seek feedback during the hiring process, but not consensus.

This is one of our leadership principles at Drift: Seek feedback, not consensus. It’s a principle we apply across our entire business, but it rings especially true when applied to hiring.

Consensus thinking leads to average ideas, average speed, and average outcomes. That’s because the best idea will rarely, if ever, sound like the best idea to everyone. As we all know, people have different opinions, and different biases.

In the same way, consensus hiring leads to average hires. Because when there are lots of people, including a candidate’s future teammates, involved in the decision-making process, there’s a higher likelihood that someone will feel threatened by a candidate’s talent and experience. As a result, a great candidate might end up getting a “no” vote simply because someone feels like their territory is being encroached on. To quote former Facebook executive Molly Graham, this a textbook example of someone who doesn’t want to “share the fun Legos.”

In a high-growth company, you can’t afford to let that kind of behavior get in the way of progress. Your hiring objective should be to seek out people who are better than you, and better than your existing people, and that means getting comfortable with the fact that you’re going to need to “share the Legos” and gradually give up responsibilities. That’s how you level-up an organization.

At Drift, we’ve deliberately designed our hiring process to remove biases and egos from the equation. First, we rely on five, full-time recruiters to source qualified candidates for each of our departments. Second, we empower practice-area hiring managers to be the decision-makers when it comes to saying “yes” or “no” to any given candidate. Instead of treating hiring as a democratic process and letting everyone in a specific department or on a specific team have a vote, we give hiring managers the ultimate authority.

That being said, our objective here isn’t to eliminate internal feedback or to discourage people from voicing legitimate concerns about potential hires. While hiring managers need to own the final stage of the hiring process, it’s important to include others in the earlier stages. At Drift, we rely on a feedback loop where we bring in people from all levels of the company (executives, managers, individual contributors, etc.) and have them interview a candidate one after the other. It’s an efficient way to gather a lot of feedback on a potential hire in a short amount of time. Hiring managers can then use that feedback to help them make the best decision possible as quickly as possible.

By avoiding consensus during the hiring process, we’ve been able to shrink our hiring times down from weeks and months to days, and sometimes even hours. At Drift, our rule of thumb is that from the day we learn a candidate’s name, it should take us no longer than seven days to conduct interviews and (if all goes well) to make that candidate an offer. In many cases, we’ll make offers on the same day we do our interviews. If our hiring process takes longer than seven days (barring certain exceptions, like when hiring a high-level executive), we know we need to make an adjustment and move faster.

At high-growth startups, hesitation in hiring is the enemy. Remember, 99% of your business’s success depends on people. If you don’t act fast and hire great people as soon as you find them, they could end up working for the competition.

By adopting the three hiring principles I’ve outlined above, you can make sure you’re hiring the right people, for the right growth stage, at the right time (as soon as possible).