Dunja Lazic is a wantrepreneur, as she says, in love with the startup world and enjoys writing @ Startit.rs. Here we repost an article of hers about early stage hiring.
Choosing a co-founder and hiring the first team members and employees may not be the hardest task in a startup, but it’s often the most delicate one. We all want to work with awesome people and have that all-star team any startup would kill for. If you’re used to picking exclusively friends or acquaintances, you might not get a really awesome team. If you hire people without consulting your team members, you will also likely fail in being an awesome recruiter.
Your first hires might stay with you for years, so choose them wisely and never settle for less. Otherwise, they’ll stay with you for a few months, you’ll see you made a mistake and then repeat the same cycle again until you finally create the perfect team. In the beginning they will almost certainly be people from your network, but remember to be picky before you get someone on board.
“Our first hires came from personal acquaintances and recommendations. It’s important to mention that friends, unless they are friends you gained working and sharing hard times with (“brothers in arms”), are most often a bad choice and your friendship, your work, or often both, will suffer.” Seven Bridges Genomics
One interesting and often given advice is “Hire people that are better than you”. It’s important to keep in mind that no one knows the product or idea better than the founders (otherwise they might be doing something wrong?) but also that the founders shouldn’t be afraid to bring on board someone with a completely different set of interests and a stronger expertise in a given subject.
[Tweet “”Hire people that are better than you.””]
What happens is — if you always hire people whose skills are a bit worse than yours, they will hire people a bit worse than them and before you know it — you’ll end up with a mediocre team.
In the beginning, but even today, Nordeus was developing fast. Beginning with our founders, moving towards the first employees, to the 150 employees in 4 different locations of today, we tried hard to cultivate a team atmosphere where each employee adds value to the teams and the whole Nordeus. Since we all share this idea, we can say that we all participate in hiring, together. Our employees are always ready to refer our company to their friends, and in effect, through their positive experience promote Nordeus.” Milena Dulanovic, Nordeus
Find the best people that will take your idea to perfection and then execute everything you imagined. Create a team that you trust in completely, and organize it accordingly. After having built the team, if you still have to take the reins all the time, you’re doing something wrong.
[Tweet “”Having built the team, If you still have to take the reins all the time, something is wrong.””]
Nikola Radivojević recently wrote about early stage hiring:
“In reality, startups in the beginning often don’t have an endless source of income so deciding on who to hire first in order to acquire the first clients as fast as possible is crucial for the development and scaling stages of the startup, because a good decision can send you shooting to the moon and secure the startup’s survival, while a bad decision can cost you everything you don’t have — time, money and resources.”
Cheers,
Dunja Lazic
@DunjaLazic
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