Let's set the scene. You've secured your first round of funding and it’s time to build your team with A-players.
What types of roles should you go after first?
How can you assess their technical acumen?
And how will you create and cultivate a positive company culture?
Answering these questions and making your initial hires are critical to the early success of your company. The technical team will design, engineer, and support a solution that needs to be intuitive, scalable, reliable, secure, and performant while conveying the broader vision of the company. Budget and time to deliver a minimal viable product (MVP) will dictate your short-term hiring plan.
Hiring Your Team
With a small seed investment, I believe you should first consider hiring a:
- Platform Designer
- Full-Stack Engineer
- Cloud Services Engineer (with Solution Architecture experience as a major plus.)
Ideally, you will recruit contributors that are able and willing to wear multiple hats, which is to be expected at an early-stage startup.
The Platform Designer
At High Alpha, the Platform Designer is one of the first key hires because design can — and should — be a primary differentiator for your business, profoundly impacting your brand, culture, presentation of ideas, UI, and product experiences. This resource should be prepared to roll up their sleeves, leading efforts in design with Product, Sales, and Marketing.
The Full-Stack Engineer
Full-Stack engineers have the unique ability to develop components and services for all tiers of your product, including front-end UI, middle-tier/API, and the back-end data tier. It’s recommended to encourage your Full-Stack resources to alternate where they focus their development over time so not to have single-threaded contributors who only develop API resources or front-end UI.
A Cloud Services Engineer
A Cloud Services resource for a SaaS product is critical. This type of engineer has the ability to cherry-pick which services and infrastructure are most valuable to your overall solution. A Cloud Services ace will identify the best AWS/Google Cloud/Azure services that will align with the product’s needs. They will also save you financially in the long run by fueling the solution with services that will scale exponentially while not burning through your financial runway.
As your budget grows for technical headcount, I would recommend adding some strategic leaders to the team to head up Product and/or Engineering along with additional engineers that can focus on testing, quality, and DevOps. These leaders will help continuously shape and evolve the product by identifying and prioritizing the needs of the customer, achieving market fit, and developing repeatable and predictable processes. In addition, they will continue to build out the tech team(s) and help foster a positive company culture.
Candidate Evaluation
Once recruiting begins, you’ll need to evaluate each candidate to ensure they have the right mixture of knowledge, skills, experience, and cultural fit to serve as an asset on your new team. At High Alpha, early-stage companies have the recruiting advantage of an experienced team of human resources professionals. If you do not have recruiter firepower, start building your pipeline by intentionally tapping your network for the resources that you and your contacts can vouch for. Post your roles on social media and job boards. Consider using job board services that help automatically qualify your candidates before you ever see a resume.
Once resumes start to flow, consider the following assessment path:
- Have a 15–30 minute coffee (if the candidate is local) to discuss your company vision, assess whether the candidate “gets it”, and see if they are interested in further exploring. If not local, have a 15–30 minute phone screen covering the same topics.
- Invite the candidate into your workspace to meet additional members of the team, and if you have any specific technical resources, have them provide an informal test to gauge their knowledge and skills. This type of an assessment should include both high-level, open-ended questions along with some rapid-fire multiple choice questions. The open-ended ones help the team evaluate how the candidate processes information and approaches a solution while the rapid-fire questions shed light on the necessary knowledge/skills needed for the job.
- Make sure to sprinkle in a few company culture questions that will help show the team a realistic preview of what it will be like working with this person. Some example culture questions could include candidate’s work hour and location preferences, favorite book/movie/TV show, etc….
- For engineering candidates that are asked to return, provide them a small project to complete offsite. This software project should require leveraging skills and technology relevant to the SaaS technology stack you believe your product will be fueled by. This project should take them 2–5 days. Assign a rigid deadline, and require that they ask you questions via email/Slack to assess their written communication skills.
- Have the candidate return to your workspace (or via video chat if not local) to present to you and tech team their approach to the project, and have the team evaluate the approach. This will provide you insight into the candidate’s communication skills and general rapport with others along with the technical acumen.
This project truly defines where the rubber meets the road. Not only does the candidate show you that they have the skills and ability to successfully deliver the project on-time and within scope, but that they are genuinely interested in jumping through hoops for you to get the job!
As you build the technical team of aces, pay careful attention to foster a positive company culture. Utilize attributes such as excellence, quality, high performance, transparency, and accountability, and evangelize the importance of a positive culture as it will directly impact your company’s success.
Best of luck with your team building!
