As founders, many of us had to learn skills that don’t come naturally. Some responsibilities are better handled by your co-founders and other team members. You may be an amazing engineer, but a weak product manager. You may be a great product manager, but terrible at sales.
And then there’s the universal challenge that every founder has to deal with – hiring.
Founders have an internal compass of identifying people in their own area of strength. But we generally cannot replicate that compass to other roles,which require different strengths. Moreover, most of us make the mistake of mirror hiring i.e. hiring people like ourselves, or of not defining a common evaluation process across all interviewers.
With growing teams, it can become messier and messier as founders discontinue their involvement in the hiring of certain roles. As a founder, you inform three crucial elements of the hiring process: (1) how you pitch the company; (2) how you screen beyond paper qualifications; and (3) how you evaluate against what the role and company require. You might be doing these three things well today, but the point is that you need to depend on others on your team to do these well, too. Hence you need to define a process around hiring. Founders don’t scale, processes do.
Over the last year, we defined a process that we employ across all our roles. And we have put it all down in a book so that it can help other founders and teams.
Here is the free ebook – recruiterbox.com/prepare. Hope it helps you!
The transparency and sharing tradition carried over to iSPIRT. Nowadays, iSPIRT routinely shares the good, bad and ugly, often in the form of a “journeyline”, so that everybody in the ecosystem can learn from its experiences (see