“In the chaotic world of entrepreneurship, it is crucial to take the time to think about how to better manage yourself.” 

• Rely on Proven Tools. Many times I’ve seen the advice of “following your instincts” being given to managers as the golden rule of hiring. Your personal sympathies or dislikes can easily turn into prejudices that at the end of the day will have nothing to do with the candidate’s qualifications for the job. There are tools and procedures to help you choose the best candidate. Use background checks, check references, dig into personal and professional detail and use personality tests. There are no shortage of real tools to help you.
• Use Outsiders to Interview. You are often too anxious to bring on resources to be objective about a candidate. Ask a colleague or advisor who has little to do with your business, but plenty of business knowledge, to interview finalists.They are much more likely to be objective than you are.
• Don’t Panic. When the pressure goes up, people tend to act hastily and make decisions that may not be fully thought-through. Hiring a new guy may be a sufficient immediate solution to workforce shortage, but not making sure he’s the right one can backfire in the days to come.
• Hire for Your Phase of Growth. It’s important to adjust recruiting to your startup’s size or phase of growth: hire energetic generalists in your early days, build a recruiting team as you grow, target and hire specialists with your now-sophisticated recruitment team, and build a culture of recruiting to keep a full hiring pipeline once you’ve matured. An employee who helps you hustle through your early days isn’t always right for your later-stage startup years later.
• Be Wary of Strategists. Thinking is easy, executing is hard. As careers advance, fewer people choose to remain in an execution role and steer toward “strategy” and “strategic thinking.” When you hire experienced people, make sure you ask them, “Tell me about your desire to build process and structure, and also execute it.” If they answer, “I am willing to get my hands dirty,” move on. If they say, “I love building businesses” or “I love watching a team gel,” consider them. You need people who “love to” and not ones that are “willing to” get their hands dirty.
• Read through References. Pay attention to what the candidate’s previous employers had to say, and focus on the details. Better, pick up the phone and personally check unlisted references as well. There may be a reason they were unlisted, and you may want to know about them.
• Pay More. The difference between someone who makes $125,000 versus $150,000 seems like a fortune when you have little money (or it’s your money). The difference in talent and experience can be significant and worth the additional spending. With the right team member, it will unlock more than that amount of value.
• Maintain a Strong Bench. Boy this is a tough one. You don’t have starters and I am asking you to create a bench. You also need to be able to make changes when things aren’t working out. Without a bench, you keep underperforming employees longer and compromise on the non-negotiables (e.g., culture, etc.). Without viable alternatives, making personnel changes seems impossible. To prevent this, as hard as it is, you must nurture relationships with potential employees to create bench strength. You likely don’t have the capital to hire a bench, but just like an actor in a play has an understudy, you need to prepare to back up your key resources. If you don’t, you will retain the wrong people longer and this will weaken your business.
• Keep an Open Mind. Put your gut and instincts aside, and give an equal chance to everyone. You may already have a more or less clear picture in your head of how the employee should ideally look and where should they come from, which makes you subconsciously play down the candidates who don’t exactly fit into this mental blueprint – be it their background, experience or approach to your company’s ideas. Give everyone an equal space to present their skills, and maybe you’ll be surprised by the person who’ll end up sitting in that chair.
• Don’t Be Charmed. Don’t fall in love immediately. Take a step back and make sure that every word they say can also be underset with some solid evidence of their past working experience. Stay on your toes and ask for results, instead of just big talk.
• Teach Your Team Recruiting Basics. Young startups tend to attract energetic but inexperienced people—employees who may have been interviewed a lot, but lack the chops to sit in the interviewer’s chair themselves. Brief your team on their important role in recruiting top talent.
• Create a Solid Onboarding Program. Enrolling even a couple of employees in benefits the traditional way (and managing details for your existing team) is a full-time job. At most startups without designated HR, this responsibility falls on the shoulders of the founders, senior leadership, or office managers, distracting significantly from their primary responsibilities.
• Don’t Hire Teams of People Who Have Worked Together Before. It’s tempting to hire a team of people who have worked together before. Imagine if you could bring in multiple team members who have worked together and who could bring productivity and synergy to your endeavor quickly. In theory, that sounds great. Here’s the problem. When you hire a team who have worked together before, it is hard to hold one of them accountable, or provide constructive criticism to one of them. You are subject to the whims of that team. This makes it difficult to hold one team member accountable without ruffling the feathers of the team. When you bring in a team you think you are killing many birds with one stone. All you are doing was creating a power center that makes it difficult to hold a team accountable and build a successful company culture.
• Hire Proactively. Do not wait until you have a job opening to fill. Be in alert mode constantly and look out for new talent that may come by. You usually stumble across the biggest talents when you’re not in desperate need of them, and vice versa. If you’re consistent, you may end up making a good network of A players who are just a phone call away, instead of settling for what comes your way when you really need to find someone.

The resources that make your company grow and succeed are your people—especially your senior people. Hiring the right people is difficult to do in any business. In an entrepreneurial venture, it is even more challenging. But if you adopt the right perspective, it will become clear just how critically important hiring is. You’ll develop it as a specialized skill, and in doing so, approach building your team with the same purpose and care you devote to other key elements of your business. Every time I failed to prioritize this perspective, the mistake was obvious and far-reaching. But when I approached hiring and recruiting new team members with a deeper understanding of the purpose—and the painful consequences of getting it wrong—we advanced the business and strengthened our company culture. You can’t control everything, but this is one skill you can choose to improve and the results will be undeniable.