5harathFounding Growth Lead, Willow Voice

How to Interview

11 Apr 2024 · 1 min

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In this brief talk, the speaker recounts their extensive involvement in hiring the first 50 employees of a startup, covering everything from creating hiring plans and sourcing candidates to conducting interviews across all roles. This hands‑on experience taught them how to define the skills needed for each position, understand the functions of different roles within a company, and ultimately informed their transition to a founder role, giving them a deeper appreciation of how teams are built and how companies operate.

Chapters

I was involved in hiring a lot of the early company. So whether it was creating hiring plans, whether it was, you know, actually sourcing candidates, interviewing, I think I interviewed probably the, you know, if you look at the next 50 people after me, I think I interviewed almost every person, if not everyone. It was like a, you know, major part of bringing them on the team and that in every role, which I think has been really interesting now that I've transitioned to being a founder. Because, you know, a lot of building the team is, of course, there's a lot of engineering, but there's a lot of other roles. And it helped me going off and researching what skills do we think would be successful for this particular role? What are we looking for? What do we need this person to do when we had something we needed in the company? Actually showed me quite a lot about how companies function and like the different roles and the different, the types of people that you need to bring in. So I think that's been really helpful.