As long as founders prioritize recruitment, they can become excellent recruiters.

Written by: Aurora Petracca

Translated by: Luffy, Foresight News

For early-stage entrepreneurs, focusing on product-market fit (PMF) is often the core strategy for success. However, once you find PMF and begin to scale, a whole new set of challenges will arise, each requiring new skills, knowledge, and strategic thinking.

Among these urgent priorities, what is the most important and challenging? It is recruitment, and it needs to be done quickly. But if you act too fast and lack a plan, it can lead to many painful and costly mistakes. To help founders avoid unnecessary growing pains, here are the 10 common mistakes we found that founders repeatedly make during the recruitment process, along with some wise ways to avoid them.

1. Underestimating the time and effort required for recruitment

When you are fully immersed in product development, you may set aside networking until you need to hire talent. Many founders are surprised to find how difficult it is to attract the right candidates without prior preparation.

Given that most early-stage companies have not yet established a trustworthy brand, as a founder, you must sell your mission, yourself, and the future vision of the company to candidates. This work requires long-term, proactive, one-on-one talent networking, which may take months (or even years).

From the moment you have the idea for your startup, you should start spending time each week building your network, talking about the business you are building, and establishing relationships with people you may eventually want to recruit, all before you need to hire talent.

2. Not valuing the candidate experience enough

Founders often have tight schedules, but you cannot let your stress lead to a rushed and chaotic interview process. Interviewers who do not carefully read candidates' profiles, are unprepared with interview questions, and ask the same questions as other interviewers can lead to interview processes that stall for days or even weeks. This is a candidate's nightmare.

If candidates have little or no communication with the company team, or if communication is not timely, even if candidates are enthusiastic about the company, they will quickly lose interest.

Remember, candidates are also interviewing the company and often communicate with multiple companies. Worse, the crypto industry is small, and negative experiences can spread quickly, leading to the loss of quality candidates.

Ensure that you allocate enough resources for recruitment (whether hiring talent experts or leading it yourself), make sure the interview process runs smoothly, and maintain communication with candidates. Additionally, always set aside time before interviews to research candidates' backgrounds to avoid negatively impacting their experience due to lack of preparation.

3. Starting every interview with a cliché pitch

Each candidate has different motivations. Unless you understand the candidate's needs or why they are interested in talking to you, how can you effectively pitch to them? It is important to know the basics of the interview, asking candidates about their motivations for speaking with you, what they feel is lacking in their current job, what aspects of company culture they value, their decision-making timeline, and their salary expectations. But you must also be prepared to turn what you learn into a customized pitch for the candidate you are speaking with, which means you need to take the time to understand them.

Due to the relative complexity of the Web3 industry, coupled with the fact that companies in this field often hire candidates from Web2 who lack a solid foundational understanding of crypto technology and its potential, this challenge is particularly acute in the Web3 world.

If you do not understand the candidate, you may inadvertently emphasize things they are not interested in or, conversely, overlook things that might attract them. So, start with a series of questions to help you understand the candidate, and then adjust your pitch accordingly.

4. Rushing through the review process

Acting hastily and skipping steps that could save you a lot of trouble later. For example, if a candidate seems perfect, you might want to skip the work trial or in-depth background check, which can help you verify the candidate's abilities and fit. This "time-saving" approach can be a costly mistake.

Think of it this way: any time you think you are saving time in the recruitment process, it may actually mean you will spend more time managing the performance of a bad hire. A poor hire can be disastrous for an organization, especially for small companies (like startups) that need to grow quickly.

Instead, create a strong and consistent process that ideally includes a work trial to test the candidate's work style and fit with the existing team. Do not skimp on thorough background checks, and if possible, do not just focus on "surface references" (the references provided by the candidate), but also leverage your network to seek out additional references.

5. Not clarifying cultural values before team expansion

Building a team before establishing values is another potentially costly mistake. Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky referred to culture as "a shared way of doing things with passion." When founders build a strong culture through shared values, it can deepen trust among employees, promote autonomy, and reduce the need for formal processes. A lack of good culture can lead to inconsistent operations among everyone in the company, resulting in performance, communication, and employee turnover issues.

Clearly defining values when building a team can prevent you from hiring individuals whose values are inconsistent, as this can undermine the culture you are trying to build. This creates a vicious cycle.

Values are the common bond and work philosophy that unite the team, and they can help the team come together in times of difficulty. Once values are established, they must be integrated into the recruitment process in a structured and consistent manner. For example, you should pre-set some questions to assess candidates' alignment with each value and ask these questions in every interview. This way, you can easily find the best answers and avoid falling into the common traps of cultural interviews, such as whether you "click" with the other person or "can imagine spending time with them." This helps reduce unconscious bias that can easily arise in cultural interviews.

6. Lacking long-term strategic thinking when hiring managers

You are facing an urgent problem that needs to be solved, but you do not have enough time to think. This problem needs immediate resolution: business development, strategy formulation, marketing, etc. But avoid hiring someone to solve the immediate problem while neglecting your long-term future.

What will happen if the company experiences exponential growth in six months or a year? Is this person still the right fit to lead the overall strategy? Or do you need someone with a broader vision and international network?

Take the time to carefully consider all the management roles you may need next year and think about how these roles will evolve. Who will be responsible for what?

