Lesson 1: Recruiting Guidebook

Recruiting Guidebook

Steps to start defining your hires and proactively recruiting.

Defining the Need

Before you post the job, ask yourself “why am I making this hire?” Asking these types of questions will help you drive clarity in the beginning of the recruitment process. Your business model is changing rapidly so if you’re looking to hire a more senior candidate (Director level and above) or a specialist, there can be a lot of risk associated with that. There are employment costs that you might not be considering at the start of your search like benefits, taxes, or risk of layoffs to name a few. All things that could shape how you plan to hire for a specific role.

Shown in the following pages is a two-question framework to help you identify long term functional needs for your business and map those to the skill gaps on your team. This can be a great way to ensure you are hiring for the right role or to map out your hiring plan for the next 9 months.

Why are you hiring for this role?

Think about the next 6-9 months at your company and the projects that need to be completed in that timeframe. Try using the framework in Exercise 1 to identify which projects are immediate fires that could be put out with a short-term resource vs. which projects are long term needs and might demand a full-time hire.

Gut check: If you could put out some of your immediate fires at the company, how might that change the long-term horizon for the work to be done and the roles you need to hire for?

 Defining the Need

Ask yourself, “why am I making this hire?”

● Step 1: Outline the projects you need to complete over the next 3-6-9 months.

● Step 2: Identify the resources you need to complete each of those projects.

● Step 3: Group the resources by function and identify trends over time.

● Step 4: Based on those trends you can now pinpoint your recurring needs, which indicates the potential roles you should hire for

● Step 5: *Remember to evaluate your current team against your hiring plan

Additional Questions to Consider

Should you Hire for Breadth or Depth?

There’s value when you’re hiring early-on in having employees that are flexible and highly adaptable. Early-stage companies often make the mistake of hiring someone too senior or too specialized. If the business pivots, you may no longer need that person in the same capacity. In the early stages we often recommend looking for a more junior candidate who has breadth of experience instead of depth and is excited to mould and change with your company. After you have scaled to a certain size and your long-term needs are better defined, that’s when it makes the most sense to start hiring senior or specialized candidates.

Are you open to remote?

It will impact your talent pool! But be sure to consider all the factors that go into managing a distributed team - check out Building Distributed Teams by Sabrina Kelly

 Exercise 2: Roles and Responsibilities Matrix

Outline your current team in a matrix. List their strengths and primary responsibilities in one row and their weaknesses and future roadblocks in another. Then consider how they map to the long-term challenges you laid out. Look for the gaps between long term needs and currently available talent. Use the functional needs you defined in Question 1 (Product, Sales, etc) to look for gaps or opportunities on your team. With the CEO focused on fundraising, you’ll have a gap in Sales over the next 9 months which indicates you need to hire a

CEO COO, Software Engineer, Intern/full-time person in that capacity. Your COO currently owns too many things and doesn’t want to keep managing the product, which indicates you should bring in product support for your COO to be most effective in their role. In terms of opportunities, you might consider giving your Software Engineer professional development to grow them into a VP over time and your intern could be a great temporary solution for your customer service needs for the next 3 months while you source a full-time product person.

 Responsible for cash flow, partnership lead gen, fundraising & investor management, and product vision.

Responsible for brand management, data management and driving the product vision. Manages the team & corporate development.

Skilled developer - handles all coding and owns the product testing and development. Very hands on and involved.

Breadth of experience, willing to get their hands dirty and do whatever is asked of them, multi-functional and good at problem solving.

Going into raising a round - won’t have time to generate and nurture partnership leads.

Currently owns too many things. Wants to keep Corporate Development and Brand Management.

Struggles to translate business requirements into product features.

  Writing a Job Description

Below are some questions to consider that will help you craft your job description:

1. Why does this role exist?

Create a two-sentence summary of the job’s purpose: one sentence that focuses on the core responsibility of the job and one for its purpose. Try explaining in simple terms what the role is and why you need to hire for it.

2. What does success look like in this role?

Describe 4 - 6 measurable performance outcomes (meaning they have a number, date or KPI tied to them) that this role needs to accomplish to be considered successful.

3. What are the core competencies?

List out the competencies you would expect a competitive candidate to have on their resume - competencies are past behaviours that indicate future success in your company as it relates to the mission and values. *Be careful not to confuse these with credentials, which are experiences or licensing that you require.

If you’re looking to hire for a senior role, you should first talk with a mentor or advisor who you respect in that function. Ask them what qualities you should look for in this hire. Mentors can be a great resource to help you think through what would make a candidate great and they can also be a great person to help you interview the finalists for the position.

Proactive recruiting will help you build a pipeline of quality candidates for a specific role, develop your company brand, and win quality candidates over time. This guidebook will take you through some of the steps and suggestions for effective and efficient recruiting.

Why Proactive Recruiting Matters

The reason that recruiting matters is straightforward; you will find better candidates when you take the time to recruit thoughtfully. Recruiting can be incredibly time consuming and as an early-stage founder the onus for hiring will likely be put on you. A common mistake that founders make is thinking that by simply posting their job across a variety of job sites the right applicants will find you. The unfortunate truth is that as a start-up, very few candidates even know your company exists, and even fewer are trying to work for you. So, in the same way you would think about building your product brand to attract customers, you must build a company brand to attract employees.

Recruiting is both a short and long-term gain for the company. Ideally, proactive recruiting will help you fill your immediate roles. It’s also equally important to understand the benefit of your efforts when candidates don’t end up filling a role. By making the effort to network with a highly relevant subset of candidates for a given role, you are building a valuable long-term pipeline for your business. For example, you have coffee with the VP of Engineering from your top competitor and she declines your offer because she thinks your company is too early-stage to take a risk on today. Having that one great conversation with her in the short-term could lead to her reconnecting later when she reads the news about your Series A. In the same way that your sales cycle might take longer than one interaction, your recruiting efforts might take longer than one job posting.

