By Aurora Petracca

Compiled 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 start to scale, a whole new set of challenges will follow, each requiring new skills, knowledge, and strategic thinking.

What’s the most important and tricky of these imperatives? Hire, and hire fast. But moving too fast and without a plan can lead to many painful and costly mistakes. To help founders avoid unnecessary growing pains, here are 10 mistakes we see founders make over and over again during the hiring process, and some smart ways to avoid them.

1. Underestimating the time and effort required to recruit

When you’re focused on product development, you might put networking on the back burner until you need to hire. Many founders are surprised to learn how difficult it is to attract the right quality candidates without doing the homework up front.

Given that most early-stage companies haven’t yet established a trusted brand, as a founder you must sell candidates on your mission, yourself, and your vision for the future of your company. This work requires long-term, proactive, one-on-one talent networking that can take months (or even years).

From the moment you have the idea for your startup, you should start spending time each week networking, talking about the business you’re building, and building relationships with people you might eventually want to recruit, all before you need to hire anyone.

2. Not paying enough attention to the candidate experience

Founders often have tight schedules, but you can’t let your stress lead to a rushed and chaotic interview process. What if the interviewer didn’t read the candidate’s profile carefully, didn’t prepare interview questions, asked the same questions as other interviewers, and the interview process went nowhere for days or even weeks? This is a candidate’s nightmare.

Even if a candidate is passionate about a company, they will quickly lose interest if they have little or no communication with the company team, or if communication is untimely.

Remember, candidates are also interviewing with companies and are often communicating with multiple companies. To make matters worse, the crypto community is small and negative experiences can spread quickly, causing high-quality candidates to disappear.

Make sure you allocate enough resources to recruiting (whether you hire a talent expert or lead it yourself), ensure that the interview process is smooth, and keep communicating with candidates. In addition, be sure to reserve time to research the candidate's background before the interview to avoid being unprepared and affecting the candidate's impression.

3. Every interview starts with a cliché sales pitch

Every candidate is motivated differently. Unless you understand what this candidate wants, or why they’re interested in speaking with you, how can you effectively sell to them? It’s important to know the basics of the interview, asking candidates what motivates them to speak with you, what’s lacking in their current job, what they value in company culture, their timeline for making a decision, and their compensation expectations. But you also have to be prepared to turn what you learn into a customized sales pitch for the candidate you’re speaking with, which means taking the time to get to know the candidate.

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

Without knowing the candidate, you might inadvertently emphasize things that the candidate isn’t interested in, or conversely, ignore something that might attract them. So, start by asking a series of questions that help you get to know the candidate, and then tailor your pitch accordingly.

4. Skipping the review process

Rushing into things and skipping steps that could save you a ton of headaches later. For example, if a candidate seems perfect, you might be tempted to skip a job trial or deep background check that would allow you to 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’re saving time in the hiring process, it may actually mean you’re spending more time managing the performance of a bad hire. A bad hire can be disastrous for an organization, especially for a small company that needs to grow quickly (like a startup).

Instead, create a strong and consistent process, preferably one that includes a job trial to test candidates’ work style and fit with the existing team. Don’t skimp on a thorough reference check, and if possible, don’t just focus on “face references” (those provided by the candidate) but also tap your network to find other references.

5. Not defining cultural values before team expansion

Building a team before establishing values is another potentially costly mistake. Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, calls culture “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. The lack of a good culture can lead to inconsistencies in how everyone operates as the company grows, which can lead to performance, communication, and employee turnover issues.

Clearly defining your values when you build your team prevents you from hiring people whose values don’t align with yours, which could harm the culture you’re trying to build. It’s a vicious cycle.

Values are the common bond and working philosophy that unites a team and keeps them together when times get tough. Once you’ve identified your values, it’s important to incorporate them into your hiring process in a structured, consistent way. For example, you should have pre-defined questions that assess how well a candidate aligns with each value, and ask these questions in every interview. This way, you can easily find the best answers and avoid the common trap of cultural interviews of seeing if you “click” with the person or “if you can imagine yourself spending time with them.” This helps reduce the unconscious bias that can easily occur in cultural interviews.

6. Lack of long-term strategic thinking when hiring managers

You are facing a problem that needs to be solved and not enough time to think about it. This problem needs to be solved immediately: business development, strategy development, marketing, etc. But avoid hiring a helper to solve the immediate problem while ignoring your long-term future.

What happens if the company grows exponentially six months or a year from now? Is this person still the right person to lead the overall strategy, or do you need someone with a broader perspective and international network?

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

When building your management team, your goal is to define the boundaries and capabilities of each position. Thinking long-term can also help you be more strategic in hiring, finding people who have both the skills for later positions and are passionate about the opportunities that a startup presents. At the beginning of a new employee’s employment, be honest with them about the short-term and long-term expectations for success in their role, as well as the direction of the organization under different growth scenarios.

