Hiring is one of the most difficult tasks that a company performs. It does not stay the same throughout time and evolves with the dynamic needs of the company. In the early days of the startup hiring new people to fill positions seems like a faraway problem, but it’s far from that. Instead, founders would do well to ask these questions early to prepare for the day that comes when they might need to have crucial conversations with some of the founding members regarding hiring their own boss or if they need to be responsible for hiring the right people. All it takes is one bad person to cause irreparable damage to the company.
Of course, as the company grows the leaders cannot be personally held responsible for every employee. Julia Austin, a writer for the Harvard Business School, makes an interesting point in her article about early company cultures. She states: “The first 10-15 employees will set the culture of your company, and how you lead them will set the tone for leadership going forward.” (Austin, 2019) This resonates with Chapter 8 of Wasserman’s book Founder’s Dilemmas where the dangers of outsourcing hiring to a non-founding HR manager. Leadership should be heavily involved in the early days.
I feel that a lot of businesses or those who have been trained by profit centric professionals tend to lose sight of the other underlying factors that make a company. It is completely reasonable for a person that has worked in an established company to teach their students that product is important and that HR is something that can be outsourced, but what works for a limited perspective for decades will not work for all scenarios. As a founder, you must remember that there is a bigger picture that includes your clients, your product, and the interconnected web of people inside the company that actually make your products and client interactions so impactful to your business. We are no better than the sum of our parts.
As we continue to build our companies, we should never lose sight of all the parts of a business and their importance. What do you think? What has your experience been?
Resources
Austin, J. B. (2019, Aug 12). How Scale Changes a Manager’s Responsibilities. Retrieved from Harvard Business School: https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/how-scale-changes-a-manager-s-responsibilities
Herrenkohl, E. (2010). How To Hire A-Players. Hoboken, New Jersey, United States: John Wiley & Sons Inc.
Wasserman, N. (2012). The Founder’s Dilemmas. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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