Tips on Hiring for startups

Here are 4 tips on Hiring for startups

1) Hire well rounded senior developers.

If you hire junior developers you will end up having a lot of code debt and at the end you will
have to pay back the debt (just like borrowing money with interest). Having well rounded generalist senior developers would alleviate most of the debt but also have a small number of juniors to help out small modules. I have seen companies with 4 seniors do amazing things.

Of course, the initial cost of hiring senior developers is way more than juniors but at the end it will cost you less, since you will have less technical debt.

Also try not to hire specialist. e.g database scaling pro (DBA), web scaling pro, since you need someone who can jump into any part of the code to fix things (database, network, web, font-end javascript, version control etc), while a specialist may not have that experience.

2) Give Incentive to employees

Early stage startup need to give incentive’s to all the founders. Give equity to the people who work, but do give them by fairness and by giving it in equal portions to their input to the company. By giving them shares or equity, you would create more loyalty from the employees, they would put their heart and soul into the baby (startup).

Don’t forget to create a vesting schedule, overtime give share to the founders they are allocated. e.g first year 30% and over the months the rest of the amount of it, thus it will eliminate if a founder leaves the company of having 50% of the share in the 10th year of the company when they left in the first year.

Example:

• Founders: 25% up front and the rest monthly over 3-4 years.
• Employees: 25% after one year and the rest monthly over 3-4 years.

3) Dont’ forget remote talent

It may be hard to hire local talent but remote work is getting very popular. I don’t mean outsourcing by just hiring people from China or India to do the work, maybe the talent is not in your city, maybe in another part of your country, and the developer is willing to work remotely and time to time travel to the startup location to have meetings etc.
I believe this is gaining quite a momentum these days e.g #37signals, #github, etc | https://weworkremotely.com/

4) Always be hiring ABH

In the words of Glengarry Glen Ross speech ABC (Always be closing). A startup needs ABH (Always be Hiring). A startup needs to be always be hiring and looking for great talent, because you may be happy with your team but you never know if someone else would scout your talent away from you.