How to hire

Keith Rabois 认为，在公司人数到达 500 人之前， CEO 或创始人应该亲自招聘面试每个员工。

After startups raise money, their next biggest problem becomes hiring. It turns out it s both really hard and really important to hire good people; in fact, it s probably the most important thing a founder does. If you don t hire very well, you will not be successful companies are a product of the team the founders build. There is no way you can build an important company by yourself. It s easy to delude yourself into thinking that you can manage a mediocre hire into doing good work. Here is some advice about hiring: *Spend more time on it. The vast majority of founders don t spend nearly enough time hiring. After you figure out your vision and get product-market fit, you should probably be spending between a third and a half of your time hiring. It sounds crazy, and there will always be a ton of other work, but it s the highest-leverage thing you can do, and great companies always, always have great people. You can t outsource this you need to be spending time identifying people, getting potential candidates to want to work at your company, and meeting every person that comes to interview. Keith Rabois believes the CEO/founders should interview every candidate until the company is at least 500 employees. *In the beginning, get your hands dirty. Speaking of spending time, you should spend the time to learn a role before you hire for it. If you don t understand it, it s very hard to get the right person. The classic example of this is a hacker-CEO deciding to hire a VP of Sales because he doesn t want to get his hands dirty. This does not work. He needs to do it himself first and learn it in detail. Then after that, he should lean on his board or investors to give him opinions on his final few candidates. *Look for smart, effective people. There are always specifics of what you need in a particular role, but smart and effective have got to be table stakes. It s amazing how often people are willing to forgo these requirements; predictably, those hires don t work out in the early days of a startup (they may never work). Fortunately, these are easy to look for. Talk to the candidates about what they ve done. Ask them about their most impressive projects and biggest wins. Specifically, ask them about how they spend their time during an average day, and what they got done in the last month. Go deep in a specific area and ask about what the candidate actually did it s easy to take credit for a successful project. Ask them how they would solve a problem you are having related to the role they are interviewing for. That, combined with the right questions when you check references, will usually give you a good feel about effectiveness. And usually you can gauge intelligence by the end of an hour-long conversation. If you don t learn anything in the interview, that s bad. If you are bored in the interview, that s really bad. A good interview should feel like a conversation, not questions and responses. Remember that in a startup, anyone you hire is likely to be doing a new job in three to six months. Smart and effective people are adaptable. *Have people audition for roles instead of interviewing for them. This is the most important tactical piece of advice I have. It is difficult to know what it s like working with someone after a few interviews; it is quite easy to know what it s like after working with them Whenever possible (and it s almost always possible), have someone do a day or two of work with you before you hire her; you can do this at night or on the weekends. If you re interviewing a developer, have her write code for a real but non-critical project. For a PR person, have her write a press release and identify reporters to pitch it to. Just have the person sign a contractor agreement and pay them for this work like a normal contractor. You ll get a much, much better sense of what it s like working with this person and how good she is at the role than you can ever get in just an interview. And she ll get a feel for what working at your company is like. *Focus on the right ways to source candidates. Basically, this boils down to use your personal networks more . By at least a 10x margin, the best candidate sources I ve ever seen are friends and friends of friends. Even if you don t think you can get these people, go after the best ones relentlessly. If it works out 5% of the time, it s still well worth it. All the best startups I know manage to hire like this for much longer than one would think possible. Most bad startups make excuses for not doing this. When you hire someone, as soon as you re sure she s a star you should sit her down and wring out of her the names of everyone that you should try to hire. You may have to work pretty hard at this. Often, to get great people, you have to poach. They re never looking for jobs, so don t limit your recruiting to people that are looking for jobs. A difficult question is what you should do about poaching from acquaintances I don t have a great answer for this. A friend says, Poaching is the titty twister of Silicon Valley relationships . Technical recruiters are pretty bad. The job boards are generally worse. Conferences can be good. Hosting interesting tech talks can be good for technical hiring. University recruiting works well once you re reasonably established. Don t limit your search to candidates in your area. This is especially true if you re in the bay area; lots of people want to move here. View candidate sourcing as a long-term investment you may spend time now with someone that you don t even talk to about a job for a year or more. Use you investors and their networks to find candidates. In your investor update emails, let them know what kind of people you need to hire. As a side note, if I were going to jump into the mosh pit of people starting recruiting startups, I would try to make it look as much like personal network hiring as possible, since that s what seems to work. I d love a service that would let me see how everyone in my company was connected to a candidate, and be able to search personal networks of people in the company (LinkedIn is probably good at this for hiring sales people but not very good at this for developers). *Have a mission, and don t be surprised at how much selling you ll have to do. You need a mission in order to hire well. In addition to wanting to work with a great team, candidates need to believe in your mission i.e., why is this job more important than any of the others they could take? Having a mission that gets people excited is probably the best thing you can do to get a great team on board before you have runaway traction. As a founder, you ll assume that everyone will be as excited about your company as you are. In reality, no one will. You need to spend a lot of time getting candidates excited about your mission. If you have a good mission and you re good at selling it, you ll be able to get slightly overqualified people although, in a fast-growing startup, they ll end up in a role that they feel not quite ready for quickly anyway. You should use your board and your investors to help you close candidates. Once you decide you want someone, switch into closing mode. The person that the new hire will report to (and ideally also the CEO) should be doing everything possible to close the candidate, and talking to her about once a day. *Hire people you like. At Stripe, I believe they call this the Sunday test would you be likely to come into the office on a Sunday because you want to hang out with this person? Liking the people you work with is pretty important to the right kind of company culture. Only a few times have I ever seen a scenario where I didn t like an otherwise very goo