Startup founders often need to hire people into areas that they don’t
know anything about. This can be a technical founder hiring a VP
marketing, a business development founder hiring a VP Engineering, or a
product management founder hiring a VP Ad Sales. Often these hires are
some of the most important that a company makes as they fill the holes
in a founding management team.
There are three things that you should test a potential hire for:
1. Technical Skills
2. Cultural Fit
3. Performance Skills
Technical Skills: These are the skills strictly
required to do the job. They are typically based on training or past
experience. Examples include ability to program in Ruby on Rails,
ability to run an Search Engine Marketing campaign, ability to sell 6
figure ad deals to movie studios etc. Resumes provide a good first
screen for technical skills.
If you do not know anything about the field of the candidate that
you’re hiring, your ability to discern their level of technical skills
is limited. You should have a domain expert (who does not need to be an
employee of the company – advisers, investors and friends can fill this
role) interview your candidate to make sure that their expertise
matches their resume. Having more junior employees within that function
interview the candidate (ie having the team interview the boss) can be
helpful but is not always enough. Often more junior employees don’t
fully appreciate the full scope of their bosses’ jobs.
Cultural Fit: Companies are groups of people, and
all groups of people have culture. This can include styles and modes of
communication, work norms, modes of decision making and many other
elements that can be difficult to define. Any team members can
interview a candidate for cultural fit.
You have to be careful not to let “cultural fit” become a code word
for suppressing diversity. The key question to ask is not, “Is this
person different from the norms of our company culture?”, but “Could
this person be effective in their job given the norms of our company
culture?”. For example, consider a startup comprised only of recent
engineering graduates with a norm of getting to work around noon and
working until 3am, that is considering hiring a VP of Marketing who has
to leave the office at 5pm to pick up her kids from daycare. It isn’t
reasonable to ask if the VP Marketing will be in the office at
midnight. It is reasonable to ask if the VP Marketing will be able to
do all the required communication and coordination with the engineering
team during the five hours that they will both be in the office
together.
Performance Skills: Whereas Technical skills tell
you if a person can do a job, Performance skills tell you how well they
can do a job. These include characteristics such as attention to
detail, problem solving, initiative, leadership and team work. Anybody
can interview a candidate for these characteristics. However, there is
a trick to doing this effectively. Asking someone “how tolerant are you
of ambiguity?” is not a good differentiator. One of the most effective
techniques I have come across is called behavioral interviewing. When I
was GM of Netscape I put my entire team through the Skill Analyzer
training from Novations to learn this technique of interviewing. I
thought it was extremely helpful in creating a structured, standardized
interviewing process.
Later, I’ll talk about some of the key elements of Behavioral Interviewing.
(For more from Jeremy, visit his blog.)
