Recruiting mistakes early-stage founders keep making

Because of my work, I frequently find myself chatting with early stage founders about their recruiting challenges. I find most of them are overlooking some basics, here's some of the more common mistakes I see:

1. Treating their job postings like a laundry list of requirements instead of an opportunity to convey why someone should be excited to work with you. Job postings are a weak filter so you're not doing yourself any favors with your long and uninteresting post.

All you're doing is screening out some of your best potential candidates (especially diverse candidates who are more likely to self-select out if they see a requirement they don't meet).

2. Not planning out their interview process. Too often startup interviews are a series of ad-hoc 1:1s without much thought put into what skillsets they're testing for and how they test for them. They're accidentally filtering for people who are good at marketing themselves.

If you open interviews with ambiguous personal questions like "tell me about yourself" or "Why are you interested in us?" this is probably you. It's not hard to come up with structured evaluation criteria and you'll mitigate a lot of bias in your process if you do.

3. Not incorporating homework into the process. Interviews are great but they give you a thin slice of someone and they're not representative of how work actually happens. Homework, even if it's a short one, gives you a more holistic picture and further reduces your bias.

4. Overindexing on intercept over slope. Too many startups focus on finding the perfect candidate with the right background. The truth is that at a startup the job you hire someone for won't exist in 6 months, so stop hunting for your speckled unicorn.

You're far better off finding someone who will grow with you instead of finding the candidate with the perfect background for today. You'll also significantly widen your potential candidate pool if you do, plus they'll be more motivated once they join.

5. Dropping the ball and taking too long. Speed is a HUGE advantage startups have over BigCos yet way too many squander that by taking too long to get back to a candidate or forgetting to follow up. This is one of the worst reasons to lose a candidate, don't make this mistake!

6. Not spending time on outbound. It's easy to rely on personal network and inbound to start, but you're missing out on a lot of great talent if you do (plus you'll end up with a team that mostly looks like you). Spending time on outbound doesn't have to be a huge time sink.

Even a little bit of investment every week can make a big difference. It's not crazy to get response rates north of 20 or even 30%. Plus, there's a number of sourcing automation tools like @therecruitbot @fetcherai and @topfunnel that make it a lot easier.

7. Not benchmarking their offers. This is super easy y'all. There's free tools out there to make giving a fair offer easier. You're more likely to close a candidate, they're more likely to stick around, and it takes all of 10 minutes.

8. Realizing too late they're looking for the wrong person. This looks like hunting for that head of marketing, head of sales, or experienced ML engineer when that's not who the business needs.

I see startups that aren't even hiring in the right category (e.g. looking for sales when they need ops) with doubts surfacing only when they're about to give an offer at which point they might have wasted months.

Take the time to really figure out who you need, don't just adopt a generic hiring plan (and ESPECIALLY avoid looking for someone just because your investors told you that you need [x]).