How to find your startup’s first employees
Lessons from my failed career as a headhunter
At The Family, we’ve seen just how hard early recruitments can be for our founders. Believe it or not, it can take entrepreneurs up to 3 times as long to recruit their first employee as it does for them to raise their seed round!
That’s why last year I decided to organize a Talent Bootcamp for early founders: 2 days of workshops & use cases with the best People experts to learn everything HR, from sourcing to retaining talent.
Alison, Head of Talent at Sqreen explained how to craft an interview process, Hugo, Engineer sales at Dataiku, described counterintuitive traits to look for in your first technical salesperson, & Deborah, Head of Talent at Alan, stressed the importance of defining your culture before even finishing your incorporation papers… And it was great! Each of the 14 founders drew up their scorecards, defined their key values, and wrote several job descriptions. But after the workshop? All of them struggled to actually find the talents they needed.
My failed attempt at becoming an early-employee recruiter
I figured I could roll up my sleeves and help them. After all, I just had to nail that boolean search on Linkedin and pitch the opportunity, right?
Annabelle, CEO at JoinLion, volunteered to be my guinea pig. She was looking for a content manager, an ops manager, and her first salesperson. Together, we followed Geoff Smart’s “Who” process step by step. Every week, I would source 30 candidates, targeting similar mid-level roles — say, content people at education companies — in companies with similar models and using lookalike functions & other tricks to reach out to them on LinkedIn. Thanks to The Family label, I pretty much had a 100% reply rate on my cold emails & it was easy for me to sell them on Lion since I knew the company and Annabelle really well. I was thrilled. It felt like a piece of cake. The only problem was that none of those candidates was actually a fit.
That’s when I really saw that you can’t recruit early employees like you would recruit Senior positions post-Series A. Early employees are often random encounters born out of chaos & serendipity. How did we end up finding all-star early employees for Lion?
Stealing your talented friends
Amongst the 3 roles, the one I had the most struggle with was the “Content strategist”. The people marketed as such on Linkedin were not what Annabelle needed. Their mission scopes included social networks, SEO articles, branding events… because content at their companies is an acquisition strategy. Lion is a school, the Harvard of startup culture. Content is essential to its model. It’s not just about acquisition, it’s also about thought leadership. Annabelle needed a professor and he was right under our nose…
Younes loves finance and rap. Both creative and analytical, he’s this very lovably annoying guy who loves to teach lessons about everything. He was also a top employee at The Family before Annabelle snagged him to become Lion’s “Dean”. What happened then is that Younes didn’t limit himself to a few Medium posts… he wrote a whole book in 3 months that will come out in January with Dunod. We all have friends that we trust and who inspire us, so why not hire them?
Sharing a Big Mac with a consultant
I met Khodor eating a Big Mac at a station service just before a 5-hour drive back to Paris after a weekend in the countryside.
He was an IT consultant at Capgemini and was eager to join a startup as a Product Manager. As we talked, I realized he was born to be a Salesman: enthusiastic, analytical and creative. I would never have come across Khodor on Linkedin while searching for a salesperson with experience in tech.
But even if they’ve never used Salesforce or closed a deal, consultants can become great enterprise salespeople: they’re problem solvers with strong analytical and presentation skills. When combined with an entrepreneurial mindset and a strong drive to learn, they have great potential to become A-players. Aptitudes are often more important than hard skills at this stage, since you can learn the latter.
Directed creativity
Last but not least, Hanae was a friend of a friend. She reached out to me on Facebook when she was coming back from Montreal and wanted to work for The Family. She had previously worked at the Opera Garnier & in digital consulting, but she didn’t know much about the Paris startup ecosystem. But she had organized lots of events and led her theatre troupes at the Festival d’Avignon while studying at Sciences Po. Basically, lots of strong signals that she could adapt to new environments, create projects from scratch and lead ops. You should always look beyond obvious categories and take calculated risks.
