HIRING FOR START-UPS

The 3-step process to getting the right people to

work for your company

Written by

Vijay Sharma

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Exotel is a small sized startup but the 30-40 people

who have helped build this company, have all been

honest, happy, hard-working & humble people. We

are really proud and honoured to be working with

all of these folks.

I thought about a good way to structure this e-book,

which literally is a collection of all the insights we

have picked up during our hiring over the last 2.5

years at Exotel and this is what I came up with.

Vijay Sharma@vijaysw

INDEX

8 Hiring Strategy

9 Structure

16 Techniques

24 Culture of your company

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Before we dive into what right hiring can do for your company, do remember, you must believe deep down in your vision and know why you are doing, what you are doing.

It is the first and foremost thing that’s required to work full-time on your start-up, the first thing needed to convince your family that you want to do this and the first thing needed to convince everyone else that they should do this with you.

It all starts from your own vision of what you want to build and why.

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HIRING STRATEGY

There are 3 ways you can break down your hiring strategy -

1. Structure your hiring process.

2. Employ different hiring techniques for different positions.

3. Keep the culture intact.

Hiring Strategy | Structure

Read on to understand in detail each of the points listed above.

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STRUCTURE

THE

RECRUTINGFUNNEL

The hiring funnel is just the same as your marketing or sales funnel.

Once you’re able to think about hiring & recruitment in this way, you need to start aligning your thoughts to problems of :

1. Sourcing applications

2. Enough “Good” applications

3. Quick responsiveness to all “applicants” aka Leads

4. Demo/Trial/Interviews via a process

5. Finalize – Fit or Not and move on with a reason to the candidate.

Would you not want to know if you were applying to a particular job, a VC or a business partner, why they are not responding or rejecting you?

Hiring Strategy | Structure

1. A Funnel

What are the different componenets to hiring ?

Like Marketing & Sales, Hiring is also an important process in your company and it needs all the mileage and respect it deserves.

2. Application Tracking System

To track all of this, you need a tool. An Application Tracking System (ATS) is something that helps you keep track of all the candidates you are talking to and at what stage of the process they are in.

Few simple reasons why you need an ATS and what you should do to choose one

Hiring Strategy | Structure

•Do you think you can scale with Email & Excel or would you need a separate software?•Does the software help streamline the process of conversations with candidates, give you a 360 view on the conversations and the candidates?•Does it sync up and help you build a funnel via social media postings? •How much time does your hiring lead spend on emails, organizing information, following up (all these should ideally be automated) with candidates & the team internally?

Hiring Strategy | Structure

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We use Recruiterbox and it does a fantastic job of helping us follow a process for all our applicants. For every opening, we are able to track all the candidates, look at the funnel, understand where people are getting stuck, who is the task stuck on, which opening has what sort of sourcing requirements and what more inputs are needed to speed up the process and from whom.

3. Strategy

Is your hiring strategy similar to your marketing & sales strategy?The marketing strategy of Exotel is Inbound. Our product and our customers are online and that’s what works for us. Similarly, our hiring strategy is also inbound.

Does your hiring strategy resonate with your ideology as a company??

You can arrive at a hiring strategy by understanding where your potential hires or team-mates are. Will they be hanging out - online/offline? At sales meetings or at events?

Once you have the answer to these questions, you can build your strategy accordingly. You also need to ask yourself where your resources are and how can you utilize your team’s presence. Our team is heavy on Twitter and hence we are able to use that platform very well. If your team is great at attending events, then that’s where your energies should be focussed in hiring too.

Hiring Strategy | Structure

4. Timeline

There is no timeline to hiring - you should ALWAYS BE HIRING !

The people you’re looking to recruit are like your potential clients. A prospective team member deserves as much, if not more, respect than a potential customer. If they decides to spend time building a company with you, hopefully you would have done enough work to attract them to your company and spent good time on getting them on board.

Hiring is not a 1-4 month thing (let’s open up when we need game).

Hiring Strategy | Structure

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Monika Gunalan, who is works in the HR department at Freshdesk shared one of her best learnings.

We’re always hiring !