When building a management team, your goal is to define the boundaries of responsibilities and skill requirements for each position. Long-term considerations can also help you be more strategic in your hiring, finding individuals who possess the skills for later positions and are passionate about the opportunities presented by startups. At the beginning of new employees' onboarding, be sure to communicate openly about your short- and long-term expectations for success in the role, as well as the direction of the organization under different growth scenarios.

7. Attracting candidates with inflated titles

To attract candidates, you set some lofty titles, such as Chief X Officer. This may be tempting, and some candidates do like this, but setting such titles can lead to problems down the line. For example:

• This person may not actually be qualified for the title, especially as the company scales (see point 6).
• This may hinder your ability to recruit more senior talent later.
• If employees perform well, you lose the opportunity to promote them. (Internal promotions greatly benefit company culture and talent retention, and can also enhance recruitment appeal.)
• The tone you set indicates that there is a hierarchy in your company culture rather than a flat "we are all owners" mentality.
• Those who only care about titles may not be well-suited for a startup.

Before granting a candidate a fancy title, give them a chance to prove their leadership capabilities. Before granting them a senior title, follow the advice in point 6: think about what your company structure will look like in the next six months to a year. What positions do you anticipate needing to hire?

Consider whether the candidate's qualifications truly match the position they are applying for. Ideally, you can let them join but at a lower level, allowing them six months to prove whether they truly meet the job requirements.

8. A haphazard onboarding process lacking systematic guidance

Founders sometimes assume that if they hire an experienced person, giving them a laptop will allow them to start working smoothly on the first day. While it is reasonable to think that a rigorously vetted, experienced professional should excel at their job, do not assume they can read minds. The only way to ensure you and the new employee are aligned on expectations is through communication.

Develop an onboarding training plan that includes your expectations for the candidate's deliverables and timelines (e.g., 30/60/90 days), which is the minimum requirement. Regularly (preferably weekly) follow up on their progress during the initial 90 days, and adjust the pace of follow-ups based on mutual willingness.

Be sure to provide feedback on what works and what does not, and offer new employees a communication channel to express any requirements they need to complete their work. For founders of early-stage companies (with fewer than 10 employees), it is essential to personally help new employees connect with other staff.

As the company grows, investing in building a more comprehensive onboarding program becomes necessary. However, good onboarding, whether rudimentary or sophisticated, has one crucial element: establishing expectations and communication channels between new employees and managers, ensuring new employees have all the necessary tools and equipment to get up to speed quickly, and fostering good relationships with the team.

9a. Superstitious belief in prestigious schools and big company backgrounds

Stanford University, MIT, Princeton University, the University of Waterloo, and Cornell University are all world-class institutions. But do not exclude candidates solely based on their backgrounds.

There are countless candidates who did not attend top schools but may have spent their free time working on engineering projects on GitHub or solving real-world problems, which is a strong indication of curiosity and problem-solving inclination.

Similarly, overemphasizing experience at FAANG companies can limit your talent pool. Admittedly, these companies often have high standards for talent and have established rigorous engineering practices. However, many other companies also have strong talent brands. Moreover, not everyone who thrives under the FAANG structure will succeed in a driven startup environment.

Do not look at candidates' credentials; instead, consider their career development:

• Have they taken ownership and proven themselves successful?
• Have they encountered problems that are relevant to your company's work?
• Do they possess the drive and right attitude to lend a hand and provide help when necessary?

9b. The "crypto-native" argument

On the other hand, cryptocurrency founders may believe that "crypto-native" candidates are inherently superior. By limiting the candidate pool to crypto-native talent, you might miss out on excellent individuals with rich experience and a rigorous attitude in the Web2 space. In the early days of Coinbase (around 2014), there were no crypto-native talents, so we turned to candidates from "crypto-related" companies (such as payment companies) to see if they possessed core skills and a genuine interest and passion for the field. Afterwards, we provided new employees with time and support to help them grow quickly.

While engineers with years of experience in RUST may be able to contribute code immediately, any good engineer should be able to master a new language proficiently within a month or two. Therefore, instead of spending eight months searching for the perfect web3 candidate, it is better to spend half that time filling the position and giving candidates time to adapt to the field.

10. Underestimating the importance of offline collaboration

On one hand, the flexibility of remote hiring makes it easier to recruit talent and better meets the needs of those who are more efficient working from home. On the other hand, when everyone is working remotely, building trust and genuine relationships can become more challenging.

Trust is often built through sincere relationships, which can facilitate more direct problem-solving, create better cross-functional collaboration, bonds, and friendships, helping your company come together in times of difficulty.

So, does this mean that remote-first companies are unworkable? Of course not. But remote hiring has a compromise: regular in-person meetings and work sessions to allow people to collaborate and develop friendships. In addition to more offline collaboration at the team level, you can also focus remote hiring on key areas and hold local gatherings more frequently. The remote work culture is a blessing that allows us to be more inclusive in our hiring practices, enabling people to work together regardless of their location. However, it is important to understand that the lack of offline collaboration comes at a cost, so you need to establish corresponding mechanisms to mitigate this loss.

Summary

Running a startup is no easy task, and as a founder, you will be pulled in countless different directions, one of which is recruiting top talent for the company. While hiring is challenging, it is far from rocket science. As long as founders prioritize recruitment, they can become excellent recruiters, and this list can help you avoid the most significant pitfalls in the hiring process.

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