Here’s the steps i take when slogging through the recruiting process to find the right people to join my business:
Generate candidates for interview – use online postings, your extended network, employee referrals. Make sure that the job posting is going to attract someone you want in your team
Have all candidates email a resume and a letter stating why they are right for the job
Short list candidates for phone screening (disregard any candidates who have not taken the time to write the cover letter saying why they are right for the job). Keep the conversation to 15 mins. Your goal is to determine whether you want to interview them face to face (not whether you want to offer them the job). Come up with 10 areas that you can score the candidate – entrepreneurial, experience, creativity, cultural fit, gut feel etc. The first question i ask is what do you think of our web site and business. If they have not bothered to look at our web site, i terminate the interview (in a nice way). Have questions ready that address each category and keep notes against each category as you talk to the candidate. When you finish the call, add up their score.
Face to face interviews #1 – select the 5 or so candidates you think are good candidates (the best scorers) . keep to 30-45 mins
Face to Face interviews #2 – 1 or 2 candidates you think really could do the job. Have them interview with key people in your business ( 3 or 4 people). Do not have people compare notes until you have all interviewed the candidates. Meet with everyone immediately after everyone has finished so it;s fresh. Send a similar email to the one i’ve attached below to the people interviewing the candidates, so they have an idea of what to say. Daisy chain the interview in succession so that the candidate only has to make 1 visit. Schedule a time for you people to conduct the interviews. Interviews should be 20 minutes e.g. Tom see candidate @ 2pm, Jane @ 2.30pm and Dave @ 3pm. Tom, Jane and Dave debrief with you @ 3.30pm when candidate leaves.
Check references of the candidate, AS PART of the interview process, not after you have made the job offer. References should be part of your decision making process on someone.
When is it the right time to resign, get out or move on from a business, client or idea you been pusuing? Sometimes resigning – or firing a client – is a black and white clear cut case, like – my boss sucks, i’ve been offered the fat cat position with the competitor at double the salary or i painted the walls of Facebook in 2007 and now i have a pay-ff of $200m. But let’s face it, things are rarely that clean cut.
Here’s 4 reasons for you to get on your bike:
“Stick to the original plan” – i once joined a start up with a good deal of skepticism and reservation about the company’s long term ability to make money. In fact, i broke my own rule at the time: “i’m not going to back a product with a build-it-and-they-will-come business model”. Why did i do this? Because i liked the team, the space and we were funded for 18 months. It was always going to be a long short and it didn’t eventually work out but it was worth a go. When the business had run out of money and the business model had proved itself as a poor one, it was time to go. This became an easy clear cut decision because when i joned i set up a specific list of criteria against which to measure my success. This became my “original plan” and 18 months later when i reviewed this plan it was obvious to me i needed to go.
“Give up when the time is right” – as someone who thrives on starting up companies and products the biggest dilema is knowing WHEN it’s time to say enough is enough. It’s hard to walk away from something for me when i’ve put so much time and energy into it but this becomes easier when i avoid emotional attachment to a business idea or situation.
“Decide what’s right for you, not everyone else” – “How much should i be compensated” is a question i hear asked a good bit, especially around the start-up scene. There are “officially accepted” rules of thumb (you can read a good post on this here) but at the end of the day it’s time to go or not start in the first place, if you’re not getting what YOU need. I need x% of equity to make this work; i need Y salary and so on. When i become clear on this i get clarity on everything. It’s not a case of the other person being unreasonable if they dont want to pay you what you feel your worth- it’s not a personal thing – it’s just a case this is what i need. Being clear on this makes things easier.
“Dont let love cloud the issue” – it’s probably the hardest part for me, leaving a business. Building a successful start up involves having a great team, one where disagreement, respect, great ability, hard work and fun all come together, so moving on can be a pig. This shouldn’t cloud the issue though.
Leaving a business, killing a floundering product or just saying enough is enough, even if the sometimes the break up is hard.
Today I was checking out Instagram online – i’ve already looked at the ipad / iphone app and they have a polished designed – but the website UI design is basic, very basic. Given that i’m in the throws of product design for FlashIssue it really caught my eye. How can a product that has received such [...]
Setting up hypothesis and running business experiments is an good way to make decisions on validity of business models, products or services. When The Lean Startup book was launched online the founder, Eric Ries, conducted numerous micro experiments around his book and published the results. They make interesting reading from the perspective of seeing what [...]
Thomas Edison is well known for the numerous inventions attributed to him – some 1,093, including the light bulb, electric sub division, alkali battery amongst others. A little known fact – to me anyway – is the number of companies he got off the ground. The guy was a start-up machine, founding 100 businesses; he [...]
Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him@jaltucher. Iʼm writing this white sitting in a hotel room. To my left is the Pacific Ocean [...]
Jobs then all of 24, had a privileged invitation to visit Xerox park …{Jobs} “and they showed my really threes things but…I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me the graphical user interface i didn’t see the other two. Within ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this”. Comment: Apple [...]
If you want to own your own dot *you*, like .car, .pepsi or .phil (instead of having to use.com) your chance is around the corner. Icann, the important people who control domains, are extending the suffixes used for web addresses beyond the current .com, .edu, .net etc. Here’s how it will work: Submit your [...]
Basically, this is a real life case study on how i’m testing my business idea. The first part in working out how to start a business is to find out from customers what they need (not what *you*, what they need). Here’s some of my assumptions – aka a hypothesis – for the iGoIQ business [...]
