I’m at the stage of my consultancy where I’m looking to hire a full-time team instead of a collection of part-time/subcontracted freelancers.
It’s very challenging to go from one full-timer to 2-3. I’ll learn at some point if other stages are harder, but the first hire seems scary, and I don’t want to mess it up.
I also think hiring two full-timers at a time may be better, to create more of a team, rather than just boss and employee 1. But that may be my overly optimistic and ambitious thinking, which sometimes lands me in over my head.
I have a bunch of YouTube videos saved and have many books I’m reading on the subject.
But this one from Kauffman has been helpful and to the point right now. It’s hosted by Matt Blumberg, co-founder and CEO of Return Path.
Recruiting & Top Challenges
1) Defining the job properly
Take the time to define it properly, what do you really need?
Do you have on paper what their role is? Take the time to define what you need to fill the gaps of your current skillset.
2) Putting enough time into recruiting process
Think of it as seriously as marrying someone. You’re going to spend a lot of time with them.
3) Ending the process too early
He also says that recruiting doesn’t end until 90 days after the employee has started.
The onboarding piece is particularly important to make sure the new hire sticks.
Not Every Employee Can Scale with the Company
This is a super important takeaway – you can’t expect every employee to be a fit for your company at all stages of the organization.
Why I’m Looking at Startup Advice Now
I run a consultancy, trying to become an agency, so why am I looking at startup advice?
Before I would search for “agency advice” like “agency hiring tips” and while that can bring up some information, you get a lot of non-experts writing listicles, or conversely, you get former agency owners with their own new consulting practice trying to sell you on their agency training package or $1,000/hr consulting (not saying it’s not worth it).
Now I’ve learned that searching for “startup hiring tips” is better to find higher quality content produced because there’s a lot more money backing startups to succeed. (Seed funds, angels, VCs put out a lot of advice).
Since I’m the only full-timer at my consultancy, it’s comparable to a one or two-man startup that might currently be in Y Combinator and trying to nail down product-market fit.
So the advice for “how to hire your first employee for a startup” is extremely relevant.
It’s also my opinion that agencies need to think like a startup product company and not just be a staffing agency that can only ever dream of a 30% net margin one day.
All Companies are the Same, All Companies are Different
I’m sure Peter Drucker has some great quotes for this somewhere, but one realization I had in this process is the fact that all companies have core sameness in some areas like: hiring, taxes, leadership, HR, ops, and management. These are core business components that have universal principles – mainly because they deal with humans and the government, which is universal across any company. There are small nuanced differences, but a one-person startup should follow hiring principles for their first entry-level digital marketer that a multi-national corporation should for their entry-level digital marketer.
On the flipside, every business is different for other elements such as their business model, industry, narrow target market, specific product or service, the collective hive mind of the team, and more. So the process here are very different across companies. A startup hiring a marketer can write up the draft for their needs in 2 hours and post it on RemoteOK.io, while a multi-national will have many goals, meetings and signoffs before they can put up a job post.
I think it’s important to understand when the universal principles apply and when they don’t – it’s hard to know the difference all the time, which takes experience and learning from others to figure out.
Next, I need to dig into the Startup CEO video.