How to Attract, Develop, and Keep Good People
Fortune’s Path Founder Tom Noser sat down with four other entrepreneurs for a conversation about hiring the right people and building a great company culture in the process.
No one succeeds alone, and hiring the right people is the most critical task for any start-up after fundraising.
But finding the right people for the right roles is a unique skill set, and it’s one that most founders have to learn through trial and error. And once you’ve hired someone, you also have to make sure you’ve built a culture that will empower them to succeed and continue to grow with your company.
To help offer perspective on the hiring landscape today, as well as tips and tricks for building a great team, listen in as Fortune’s Path Founder Tom Noser conducts an in-depth discussion about attracting, developing, and keeping great people at your company. You can also read highlights of their discussion below.
What is Working and Not Working in Hiring Today?
The U.S. working population got smaller for the first time ever in 2020, but what does this really mean for employers?
Ben Kettle, vice president of revenue at Gun.io, and author of the “Lying to Ourselves” newsletter about hiring, argued that it’s time for employers to re-examine their hiring processes to make sure they’re not only finding great candidates, but putting them in positions where they can succeed.
“I think we’re really bad allocators of resources, if you think of people as resources. As a society we’re not great at getting the right butts in the right seats, and I think that there’s a lot of improvements we can do there,” he explained. “No one takes a class in how to hire or how to evaluate talent.”
To do this, he recommends that people work to quantify the hiring process by figuring out how to measure the values and character traits they are looking for.
“It’s one thing to ask the question of a candidate, it’s another thing to actually score it,” he said. “Think very systematically. What behaviors do I need to see, what kind of traits do I need to see, and what does good look like?”
How Do You Build a Culture that Empowers People to Succeed?
It’s one thing to find great people for your company, but it’s another thing entirely to make sure that once they start working with you, they have what they need to do great work. Many companies focus on building processes, but Credo Founder and CEO Carm Huntress thinks processes often do more harm than good.
“If you want to find a bad culture, find a lot of processes,” he argued. “If everything is process oriented, you don’t have a culture that empowers people to do the right thing.”
Andrew Suggs has experienced this firsthand in his role as founder and CEO of Live Chair Health. He started out with trying to create processes, but then realized that it was more important to hire based on the core values of respect, integrity, and results.
“Are you a good human being? When no one is watching you, that’s who you truly are. So I try to get to that in the interview process,” he explained.
Clear Start Creative Founder Ashley Kent agreed that process is far less important than someone’s ability to deliver the outcomes you’re looking for.
“I need someone who can just take ownership over what they’re doing, and I need someone who can push something to the finish line without their hand being held,” she explained. “I don’t care how you get there, as long as you get to the finish line.”
Why is Diversity of Thought Important?
Early-stage founders may be tempted to hire friends or people who think exactly like them, but all five founders agreed that this does your business a disservice. When you value diversity, whether it’s demographic diversity or diversity of experience and thought, it gives your business a new perspective.
“If a business is about solving problems, and producing products and services that consumers will buy, you would want the broadest set of abilities to solve problems and figure out how to do something. The way you achieve that is through diversity,” Carm explained.
Sometimes, this also means looking beyond someone’s resume to better understand who they are and what they can bring to the table.
“I truly do not believe that what somebody has on their resume really means all that much. I’ve told everyone this, I have a kinesiology degree. So truly my resume is trash for what I do. But I was extremely dedicated,” Ashley shared. “What you have on paper is not always going to display how you perform.”
Top Tips for Hiring and Interviews
To close out the conversation, each founder shared one piece of advice that they’ve learned throughout their hiring experiences:
Tom Noser: Interview for character over ability
“Who you are in your character is much more important than what you can do today. Skills are continually changing, and they should be evolving. So I don’t really give a crap about your previous experience.”
Ben Kettle: Question your intuition
“If your gut or your intuition is telling you something, it’s really good to ask yourself why… Skills are really easy to measure in a work assessment. Someone can build a revenue model or they can’t. Someone can call up code in Python or they can’t… The harder thing is determining the traits they need.”
Andrew Suggs: Ask questions that help reveal how the candidate thinks
“I like two questions that are very atypical and almost heretical in the interview process: ‘What would your enemies say about you?’ because it allows me to glean insight into how they think about themselves. And then, ‘What books are you currently reading?’”
Ashley Kent: Treat the first 60 days like a trial run
“I always keep that in the back of my head in those first 60 days, to think about how we’re working out together. Because there’s only so much you can learn from interviews, and it’s just me. So we have to kind of see how things are going after the hiring process, to make sure that it’s still working for both of us. So making sure that I’m touching base with whoever I’ve brought on to make sure this is still a fruitful process.”
Carm Huntress: Try to understand people’s motivations
“Some of my favorite questions are, ‘Why have you done what you’ve done?’ and ‘Why do you want this job?’ I think the most important thing to watch is the reaction. It really is getting into, why does someone get up every day and do what they do, and how motivated are they in that role?”