How to stay lean as a startup - Part 2: Hiring
Lessons from building and working at startups
I don’t like the process of hiring; most of the time it’s long, painful, and the perfect candidate only exists in your imagination.
Oh, and hiring the wrong person early can mean the death of your startup.
But no pressure.
Firing, on the other hand, is faster and easier.
The corollary is that there's less to say about firing, so, I guess we're in to speak about hiring.
This post is the second of a series of posts about "How to stay lean as a startup"
1. Project Management (the #1 culprit)
2. Hiring - this post
3. (I'll update when more posts are available)
Traps, traps everywhere!
As I said just before, a bad hire early on can be a death sentence for your startup. The impact on a small team or company can be vastly underestimated.
Choosing the right candidate is like navigating a minefield. Ok, maybe I'm being a bit dramatic, but there are a few traps to avoid and guidelines to keep in mind.
Culture add
A new hire will bring their own personality and character to the team culture and environment. If this new teammate is accountable, positive and competent, it's a huge boost for the team. However the opposite is also true: someone barely competent or motivated - or worse, not accountable - can quickly lead to a team implosion. To add insult to injury, most of the time this collapse happens almost silently.
Product Impact
Having someone new work on your beloved product means trusting this newcomer with responsibility for something you care about. That can be great but it can also be truly horrendous.
Big companies have ways to mitigate the risks: code reviews, formal processes, audits by other teams, etc. As a startup these are not really practical options. These tools are expensive and that means resources you aren't spending on winning.
Bloating the organization
If your new hire needs constant supervision, meetings, code reviews, or if their manager doesn't set clear responsibilities and missions then you just have another vaguely productive worker that you need to pay every month, adding to your maintenance costs.
Worse, you now have to feed the beast: employees with no clear missions whom you try to keep busy. That's the recipe for a culture of busy work with zero real impact on your product or goals.
No hire will always be better than a bad hire.
Who to hire?
The startup environment is a special one. You're building something from the ground up, against all odds and in a probably ultra competitive space.
Not a 9-5 job
Sometimes something breaks at a late hour and there’s no formal on-call duty yet, because you’re a small team. So yes, sometimes your employees will have to jump on a call or resolve an incident at an indecent hour.
This is also a job that can end quickly, given the uncertainties of a company living on a limited runway. Without getting into personal details, your employees are adults (I hope) and make their own decisions. Just double check they’re aware of the situation.
Startups can be tough. That’s a conversation you need to have in the first interview, I believe. Some people need stability and predictable days, that's ok, of course, but a startup environment will probably be challenging for them, so address it early in the process.
Skills
Each job has its own specifics, so I'll just speak about what I know best: software developers.
You want people with some experience that will help with what you do. For that, above everything else, you need some context knowledge and some domain knowledge.
The context knowledge is: let's say you're building mobile apps, you want people with experience building mobile apps. The specifics of mobile apps development, the platforms, the tools, etc., will be a long journey to learn for someone coming from another context like web development.
That's non-negotiable (for a startup).
Next on the list by order of importance is the domain knowledge: let's say you're building an insurance product (nobody's perfect) you should look for developers with some insurance domain knowledge, no matter what their tech stack is (as long as they have the context knowledge).
The cherry on the cake is a candidate with a proven track record on your technical stack. But, hey, that should not be mandatory, there are dozens of languages or frameworks and hundreds of combinations. Don't waste your time trying to find someone who does exactly what you do. Make sure they're willing to learn a new stack and that they see it as an opportunity, not a constraint.
People who ship, learn, and communicate you can trust
It's about who they are, not what they know.
So yes, in a small team or startup, you should hire people who want to have an impact. Efficient communicators who are focused on shipping and creating user-facing value while building solid foundations (without over-engineering).
But that will basically be a side effect if you are successful in hiring people that you can trust and who can trust you. If you can find that mutual trust, everything can be achieved.
And don't think you'll create trust by playing the “we are a family” card, that can work on some naive juniors but you need to be better than that and show some ethics and accountability.
