# Introduction ## Recruiting - The 3rd Crucial Startup Skill - [For Entrepreneurs](https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/recruiting/) ![[Hiring - The third skill.png]] - By bringing on your own **full-time recruiter**, early in your growth, you get total focus on this function. - **CEO involvement** is critical - The recruiter’s job: **sourcing**, and **managing candidate flow** through the funnel - A good recruiter will spend time with existing employees and work through their networks from all their past jobs, supplying lists of people to help jog their memories. - **Building a brand**: Companies with a strong talent brand (as measured by LinkedIn’s Talent Brand Index) see a 43% decrease in cost per hire, and 20% faster rate of hire. - The **scorecard** makes sourcing and interviewing much easier, as now you have a clear tool that all interviewers can use to score candidates. - There is a good chance that somewhere down the road, there will be a trigger that makes your **top passive candidates** open to looking, and you want to be top of mind when that happens. - Few founders and managers have had any training on the best way to conduct an interview, and fail to ask the questions that get to the heart of whether a candidate possesses the key competencies. - When hiring **senior people**, I have found that **references** are far more important than the interview. - Selling isn’t over when your candidate signs your offer letter. ## Good hiring practices - [AVC](https://avc.com/2012/06/mba-mondays-best-hiring-practices/) - **The manager who is directly responsible for the person being hired should draft the job spec** and it should be signed off on by the CEO and whomever is in charge of HR (which could be the CEO in a small company). - **Your company should have a jobs page.** Even if you are a five person startup, you should have one. It should articulate what it is like to work at your company and list any open jobs. - **You must go out and find the talent you want to hire.** You can use your existing team, that is where the best leads always come from. You can use your network. You can use recruiters, both contingency and retained, and you can use services like LinkedIn and Indeed. You want to cast a wide net and work hard to source the best candidates you can. - Once the candidates start coming in, you will need to vet them to determine who gets an interview and who does not. Someone inside the company must lead this process. - You will want to interview a decent number of folks for every position. There are no hard rules for this, but the more people you meet, the better job you will do with the hire. - Many companies like **a 15 minute phone call (the phone screen)** as the first filter into the interview process. - Once you get to face to face interviews, you will want to figure out how to get as many folks in the company to meet the candidates as possible. - **Many employees don't know how to interview and you should teach them the basics** as well as educate them on what you are looking to learn from their interview. Some training on interviewing as well as a quick feedback form for each employee to fill out will provide consistency and clarity from the employee interview process. - **Most CEOs I know interview every hire their company makes until they get to be more than 100 employees (or more).** Even if you have a head of HR and a top notch recruiting team, the responsibility for hiring is yours and yours only. - **When you are ready to make the hire, you must prepare an offer letter.** The offer letter will outline the compensation you are offering and any other salient terms of the employement offer. ## Recruiting outside of your personal network - [Stripe](https://stripe.com/fr/atlas/guides/recruiting) - **Step 1:** Determine what roles you want to hire for and their core responsibilities - **Step 2:** Post a role with a clear, motivating job description on your website - **Step 3:** Fill your pipeline with excellent candidates - **Step 4:** Talk to candidates in a way that gets them excited - **Step 5:** Keep it up ## 7 Reasons Your Growth Startup Is Hiring Too Junior - [StaySaaSy](https://staysaasy.com/management/2020/09/11/Hiring-Too-Junior.html) - **Reason 1:** Habit - **Reason 2:** Hubris - **Reason 3:** Fear - **Reason 4:** Money Issues - **Reason 5:** Miscalculation of Necessary Skills For Right Now - **Reason 6:** Miscalculation of Necessary Skills In the Future - **Reason 7:** Arguments About What-Seniors-Need ## How To Get Better at Recruiting. (We All Need To) - [SaaStr](https://www.saastr.com/6-tips-to-be-better-at-recruiting/) - Force yourself to **interview 30 candidates for each VP position**. - Hire **external recruiters** — and be very good to them. - Hire an **internal recruiter**, too, as early as you can. - Find **screening filters** you can apply before the first Zoom / face-to-face. - Assume your personal and extended network does NOT source the candidate. - Listen. **Look for flags**. - Don’t assume because you are so charismatic and your startup is so great you can close anyone. Bring in the cavalry (VC, business angels, etc.). - **Drop other stuff.