A quick thought on recruiting today

I’ve had the pleasure of talking with a lot of new or aspiring entrepreneurs recently.  One of the most common themes I’ve noticed is that just about everyone is having a hard time recruiting good people.  This isn’t really a surprise, just about every tech blogger has talked about this in the last few months.  The reason this is interesting and important to dive into is just how important it is that these entrepreneurs figure out a way around it, as the success of their business depends on it.

First, without doubt, ideas don’t start themselves or sell themselves.  You need great folks to execute the product vision and the business plan, and a large value of the enterprise ends up being the quality/talent of the people inside it.  If there’s one thing I learned at Invite, it’s that you can never spend enough time recruiting and interviewing for the right people to join the team (and you need to fix mistakes quickly).

So why is it so hard all of a sudden, and what can you do about it?  A lot of people think it’s because there are more startups out there due to a loosened up funding environment, and thus more companies competing for the same people.  That’s definitely part of it.  But another thing we learned at Invite is that the best people we hired were aspiring entrepreneurs, not just regular everyday workers.  These folks wanted to change the world, and looked at their role at Invite as a crucial building block towards their goal of starting their own company.  One of our goals was to create the “Invite Media Mafia”, in homage to the PayPal mafia where tons of disruptive businesses came from former PayPal employees.

This to me, combined with the perceived frothy VC/investing environment but also the reduction in barriers to starting a company (lower overall startup costs, cloud computing, etc…), screams that more and more of these folks who were just a couple years ago joining startups as early employees are now being convinced to start their own companies.  So, in other words, you’re not competing against other companies to hire Susan, you’re competing against Susan’s goal and ability to start her own startup.  Honestly, you can’t really complain about this at a very high-level.  It’s a great thing that these folks are able to go after their dreams now; however, that just means as a startup founder, you’re going to need to be just as equally more effective in convincing folks that you’re enterprise is worth joining.

So how do you do that?  If I knew the perfect answer I’d tell you.  What I do know, and from my limited experience, is that you have to do a damn good job of creating an environment that helps these folks grow as entrepreneurs and not just employees (and not just being able to tell that story) .  In my mind, this means a flatter organization, less middle management recruited from big companies, more self-accountability, and more delegation and responsibility.  Another idea is also to encourage a dialogue and help them build a network with your investors, whereby your entrepreneurial employees will gain a relationship with the right kind of folks by working with you.  You have to empower your people to be their own CEO’s, and be confident that when you’re courting that next great person to join your team that your existing employees will tell the same thing to the candidate.  Only then will you be able to convince Susan that she’ll learn skills at your startup that will help her be that more effective at her own startup.  It’s no longer good enough to be able to recruit people solely on how cool your idea sounds.

That’s my two cents on how to hire the best people in the current environment.