“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate”
You critically need people able to communicate, about doubts, failure, asking questions, who want to understand and to collaborate.
The cliché of the developer in their cave speaking to no one and shipping when it's done? Avoid this at all costs. That person may even be an excellent coder, but you need more: you need them to communicate, learn, teach and collaborate.
Communication also means being able to reason and express ideas clearly, both in writing and speaking. Especially in a remote or partially remote environment, this is a hard prerequisite.
Impact in 3, 2, 1
Hire people working for impact not just for the love of the craft.
Some individual contributors have little interest for the product you're building or the business side of your activity, they want to spend time writing elegant patterns and exploring all the possible solutions before picking one. They also tend to over-engineer a lot.
These are often experts in their field. These profiles are (very) useful at a small dose but is it the right timing to hire them? It really depends on your company maturity and needs. If you're starting up and have very few teammates it will probably not be the best fit, for you or for them.
Right time to hire
Don't hire because you can, try to do more with less until it's painful.
I'm not saying you should push people to burnout, quite the opposite, actually, but there's a few things that need to be acknowledged.
Basically it's very tempting when you have the money or think it will help you scale, but you should always:
Feel real pain first (trying to scale and failing is a pain)
Try to solve it without hiring, take the opportunity to double check if you’re lean enough and focused enough. Can this pain be solved by focusing on critical priorities?
Think from the standpoint of an already dead company. Now rewind time and go back to now. Is 100% of what you're doing now critical and leading to a robust growing (or at least sustainable) company?Hire freelancers for short term needs, to validate some hypothesis or to get an external opinion on issues.
When the solution to the pain is definitely hiring, then go for it.
How to hire?
I'll be brief: I'm a fan of experimenting in every domain. So, after an interview or two, hire your favorite candidate as a freelancer (or on a trial period) for a few days or weeks depending on the job. Set a clear mission and expectations and give feedback often.
Now you'll have real data points. Are they up to your standards? Does the soon-to-be hire behave in a way that’s positive for the team and company? If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. Don’t fall for the sunk cost fallacy: end the collaboration and start over.
It's easy to cheat tests and technical interviews, especially now that people are massively using LLM's for interviews and tests. These old school technical challenges have gone from unreliable to absolutely useless at selecting candidates.
Also, great candidates won’t do seven rounds of interviews and days of unpaid work with no certainty to be hired, they will go elsewhere because they can. Even in 2025.
As with all things, be lean, be pragmatic, experiment and decide based on results.
Firing
When there's doubt, there's no doubt.
When trust is broken or performance is low and not improving quickly enough, you owe it to yourself and your employee to give candid feedback about what’s going wrong. If there’s no improvement, you should discuss ending the collaboration.
In my experience, underperforming employees who made it through the hiring process are usually highly demotivated by the mission or the work environment. They're probably afraid of hitting the job market again so they hold on to their job with a death grip but it's a disservice to both themselves and to you.
I'm not advocating for being an absolute savage in your feedback or firing someone hastily, do it candidly and with empathy but also firmly.
As a startup you can't afford underperformers. Just make sure they really are underperforming, sometimes you don't measure the right thing, so ask around and only act when you're 100% confident you need to part ways.
Lean culture
Culture, especially at the beginning, is a top down thing. As a founder or a manager, what you do will be mimicked.
Are you always five minutes late to meetings? Expect that to be the norm. Show no respect? Don't expect any in return. Do something else during a Zoom call? Don't fool yourself, everyone can tell and why should they do otherwise?
You want accountable people? Be accountable. You want people you can trust? Be trustworthy.
If you tell things and don't deliver, don't expect loyalty and teammates getting out of their ways for you or your company.
The more you grow the more the culture is enriched by new hires. You should aim for a bit of culture fit but don't miss on the culture add opportunity. People that will naturally help shape the org in the right direction, shining a new light on old problems, coming with a different set of experiences and background. Aim for empathetic and accountable people with a strong work ethic. Ultimately, aim for teammates you can trust. That is far more important than any other skill in the long run.