** Almost nothing really matters, once you have traction, other than building the team. ## Value Based Recruiting - [StaySaaSy](https://staysaasy.com/recruiting/2022/06/20/value-recruiting.html)) - Sales teams have a concept of value selling software: instead of doing a feature rundown and trying to impress with every widget and gizmo, **figure out what problems people are trying to solve and talk about how you can solve them**. - I cut out the scripted sell and went to a two step process when it came time to describe the role: 1. I always **ask people what the top things they are looking for in a new role**. This isn’t always the same as what they ask questions about, so it’s good context for answering questions. 2. Just **answer questions**. - Reminder: selling in recruiting is all about getting people to make the most informed decision (i.e. you’re not trying to convince or compel). As it turns out, the most informed decision is one where the candidate gets deep information about what they care about, not broad information about what they could care about. # Early stage hiring ## Hiring the initial team for seed stage startups - [Andrew Chen](https://www.saastr.com/what-your-first-100-hires-will-look-like/) - Hiring **T-shaped people** versus specialists - Try to get **doers** - **More candidate flow** solves a lot of problems - Interview for the actual work you’ll be doing, not skillset trivia - Raw intelligence is just one factor – don’t overestimate it ## What Order Should You Hire Your Management Team In? - [SaaStr](https://www.saastr.com/order-hire-management-team/) - Rough order to make hires in: - VPM: $0.2m ARR - **You really can and should try to hire your VP of Marketing as Early as $20k in MRR.** This will seem crazy early to many of you. But a great head of demand gen (or maybe growth hacking if you are SMB) should be very accretive at even $20k in MRR. Imagine you are organically growing 4x, so from, say, $200k in ARR this year to $800k by the end of the year. And your first VP of Marketing just increases qualified leads by 25%. That alone will pay for all her salary. - VPS: $1-$1.5m ARR - **You’ll probably be ready for your first VP of Sales by $1m in ARR.** We’ve talked about this a lot on SaaStr, but hiring a true VP of Sales before you have 2 reps hitting quota (and thus a repeatable, if not yet fully repeating process) is too early. But by $1m in ARR, you should have at least 2 reps hitting quota. Ideally, have your VP of Sales on board in time to hire reps 3-300. But asking her to hire the first ones before you’ve proven it out yourself? Disaster. - VPCS: $2m ARR - **You’ll probably be ready for your first VP of Customer Success by $2m-$3m in ARR.** The exact timing of this hire is a bit murkier to me than the others, but $2m-$3m ARR is probably a good target. You can hack customer success in the beginning with an individual contributor or two with some experience and a lot of chutzpah. - VPP: $3m-$4m ARR - **You probably won’t see it, but you’ll need a VP of Product by $4m-$5m in ARR.** Most first-time founders have never worked with a great VP of Product, so they don’t intuitively “get it”. But trust me. By the time you have 20-100 enterprise customers, 50-100+ workflows, 10+ configurations… it’s all just too complicated to do part-time, in your head. - VPE: $5m-$6m ARR - **You’ll need a VP of Engineering by $8m-$10m ARR. Earlier is better.** 90% of CTOs and founders struggle to hire engineers 10-100. They can attract a small, great team under them. But the burdens of recruiting beyond a pizza box or two, of creating thoughtful deployment processes, of maintaining legacy code, of code reviews, of putting together a DevOps team and a SecOps team and strategy and more … it’s too much. Someone else should spend half their time hiring, 25% of their time spotting issues, and 25% of their time planning. And this VPE role often involves zero code commits. - CFO: $10m ARR - COO: $20m ARR - **And if you find one or two earlier than this, that are great … well, pounce.** There’s always enough to do. The real answer is hire any Great VP you can find, even if it seems too early. The great ones are always accretive. ![[Who to hire when.png]] ## What Your First 100 Hires Will Look Like - [SaaStr](https://www.saastr.com/what-your-first-100-hires-will-look-like/) - **So on the Sales side we’ll need about 40 headcount at $10m ARR (to grow 100% the following year):** - 1 VP of Sales, and probably a VP or Director of Sales Ops, and at least one analyst under her (3) - Say 20 sales reps to fully hit the $20m ARR plan because we’re adding $10m in ARR next year, and more by the end of the year.  (That’s a yielded quota).  Really, we’ll want more than this toward the middle of the year because we’ll be adding so much net new bookings / MRR.  Budget for 25 at least. - Maybe 8 SDRs to support the sales reps in outbound, screening, etc.  Situations vary wildly, but a 1:3 ratio is good for modeling purposes. - Probably 3-4 Sales Directors to manage the 25 reps (8 reps per director is a standard ratio that works well), and the SDRs (8-10 per director; usually SDR managers can handle more reports than AE managers). - I’m not even breaking this down between inbound and outbound, or adding a distinct field sales function. You’ll probably want to add field sales (for Big Deals) by $10m ARR or so, another 2-3 headcount here, minimum. - **In Customer Success, we’ll probably need about 20 headcount:** - Assume $1.5m ARR per CSM.  