Recruiting For Your Startup: Unconventional Thinking, Smart Ideas and Amazing Mistakes

Recruiting for your startup:Unconventional thinking, smart ideas

& amazing mistakes

Queen’s Road Capital, 100 Queen’s Road Central, 15/F, Suite 1518, Hong Kong

Dominik NagillerFebruary 2017

1. People

2. Customers

3. Shareholders

Jack Mafounder of Alibaba

Let’s start with priorities …

1. People

2. Service

3. Profit

Fred Smithfounder of FedEx

Some context: The hiring process

Defining ClosingSelectingSourcing

… differently

Part One: Thinking about recruiting

Traditional vs. new filters

Feeling the pebbles to cross the stream.

Talent

vs.

Trust

Experience vs. potential

You need to double your knowledge every 18 months-- Moore’s Law of Knowledge

Flexibility vs process

Ability to recover quickly (from failures, mistakes) vs. consistent performance

Find out your candidate’s past failures and how

he/she coped.

“Hire slow, fire fast”

Hire SlowFire Fast

Hire Fast Fire Faster

Senior

Junior

The best person to do the initial screening? HR department, line manager or CEO?

Part 2:

Smart Ideas

Maintain an open network

Success

LinkedIn filters

Social media groups

Alumni organisations

Meet-ups … start your own

Fish where the fish are

Incentive or referral programs for existing staff

Sales starts at first point of contact

Turn the interview around …

Questions Are Answers

The 20-hour rule

Some of your staff are much better recruiters than others, and many of them are not in HR.

Team decision making on hiring can sometimes be very effective.

Money is not the only way to hire people …

Ownership

Purpose

Engagement

Mentorship

Part 3: Amazing mistakes

Hiring for a function

The Failure to Pipeline

There is always a long lead-time to bring in a candidate …

There is more than one funnel

Lack of preparation

90% of the battle is being prepared

Taking yourself as the measure of all things

Not getting the price right

Salary $

Time

If salaries go up the first gets the A-talents

Being obscure, but actually disorganized

To wrap-up

● People come first in great companies and recruiting should be a key priority

● Think carefully about what talents your company needs

● Meet enough people, value diversity and be very humble but curios

● There is not a single way of doing hiring, but follow a process (radically)

● Whom do you least mind being stuck in an airport with?

Thanks!

Contact: dominik@queensroadcapital.com