Hiring Hack: Lessons from 3 Years and 150 Interviews in the Startup World
In the last 3 years, i’ve interviewed over 150+ applicants for full-time positions in my startups inc. pixeltrue.com ($50k/mo) and currently flowspark.co ($7k/mo). I’m using these learnings to hire full-time UI/UX designers and developers for my agency. Here's what i’ve learnt:
You don’t have to pay $100k/Year for skilled hires
You don’t have to pay $100k/year for a skilled full-stack developer. If you hire internationally you’ll be able to find skilled developers for $30k/year. This applies to Product Managers, Designers etc.. pretty much every industry. I’d recommend paltforms like onlinejobs.ph and upwork.com. With the advances of AI, this is getting even cheaper.
Skilled hires are hard to find
All the highyly skilled people will have a waitlist of clients and will instantly get jobs. The best people i’ve hired had just recently become unemployed - timing matters a lot. However knowing this can inform your strategy for hiring:
- Post about jobs in-advance - if you know you’ll need to hire a full-stack dev, start hiring 1 month in advance to give you the best chance to find skilled hires
- Reach out to people directly on LinkedIn, even if they have jobs already - why wait for these skilled hires to look for a job. Nowadays, it’s pretty easy to scrape a list of hires in a department and send automated messages - this strategy works extremely well, especially for part-time work that could potentially transition into full-time work.
Include probationary periods
It’s hard to tell if someone’s a good fit for your business and culture. It’s easy to jump the gun when find someone who’s a good fit. But often i’ve found myself hiring people who I think are good only to find there’s fundamental issues with their work/values.
When moving them to full-time always include a probationary period of at least 1 month in the contract. This will save you a lot of headache if you have to let them go later down the line.
Always include contracts in any sort of long-term engagements
This is more relevant to my fellow indiehackers, it took me a while to understand the power of a contract. It’s a great way to set expectations and boundaries within the job e.g. ownership of work, working times, expectations in the job.
Vision & Culture matters
Working isn’t just about money, is the work challenging? what is it like to work at your company? This stuff neesd to be clearly defined. I typically write up a standard presentation, detailing all of this out with company docs, here’s an example of our Hiring Slide Deck @ Flowspark
I'm currently growing my latest startup, Flowspark to $20k/month - I post regular updates on my learnings. Follow for more at https://twitter.com/AndyDao13
