How To Get Better at Recruiting!!

Hey Saster. I wanted to talk for a little bit about how to get better at recruiting. And in the initial days, but especially as you scale, even at just a million in ARR and beyond, nothing is more important than recruiting. Yes, you have to figure out the initial minimum sellable product, something one customer will pay for 2 then 10. But as soon as you have something, you will realize that nothing matters other than the team that you recruit. And most of us are not that great at recruiting. We find a way to get that initial group of co founders together, grab someone we used to work for, get a team of two to three, to four to five, maybe a few more together that ultimately may be quirky but are of high quality. But most of us have not spent our entire careers being aggressive recruiters. But again, nothing that else matters as much as hiring the people that can help you scale to the next level. And nothing will arrest your growth more after a few million in revenue. If you don't hire the right people, everyone will get overloaded. You as CEO can't be the VP of product forever. Your co founder can't be the VP of engineering as well as everything else. Your head of sales can also be your head of customer success, etc. Etc. You've got to get better at recruiting. So you probably know this, but let me come up with nine ideas to help you become a better recruiter. The first one I see so many first time founders come up short on, which is you have to force yourself to interview 30 candidates for each VP position. If you do this, it will solve so many problems. What tends to happen is, you know, hey, you don't know anybody. I don't know any great VPs of sales. You, you work the LinkedIn, you work your investors, you interview two or three candidates, five or six, you're not sure, then you kind of give up or you don't put enough hours into it. If you take your especially your number one VP role, the number one and most important hire you have to make, and you say, listen, I've got to interview 30 folks to make this higher and I want to make this higher in 60 days. Think about the math for a minute. That means you're committing to recruiting, to meeting four candidates a week by hook or by crook. That means if you can't find four from your network, you're going to hire recruiters, you're going to do blog posts, you're going to do whatever it takes, you're going to try every source to get them. And if you commit to 30, you're less likely to settle. And so many times we settle. We finally find 5, 6, 8, 10 candidates. We realize no one's perfect and no one is perfect. That perfect candidate may be out there, but she doesn't want to join your startup. She wants to join the perfect startup. So we get tired and after eight or 10 or 12 interviews, we sort of settle. But if you force yourself to hire 30, you dramatically increase the odds you get it done, that you invest the time and that you find a candidate you don't settle for. Okay, second point. And I know the veterans watching or listening know this, but I see so many first time founders that don't listen. Hire external recruiters and be good to them. External recruiters are your secret weapon. Look, it may seem frustrating to pay 20, $30,000 for a contingent search and maybe even $100,000 for retained SE, but what if you get the best VP in the world? It's worth it. It's worth it to pay that little bit of extra money on top of their salary to have someone that's amazing versus someone that's merely good or versus nobody at all. So you've got to hire external recruiters and you have to be good to them. Especially folks that are contingent, right, that you're not paying up front. Because contingent recruiters are, especially in sales, if they don't get you a candidate and you don't hire them, they don't make any money or very much money. So the mistake I see is not being responsive. Every time a contingent recruiter sends you a candidate, review it and provide real time feedback what you think and when you do an interview, provide that recruiter feedback immediately. Right after that zoom ends. Just send feedback to the recruiter so they know that there's money there and they'll keep working with you. Because if you don't provide that encouragement and feedback to contingent recruiters especially, they disappear on you. They don't think there's really any money there. Retained search. If you do them, you won't do them early, but later you may hire bigger firms that you pay a lot of money to retain. They'll keep at it because you paid them. But if you don't keep pushing them constantly and those first five or six candidates don't work out, they descend into the obvious. They descend into not quite as much energy as the start of the process. So you've got to be all over them and, and have a weekly check in call on that candidate as well. But whatever it is, realize don't not hire a recruiter to save money. A great recruiter will save you money because they will get you a better candidate than you will otherwise found and that will pay for itself in weeks. Okay, point three. And I think we've all figured this out now, or many of us have, but hire an internal recruiter as early as you can. And let's talk about what an internal recruiter can do. An internal recruiter is not a magical replacement for all the hard work that you might do finding candidates. It's not a hard work for working with a replacement for external recruiters. What an internal recruiter mostly does is manage the process for you and your team. If you're doing one interview a week, a couple of months, you can handle that. You can do the mix maxes and calendar leaves and figure it out. But at some point, if you're going to do 30 per candidate and you're going to start interviewing