Who Should You Avoid Hiring at This Stage?

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At the earliest stages, before you know what you’re doing and what you’re all about, your hires need to reflect this ability to roll with the punches.

I see it all too often: startups get excited and then quickly get ahead of themselves. Rather than focus on big-picture questions (“What’s our minimum viable product to generate revenue?”), they focus on process. They hire CTOs and heads of HR without knowing what their business will look like in a year.

The head of HR might be perfectly capable—but do you really need a head of HR, or do you need a savvy, fast-paced recruiter who is passionate about your startup? Do you really need a CTO right now, or do you need a scrappy 10x engineer who is motivated to build your product?

Ideally, you should think about how each new hire fits into a quadrant—a diagram with four boxes:

Unwilling and incapable: The people who lack the skills armenia telegram data and the self-starting motivation to learn on the job. Avoid these hires at all costs.
Incapable but willing: Not ideal, but a step up. Your startup should be picky about the skills you hire because you likely don’t have the time or budget to learn skills on the job.
Capable but unwilling: A skilled employee who’s not all that invested in your long-term plans. They can be advantageous hires in the short-term, but may not be the “pillar” employees upon whom you can build a startup.
Capable and willing: Locked-in, experienced, and highly skilled. The sweet spot.

‎Generally, startups should trend towards the willing half of the quadrants. You’ll want self-starters. Hire people who can do well if you give them a lot of autonomy. After all, you won’t always have time to supervise, train, or micromanage people at this stage.

Avoid hiring people who need a lot of structure and formal processes. If a new hire needs to inherit a process or handbook, they’ll require a lot of guidance and they’ll only slow you down.

In your startup’s early days, the entire purpose of hiring new roles is to remove something from your plate. If you’re too busy managing a new hire’s day-to-day responsibilities, you’ve only added work to your plate.

Luckily, some people are so excited and thrilled by a lack of structure and a lack of process, that when you hire them, they help the company find its footing, uncovering the most successful path the company has to take. Those are the people who will thrive at a startup.