That’s how you need to be if you want great talent, who will take your company from a young company to a fast scaling young company.

Some advice from Monika :

Maximum hiring happens by referrals. In referrals we have 2 categories:

a) Strongly recommended b) Just forwarding 

I ensure that I don’t miss out calling these ‘strongly recommended’ candidates.

This year, we conducted a couple of hackathons for experienced folks and college freshers, gave away cash prizes and cool gadgets. Helped in brand building as well as found some real good talent! 

As a process, we make an offer on the same day immediately after the HR discussion and if its a reject, I tell them right away explaining why they couldn’t clear (which is the most difficult part).

“

Hiring Strategy | Structure

What do I mean by Hiring is not a 1-4 month thing? Hiring is actually like Enterprise Sales when it comes to nurturing great talent. Enterprise Sales means big ticket, big revenue, long sales cycle, long term relationship and much more.

That’s how each hire should be.

A few examples from Exotel :

When he was working at AyAuto(November 2011), we genuinely liked him and always tried to help him either via Exotel or independently in his business. When he did eventually stop running that and was considering his next course of action, he thought of us, because we cared about him as a customer and wanted him to win.

He’s now started his own venture again.

He joined us around June 2013. That’s a 1.7 years relationship.

Gopi Aravind

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Hiring Strategy | Structure

Abhishek Srinivas

He joined us on February 1st, 2014. Abhishek first came across us during the Start-up Festival in February 2013 and ever since we met a lot of times to see what might work out for both of us. Eventually it did and today he’s working on Enterprise Sales.

Another 1 year relationship.

5. Figure out your rough 12 month requirement

How many people will you need in Tech, Design, Marketing, Sales etc.

Once you have a rough sketch, then whenever you meet someone and you can see them fitting in a role, stay in touch. You never know what might happen and genuinely try to help them.

Now, you are ready to Start :)

Hiring Strategy | Techniques

TECHNIQUES

We’ll break this up into Must Do’s & Vertical focussed strategies:

Must Do’s

1. Job Description – Personify it

What do you mean by Personifying a profile? Simple – when we wanted to hire an Inbound/Content Marketing specialist for Exotel, we skimmed through our networks and thought about the kind of person who’d be the best possible fit for this role. We narrowed it down to a wonderful girl, Nandini Vishwanath who heads Community & Customer Support at Urban Ladder, our customer. I did not want to poach her but I definitely framed the Job Description keeping her in mind.

So, I wrote an entire job description, sent the JD to her and asked her if she would apply if she was looking for a job. She responded with suggestions and changes and with one more big help.

She connected me to Gayatri, her friend and guess what, she now leads that same role and we couldn’t have been happier :-)

Hiring Strategy | Techniques

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We did this for other positions too and it really helps frame a good JD. And that’s what a potential applicant reads, right? That’s on the basis of which they decide if this is for them or not. If a good talent leaves because you haven’t spent time on your JD, it is your loss.

2. The “Abhishek Goyal” exercise

Try doing this - • go to your network • think of the best fit for a particular role • talk to them about what they do, how they spend their day, • take their help to make the JD • market it and spread the word.

He let us in on his secret.

He noted down the positions he wanted to fill and thought about the best characteristics for these positions. E.g. He needed a consultant in Supply Chain. He went to his friends in Bain and asked them over a beer to open their Linkedin profile and share the Top 3 people in Bain, Gurgaon. He did that with 3 other people in Bain and then found out that all the 3 had 1 person in common on their list. He then went after “that” person and got him on-board. He did that for a lot of his top management positions and it’s a beautiful way to make hiring happen.

We met the man who scaled Urbantouch crazily in 2 years and had the best talent working with him, so much so, he said, he could have been out for 4 months and not affected the growth of the company. It was all down to the team he had built.

Hiring Strategy | Techniques

3. Sourcing the Funnel

Some of the places you should definitely post your job openings

• Linkedin• Facebook• Twitter• Angel List – Click here to read my detailed post about this • HasJob • Yourstory Jobs• Stackoverflow (for techies)

4. Hiring Saturday’s

This is another one of the “Abhishek Goyal” techniques which we used successfully at Exotel.

