Most companies when hiring throw up a post on their blog exclaiming "We're hiring!", that touches on all the awesome reasons you should want to work at their company. While we are hiring here at BostInno, I thought I would talk a bit about how we hire, which I think will be more useful for those of you who are potential candidates, which in turn will be better for us. I also hope to hear from members in the community about how they hire, in order to get a dialogue going around best practices. (Side note: My colleague Dan is currently sifting through 400+ applications, so if you are one of those who is yet to hear back, hopefully this post will be helpful.)
The three main things we are focusing on regarding our hiring are:
- Evaluating actual performance.
- Cultural fit.
- Accelerating our hiring process.
Evaluating actual performance.
Over the past six years since I launched my first media startup, I have learned that the only way to really see how valuable someone will be as a part of your company is to see them in action. I personally don't care if you went to Harvard or if you went to Kings Highway Elementary School, I want to see you perform "in the shit" - I should also note that some of our team members feel differently about performance in school as an indicator, and this difference in opinion is good for our hiring process.
We've got a pretty good hold on what we need from people across our various positions in editorial, tech and sales/marketing.
- Editorial: We need people with more than just domain knowledge and good writing form. We now compete for people's attention online, and there is a lot of stuff that people can look at online, so we look for fire - eating, sleeping and breathing everything about the vertical being covered. Editorial needs to get out in the community and network too. You need to be able to write all day and then work a room at night. So we evaluate these skills by bringing candidates to events (or better yet a candidate will drag us to an event) and seeing how they act and by putting their content to the test live on BostInno. Good writing will ignite response from people on our site, which is easy to measure through shares, pageviews and comments. My suggestion would be before you send a resume, submit a post through the frontend. And if you really want the job, submit a bunch, ignite responses from people on BostInno and leave us with no choice but to hire you.
- Tech/development: We look for people with deep interest in developing better digital news products. One of our recent hires, Brian Zeligson, made hiring him quite easy - he simply developed two or three different ideas for WordPress plugins that I casually mentioned in our interview, and more importantly, he developed some of his own ideas. Identifying problems, building products, pushing quickly, iterating, and always having your eyes on the larger platform goals are critical for our dev team. Showing us these abilities rather than telling us about them is the key.
- Sales/marketing: As we are a multi-sided platform (i.e. we have multiple customer segments - consumers and content producers/marketers), we need people that have a clear understanding of these different segments. Since there are two different segments, we have two different value propositions that our platform needs to provide. Sales and marketing people need to show they know what consumers are looking for, where they hang out, when and how they want content and ultimately how BostInno specifically will acquire their attention. On the other side of the ball, the same applies to content producers and marketers. What are they saying about the platform and specifics products sold to them? How do we segment them and what are the cheapest ways to acquire them? Providing specific examples of segments we could target for growth and we could acquire these potential customers is what we're looking for rather than hearing about how much you've sold in the past at an established company.
Cultural fit.
While I believe that Zappos's success has created a lot of forced/fake display of "cool culture" in the startup world, there is nothing more important to success than nailing and maintaining the true culture needed in order to succeed. We have a lot of different personality types at BostInno, but there are a few common traits we look for. Mainly it can be boiled down to three things: 1) the right balance of working hard and playing hard and 2) intellectual curiosity and 3) being a good person.
We work very hard and don't want people that just want a job, but we always try to make it fun. Playing hard is critical to maintain the right balance - with that being said, we've had candidates put too much emphasis on how much they like the play side and make no mistake, we are a business first and foremost, and we very much value appropriate ambition and wanting to win.
The second thing, what I call intellectual curiosity for lack of a better term, helps us identify people who have an innate interest in the world around them. People with wonder and curiosity are the ones that make the best discoveries in this world, which I believe is valuable to any person in any job. I believe Einstein said it best, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Finally, we are very much believers in karma. The true mark of a man/woman is how they treat those that can't help them. We try to only bring on people we think are genuinely nice to most all people (having a few enemies is ok) and care about leaving the world a better place.
So how do we determine these things? We have people 1) tell us about their favorite period in history 2) tell us how they spend their free time/how they would like to spend their free time in an ideal world and 3) spend time with us in different settings - work, one on one convo's, at the bar, etc.
Accelerating our hiring process.
As Mark Suster put it (which I am a big believer in too), "Hire fast, fire fast."
What I care about is simple, what can you produce for our company? Unfortunately, in a short period of time it can be difficult to make the right call, but it is important to run a fast process in order to get things done and move forward quickly. Figuring out the right balance between patiently evaluating candidates in order to determine the right fit and quickly making judgment calls is hands down the hardest part of hiring for a startup in my opinion.
While I have no magic answer for managing this challenge, the main thing I have seen is that urgency and consistency in a candidate are the best indicators of good fit. Candidates that are pushing you for the job, following up to see where things stand, emailing with ideas and generally showing a sense of urgency are the ones that warrant attention. I'd rather have a candidate that is slightly less skilled and significantly hungrier than a highly skilled, less hungry candidate. Bringing people in that enable your organization to accelerate, are incredibly valuable.
Being proactive and making it easy for us to hire you signals you will also be able to get trained and up-and-running quickly, which means you can add value quickly. People like this are the life blood of any startup and what we look for when hiring.
Performance, cultural fit, and acceleration - what good startup hiring all boils down to.