So we’ll need about 15 CSMs to hit our plan for next year, although we can hire some later in the year, so we can call it 15 for now, and - A VP to manage them, 2 directors to manage half of the CSMs each, and probably an analyst to support her in data analysis, etc. (4). - **In Marketing, it can vary based on outside vendors, but I’m guessing 4-8 employees:** - VP Marketing - Director Demand Gen - Director, Field Marketing (events, etc.) - Content Marketing - Product Marketing - Probably, marketing’s own lead qualification reps to manage the MQLs (2-3). - **In Support, we want 24×7 support at this point, including phone support. Let’s assume that takes 5 headcount, minimum, ideally 6.** - **Tech & Product** - In Product, we’re going to need at least 4 FTEs, and even that isn’t much fat: - A VP Product to manage the whole thing - 2-3 Product Managers to manage segments of the product, integrations, releases, etc. - In DevOps/TechOps, we’re going to want probably 3-4 folks just to ensure 24×7 coverage.  Really, 4 would be a lot better than 3.  PagerDuty is tiring.  Should we count DBAs etc. in here?  Maybe it’s really 6-7. - In Engineering, I think rough-and-tough we’ll want 20 folks.  That’s two “pizza box” teams plus a few engineers to do crazy / next gen stuff and a few to just focus on refactors, back-end, etc.  We’ll want 2 designers that can work with front-end team by this point. - And finally, we need QA, probably at least 8 QA engineers + 1 manager. You can use RainforestQA or something else to get the headcount down, but otherwise, best case assume 1:2 coverage. So with 20 engineers writing code, we’re gonna need 8 folks on QA team minimum once things are humming, plus a boss for the team. - So that’s about 40 in product and engineering you’re gonna want at $10m ARR or so. - Or 110 altogether.  Plus whomever you need in G&A, finance, etc. - I went over 100 a bit, I know, so cut back from there proportionately.   ## Whom should you hire at a startup? - [Whom Should you Hire at a Startup? | by Mark Suster | Both Sides of the Table](https://bothsidesofthetable.com/whom-should-you-hire-at-a-startup-bc47cac70e49): - **Only Hire A+ People Who Punch Above Their Weight Class** - [Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude Over Aptitude) | by Mark Suster | Both Sides of the Table](https://bothsidesofthetable.com/whom-should-you-hire-at-a-startup-attitude-over-aptitude-b19ebb7f0357) 1. Only hire A players 2. Find people to “punch above their weight class” 3. ABR: Always be recruiting 4. Don’t worry about exact “roles” 5. Attitude over Aptitude 6. Culture matters 7. Don’t over-sell - I don’t mean you shouldn’t sell hard on the virtues of your company and why you’re the next Google — you should. If for nothing else you want all of the talented people you interview to spread the gospel whether they join or not. - What I’m talking about is this — if somebody is thinking about joining but you can tell they’re not convinced don’t cross the line to get them to join. ## Compensation - Early-stage hiring - [SaaSy Questions #1: Compensation Heuristics - Stay SaaSy](https://blog.staysaasy.com/p/saasy-questions-1-compensation-heuristics) - **The Thanksgiving Dinner Test**: Is compensation likely to create upsetness? - **The All-Hands Test**: Would explaining your team’s compensation publicly cause a riot? - **The Millionaire Test**: Does your team feel like they could clear a million dollars if you hit it big? # Methodology ## Who Methodology - Introduction - [Who](https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194) book - Summary: [Who method](https://medium.com/mbreads/book-summary-who-c4a437d8ae3a) ## Scorecard - "If you take someone who lacks the experience and the know-how but has the *real desire and the willingness to work his tail off to get the job done, he’ll make up for what he lacks*. And that proved true nine times out of ten. It was one way we were able to grow so fast." - Made in America - Sam Walton ## Writing a job description - [How to Write a Brilliant Job Description](https://www.process.st/how-to-write-a-job-description/) ## Structuring the Hiring Process - [Re:work tools](https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/structure-hiring-with-rework-tools/) (Google) - Here Are All the Documents You Need to Hire Like Google ([Inc](https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/here-are-all-the-documents-you-need-to-hire-like-google-absolutely-free.html)) - Full recruiting process at Bolt - [Shared Google Doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z3gc_ouyeGw2pBrJpDU8d5kHJjxg2Lv1XRANv562j4E/edit) ## Sourcing candidates - Hiring hack ![[Hiring Hack - Job description.jpg]] ## Interview Questions ### STAR model - [STAR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_result) model (used at Google & Amazon) ### 3 [questions](https://ideas.ted.com/the-3-questions-this-ceo-uses-to-weed-out-jerks/) from Boxed CEO to identify assholes to candidates 1. **“Tell me about yourself, but you can’t mention anything that’s on your resume”** - “If they’re hired, we’ll spend more waking hours with each other than with our families, so I’m checking, can they carry on a regular conversation?” 2. **“Which country will be the first to make it illegal for humans to drive cars? And what year do you think it will happen?”