Hiring Advice From Legendary Founders

- Recruit the Best, Think Long Term

Startups face unique challenges when it comes to recruiting. Finding the right talent is time-consuming and burdensome, especially for smaller teams with limited marketing budgets and lower salary payouts. It can take startups weeks or months to open new positions, interview candidates, and finalize hires. 

And because early-stage companies are relatively unknown, they may not have a reputation in the open market. They have to work harder to capture the attention of potential job seekers. 

Once applications come in, leaders can’t afford to waste hours sifting through low-quality resumes when they have so much else on their plates. Given these realities, teams should be focused on growing their business, not on recruiting, which is a specialized skill on its own. 

In the startup world, there is also little room for recruiting errors. Companies can’t bring in mediocre teammates if they intend to disrupt or transform the status quo. Additionally, potential hires not only need relevant skills, but they also have to fit culturally with the rest of the group.

With today’s professionals jumping quickly between opportunities, it’s difficult to retain talent long enough to get young businesses off the ground.

In short, recruiting and retaining good people at startups is hard. Hiring talent is never risk-free, but it weighs more heavily on early-stage companies. 

We did some research to see what the best of the best had to say about recruiting for startups and scale-ups. Over and over, we heard the same advice spoken in different ways. Even as the startup ecosystem has changed, two broader tenets still ring true:
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1. Hire the Best
2. Think Long Term

We extracted these themes from the following video interviews and compiled a consolidated version for you to share with your group:

• Steve Jobs (Apple)
• Brian Chesky (Airbnb)
• John Collison (Stripe)
• Matt Blumberg (Return Path)
• Mark Newman (HireVue)
• Elon Musk (Tesla)

Hire the Best
Without fail, startups must hire the best talent for their specific needs and vision. Not everyone is cut out for the pace and ambiguity of young companies. Those who are looking to scale operations for innovative services and products need employees who can charge forth with little guidance. 
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Startups need people who aren’t just looking for a paycheck. They need personnel who are passionate about building great companies. Once businesses grow beyond a certain size, founders can’t be involved in every decision. They have to delegate to others, which is much easier when everyone on the roster is an all-star. 

Don’t settle. Although it may take longer to find the right people, the effort is worth it. So much of a company’s success depends on the talent involved. Give yourself the best chance to be one of the 10% of startups that survive by hiring well. 


Think Long Term
Startups live in the tension of addressing the urgent versus planning for the future. It’s easy to focus time and energy on putting out daily fires. However, you can’t neglect the long-term trajectory of your business.

Hiring decisions, especially for the first 10-50 employees, compound over time. The people you bring in execute your strategy and help you fight through the unique challenges of building a company from scratch. 

Your hires also go on to recruit others and have a major impact on how you scale over time. If you recruit a B-level player, that person will likely recruit 3-5 other B-level players throughout his or her tenure. Before long, your company is filled with average talent that performs...average. And average isn’t good enough.


Work with Funded.club
For fast-growing startups, hiring the best and recruiting for the long term are extremely hard to do effectively alongside all other critical needs. After 20 years in recruiting and 5 years in startups, Ray Gibson set up Funded.club to provide startups and scale-ups with a cost-efficient way to grow their teams with the right people. As entrepreneurs, we know what it’s like to be in your shoes.

Our expert recruiters work closely with you to develop an ideal candidate profile. We run all of the marketing and advertising for your open positions. Through our selection process, we’ll identify 3-5 exceptional individuals for your team to interview and manage every step after that, too. Overall, we set you up for success without burdening your team or burning your capital.
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​​If, like us, you believe in rainbows, unicorns, 10x developers and hungry sales hackers, come and join our club!

​Start a chat or book a call to receive free hiring tips from startup veterans with >20 years experience in HR and recruiting.

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