Here’s Why You’re Not Hiring the Best and the Brightest
What’s the most consistent piece of advice you get as a startup? Always hire the best people. Never compromise in your hiring standards, no matter how big your company gets. And it’s true. A great team...
View Article80% of Your Culture is Your Founder
When Molly Graham joined Facebook in 2008, the company still felt scrappy. With 400 employees serving 80 million users, people were so busy “moving fast and breaking things” that the culture still...
View ArticleHow to Successfully Onboard Interns and New Grads
Congratulations! You’ve navigated a very competitive market and hired talented students and new grads to join your team. Your next step is successfully onboarding your new team members into your...
View ArticleI’ve Worked with Hundreds of Recruiters – Here’s What I Learned
When you run a software recruiting company, you end up fielding a lot of questions from other founders who are just starting to hire. The number one question I get: How can I find a great recruiter?...
View ArticleNavigating the Hiring Process
Here at Tradecraft, we spend our time obsessing over traction. How can we deeply understand customer needs and design a solution to satiate them? (UX) How can we digitally distribute our product?...
View ArticlePower Up Your Team with Nonviolent Communication Principles
Why does one startup succeed wildly while another with a similar model and talented team fails miserably? Case studies might highlight the winner’s flexible business model or responsive community...
View ArticleBuilding A Recruiting Org
The use of recruiters by a startup will shift dramatically over the lifetime of the company. As a small startup (e.g. 3-10 people), using a recruiter is usually not as useful as direct founder or...
View ArticleHow Founders Hire
Hiring can make or break a company. From the first few critical team members to senior leadership further down the road, knowing how and when to hire is a vital skill every Founder must learn. And as...
View Article9 inbound recruiting tips for attracting top engineers
One of the most frustrating aspects of hiring great people to my team was poor timing, or so I thought. It seemed the second I started to look for amazing people to join my team, the talent pool got...
View ArticleEmployee Onboarding at Startups Is Broken – Here’s How to Fix It
You’re greeted at the pearly gates to heaven by St. Peter who asks where you’d like to spend eternity. “Well, heaven of course!” you say. Peter replies: “You have to check out hell just to see what you...
View ArticleMoney, Bonuses, “Customers That Waste My Time”, and Greed: You Get What You...
There was one thing prospective sales reps would say in an interview that always chilled my spine. It would especially come from sales reps from larger companies in high-velocity in-bound environment...
View ArticleHow to Hire Engineers: Step 1 (Sourcing)
Software startups need two kinds of resources: capital and talent, and right now capital is the easy one. Fundraising is difficult and demanding, but venture financing is more available now than it’s...
View ArticleHow top startups pay designers
A few weeks ago I had coffee with an experienced product designer. Let’s call him Carl. He’d been working at a respected San Francisco startup for five years, but he was getting restless. Carl had...
View ArticleStartup Best Practices #9: Structuring One on Ones to Maximize Your Team’s...
The startups that build and retain the best teams develop a huge competitive advantage. It’s no surprise that managers are the most important influencers of team development and retention. The most...
View Article10 Team Motivation Killers and How to Fix Them [slideshare]
A happy team is also a productive team and Weekdone (https://weekdone.com) always gives its best to help leaders build better, more engaged and efficiently collaborating teams. That is why, this time,...
View ArticleThis is Why People Leave Your Company
When Carly Guthrie was running HR for Per Se, one of the hottest restaurants in New York, the General Manager gave her a piece of advice: “You know, Carly,” he said. “If we’re doing our job as leaders,...
View ArticleCompany Culture and Building a Team, Part II [Video]
Sam Altman: Part two of Culture and Team. We have Ben Silbermann, the founder of Pinterest, and John and Patrick Collison, the founders of Stripe. Founders that have obviously, some of the best...
View ArticleHow do you distinguish 10X software engineers from the rest?
I have spent years of my life attempting to develop systems to do this, so here’s some of what I know: Do not rely on your HR staff to source top-tier engineers for you. They are good at sourcing...
View ArticleA Counterintuitive System for Startup Compensation
When Molly Graham joined Facebook, the company already had 400 employees, but there was no official performance or compensation system in place. There had been attempts, but nothing stuck. The result:...
View ArticleHow to Ask For a Raise
I’m guessing this topic will get some good play, both internally at Return Path and externally. It’s an important topic for many reasons, although one of the best ones I can think of is that most...
View ArticleYou Are Incurring HR Debt
Most startup founders are familiar with the idea of technical debt, whereby poor system design or coding builds problems over time and makes it hard to improve a piece of software. If you don’t clean...
View ArticleFiring: How I Do the Hardest Thing as an Entrepreneur
I’ve heard it said that firing someone is like ripping off a band-aid. That is, it’s best done — and hurts less — when done quickly. “Just get it over with.” But I think that the band-aid analogy...
View ArticleThe Simple Numbers That Could Change How You Hire
Eric Feng made a lot happen at Hulu in just three years. As the first senior executive the company hired, he played a pivotal role in the development of Hulu.com, the desktop app, distribution and...
View ArticleThis is How Effective CTOs Embrace Change
Chief technology officers at high-growth tech startups typically have three completely different careers in the span of only a few years: Engineer – The role of technical founders typically starts by...
View ArticleHow to Interview and Hire a Designer
I’ve worked as a creative/design director for the last 6 years and a designer for 9 years prior. In that time I’ve interviewed and hired dozens of designers. Recently, I was asked to help a startup...
View ArticleFixing Engineering’s Loyalty and Longevity Problem
Tiho Bajic started his career at a fortuitous time in the history of tech — having just missed the dot-com crash but before the advent of ‘the social network billionaire.’ In the calm between the...
