Culture and Hiring 101: Define Your Values Before You Start Hiring
Three tips to successfully find, interview and hire your first employees.
Sabrina Kelly, August 13, 2019
Your first few hires are arguably the most important to the success of your business—so it makes sense that founders put a lot of time and energy into getting those first few hires right.
But, when you really boil it down, there are some best practices that founders can follow to successfully source top talent from the get-go.
Here are three, quick-and-dirty tips for founders to focus on:
Define your values and don’t overthink it.
Leverage the expertise of your mentors when hiring for positions that you don't have experience with.
Learn the basics of holding successful interviews and assessing candidates.
Define Your Values and Don’t Overthink It
It’s important for founders to have a clear vision of their company before recruiting any candidate. Not only does it make it easier to see if candidates match your values and way of working, but it also enables you to better attract top leadership talent. “If everyone on your team is saying the same thing in terms of what makes your business unique, why you do what you do and the types of people you care about, it shows cohesion. And that’s really inspiring to a candidate.”
To pull this cohesive description together, just get your co-founding or leadership team in one room and ask yourselves a few introspective questions, like what gets you out of bed every morning and why you value each other. While it’s vital to have this collaborative culture discussion with your team, it doesn’t have to take over all other business operations. Rather, developing culture should be an ongoing process of discovery.
Leverage Your Experts
For a founder who wears multiple hats, it can be difficult to take a step back and ask for help. But doing so can be game-changing when hiring talent outside your team's expertise. In fact, it can not only help you better understand the role you're hiring for, but also give you the inside track to onboarding the best candidates. “In those cases, it’s really important to leverage your mentors with expertise in those specific disciplines.”
“Try reaching out to a few different mentors and ask them about the best person they’ve ever worked with in that role. Encourage them to get specific about the skills and behaviors that person exhibited.”
Mentors can also be a major benefit when it comes time to interview. Not only do they usually have direct experience with the interview process, but they can offer a valuable perspective on each of your candidates, as well.
Learn the Basics
"There's a whole discipline of how to effectively recruit, but there are some simple things you can focus on to be really thoughtful and remove bias in your hiring processes."
A simple roadmap could look like: first taking a step back and outlining what the business needs to accomplish over the next six to nine months, then considering the skills that are already on the team related to your business objectives and identifying gaps. Once a founder has identified those gaps, they can build a job description based on the behaviors and skills that are currently missing from the team.
After identifying who needs to be hired and why, a founder can start to focus on making the hiring process successful by structuring the interview to find the best candidate while avoiding bias.
