Building a recruiting machine: Rules to nail your early hiring processes

Founders Supporting Founders: Iterative is accepting applications for its next batch.

This is the first installment of a three-part series on how to build a recruiting machine. In this article, we’ll dig into the motivations for why it’s important to get really good at hiring, plus writing your first job description.

Image credit: Holly Guacamolly

Hiring is a really complex topic because it quickly dovetails into other best practices for human resources like firing, performance management, culture, etc. Hiring is also very different when you’re at the varying stages of a company.

Since we at Iterative typically work with earlier-stage companies, I’m going to try to focus on this scope.

Part one of this series will zoom in on why you should care about hiring and offer tips to draft your first job post. In the later parts of this series, we’ll get into sourcing, pipeline, and closing.

Why should you care?

In tech startups, people generally account for majority of costs and serve as the biggest lever to growth. In fast-paced startups, ideas are plentiful, but what matters is execution. A 10x team specifically honed to execute your mission will outperform one that is haphazardly built.

As founders and executives, you will spend at least 20% to 30% of your time on people (and this allocation is much higher right after a fundraiser), so you need to get good at it.

A couple more things to note:

• Hiring is sales – Funnels matter, sales pitches matter, closing rates matter, cycle times matter.
• Hiring is hard – As a startup, you are completely unknown with no brand and very little validation. You’re risky and you can’t pay high salaries. Finding the perfect person and convincing them to sacrifice a lot to join you will take time and effort.

Don’t be discouraged, though. Doing a great job with hiring will save you a ton of headaches down the road, as a well-built team will make executing, planning, navigating, fundraising, and more hiring much easier in the future.

Stage matters: Traps to avoid

When a company scales, there are very distinct stages that require different hiring strategies. The reason for this is because a person’s most efficient span of control – the number of people that report to them where they actually have some influence – is between six to eight people.

That means each power of seven is approximately a different stage of the company. I’ve outlined these stages in the table below as well as what makes each of them slightly different.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on the “pizza team” stage and things to look out for there. I’ll avoid the “How to find a co-founder” or the “How to do executive hiring” discussions and save those for a future piece.

Building a recruiting process