5 Tips for Hiring the Best Startup Talent

Hiring employees, whether just one person or staffing an entire tech team, is a huge challenge for tech startups. The reality is CEOs and CTOs aren’t trained in interviewing and recruiting, they’re busy raising funds, designing a company culture and creating buzz.

Since those first few employees are crucial to the growth of any startup, and help set the tone for the company, there should be a process in place for attracting, recruiting and hiring tech talent. To help navigate this confusing but crucial process, we got insight from two experts with first-hand experience in the field.

1. Get help with recruiting

“HR and recruiting are both a tool and a partner to help managers and leaders hire the right teams,” says Shannon Schiltz, who heads up Technical Talent at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. She leads a team devoted to helping startups connect with, hire, and retain top tech talent.

“They can’t hire the team for you, you have to hire the team. Recruiters can identify and source but CEO, CTO, COO and their direct reports have to be the ones dedicated to selling people on the opportunities, and be very involved in the recruiting process.”

2. Sell Your Vision

So just how do you sell your company to a potential hire? Schiltz advises in this market, where competition is fierce, adequate compensation is a must.  “You have to pay to play” she says, but it’s also about selling your vision.

“Sell your company by talking about culture and by culture, I don’t mean the perks. Perks of free launch and a meditation room and happy hours, that’s part of the fun of your company. You’ve got to sell your company by having great folks that already work there so they attract great people. Engineers want to work with smart engineers so you have to have a great team and you have to highlight that great team.”

3. Early decisions matter

Your first hiring decisions are crucial to the future of your company, says Matt Rogers, VP of engineering and co-founder of Nest Labs which was purchased by Google for over $3 billion.

“The decision-making that goes into your first 10 hires is way more important than people realize. Those decisions, albeit are never set in stone, will shape the company that you become.”

Rogers advises making those hiring decisions not just for how technically experienced an engineer is, but for how well they can be part of and lead a growing company.

“Can they lead teams, are they going to be a great beacon of culture and personality for the other people you bring in because as you onboard, your early employees are the ones who are going to teach them what the company is all about.”

4. Plan your management structure

“In the early days, we wanted to hire seed crystals,” says Rogers, “folks we could build teams around so not necessarily an executive but we hired people who we knew had a lot of leadership potential, could lead a project, could lead a team. We hired a seed crystal per area; one from marketing, one for product development, one for product design and we built teams around those individuals and eventually a lot of those leaders became the executives that are running the company today.”

5. Invest in your employees to keep them

Once you’ve hired these tech rock stars, you need to work hard to make sure they stay a part of your growing company. In this competitive market, if you’re not investing in your talent, you may lose them, warns Schiltz.

“You can spend your time recruiting top talent, but if you don’t think about how you retain them, you’re going to have an on-going exit and you’re never going to get ahead. You have to invest in your employees and build it the right way. When people start leaving because they don’t think the company really cares about their employees, that’s a really hard perception to change – you’ve got to address it up front.”

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