Hiring your leadership team at 🌱 stage
Arguably, seed is the most challenging (and rewarding) stage of the company’s lifecycle. This is a “to be or not to be” kind of a situation for your product, you are in the middle of figuring out how exactly things will look like and what the route to the market actually is. A lot of risk is taken, and not just by the investors (that’s right), by the talent joining the team too. An extra 300% of convincing and nurturing is going into each seed stage senior executive member who is brought in and an extra edge is required from the potential hires.
Whereas it helps to bring a headhunter on board to pass on the right signal to the talent market, the whole hiring team needs to be aware and brought on board to the following specificities of hiring at an early stage:
Understand your talent: at seed you are likely to be looking for great builders. Those typically work collaboratively, efficiently and proactively. Likely you are looking for a builder who had gone through a journey already from seed to series B and likely these builders are at the common age groups of having a family and, therefore, certain responsibilities.
Access adequately what you offer: If you are hiring from Series A -B-C, make sure you are able to meet the salary expectations with a maximum of 20% drop on the base. Equity comp will cover some of the loss, yet be aware that the talent is taking a risk here as well and part of this compensation will go to cover that willingness to take that risk. Do research the market of talent you are after, their expectations and minimum requirements.
Give the free rain: no startuper likes micromanegement, especially at early stages. Make sure that your CTO and CPO are the lead decision makers in their verticals. Otherwise - why hire them in the first place?
Over-budget: noone wants to be stuck in the situation where there is a lack of budget to grow the team and an immense pressure to deliver at the same time. Assuring you have a longer than enough runway to support and sponsor your team is critical to maintaining focused atmosphere and team spirit.
