Brie set a 60-minute timer to answer the question “how should early stage companies think about hiring?”

• Your first 10 team members will dictate the culture of your organization. They’re going to implicitly set the default operating norms for your company, and those are incredibly hard to change.
• Only two things matter:

• Can they get the job done?
• Can they work well with others to get there?

• Hiring takes a ton of time. You’re recruiting to spec not to cost. Don’t forget it! Write it on every whiteboard in your office if you need to.
• Universally good qualities for early teams: Resourcefulness. Self-awareness. Hard-working/committed. High integrity. Good attitude. High standards for themselves/others. Communication (this is very context-dependent, so make sure they will be good communicators in your context).
• **Do not** lower your standards because you are overwhelmed by the workload. It will create way more work to have an underperformer or a bad fit on the team.

• There’s a point in every hiring process where everyone feels “our standards are too high, we’re looking for someone that doesn’t exist.” Someone has to be the one to say, “have confidence, we will find them.” Be that person. You will find them. Trust yourself, trust the process, trust your standards.

• Candidates will get a very high signal about your company from your hiring process. Being disorganized or out of sync is a MAJOR red flag. Also talent talks. I can’t tell you how many times people say “that company is a mess” based on their candidate experience.
• Over-communicate and over-document.  The thing that matters most is that everyone is on the same page (your team, your candidate) about what’s happening when.

• assign a single DRI/point of contact for roles/candidates. Every candidate should know exactly where they are in the process at all times. No leaving people hanging. Even at the first resume screen phase. Absolutely no ghosting.
• Writing things down is a good forcing function for clarity/alignment in a way that talking things out isn’t. This is especially important for hiring when things can get kind of squishy. Role scope/job description. Hiring process. Decision-maker. Ideal candidates. Etc.

• Keep an eye out for those primarily motivated by the following. They will probably end up dissatisfied.

• Getting rich
• Fancy titles they can put on their LinkedIn
• Leading big teams (Stripe had an early operating principle that says “we don’t hire people that say they want to be managers”)
• Become a public spokesperson for the company / getting Twitter/LinkedIn famous

• Hiring based on referrals from your networks will not only get you the best candidates, it’ll also be the highest ROI on your time.
• Everyone should be involved in every hiring decision on your early team. It erodes trust in the company/your colleagues to have someone just show up at the desk next to you. I like the following set-up for keeping the team abreast of what’s going on with hiring:

• Slack channel for every role: weekly updates about the candidate pipeline, who is at every phase (sourced, early round interviews, final round interviews, offer out)
• Slack channel for every candidate: for anyone that wants loads of detail about where the candidate is at in the process, team impressions of that candidate, etc.)

• Try hard to get a woman and POC on your early team. After 10 white guys, it’ll get way harder to recruit non-white-guys.
• Team prep worth doing

• “Are they good at what they do?” is only part of the equation. They have to be good in the context of your company.

• Only you can know what the “context of your company” actually is. It’s worth developing a clear-eyed perspective on the qualities of a person that will thrive at your company. Imagine yourself working with them every day for 12 months. Do they have to be prepared to debate a lot? Do they need to enjoy working independently?  
• Before you start hiring, write these down. Make sure everyone’s in agreement on what’s table-stakes vs nice-to-have.

• Define your decision-making process on candidates. Does everyone have to be a yes? Does everyone have to be a hells yes? Who breaks ties? Can individuals block? Who?
• Clarifying role scope:

• Paint the picture of what a great candidate looks like by having everyone share Linkedin’s of ideal candidates (not fake criteria, actual people you know you think would do a great job).
• Start at the outcomes. In 3 months, we’ll know this person has done a great job if…
• Another articulation of role scope I like:

• p0s/ Glass balls: the most important things to definitely get right / prioritize over other things, these are the things that if dropped will meaningfully break things
• p1s/rubber balls: The other important things to get right, but not at the expense of P0’s, these are the things that if dropped are more resilient

• Role FAQ’s

• Anticipated joys/challenges? Have a clear picture of anticipated joys and challenges for this role, and be prepared to speak to them. Pretending the challenges don’t exist will only make things harder.
• Reporting structure. Don’t do the “we don’t really have clear structures or managers, we embrace ambiguity” thing. Everyone has a manager.
• Ideal level: more junior/more senior

• Create an interview plan

• Evaluation Criteria: hard and soft skills
• Phases (phone screen, working session, exec interview, etc.) with owners

• What criteria you are looking for at each phase
• (nice to have) some interview questions to assess that thing
• Here are some questions I like/have used over the years.

• Job Description

• Create one.  

• Because you’re mostly going to hire via referrals, having an artifact for that job is important because it helps people send something around vs take the time to explain. (lightweight Notion page/google doc is fine.
• It forces the team to get clear on who they are looking for.

• What goes on a good one?

• 1-2 sentences explain what the company does/the ambition.
• 1-2 sentences on reasons to believe (great investors, strong early team/traction, etc.)
• Title matters for this document. It’s what will dictate whether someone will keep reading or not.
• Get 1-2 external eyes for feedback. That list of people you think would make good candidates could be a good place to start. “We’re designing a role that we would want to be very appealing to someone like you. Any feedback on what piqued your interest or turned you off?”
• If you are open-minded about how experienced you want this person to be, say so. People understand.
• Something that indicates what their day-to-day will look like. What problems will they have to solve? (I like this framed as questions they’ll help the team answer).
• Write like a person, not some weird corporate automaton.  This is a good example IMO.
• A way to get in touch.