multiple candidates simultaneously, you're going to get overwhelmed with the process. You're going to miss candidates, you're going to miss follow ups, you're going to miss scheduling things. It's way too much. So as soon as you're even hiring two folks a month, it more than pays for itself to have an internal recruiter to manage it. That's a much better use of their time and a much more efficient use of their time than you or your co founder or others. Okay, next point 4. Find a way to screen people better. You know, there's so many great next generation applicant tracking systems. There's Greenhouse, which was just acquired for 800 million. There's so many others that make automation of applications much, much more smoother. But you've got to add an extra step. Most of us have at some point in our careers been part of programming tests. Many folks still use them. There's pros and cons to them, but they at least are a filter. Whether they're a flawed filter for engineers, they are a filter. Most of us don't have enough filters. The sell me the pen. This pen test in sales can sort of work, but it's hard to do it over an application. But what about a loom? What about a video application where they tell you why they'd like to join? Those are so powerful. What about asking people to tell you in email why they want to join? Whatever it is, make sure you have a good screening filter because if you don't, you're going to waste a ton of time talking to folks that maybe have a great LinkedIn but that are not a fit. Or more importantly, don't have the passion for your company. Okay, point five. We touched on this before, but trust me on this one. And first time founders don't listen. Assume. Just for the sake of assumptions, assume your personal network does not source the candidate. And what I mean is, of course finding a candidate from your own network is free. At least could be free. It also has an advantage that if someone from your network that you trust recommends a candidate, whoa, you're way ahead. You've already gotten that big thumbs up on the candidate. So of course the best candidates are from people you trust that say, this is the best person I ever worked with. That will be true for all, for all time and eternity. But the problem is not. The problem is folks assume that that will work. And I find even in the early stages, you're lucky if half of your top folks come from your network and that percentage is going to decrease over time. I know many founders say, hey, it's a point of pride. I source all my candidates myself. Well, great, maybe you will, but that will also narrow your thinking. You won't expand your candidate pool. So just assume for the sake of a new hire, assume. Unless you already have a hot lead, assume your personal network isn't going to get you there and start thinking about the other avenues and the other channels that you're going to do to source that candidate. Okay, point seven. And I know again, you know this, but this is especially true for positions you haven't hired for, which is you have to listen and look for flags. Flags. Half the point of recruiting is listening for flags. It's not hearing whether they say the right things, it's hearing whether they say problematic things. Some classic flags for marketers are folks that want to do things in marketing that are not a good fit for your company or your product. For example, it's pretty common. If, let's say you're selling enterprise big deals, you'll meet a lot of marketers that are good at SEM and SEO and paid acquisition. That's great, but that works best for SMBs. And often those folks will know nothing about how to do ABM or source larger, larger, larger potential opportunities, et cetera, et cetera, listen for flags, and especially listen for flags from folks whose LinkedIns are very attractive, who have great logos, who worked at great places or worked at your competition. Because you're going to over index on that great LinkedIn and you're not going to listen as carefully for flags. And we know any flag, any issue you hear during the recruiting process, it's going to be 10x bigger once you hire them, not smaller. And no candidate's perfect. Everyone's going to have flaws and quirks, but it's flags you've just got to listen to. Okay, next point. And too many candidates make this mistake first time, especially first time founders. Don't assume because you're so charismatic that you can close anybody. You have to bring in the cavalry. Okay, what do I mean? Is like so many candidates are so driven. So many CEOs are so driven and they, they, they're so mission driven. They feel like the biggest problem with recruiting is just get me to that candidate, get me to that great VP of sales or marketing and customer success or engineering. And then my passion, my vision, my tenacity will close them. Often will actually work with your early customers. Right. If you can just talk to them. And as a CEO, you're very engaged in the product, sort of almost there. You can close them as CEO. The customers love to talk to the CEO. But there's a lot of startups out there and most of them that have gotten anywhere have a CEO of some level of charisma. Maybe quirky charisma. It may be unusual. So it's not enough. You're not the only CEO or founders with charisma out there. So bring in the cavalry. Get your investors, get your advisors, get them all outbounding and talking to that candidate. Do everything. Get all of your advocates helping you close. Do more pr, do everyone else's podcast, do webinars, do events, speak at people's events. Not because you're going to get leads or anything, but because it's air cover for recruiting to make folks want to join you. Be cognizant of your glass doors. Be cognizant of what's written about you on the