7. Attract candidates with inflated titles

To attract candidates, give them some high-sounding titles, such as Chief X Officer. It may be tempting, and some candidates do like this, but giving them such titles may cause problems later. For example:

• This person may not actually be qualified for the title, especially as the company grows (see #6).
• This may prevent you from hiring more senior talent in the future
• If an employee is performing well, you lose the opportunity to promote them. (Internal promotions are great for corporate culture and retention, and can also increase recruitment appeal.)
• You set the tone that there is hierarchy in your corporate culture, rather than a flat “we’re all masters” mentality.
• Those who focus only on titles may not be a good fit for a startup.

Before you give a candidate a fancy title, give them a chance to prove they’re good at leadership. Before you give them a senior title, follow the advice in #6 above: Think about what your company will look like in six months to a year. What roles do you foresee hiring?

Consider whether the candidate's qualifications are really suitable for the role they are applying for. Ideally, you can bring them in at a lower level and give them six months to prove to you whether they are really suitable for the role.

8. The onboarding process is rough and lacks systematic guidance

Founders sometimes assume that if they hire someone with experience, give them a laptop, they’ll be able to hit the ground running on day one. While it’s reasonable to assume that a well-vetted, experienced professional should be good at their job, you can’t assume they can read other people’s minds. The only way to ensure that you and your new hire are on the same page about expectations is to communicate with them.

Create an onboarding plan that includes your expectations of candidate deliverables and timeframes (e.g. 30/60/90 days) as a minimum. Follow up with them regularly (preferably weekly) during the first 90 days and adjust the cadence as desired.

Be sure to provide feedback on what’s working and what’s not, and provide channels for new hires to ask for whatever they need to do their job. For founders of early-stage companies (less than 10 employees), personally help new hires connect with other employees.

As your company grows, investing in a more comprehensive onboarding program is a must. But the most important elements of a good onboarding program, whether it’s basic or comprehensive, are: 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 building rapport with the team.

9a. Superstitious about the background of famous schools and big companies

Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Waterloo, and Cornell are all world-class universities. But don't rule them out simply because of a candidate's background.

There are countless candidates who didn’t attend top schools, but who probably spend their free time working on engineering projects on Github or solving real-world problems, which is a strong indicator of curiosity and problem-solving tendencies.

Likewise, overemphasizing having FAANG experience can also limit your talent pool. Granted, these companies are often very demanding and have established strong engineering rigor. But there are many other companies with strong talent brands. Furthermore, not everyone who thrives in a FAANG structure will succeed at a scrappy startup.

Don't look at a candidate's qualifications, look at their career path:

• Have they taken ownership roles and proven themselves to be successful?
• Have they been exposed to problems that would qualify them for work at your company?
• Do they have the fighting spirit and the right attitude to lend a hand and help when necessary?

9b. Crypto-native only

On the other hand, crypto founders may think that "crypto-native" candidates are naturally superior. If you limit the candidate pool to crypto-natives, you may miss out on excellent talents with rich experience and rigor in the Web2 field. In the early days of Coinbase (around 2014), there were no crypto-natives, so we turned to looking for candidates from "crypto-related" companies (such as payment companies) to see if they had core skills and a real interest and passion for the field. After that, we would give new employees time and support to help them grow quickly.

While engineers who have been working in RUST for years can probably start contributing code right away, any good engineer should be able to become proficient in a new language in a month or two. So instead of spending eight months looking for the perfect web3 candidate, fill the position immediately in half the time and give the candidate time to adapt to the field.

10. Underestimating the importance of offline collaboration

On the one hand, the flexibility of remote hiring makes it easier to recruit talent and better meets the needs of those who can work more efficiently from home. On the other hand, building trust and authentic relationships can be more difficult when everyone is working remotely.

Trust is often built through authentic relationships, which can lead to more straightforward problem solving, create better cross-functional collaboration, bonds, and friendships that help hold your company together when times get tough.

So, does this mean that remote-first companies don’t work? Of course not. But there is a trade-off with remote hiring, which is regular in-person interactions and work meetings so that people can collaborate and develop friendships. In addition to more in-person collaboration at the team level, you can also focus remote hiring in key regions and hold local meetups more frequently. Remote work culture is a blessing that allows us to be more inclusive in our hiring approach, allowing people to work together no matter where they are. However, it’s important to understand that the lack of in-person collaboration comes at a cost, so you need to build in mechanisms to mitigate that loss.

Summarize

Running a startup is no easy feat, and as a founder you’ll be pulled in countless different directions, one of which is recruiting top talent for your company. While recruiting is hard, it’s not rocket science. Founders can become great recruiters if they make recruiting a priority, and this checklist can help you avoid the biggest pitfalls of recruiting.