Now, did I struggle to hire candidates through Linkedin because I was a total amateur? Possibly. But I really do think that headhunting early employees is a fantasy because A) you don’t always know what you need, B) you’re the only one who can convince someone to join your company before it’s “sexy”, C) most of the time you’ll hire people you already know. And while you’ll always find exceptions like Jean Charles, CEO at Alan, who headhunted rockstars before even having a product. But he was a 2nd-time founder who already had a serious exit that had earned him a reputation.
5 things to keep in mind when searching for early employees in the chaos
I don’t know that there’s a magic recipe for finding your first employee. But I believe there are a few things you can do maximize your chances of meeting “the one”. It all comes down to serendipity.
1. Always be recruiting. At The Family, we never really had open positions until we raised our €15M round last summer. Oussama, Alice & Nicolas, the three co-founders of The Family, hired the talented people they met at conferences/talks/classes on a continuous-flow basis, even if they didn’t actually know what those people would end up doing. They trusted them to just figure it out along on the way, totally focused on the potential. For example, Oussama met Hugo at the Sciences Po incubator where Hugo had a startup. Oussama acted as his advisor, helped him go to SF to live his entrepreneurial fantasy and… then saw him massively kill the startup. But since Hugo joined TF as the #2 employee, he has selected startups, led Paris events, spent 1 year in Latin America and then returned to become Head of The Family Berlin… He’s now leading our European tour, exploiting his people & networking skills at full speed.
2. Always be selling your company. As an early founder, you should seize every opportunity to talk about your mission. And do it as much as you can: give classes at Lion, post job boards on Welcome to the Jungle, talk to your friends and friends of friends, use every platform out there — Elinoï / Hiresweet / Talent.io / La Relève — to extend your initial circle. This will bring good and bad profiles. Figure out which is which.
3. Don’t be afraid to go away from your scorecard. Early employees often help the founders define who they really need to develop their startups. And chances are their role will evolve a lot with your company in the months after you hire them.
Adrien, CEO & co-founder at Sidekick, met Catalina at an event at The Family. He had just hired his Head of Engineering but didn’t really know how to take care of their users and structure customer success. When he met Catalina he told her about the issue and she jumped on it. As she received more feedback from customers, she came up with a lot of ideas on how to improve their product, basically starting to do Product Management and learning by watching videos online. Adrien’s great at this kind of hire — as I was writing this article, I received this email from another person who I randomly introduced to him one day:
4. Don’t be too strict on “A-players”. Geoff Smart’s “Who” is an extremely popular book for startup founders. But it’s unlikely that an early-stage company is going to just go out and get someone who’s been proving themselves at Google or Facebook for the past few years. A-players in early-stage companies aren’t only high performers, they’re the people who are overly enthusiastic about your company and actually willing to build tools and processes from scratch. Paul, CEO & co-founder of Fretlink, hired a former carpenter as his first SDR because he was so in love with Fretlink’s mission that he convinced Paul he’d be able to learn faster than anyone else. Victoria signed up to be a driver for Heetch before getting in contact with them and eventually taking over their partnerships. And I could go on forever.
5. Think of your first employees as culture co-founders. Hiring your first employee is the moment when you define your company culture. There aren’t any shortcuts. You need to spend loooots of time talking with people to understand what kind of company you want to become. This will help you find your “Employee-market fit”, the profiles that will become successful at your company because they fit your model and your values. As you meet candidates, you will fine-tune a culture that rejects as many people as it attracts. At The Family we’ve had companies that got it right from the beginning and others for whom it took painful recruitment mistakes to really understand.
Your early employees are the foundations of your organization. For each of them, you’ll have to go on a treasure hunt, searching around for that little glimmer that reveals the gold.
Building on this foundation will become your full-time job as a CEO: acquiring more talents, coaching / growing the team, and getting them all to work together. Doing it on your own is really really hard. When it’s time to scale your team and organize your people, HR experts can save you a lot of time and mistakes.
A Head of Talent that helps you design an interview & onboarding process that fits your culture, seasoned recruiters who find the right senior profiles, executive coaches that help your managers grow…
I won’t find your early employees but I did find the best HR people in Europe. The HR Shortlist is coming very soon 🙂
