I am an entrepreneur, how should a startup recruit people? Where do you recruit people?

After financing, the next big thing for startups is recruitment. It is important to recruit excellent employees, but it is difficult.

In fact, this may be the most important thing for a founder to do. If the recruitment is not done well, it will not succeed. Companies are often products produced by teams formed by founders. There is no way to build a great company on your own. And it's easy for you to have the illusion that you have the ability to make a group of mediocre people make great achievements.

Here are some suggestions on recruitment:

Spend more time on recruitment.

Most entrepreneurs almost never spend enough time on recruitment. After you have figured out the development prospects and found a feasible business model, you should probably start to spend one-third to one-half of your time on recruitment. It sounds a little crazy, because you always have a lot of work to do, but recruitment is always the most important thing you have to do, and the best companies always supplement the best talents.

You can't count on outsourcing: you need to spend more time meeting people, win the favor of potential candidates for your company, and have face-to-face communication with all the people who come to interview. Keith Rabois believes that the founder CEO should personally interview every candidate before the company has more than 500 employees.

At the beginning, put your energy into it.

Speaking of spending time, you should spend more time to understand what this position needs to do before you start recruiting. If you don't understand the responsibilities of this position, it will be very, very difficult to get the right talent. A typical example is that a hacker CEO decided to hire a sales VP because he didn't want to spend too much time on sales. Actually, it doesn't work at all. He should do it himself and learn more about it. Only after that can he convince everyone at the board meeting why he wants to recruit this person to do it.

Find those smart and efficient talents.

For a specific role, there will always be some specific requirements, but the two requirements of intelligence and efficiency are always universally applicable. Surprisingly, people always forget this principle easily; As a result, these recruited people are useless in early startups (they may not be able to do anything useful).

Fortunately, smart and efficient people are often not difficult to find.

Talk to those candidates about what they have done. Try to ask them about the most impressive projects and achievements. Specifically, ask them how they arrange their time every day, or what they accomplished last month. Ask in-depth questions about specific fields and find out what your candidate has done: it is very easy to achieve results in a successful project. Understand how they solve the specific problems of this position that you care about.

If you ask the right questions after consulting the relevant information, it will usually give you a good sense of efficiency, and at the end of an hour's conversation, you can judge the intelligence of the candidate. If you don't learn anything in the interview, it's not good. It's even worse if you feel bored during the interview. A good interview usually feels like a conversation, not just a question and answer.

Remember, in a startup, anyone you hire is more likely to take a brand-new job in the next three to six months. We should look for people who are smart and efficient.

Let people feel the role, not just give them an interview.

This is the most important tactical advice I want to give. Usually, even after the interview, it is difficult for everyone to know what it will be like to work together, but if you work together for a while, it will become very simple.

If possible (which is almost always possible), let him work with you for a day or two before you formally hire him; You can try this at night or on weekends. If you are interviewing a developer, ask him to write some code for some real but unimportant projects. If it is an interview for PR position, let him write a press release and find a reporter to criticize. Sign some contract terms with them and pay them this week like ordinary contract workers.

So far, you will get a more accurate feeling of what it will be like to work with this person, or how suitable this person is for this role, not just an interview. In addition, he will gain personal experience working in your company.

Pay attention to finding these candidates through the right channels.

Basically, this seminar boils down to "making full use of your network". Even if it is exaggerated ten times, it is not too much. The best candidates I have ever seen come from friends or friends of friends. Even if you don't think you can know so many people, please don't hesitate to find the best person. Even if there is only a 5% chance of success, it is definitely worth it.

All the great startups I know spend more time looking for suitable recruitment channels than most people think. The worst startups always make excuses for their laziness.

When you hire someone, once you are sure that he is the right person, you should ask him to sit down and put his name on the list of people you want to hire. You should try your best to do it well.

Usually, in order to find the best talents, you must take the initiative. These people almost never look for jobs, so don't limit your recruitment to job seekers. A difficult question is how to hook up with people you know: I don't think I have a good answer. A friend said, "Hooking up is the most popular form of relationship in Silicon Valley".

