Building

How to hire your first people

I read applications professionally, and the early hires are the ones where the usual process helps least and matters most.

1. Don’t hire to fix a problem you haven’t defined.

   “We need a marketer” usually means “nobody is doing marketing and we haven’t decided what it is.” A hire against an undefined problem inherits the confusion and gets blamed for it.

2. Hire the thing you are worst at.

   The instinct is to hire more of yourself, because you can evaluate it comfortably. The value is in the gap you can’t cover, which is precisely the one you’ll interview badly for.

3. The first hire sets the culture more than any document.

   Whoever arrives first doubles the culture instead of joining it. Everything they model -- hours, standards, how disagreement happens -- becomes the default before anyone writes it down.

4. Work with someone before you employ them.

   A paid piece of real work tells you more in a week than four interviews will in a month. It’s also fairer to them, because they get to see what they’re joining.

5. Early on, hire for slope over intercept.

   Where someone is today matters less than how fast they got there. Early companies change faster than any job description survives, and rate of learning is what carries someone through that.

6. Generalists first, specialists later.

   The first people need to do six jobs adequately. Deep specialists are enormously valuable once the work is stable enough to specialise on, and frustrated before that.

7. Write the role down before the person exists.

   If you can’t describe what success looks like in ninety days, you’re not ready to hire -- you’re ready to think. Writing it also stops you reshaping the job around whoever happened to be impressive.

8. Structure the interview or you’ll just hire people like you.

   Unstructured conversations reliably select for familiarity and confidence, neither of which predicts performance. The same questions, in the same order, scored the same way, is the least glamorous and most effective fix.

9. Pay in clarity when you can’t pay at market.

   Small companies rarely win on salary. They can win on ownership, honesty about the risk, real autonomy and a clear picture of what the person will be able to do next, which people undervalue and shouldn’t.

10. Hire to buy back founder time.

    The scarcest resource is your attention. The right first hire is the one that returns the most of it to the work only you can do.