Hire Before It’s Too Late
Hire Before It’s Too Late
You need to hire people before you need them.
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Hiring is a lot like fighting a fire, if you wait too long to deal with it then it might have already burnt your house down. In the early days of any team (even when it’s just you), there are always a ton of great reasons to wait on hiring. You’ve probably thought to yourself:
I can’t afford another salary right now.
There isn’t enough for another person to do.
I really need to do this myself to make sure it’s done right.
All of those sound like reasonable justifications for not hiring, but they are really just excuses. Hiring is intimidating, time consuming and hard to do well so you will avoid it as long as you can. At the same time, it is one of the most critical factors in your success.
To be successful, you need to be able to make the decision on who to hire and when.
The Power of Focus
A very good rule of thumb for who you need on your team in the early days is that every essential function should have at least one person whose entire focus and responsibility is for that one thing.
While the term “essential function” might seem vague, it covers anything that you MUST do well to succeed. For example, if you are counting on your launch to have a big impact there should be someone on your team who is solely focused on the launch. If you are scaling up a complex software platform, someone should be solely focused on scaling. If you are raising funding, someone will be spending all of their time on fundraising. The person assigned to each task might be the CEO, a co-founder or an employee but it needs to be someone.
Why is it so important to have someone dedicated to that function? Can’t you just split the work among the team you have? Sure, but then you are splitting focus and accountability. If you have two top priorities you will only spend half of your time on each and hence do each half as well as you could. Having a sole priority means that someone will do a great job and be held accountable for performance with the rest of the team. If something is essential to your company’s success you cannot afford to have someone do less than their best.
Does it mean everyone only does one thing? No, but every essential function needs a dedicated person. If you have as many people as essential functions then, yes, everyone has only one thing to focus on. Perhaps that means you should hire some more people.
The list of essential functions is entirely up to you and very dependent on your business. However, it should already be reflected in the top priorities for your business that you review with your team regularly and are baked into everything that you do. If you have a top priority that does not have a dedicated person next to it, then it’s time to start hiring.
Get a Head Start
Even if you have made the decision that you need to hire to fill an essential function, you can still fall into the trap of putting it off. You will be busy in the chaos of building your business and with all of the short term urgent issues the long term benefits of hiring seem easy to put off.
However, putting off hiring is a dangerous trap. If you don’t anticipate and hire ahead of your needs then you’ll find yourself stalling out and suffering later. You can’t just snap your fingers and make employees appear after all. Consider that even if you decide to hire someone tomorrow you still need to spend the following amount of time:
2 months searching for the right candidate
+ 2 weeks notice at their current company
+ 1 month training before they are productive
----
3.5 months lead time
And that assumes they don’t take any time off between jobs. For sales people you need to assume another 2 months after training before they are productive because you can’t close deals the minute you start selling. That means that you need almost 6 months lead time before sales people will be productive after you decide you hire one.
To put it in perspective, let’s say you are an enterprise sales driven company (revenue is derived from sales people) and you have a revenue forecast that has you growing by 3x in nine months. Your hiring plan should reflect that you need to grow your sales team by an equivalent amount and account for lead time before they become productive. If your current sales team is 3 people, that means growing to 12, and that might look like this:
In order to meet your aggressive nine month revenue growth plan, you need to start recruiting aggressively in the next three months with the goal of hiring one new hire in month 4, 2 in month 5 and 3 in month 6. This assumes equivalent production per salesperson which is a safe assumption and plenty of lead time for both recruiting and on-boarding.
If you had taken a conservative approach to hiring and only hired 1 sales person per month, you would have failed before you even started. Nine months later you would wonder why you are falling short of your plan and why it’s taking so long to ramp up your team.
This is a pretty aggressive hiring example, and I don’t recommend this kind of rapid expansion. However, it really makes it clear that ambitious goals require ambitious hiring plans to achieve!
This example uses sales people, but the same principle applies to engineers, marketers and every other part of your business. If you don’t think you can hire enough people to meet your plan based on the lead time to productivity, perhaps you need to revisit your goals. If you MUST reach your goals, then you better hire ahead of the goal.
Hiring is Selling
Even after deciding who to hire and giving yourself enough lead time, you will probably fall back on the final excuse: I can’t afford another person right now.
That might be true, but remember you aren’t hiring the person right now. You are hiring the person in a number of months after completing a hiring process! Will you be able to afford them by then? If you’re growing fast then the answer is likely yes.
Even if you can’t afford them, every new hire should improve your business in a meaningful way. Sales people, for example, should only cost you in their first few months. After that, they should be paying for themselves (and more) with the revenue they generate from sales! While it’s harder to measure the revenue impact for other members of your team, it is possible to do. Hiring a new engineer might accelerate your product velocity and allow you to close more deals or beat out the competition.
In the end, hiring is hard and it’s easy to put off. However, the satisfaction you get from hiring great people to fill important needs for your business and see them contribute to its success is one of the best rewards.
For more on Hiring and Team Building, see: