How Can I Hire Great People?

Now that you know the role you want to fill, how can you find the best candidate?

I’m a staunch supporter of taking your time to fill a position. The people you hire—particularly at this phase of your business—can either help you grow or hold you back. It’s better to be picky and learn to hire slow and fire fast.

After spending hundreds of hours hiring at my last startup, I swore I would never hire on my own again. If you have the money, hire a recruiter to help you find the best candidates.

Many recruiters will work off commission, such as asking for 15% of the first year’s salary. Unfortunately, they are more expensive than the value they bring. I recommend going with a flat-fee recruiter like Remote First Recruiting.

Whether or not you have the money to hire a recruiter, these tips will help you find and attract the best candidates.

Be Different. When I was hiring for Drip, I would write job descriptions explaining that we viewed software as a craft. That we often wrote 2.5 lines of test code for every line of production code and that our codebase was immaculate.

I wanted to attract developers who viewed themselves as craftspeople, who were looking to work in an environment where that meticulous dedication would be valued.

When writing job descriptions, you want to show folks that working at your company will be unlike other places they’ve worked. It’s not enough to say that you’re different; you have to be different.

Work on Interesting Problems. Amazing team members want to be challenged and learn something new each day. Your job description should lean into this.

It’s helpful if you happen to be working on an exciting, innovative product, but it doesn’t need to be. Building an email services provider like Drip wasn’t inherently interesting. But when I would recruit developers, I would engage them with the things that were interesting.

• We were scaling fast, which is an interesting problem.
• We had a wide variety of UX paradigms, so the product itself looked great and was fun to work on.
• There was so much going on in the app that a developer’s day-to-day job would be varied.

Lean into Your Advantages. As a bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped company, high pay and benefits probably aren’t going to be your advantage. Those are the advantages of Fortune 1000 companies. But those companies also have Achilles heels: office politics, no remote work options, massive teams, tons of meetings, and other headaches that many great team members don’t want to deal with.

Your advantage is in finding what motivates these top performers beyond pay and benefits and giving it to them.

For example, here’s a pitch I could give to any role I was hiring for: “We’re fully remote. We’re a small team with no politics. You’ll work with and learn directly from the founders. We’re a fast-growing company. You’ll work on interesting problems.”

For specific roles, I added even more advantages.

I told developers, “You’re going to have a huge impact on the product and the company. You’ll work on an amazing code base. We ship features weekly, so you’ll always be working on something new.”

I told customer success folks, “We have a great product, and our customers love us, which makes your job easy. We also have a high feature velocity to make sure it continues to be easy.”

Think of Your Job Description as a Sales Letter. Your job description should convince the person reading it that you have a fantastic company and that they should apply.

You’re not a big company, so don’t write like one. One of your advantages is that you can inject personality into your job descriptions, even to the point of making them entertaining. Write like a human, and don’t shy away from having personality.

At Drip, I had a line in our developer job description that read, “Crappy code makes you want to flip a table.” It’s a quirky thing to say and made people realize our team had personality and opinions. It was an instant filter to drive away people with whom that thought wouldn’t resonate and attract those with whom it did.

When you think along the lines of a long-form sales letter rather than a list of requirements, it will set you apart from the stiff Fortune 1000 job descriptions and communicate something about your company’s culture by showing, not telling.

You should also let candidates know you’re picky about who you hire. A-level performers want to work with other A-level performers, and they get excited by the idea of joining a top-notch team.

Build an Audience. I struggle a bit with this advice because you can build an amazing company without an audience. I’ve seen hundreds—thousands—of founders who have built strong companies without an audience.

I also don’t believe you need to build an audience to build a successful SaaS product (in fact, I think it’s a waste of time for most people).

That said, having an audience makes hiring easier. Because when you have an audience that knows you, likes you, and trusts you, it’s much easier to attract good talent.

Top-tier talent is constantly learning. They are reading blogs and books and listening to podcasts. If you are one of the people they learn from, you’ll find a higher percentage of top-tier talent in your audience when it comes time to hire.

I want to point out that all the hiring tips in the world won’t help you if you’re not focused on retaining your people. If you misrepresented what the experience would be like, or you don’t keep them interested in the work, top performers will move on because they have the option to work anywhere.

For further reading, I recommend the book Who: A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. It gives a solid framework for the entire hiring process. In addition, it provides a solid interview approach to discover more about what candidates actually did in their previous roles and teaches you how to avoid asking surface-level questions.

For further reading on job descriptions, I’ve seen a few companies emulate Drift’s approach of creating a 90-day plan for every new role, and that effectively becomes the job description. You can read about Drift’s hiring process here: drift.com/blog/hiring-philosophy/.

If I were hiring right now, there are a handful of websites I would use to advertise the job listing. Because these sites change over time, I have a page on this book’s companion website that includes the most up-to-date hiring sites for SaaS founders: saasplaybook.com.

The primary benefit of these job boards is that candidates are typically looking for roles at remote or small startups.