View ArticleTraits of Exceptional Engineers
You don’t design your engineering culture by writing blog posts, or printing posters, it’s shaped by the people you hire and the things they do, and the traits you reward and celebrate. Choose wisely,...
View ArticleThe 9 Box Matrix Talent Model
McKinsey developed the 9 Box Matrix in the 1970s to help GE prioritize investments across its 150 business units. Not all business units were equally attractive. Some should receive investments and...
View ArticleRecruiting – The 3rd Crucial Startup Skill
I used to believe that there were two critical startup skills: 1. Building a great product that has clear product/market fit. 2. Building a sales and marketing machine. At Matrix Partners, we’d argue...
View ArticleThe Difference Between Culture and Values
This topic has been bugging me for a while, so I am going to use the writing of this post as a means of working through it. We have a great set of core values here at Return Path. And we also have a...
View ArticleHow SoundCloud Keeps Communication Flowing Across 4 Offices in 4 Time Zones
This is how hard building healthy internal communications is at a growing startup: SoundCloud moved its VP of Community — the man who built its 20+ team of community managers and support specialists...
View ArticleFire Faster: Five Excuses Startup CEOs Give For Not Getting Rid of Low...
Letting someone go from your company because they’re failing to meet your expectations is emotional. It’s emotional the first time you do it and it’s still emotional the 100th (I’ve personally had to...
View ArticleWhat Your First 100 Hires Will Look Like
There’s an exercise I’ve been through with many founders that are just getting to Initial Traction, say $1m in ARR or so, sometimes less, where I map out their future hiring. They are often a bit...
View ArticleHow to find the best engineers for your startup
Interviews are incredibly expensive, for both parties. Great screeners are vital to ensure that no one is wasting anyone’s time. Here’s how we do them in Intercom. It’s easy to underestimate the true...
View ArticleThis 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers
There’s an all-too-common cycle in tech these days. Startup avoids management. Founder makes all the decisions. Startup gets traction. Hiring takes off. Management is suddenly needed. Founder turns to...
View ArticleHow to Fight Startup Burnout via @mattermark
If you only have a second, scroll to the bottom. I’ve aggregated 7 articles on fighting burnout and 5 travel startups that can help. In this post I explore the cause of burnout at startups, the...
View ArticleSales and Employee Onboarding Best Practices
Having a high performing team means: Hiring the right people Creating a structure and culture for them to do great work Equipping them with the knowledge and skills to work effectively These first two...
View Article13 experienced startup CTOs offer their top tips to first-time CTOs
For many techie types (and marketing, biz-dev, and other types too, for that matter) joining a startup and being a part of something that could potentially become the next big thing, is a truly...
View ArticleOn hiring.
Pablo VigueraFollow + Pablo Viguera Sep 147 min read Gonçalo Guerreiro and 22 others recommended On hiring. At a (growing) startup. “The last few months have been pretty hectic”. I’m pretty sure this...
View ArticleHow This Startup’s Culture Won It an Awesome C-Suite, Funding and Partnerships
Five years ago, short-track skater Apolo Ohno became the most decorated US athlete in Winter Olympics history, midfielder Andrés Iniesta helped bring Spain its first World Cup title, and GiveForward...
View ArticleThe Zero B.S. Method To Recruiting A Killer Sales Force
In most interview situations there’s often an odd, sometimes disturbing imbalance, and it boils down to one word: power. Who has it, who doesn’t. Typically it’s the interviewer who has more power,...
View ArticleHire a Top Performer Every Time with These Interview Questions
Hiring the right people is extremely hard. Not only is the market tightly constrained — especially for tech companies, but the unwritten rules for how to hire are often plain wrong. With more...
View ArticleThe Total Talent Reboot — How This Startup Overhauled Its Workforce
Two years ago, Tim Chen presided over a tech startup that employed mostly former Wall Street finance types (who were mostly new graduates). He’d bootstrapped his company, Nerdwallet, for over five...
View ArticleIndispensable Growth Frameworks from My Years at Facebook, Twitter and...
Imagine you asked your finance team about how money enters and moves through your company, and they couldn’t tell you exactly where each dollar goes and is spent. You’d probably fire them all. So why...
View ArticleHow Startups Can Build a Recruiting Machine
The competition for hiring the best top talent in startups has never been higher. The best people are almost never on the market, so it’s imperative to develop recruiting processes to find and sell...
View Article16 lessons on scaling from Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Marissa Mayer, Brian...
From September 2015 to December 2015, I took Stanford University’s CS183C course — Technology-enabled Blitzscaling — taught by Reid Hoffman, John Lilly, Chris Yeh, and Allen Blue. I listened and took...
View ArticleHow to Spot and Magnify the Powers of Your Engineering Superheroes
It may not be instinctual to link director Christopher Nolan and Looker founder Lloyd Tabb, but the two might view the world through a shared lens. A serial entrepreneur, Tabb has assembled development...
View ArticleA Data-Centric Approach to Interviewing
“Talent is the limiting resource in everything we do right now.” If that observation rings true, you’re not alone. Despite every effort, most startups struggle to hire the best people. My partners and...
View ArticleA Framework to Maximize Your Startup’s Hiring Success
After a startup attains product market fit and begins to exceed the first breaking point of the startup management structure around 10 employees, it’s time to codify the company’s values. The values of...
View ArticleHow to Hire — Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking
Below is an excerpt from a talk I gave at the eShares Town Hall in November 2015. I hope it is helpful to other CEOs struggling with hiring.TLDRHiring Principles:Hiring means we failed to execute and...
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