Internet. Whatever you do, recruit all the help you can for recruiting. And don't assume your drive and charisma alone is enough, because it is necessary. You have to be an inspiring leader as a startup leader. But the other startups have inspiring leaders too. Okay, penultimate point we hit earlier, but I want to give it. It's a standalone point. Don't get overexcited about logos and folks that worked at your competitors. This is the classic mistake. We all fall into it. I still even fall into it a little bit. I see this nine times out of ten. First of all, everyone gets super attracted to someone that worked at your competitor. Hooray. Okay, listen. It can create a fun dialogue and discussion and sometimes it even can be helpful in the early days because they can bring a little of that playbook. But you already know your competitor's playbook. And you can learn everything you need to learn just by interviewing a few people or even dropping into their webinars or being a fake sales prospect. Whether that's completely ethical or not, you'll learn a lot. You don't need to hire them. You don't need to hire them to learn the 10 tidbits of information that an AE or an engineer or a VP at your company competitor knows you can. You can pick that up on your own. And don't let that fluency with, especially with the more successful competition, blind you to their weaknesses. Because this is what happens with competitors. We get so excited about hiring someone from our more successful competitor that we overlook the weaknesses. We overlook they're not driven enough. We overlook the reasons why. Aren't they there anymore? We overlook the reasons why they were fired. Were they fired as a sales rep because they were a low performer? This is so often the case in competitive hiring folks from Kidders and sales. They were let go because they weren't that good. But you're so attracted to them because they worked at your bigger competitor. You've got to dig deeper. And if nothing else, for logos and competition, especially competition, only hire them. If they didn't work at your competitor, remove it from their LinkedIn as best you can. As a mental exercise, would you still hire them? If you're not sure, do not make the hire. And similarly, logos, it's great if they worked at Slack or Asana or wherever, but those are big companies and they were a long time ago. So I'd much rather them. For most startups, they're working at the next Asana, right? Take someone from somewhere that's closer to your ACV than someone that worked at someone somewhere north of 100 million in AR. Just almost draw a black line through the linkedins of anyone that works somewhere north of 80 to 100 million AR, because those are not the skill sets you need. And you'll get attracted to them as we all are. We're all attracted to logos, we're all attracted to brands. But in fact it often means they know less. Remember this, especially on the revenue side in sales and marketing and customer success, the playbook, when you have a dominant brand, has very little in common with the playbook. When you don't, okay, the leads come in and sales is always hard. But when you have a dominant brand, it's just about convincing them to make the decision they've half made. When they come in not convincing them to buy from a brand new vendor they barely know if they can trust. So be thoughtful here. Pretend any candidate don't get blinded by the logo and almost black out if they worked at a competitor. Okay, and the last point, the last point. Drop everything else. Drop everything else. This is the conundrum that founders get themselves into. Okay, it's time to hire my VP of Sales, my VP of Marketing, my VP of Product, and then it goes on for a month or two and it drags on. The first candidates don't work out, it's harder than they thought, and they sort of sink into their chair and they go back and they do it the old way. The CEO remains the VP of Product, the CTO remains the VP of Engineering. You muddle on without a real VP of Sales or VP of Marketing at all. No, that's wrong. It is okay even to let. It's never really okay to let a quarter slide, but if you have to do recruit, do it. Drop everything else. Because again, you can't scale without a team. You can't get to the next level without a team. And nothing else really matters once you have something. And a great VP really can cure many of the ills in a functional area. If sales have slowed down, a great VP of sales can inflect the curve. If leads have plateaued, where's your VP of Demand Gen? Right? If product is slowing down because you have no true VP of product or because your CTO is overwhelmed, the VP of Product or VP of Engineering will solve those problems and then you will grow faster. So literally drop other stuff. It's not quite the same, but when you talk to the best venture capitalists, for example, you think VCs will say they meet with 3,000 startups a year, blah, blah, blah. Maybe they do. But the best ones, you'll hear, as soon as they find the great next deal, the greatest next startup, they drop everything. A VC will do anything. If you've been on the other side as a founder, you'll see yourself smothered with attention from a vc and you won't get wired. Aren't you meeting with hundreds and hundreds of other customers? No, but they're recruiting. They're just. They're in sales, they want to close the deal and they know there's only one. One great deal every month or quarter, and they're all over it. You should treat your VB candidates the same way, like drop other stuff so that you can scale. It's okay. I give you permission and whatever you do. Don't, after a month or two, slink back and do it yourself. Because you can't find someone recognize, if nothing else, that's a failure and find a way to do better.