Many a times what happens is, in day-day to activities, we forget to respond to a lot of good potential hires via our recruiterbox application process. So, we have now started running “Hiring Saturday’s” where we invite all the candidates for a specific job role to our office and the whole Saturday is lined up with specific activities from assessment rounds, to technical & aptitude rounds, to interviews and final offers on the same day itself.

We’ve been able to hire Vasu, Nruthya & Rahul this way.

5. Betty & VeronicaAlways do this exercise of asking “What are your expectations” as early as possible. I wrote about it in this post here as well.

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Hiring Strategy | Techniques

Vertical Focussed Hiring Techniques

Tech Hiring - The Holy Question

You would need to constantly keep meeting people at various conferences/events and keep an eye out for young folks who are 24-25, who might want to quit their 2 year boring stint at an MNC or at a large company and now want to take matters in their own-hands. Some good conferences to do this are at events run by HasGeek, Headstart Network, Chennai Geeks and more Techie events - not the TiE Summit or a Business Summit where you won’t find a Techie around the 1250 people in the conference because he rather be coding in his room.

1. Attend Tech events / conferences

Hasgeek is one of the best, with a bit of Interviewstreet, Stalk Ninja (earlier was helpful, now has shut down) and maybe Hire Rabbit (Social plug-in to attract FB crowd) to get the right word out. Hackerstreet India is a good place to post as well. Try Stack-overflow for one opening possibly to see what kind of responses you get. Practo has had some success there I have heard. Recently, TopTalent, HackerEarth, have also began to help a lot. I have also written about Angel List later, and that is a great place too.

2. Job Portals

Job Portals like Naukri, Monster etc., really don’t make the cut for hiring techies for start-ups.

Hiring Strategy | Techniques

Grow them in house - get them over for a 6 month internship, pay them well for that and see if they can code well, learn quickly and then hire them. These guys are typically awesome and will be gems for multiple reasons. They can be molded as well. This you can do from Twenty19.com, Letmeknow, LetsIntern.com, BITS-Pilani PS II Program, Start-up Internship programs.

3. Hiring intern - cum - freshers

4. Linkedin

Linkedin for Tech Hiring requires a LOT of time and effort. You need to constantly keep talking to people, connecting and follow the right trends. For e.g. if people are leaving a certain XYZ company in Tech a lot, that means, something is not right and you should focus on employees from that place. Posting helps but there is an overflow of applications and you are normally inundated.

5. Twitter

If the guy is on Twitter - he has me half won over already . It is a slightly important clause because on Twitter it is very easy to get to know how the person thinks and who is a part of their friends circle.

The secret though is to just keep helping people and you will get referrals back. If Techies like you, they are a very strong community and the right word spreads.

What has worked best for us with Tech hires is referrals and that comes from helping and your own network.

Hiring Strategy | Techniques

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Sales/Marketing Hiring - the next question

I will break this in a different way, not via efforts, but the type of people to hire for different roles in Sales/Marketing

1. Core Team

Has to be from your referral networks or from Linkedin. This person will decide the strategy (big word) and get early customers and scale initial traction. They should be nimble, not a big money spender and be able to pull off a lot with limited budgets.

Also, an early place that has helped us find great talent for non-technical roles is the NEN E-Leaders (These are students who are heading entrepreneurship cells from colleges and are doing a lot of B-Plan events, trying start-ups and failing and are enthusiastic and willing to learn). We found some great talent in Nijanthan, Ruchir, Ajay via this network for our early team.

B2B Sales in India - Focus on an inclination to sell. B2C Sales - Focus more on the Marketing angle.

2. Level II, Level III Sales Hires

You can use Job Portals like Naukri, Monster, Sutra and others. This requires one of your HR employees to keep interviewing and meeting folks. There should be a process in place with a set of questions, interviews, rounds and ideally this person should have 1-2 years of work-ex of selling at an IndiaMart, Naukri, JustDial - understands the basics of internet, so you need not train them from scratch. They will understand targets and will work well towards it and hopefully your targets will be set by then as well.