   Building a Pipeline

There are two different types of candidates pipelines you should be thinking about building when hiring, and the strategy for each looks a little different. The first is your inbound pipeline, which are the candidates who are finding your job through external channels. The second is your outbound pipeline, which are the candidates you are initiating contact with based on experience and interest.

Inbound

Building Your Brand

Spending a few hours building out a relevant brand presence for your company will stimulate better candidate engagement. Think about it: if someone reached out to you with a job offer and you couldn’t find any information on their company, would you want to work there?

Building out your employer brand doesn’t have to be a lot of work or require a big marketing push. There are many free options across most job-boards that allow you to build out simple pages for your company. One of your interns could easily spend a few hours building out your online presence with up-to-date information about your culture, vision, team, and values. That way candidates have a place to do their own research on the company after they talk to you.

  Quality over Quantity

Focus on quality before quantity when thinking about

your inbound strategy. Although posting your job on a larger site offers the appeal of a bigger candidate base, that candidate pool is entirely untargeted. You’re likely to get more applications with that approach but you’re also guaranteed to spend more time disqualifying candidates and there’s a chance you’ll end up with the same number, or even fewer quality-leads than a more targeted approach would yield.

Instead, think about posting on sites that are relevant for your company stage and targeted at the type of role you’re hiring for. As a rule of thumb, it’s always worth posting your job on at least three free sites to start out with, then consider using some paid sites if you aren’t getting the quality of inbound candidates you’d like to see. You might have to invest some money upfront to post your job and attract the right candidate but that’s a worthwhile investment.

Paying to post one job on a start-up-specific job board in your geography is a small cost compared to the time lost on vetting a high volume of low-quality candidates or paying an external agency to run the search. To find which sites are best for you, usually a quick internet search for “start-up jobs in [your city]” will quickly tell you which sites are relevant, and which seem less trafficked.

   Tap Into Your Team

Asking your team to help you make the next hire can.

serve dual purposes. First, it will help align the team on what an ideal candidate looks like and creates accountability to help with the search. Involving your team from the beginning allows them to actively engage with the search and if you loop them in to help with interviews, they know what to look for. Second, it will allow you to leverage a bigger network. Try hosting a 30-minute meeting during which you ask your team what they think are the potential-candidate qualities that drive success at your company. Then ask them about different events or meetups they attend, companies they’ve worked with in the past, or networks they are a part of and lean into those. The goal is to make your team feel empowered and accountable to help.

Ask Your Advisors

Most founders go to mentors and advisors as a great

resource to help advertise a job description. Something that can help you elevate that ask and support your own hiring process is to ask your mentors to tell you about the best hire they ever made, or best person they ever worked with in the role you are hiring for. That approach will help give your mentor a more dynamic understanding of this role so they can more easily identify people in their network who could be a fit, it will also give you a list of qualities to look for in candidates. This approach makes the hire more collaborative because you are synthesizing the ideal candidate description with your advisor instead of asking them to do it for themselves.

  Make a “Hit-List”

Start by making a “hit list” of 5-10 companies that you.

respect. You might include other members of your team when you make this list as it relates to the role, for example if you are hiring your first CTO and you have a Senior Developer on the team - they will likely be very helpful in creating this list because they understand your tech stack. Also, don’t be afraid to target larger companies! They might have employees who have scaled an independent product inside their larger department that’s akin to the experience you’re looking for but be sure to consider level compared to company size.

Try thinking of the following prompts to get your list started:

● Companies who built something like what you’re trying to build

● Companies who are relevant in your industry comparative to what you’re trying to build

● Companies who have a strong presence /

brand in the geography you’re recruiting in

● Companies who scaled through a similar

growth-curve you are entering (think of the most relevant growth-curve for the role: that could be employee count for a People focused role or revenue for Sales and Biz Dev, etc.)

You don’t want to ‘over-outreach’ to any of the companies on your list, so spend some time on LinkedIn and try to narrow down to 1-2 people at each company who you think, based off their career history, could be interesting for your business. Then reach out to them and see if they’re interested in getting a coffee. Check out the next section for a template on how to engage passive candidates.

  Capture Passive Candidates

There are several ways to search for passive talent and

many platforms you can use, but for the purposes of this guidebook (and considering that you are likely not looking to move into sourcing as a career) we’ll limit these instructions to using LinkedIn for sourcing.

Boolean Searching

Boolean searching in LinkedIn is a way to pull relevant profiles based on keywords. Think about keywords that will narrow the candidate pool while helping you zero in on the right talent. Experiment with different keywords and different combinations of keywords to find the right talent - you can create a search by grouping the keywords you are looking for using:

● “OR” if you are looking for either keyword

● “AND” if you are looking for a combination of

keywords

● “NOT” if you are excluding a keyword

● “- “use quotations to search a specific term

An example for a mix of terms you might use when searching for a Sales hire is below:

    “Sales Executive” OR “Account Executive” “Enterprise Sales” OR “Inside Sales” OR “SDR” “Data” OR “Analytics” OR “Business Intelligence”

 When you’re hiring for specific skill sets, you can narrow down your candidate pool by using more specific keywords, so instead of using “JavaScript,” search for “Vue.js” OR “Graph” If that search still returns too many profiles you can further refine it by combining the keywords, “Vue.js” AND “Graph.”

Try sharing these keyword strings with other members of your leadership team and ask them to do a quick search and share any matching profiles from their network with you. This way you aren’t asking them to comb through every LinkedIn connection they have - instead you are facilitating the search for them and getting stronger, more relevant profiles in return.