How to Excel When Hiring for Your Startup

What do professional athletes have in common with a startup team?

Exceptional projects are never the result of a lone genius – it’s instead a collective of brilliant minds. Still, when it comes to assembling a dream team, many struggle to find an efficient strategy.

Startups shape their destiny by asking the right questions to the candidates and assessing their skills effectively during interviews.

But what if 75% of what they do is not right, no matter how hard they try?

At Educate Online, we've implemented an efficient process we’d like to share. But first things first, time to think about one key thing we did that we highly recommend doing before building your team:

1. Determine your startup core values

Let us introduce brief guidelines on how one can make up their list of company values:

Company values guide behavior and foster a robust organizational culture. After determining them, you can gradually integrate them into the hiring process.

In Educate Online, we prioritized our values and the foundation we base our hiring process on. We managed and continued building a team of strong professionals with the same values. We’ve noticed how it helps us be on the same page and work shoulder-to-shoulder. Here are the values we base our hiring on:

• Do what makes sense;
• Be agile;
• Treat the company as your own;
• Give and get feedback;
• Test and learn.

2. Base job interview questions on your values

Do the right interview questions improve your chances of finding eligible candidates? They do. Let's break them down into three key categories:

All these categories help you assess the candidate in the most thorough manner possible.

Consider this:

It's crucial to evaluate soft skills (effective communication, desire for personal growth, etc.) and hard skills (working with hypotheses, analytics, etc.) Remember, your questions serve as means to identify the answers you're looking for:

• Ask directly so that you can quickly reveal whether a candidate is an excellent fit for the team;
• Demand real-life examples from their experience and their most remarkable achievements (e.g., when asking about hypotheses, learn how they formulated them and what tools they used);

Go beyond trivial questions, and learn about recent initiatives they've spearheaded and the obstacles they've encountered and overcome.

3. Dig deeper to uncover the truth

Several tools guide you if you want to go beyond resumes and interviews. If you want to get a more comprehensive picture of your candidates, that's where tools like Gallup and Wingfinder can help.

Gallup offers assessments that reveal candidates' natural talents and motivations. This gives you a deeper understanding of their potential. It's like having a superpower detector!

Wingfinder, initially designed for pilots, is now applicable to any role. It assesses candidates’ cognitive abilities, personality traits, and motivation levels.

Let’s compare the tools:

So, how do you use the apps to their full capacity?

Apart from the apps, one more opportunity you may use to learn more about a candidate is to ask their previous employer, manager, or subordinate for more info:

Here are some questions you may ask…

• What place would this person take if you were to top your subordinates? Why?
• How often did they carry out their plans? If they did not, what was the reason?
• How much impact has this person had on the growth of the company? Why?

…to an employee if their ex-boss is your candidate:

• If you were to list the top executives, what place would this person take? Why?
• What management rituals and practices did you have on your team?

How do you rate your growth during your time working with this man?

4. Hire quickly and fire even faster

A startup has little to do with a nursery where we can patiently groom individuals, correct their mistakes, and hope for results. At Educate Online, we made the mistake of thinking that our candidates' hard skills were the most important thing, and we didn’t pay much attention to other aspects.

How did it turn out for us?

Well, we needed approximately a month to discover that many of our new employees didn’t have the soft skills required for the jobs they were hired for, and more than that, we did not share the same values.

As a result, we wasted time hiring, onboarding, and subsequently firing people who did not fit into our work environment. We even once fired more than five people in one month!

Remember these three key points:

What if you failed and now feel you must make some changes?

It is a world where quick decision-making is the key. Think of it more like a soccer game with professional athletes. You might receive two yellow cards, but a red card warrants immediate action. Sometimes, you don't have to wait for two yellow cards.

Often, the problem lies not in hasty or incorrect hiring decisions but rather in the failure to correct a wrong decision promptly. Remember, 75% of hires may be bad, and the damage increases when we hold onto that 25% for too long.

Act decisively, and let your team's success soar to new heights.

All in all, the hiring process has proven to be one of the most crucial when building a team. You don't have to stick to the script in this article but feel free to adapt and create your interview style. It might seem difficult initially, but after 5-10 interviews, you'll find yourself expertly riding the wave.