Ask any startup founder, and they’ll agree – a company’s success depends largely on your ability to build a solid team around you. You need to have people on board who you can count on, who are fully behind your vision, and who can consistently outperform the competition, taking you to the top of the pack. When you’re just starting out, a strong company culture is the foundation for your startup’s success.
If you’re at all familiar with what we do here at Good.Co, then it wouldn’t surprise you to learn that how I hire is largely focused on company culture fit. After all, research shows that a hire’s personality fit with immediate peers is more critical than the overall culture of the company or even functional skills (Corporate Executive Board Study, 2013).
However, as a young startup with a small, close-knit team, there’s an additional set of criteria I use when assessing potential hires. If you’re a startup founder looking to build your team, I’d like to share with you the six key traits I look for when hiring, which have served me quite well thus far.
1. Passion
I’m a firm believer in the fact that if you love what you do, work feels like play. My team and I are passionate about creating happier, more productive workplaces, and this shared passion is a huge part of our company’s culture. For this reason, I only hire people that are just as passionate about what Good.Co is doing as I am. When your entire team is working towards the same goal with the same level of enthusiasm, the sky’s the limit.
2. Problem-Solving
At Good.Co, we practice a unique 50/50 rule when assessing a new hire. While one-half of what we seek is directly related to functional skills, the other half is all about the ability to adapt and problem-solve. We have learned that the first dozen startup hires are essentially part of the co-founding team. Because these team members will play such a critical role in setting the tone of growth, it is unrealistic to hire purely for functional skills.
No doubt it’s important to have process, but the fact is that too much structure can be detrimental to a startup’s key competitive advantage – speed. The purposely chaotic manner in which we go about building stuff requires people to think on their feet and “fill the holes” as needed. This means that each one of us has to have a pretty good understanding of each aspect of the business, whether it’s development, design, psychometrics, user experience, or growth hacking. The cohesion this creates is invaluable in our ability to move quickly and iterate. Of course, this cohesion might not be sustainable as the team grows, but why lose that competitive advantage sooner than we should?
3. Smart Recklessness
“Recklessness” is a loaded word with undeservedly negative connotations, but calculated recklessness can be a powerful asset with the ability to move mountains. At Good.Co, we are looking to fix hiring from the bottom-up. Why? We realized that an evolutionary product simply wasn’t going to cut it. Every day, I ask myself what we could be doing differently – not for the sake of doing it differently, but with an eye towards making things better. In order to be successful, I believe everyone on my team should be doing the same.
Playing it too safe and playing too much into the system can be toxic for a company of any size, let alone a startup where ‘learning’ is a critical metric. We strongly believe that learning comes from making mistakes – and if you’re afraid of making mistakes, then it is going to be impossible to discover that extra 1% insight that separates breakthrough companies from the rest.
4. Integrity
In a startup environment, stakes are high and integrity is key. Can you implicitly trust every single one of your employees to not only get the job done, but to also do it to the best of their ability and safeguard your company’s intelligence? Sure, you may be sitting across from a brilliant developer or product manager, but if you can’t wholeheartedly trust them, it’s time to move on to the next candidate.
5. Fit
Not unlike most young startups, our team here at Good.Co is small – but mighty. At this stage, fit isn’t just important, it’s vital. Every single person on our team works closely together on a daily basis – so our marketing people must be able to get along well with our developers, our psychometrics team with our designers, and so on. Not only do we use our own product to assess FitScore, but we also make sure each candidate meets every member of our team so we can see how they interact. Thankfully, we’ve been lucky in this regard and have built a team that doesn’t just simply get along, but actually feels like a group of friends working single-mindedly towards a common purpose. When it comes time to burn the midnight oil, this type of “fit” between employees makes all the difference in the world.
6. Complementary Skills
One of the biggest mistakes I see many managers make is hiring their likeness, when in reality, they should be doing the exact opposite. When hiring new team members at Good.Co, I look for people with strengths that are the exact opposite of those they’ll be working with. For example, if a current team member is more creative, the person I hire to work with them should be more analytical in nature. In addition, we use Good.Co’s Team Fit tool to see what sort of “role” any new hire will take on within our organization, which has helped us immensely in filling strengths gaps.
via How I Hire: The 6 Key Traits Every Startup Employee Should Possess.
The 6 Key Traits Every Startup Employee Should Possess