• Interviewing

• Don’t just throw people into a room to talk. Everyone should be interviewing for a specific competency. Ex-someone should do the technical interview and someone else should do the behavioral interview. Both shouldn’t do both.

• The role DRI/hiring manager should write our what those are and then divvy them up by phase/interviewer.

• Having a question bank is helpful. Here’s a start.
• The appropriate amount of total candidate time to ask for is ~10 hours through your interviewing process. 15 max. (This doesn’t include closing which may add another 3-5). If you are going to go over that, you should have a very good reason.

• If this feels like too little, turning to references will help a lot.

• Endless rounds of interviews to collect more information means your process is broken. Challenge yourself to build a process that allows you to get enough signal in that time.

• References

• You absolutely must talk to references. DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP!!
• 7 is a good number to strive for. Yes, 7. In some ways, this is the highest signal thing.
• Don’t wait for the candidate to tell you who to talk to or wait for the end of the process to confirm that you’ve found your person. Go out and find people who have worked directly with this person and talk to them with an open-mind.^[a]
• Graham Duncan’s Reference Guide is the most helpful thing I’ve encountered on the topic.

• Looking at work.

• Do not forget to look at real work together. So many teams do. Your options are as follows. Have a perspective on this for every role:

• Do a working session/series of working sessions on a real problem.
• Have a candidate walk you through work they’ve already done.
• Do a work trial.
• (my least favorite for early teams) assign a take home where candidates produce new work for you. (Later stage teams need to do this to standardize the process, but this is a place you can afford to be a little bespoke).  

• Evaluating candidates

• Rubrics are probably overkill for a small team, but you should be prepared to have a perspective on how they rank according to what specific skills/experiences you are hiring for.
• “Trope/round up”: This is the forum where everyone gets a chance to talk about their experience of the candidate. Because you are all interviewing for slightly different competencies, the trope should feel like putting the whole puzzle together.

• Have everyone rate the candidate with a number. 1-7, where 4 is not allowed. You want people to decisively pick sides. (Alternative is strong yes, weak yes, weak no, strong no. Again, no “luke warm” option.)
• It’s also a decision-making meeting. Don’t leave the room without a yes/no perspective on hiring.

• If you “need more information” after the trope, your hiring process is broken
• Attitude matters a lot more on small teams. You’re going to be in close quarters with these people. You can save yourself a lot of heartache by surrounding yourself having mostly people in mostly good moods.
• Care less about a candidate’s default connection to the mission than you think. They definitely need to be open-minded/curious about it, but they may need some time to fall in love with the problem space. (This was certainly the case for most of the early team at Stripe–most people didn’t join because of their enthusiasm about payments processing infrastructure)

• Offers

• You’ll be tempted to create a bespoke process/offer for every candidate. But, it’s ultimately better for the company and the candidate if there are clear standards and guidelines for hiring/offers.

• Your early team will get very close and will talk to each other. It won’t take long for everyone to know everyone else’s salary and equity stake. When that comes out, will everyone feel like they were treated fairly?

• If you actually want the best people, you cannot be cheap, but you also don’t have to go crazy high on your offers. I’d suggest aiming for the 65-75th percentile on both.

• The best people are motivated by doing really good work and working with great people.

• When you make the offer, be VERY specific about why you chose them. You want them to feel seen and special.
• I think early teams should explore non-standard vesting schedules (depending on how good you think you are at hiring)

• Back-Weighted vesting schedules (to incentivize folks to stay longer), I’m not sure but I think Amazon explored this
• Schedules that assume 2 years vs 4 (a 2 year sprint is possible, 4 years much harder, also forces default check-sooner)

• Things that were table stakes in my early-stage offer:

• Reporting to CEO
• Comp: Even though there were no formal levels, I looked at the comp bands to make sure they were viewing me as appropriately “senior”
• What I wanted but didn’t get

• Early exercise
• Start date

• What I didn’t care at all about

• Title

• Closing

• Love bomb, bear hug, full court press, whatever you want to call it.

• Have an explicit owner for this. For continuity, it should probably be the same person that was running their hiring process until now. For example, it’s overwhelming/confusing if multiple people are offering to schedule a celebratory meal.

• Discovery: at the moment you give them the offer, ask them how they’ll make the decision whether to join. What are they excited about? What are they apprehensive about? Keep asking “anything else?” until you think you have a good mental model of how they’ll make the decision. Then you can create a plan of attack.

• This will also help you with Objection handling. If they tell you they are going elsewhere, you’ll know where to poke.
• If you have a close mutual, ask them what would get them motivated and then do it.

• I’ve done many character references for people in interview processes I have no stake in just because I think it’ll be a good fit for everyone!

• Texting is better than emailing at this phase IMO.
• “Excite email”: everyone on the team (yes, everyone) should DM them to say they are excited about the potential for them to join and offer time to talk.

• This is especially important from founding team.

• Once you decide, you’re all in. Be willing to spend an extraordinary amount of time closing them.
• Invite them to team lunch to celebrate (that can be in the office).
• Invite them to a more casual/not in the office setting to talk/celebrate–meal, coffee.
• Tap investors to have conversations with candidates. The outsider/insider perspective can be helpful.
• I find gifts cheesy, but if you feel strongly about it, don’t sleep on the handwritten note.
• Being demure doesn’t work. Being responsive and attentive does.

• Do not let them go unanswered for more than an hour. (Even if it’s just “acknowledging receipt, I’ll get back to you.”)

• Firing

• It’s your job to set people up to be successful. No underperformers should make it past the 3-month mark.
• If you need to fire someone, do not kick the can down the road. It’s bad for everyone (including them).