**: ultimately, what he’s looking for is an attitude of curiosity and openness. - A “thought-provoking” query to test how candidates think on the spot - Huang says, “The only wrong answer is when people freeze up and say, ‘I don’t know.’” - In his experience, he adds, “The best answers have been from folks who think about it and say something like, ‘If that’s going to be the case, then every car sold there would have to be autonomous. Otherwise, how could you make it illegal?’ They go one level deeper. ” 3. **“Rate your knowledge of technology trends on a scale of 1 to 10”** - Since the world is constantly changing, anyone who calls themselves a 9 or 10 is probably overhyping their know-how ### Google interviews [done by Page & Brin](http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-job-interview-process-questions-larry-page-and-sergey-brin-ask-2017-5?r=UK&IR=T) : - “**We're not really sure what to ask you. Ask yourself the questions**. What questions would you ask yourself, if you were us?” (A common tactic they used to help judge a candidate's character) ## Peter Thiel: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” - “It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that every is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular.” (Zero to One) ### Mathilde Collin’s favorite interview questions - “On a scale from 0 to 10 how happy are you at your current job?” (most common answer: 7) - “What would make you go from 7 to 10 ?” ### Favorite hiring question from Tyler Wilson (partner at a16z) - **"Do you prefer to eat for-profit sushis or non-profit sushis?"** - Answer from Marc Andreessen: “the idea of non-profit sushis makes me so nauseous, that I want to throw up on stage.” ## Scorecard's question - Questions [[(to finish) Ressources - List of questions - Scorecard’s competencies]] ## GO / NO decision ### Three questions from [Amazon](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-jobs-executive-questions-2018-8) for the recruiter 1. **“Will you admire this person?”** 2. **“Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering?”** 3. **“Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?”** (even not job-related) ### How to Know if a Key Hire is an A or a B (or even a C) - [SaaStr](https://www.saastr.com/know-key-hire-b-even-c/) - **As a first-time manager, you really won’t have the experience to know really who is an A, B or C player for any position you haven’t held yourself**. It’s hard to judge if you haven’t done it before and/or if you are a first-time hiring manager.  - **But there is an easy hack / fix**: - Get an advisor / mentor who has done it before — and well — to interview your final list candidates. She or he will know. - **And second, one thing is clear: you’ll know 90 days in**. - A’s: - (x) step up and own more than they are told to own - And (y) get more of these things done that others don’t - And (z) attract the top talent to work with them. - You’ll see this with crystal clarity in the first 45-60 days.  90 max.  Everyone else is a B or C. - **Make a change by Day 91.** # Specific process for certain positions - When you don’t know how to recruit for some specific positions, go take coffees with the 5 best people in this area in other startups. It helps identify why this person are so good, and what you’re looking for. ([Video - Building Amazing Teams with Keith Rabois](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFfXn_jViaM)) ## CEOs - Interesting podcast by Andrew Wilkinson (Tiny CEO), on how to recruit CEOs for his companies (can be applied to other hires). Tries to value his time as much as possible : [I Own 40 Companies, But Don't Run Any Of Them - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=RzwS8iUHeQo) ## Managers [**The Most Valuable Question When Interviewing Managers**](https://staysaasy.com/recruiting/2021/02/15/Top-Question-Interviewing-Managers.html) - **How many people have you hired, fired, and promoted?** - **How many people have you hired?** - If they’ve hired a bunch, ask some quick follow-ups to understand how they did it: - What’s your offer acceptance rate? Where do you want it to be? - What’s your top source for top-of-funnel pipeline? - How do you make sure you’re counteracting bias in the hiring process? - **How many people have you fired?** - The biggest red flag for this question is anyone is if someone acts like firing is anything besides a life-changing event that requires the utmost seriousness and attention. - **How many people have you promoted?** - The biggest red flag for this question is multi-year management stints with very low promotion counts. Dive into that signal to uncover if it was happenstance, a faulty reward mechanism, or a failure in team execution. - **You should be able to get through this three-part question in under 15 minutes.** By the end of it you’ll have a quick but useful read on the candidate’s ability to hire, fire, and promote effectively. A nice benefit of this rapid-fire discovery is that it explores the candidate’s ability to communicate effectively when concise information is needed. ## VP Marketing - [The Top 10 Questions to Ask a VP of Marketing in an Interview (Updated) | SaaStr](https://www.saastr.com/top-10-questions-to-ask-a-vp-of-marketing-in-an-interview/) ## VP Sales [[Hiring a VP Sales]] ## Sales Manager - [35 Sales Manager Job Interview Questions](https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/interview-questions-to-ask-a-sales-manager-candidate) ## Sales [[Hiring Sales]] ## Engineering Manager - [Soft Skills for Managers](https://staysaasy.com/product/2020/09/06/soft-skills-for-managers.html)