Ace your next hire!
You’ve just raised a round and you’re looking to make your first few hires. How can you hire the right fit for your team?
Deciding who to hire is significant at any stage of a business, but is crucial for early stage startups. But there’s one major misconception about hiring that costs organisations time and money — hiring is framed on job titles and not the job to be done. The impact of a ‘false-positive’ hire can be significant in a small time looking to hit ambitious goals. It increases cost significantly, can impact the morale of a team and can slow down projects.
The point of an organisation is to create value for customers, so any hire should be increasing capability to create even more value for customers or value for more customers (or both!).
To illustrate the misconception, let’s paint a picture:
In an early stage company, the founder has started to get some traction with a few customers. She believes they need to build more to accelerate value for customers/gain new customers.
She realises there are too many things they are doing manually, and there are aspects of their product that need to be made easier for the customer. The website keeps crashing, payments are getting missed and support calls are flooding. The founder decides they need to automate and build more, and brings on a CTO (chief technology officer) to tackle these problems.
Issue → Framing your “hiring solution” through a job title doesn’t acknowledge the problems you need solved.
This is because there is no uniform taxonomy for job titles. A CTO title is used for a 3, 30, 300 or even 3000 person startup, but the engineering and product issues are extremely varied, and require different experiences and skill sets. In an early stage startup, you need to understand the customer, and build to solve their problems. In a scale up, you need an engineering leader who is adept and experienced at building a strong engineering culture, hiring and organising teams. Both these roles require vastly different experiences, with a note that the best senior leaders are those who have done excellent work in both smaller and larger environments.
So, what should we do?
Instead of looking for the solution, communicate the ‘Job to be Done’ (JTBD). To do so, you need to first acknowledge the current state of the business, what the problems to be solved are today and for the next year (in your opinion), and therefore the projects and JTBD that the new role will take on.
Below is a simple checklist that outlines the questions a founder or hirer should go through to identify the JTBD they should be looking for when they go out to the market to look for their next hire:
Coming back to our founder
By undertaking a proper decision making process, she realises that what this startup actually needs is a senior engineer/engineering lead. A CTO is someone who makes strategic decisions about technology and showcases the right engineering/coding practices. That’s completely different to our JTBD of automating processes and building our product in order to accelerate growth.
But what’s wrong with handing a wrong title?
You might be thinking — is there a problem with a job title that’s not accurate to the role? If the employee does his job well, there mustn’t be an issue right?
Not only will there be dissonance between the CTO’s idea of the role and their actual expectations but as the business grows, the founder may actually need the actual CTO role. But how do you hire another CTO when you theoretically already have one? And that’s where the issue lies with handing a wrong job title. The process of undoing the misconception will cost the business a lot of time and likely money, when it could all have been avoided.
Two considerations should take place in the hiring process.
- Are you sure these are the projects that are the most important? Will they actually shift the dial and move your company towards your goals?
- If you are not experienced in those particular skill sets/capabilities — how do you know those are the ones that will make sure the project succeeds?
So, before going out to hire, it is necessary to speak to an expert who has done this multiple times. Otherwise, you risk not understanding the problem that needs to be solved, the skills that are required to solve that problem, the calibre of skills needed, how to assess/compare skill sets and therefore making a bad hire.
You could turn to a CEO that’s built a successful startup, an early stage operator (in this case an engineering leader), or anyone experienced in the hiring process. Here at NZScaleUp, we provide talent acquisition services and have experience in building world-class product design/engineering teams at Canva, Airtasker and some of Australia’s most successful tech startups.
