5 Top Tips to Get Started Hiring

My observations from 6 months at Seedcamp

There is a shared understanding that hiring is one of the most challenging aspects of company building. Over the past six months at Seedcamp, spending a lot of my time speaking with early-stage founders, I have found that there are many facets of the hiring process that are overlooked or not understood in early-stage companies. These blindspots can profoundly impact your ability to hire.

Below I have set out five snippets to keep in mind, based on some recurring themes from our portfolio, that I believe will help you as a new founder hit the ground running when it comes to your hiring journey.

Scout like a headhunter

If you’re part of the Seedcamp Nation, stay tuned, I will shortly be launching a workshop on this for you to participate in. Headhunting is a hugely overlooked skill for founders to learn, as it is more often than not perceived best practice to immediately outsource to recruitment partners once networks have been saturated. I believe this comes from a lack of understanding of how recruiters do what they do, but it comes down to a few key areas:

• Market mapping competitors and businesses founders compete with, aspire to be, or admire to identify talent
• Speaking to this talent to understand how competitive you are
• Analysing this data, circling back and iterating the search and the offering until perfected, whilst selling a carefully curated story across different mediums, which often comes from the founders themselves, after all, you’re the best people to sell your dream!

If you’re going to spend 50% — 80% of your time on hiring, it’s best to learn how to do it properly. By even marginally reallocating capital expenditures from outsourcing hiring to retention, through learning a few sourcing techniques at the start of the journey, founders could see a dramatic increase in their ability to sustainably scale.

Ask yourself, why us? Build your employer brand

OK, so you want some of the best talent out there — now take a step back and ask yourself why would they want to work with me and help build my dream. Quite often, I see that start-ups go to market for talent and have very little in the way of marketing materials or insight into the company they’re trying to build. You have to sell that vision to build the passion and excitement you have for the business you are building!

Simple things like a link to a news article regarding your launch, a video demonstrating your product or your team, or even just a visual page on your website helping them to understand your values and vision will go a long way amongst a lot of start-up noise. After all, it’s busy out there! Including this media when reaching out to passive candidates will make it seem more “real” and, in my experience, can increase the response rate of your messages by upwards of 10%. If you’re part of the Seedcamp Nation, I have summarised this for you on the Talent and People Hub.

Who should I work with on this? Tools and services

If you’re early-stage, you won’t want to be spending your hard-earned fundraise on fees from external providers, although they are excellent options under the right circumstances. I have found that between headhunting and tools like Linkedin, Otta, and Cord, most of our early-stage startups are able to find some excellent talent. However, having a good partnership with a search firm when it comes to hiring your leadership roles will save you far more than time in the long run. Nowadays, a lot of these firms also have pricing models to reflect the stage of your business, so don’t let fees put you off.

If you need to scale quickly, an embedded option like Elements, Scaling Up or Talentful will help you do that and set up the processes needed to help you grow sustainably, as well as acting as your own talent team. Make sure you do your research and understand the pros and cons — if you’re part of the Seedcamp Nation, I have summarised all of this for you on the Talent and People Hub, along with a whole range of tools and companies out there that can help you hire.

Don’t forget onboarding!

Retention is key. Many people have written about effective interview and assessment processes, but onboarding is almost an afterthought. In reality, it’s one of the most important parts of the candidate’s journey, since it’s the first real taste of what it is like to work for you.

• What does day 1, 7, 30, 90 look like…?
• How are they going to be introduced to their team…?
• What are the logistics to receive all of their IT equipment and company swag…?

Plan this out in advance. If you’re using Slack, tools like Donut are great at automating onboarding and plugging regular reminders. Make those first weeks really count! Starting a new job can be very lonely, especially in the current world we live in, so make the effort to be more human and make those first weeks really matter; they won’t go forgotten.

Hire a talent and people person

The thing that has surprised me the most over the past six months is that founders don’t think they should hire a talent and people person, because they think they are too early and won’t have enough to do until they raise their Series A. Trust me, there is a lot to do! I tell our portfolio to hire someone at least six months before your Series A round hits your bank account. Why? Because:

• They can help you with organisational planning and how much capital to allocate to talent post raise
• Start talent pooling some of those trickier roles which they can identify for you
• Understand all of your historical hiring and people data to put processes in place to be able to tackle and deal with all this growth

Now, when your A round comes in, you are prepared as a business, not playing catch up! Trust me, I’ve only highlighted a handful of the things this person could be doing. Invest early, invest well (this is an ever increasingly expensive position to hire as people come to understand what good looks like) and it’ll reap incredible rewards, whilst saving you a huge amount of hassle.

If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to reach out at alexlewis@seedcamp.com and if you’re looking for pre-seed and seed funding, reach out to us here.