<aside> 👋 I’m Steve Bartel, the co-founder and CEO of Gem. Welcome to Startup Hiring 101 where we'll cover all the basics of startup hiring, including step-by-step instructions, example templates, and best practices.
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1. Introduction: recruiting is sales
2. Finding & reaching out to great candidates
3. The initial sell conversation
4. Nurturing passive talent from your network
This guide is for early-stage startups who have raised enough money to hire their initial team, (e.g. a $1-5M round). It’s meant for founders and founding teams with little to no knowledge about hiring.
If you don’t have the money to hire, you shouldn’t waste time recruiting & hiring. Raise money first, then hire. If you’ve already hired your first recruiter and are looking to scale your hiring, or if you’re a recruiter, sourcer, or talent leader, the Gem blog will have more content that may be more tailored to you.
Parts of this guide may also be helpful for hiring managers at fast-growing companies who are closely involved in recruiting. In some ways, playing a more active role as a hiring manager is a lot like hiring for a startup within a larger company, especially if you don’t have as much support from your recruiting team.
Hiring is important. In the startup world, ideas are free, so building a strong team is everything. Once you’ve raised money, hiring becomes your number one priority and will remain your top priority as your company scales. Hiring is how you get leverage as a founder to scale the work you’re doing and will accelerate your company far more than putting in 80-hour weeks.
Hiring the right team is essential. Not only does having the right team help you move faster, but it also sets the foundation for everyone you hire moving forward. Both because prospective talent will want to work with your team, and because the people you choose to hire will know other talented people, so hiring the right employees will make it easier and easier to continue hiring the right people for your team.
Hiring isn’t easy. As a startup, you are a completely unknown quantity. You have no existing talent brand. You have little to no validation. You are super risky. You probably can’t pay a high salary. And people you want to hire have tons of options for where to work.
To make things harder, most of us as founders have no clue where to start. Even if you have years of experience recruiting at top companies, you can still make rookie mistakes when it comes to building the team for your new startup. And unfortunately, there aren’t many resources out there for founders looking to hire their early team.
But don’t let all of this discourage you — mastering hiring and building a great team is a huge opportunity. Hiring your early team will be a lot of hard work and require learning by doing, but there is a science to it, which this guide will walk you through. Done right, hiring will become your competitive advantage, propelling you past your competitors toward escape velocity. Not only is the opportunity massive, but putting together a world-class team you want to work with every day is one of the most rewarding parts of building a startup. At least it certainly has been for Gem.
I’m Steve Bartel, the co-founder and CEO of Gem. At Gem, we build the leading all-in-one recruiting platform, so, naturally, we spend a lot of time thinking about hiring given the product we build.
