The best way to hire someone for your startup is through your own network, but even the most well-connected startup founder will find themselves tapped out pretty quickly.
So what is a founder to do if they want to find a good candidate? Recruiting firms can be really good at finding candidates if you have a very clear picture of what you need and a tight job requisition. For early-stage founders, however, that can often prove to be tricky. In practice, hiring at startups starts off as an iterative process that helps you crystallize your requirements as you have conversations with high-quality candidates.
But how the hell do you optimize for that? Well, we spoke with Chris Quintero, the CEO at Sourcingsprints, to get the inside line on how founders can run a successful hiring process for the first time.
“Referrals are great, everyone likes referrals, but most of the time, founders strike out there very quickly,” says Quintero. “Early-stage founders post on social media, email a couple of people, and when they still haven’t hired anybody, the process stalls. Then you need to find a different approach. The next step is to hire outside of your immediate network.”
He points out that startups can take the tried and tested approach to hiring, but that can take a lot of time: “The traditional recruiting model works well if you are a later-stage company or if you are backfilling an existing role, so you know exactly what you’re looking for.”
But your first hire in a category, Quintero suggests, is more like a fishing expedition — one made much harder because nobody has heard of you or your company yet.
“The process is pretty straightforward. From a sourcing standpoint, it’s all about identifying a couple of hypotheses around personas that could be a fit for the role. You start by putting together a job requisition so you have some agreement between yourself and your co-founders on what the core requirements are,” explains Quintero.
From there, start mapping out companies that are similar to yours and look for comparable talent. “It’s very hard to know whether you’re looking for a unicorn or somebody that actually exists.”
In several of my own startups, this “Does this person exist?” question has bitten me pretty hard. Of course, you want an experienced person who can grow and eventually lead a team, but they should be a great contributor for now, have relevant, recent experience, possess the ability do both front- and back-end architecture design while ensuring that all compliance and legal frameworks are followed and have a Rolodex of 20 to 30 people who you could hire as soon as it makes sense to.
That would be great. Sadly, that person may not exist.
In the rest of this article, we’ll look at how to find and reach out to these potential candidates.
LinkedIn continues to be one of the most powerful tools for finding candidates. To start, make a list of companies that could “donate” employees to you. You may want to hire from your direct competitors, but there’s no need to limit yourself to those.
“The hard part is understanding your market space well enough to figure out the most comparable companies,” Quintero says. “Adjacent categories of companies are helpful too, as people will have encountered similar problems. So the experience is still very relevant.”
In other words: If you are building a dog-walking app, you don’t have to hire from only other dog-walking apps. Any location-based gig economy company will have people who have been working on problems similar to those you’ll be facing. Finding companies with a similar tech stack and culture as the one you want to build helps.
Then there is the question of the “mission.”
“When you’re looking for someone to work at an early-stage startup, how well they fit your mission is just as important as how well their skills fit your needs,” argues Quintero. “Why should they leave their current, likely more stable, job to join you, especially in today’s market? Ideally, you’re always looking for that ‘mission fit’ first.”
Similarly, how well a candidate fits your culture should also be a consideration. This can be as basic as the difference between big corporations and startups. At a corporation, the labor is divided relatively clearly and people tend to stay within their job descriptions, more or less. At a startup, you want people who can deal with ambiguity, navigate a certain amount of uncertainty and have a more generalist skill set. There’s also a different level of risk when you’re working at an early-stage startup, as our coverage of layoffs in startup land has illustrated.
“I wouldn’t want to disqualify people because they worked at a big company if they’ve only had a couple of years of experience. But if it’s been 10 years in four different big companies, it’s going to be a hell of a transition to a startup,” Quintero points out.
For senior staff, you can often get a pretty decent idea of how well they fit your mission and culture based on their LinkedIn profile, recent job titles and the companies they’ve worked at. But you’ll find a fair bit of variability in junior and mid-level candidates’ skills and experience, even among people who have seemingly similar experience sets. In such cases, an in-depth conversation is indispensable.
Similarly, it can be very hard to find executive-level employees because those roles can be quite variable, too. “At the senior level, [sourcing based on work history] works really well. If someone has over five years of experience, you can understand quite a bit about their competency, interests and their mission from their work history,” says Quintero. “That isn’t to say that people can’t pivot, but when you’re hiring the first few employees, you’re generally not hiring for big pivots. You’re hiring people who have done something adjacent previously and can hit the ground running. Does this person’s work history scream, ‘oh my god, I want to talk to them’?”
For technical roles, Quintero says listing 20 to 50 donor companies makes for a good starting point. Look up everyone with relevant work experience who works for those companies or has worked there in the past. Then you go through these people’s work histories and add new donor companies to the list. (Come to think of it, that’s very similar to the process for finding the right investors for your startup.)
To bolster this list of potential candidates, take a different tack: Instead of finding companies to poach from, you can look for candidates directly using keyword searches.
“We were looking for a front-end engineer for a company that builds [a GitHub clone] for mechanical engineers,” explains Quintero, referring to Five Flute, whose pitch deck we tore down last year. “We asked ourselves why someone would be passionate about this mission. What should their background be? So we looked at everybody who had studied mechanical engineering and is now working as a front-end developer. We also looked for people who had certain mechanical-engineering-centric keywords (like CAD or CNC) on their profiles.”
However, that process actually wasn’t super helpful, Quintero says. However, they did find success by searching along those lines for people with backgrounds in architecture. “Architects have a real appreciation for the built environment and design systems. In summary, try to think about the career journey of the people who you know are going to resonate with your story.”
It’s important to remember that it isn’t about hiring as fast as possible but about hiring the best person possible. This is a process that requires time and effort, one that evolves over several months.
“Our model involves us helping you have about five conversations every week. That is tricky for hiring, because you have different people at different stages of the hiring funnel, but it’s amazing for learning. In the first week, you start learning about the different hypotheses and archetypes, then the next week, you start putting candidates back into the funnel and focus on [what you learned in week one]. Then you repeat the process,” Quintero said. “This iterative learning is very hard to do with a recruiting firm outside your company. You can pull it off with a motivated internal recruiter, but as an early-stage startup, you probably don’t have one. So founders just have to shoulder that burden themselves.”
Getting to those five calls per week is a numbers game: Once you understand how many people you need to contact to get five candidates on the phone, you can work backward and calculate the numbers from there.
“The statistics of hiring are pretty consistent from market to market and role to role. We’ll often see pretty high open rates for our emails — typically around 85% across the email sequences. We get a pretty consistent 20% to 25% response rate, and of those, 5% to 10% might be interested,” Quintero summarizes. Doing the math, it means that if you want to talk to five people per week, you’ll need to trawl 1,500 LinkedIn profiles every week as your top-of-funnel.
Hiring for startups is particularly hard, not least because the best candidates aren’t out there looking for a new job: They are in the middle of building something elsewhere.
“Many of the best candidates, especially technical candidates, have never applied for a job in their life,” Quintero explains. “They move from job to job because people reach out to them saying, ‘Hey, here’s an interesting opportunity.’ So the question is: How can you get in touch with those people?”
That makes it clear why a company like Quintero’s exists in the first place: Being able to outsource a few thousand clicks and searches makes a lot of sense for busy startup founders. “You can do it via referrals or you can do it through this kind of grind, but there’s virtually no middle ground for a company at this stage. The better candidates don’t need to list themselves on job sites or hiring platforms. A big part of the problem is figuring out where your best candidates are, who are not applying to your job ads, engaging them and getting them into your hiring funnel.”