4 Characteristics Your Top Talent Should Have

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal, the number one show for making your life easier as an entrepreneur. Today's topic is about hiring your very first employee. But even if you have more than one employee, I would still stick around for the episode. The lessons I'm about to share apply to any of your early hires. Now, I just have one ask of you before we start the show. Once you have listened to the episode, if you found it valuable, please share it with someone who you think would benefit from it as well. Additionally, Shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com after you've finished listening to this episode and share any questions or challenges that you are facing in your business that you would like to see me break down over the coming weeks. Okay, my spiel is over. Let's do this thing. Employee number one at my new executive ghostwriting agency, Storyarb, is starting, and it has me reflecting on the mental model that I use used to evaluate whether this person was the right hire. And the reason I spent a good amount of time deciding on who to hire and evaluating if it was the right decision is because I really, really, really do not want to screw up employee number one. It is inevitable that you will mishire employees as you build a company, but doing that with employee number one is a huge momentum killer and it's a huge pain in the ass. And that is, quite frankly, exactly what happened to us with my first business, Morning Brew, back in 2017. We had just raised our first and only round of funding, $750,000 from 28 investors, and we were ready to hire employee number one, a newsletter writer, to replace my co-founder Austin and I, since we were highly unqualified to write Morning Brew every day. And I remember this experience so vividly. We hired employee number one off of AngelList. They started in March of 2017. We didn't have an office space. We were mooching off of someone's tech accelerator space on NYU's campus. And about 2 months into the job, I remember this person asking for me to step into the communal conference room with them. They sat me down and they told me that they couldn't do it anymore, that this role wasn't for them. It had taken a toll on their physical and mental health. And they would be resigning. I was shocked. Everything about this situation was full of firsts. The first time that an employee resigned, the first time that I felt like I had messed up as the CEO, the first time that I'd have to figure out things like severance and separation agreements. I felt a mix of emotions. I felt horrible that this person was so exhausted from the role that it had taken a toll on their health. But to be honest, I wasn't surprised. We worked a shit ton in the early days. Would I have preferred to work less? Yes, but it wasn't an option since we had a product to put out every single day and we had a really lean team because we couldn't afford more. I also felt a sense of overwhelm that we'd have to start this entire hiring process over. Which brings us back to StoryArb and the purpose of the episode. Given my experience with employee number 1 at Morning Brew, I wanted to make sure I didn't get it wrong the second time around. So I spent a ton of time trying to control all I could to find the right person. And there were basically 3 things that focused me on finding hire number one for StoryArc, which within the business is a content strategist. The first thing was the job description. By writing a super comprehensive JD and making sure every word we put into it was intentional, it acted not only as marketing to attract the right candidates who thought they would be good for the role, but it was also the best guide to hold us accountable to hiring someone that we knew could do everything listed on the job description. The second thing was the interview process. There is no one-size-fits-all model to an interview process, but basically we designed a process that filtered for what we needed in our first hire, which I'll share in a second. I'll also link out to the different parts of the interview process so you can follow the flow of how candidates move from top of funnel to bottom of the funnel. And so our interview process was an initial application which asked for name, email, LinkedIn URL, because I prefer that to resume, and one open-ended question which asked, why are you a good fit for the role? 132 people filled out that application based on me promoting it on Twitter and LinkedIn. And so then we filtered out people that we thought had, let's call it, at least 50% of the skills needed to succeed in the role. That led to step 2, which was us having about 12 30-minute phone calls with candidates that myself and StoryArb CEO were on. The phone call was half behavioral and half skill-based, and I went off of an interview question guide that we created before this second step started. From there, we were able to narrow down to 3 candidates that we wanted to move forward with. And step 3 in the interview process was having these 3 candidates do an exercise that simulated the type of work that they would be doing as a content strategist with the company. And from there, there was an obvious top candidate of the 3 who we had a final call with to congratulate on getting a job offer from StoryYard and to talk logistics about compensation, benefits, and when we could get to work together. So the final piece I want to share, which I would argue is most important and most applicable to any company and any early hire, are the criteria that we looked for when deciding if we found the right first employee. The first and most obvious question we ask ourselves when hiring this person is, can they do the job exceptionally well? Nothing else matters if you don't hire someone that you trust to take on all of the work that you had been doing so that you, as the CEO or the founder, can focus on higher leverage tasks. If you don't trust the person to do the job, then you're going to have to end up working in the weeds, and it defeats the purpose of hiring someone in the first place. And answering this question was easy for us because we just looked at the job description that we wrote that I just described, and that job description listed out the skills that were needed for our first employee to thrive as a content strategist. And we just compared those skills on the job description against what we heard during our interviews and what we received in the exercise in the third step of the process. And so, for example, for the content strategist role, the skills included great account management skills, someone who has an ability to build trust and deep relationships with clients, Great content strategy skills, someone who is able to take a client's experience and their goals and shape that into a specific niche and content pillars that will help them achieve that goal. Someone who has deep attention to detail and someone who has killer work ethic. So those were table stakes for any first hire, given that was the job to be done. And so within your company, you had to have a similar type of thing where you have a JD that has all of the skills, the essentials, the superpowers that this person needs, and you compare that against what you saw from them in the interview process. But then the second question we would ask ourselves, which in my opinion is what any company, any early stage company should be looking for in their first employee and really in several of their early employees, is the following question: Can we see this person starting their own company after they leave here? And we want to be able to say yes with whoever we choose as employee number one, because my view is that the best early employees have the characteristics that make for great future founders. And there are 4 simple characteristics in my mind. First, they are a force of nature. They pull an entire company forward because they're proactive. They don't mind stepping on your toes if it means getting the job done, and they would always prefer to ask for forgiveness than permission because they have an owner's mentality. Second, they are a critical thinker. There is so much information being thrown at you in the early days of a company and at startups in general. This person is great at not only taking in the information and prioritizing what's worth spending time focusing on, but they're also great at forming opinions based on the information they have rather than what they've been told to do or doing things how they've always been done. The third is they have an obsessive brain. When they feel purposeful in their work and they believe in the mission, this person can't stop thinking about the business. Some may argue that it's unhealthy, but I disagree. If they are lit up and fulfilled by the work they are doing, as long as they are not neglecting their health or any of the other buckets in their life that are important to them, I want them to be as obsessed as humanly possible with the work they're doing. And the fourth characteristic? They're self-aware. The best entrepreneurs have a clear understanding of the few things that they're great at and all of the things that are weaknesses that will hold back the company if not fixed or delegated to someone else. Self-awareness is the key to self-growth, and that's why I think it's so important for your early employees to have it. Otherwise, their pace of growth won't be fast enough to keep up with the company. So with all of that said, we have hired employee number one at Storyarb. And depending on when this episode comes out, they're either just about to start or they will have already started. And these are the tools that we used in order to give ourselves the best chance of hiring an all-star. If you found this episode valuable, share it with someone who you think could benefit from it as well, and shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com with any questions or challenges you're facing in your business that you would like to see me break down like I did with hiring your first employee. As always, thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you next episode.