Hiring Strategy | Techniques

3. Marketing

Should have done his/her own start-up before, keep searching on Linkedin, try HeadStart Higher and use referral networks again. Marketing typically requires a lot of hustling, a lot of A/B testing, and this doesn’t naturally come in someone who has not started up. There is a lot of fad out there about Growth hacking but typically, a Marketer today should be technology savvy and should be ready to A/B test the heck out of anything/everything.

Hiring for HR/Customer Support/Account Man-agement/Admin - the third bit

Post on your Social Networks - Linkedin works, try a few of the Recruiting firms and since these are early members in the team, they should be from the network.

We don’t have an HR person in our company and are able to do without it. But from experience with Practo, if your HR team is honest and hardworking and willing to learn, that becomes your biggest asset. They should be willing to do whatever it takes to make things work.

Account Managers work in a similar vein to Sales hiring, maybe with a slightly larger salary bracket and slightly more experienced in client interactions.

Designers

Try Hasgeek but typically designers are a rare breed and would suggest outsourcing but you can find good folks by a lot of effort & search on Linkedin and meeting people in the Tech/Design community. Recently Dribble has come out well also but Linkedin is emerging a strong contender for this along with Angel List.

Hiring Strategy | Culture

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And now, the backbone -

CULTURE....

Hiring Strategy | Culture

CULTURE

We’ve shared our #CultureCode deck on SlideShare here. You may want to have a look at it. It clearly defines who we are, what we do, why we are the way we are etc.

Typically our culture is defined by these values:

1. Transparency

2. Honesty

3. Moving fast

4. Ethical

5. Ownership

6. Hard-work-together

What is our culture? What is it defined by? How has it been shaped?

Hiring Strategy | Culture

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One very important thing someone (Kaushik from NEN) pointed out to me recently was that our culture internally and externally is same. The way we speak internally and how we speak with our clients or possible recruits is similar and hence, it is very natural for us to be ourselves everywhere we go. We are typically open about our investment plans within the team, we get a buy in from them before we raise money, we discuss goals/targets first internally before setting them out. Similarly, for product features, we speak to customers and see their reactions and then spend time coding it up and it is all very iterative and open.

Our Product Updates are open to the world, Our downtime and uptime is open to the world here - http://status.exotel.in/

We genuinely care and want to help people in whatever they’re doing.

We are proud to have 4 entrepreneurs from our Hall of Fame who have started their own enterprises.

How do you do a culture fit check?

• Ask a lot of questions about what “drives” the individual and does that align with how most people are driven in your own company?• Do a 1 week work-together program, something Interviewstreet (now Hackerrank) suggested to us that works well for them. • Focus on getting the expectations of what the individual wants to achieve by working in your organization and does it align with what a person joining that role would be able to achieve or not over time?

Hiring Strategy | Culture

How can you make sure Culture remains intact as you hire and grow?

To be honest, it stems from the founding team members - how they behave with customers will be copied, how they interact with potential recruits behind their back, will be replicated, how they respond to individuals and questions, will be replicated.

So it all stems from the founding team and how they are able to pass on the “goodness” across to every new hire, who will then in turn pass it on to the new recruits.

A simple thing like our Team Page helps everyone identify that we really appreciate the value that everyone in the team brings on board. And we enjoy sharing who all have built and are building this company with us, both for potential recruits and for customers (who really want to know who are the real people behind this software). I think focussing on doing this is really important, it shares ownership openly and also let’s your team (current) know that you care and that spreads to potential team members.

I speak about one very important thing in a video with NEN about how to build a culture - always think of “Why” someone is joining your organization or company and how can you help him/her keeping that in mind.

Hiring Strategy | Conclusion

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CONCLUSION

1. Build a structure & a funnel process, start sourcing candidates

2. Techniques - Do the essential tips of personifying the Job Description, focus on the vertical whom you need to target and set the ball rolling with sourcing

3. Build and maintain a culture that resonates with you, and is visible and shared across both in internal & external communication of the company.

In another e-book, we will be doing a person-by-person analysis of how everyone joined Exotel, and we’ll share trends with everyone on what works and what doesn’t.

Reach out to us for anything :)

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http://exotel.in/

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