Don't limit your search for candidates to your area. For you in the Bay Area, this suggestion is very correct; Many, many people want to move here

Think of candidate mining as a long-term investment: you may even need to spend some time communicating with people who won't talk about job hopping in detail next year.

Use your investors and their networks to find candidates. In your investor mailing list, let them know what kind of people you need to hire.

By the way, if I am committed to recruiting talents for startups, I will try my best to make such recruitment look more like personal communication, because it really works. I prefer the kind of service that can let me see the interpersonal relationship between everyone in my company and an applicant. This service can help my company's members to search the social network (LinkedIn may be more suitable for recruiting salespeople, but not for recruiting developers).

Draw a pie, don't worry about whether the pie will be overdone.

To hire excellent talents, you must draw a pie. In addition to working in an excellent team, candidates also need to see the cakes you draw. For example, why is this job more important than other opportunities? Before you worry about anything else, drawing cakes to motivate people may be the most important thing you can do to form a good team.

As a founder, you will assume that everyone is as excited about your company as you are. But this is not the case. You need to spend a lot of time drawing big cakes to motivate them.

If you draw a good pie and are good at selling it. You may hire some excellent employees with excess capacity. Don't worry, in a fast-growing startup, they will soon find that their abilities may not be fully adapted to these challenges.

You should use your board of directors and investors to help you get close to the candidates.

Once you decide to hire someone, switch to shutdown mode immediately. The direct report object (ideally including CEO) of the new employee should be as close as possible to this candidate and try to communicate with him once a day.

Hire someone you like.

In Stripe, I believe they call it a "Sunday test": if you want to date this person. Would you like to come to the company on Sunday? People who like to work with you are very important to the correct company culture. I rarely see such a situation: a candidate I don't like is also a very suitable candidate. I only want to confess once. It was a mistake.

In other words, even if you still want some diversified values, you still need some constant unified standards: such as honesty, intelligence and so on. Depending on the situation, you may need more.

Establish a set of company culture and values as recruitment standards.

Spend more time figuring out what your company culture and values are. There are some great cases online. Try to make sure that everyone in the whole company knows what their values are and believes in them. Everyone you hire should conform to the culture and values of this company.

Andrew Mei Sen said: "Values are used to make individuals consciously make the same decisions as those you would make as a founder (for example, this is more important than' user growth' or' user satisfaction')."

Take one's own values as the creed. Use these values to filter candidates. If he can't meet the value standard you set, don't hire him even if he is excellent. We need diverse viewpoints and different personality traits, which is a good thing (for example, in your team, you will want some nerds and some athletes at the same time), but the disorder of startup values is extremely bad.

Some people are too obsessed with their own values and may turn their backs on the values you set; You may have to get rid of these people eventually.

By the way, at the beginning of your business, try to avoid recruiting telecommuting employees. Because culture is always spread by people, you must ensure that everyone works in the same place.

Don't compromise

At the beginning of a startup, you will always need some people urgently, so it is very likely that you will hire some people who are not so smart or adapt to the company culture to help you complete a specific task. Especially in the early stage, never compromise. A casual but bad employment will leave irreparable danger and may lead to the premature death of the company. Losing an opportunity, delaying the release of a product, or any other loss is better than hiring a mediocre person.

The best people always attract other best people; Once you hire a mediocre person in the office, it's hard to turn the whole situation around.

Welfare should be generous, but there should be equity incentives.

At the beginning of your business, you may be very frugal in almost all aspects. But the treatment given to outstanding talents is an exception.

But when generous, we must pay attention to giving special equity incentives. Ideally, you'd better pay the candidate a salary slightly lower than the market price, but there should be very generous equity incentives. "Experienced" candidates usually have higher personal salaries, and sometimes you may have to pay more, but remember that great companies are usually not created by experienced people (special roles in some special fields may be exceptions). )

I will definitely be sprayed to death after saying this, but this is definitely the right strategic choice: if you want to have a salary above the market level, please work in a big company as soon as possible, and don't think about any options.

