Tech entrepreneur with a strong business development background, CEO and Founder of FlyFeed, an insect farming startup.
Every founder aims to put together a team of top industry professionals in the early stages of their startup. The question is how to achieve this goal when you are leading a fledgling business with little more than a promising concept and a passion in your eyes.
Step one: Don’t skip the research.
Every hire starts with research. Begin by exploring potential candidates and adjusting your expectations accordingly.
I’ve found there are two types of talent markets. The first has a broad field of comparable candidates, so the challenge here is to identify the top 5% of these and hire the best of the bunch as soon as possible. During my time with various startups, I hired a lot of marketing specialists and software engineers, which represent this type of market.
The second market is somewhat more complex. This is when there are a minimal number of suitable candidates for the job, even fewer top-tier standouts and almost none of them are actively looking for a new position. That’s what I encountered in insect farming—a young and rapidly growing industry. Hiring a top-tier contributor in just 23 days is practically performing a miracle.
Although these two markets are strikingly different, errors in either one can be costly. You might move too slowly, which is a grave danger for a startup, or fail to do a thorough search for talent, which is equally dangerous to your success. Identify the market you’re dealing with, and move on to the next step.
Step two: Craft your strategy.
In both instances, hiring top talent should be viewed less as recruitment and more as a series of well-researched sales pitches.
When tackling the first type of talent market, treat the process like conversion optimization: Use numbers to assess quality across metrics, iterate fast and measure data over a period of time. For example, measuring passthrough rates is crucial for bringing the best candidates through the entire funnel. Average recruitment conversion rates at or above 10% are considered very good, with 7%-10% as the standard range.
Funneling doesn’t work for the second talent market because quantitative data is useless here. If only five people can fit the position you need to be filled, your job is to learn all you can about who they are, regardless of how out of reach they seem. Double down on making industry connections and remember not to limit yourself to only looking for candidates from startups; look for them in corporate enterprises as well. This is how we found one of our advisors who has over 30 years of industry experience and who served as CEO at one of the major companies among our customer segment.
Step three: It’s time to sell, sell, sell.
Once you have a group of candidates in mind, it’s time to go into “master of persuasion” mode. You need to sell yourself, your company, its mission and the role this person would fill.
Never pitch your vision to candidates first. Pitch your interest in them.
When pitching to a candidate, show interest in their background, experience and potential. Highlighting their uniqueness and what they can bring to the table can help you build a connection and make the candidate feel valued.
Next, it’s crucial to present a clear vision of how the candidate fits into the larger market change that your company is delivering. This could involve discussing the company’s goals and how the candidate’s skills and experience align with those goals.
Pitch the opportunity to unleash their potential.
Leverage the variety of opportunities that come with being early-stage. According to 2019 data, over 60% of employees at startups reported being happy. Often, this is because of the special advantages that startups offer, such as the chance to take on leadership roles and unleash the potential employees were not able to in bigger companies.
To convince someone talented to join, you might need to highlight the fact that the position can be altered to fit their expert opinion of what would be the best use of their talents.
In that way, you can convince them to join the team in an advisory role. Advisors can share their expertise while getting an inside view of the day-to-day operations of your company. It’s also a great way to develop a deeper relationship with them. This intermediary step gives you more opportunities to convince them to shift from an advisory role to a full-time team member.
Pitch your ability to learn and execute.
Don’t forget that you’re building a relationship. When we discuss the pain points of candidates in their current companies, we are learning about what is not optimal from the candidate’s perspective. We can then show them that we are ready to fix those inefficiencies immediately.
For example, a candidate explains that they are demotivated by how product development and the sales teams are disconnected, so we show that we understand the importance of this and how our company is different in that way.
In-depth conversations are essential. In fact, one of the key “take your shot” hires for my company was an industry professional who told me my company didn’t stand a chance. We met and talked at length, and then half a year after this meeting, she agreed to join the team.
Recruitment is more than just the job.
Hiring top-tier specialists for an early-stage startup is more like a sales campaign than a talent selection process. Having conducted thorough research, make sure to adjust your expectations and craft a compelling pitch specific to that person.
When recruiting for an early-stage company, you’re shooting for the stars. Making industry professionals want to take a leap of faith is no small feat, so don’t be afraid to be bold, vulnerable and flexible to get the stellar team your startup deserves.
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