venturegrit

How many times have you slaved away creating a job description for your dream hire only to have no one qualified respond?

Why does this happen?

Remember that when you are recruiting for your startup you are in sales and marketing mode. And to be successful you need to use the same tools to close candidates that great sales and marketing people use to win customers.

With that in mind, here are a few specific problems you may be facing and how to fix them.

People don’t know about your startup

In the US there are more than 400,000 new businesses started each year. There were 2,725 venture funding rounds closed in 2011.

Getting your startup to stand out from the crowd takes some work. Especially since the best talent is fully employed and not spending their time actively scanning job boards.

So how can you address this?
[Read more...]

Some people love Google’s hiring process. Others hate it. Either way, the subject always generates strong emotions.

I have had the good fortune to go through the hiring process and also to have led a team through the hiring process as part of a potential acquisition. While the acquisition never happened, I passed the interviews and found the entire experience truly eye opening.

My takeaway is that Google’s hiring process is not just a little better, but significantly and fundamentally better. And not necessarily for the reasons most people think.

Hire for foundation

In an interview with Google, the focus is not ‘are you capable of doing a specific and narrowly defined job’. The focus is on your foundational abilities in a specific functional area.

If you’re applying for a job as an engineer, you need to be on top of your data structures and algorithms. If you’re applying for a job as a product manager, you need to deeply understand what building winning products is all about (no matter the industry) and have the ability to keep pace on a technical level with Google engineers.

Why does this matter? Focusing on a strong horizontal foundation rather than day-to-day vertical expertise means that Google employees learn faster, are more agile and are more able to respond to a rapidly changing business.

You might think this focus on fundamentals is obvious, but few companies actually do it. Startups are actually the worst offenders because of the extreme pressure to show results while being unproven and unknown, making hiring for them more difficult.
[Read more...]