Hiring your first employees!
Beyond your group of initial founders you eventually, should you be enough of a success, have to hire some employees. Yay! There are many things to think about in this aspect and the best way is to think big and then wide. It’s easy to simply get someone that has the right skills especially if you are in a tight spot but they may prove a burden when you later realise they haven’t got any personality to back those skills. A friend of mine hired someone who may only be described as “Awesome” on paper and during the interview. When it came to the job he was also good but this guy was bad at everything else. The guy was always sulking by the drinks machine, preferred individual projects, slow to respond, the problem: poor culture fit.
Cultural Fit
As an HR person, I know the unnecessary fuss we create around seemingly mindless issues; I have been at meetings to agree on further meetings, to change a one-line slogan on “Marketing HR to the Company”(!) We can be tedious, but cultural fit is hugely paramount. Cultural fit is what makes the difference between a good, thoughtful employee and an engaged, highly innovative one. It all relates back to Morse’s (1975) study which demonstrated that where there is a fit between the employee’s personality and that of the organisation, then employees are more content, have higher levels of job satisfaction, and most importantly demonstrate superior levels of job performance.
An obvious pre-requisite to this is understanding what type of culture of have at your organisation. Ask yourself and your co-founders:
- What type of people are we? (Be brutally honest!) Rate each other
- Does this organisation more of a team-based or individual-based work?
- How do we exchange information: very discreet because of the work we do, remotely as we work far apart, through face-to-face meetings or more email communications?
- What type of language do we allow/ encourage/ use?
- Do we have any quirky aspects or rituals? e.g. a sales group I worked with regularly linked arms, sang and ‘roared’ before heading out to the field, and were discouraging of anyone “neg-ging” them out with less-than-positive comments.
These are hugely useful in forming interview questions. You want to hire people whose answers more closely match yours from this exercise.
General v. Specific skills set
