Hiring for a startup

From my latest article, the first in the second phase of the Start-up Logic entrepreneurship series in the Hindu BusinessLine.

Her father is in the lobby, waiting to meet you,” I was told. I wasn’t sure I had heard right, so when I stepped out into the little passage that served as the “lobby” of our start-up, there was indeed a gentleman, probably in his late fifties, waiting there. Granted it’s not every new employee’s father who travels 2,000 km to meet her prospective employers, but as a start-up you should expect the unexpected. More importantly, be prepar ed to do the unexpected to find, hire and retain the right people.

Read the rest here.

People - the lifeblood of an organization

From my seventh article in the Start-up Logic entrepreneurship series in the Hindu BusinessLine

In every entrepreneur’s life, there comes a moment when a bulb goes off, “Darn! We are a real business.” You’d think that having embarked with much thought (or for some of us with little thought) on the path of entrepreneurship, learning that you are a real business wouldn’t surprise you. Of course, such a realisation usually occurs when the problems of running a real business put in an appearance.

When you first start your business, it all seems more fun than work — figuring out what you want, whom you are going to make the journey with, whom your customers are and what they want and if you have raised capital, what prospective investors want. Notice, but for the first day, you haven’t had time to think about yourself.

However, soon each new day seems to bring up a number of issues, ranging from life-threatening cash-flow problems to stumbling product development, stuttering sales and marketing and the inability to hire good people fast enough. We will look at each of these issues, and how best to address them over the next few weeks.

Let’s begin with the good news – you are not the first entrepreneur to go through this. The bad news is that this knowledge does not make it any easier to get through this period. As with adolescence that every one of us has had to go through, companies too go through an equivalent phase. Only this seems to appear a lot sooner for entrepreneurial firms and, at times, more than once; as with any hormone-laden teenager this will be a time of monumental emotional ups and downs for your company and you.

The one thing that can help you navigate your way through these emotional rapids is having great people on board with you. I spoke of business being all about people earlier and this is truest in such times of corporate hormonal sloshing. Hiring, retaining and motivating great people is far easier said than done and fixing hiring mistakes always takes far longer than we’d like. The truth is companies that learn how to do this well are the ones that grow and prosper in the end.

Read the rest of the article here.

Hiring for Skills, Talent AND Values? One Story

In a recent Forbes article, Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles state,

Repeatedly we hear from executives that the talent pool is not nearly as
challenging to navigate as is what we have come to call the "values pool." We
suggest that, [...], the real shortage facing companies in the future will be less
about finding individuals with the knowledge, skills and abilities to do the job
than about finding individuals whose personal value system provides a fit with
the company's values and mission.

Anyone who has run or worked in a startup knows how true this is. In our own startup Impulsesoft, at the very beginning (circa 1999) there was no such separation of values and talent. When you are less than eight people, everybody better be able to pull their own weight - but then again the reason you do a startup (at least the reason we did) is to work with people who share your values and vision. It's when you try to begin hiring beyond the first few - the core team, the importance of values becomes real apparent. We went through four distinct phases in our startup -

[i] can we get anyone else to even join us?
we got started without a lot of forethought or planning. We even got our first customer signed up, before we bought our first computer. Now there was the minor matter of actually doing the work. It dawned on us then that with no money, no office and no clear grand strategy could we even get anyone else to join us. We talked a good story I can tell you that - but when our first prospective employee's dad showed up to check us out, we knew we had a challenge on our hands. However values were paramount at this phase, as we felt we had the talent to get the job, any job, done!

[ii] lets focus on bringing only these three/four folks on board
Once we had our share of new college grads (NCGs) come by, wisdom bloomed. We were not going to be able to do it all - hustle customers, write proposals and actually write code - let alone direct the still not-steady-on-their-feet NCGs. By now we'd been talking to ex-colleagues who shared our values and skillwise walked-on-water; they saw that we were not yet dead and realized there might be something here after all. Suddenly we had a core team, that was incredibly talented and well aligned.

[iii] how fast can we hire hands & bodies and bring 'em on board?
Suddenly we were a real business, with customers signed up for products we hadn't built yet, and paying customers expecting us to support them with prototypes we had shipped as product. The software managers wanted more coders - the hardware folks more designers and everyone wanted more testers - we just went crazy trying to find the "talent pool" - if you could walk, string a set of C code together and didn't drool excessively, we hired you! Even the talent bar probably got shaky in this phase.

[iv] what the hell where we thinking in phase [iii]
When products still didn't work as advertised and customers were no happier, having paid up even more money and our own managers ready to kill some of their staff, we began wondering what the hell had we been thinking? The questions now were how do we let go of these folks and get folks with the right values and attitude even if we have to teach 'em the right skills? The lesson we learnt was that though we had hired talented folks, they had come up real short in both attitude and vision alignment. Our hiring process about which we had become quite proud (It's hard to get hired at Impulsesoft, we'd say) had become too much talent focused and too little value focused in phase [iii]; the fact that I am writing this today means we learned from this and while it hurt us, it didn't kill us. But then again that's the sort of lesson that stays with you. Bennett and Miles are right - only the future is here NOW!