Ideally, you'd better pay your employees properly to make them less nervous. Options are more difficult to master, but a good plan is that the top 20 candidates can get twice the options suggested by your investors. For a company that is in a good state but has not completely started to explode, some approximate figures I have seen are that the first engineer gets the 1.5% option and the twentieth one gets 0.25%, but the fluctuations are very different.

Occasionally, a very successful YC company implements a unified salary structure for almost all engineers, and it looks quite good. This salary is usually less than what employees can get elsewhere, but they obviously like their jobs very much and believe that stocks will be very valuable. This kind of employee who is willing to put money in the future to earn is what you really need in a startup. Unless things get very bad, these engineers will get much higher returns than they get high salaries elsewhere. Not to mention, their working environment will be much better than the latter.

You may need to learn to make some compromises. Learn to negotiate. In a word, it is very bad to break your treatment structure in order to hire someone. These rumors will spread and everyone will become very depressed.

Be alert to danger and trust your intuition.

During the interview and negotiation, there are some things that must be paid attention to, because they often mean that this guy may not be qualified to work in a startup company. For example, it is a signal to care too much about his identity; Paying too much attention to such things as "how many reports will there be in my organization" is a more serious signal. You will soon feel something about these things. Don't turn a blind eye to this feeling.

If you have an unspeakable feeling that you don't want this person, then don't want this person.

Always open recruitment positions

Unfortunately, recruitment is often not something you can recruit if you want, but you can recruit if you want. You must regard it as your lifelong career, not just something you want to do when you suddenly want to find someone to fill the vacancy. In this process, some are unexpected; If you find that someone is very suitable for certain roles, but you may not need that role in the next two months, you should still hire him immediately.

Quick dismissal

I have hardly ever seen a rookie founder fired so quickly; I have hardly met a founder who still can't learn how to fire quickly after a few years.

It is almost impossible for you to guarantee that your employment is 100% correct. When this is obviously a mistake, it can't be right. Instead of letting everyone hang on a rope and have unrealistic illusions such as "it will get better", it is better to let the relevant personnel go their separate ways as soon as possible. When you meet someone you have to let go, this is a particularly correct choice: if they have only been in your company for a few months, this is hardly an important experience in his resume. And other people in the company may have noticed that the guy is not good in front of you.

Strictly formulate some employment procedures.

Get everyone in your team involved, decide whether to hire them for the interview, and write down their thoughts. If there is misunderstanding in the process, it will be very useful for later reflection. After the interviewer leaves, it is very useful to have a short private discussion with the whole interview team.

Ask employees to take candidates out for dinner. Insist that everyone should be punctual and be fully prepared for the interview. Make sure that every candidate leaves with a positive impression of your company.

Make good arrangements: there should be a special person to coordinate the whole interview process, ensure that every topic you want to ask has been asked, and gather everyone to discuss it at the end of the interview, and so on. Also, make a general framework about how to decide whether to hire or not, such as: do you need unanimous consent?

Remember, although some people in your team are good at what they are doing, it doesn't mean that they will become good interviewers. It is very important to teach you how to be an interviewer.

Don't recruit people at will

Many founders hire people just because they look cool. People will always ask how many employees you have. Companies usually operate better when they are young. It is always worthwhile to spend time thinking about how to do the least unnecessary work under feasible conditions. The smaller the team, the better.

Don't recruit because of recruitment. Recruitment should be a helpless move. Don't talk about what you can do.

Good luck, man. Recruitment is a very difficult but very important job. And don't forget, you need to find ways to keep these people after recruiting them. Remember to communicate with them often, be a good manager, keep regular and full discussions, ensure that everyone is in a happy state and get enough exercise, and so on. Remember to always keep moving forward: it is important to retain talents. Give them some new tasks and roles every six months. Of course, we should continue to pay attention to how to attract new talents to join us: this will make other outstanding talents willing to stay in the company.

Remember to identify and cultivate new talents. This may not be as interesting as solving a new problem, but it will ultimately determine your success.