I’ve worked in startups as an HR leader for over a decade and one thing I always stood by was that the earlier the startup, the more you need to build. This includes your recruitment process and how you hire, which is critical to the future success of your company.
Most founders hire for “scrappy,” the person who will wear 4 different hats and get stuff done. These hires are often great for people who can manage chaos, work in dysfunction and be comfortable with deep ambiguity.
However, as the company grows and matures, founders or founding HR teams need to learn to start finding hires that can implement systems to compound output.
Most teams that romanticize “scrappy” reward chaos tolerance. Fire drills, Late nights, Duct tape. But that type of culture scales pain, not performance, and investors don’t fund want to “toil.” They want to fund speed with quality.
What you hire for is what you’ll end up getting.
So rather than staying in dysfunctional scrappy forever, here’s what you should be hiring for if you’re looking to move into “throughput” (how much useful work ships per unit of time) and “slope” (how fast someone learns and improves week over week).
Look for candidates who can show their hustle was replaced by a repeatable system they designed.
Find candidates who can showcase skills that compounded in the last 12 months. We’re talking new tools, bigger scope and a consistently higher quality bar.
Seek those who can prove they focused on judgement under constraint. These are measured tradeoffs, not just “I did whatever it took.”
As the hiring TA/HR manager, you’re going to need to ask for numbers and proof. Ask how they did it (describe the step-by-step process with me), what improved (quantifiable numbers) and get them to describe what they had to sacrifice (time, effort, speed) to get this new process/system implemented successfully.
If you only get glorified stories but no data to validate the results, you’re probably interviewing a “wanna be” hero. Someone who glorifies chaos and takes great pride in being a firefighter but can’t actually help to scale the company as it matures.
Of course, depending on how early the company stage is at, you also don’t want to hire someone who only looks at dashboards and processes without actually doing the work itself.
It’s always a fine balance and we won’t always be perfect - we’ll make mishires in the process. But what you want to do is to make less mistakes and learn how to recruit better talent, earlier on. The more you practice interviewing for scaling leaders that can really help to build the momentum and quality of your hires, the faster you’ll be able to scale your company.
What other tactics or interview questions have you used to find the right scale-up operators at companies you worked at?