Given the current economic climate, fewer companies are hiring these days. While the best candidates still have jobs, employers can still afford to be more picky when it comes to assessing potential team members. Here’s what I look for in all new hires. You won’t find this on the job descriptions, but nobody gets in the door without these traits.
Energy: I look for people who have a fire underneath them. They should almost scare me a little with their energy. How do you find this? Ask questions around areas that excite them and see how or if they light up. One area that had better excite the candidate is our product or service. Therefore, I next look for:
A glass full of Kool Aid: If you haven’t tried our product out and come in ready with comments on it, and if you don’t generally seem to be drinking the Kool Aid (i.e. you’re just not excited by what we do), you won’t get in no matter how talented you are. We need people who are genuinely excited and engaged by our mission. We can’t win without that.
Relevant prior experience: Startups are unique beasts. I have seen very few big company people succeed in a startup. To be clear, I have hired people who didn’t come from a startup. But I did so with some reservation and I did it because I could tell they were startup people inside.
Animal-like tendencies: While it’s probably counter-productive to be wild all the time, I look for people who can and regularly do behave like animals. This trait comes in handy when you’re trying to sell a product that nobody has ever bought before and if you’re trying to develop something that will revolutionize and industry even though you’re 4 people in a room.
Imbalance: I don’t believe people should work all the time, but you should have a relatively unhealthy dedication to your particular craft. If you’re like me, you like to relax by reading business books and industry blogs. If you like to end your day job as a developer by going home and learning new coding languages, you’re my kind of hire.
You’ll notice one thing I left out is domain knowledge. I’m on the fence here. It’s definitely helpful to have contacts in the space, but I don’t know if you absolutely need knowledge in a space to be successful in it. The only clarification I’d make to this is that B2C people probably don’t make good B2B people and vice versa. That could be a personal bias. I just came from a B2C company after spending my whole career serving businesses and business users. It was tough.
A good hiring process must include checking for the traditional stuff (what you see in the job description) as well as a test or some form of work sample (this is a must). The 3rd element is to check for the above intangibles. I have made lots of hiring mistakes in my career, and I’ll make more. But when I’ve hired people who have these traits, they’ve never let us down.